My First Forrester Report: Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid

[Posted by Augie Ray]

Three months after starting at Forrester, my first report for Interactive Marketers is now available: Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid.  Forrester subscribers can click the link to read about the Peer Influence Pyramid, which describes and shares recommendations about three types of online influencers: Social Broadcasters, Mass Influencers and Potential Influencers.  

Each of the three types of influencer is important to marketers, and each must be engaged in a different manner.  Social Broadcasters are appealing because of their large followings, but they tend to assist more with awareness than with preference. Mass Influencers is a new category of influencer–28 million in number in the U.S. alone–created thanks to the scale afforded consumers by social media tools. (I'll be sharing more about Mass Influencers in my next Forrester report.)  Finally, the vast majority of social media participants are Potential Influencers, people who have modest networks rich with trust.

 

For me, the publication of this report marks the end of a long journey and the beginning of another.  I started this report back in September, before I was even a Forrester employee.  As part of the recruiting process, Forrester requested I write and present a report that demonstrates the sort of research and analysis I would offer to Forrester clients.  Version one of the report did the trick and I was hired.

At that point, it seemed the "Peer Influence Pyramid" report might be polished and published within a matter of weeks, but instead it took over three months; I have lost count, but I think the report now available on Forrester.com is version number seventeen. One reason for the time and edits is that Forrester reports adhere to a very particular style of writing. I am having to unlearn some bad habits and enjoying my continued development as a writer.

Another part of the challenge was that Forrester has a rich history of research on the topic of influence. Before Forrester could release my report, the concepts and language I developed independently as a job candidate needed to reflect and expand upon the work done by my new peers and those who came before me at Forrester.

Most importantly, I learned that Josh Bernoff had just completed some new and fascinating research on influence in social media.  That research was conducted for the upcoming book Groundswell HEROes, a follow up to the popular and very informative Groundswell. This good luck in timing afforded me the opportunity to work with Josh and leverage some groundbreaking research to further guide and strengthen the ideas within my report.  

A lot of time, effort, and consideration went into Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid. I hope Forrester subscribers find it informative and interesting.  Within a month, I will be sharing some news about my second report, which dives even deeper into the new category of influencer–the Mass Influencer.

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Single ID: What Consumers Think and Why It May Not Matter

I saw some interesting Forrester research this week.  We asked over 4,000 consumers about Single-ID systems, which permit a profile to be used on multiple Web sites and eliminate the need to register, create and maintain separate profiles on each new site.   While we didn’t ask consumers about the currently available options (such as Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth, etc.), the Forrester survey did explore what consumers care about when deciding whether to use a single-signon tool.

We early adopters were quick to use and see the benefits of portable IDs, so I was surprised by one big discovery out of this study:  A lot of consumers aren’t yet that interested.  When asked to select the most important features that would motivate them to use a single-ID tool, more than four in ten didn’t see any of them as compelling.  With a list that included features as simple and appealing as “The ID worked with Yahoo,” “The ID worked with Google,” and “The ID would only be used with sites I select,” 44% of consumers surveyed instead selected “I'm not interested in creating a single ‘ID’ that works at multiple Web sites.”

There is demographic skew to this data; only 32% of young adults responded “not interested” compared to 52% of those 55 and older. Still, a significant number of people don’t yet see the benefit of portable IDs and unified registration systems.

What should marketers do with this information?  Given the significant indifference, should they slow down efforts to implement single-ID profiles on their sites?  

I don’t believe so, and here’s why:  First of all, while many people may not understand the benefits, a lot do.  Facebook Connect recently celebrated its first birthday with an announcement that 60 million Facebook users are using Facebook Connect across 80,000 Web sites. 

Secondly, single-ID systems provide benefits for marketers now, and when implemented with a focus on the user needs and experience, consumers see the benefits.  Take the Huffington Post, for example;  thanks to their implementation of Facebook Connect, I can easily see what content my friends find interesting (which—not coincidentally—always seems relevant to my interests).  So, although many consumers don’t see the benefits now, it is reasonable to expect they can and will adopt these tools as sites make the advantages more evident.

With all the buzz about Social Commerce, there was one more finding from the study that caught my eye:  The number one factor that consumers say is essential for them to sign up for a portable “ID” is that it not be associated with their credit card information.  Consumers are just not quite ready to make their financial data as sharable as they are their photos and status updates.

Google, Gmail, Relevance Filtering & the Future of Social Media

 Is the Social Media world about to change on Tuesday? Probably not, but all eyes will be on Mountain View tomorrow when Google announces their latest venture into the social sphere, reportedly a social add-on to Gmail.

Let me begin by saying that I know absolutely nothing about what Google has up its sleeve, but let's speculate.  Why?  Because like Apple, Google is one of those rare companies that can still capture our imaginations and make us hope for a new product or service that will dazzle our eyes and change our lives.

At first glance, the addition of status updates to Gmail–if that is in fact what Google is announcing–seems to add nothing new.  After all, Yahoo added "Status-Casting" to their mail and IM offerings six months ago.  Moreover, it would seem to make little sense for Google to try to compete directly with Facebook and Twitter, the reigning kings of the status update realm. 

But what if Google isn't aiming to compete with Twitter and Facebook but instead with Seesmic and Hootsuite?  What if Google doesn't care about owning the stream so much as accessing the content and owning the place where consumers look (and where AdSense ads can be served)?  For some, it would be a powerful combination to aggregate email and status feeds in one simple and powerful tool.  And add Google's Android and Nexus One into the mix for mobile viewing, and you begin to see the makings for a dominant and portable tool for managing highly personalized real-time information.

Let's not stop our speculation there.  Where else might Google take us once they gather and display our friends' tweets, emails and status updates?  Well, what is the one thing at which Google excels, more than anything else?  Relevance!  Search for it, and chances are you will find just what you were seeking at the top of Google's first search engine results page.

How might Relevance Filtering change our ability to monitor what is pertinent and ignore what is not?  Admit it–you find Facebook and Twitter noisy.  Do you care about Farmville?  Some of you do; most of you do not. How about your friends' FourSquare check-ins?  Some of you care where your local friends are, but most of you likely couldn't care less where I'm dining when I'm thousands of miles away. 

That's the trouble with today's Social Media tools–they are largely based on People Filtering (following everything posted by select individuals) rather than Relevance Filtering (seeing only what is relevant while ignoring what is not).  To get a sense of the power of Relevance Filtering, see the chart below; based on this simple example, Relevance Filtering cuts down on the data received by 50% and more than doubles the relevance.  Less time, less noise, more pertinence–where do I sign up?

The company that not only aggregates our friends' lifestreams but turns them from data into interesting and useful information would own the world, wouldn't they?  Google was the hands-down winner of Web 1.0.  Might they be about to repeat the feat in the Web 2.0 era?

I'm not expecting anything that earth shattering from Google's announcement tomorrow, but you have to think the folks in Mountain View have more on their minds than simply tweaking Gmail to compete with Facebook and Twitter.  Time will tell, and I'll be watching where Google is heading, not just where they are.

 
 

Forrester Wants More Analysts Using Social Tools

[Posted by Cliff Condon]

Wow. There are a lot of comments flying around about Forrester’s yet-to-be released blog platform and associated policy – some accurate, some not. The blog posts from Forrester analysts like Josh Bernoff and Augie Ray have had the most accurate information to date.

Since my job is to lead many of Forrester’s social initiatives, including the new blog platform, I thought I would weigh in. So let me add some clarity to what we working on:

1. Forrester wants more analysts using social tools because it makes for better research. The research we write for clients has always depended on a rich two-way conversation with experts and practitioners in the marketplace. The rise of social tools like blogs and Twitter allows analysts to extend that conversation with more people in the marketplace. The more smart people our analysts interact with, the better our research will be. That’s the basis of the Groundswell. Therefore, Forrester is investing in building social tools and associated best-practice training for our analysts so that more of them get involved.
2. We are building a new blog platform to provide each analyst with a personal blog. Our platform today supports team blogs based on the professional roles we serve – such as the Forrester Blog for Consumer Product Strategy Professionals. The new platform we are building will allow our analysts to also maintain an individual blog on their coverage area. We are doing this so that our analysts can have direct conversations with key players in the marketplace and so clients have the flexibility to engage at an individual analyst level or a team level.
3. We want to make it easy for our clients. Our clients rely on us to help make them successful. They have told us that they are starved for time – they subscribe to our services in part because they conveniently get the insight they need from us and others who join in the Forrester conversation. Therefore, we can best serve client needs by placing all of our blog content in one place (at Forrester.com), and put it in context alongside the rest of our data and analysis.

I hope that adds some clarity to what we are working on – I’ll share more as we move closer to roll-out later in the quarter. However, I felt it necessary to add to the conversation now since there has been discussion about analysts’ brands and the Forrester brand. The fact is we want to do everything possible to give analysts a high degree of visibility. Giving every analyst a personal blog is a step toward that goal. Our analysts’ reputation and our own are tied together. Our new blog platform is being designed to boost them both.

Cliff Condon

My Thoughts on Forrester, Analysts, and Blogging

Image via CrunchBase

A minor tempest in the research industry teapot erupted today on Twitter and elsewhere.  A SageCircle blog post entitled "Forrester tells analysts no more personal blogs with interesting implications for analyst relations" sparked a fair amount of dialog about Forrester and the rights and independence of analysts.  SageCircle shared rumors that a change to Forrester blogging policies would prevent analysts from having personal blogs and would aggregate analysts’ posts into Forrester-branded role-based blogs. 

 

I thought I’d share a few thoughts from my perspective as a newish Forresterite and a long-time blogger.  First of all, the term “personal blogs” deserves a bit of definition.  Forrester is not interested in limiting employees’ involvement in Social Media or their ability to blog on personal subjects.  I can blog to my heart’s content about travels, cats, politics, music, movies or any other topic of a personal nature. 

 

But there are changes coming to the ways analysts share information, ideas, and observations about the areas they cover.  Forrester is still developing its policies, but it is in the process of rolling out a new blog platform and will ask analysts to share their industry-related thoughts within this new platform.  So, there are elements of truth to SageCircle reports, but there’s more to the story.  For example, SageCircle speculated that the aim of the policy was to “restrict analysts’ personal blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure.”  This would be incorrect on a couple of different fronts. 

 

First of all, Forrester analysts will all have their own blogs within the new platform, and this will continue to furnish a platform for sharing our insights and building our individual reputations.  I will have my own Forrester blog, the contents of which will roll up into a blog focused on the needs and interests of Interactive Marketers. 

 

More importantly, the hint that Forrester might want to restrict individual brand building is quite the opposite of my own experience during my first three months in the organization.  If anything, Forrester demonstrates a strong and active desire to have analysts build their reputation and brand;  for example, there are discussions about how analysts can best “build their franchises.”  So strong is Forrester’s vision for its analysts that at times I can feel more like a self-employed specialist working within a loose collective than an employee;  I like this feeling, and it is one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about Forrester thus far.

 

Am I thrilled at the prospect of giving up Experience: The Blog, my personal/professional blog?  Well no—it’s become part of my digital identity and represents thousands of hours of time and effort.  But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes.  There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage. 

 

Furthermore, it would be silly to believe that readers will recognize and understand the distinction between Augie, the guy who shares thoughts about marketing on his personal blog, and Augie, the Forrester analyst who covers the marketing industry.  There is only one Augie, and the thoughts I share on my blog are now based upon the research I do, the people I meet, and the information I am given access to thanks to my role at Forrester.

 

I’ll be sad to see Experience: The Blog go, but I’m also looking forward to digging into the new Forrester blog platform.  There, I will continue to do what I’ve been doing for years on my personal blog:  Sharing news, offering insights, connecting with others, asking for input, and—most importantly—continuing to build my reputation within my field.

 

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Who is the MVP of the Marketing Bowl: Social Media or Super Bowl Ads?

Image by Michael Kwan (Freelancer) via Flickr

If you read this blog, you likely already care less about the Saints versus the Colts than you do about Super Bowl ads versus Social Media marketing.  After all, the real money isn’t earned from the battle on the field but in the battle that occurs during timeouts: Each player on last year’s winning team earned a bonus of $83,000 while NBC earned around $213 million in ad revenue for the telecast.

A shift is occurring in the relative importance to marketers of Social Media and Super Bowl advertising.  Of course, the 2010 Super Bowl isn’t the first we’ve seen of the marriage of Social Media and Super Bowl ads.  Last year, Doritos struck gold with a UGC (User-Generated Content) ad produced by two unemployed brothers, and the brand is back this year with more UGC ads competing for even greater prize money.

But this year, there’s a difference:  The first evidence that the world has changed between Super Bowl XLIII and XLIV came from Pepsi’s news it would not advertise during the big game; instead the brand is opting to invest its marketing budget in a Social Media marketing program called Pepsi Refresh.  Many of us in the Social Media business were a bit shocked by this, not because Pepsi saw the importance of Social Media marketing but because they saw it as an alternative rather than an adjunct to their Super Bowl ad campaign.  As I said to 1to1 Media at the time, “There was a part of me that was a little surprised that (Pepsi) didn’t think about layering a social media program on top of a Super Bowl ad.”

While Pepsi is to be commended for using the “Social Media vs. Super Bowl ads” hype for terrific PR advantage, the fact is that advertising and Social Media go together like brats and beer.  Advertising is great at raising awareness to a mass audience, while Social Media marketing is perfect for building deeper relationships and influence.  The two are mutually beneficial, not mutually exclusive.

This paired benefit is not lost on other brands; in fact,the first sentence of the New York Times article says it all, “Coca-Cola is telling Pepsi-Cola that when it comes to Super Bowl advertising, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.”  Coke is one brand that will use its Super Bowl ad to promote its Facebook program, http://facebook.com/livepositively, where consumers can send virtual goods and earn Coca-Cola donations to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.  Audi is another Super Bowl advertiser that is using their valuable ad time to drive consumers into a Social Media venue;  their “Green Police” ads direct consumers to the Audi YouTube channel where the humorous ads can be viewed, rated, and shared.  On Twitter,Unilever will be engaging people who tweet about their Dove Men+Care ads in real-time during the game and E*Trade will be directing viewers to BabyMail, a site to send e-mail messages using voices that simulate baby talk.

And this is where the interesting shift in the recognition of Social Media marketing is evident:  Last year, brands used Social Media marketing mostly to develop content for and promote their Super Bowl ads, but this year Super Bowl ads are being dedicated to the support of larger Social Media marketing strategies.  The servant has become the master.

The reason for this shift is obvious:  Consumer habits are changing.  Back in 2007, Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey found that only 25% were Joiners–people who maintained a profile on social networking sites.   In 2009, that figure had risen to 59%.  The shift in consumer media consumptions is continuing, and this year’s Super Bowl will not be the end of the evolution of marketers’ budgets and strategies toward Social Computing.

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