PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Over the past month, we’ve helped a client to find their best fit in a social media tracking and analysis vendor. Top contenders included Biz360, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony, and Factiva. With this group, we felt pretty comfortable we’d covered all the bases.

As an agency employee, it’s always interesting to play client once in a while and see how vendors look from the other side of the table. Who looks hungry and who comes across as surprisingly sleepy? Who attempts to dazzle with capabilities? Who really does their homework on the brand? Who pauses the longest on the well-designed slide that shows their huge global network, while the clients politely glance down and check their PDAs? Nothing leaves you feeling more exposed about your last pitch than seeing how others do it. On the other hand, talking to so many speciality vendors in a row is always instructive, and I’ve pulled out a few of the more interesting tidbits from all the presentations.

Seven tidbits, to be exact. Here they are:

1. The last 24 months have been a very dynamic period for consumers, a true Web 2.0 ramp-up. Adding multimedia to CGM has made it much more persuasive. A lot of tools don’t capture video CGM yet.

2. It’s key for companies to position themselves in the social media process, not just react defensively to what’s heard and said. Dumping a press release online does not qualify as reacting.

3. Few companies are ready to defend their brands when the search trend is directionally negative. If a brand neglects to buy any kind of defensive marketing, it’s much tougher for them. Companies must buy terms quickly and link to ‘get the facts’ sites in order to shape expectations. Most price competition on adword buys is around positive terms, not negative, so it’s not that onerous to combat.

4. Although SEO is the way to go, a good SEO strategy may take 16 months to show good ‘shelf space’ results in the search engines.

5. Every company needs a definition strategy for Wikipedia, as it currently ranks 9th in Alexa ratings. Negative press, deserved or not, often leaks into definitions and becomes hard to dislodge.

6. Corporate Web sites continue to show surprising strength in terms of reference-ability, as long as they offer good objective information, ask for input and offer communities. Intuit’s community has 200,000 users.

7. CGM can provide great content for corporate blogs (one company called it DNA matching). In turn, blogs can serve as a sensor for how you calibrate messages. Example: based on strong community and fact that a recent defect was surfaced online, Toyota recently was the first company to launch a recall online. Another great use of CGM is to see what publications have the best online echo effect for your target audience and direct the buy there.

There are probably 700 golden rules floating around out there, but I thought these were smart and perceptive. And after looking at all the presentations, a clear candidate rose to the top. Which is just as it should be.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Interactive, Marketing, Measurement, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.