Why Pre-Commerce is the Next Frontier

About 4,000 years ago, give or take a few decades, we developed the notion of currency to act as a valuable receipt for goods received.  If you were hanging out in Mesopotamia 2000 B.C., you might have trusted your buddy delivering the grain, but your boss still wanted to get a form of receipt to match the grain you would put in the temple storehouse.  Nothing personal, just business.  

 

About 30 years ago, we started figuring out how to order online.   In 1982, Minitel was introduced in France by France Telecom.  I remember it when working for Rhone-Poulenc Rorer in Paris.  It was revolutionary at the time.  You could book travel online via this little electronic box with green writing on the screen.   In the 90’s, we started introducing security protocols and improved our bandwidth dramatically.  In 1994, it became possible to buy pizza from Pizza Hut right from their site.  Not a revolution, but cool.  1995 then proved to be the breakout year.  Dell.com started with an initial goal of hoping to make $1MM per month, which was very bold at that time.  Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com.  Cisco started selling online and eBay was founded, all in the same year. 

 

15 years later, it’s safe to say that companies have focused on e-commerce as a way to purchase goods directly through the Internet.  And, quite predictably, the majority of promotional spend goes against this transaction.   We are good at the transaction. 

 

We are bad on reaching customers before the transaction.  And this is giving rise to the next wave of e-commerce, which I refer to as “pre-commerce”.   

 

Pre-Commerce is a reality due to how the web is being transformed by technology and the customer together.    And it is a major opportunity.

 

There is a reason why we ask our peers for advice before we purchase online or why we look for weeks/months before making a decision.  In the offline experience, we can see, touch and hear direct.  Online, we are often missing that experience of interacting with products, asking questions and putting our five senses to work.  So, we do the next best thing.  We explore by ourselves.  We often start with search.   15.2 billion searches were conducted by all of us in the U.S. only in January, 2010.  We ask our peers for direct advice often after sending them content to look at.  We visit the communities we trust to learn more and ask questions.  We go to Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo and see what others have said.  We look at Craigslist now and then.   We explore until we are satisfied…..then we visit to buy online. 

 

Basically, we substitute the offline experience we know with a rich, deep exploration online. 

 

It’s the world of pre-commerce.  It’s a world most marketers think they know, but actually have no idea where or how decisions are made before a customer ever visits your transaction-focused site.  Most companies are analogous to the retailer waiting patiently in their store for you to arrive.  It’s an old model. 

 

In the future, leaders will be experts at interacting with you appropriately before you make a decision and they will integrate community into their e-commerce site, so your experience continues when you visit.  Those companies will become a valid and trusted partner in the pre-commerce journey. 

 

This is what I love about the evolution of the web.  We think we have solved how do to something and we realize we’re just getting started.  We’ve come a long way from taking receipts for grain, but just imagine where we can go from here….

 

All the best, Bob

Google Buzz and the Enterprise: A Look at the Real Opportunity

The Enterprise is the new frontier for social media – the wild west.  It’s wide open for leadership and here’s why.

 

Today, email is the center of our world inside a company.    It’s a fact whether we like it or not.

Tomorrow, text messaging will increase in importance.  The next generation of employees have grown up texting.  They don’t do email and don’t want to. 

The mobile phone is often the device of choice to learn on the go.  We want our laptop and phone to be fully integrated.

And we’re increasingly parking our data and accessing solutions in the cloud. 

 

The winner in the Enterprise will likely be the “Switzerland” of data, email, conversations and community.  They will be able to combine structured and unstructured data in new ways that streamline how we truly communicate. 

 

The winner will provide us new and obvious ways to improve productivity, share and network ideas faster and gain insights that matter with incredible speed.  Relevance of data will be key.  We want to receive ideas and insights from peers we respect inside and outside our company, not a random onslaught of opinion from the entire company and all people in the free world.  We want to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds we are part of…..what we don’t need is more clutter in Outlook or Gmail or Hotmail. 

 

So today, email is not the center we want, but it is the center we have.  It is our main way we learn.

 

Many companies are trying to build out their proprietary solutions, which is typical and expected.  I guess I would do the same to build a company.  Salesforce.com has a great CRM platform, an idea community, integration with Facebook and mobile solutions.  Microsoft has a new and improved Sharepoint 2010, Outlook continues to look for ways to integrate from Xobni to LinkedIn and Bing is impressive.  Google has Buzz, Apps, the Droid and the best search on the planet.  There’s just one problem.

 

Not much changes in the Enterprise unless you can integrate easily with current platforms/infrastructure and if your solution is adaptable with time.  Innovation in the Enterprise happens incrementally when we are talking software and hardware. 

 

So back to Google.  Their search is a great solution internally for companies.  Their Apps are reasonably popular with smaller companies.  But they have not penetrated large Enterprise in a significant manner.    

 

The solution is not to win the battle, but to figure out how to integrate across platforms and win the war.   Search, email, text messaging and the phone will be central to this success….

 

One of these companies will figure out that social media and technology are so transformative that they can’t do it all by themselves.  If they can work more openly, perhaps even partner, to integrate email, data, search, conversations and community, they can win big long-term. 

 

Meanwhile, most of the attention is on the consumer world.  To me, it is ironic, since the consumer world is a community-driven world and it will be a long uphill battle to integrate community into email.  It’s a much easier game to do the reverse and integrate email into community.  The world tilts in favor of social media communities, ala Facebook, in this regard. 

 

The good news is Google is once again raising everyone’s game via their innovation.  It is what we need to push us to a new way to drive future innovation in the Enterprise.  And we’re really just getting started…. 

 

All the best, Bob

 

Advertising is a Catalyst, Not an Answer

Thousands of years ago, we learned how to tell our story visually.  Commercial messages have been found in the ruins of Pompei and paintings on rock walls were quite popular for awhile.   As more people learned how to read and write, we evolved how we communicate.  Rock walls lost their fizz and town criers became cool until we created the printing press.  Eventually, someone had the bright idea of creating a daily update and we moved into the world of newspapers.  With all this new space available to reach people, it wasn’t too long before the first paid advertising occurred in 1836 in the French newspaper, La Presse. 

 

Once ads started, ad agencies were not far behind with the creation of Havas in the 1840’s as everyone realized how ads could help newspapers lower price and reach valuable customers.   Not much changed for the next 150 or so years as we learned how to get more sophisticated in how we advertise, but the concept was largely the same.   We went from rock walls to billboards.  From commercial messages in Pompei to commercial messages on TV.  The concept was the same and when done well, it was amazingly effective.   

 

Fast forward to 1998 and our friends at Google emerge with a new way to learn and tell your story.  Disruptive for sure, but we are often slow to change, so many folks, even today, still hold on to the idea that advertising is the way to tell your story and for customers to learn about your brand.  Just one more billboard…one more SuperBowl Ad….just one more of a lot of things. 

 

The reality is we are experiencing a shift in the importance of advertising.  It is still important, but in a much different way.   

 

Advertising is no longer the most effective way to tell your story.  Customers believe their peers are more credible.  Most of us form our first impression of a brand via search.  We read ratings and reviews.  We learn on YouTube. 

 

Advertising is now a catalyst that triggers an offline and online experience that leads customers to learn, share and decide what they will do in the future and they do this on their own time.   Anyone who spends a lot of money in advertising or email marketing or other forms of promotion is experiencing this change. 

 

Future leaders in Marketing will  use advertising strategically to start conversations or to shift the conversation, but will not have the expectation that the campaign will be the answer and the key driver of all sales success.  It will lead to more focused use of advertising and less continual drip versions of campaigns. 

 

The answer is all about what your customers, the people who buy your brands, do when their awareness is triggered.  And they do this for weeks and months after their interest is triggered, not when you want them to do it.  Here is a sample of what is happening today. 

 

Consumers exposed to display advertising are spending far more time (55%) than average visitors going to a site up to 30 days after the ad is seen (and page views were up 50+% in the same study)

48% of Twitter users introduced to a brand on Twitter say they are compelled to search for additional information.

30% of this same group say their inspiration is to learn more.

44% recommend products in social media and 39%  have discussed a product specifically on Twitter.

 

Essentially, advertising starts the search to learn more.  And I mean, search, literally.

 

Even the large holding companies are embracing this change.  Group M, part of WPP, did research showing that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media and paid search programs are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products compared to users who only saw paid search. 

 

So next time you are thinking of investing money in an advertising campaign, ask yourself the following questions:

 

#1 – Is this an integrated campaign that will create the right learning experience for my customer?

#2 – Am I measuring the online impact of how people search, recommend and discuss my brand related to the advertising over time or am I still stuck measuring the old school stuff, like traffic to my site and other short-term transactional measures?

#3 – Am I launching a campaign that actually builds intelligence on how customers want to interact, so I can understand how to build a lasting communications model that works for the brand and the customer?

#4 –Is my campaign flexible enough that I can adjust to what I learn?

#5 – Am I investing in what really matters to move the needle? 

 

We are at the beginning of a major transition in how we utilize advertising effectively.  It will remain valuable, but how we use it will change significantly. 

 

All the best, Bob

Are You Really Listening to Your Customers? 7 Important Areas……

Yep…uh huh…right….click, click, click….no, I’m listening…seriously, I’m listening….click, click, click…what? Can you say that again? 

 

Sound familiar?  It’s the cadence of corporate life these days……we are half-listening, which in my view, is not listening at all. 

 

Strategic listening is becoming a competitive advantage for companies.  And for those who truly listen, they are realizing that it is not as simple as it sounds.  When done well, it becomes incredibly powerful – it is the cornerstone of your online strategy. 

The reason is that strategic listening involves a number of variables.  It’s the nuances of listening that lead to the breakthroughs.  Conversations provide clues that three-ring binders never could compete with.  Leaders talk about where conversations occur, who has influence and which words are most powerful.  They are developing their own knowledge base that only gets stronger with time.  Followers are still talking in conference rooms looking at slides with pie charts and using group-think to debate what may be happening. 

 

It’s time to look at the “walk” as well as the “talk” in listening. 

 

Here are 7 important areas in strategic listening. 

 

#1 – Location, Location, Location – remember the old adage that the three most important factors in buying a home are location, location and location?  Same with conversations.  Know where your customers hang. 

 

#2 – Share of Conversation – throw away the slides showing positive, negative and neutral comments.  When data makes you guess what is happening, you don’t have data, you have just  “collected noise”.  Leaders know exactly who is driving share of conversation for their brand….with precision….they know what is happening behind the pie charts, graphs and tables…..they don’t guess.

 

#3 – Customer Expressions of Faith & Concern – they are equally important.  When a customer takes time to tell you what they think, either via a rating and review or a complaint or by answering a question, they are giving you a view into their way of thinking.  What do your most active customers actually care about and how is it trending?  Is your knowledge real-time or is it based on data that is months old?  Do you know exactly?

 

#4 – Ideas – customers like to do three things…share ideas, share product knowledge and provide each other with solutions to problems.  Customers can’t wait to provide you with their best intellectual capital.  All you have to do is grant permission by asking them in an idea site or on the phone when they call technical support.  Let your customers loose and watch what happens.  

 

#5 – The New Language – leaders know the exact words their customers use when they are talking online.  They don’t think in terms of keyword dictionary spreadsheets.  They think about the language of the customer.  Search is about customers using their language to find what they want.  Too often, our search strategies actually don’t reflect the prioritization of the customer’s words of choice.  Pretty amazing to me.   

 

#6 – What’s Bothering Me – many companies hope to avoid calls with complaints, but, in reality, you can learn so much.  Imperfect companies improve immensely by listening, learning and sharing what they are being told…..right away.  And we all know there are no perfect companies..yet.

 

#7 – How Customers Learn – now that you are listening to your customers, you develop an understanding about how they like to learn.  For example, maybe it really does make sense to start telling your story via video.  Or a certain group of customers would prefer to only receive information via their smart phone.  Do you know how they like to learn? Or how you want them to learn?

 

When you become a strategic listener, the world opens up along with opportunities for your brands.  What was that? Huh? Click, click, click…just a second….yep, be there in a minute…huh?  J

 

Push out the noise in your corporate life…..it never was helpful to begin with……make the customer your learning center every day.  Just make it happen....

 

Enjoy, Bob

 

WeissWatch ThoughtLeader Interview: Michael Fleming, GSK USA

In this first edition of WeissWatch ThoughtLeaders - a new podcast series that features conversations with influential people in organizations around the world – guest Michael Fleming of GlaxoSmithKline USA and host Neville Hobson discuss communication and engagement in the pharma industry including the objectives behind and experiences with “More Than Medicine,” the GSK US public blog launched in May 2009; the role of social media; and commentary on the FDA social media hearing in November 2009 and implications for healthcare communications.

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About Our Guest

As head of new and social media communications for GSK US Pharmaceuticals, Michael Fleming is spearheading exploration and adoption of social media strategies across both product marketing and corporate communications.  He leads the team that recently launched the first US pharma blog, "More than Medicine" and the company's foray into Twitter. Previously, Michael led US product communications at GSK.

Before joining GSK, he held positions in global marketing, public affairs, and operations at Searle and DuPont Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in his career, Michael was a senior aide to a US Senator and he continues to be active in politics and civic affairs.

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Do you have a comment, question or suggestion about this episode of The WeissWatch Podcast? Feel free to let us know what’s on your mind - leave a comment in this post for inclusion in the next episode. If you wish, you can email your comment, question or suggestion as an MP3 file attachment (max 3 minutes / 5Mb file size) to weisswatchpodcast@wcgworld.com.

Podsafe music from Moving On Swiftly by The Smallvilles.

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WCG Headlines PR Week's List of Agencies to Watch in 2010

A big thanks to the folks at PRWeek and all the staff at WCG for a stellar year that led to the Editor's Choice award for the top agencies to watch in 2010.  PR Week noted WCG's growth in headcount and revenue, as well as rapid expansion of creative and social media capabilities, as indicators that WCG will indeed be one of the top agencies to watch in 2010.  Other agencies that were recognized include MS&L, Waggener Edstrom, Next Fifteen, and Ogilvy PR Worldwide.

From PR Week:

"WeissComm, once a traditional healthcare PR shop, used 2009 to expand its offerings further into social media and creative services through a number of acquisitions and hires. It says it expects revenues for 2009 to increase 40% year-over-year.
 
The acquisitions set a tone for the San Francisco-based agency, especially during a year where many firms were cutting budgets and staff. Going into 2010, it is well positioned for more growth.
 
With its integrated offerings, the firm is more than poised to take the lead as a counselor and strategist on issues relating to the FDA's policy on online communications, healthcare reform, new technology, and the growing consumer health sector.
 
If the FDA develops guidance for social media and online communications, the firm, which has been a key partner in developing social media strategies for some of the largest pharma companies, can guide its clients through changes as a true adviser.
 
WeissComm's acquisitions will also help it develop client relationships outside the traditional pharma and biotech sphere. Yet, many firms are remaining cautious about 2010. If budgets don't increase and revenues stay flat, the agency could face challenges in maintaining its success."

http://www.prweekus.com/editors-choice-2010-who-to-watch/article/160360/2/

The Top 10 Health Stories of 2009

When it comes to staying on top of the collective news cycle, accurately tracking and knowing the stories that prompt conversation is the key. Being connected to the audience and their interests is impossible without an understanding of what has mattered in the past.

Health reform on Capitol Hill, the H1N1 virus, breakthroughs in cancer and obesity research, and the merging of Pfizer and Wyeth into the world’s largest pharma company were all big news in 2009.

While several organizations have done a nice job of synthesizing the top issues driving healthcare news coverage this past year (Harvard Health Letter, Time Magazine), our Media and Technology group went a step further to examine the exact articles that had the greatest impact online.

Starting from a list of more than 500 news articles and blog posts, WCG developed a simple algorithm to zero in on the Top 10 stories from 2009.  The ranking, highlighted below, considers factors such as the number of websites that link to an article, how many people commented on it, how broadly it was disseminated in Twitter and top social bookmarking sites, and how many websites referenced the article’s headline.

We look forward to discussing with you more about how we arrived at the Top 10 and using similar analytics and approaches as we continue to innovate new ways of analyzing what drives influence online.  Please use the Comments section below to add your thoughts.

Top 10 Stories of 2009

 

Rank	Index*	Headline	Author	Outlet
1	100	House Democrats pass health-care bill	Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray	Washington Post
2	59.36922	Why We Need Health Care Reform	Barrack Obama	NY Times
3	56.66738	Obama signs massive, 'imperfect' spending bill	Danny DeFreitas (Deputy Editor)	MSNBC
4	48.59569	Congress Slams Panel for New Mammogram Guidelines	John McKenzie and John Parkinson	ABC News
5	42.31632	HIV/AIDS: The incurable epidemic	Fred Hiatt (Editor)	Washington Post
6	34.41015	24 hours in the ER' shows challenges of health system	Susan Page, Marisol Bello, John Fritze, Mary Brophy Marcus and Liz Szabo	USA Today
7	34.22327	WHO raises pandemic alert to second-highest level	Vital Signs Blog--Contributors Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Barbara Starr	CNN
8	28.60779	Senate Blocks Use of New Mammogram Guidelines	David M. Herszehorn	NY Times Prescriptions Blog
9	27.43842	New guidelines: Pap smears can start at 21	Julia Sommerfeld (Editor)	MSNBC
10	18.03716	Obama Ends Stem Cell Research Ban	CBS News	Associated Press

*Index: the measure that defines the relative impact of each article when compared with all of the articles collected from 2009; This is the final output from the algorithm describes above. This list brings to life the common concerns and interest of the broad healthcare audience. This ranges from the average person who simply keeps up with the news to the top health industry executive who never stops monitoring the issues. Now, what will the focus be in 2010? It’s impossible to know, but I leave you with the proof that news flow matters and the stories the audience chooses are what drives it.

The WeissWatch Podcast #5: December 21, 2009

Welcome to the The WeissWatch Podcast: talking points for clients, colleagues and friends of the WeissComm Group. To automatically receive episodes as they are published, subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also subscribe at iTunes (coming soon).

In This Episode:

• Bob Pearson, Chief Technology and Media Officer, and Neville Hobson, Head of Social Media Europe, discuss ten trends that will matter to every company in 2010 including search, mobile, video, trust and influence; Bob offers some insight into the behaviours and communication leadership that the best companies will demonstrate in the coming year.

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Download the Podcast (MP3, 5.5Mb, 12:07)

Do you have a comment, question or suggestion about this episode of The WeissWatch Podcast? Feel free to let us know what’s on your mind - leave a comment in this post for inclusion in the next episode. If you wish, you can email your comment, question or suggestion as an MP3 file attachment (max 3 minutes / 5Mb file size) to weisswatch@googlemail.com.

Podsafe music from Moving On Swiftly by The Smallvilles.

Enjoy the show!

Google Debuts New Twitter Search Results

On December 11th, Google debuted their new real time search results for Tweets. This is the latest in a movement among social media and search companies that underscores a preference for real time content.

When searching for certain keywords you will now find call outs for the most recent Tweets pertaining to your search.

Why Measuring Click-Throughs is Next to Meaningless

Whenever we do something long enough, we start to assume it actually is meaningful.  Of course, this is often where we get into trouble.

 

A great example is our fascination with click-through rates.  If we run an ad and people click through to a site, we are endlessly fascinated by whether our click-through rate was higher than last time or higher than average.

 

The real conclusion?  It’s not relevant.  It’s at best a basic diagnostic measure. 

 

Here’s why. 

 

People often take action over a period of a month or so after they learn about something via display advertising.  We are not as pavlovian as once thought.  And when we do get around to visiting, we tend to spend 55% more time than average visitors to the site.  So ask yourself if you are measuring what is convenient (a click through) or what is real (activity over a period of one month). 

 

Now, think of social media sites.  One study showed that 48% of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information.  44% of people said they recommend products in social media and 39% said they have discussed a product specifically on Twitter.  Facebook users edged out Twitter with 46% talking about or recommending products.

 

This is interesting.  What it tells us is that if advertising is truly compelling, customers will take their own action to recommend and discuss your brand.  The flip side is that if there is silence, it is more clear than ever that you did not make a real impact.   Are you measuring the conversations you generate or not?  Good question to ask yourself.

 

Now, how about a nod towards integration.  Research by GroupM basically says that if you do a campaign in isolation, it doesn’t achieve nearly as much as if you combine social media and paid search.  In fact, you are 2.8x more likely to have someone search for that brand’s products compared to users who only saw paid search.  So, when you measure one variable such as paid search, is this actually correct or should you be looking at the total impact you make over a period of time based on what you do via natural and paid search? 

 

I believe I know the answer.  Evolve how you measure.  In today’s world, we can see quite transparently if customers care or not by what they say.  Don’t guess, make sure your measurement tells you definitively what reality is for you.

 

All the best, Bob