To round off this blog, for now, I would like to touch on something I have briefly mentioned earlier in the blog post “Your wallet is being eaten” – The results from an Ernst and Young survey showed, that mobile is viewed as the future’s most important growth driver. Let’s dig a little deeper on this subject.

The report “Score Your Mobile Marketing Maturity” takes us down the road to the world of mobile. As today’s consumers are always addressable and are able to connect everywhere through their mobiles, one should think that this is something all companies would embrace. However, the report showed that 34% of the respondents said their company had no plans to launch mobile marketing programs. Several obstacles could explain this reluctance to engage in mobile, including lack of organizational support, no best practices to lean on, or ambiguity on how to measure mobile. The report suggests scoring your organization’s mobile maturity. I believe that this can be a helpful tool, but I can’t help thinking of something else, that could be equally rewarding.

In general “Knowing your customers” has become a mantra, something you should strive towards. Tools as monitoring, social technographics and the consumer decision journey, are all telling us something about our customers. I wonder if a tool for assessing mobile usage patterns exists. The Forrester report states that “The bottom line is that as your customers’ mobile activity accelerates, so must your organization’s expertise”. I agree that this is true, however you could be more specific. What is meant by “mobile activity accelerates”? Can you score your customers’ mobile maturity?

I imagine that target customer groups can vary a lot in their mobile behavior. If you could assess customer mobile maturity and then compare it with your own score, you could get a more precise idea of where you should be or go. Why not stay ahead of the development? Strategically this comparison would be of great value – instead of wandering around in the world of mobile somewhat blindfolded, you would have a direction to go, a visible target to aim at. After all, it is your customers who you should walk with, so in a sense, they decide the direction.

According to the Forrester Groundswell framework the sequence of the 5 objectives is monitoring, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing. While the first three are usually a big enough challenge, I will now show you two examples of how companies can take it to the next level – embracing customers!

Starbucks went for it

Embracing includes integrating customers in the company’s world and using their help to design products and improve processes. Starbucks actually have a function on their website called “My Starbucks Idea”. It allows any fan to come up with ideas for improving the Starbucks business. Every idea that is submitted will be reviewed, and if it is a great idea it will be launched. To maintain trust and enthusiasm, each will have a symbol next to it signaling the status of the idea, whether it is being reviewed, already reviewed or if it has been launched. This way Starbucks can show customers that their requests aren’t going unheard, and every fan can follow their idea in the process. In addition fans can comment on all the ideas, creating a place to chat and brainstorm new ideas to help improve the business.

Mountain Dew went further !

“Mountain Dew put 100% of the power into the Flavor Nations to control the direction, marketing and branding of the respected flavors.”

They started something very unique called the Dewmocracy. It was a campaign empowering users to choose which of three new flavors that should become a permanent flavor in the Mountain Dew Family. What is really interesting though, is that Mountain Dew handed over the responsibility for choosing the three final flavors to users as well. They started out with seven experimental new flavors, and then selected 50 applicants who then were sent “test kits” of the seven flavors. They had to test the flavors and report their reactions to each flavor. The seven flavors were then narrowed down to the three most popular.

However, Mountain Dew went EVEN further.

The 50 applicants were divided into three different groups called Flavor Nations. These Flavor Nations were given the responsibility of everything about promoting their Flavor. They named it, designed it and even did all of the marketing!

The campaign turned out to be a huge success. Fans appreciated the fact that they could choose what they wanted the most. People would talk about which flavor they liked best, post it on their favorite social media network, and even blog about it. This helped Mountain Dew’s Dewmocracy campaign become viral, and a social media hit.

The Mountain Dew example is incredible in terms of embracing customers. Not only did they ask the customers for help in choosing and designing the next new product, they made customers work for them by giving them a sense of ownership over the product. What a strong connection, I bet their net promoter score went through the roof!

A precedent to McDonald’s successful “Our Food, Your Questions” campaign, actually exists though on in a slightly different form and on a smaller scale. The core idea however is the same – explaining and answering questions from customers about the process of how their food is made.

Many farmers across Canada have become aware of Twitter as a tool to bridge the gap between farm and table. They use it to connect with Canadians wanting to know more, about where the food comes from. One farmer answered questions on pesticide use, which can be seen as a parallel to McDonald’s asking questions about whether their food is real beef.  This farmer also invited a consumer to come and walk in his soybean field. This “behind the scenes” experience can be viewed as a parallel to the McDonald’s video on YouTube, taking you behind the scenes of a photo shoot of a burger.

Tweeting farmer

As there were misconceptions about the McDonald’s food and the process of making it, farmers have been suffering from this as well. One farmer says: “There’s that misconception that there are hormones everywhere throughout the milk, and of course that’s definitely not the case”. This farmer has been able to accommodate questions about this on Twitter and, to some extent, dispel the misconception.

As McDonald’s sought to change the consumer perception of the quality of their food to the better, the farmers’ mission was the same. One said: “I think the big thing is you want to make sure that people are comfortable with the processes that you’re doing on your farm (…) and knowing where your food comes from”.

As my example shows, it is not only the big corporations, who do great social media campaigns. Social media is a tool that everyone can leverage. Normally when discussing “monitoring”, most of the focus is on listening to consumers in the category. However, I see no reason why large companies shouldn’t be monitoring the initiatives of smaller companies as well. These could turn out to be a great source of inspiration.

Twitter can be used for many things, apparently also as a “mood meter”.

Cornell University researchers find most people worldwide have the same mood rhythms. They used a text-analysis program to analyze 509 million tweets and measure the “positive affect (enthusiasm, delight, activeness, alertness, etc.) or negative affect (distress, fear, anger, guilt, disgust, etc.) expressed by the text”.

The results showed that people tend to be more positive on weekends and early in the morning. Generally people’s mood slowly gets worse during the day. “Twitter moods and the rhythm of those moods are about the same in among the 2.4 million users in 84 different countries surveyed over a two-year period”.

This could potentially be very interesting information for marketers at companies. This essentially is an alternative way of monitoring. Why not use this information to pick the right time to engage with customers online? You could try to encourage conversation at times when people generally are in a good mood. For wider implications however, one might ask critical questions like “what about all the people who don’t use twitter?”. Can the results of the study be generalized to those people? Furthermore the tool is only analyzing the text in tweets, what about pictures, sound and videos? What role do these elements play? Lastly you may address the issue of the number of tweets during the day. What if you are in a really good mood in the evening, just before you go to bed, but don’t tweet about it?

Click on the picture above to read the article and watch the videos.

Even though the study is very interesting, and exemplifies how the role of social media is evolving, the results are in my opinion not yet ready to be utilized in a business environment without further research.

Maybe in the future, social media can provide information about consumers that we had never imagined.

After the hurricane Sandy hit New York last week, many photos circulated online. However, many of these photos were fake. They were retweeted on Twitter, shared on Facebook and liked on Instagram, in some cases tens of thousands of times. The photos are either old photos from other hurricanes, completely manipulated photos or old manipulated photos. One example is a photo of a shark swimming through the streets of New Jersey:

It turns out, that the shark has been “photoshopped” into the picture. This is just one out of many – for other photos, click here 

It can be very hard to determine whether photos are true or false. This is an example of how easy it has become to create false content, for example by using tools as Photoshop.

I think this problem becomes especially relevant, to techniques for encouraging users to create content, such as “Flipping the funnel”. This might be an effective way of encouraging conversations and user generated content, but it is also subject to one of the major disadvantages of UGC which my example illustrates – loss of control, people can create almost anything. Companies can’t control what content users create, and how they converse about the brand. Due to this lack of control, you can’t totally prevent untrue content to circulate. Some people advocating user generated content, seem to pay very little or no attention to how to deal with false content or even prevent it. I think you need to think about how to minimize motivation to create false content, and stimulate motivation to create truthful content. You could monitor and remove false content yourself, or even help customers filter out and report false content.

Now, the photo below is supposed to be the original photo. But is it true? – I really don’t know. The photo looks incredible and could just be another “photoshop production”.

.

.

…what do YOU think?

 .

.

.

To finish this of, there are also stories of problems the other way around, where companies pretend to be a user, and then create fake content such as positive reviews on their own products. This adds another layer of complexity to the debate about trust in UGC. Indeed it is a complex issue, and sometimes it is almost impossible to tell the loyals from the lyers.