Harness the Power of Conversations

A big part I love about the City is its magnetic nature of attracting different kinds of talents and hosting an open stage to stimulate new insights out of a diverse community.

Yesterday and today I spent a fair amount of time at the Hudson Theatre attending Conversational Marketing Summit, which is a part of the Internet Week saluting New York's thriving Internet industry. As the media industry plays such a strategic role in the city, the Internet Week here has an inherent focus on how to use technology and internet to reach and engage audience in the new media arena.

The two-day summit was mainly comprised of 15-minute case studies, which made the whole conference fruitful and efficient. With exponentially growing user base and user-initiated activities, conversational marketing is gaining more and more popularity among a myriad of entrepreneurs and marketers. Just think for one second about Elieen Naughton's statement: Youtube could be the third largest country in population if it were a country. Not to mention another fact: 51% of registered citizens go to this 'country' weekly or more often.

Some interesting cases and trends noticed in this summit that I'd like to share with you:

What is the formula of successful conversational marketing?

Is there a way that we can distill the chaotic marketplace and repeat success in different brands and different regions?

I don't think I can or have no intention to answer this question thoroughly here. But it's a good question that motivates us to explore the lucrative but less-marketer-controlled new space. As a strategist, I tend to treat all the market dynamics as inputs and interpret the variables of technolgy and consumer trends, in an attempt to figure out the puzzle and output constants and key driving forces.

That's probably why I was delighted to hear Lucas Watson introducing the 'Marketing Technopologist' approach inside P&G marketing practice. Marketing Technopologist is the combination of marketer, anthropologist and technologist. Lucas thinks that to achieve success in the changing environment, a marketer should not only be good at the basics that defined marketing in the past, but also be sympathetic to consumers and have a clear understanding of different technology options.

To illustrate the approach, he presented the case of Gillette's marketing campaign in India. As you may know, there is some unique shaving market segments and traditions in India. A great number of Indian men wear heavy facial hair, and cheap local shaving products have established a huge market presence and formed consumer habits of shaving over centuries. How could they sell the 20 times more expensive Gillette products to over 500 million Indian men?

You can't simply apply any Western marketing textbook model into this cultural context. But the basics still apply. If people don't shave, how do you sell your shaving products? Firstly, change the attitude and make them want to shave. This is what P&G did in India. The interesting part of the story is that they really learnt from the culture and uncovered a key insight that make this happen: change the consumer attitudes by letting them do they love most!

The marketing team in India found out that "to discuss, argue and debate is in the blood of Indian people". Thus they initiatied the national campaign called "India Votes: Shave or Note?" Women, celebrities and employers are invited to share their opinions on how they feel like men shaved or not. Mass traditional media and paid social media were used in mix to reach the audience and ignite the national discussion. The marketing outcomes were encouraging in terms of both brand consideration and sales.

Bridge conversations across networks.

Are you frustrated by fliping through Google search pages without finding your answers? How many windows do you have to open to read information from different sources?

I think it's a brilliant to bring those online social silos together. I also understand it's not going to break all the barriers easily because of strong economic forces and competition. But I've already seen some emerging efforts in unifying the user experience in this aspect. Google is integrating its broad online service family into Google Wave. Big-name social networks, Such as Facebook and Linkedin are aggressively offering open APIs and connecting other external applications.

In this summit, there were several case studies that demostrated the same ambitions. Brian Wallace from RIM unveiled myBlackberry online platform that enables Blackberry users to ask and answer questions across several major social networks including Facebook and myspace. From what I heard, the myBlackberry site pulls data from Blackberry fan pages on different social networks and aggregrates on its own site. So a myspace user can answer the question a Facebook user throws on the fan page without changing his/her account to another online property.

Another case was about Aardvark. This is a start-up company that tries to connect all contacts together over different messengers via an answer proxy. The website is not released yet. After it's open to public sign-ups, you can have your IM accounts connected to the Aardvark account. And there'll be a answer proxy account added in your contact list. Whenever you have a question, especially subjective ones, you can send a message to the proxy account, and it'll throw the question into your broader networks, i.e. friends of friends, across messengers. Anyone who wants to answer the question can reply to the proxy which will relay the answer message back to you.

I tried this service out on a trial version and I'm really excited about it. The answer came back quickly from a person I don't know but I can trust somehow (because he's in my broader network). I said "thank you" and he replied "sure thing". I guess I could continue to strike a conversation with him through the proxy. I don't usually enjoying chatting with strangers online. But this feels so much better than starting with the weather questions out of nowhere.

Here's the screenshot of how my question got answered via Aardvark.

Of course there are some more interesting stories from marketers and agencies.

Deborah Conrad shared the story about how the new large-scale Intel campaign, Sponsors of Tomorrow, came into being.

Jen Walsh shared the perspectives of how a century-old corporation full of innovation stories gains online momentum by building conversations with the public on GEreports.

David Churbuck told us how to make the most of the shrinking pocket by enabling enthusiastic athelets to speak out for Lenovo during the Beijing Olympics.

Jason Calacanis revealed his secret of learning from Asian counterparts to make Mahalo a unique search and knowledge sharing platform. Also at Mahalo they connect the Q&A section called Mahalo Answers with a twitter account to enlarge the answer-seeking range.

While we get excited about the new momentum of social media and conversational marketing, some companies are trying to address an essential question to all marketers: how to measure the performance of organic consumer-empowered marketing activities and how to choose from a variety of online properties?

comScore rolls out a new offering called Media Metrix 360, boasting a ‘panel-centric hybrid’ solution to digital audience measurement.

PostRank and Adage shared their joint case study of Power 150, which offers daily ranking of popular marketing blogs based upon the algorithm supported by PostRank.

As David Churbuck, the VP of global web marketing at Lenovo, addressed in his presentation, "No one's looking at the company site during the Olympics. All the audience care about is what's going on with the Games. Help with the conversations. Don't get in the way. Find your way to aggregrate the conversations."