Bloghound

Today my firm, Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research released highlights of an online communities study among 140 organizations which create and maintain communities. Some of the highlights, more of which can be found here:

Greatest value of communities:

• increasing word of mouth (35%)
• increasing brand awareness (28%)
• bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24%)
• increasing customer loyalty (24%)

Greatest obstacles

• getting people involved in the community (51%)
• finding enough time to manage the community (45%)
• attracting people to the community (34%)

What contributes most to effectiveness:

• ability for community members to connect with other like-minded people: 54%
• ability for members to help others: 43%
• focusing community  around a hot topic or issue: 41%
• quality of the community manager/community management team: 33%

Advice for others

When asked what their most important piece of advice is for others creating communities, survey participants’ advice focused around these eight areas:

1.    Start with the end in mind: “Start with a business strategy, defining carefully what you want to accomplish through the community.”

2.    Focus on the value to the members:  “Make sure you deliver real, special, unique, obvious value to the core group you’re hoping to attract.”

3.    Don’t start with the technology: “Too often people get drunk with Web 2.0 tool excitement and then try to push their business and customer goals into the wrong tool.”

4.    Keep it simple and intuitive:  “Focus on the least common denominator first. Keep it easy to navigate with simple tools to use.”

5.    Keep it fresh and active:  “Keep activity levels up, constantly add new content.”

6.    Have dynamic community leaders: “Make sure you devote enough time to managing the community; letting it fester is worse than not having it in the first place.”

7.    Think through who to involve – or not. “Get Legal and PR to buy-in and help on design, but keep them out of active management.”

8.    Get a passionate core of participants active before launching:  “Make sure you have a committed core of passionate users before you launch.”
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to take the survey and talk to us as part of the qualitative surveys. The complete results are on their way to you this morning.

I don’t know about you but I feel overwhelmed by the number of events and conferences out there. So here’s some editing: here are three where you’ll learn a lot, meet some interesting people, and feel that it was well worth your time and money.

• Word of Mouth Crash Course: My friend and WOM expert Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar on July 30 and Sept. 4 in Chicago. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get a good overview of WOM. (If you use this code when you register you’ll get a $250 discount: “welovebeelinelabs.” For more: http://events.gaspedal.com.

• BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit: Oct. 15-16 in Providence, RI. This is an amazing two-day conference that I think is better than TED. Hosted this year by Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Business Week and author Bill Taylor, speakers are fascinating innovators from business, science, education, the arts, non-profits. It will open your head up in a big way.

• Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York for the first time, Sept. 16-19. We at Beeline Labs are running a three-hour experiential workshop on the morning Sept. 16 on how to create and run thriving online communities. Based on private community-building workshops we’ve recently done you’ll come away with a blueprint for creating a community for your organization. Hope you can join us! Drop me a line, lkelly@beelinelabs.com, if you want to know more.

On Friday, June 27 at 1 p.m. EST, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned so far about marketing, social media and word of mouth marketing over at Learn From My Life. (And answering calls and email questions.)

There are some great interviews over at Learn From My Life from people like free-agent author Daniel Pink, former CNN reporter Daryn Kagan, legendary basketball coach Dale Brown, and Dan Ariely, author of the must-read new book, Predictably Irrational.

Hope you can make it!

The Ryan Montbleau Band is an amazing up-and-coming group that knows how to use Marketing 2.0 to build a fan base and sell tickets and music, with almost no money for marketing. Here are 10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the band for all marketers:

1. Love what you do: passion is the center of marketing and propels all tactical components. The greater the passion, the more powerful the marketing.

2. Listen to your customers (fans): Ryan Montbleau hung out after a recent performance, talking, signing t-shirts, and genuinely connecting with fans in the lobby. I had a great conversation with him about some of his lyrics and how he’s so come to be so wise at such a young age. (Which goes back to listening and passion again; he’s in the world.)

3. Make it easy for people to help you: The band makes it easy for people to act as word of mouth advocates, inviting anyone interested to join the Bleau Crew, their street team community.

“What is the Bleau Crew, you ask? We’re a community of fans that do our best to help the band on the road, giving them time to do what they do best: make music! Projects include postering for local shows, handing out handbills, posting banners on our Myspace pages, adding new songs to our profiles, and more! Benefits include free tickets, music, and being part of something truly special. We also get personal teleporters. Awesome, I know.”

4. Go where your fans are online: (Which also makes it easy to help you again.) The band doesn’t just rely on its site or a social network. They’re all the places their fans — and potential fans are — MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, even a simple message board community aptly named Bleauboards that is thriving.

5. Reveal your points of view and personal stories so people can connect with people in band, not just band. You get a sense of the artist and person Ryan is through his blog, and you get to know all the band members through their quirky profiles. (I especially love band member Ted Wilson’s profile — and that the other members welcomed someone like him.)

6. Keep “old” marketing tactics that work: Want to stay in touch through email? Montbleau also offers a newsletter.

7. Say thank you: When a recent tee-shirt order arrived there was a a handwritten note on the order form, thanking me for supporting the band. Small touches grow fans.

8. Be distinctive, even if people can’t categorize you. Old marketing was that you had to fit into an established category or create a new category. Yet too often trying to fit in to a category blands down the product or service. In today’s super-competitive world, distinctiveness can be a powerful differentiator. So what kind of music is Montbleau? He describes himself as “something of a Martin Sexton by way of Van Morrsion and Stevie Wonder.”

9. Give away free “products”: Giving away free stuff helps people experience the “product,” have something to share as they pass along word of mouth, and  builds fan-dom. You can download for free one of the band’s most popular songs, “How Many Times,” as well as tour posters and handbills. The band is also  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to Rock The Earth, and  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to HeadCount’s “Cents for Sense” campaign until the 2008 presidential election.

10. Make it easy to buy: The band makes it easy to buy music whether it’s on their site or on MySpace, and you can buy concert tickets right on their site.

One of my favorite lyrics from Ryan’s music is:

“It’s time to ease from concentration to focus.”

This is true for so many things in life, and  relevant to marketing. It’s time we stop concentrating on the tactics and tools, and flip our focus on earning customers with all the new 2.0 tools.

PS –  Montbleau won second prize in the 2007 International Songwriter’s Competition, competing with 15,000 songs written by amateur and professional songwriters from over 100 countries.

Here are a few of items from my guest blogging duties today over at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association blog.

wowOwow on crisis communications and much more

How to respond when your reputation is under attack? Writing in the fabulous new online community wowOwow, Leslie Stahl offers this advice: “The best way to respond when your reputation has been sullied is to get real LOUD. Go on offense with a noisy, unrelenting, niggling, persistent, bellicose warrior’s attack. If you’re swinging and kicking, that’s what people will see (and the press will cover). And the besmirching of you will fade like an old scar.”

Check out more from wowOwow, now in beta, and featuring conversations among cool women celebrity professionals like Candice Bergen, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Juliet Buck, Peggy Noon, Joni Evans and Lesley Stahl.

Measuring online community success

Generating word of mouth is the reason many organizations start online communities, but they find much more additional value once the community has been up and running, like lots of new ideas from the community members. That’s an early finding of a new industry study on measuring online community effectiveness. To share your experiences — and get a free copy of the results in April, check out www.communityeffectiveness.com

Rude is rude, enough is enough

Some of the biggest buzz this week was around the audience heckling during Mark Zuckerman’s keynote at SXSW in Austin. A big round of applause to Michael Rudin for his post about the event over at Marketing Profs, “Enough is enough. It’s time that we as a community — especially the A-listers who get quoted everywhere as so-called “experts” — stand up and call it like it actually was: rude and unacceptable.” Go Michael.

PS: Beyond Buzz + Made To Stick honored

One other highlight of the week: Beyond Buzz was selected one of the best business books of 2007 by Library Journal. Beyond Buzz and Made To Stick by Dan and Chip Heath were the editors’ top picks for marketing and branding books. Nothing like a little award news to jump-start the weekend. Enjoy all.

I’m so honored and thrilled that my book Beyond Buzz has been awarded a gold prize in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category. I’m especially honored to share the gold with Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing. Here’s a list of all the winners.The awards are sponsored by Independent Publisher, Inc, Jenkins Group, and Padilla Spear Beardsley.

Most viral videos that hit it big have low production values, said Stephen Voltz of Eeepy Bird, the 2-person video/live performance company that has produced the wildly successful Diet Coke- Mentos viral videos. Today at the Society of New Communications Research conference Stephen also said that low production quality makes the video feel real to the viewer, making a “more genuine connection between the persson(s) on the video and the person watching.”

More than 40 million people have viewed the Diet Coke-Mento videos. Another low production quality viral hit? AskANinja.

In a meeting today with VML, Mike Lundgren, VML’s creative technology director, had an interesting comment about one of the big mind shift changes happening in marketing today:

“It’s not about how good you look talking about your own brand. It’s about how you make other people look good talking about your brand.”

In other words because people pay attention to people like them through Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and word of mouth, an important marketing goal should be helping people talk about your brand in ways they find easy, interesting and natural. That is more important than how YOU the company talk about your brand because people pay more attention to people like them than your company’s marketing programs.

It’s no longer messaging as usual.

“Word of mouth is an objective, not a strategy or tactic. ”

That small but significant nugget came during a conversation I had last week with Gary Spangler of Dupont to prep for our July 31 presentation at ad:tech Chicago, ” Word of Mouth Marketing: Luck or Skill?” If you’re going to ad:tech, please join us.

Today’s Wall St. Journal has a great article about how Narragansett Beer is successfully reviving its brand using listening tours to tap into the brand’s genuine differentiation (”the townie’s beer”), and word of mouth marketing to develop passionate customer relationships.

Writer Simona Covel interviewed me as part of her research for the piece and we had some great conversations about the value of tapping into what consumers believe a brand stands for and then engaging directly with those passionate brand believers and turning them into advocates. There’s no better example of how a company is doing this than Narragansett Beer, the official beer of the Boston Red Sox for decades, but an almost dead brand by the 1980s. Mark Hellendrung bought the rights to the brand from Pabst Brewing in 2005, and revenue is expected to reach $5 million this year.

No traditional advertising in this success story. Just savvy targeting, reviving what people love about the brand, and a disciplined word of mouth strategy, led by the CEO.