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Propensity or influence? During the past months we’ve had several discussions internally and with our customers about virality. Our experience clearly shows that not everything is viral in marketing. Churn virality varies in different networks and there are cases where churn is not viral at all. Product marketing is a more potential case, but it’s become clear that the viral spread totally depends on the attractiveness of the offering.

This week I attended a seminar on how to do marketing in Facebook. One of the success stories was the launch of a new IKEA store in Malmö – a campaign designed by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors in Sweden (check IKEA Facebook showroom campaign ). They succeeded in creating an incredible viral spread by allowing people to tag IKEA items on the store manager’s profile page, and get the items for free. Obviously a compelling offer – but the point of the designers was that if you want things to spread – it’s all in the offering. Simple ideas usually work best. You are fighting for your customers’ time, to succeed you need to offer them something worthwhile, and your brand needs to be something they are willing to promote. How do you find such ideas? These guys advice was – gut feeling.

This basically means that you are working on a trial and error basis. It also means that finding so-called influencers in your network will not guarantee viral spread. Influence is always context related, and you need to find the first tier targets to get any results at all. That’s why we put so much emphasis on finding the people that have the highest propensity in each context. At the same time we find the ones with the highest influence on others. So, if your gut feeling was right and you have a killer offering, you’ll get both the high first tier pull rates and the virality. But if you cannot find even the first adopters for this particular offering – you’ll have no virality either. Simple.

The good news is that if your offering is relevant but not viral (and you will have lots of these), you need to find the customers with the highest propensity in each case. These revenue streams are what matter for your business and they directly affect your bottom line.

UTalkMarketing featured an article by Jouko Ahvenainen of Xtract. In this article, Ahvenainen looks at word of mouth marketing in a pragmatic manner. Here is a quick peek with some of the requirements for starting a positive word-of-mouth effect:

• Identifying who within the social ecosystem of your customers is influential. In this way, any company can consider its customer base as a social network; we aren’t talking just about Facebook users

• Targeting these influential people (what can be called ‘Alphas’) with campaigns that are most relevant to them, which they are likely to want to share with their network

• Making real-time marketing decisions based upon actual data and the way it’s analysed.

A full version of the article can be found from: UTalkMarketing

An Alpha is similar to a champion or an influencer. Nevertheless, in addition to having high influence and links in the community, the Alpha also has high probability to buy some of your products, acquire more customers or churn away. So, there are different kinds of Alphas and today I want to tell you how we find the Acquisition Alphas.

For Customer Acquisition, we use highly advanced analytics software that can process billions of data points. This powerful software is highly accurate. We find exactly those subscribers that have the highest potential to recruit new ones from another network. We take into account their influence level and number of off-net (out of your network) friends.

The illustration shows subscribers that have high or low influence and that might have off-net friends. Xtract identifies that the subscriber with the green circle has off-net friends (the ones in yellow) as well as high recruiting influence. This means that she would be the best target for your member-get-member campaign.

Finding the Alphas in your customer base is like finding gold in a goldmine. Remember! You need your Alphas and you need to treat them well.

We have a brand new white paper online on the topic Brands need People and People need Brands: How social analytics benefit consumers while protecting their privacy.

Using new social tools, consumers can decide, what information they want to reveal to the advertisers and what to keep private. For marketers and advertisers, this is a unique opportunity. They can concentrate on promoting their products and services to those who have already shown interest to them.

In the white paper, we analyze ways of making marketing relevant and useful for the end users. This can be done by targeting the Alpha users, the most influential persons in a social network.

We list six topics to consider when planning social analytics:

1. Provide simple opt-out
2. Inform users on data usage
3. Protect customer information
4. Respect industry guidelines
5. Let users control their privacy
6. Advertise to youth with care

The white paper also presents, how mobile operators can use Xtract Social Links to find effectively the targets for marketing campaigns. The Product Marketing Module for Xtract Social Links can bring this power to targeting specific products effectively to the influential users.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Download the white paper here.

With Xtract Social Links Base, the foundation of Xtract Social Links, you can find the generic Alpha Users. These influencers are the most connected customers in the social network, especially great for customer understanding and feedback, but not directly related to any products. But what if you want to advertise two different products to Alpha Users: one about Mobile TV and a second one about push e-mail? Or, here’s another option, what if you wanted to advertise a new 12 months contract with cheaper rates to those about to churn, and a contract to those with a lot of connections outside the operator’s customer base? Xtract Social Links add-on modules enable you to find specific Alpha Users:

• Product Alphas are the influencers who have a highest probability to buy a specific product, the most receptive neighbours to this product and the highest effect on the product penetration rate.
• Churn Alphas are the customers who have a highest probability to leave the operator and take neighbours with them, so the ones you will want to keep at all prices.
• Acquisition Alphas are the customers who have the most connections to people outside the operator’s network, therefore the best to target for new customer acquisition campaigns.

Once you have the Alpha Users to target, you can for example create one or several personalised campaigns based on your segmentation. Read more about these add-on modules on the Xtract Social Links page.

2007 was the year of “social networks”. But wait a second: I joined a fringe “common interest-based” mailing-list in 1997, which became in 2000 a Yahoo!group. There are 950 members, the flow of e-mails is still enormous (give or take 1500 messages per month–without spam), discussions are sometimes fierce… and we are supposed to participate only in our free time. There was a seminal spin-off in 1999, when a e-mail-based RPG was created, which is still active. And discussions are fiercer, because each of us is supposed to be a country leader. Other spin-offs included local versions of the groups. No, we are not transferring it into any of the “hip” Social Network Sites (SNS). But the point is: already 10 years ago there were indeed vibrant communities. Now it is much easier to create them, adding content, and administrate them. What in a way puzzles me is that only in 2007 it became mainstream.

2007 was also the year of “mobile internet”. Someone was mentioning that “we’re finally going to make significant progress on mobile search (…) now we have .mobi domains”, but why use the word “mobile” in this context?
Internet is “mobile” by definition!
In the “good old days”, it was less mobile, because laptops were not widespread. Nor 3G phones. But it could be accessed anywhere at any time already in the 1990’s, provided one had a compliant device and infrastructure.
In short, the same way as today.
So “.mobi” sites will be easier to use in small screens. Great. But HTML and CSS has already features to adapt the webpage to a specific device since at least 2000. The significant progress is going to be done, not on the search by itself, but on the search combined with the user’s communication data records (from the operator perspective) and usage of the phone (from the network perspective). Guess who is doing it already, preparing the “next big thing“! Yes, we are. I might add that another benefit for the advertisers is combining that search with GPS positioning, for instance looking for a restaurant. The answer could be (literally) just around the corner!

2008 will be the year of “community marketing intelligence”.
So finally something new! It was about time!

My son’s in the eighth grade. It is interesting to observe how these school children are influencing each other when it comes to choosing mobile phones and even mobile operators. In Sweden, when Vodafone was sold off to Telenor, they changed their logo colours from Vodafone red to Telenor blue. Telenor ran heavy and expensive campaigns on pretty much all types of media about this colour change. One of the girls in my son’s class said quite loudly in front of a bunch of her friends: “I don’t like blue, I like red better!” And within 3-4 months, most of the kids in that class, including my son, had mobile phones and subscriptions from the operator 3 who happens to have a reddish logo. Is this girl an Alpha User? You bet! And then my son went around saying that Nokia phones are not cool, they are for old people. In the last school event, I asked a few kids in the class what phones they have. They were all, either SonyEricsson, or Samsung. And that considering that Nokia overall has the biggest marketshare. This word of mouth seems to work both ways – for a product or service, as much as against it. Read: Children, School and Mobile Phones.