Communispace is the Case

Knowing nothing about Communispace previously, I thought this Case Study was a very intriguing look at a company who has successfully maneuvered into the market of providing "actionable" recommendations for managing a firms brand. After reading this article I am left with no doubt as to why Communispace has become a leader in their market place.

A large reason as to why Communispace has seen success in my opinion is their facilitation of information between the customer and the company. I know they were the topic of much controversy in our last class, BUT while reading the Harvard Business School Communispace Case Study, I could not help but draw a parallel between the active participants in communities created by Communispace and consumers creating ads from our reading last week. Obviously there are very distinct differences that set the two categories of consumers apart, however I would be remised if I didn't touch upon the core unifier between the two groups. The two groups likeness comes from their need to be heard. As I mentioned in my blog post last week, brands today are used (generally too much!) to define who we are and used convey a message about our beliefs and opinions, thus being such a big part of their lives consumers have started to say something personal about the brand in return. It is this need to be heard that made me draw a distinct parallel between the Communispace community members and consumer creators.

However, after expressing a need to vocalize their wants, opinions and general questions these two groups of consumers deviate. For members of the Communispace community participation is, again hardly about monetizing their time, but rather "about having a direct voice to a company, category, or brand they care about". For community members it isn't just about getting their ideas out their, but seeing that their opinions matter and will be put into ACTION. While consumer created ads might be airing their complaints or reflections on a particular brand through their personally created content, members of a Communispace community are able to give a truthful, open and emotional response that will actually be taken seriously. I think this is a primary example of a forum in which consumer grievances can be heard and responded to without an agenda. Companies are also able to maintain the element of control that is vital to their brand management. This platform works so well because consumers feel like not only are they being heard, but responded to. Not to mention corporations are gaining from this as well, as they are able to aggregate information, opinions and solutions to better build their brand.

Creating a community alone however is not a recipe for success. Communispace harnesses several other elements to strengthen their platform. One of those elements is the time component allowing for the generation and growth of a community. In a day and age where need for speed is so overreaching that if it isn't instant, it isn't, Communispace has the right idea of taking it back a notch and letting the data do its thing. As Diane Hessen said, "communities provide a continuous flow of information, not a snapshot in time". Rather than try and force the data out of their community members Communispace looks long term because it is the broad insights that develop slowly. However, Communispace provides several methods allowing companies to take the pulse of a community intermittently. Hardly the big picture, but tools such as Front Page Reports or Email Snapshots allow for an immediate assessment verses the analysis of long term trends. The other area allowing for the success of Communispace is their development of interactive, fun and engaging activities that members of the community perform to provide feedback for companies. If participants are bored and not passionate about their participation, they are not going to be valuable participants who will offer useful feedback. One of the more unique activities Created by Communispace to hold interest while gaining information, was to have a community create a virtual slang dictionary, which allowed Communispace to generate content for an ad campaign designed to truly resinate with their targeted demographic.

Clearly Communispace is doing some great things. Now I must ask, the case study ended on a cliffhanger, and it is not clear whether Communispace took on the WOM client Simmons, what would you do and why if you were Communispace. Knowing what you know about the company and the formative opinions of two Communispace employees, if you were Diane would you lead Communispace past the point of no return?

Ad Lib: When Customers Create the AD

So its official, "WE'VE GOT THE POWER" - as consumers it has been a long standing tradition that when it comes to marketing and advertisements we fulfill the role of the passive recipients, merely taking what is thrown at us and, majority speaking , simply ignore the advertisers message. However, this is hardly the case anymore, as the article "Ad Lib: When Customers Create the Ad", demonstrates, today, "it's the consumer who runs the show for the most part... in fact forget the consumer label altogether"

I found this article to be very representative of the viral video culture that has taken hold of our generation, largely as a result of YouTube and simplicity of uploading video content to the web. However, this article is hardly assessing how one uploads a consumer created ad, but rather why they would want to create such content in the first place. It then proceeds to assess the implications of these consumer created ads from the vantage point of business firms and the different reactive stances they must uphold, as a result of this new interactive, 2 way dynamic between corporations and consumers.

One of the most striking things that this article brought to my attention, in its assessment of why consumers are creating these ads, is that consumers do it purely for the enjoyment and passion they have for a brand. In a world where brands have come to make a statement about who people are, consumers have taken it upon themselves to say something personal about the brand. Now what is most striking however about these creations is the fact that "their creation is not so much related to sales directly, as it some inner spur or impulse". Now, this really says something to me. In this day and age, where marketing behemoths spend billions of dollars annually in the hopes of gaining just one extra percent of market share, we have consumers creating ads just because they can and for FREE, no less! People have become so passionate and opinionated about specific brands and corporations that they, with no monetary incentive, have taken it upon themselves to make an opinionated statement for the rest of the world to see. And for good or bad, companies have been forced to react and embrace the ever-occurring trend of consumer creations.

While the article touches upon a variety of responses to such consumer based ads, one method I wanted to mention, as it relates to our class discussion is the strategy of facilitation. One of the very successful add campaigns that became a topic of discussion both on our twitter feed and in class is "The Old Spice Guy". Unbeknownst to me, the entertainment and humor I found in watching the "The Old Spice Guy" perform customer driven skits, such as the infamous proposal, was a combination of both consumer created ads and the art of facilitation on behalf of Old Spice. These types of ads have become so common and often go viral on the web that I wouldn't even think of it as a marketing move on behalf of a company. And while the article makes it very clear that this approach is hardly for everyone and that validation of a consumer created ad by a company can result in grievous consequences, the companies who get it just right could be onto something. I am sure most people are of course familiar with the Mentos in Coke YouTube videos (if not I am linking it below) that hit the web a couple of years ago - well apparently while I was in the process of being highly entertained by the sky-high geysers of coke I was also being marketed to?

So I suppose my question for the week is this: Is the marketing of the future moving away from the artfully constructed corporate ads, in favor of videos and multimedia, facilitated by the internet and social media, that market a brand so effectively that we are completely unaware we are being pitched a product?

So I just couldn't resist here are two of my favorite videos, which are also (I guess?) selling us something?

Here is one of the many Mentos in Coke videos:

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and my personal favorite, created by Southwest Airlines:

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Collaborative Minds: Facing the Realities of Social Media and Technologies Far-Reaching Implications

I must begin by saying, wow. As we shift our focus this week, away from the Fairy-tales of Facebook and the communities of Twitter, I am already astounded with the very interesting perspective presented in Chapter 10: The Power of Thinking Differently of Don Tapscott and Anothony D. Williams' Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Let me start by saying they certainly have spurred me to think differently this week.

To this point our class has been very much focused on social media tools and their implications for us as consumers and for business firms, but in a very much narrow scope. Now, however, after assessing these tools and their various implications, we go one step further with Wikinomics. The Power of Thinking Differently, breaks down the wall between consumers and firms and encourages the development of collaborative relationships between the global community and corporations, which enhances both the consumer experience while increasing the profitability and marketability of a firm.

One of things I found most striking in the exploration of what it means to think with a "collaborative mind" was the fear and stigmatism surrounding companies' willingness to open source areas of their company. The whole first portion of this article indicates the primary issue preventing corporations, consumers and contributers from breaking down the doors between innovation, external input and innovation is age old conventional wisdom. Wikinomics makes it very clear that open content is not going to be explored or employed by traditional media establishments because for these aged firms open-sourcing is a perpetual threat to old businesses and their intellectual property. Companies steeped in legacy seem to be stuck, choosing to view innovation and prosumer communities as an attack. My thoughts on this resistance to embrace new methodologies are of course confusion and annoyance. In the business world today, the need for speed is ever-pressing especially with regard to agile response to consumer demands. So, WHY would these companies, who have tested time, refuse to engage in collaborative infrastructure to allow them to keep testing time? Today is not 10 years ago and most certainly not 50 years ago, these firms must come to acknowledge "a well mannered economy is not today's reality" because "stability is dead". As much as they want to fear and fight change, these companies will pay the inevitable price in remaining static.

In conjunction with this fear of change, Wikinomics also touched upon the decreasing value of telecommunications and given the availability of free internet the impending demise of telephony's ability to generate revenue altogether. It is only a matter of time before Telephony will be free. What I find to be most interesting about the impending demise of Telephony is the manner in which these telecommunication's firms are attempting to salvage the situation. What is this salvation you might ask, well for all intensive purposes, they are interested in cordoning- off the internet into different levels of service, as customers on a plane are divided into first class, business class and coach. Essentially it is the aim of failing companies to AUCTION OFF THE INTERNET to the highest bitter. This to me is the most backwards and futile thinking this industry could possibly adopt; my advise to these firms, get with the times or get lost. In these companies looking to save themselves they are in turn extinguishing innovation and collaboration.

It was this idea of a free internet that got me thinking. What if a company controlled your internet connectivity speed, search engine capabilities and overall experience. At what point would consumers effectively pay the price from not paying a price? As it stands right now the internet is in a class all its own from previous communications mediums, architecturally it is constructed on the basis that "nobody owns it, everybody uses it and anybody can add services to it". By construction alone it is built to foster collaboration, which really makes me question, why is an industry so unwilling to change that they would gladly scarifie the intrinsic collaborative value of the internet, just so they can bolster their dwindling revenues?

So I pose the question, Facebook on their login page made the statement, "sign up its free, and always will be", but what if the internet is no longer free? Can you foresee a future where you must decide to pay for a premium internet connection or just settle for regular internet?

I would give this article a (10/10) I think its approach and perspective were refreshing and insightful while still holding relevance to our class. It really made me think of how much I take traditional media, not to mention the internet for granted.

Follow the Tweets

The article, "Follow the Tweets" by Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston and Elizabeth Winkler, presented a very interesting method in which businesses or companies could use Twitter to gage interest in a product or predict sales. I found this alternative idea of using Twitter, especially interesting, given the distinct purpose that Twitter serves our class needs and method of communication.

The primary message from "Follow the Tweets" claims that by using Twitter and tweets on a trending topic, based upon positive or negative word correlation, businesses can allow for the prediction of product sales. Then based upon the predictive information they can decide where to increase inventories. In order to prove their theory, the article digresses into an example where this method of tracking positive word correlation before, during and after three movies opened at the box office over a given weekend. The study concluded that positive tweets directly corresponded with the success of the three movies at the box office opening weekend and beyond.

However, I must say, I am rather skeptical of a company's reliance on Twitter to predict EVERYTHING. While I think movies are an appropriate example of predicting popularity, on both opening weekend and in the weeks following, I would be hesitant to say that this means of prediction would work for all products and companies. This comes from the standpoint of how I see Twitter primarily being used. For me and many others I feel that Twitter serves as a platform to reiterate information they have discovered on the web, namely noteworthy articles, videos and pictures. I feel that the corporate presence on Twitter, from a selling standpoint, is often frowned upon and seen as an encroachment upon users' online experience. I know that I am far less likely to promote a sale at taking place at a department store than I am to tweet about a particular article I found on the web. I think this is one of the issues overlooked in this article, not everyone is going to be interested in promoting businesses and projects through their Twitter. The thought of me posting "@jcan great sale at Macy's, you should check it out!", in my mind winds up sounding like a sales pitch and all around generic. And if companies were to engage in this behavior, I would be inclined to consider it spam.

One thing that has cropped up again and could be the one saving grace of this strategy, is the idea of the influencer. In the, "Specifically executives need to know section", the article mentions that companies need to be aware of the influencers, but disregard athletes and other celebrities, rather they encourage executives to seek out those who are active in the Twitter community. If they can harness the influencers to promote their products and sales without making it sound corporately engineered then they may just be able to make this work. Now all we need to know, is the jury still out on whether or not those influencers exist?

For me this article did not really cut the mustard, while it offered the one movie example it really did not convince me that sales can almost always predicted on the basis of Twitter traffic. I also feel it is encouraging a form of marketing and sales pitches that have been widely frowned upon on Twitter and other social media tools. I go to Twitter to with the intention of sharing and reading aggregated articles from across the web or tweeting @ friends. I still don't see the appeal of companies marketing their products through Twitter. So what's the deal am I being overly skeptical, would people embrace this method of marketing to the extent where it predicts sales?