Rocks, Ripples & Buzz
A story and a bunch of psychobabble do not a marketing campaign make. No wonder you hate my blog, you’re waiting for something practical! There are three main tasks at hand: starting and fueling buzz, incubating the desired impact in the community that forms, and measuring the results. Let’s leave behind the idea of story altogether: write it off as one particular way to incubate community involvement (the “branded entertainment” model.) Don’t get hung up on storytelling as being the buzz maker: it’s the buzz focuser and branding vehicle, but not the only widget that could slide into that slot.
Starting and measuring buzz, however, are approaches that can apply to any form of marketing driving to any kind of measureable result. Think of marketing as throwing a rock in a lake. Traditional marketers are very good at selecting and honing rocks, quite excellent at throwing them with some force into the pond. The savvy ones learn how to measure how that changes the water level at shore and how to let that influence what rock they select next. Scrappy ones figure out that sometimes a pound of gravel is as good as a rock.
Buzz marketing approaches, though, focus on the ripples playing across the pond from all this rock throwing. All that other pond action is still happening the way it did before, you’re just looking at it all through the lens of some of the psychobabble you didn’t like … concepts like the availability heuristic or the mere exposure theory or the propinquity effect (which are three of the major ones the Heist project is crafted around.)
But I promised to be practical, so let’s stick with that. My favorite “buzz seeding” tool currently is the amazing network over at BlogAds.com in part because of the interesting things you can do when you leave the IAB standards behind. I could convince any reasonable rock weigher or chucker of the value of it as well — when you grab more than 40M impressions at an aggregate $0.45 CPM in a month you’ve got a big cheap rock. Everyone likes a good cheap rock.
If you measured just the clicks that BlogAds tracks for you (which are the title and the image hyperlinks, but not the “embedded hyperlinks” in the text portion) you’d walk away feeling like you got the industry average response rate. If you also went to your webserver referrer logs, you’d see that “the other half of the clicks” came in through those untracked direct hyperlinks, and you’d start thinking of yourself as pretty clever. But if you used a conversational technique, a propinquity technique that traded away intrusion for immersion, you’d find another more important result hovering down in your data.
People tend to blog about what they see on other blogs they read: the percentage of blog readers who actually also have blogs might surprise you. Call it nepotism, call it a connected community, call it a global feedback loop, call it influencer marketing. So your bonus ripples are that you start seeing blog entries describing the experience of having discovered the campaign (testimonial meets fresh incoming hyperlinks) that typically start with a description of where they heard about it. Which frequently starts with where exactly they interacted with the part of your marketing campaign that sucked them in at the beginning. Oh, look, we’re back to storytelling again, except now the bloggers are doing it, because they are personal narrativists anyway.
You’ve discovered the edge of one of those ripples we were talking about. If your “buzz focuser” (whatever that is) is working well those ripples pick up steam (and if not, they trail off pretty dramatically once the ad spend stops.) If you’re watching for it and know how to attribute the source of one ripple to the previous, those ripples can frequently have more “value” than the initial splash (the “direct response” from the seeding.) That would be that elusive “viral” characteristic that everyone is so eager to develop (for reasons entirely about rock weighing and chucking, I might add): ways to give momentum to the ripples.
Take, for example, one of the ads in the Art of the Heist sequence (4th down on this page) where instead of linking to the campaign directly in the text of the ads we instead used pull quotes linking to other people’s blog entries about the campaign. It raised eyebrows from some of the sites we linked to, but it also produced more traffic than most of “direct link heavy” ads we ran in the sequence — about the same number of clicks through BlogAds audited links, fewer clicks in the referrer logs from the sites we were advertising on, but a surge in traffic from the particular blog entries we were quoting and linking to. By watching the ripples, you come up with new ideas of how to use the rocks you’re already throwing.
What’s fascinating about the process, though, is not just the raw traffic produced. It’s the qualitative aspects of that traffic as well, which in this metaphor is measuring the change in the water level at shore, the real marketing impact on key indicators. From Audi’s release:
“After a person clicks an online advertisement to investigate the program, 34 percent of user page views were to A3 buying indicator pages (configurator, dealer locator, payment estimator, request a quote) on the Audi brand site. That is a 79 percent increase in ‘qualification’ over previous launch efforts.”
That’s the kind of qualitative impact buzz thinking can provide, in great part by realizing the impact that the mere exposure theory has on community media where noise and intrusion are highly resisted (marketing advice from a psychology site incoming):
“The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more we will tend to like it. Familiarity breeds liking more than contempt. Things grow on us and we acquire tastes for things over time and repeated exposure [...] Exposure can be overdone. After a certain number of exposures we will ignore the message. If the exposures continue, we will get irritated and ‘take revenge’ by assuming negative responses to the message [...] Adverts use this effect. By repeated exposure, viewers gradually start to like the product without every having tried it. It is also possible to become sick of endlessly repeated ads, so advertisers will regularly change the advertisement (thereby giving rise to a highly profitable industry).”
Which is the other core piece of advice when working with a community advertising format like BlogAds: the longest we let a creative run on the Heist was 4 days (and that’s because the response on that one was exceptionally good.) Usually, we switched out the creative every other day (which meant we had 22 different creatives over the space of 3 weeks) in order to provoke fresh curiousity as often as possible. Which is a big reason why the campaign-wide yield of even small seeding efforts is so good (because we’re actively working against the “burn out” of the “exposure effect”.)
This combination of producing a sense of discovery over intrusion coupled with providing value to the audience rather than noise (in our case, by hopefully entertaining them) works in subtle synergistic ways. When the audience is resistent to your message, when it’s seen as an intrusion on the community, the “qualification” of that audience is embarrasing only industry average. You settle for the splash of the direct response but miss out on the potential ripples. If instead the audience is actively interested in the value you’re providing them, they become more open to your overall messaging (if you don’t over do it and succumb to the “exposure effect”.)
If only there were a systematic way to measure that in a way that would make sense to marketers as much as their “mere exposures and clicks” measurements do. Oh, wait, that sort of exists already, or at least the pieces to integrate do (the subject of my next rambling.)
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