The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was held from January 24-28, 2007. Global warming and the potential for new talks on a world trade deal were the dominating issues. Media coverage varied from straightforward reports of the Forum’s events, to strong criticism saying that meeting of the world’s biggest leaders has become increasingly irrelevant.

The proposed resumption of the World Trade Organization talks dominated WEF coverage during the review period. Media coverage steadily increased, with a spike on January 26 when it was reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was hopeful the stalled global trade negotiation could resume soon, and Brazil’s president predicted a deal within months. Coverage spiked considerably on January 27 when officials announced they had agreed to resume the global free trade talks. While appearing to be positive news, a large portion of media coverage leaned toward the negative, implying that the probability of the talks actually resuming is still unlikely, that expectations were low, and the talk about restarting the global trade talks was, to a large extent, “hot air”.

The issue of global warming/climate change came in second in terms of media coverage, with coverage increasing just before the official start of the forum when President Bush acknowledged climate change in his January 23 State of the Union speech, and spiking on January 24 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel focused on climate change in her keynote speech. Coverage increased again on January 27 regarding an announcement of a partnership to standardize the reporting of climate risk-related issues. Media reaction to the announcements was mixed in tone; some positive reports commented on the constructive dialogue and potential solutions, others pointed out that no revolutionary strategies were developed and that Davos is the place to launch grandiose initiatives that never quite live up to their billing.

To read Biz360’s full report on the event and view analysis of the speakers and messages, please click here.

Charlene Li of Forrester Research published two reports on blogging today, co-authored by Chloe Stromberg. The ROI of Blogging outlines a model for companies to evaluate the risks and potential returns of launching a corporate blog (or justify/optimize an existing one). The other, Calculating the ROI of Blogging: A Case Study, applies the model to General Motors’ well-known Fastlane blog, authored by vice chairman Bob Lutz.

While the focus of the reports is how to figure out the financial value of blogging, there’s commentary on the intangibles and a warning not to be over-calculating in your evaluation. This can lead to an overly scientific approach to blogging itself, which could hurt its value to your target audience. Some other insightful findings include:

• The largest contributor of ROI to GM’s Fastlane blog in 2005 and 2006 was press mentions
• The total cost of launching a blog with a team of 4-5 people starts at $25k
• Smart blogging includes monitoring brand discussions in the broader Blogosphere
• Tying benefits to known metrics helps translate blogging ROI more easily

NOTE: Forrester calculated the ROI of press mentions by adding up offline stories and multiplying them by their corresponding advertising values. Next, they added up online stories, estimated traffic for each Web site and multiplied those numbers by the appropriate CPM (Biz360 provides this calculation to clients with the click of a mouse… shh, don’t tell Charlene).

The report provides the following chart to help translate blogging benefits into known metrics/value:

This is the first step in a three step methodology - determining the benefits and translating them into a dollar amount. This should be done directly if possible or by correlating the benefits to metrics that have already been correlated to revenue. Forrester provides the example of correlating broader blogger sentiment generated by the corporate blog to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that may already have revenue tied to its fluctuations. The second step is to calculate the total cost (hard costs and resources). Finally, calculate the risks and translate them to a dollar value by looking at the likelihood that potential scenarios could occur and what the financial impact would be.

The reports provide guidance on how to perform the calculations and include many case study examples. Charlene’s blog post has more information, excerpts and FAQs.

While it had a strong Nov. 14th launch, Microsoft’s Zune has failed to maintain the momentum it created that week. Information Week reported Tuesday that Zune had 9% of unit sales and 13% of revenue during its launch week, but that it was still far behind iPod sales, which accounted for 63% of unit sales and 72.5% of revenue that same week. Zune also failed to touch the iPod on Amazon’s top sellers list - it rarely made the list at all this holiday season.

The buzz Zune created in the market has been largely around its potential to be the ‘iPod killer.’ Zune rarely earned exclusive coverage and has been evaluated, in most news articles, based on how it compares to the industry-standard iPod. This is typical for a new entrant to a market with such an entrenched leader, but it means that establishing its own identity will take time. The chart below shows only a small blip of exclusive coverage for Zune (not shared with the iPod) during its launch week.

Microsoft will have to change the public’s concept of a portable media player to beat the iPod in the long run. But, in the short term, it will first have to prove that it’s an equal substitute. This may be why Microsoft officials have said they are satisfied with initial results of Zune sales that seem to only scratch the surface of the market.

Beating the iPod also means that Microsoft will have to beat iTunes. MediaPost covered a Hitwise report today showing a 413% increase in iTunes store visits on Christmas Day. This represented a 110% percent increase over the previous year and placed iTunes fourth on the Hitwise retail index. Zune Marketplace was nowhere to be found. This is likely due to the relatively low amount of coverage it received compared to iTunes.

Does this mean that Zune and Zune Marketplace are destined to meet the fate of others who have tried to knock Apple off its digital music throne? Not necessarily. But it does suggest that if it happens, it won’t be a quick hit, but rather a slow etching away of its market share. All of the players in the space lose points in eyes of consumers for issues like digital rights management (DRM) that limit the way someone can access and share music. Until one provider develops a digital music solution that allows anytime, anywhere access to music on consumers’ terms, the playing field could still change.

For more analysis on Microsoft Zune, please click here to visit our Industry Reports section.

I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report - Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media - the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM - health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

AdWeek published an article today by Wendy Melillo and Joan Voight called World on a String that outlines the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to consumers’ increasing power over the fate of brands. They explain that whether unprompted, such as the Mentos-Diet Coke video that gained fame on Revver and You Tube, or prompted, as in Chevrolet’s consumer ads gone awry, there’s little a marketer can or should do to push the direction of the customer’s brand experience.

In the end, more attentive listening to customers throughout a product’s lifecycle is the best way to avert unwanted negative word of mouth.

If you haven’t read PRWeek’s annual measurement feature (reg req’d) by Erica Iacono, it’s worth checking out. She talks about the movement of PR toward embracing social media measurement and integrating it with traditional media measurement. She also emphasizes a growing understanding that market influencers could be journalists, analysts, bloggers or some combination of those things.The article also features a profile on Sun Microsystems, a Biz360 client. It outlines their integrated measurement strategy that includes domestic, global and social media analysis. This approach to understanding their market has lead to a change in the way they announce products:

Working with Biz360, the company has segmented the top 300 bloggers that it considers to be individuals that can ‘move the market.’ Sun tracks them on a monthly basis as far as what announcements they pick up and what issues are important to them.

This measurement strategy has impacted the company’s outreach to the community. When it came time to announce the launch of Solaris, a new operating system on the Open Source platform, the PR team made the decision to launch it into the blogosphere first.

Erica also references the biggest measurement story from last year, which focused on how P&G had discovered through market mix modeling (MMM) that PR had the highest ROI among the marketing disciplines in four out of the six brands it tested. David Rockland of Ketchum predicts that MMM will soon be the standard for measuring “quick sale, non-durable consumer goods.”

With increasingly sophisticated measurement and budgets on the rise, I think we’ll be hearing more about placing PR results in a larger business context.

This past Friday, I participated on a panel with Jim Nail of Cymfony at Bulldog Reporter’s Advanced PR Technology in Practice conference in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was online measurement and was moderated by Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom. There were two overarching themes that came out of our presentations and Q&A. The first is that the movement of content online, the expansion of social media and the development of free and premium services for tracking all this new content make it possible to measure much more than you could just a few years ago - and get the results fast.

The second is that there is now more reason than ever for PR measurement to be placed in a business relevant context. That could be correlating results with internal marketing data, such as Web traffic or lead generation. Jim suggested that internal PR leaders get to know the folks doing marketing mix modeling (he referenced a PRWeek story - reg req’d - about P&G using market mix modeling to determine that the ROI from PR was higher than other types of marketing for four out of the six brands tested). It could also be correlating PR with changes in public perception using social media as a proxy. The ability to change opinions and behavior has always been the promise of PR. Measuring that change usually required surveys, focus groups or Web site data (how did you hear about us?). Social media changes the game by allowing PR to quickly assess public sentiment broadly or compare the buzz of individual news articles in the market.

There were many other notable sessions that day, athough I wasn’t able to attend them all, so I’m just going to note a few things that stood out for me. Dan Gilmor provided an overview of how citizen media is changing journalism and how the public consumes information. He even addressed the folly of citizen media, citing an example of a photo-shopped image of a man standing against the rail of one of the twin towers with an airplane in the background heading toward it.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR actually convinced me that the press release is not dead. At Biz360, we talk about how the rise of social media has made it possible to take your message directly to your target audiences. Jamie talked about how press releases, properly optimized for search, often rank above actual news stories on Google News and that you can take your message directly to the public in this way. His advice is to use Google Trends to figure out the top relevant search terms for your press release, use those terms in the headline and first paragraph and include hyperlinks throughout the body to drive users to your Web site (let me know if any of this works).

So if the press release isn’t dead, it’s definitely changing. Brian Solis of FutureWorks PR talked about how to write a social media press release that includes includes social bookmarks from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr and other Web 2.0 goodies. Naturally, at throughout the day, attendees asked if companies would eventually ruin social media. I expect this to be a topic at the upcoming WOMMA Summit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics here, Eric Schwartzman’s post includes links to all of the presentations, including mine. He also set up a del.icio.us page where the speakers could share links to supporting materials.

How many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand? A trick question you say…

McDonald’s has built one of the world’s most durable brands around efficient, consistent and low-cost food. People save time and money going to McDonald’s - and they know what to expect from the experience. Of course, four men robbed a McDonald’s in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, last Saturday by gunpoint providing an experience far beyond expectations. At other locations, you might have a McDrug Deal, get carjacked in the parking lot and or shot on your way home. The security at a high school in Philadelphia can monitor the McDonald’s across the street. Why? Because you might be shot at McDonald’s for showing disrespect (this one happened in London, so it’s not just us, but it may be Western culture’s own brand of extremism).

It’s not just in the news. Bloggers are talking about these things. So much, in fact, that blog posts on crime at McDonald’s outweighs conversations about its breakfast menu (there is some overlap though, like this blog post talking about someone who was run down in a McDonald’s parking lot after eating breakfast there).

Share of Key Issues and Messages for McDonald’s
3 Months of Blog Postings

And while analyzing the Blogosphere is a great way to get a sense of public discourse, there’s nothing better than good old-fashioned news media to pinpoint where the problem areas are (this may change soon, if geotagging takes off).

Top Publications Covering McDonald’s and Crime
3 Months of Media Coverage

But don’t expect local issues like crime to stay local. A local news attack at a Grand Prairie, Texas, McDonald’s was posted to You Tube where it was viewed 3,685 times in the four months between when it was posted (8/2/06) and when I checked it today. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloggers, like Dread Egos, post the You Tube video to their blog. A Google search for “McDonald’s” and “sucker punch” turns up 32,600 results. That’s not many compared to the 16,900,00 results that come up for McDonald’s, but “McDonald’s” and “crime” turns up 1,750,000 results (NOTE: the actual search results for McDonald’s, the company, would be less than a pure “McDonald’s” search and the content having to do with crime would be greater than the results from a simple “crime” keyword search).

Since McDonald’s is everywhere and crime is everywhere, you have to expect this is going to happen from time to time. But, is there any brand impact? And what could McDonald’s do about it? Knowing that it’s a topic of discussion greater than many of the products and messages being promoted is a big red flag that you might need to take action. Using local PR strategies to balance out negative perception is a good start, but in world connected by social media, that’s not enough. In the absence of a full-fledged corporate strategy to minimize crime at the stores, going beyond messaging to show some level of action is always ideal (in-store metal detector perhaps, remove shoes, toss liquids…).

I looked for some research on this topic and found a great article on the impact of corporate crimes, but not on the occurance of crimes during the brand experience. I’d like to conduct a study to find out what percentage of people who have experienced a crime at McDonald’s first hand will no longer eat there. Then ask the same question to people who heard about a crime from someone else? What’s the fall-off rate as you add more degrees of separation. You would have to take into account the number of times someone has heard about a crime, over what period of time and whether the negative impact was per location or at the brand level.

Ultimately, you could figure out the ripple effect of each crime and how many it would take to significantly impact McDonald’s brand. Then you could answer the question - how many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand?

I spent the last two days at a Carson Workshops summit called The Future of Web Apps, which featured speakers from some of more promising Web 2.0 players and thought leaders. There’s a great write up on the conference at CenterNetworks, which is a good place to get a summary of all of speakers’ presentations.

One of the big takeaways for me is the buzz around translating the best consumer-focused models of Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Web 2.0 is about collaboration, sharing and communities. Enterprise marketing applications have made strides in all of these areas, but today don’t offer the same simplicity or the ability to capture (enterprise) community decision-making in real time.

Kevin Rose presented the story of how he started Digg and grew it to be the phenomenon it is today. This is one of my favorite models and a great example of real-time decisions being made by large numbers of people. He said that all of his marketing has been word of mouth, which goes to show that “listening” can sometimes pay off more than “marketing.” The best part of this session was seeing his response to a question I had been dying to ask him - have you considered posting your product roadmap and allowing users to “digg” and “bury” upcoming product features? I knew what the answer would be and he still let me ask my real question about how he translates user feedback to a product roadmap. To my surprise, it’s just reading a lot of incoming emails from users.

Another presenter who impressed me was Carl Sjogreen, who is the product manager for Google Calendar. He talked about the need to submerse yourself in your client, so you can understand them beyond the features they want in your product. In an increasingly connected world, I couldn’t agree more - we’re innundated with large amounts of information pieces and truly understanding your audience requires good old-fashioned human contact. He gave some examples of the insight that came from this approach. One assumption is that calendars are for busy people. Through discussions with college students, he learned that they’re incredibly busy, but they have regular schedules, so many of them don’t need calendars. He also talked about staying focused on the real competition for this product, the market heavyweight that remains unseated with the most competitive set of features - the paper calendar.

Jeff Veen, the project lead for Google’s Measure Map, gave an inspiring presentation on design, from visualization to information architecture. Turning data into simple images that conveys information and meaning is at the heart of what we do at Biz360. Veen talked about using design to build trust by empowering users to do what they want. We agree that giving clients more control to see information how it best suits them creates a postive user experience.

There were lots of other great presentations on building communities, finding business models that work and why passion is the number one ingredient for success. There were also a lot of other great speakers that I didn’t mention, so I encourage anyone interested to read more at Techmeme and check out the photos on Flickr.

On August 15, 2006, a media flurry began when Dell announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Overheating batteries have been causing laptops to catch fire or explode. The following week Apple recalled 1.8 million laptop batteries, also made by Sony.

Seeing two of the industry’s most polar-opposite brands pulled into the same debacle made us wonder how the media treatment would play out. We looked at the tone and visibility of Dell and Apple’s battery woe media coverage and noticed Dell had far more visibility and negative tone than Apple.

Media Coverage by Tone
Dell and Apple Battery Problems, August 2006

MediaSignal^TM is calculated by adjusting the reach number for each article based on how prominently the subject (Dell/Apple) is mentioned and then adding together the adjusted reach numbers for each company’s total base of news articles. This chart is based on 6,986 online, print and broadcast news articles for Dell and 5,270 for Apple. Green corresponds to positive MediaSignal, blue/gray to neutral and red to negative.

One reason for this discrepancy in tone is that Dell was first to recall the Sony batteries and in that initial burst of coverage, Apple came forward to say that it was looking into the matter and examining its own Sony laptop batteries. Was it Dell taking a proactive lead on critical safety issues? Engadget and other blogs had been following the saga laptop by laptop, calling it to Dell’s attention. If you take a look at discussion of Dell and battery problems in the Blogosphere, the writing may have been on the wall for awhile.

Newscycle Report
Blog vs. Media Coverage for Dell Battery Problems

The chart shows the media coverage in volume (blue) over time compared to blog posts (gray) over time for discussion of Dell and battery problems.

InfoWorld reported that Dell and Sony knew about the problem as far back as 10 months ago. According to one Slashdot comment, Dell registered www.dellbatteryprogram.com on 11/10/2005, possibly anticipating a recall. One thing is certain though - with upwards of 50 millions blogs containing the personal experiences of millions of people, there’s no need to wait for customers to come to you. Public information on the Internet is often a better source of data for understanding your customer’s experience with your product.