Here is a presentation I gave few weeks ago at N2 Social Hub in Helsinki. 

Social Media and Measurement at Nokia

It's your responsibility to show the quality of the products you promote. It is also your job to offer things that gets your customers and prospects excited. Small things count as they sum up to large numbers.

And plush toys are very effective marketing vehicles. Never forget that.

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I attended Markkinontiviestinnän viikko (Marketing communications week) today in Helsinki and Alf Rehn's speech was the only one that struck a chord with me. His main message circulated around the macho discourse of marketing and the negativity of online discussions.

Alf Rehn's thoughts around the macho discourse of marketing reminded me about use of war metaphors in marketing. Both of these discourses are overconfident of the effectiveness of the current marketing tactics and strategies. These discourses don't really help marketing and organizations to change and meet the needs of changing customer behaviors.

Also we all know that internet is full of hate speech and negative commentary. You can read the negative product reviews even before the merchandise is in the stores and every online forum has its naysayers. Based on these facts Alf presented a new customer segmentation model. The new five customer segments consists of haters, early critics, doubters, ironic adapters and 4Chan meme.

Instead of demographic or behavioral segmentation models, you can use these online related negative psychographic segments to plan your next online marketing activity. Even if this segmentation model was presented tongue in cheek, there is a some truth in it. Don't you believe it? Just read the comments on Engadget or Digitoday. And remember these segments next time while making a marketing communication plan. 

Haters gonna hate on Knowyourmeme.com

(Originally posted on March 9th 2009 at http://erkkola.net.)

While I was watching Helene Auramo's interview about Twitter in YLE news earlier today, Helene mentioned something that caught my ear. She was talking about celebrities who are tweeting and this way their fans can feel closer to their idols.

This reminded me about uses and gratifications research, which studies reasons behind media usage: why people use media? While uses and gratifications research is an influential tradition in mass media research, it might be fun to study social media through its theoretical perspective. Uses and gratifications approach emphasizes motives and the self-perceived needs of audience members and there is not only one way that people uses media. Denis McQuail (1983) has classified four common reasons for media use:

• Entertainment - People are using media for relaxing, escaping from problems and emotional release.
• Integration and Social Interaction - Media can help maintaining social roles, enabling one to connect with family, friends and society and having a substitute for real-life companionship. Also media consumption helps finding a basis for conversation and social interaction.
• Personal Identity - With media people can reinforce their personal values, find models of behavior and identify with valued others (in the media). Media can also help to gain insight into oneself.
• Information - Using media to find information might be the most obvious use case for media.

One of the most interesting aspects of McQuail's classifications is the notion that people are using media for having a substitute for real-life companionship. In TV-series and films people have usually their favorite characters and actors. Parasocial relationship or parasocial interaction is a term to describe these one-sided, parasocial interpersonal relationships in which one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not (Horton & Wohl, 1956).

The most common form of such relationships are one-sided relations between celebrities and audience or fans. The theory of parasocial relationships becomes quite interesting when applying it to Twitter. In Twitter you can find bunch of big celebrities with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers.

If you have used Twitter, you know that there is no way to interact constantly with all of your followers when you have reached certain limit. This is why at some point Twitter transforms from personal medium to mass medium for some popular tweeters. But this doesn't prevent celebrities to reply to the tweet of their followers. Twitter has a possibility for interaction which is missing from traditional mass media. This kind of possibility and activity might make parasocial relationships even stronger. One reply from the star doesn't build real relationship.

Studies also show that the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2009).

Even if people are following multiple twitter users or they have plenty of followers or friends, they are only interacting with few other users. It seems that there are plenty of parasocial relationships in Twitter. If I study my own behaviors in Twitter and my common reasons for the usage, McQuail's four categories make sense, even if they were results of mass media research.

My main drivers to use Twitter is to connect with friends and to find interesting information. The results seems to be even too self-evidence and self-evident results have been one of the main critiques against uses and gratifications research.

Horton, Donald; R. Richard Wohl (1956). "Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance". Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–229. republished. McQuail, D. (1983). Mass Communication Theory (1st ed.). London: Sage. Huberman, A. Romero, D. M. & Wu, F. (2009) Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 1 - 5 January 2009

This is a quick check list for the evaluation of social media capabilities and online reputation for a possible brand partnership. The core brand evaluation for the brand fit should be done before doing this kind of social media related evaluation.

1. Internet and social media usage of the brand's key consumer segment related to the partnership objectives
2. Tonality of the brand in online discussions and share of voice
3. Quality of online and social media presences managed by the brand
4. Level of brand engagement online
5. Number of dedicated social media resources and their competences, e.g. community managers
6. Number and quality of dedicated online communities, blogs and sites and reach of these
7. Number of fan activities
8. Number of hate sites dedicated to the brand
9. Results of executed social media activities and campaigns
10. Willingness for cross promotional activities

The easiest and fastest way to do the analyses is just to sit down for a hour or two, surf around the web, google and use some of the social media related search tools. Easy way to start is to use Google, Google Blog , Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Technorati searches. Check also answer sites like Yahoo! Answers and review sites. Amazon.com is usually the best place to get the gist of the customer reviews on the products. You can also use search queries like "[brand] + sucks" or "hate". 

There are plenty of free and dedicated tools for specific social media platforms and tools, e.g. Klout.com, Boardreader.com and Blogged.com. If you have more resources in your hand, you can also use more robust online monitoring  and listening tools.