We also touched on how a small company can make a bigger impact in the marketplace. The BP has an in-house developed solution for managing multiple email signatures which is doing really well globally but there isn't much viral marketing going on, its all direct with resellers. The BP was thinking about creating a few YouTube videos and Slideshare presentations but that was it! I suggested that blogging and twitter might be something they could consider but this suggestion fell on deaf ears.
So two thoughts came out of the conversation
1. Does the blogosphere correlate to market share?
2. What sort of template would I use to help a small company viral market themselves?
Blogosphere
Using Blogpulse I set up a search to compare the number of blog entries which contains Jabber and Lotus Sametime in blog entries over a six month period. The results are shown in the table.As you can see there is a huge amount of difference between the number of Jabber and Sametime blog entries. There are more people blogging about Jabber than Sametime. I guess this is as you would expect as Jabber can be used by anyone and there are free jabber services at Jabber.org. Lotus Sametime has been sold for use by 100 Million employees. Most of these employees reside inside an organisation *1. My assumption is that employees of these companies don't go home and use Lotus Sametime to communicate at home with friends and family.
*1 Lotus Sametime provides extensive security and encryption, performance and high avaialbility for secure instant messaging.
Based on this result from Blogpulse I think it tells us that more people use Jabber at home than they do Lotus Sametime.
So maybe that test is the wrong one to perform using Blogpulse. Perhaps we should only use blogpulse to compare end user products, lets try the chocolate bars Snickers and Twix which are manufactured by Mars.
There was some talk of Snickers advertising being considered homophobic by some bloggers which may account for some additional interest in the brand.I will go out on a limb and say that Mars globally sells more Snickers than Twix. If anyone from a could let me kow the sales figures that would be great!! I will also say that consumers of Snickers have a greater affiliation and affinity to the brand than Twix consumers. I believe this is the case as there is a greater degree of fluctuation in the number of blog entries. Perhaps Mars, spends more advertising on Snickers which might also explain the difference in blog entries.
Viral Marketing Template
The other question which arose from my discussion this morning was, is there a template I could apply to a small (or large) company to enable them to perform viral marketing? Note that I have not read a book on viral marketing so this is completely "off the cuff"
1. Identify the community
- happy customers
- unhappy customers
- customers friends
- unknown potential customers
- How does the community benefit?
- How does the vendor benefit?
- A/S/L
- Demographic
- Internet usage
- Estimated new media participation
- Traditional: print, radio, tv, trade shows, telephone etc
- New Media: txt, email, web page, portal, blog, twitter, wiki, Facebook, instant messaging etc
- Traditional: print, radio, tv,
- New Media: web page, portal, blog, twitter,
5. Map Solutions to demographic
6. Create Communication Hub (portal - Web page)
- All communications track back to the Hub
- "Jams"
- Participation
- Viewing
- Commenting
- Blogging
- Purchasing
- Portal hits and product conversions (stickieness)
- Community activity
- Number new member
- Number of new connections between members (potential for message re-enforcement)
- stickEness
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