Ambient Awareness: insights into conumer behavior?
Sep/07/2008 07:22
Editors Note: A great article in today's New York
Times Magazine section on Social Media is an
excellent primer on how consumers are
connecting today. What can we learn from all this
as marketers?
The
paradox of ambient awareness on social media sites.
Each little update — each individual bit of social
information — is insignificant on its own, even
supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the
little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly
sophisticated portrait of a friends and family
members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a
pointillist painting. This was never before possible,
because in the real world, no friend would bother to
call you up and detail what New York sandwiches they
were eating.
The
ambient information tells a
story of how consumers live their lives in a
fragmented, knowledge based economy. More importantly
it paints a picture for marketers of how people
interact with each other, the world, and brands. If
marketers can't learn from social media, where
consumers lives are all but completely exposed, than
they are in the wrong business and need to move on to
a career in the food service business.
Imagine, listening in on consumers conversations. “It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.
What a wealth of information for marketers ! But listening to the conversation, and then becoming part of it, in a relevant non intrusive way is hard for pharma marketers to understand.
For decades marketers have been taught to break through clutter and deliver messages. Advertising today is seen as intrusive. How in the hell do marketers become part of the conversation around prescription drugs?
Well first it comes with an understanding of what we are selling; Cialis is not selling a treatment for ED it is selling confidence and an ability for men to have sex on their terms (the hell with aging !). Cymbalta is selling a way to not only alleviate depression but the pain that depression that causes those around the patient.
There are those people who regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me. Hell even married couples may communicate more via eMail and text messaging than in person ! Why? Time...and the format. Time is still the currency and lot of people don't have the time to really spend with each other to talk and become closer. Then there is the format. The great thing about eMail and text messaging is that it allows people to be passive aggressive and say things to each other that they normally wouldn't say in person. Why tell your spouse you can't pick up the kids from soccer practice because of a meeting when you can just send a text message and not listen to the negative feedback?
How is social media changing the landscape? Look at this example: Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter — she has more than 5,300 followers — recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network. “I outsource my entire life,” she said. “I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — “My little secret,” she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)
Now if you think this isn't happening with prescription drugs there is a bridge I would like you to consider purchasing. The reality is that it is happening everyday. A visit to a women's social media site, for example, yielded a conversations about Yaz the birth control medication that also is indicated for PMDD. "I don't want a birth control pill to effect my mood" wrote one person and then the conversation continued with over 25 responses. Using the 90% rule that means that there are a hell of a lot of other people who are reading but not posting. When they talk to their friends and their friends talk to their friends than you have one hell of a social media chain and a lot of ambient awareness on Yaz.
Marketers new job is Community and Content building which can be done with a smaller budgets and it will reach a hell of lot more customers and provide a better ROI. Customers are screaming to be more engaged with companies yet pharma continues to hide behind the rules and regulation of a "regulated industry". I know, for example, of one major healthcare portal that did not launch a social media area because "the legal people did not have the resources to review all the posts". Yeah that is a customer focused solution.
The goal of all marketing has always been, and will continue to be, building relationships between the brand and customers. Strong relationships are crucial to extending brand value but the challenge is to do this while keeping the non-marketing senior managers happy who are always asking about ROI.
It all starts with an understanding that the control of information has shifted from marketers to consumers. Marketers are not in control anymore. Hell pharma just reached a level of expertise in consumer marketing and now when they have these capabilities the whole landscape has changed. How dare consumers ! We just spent 10 years convincing management that DTC provides a great ROI now we have go back and tell them that DTC, and marketing, is changing so much that we need to deploy new tactical initiatives and build web metric and eMarketing departments?
Social media is an untapped gold-mine of information on consumer behavior. How can pharma mine this information? A shift is needed in DTC staffing NOW from media and creative to more eMarketing resources. The smart marketers are already staffing Web analytic departments to gain more insights but then pharma is usually at the airport when the ship comes in..
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