Circos Brand Karma

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an in-depth article about the doping controversy surrounding Lance Armstrong.  In the article, Armstrong’s former teammate, Floyd Landis, described the doping that was done in the 2004 Tour de France (which Armstrong won) as being “…part of the sport and, if he joined a top team, would be part of his job.”  Landis subsequently won the Tour in 2006 but was stripped of his win when he failed the doping test after the race.

In response, Armstrong, as he has always done in the past, denied the allegations and instead focused on supporting his cancer foundation, Livestrong.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article is full of false accusations and more of the same old news from Floyd Landis, a person with zero credibility and an established pattern of recanting tomorrow what he swears to today… For years, sensational stories based on the allegations of ax-grinders — have surfaced on the eve of the Tour for publicity reasons, and this article is simply no different.  Lastly, I have too much work to do during this, my final Tour, and then after my retirement in my continued fight against cancer, to add any attention to this predictable pre-Tour sensationalism.

Steven Levitt, author of one of my favorite books, Freakonomics, had this interesting observation on his blog in The New York Times:

I’ve never studied lying versus truth-telling academically, but I have thought a lot about creativity.  And one thing that I have come to believe is that people – virtually all people, including me – are really bad at coming up with new ideas and insights.

That is why I find the Floyd Landis allegations so compelling.  He describes in great specificity and detail scenarios involving refrigerators hidden in closets, and the precise temperature at which the blood stored in those refrigerators had to be kept; and faked bus breakdowns during which Lance received blood transfusions while lying on the floor of the bus, etc.  To make up stories of this kind, with that sort of detail, strikes me as a difficult task.

If indeed the stories Landis tells are not true, my guess would be that these incidents actually happened, just with a different set of players, and then Landis switched the names.

Levitt has a point: sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, however unbelievable it might be.

In the social media world, the equivalent of doping is fraudulent engagement.  “Engagement” includes reviews, fans, posts, likes, views, etc.; basically any activity that elevates a brand’s rank unnaturally.  Recently, someone told me that you can hire villages in China to enhance a brand’s reputation and attack a brand’s competitors.  These activities then lead to fierce exchanges on Chinese BBSs that cause more confusion for consumers.

I don’t know if fraudulent engagement in travel is as systemic as Landis alleges for cycling, but I do know that many of my friends and colleagues think that it is — particularly those whose businesses have been impacted by hacked social media rankings.  While cycling has a governing body that conducts random tests for doping, there is no governing body in travel to evaluate the truthfulness of user generated content.  This responsibility falls largely on the social media site operators and their users.  Truthful or not, whatever is posted becomes a part of the brand image mosaic, which is further consumed by prospects and the general internet population.

However unethical, these opportunities exist, and travel executives often ask me how to combat such practices. The most basic thing is to not engage fraudulently; two wrongs don’t make a right.  A brand must have a corporate policy that prohibits employees from artificially enhancing the brand’s reputation or harming that of a brand’s competitors, even if you know competitors are doing it. Eventually, the Floyd Landises of the world get found out, and the fallout is most certainly not worth the possible short-term gains.

In addition, brand owners should have a plan that develops an army of customer evangelists who are passionate about their brand and who will defend the brand if it comes under attack.  Apple has been good at achieving this in the past.  Apple’s customer evangelists incorporate Apple products into their identity, and are constantly selling Apple products to their friends, family, and colleagues without receiving any commission from Apple.  They will also defend Apple when people attack their products – both online and offline.  As a result, Apple has been virtually bulletproof against attacks against its products.  Its market value has increased over 1000% in the last 10 years, surpassing Microsoft as the largest publicly traded technology company in May.

However, recently some of Apple’s evangelists have turned against Apple, over what they consider to be deceptive explanations about iPhone 4’s reception bars and Steve Jobs’ response to a customer complaint.  Now there’s a class-action lawsuit filed against Apple in the United States, where it sold over 1.7M units in the first 3 days.

Why?  Because the ex-evangelists felt Apple broke their trust.  And once trust is broken, the thin line between love and hate disappears.

So while having customer evangelists is important, what’s even more important is delivering on your brand promise consistently and truthfully.  If you do, customers will follow, and they, along with you, will breathe continuous life into the evangelization of your brand.

Whether Lance Armstrong will be exonerated or go the way of many famous athletes/role models/celebrities/politicians/brands and fall from grace remains to be seen.  But one thing is for certain though: in this era of hyper transparency, brand integrity must never be compromised.

(this post was original written as a feature post for Web In Travel)

Hoteliers: suppose Justin Bieber, the fastest rising international pop star, comes knocking on your door in the following way, what would you do?  (see video below — it’s only 46 seconds)

You would:

1. Do nothing
2. Respond privately to Bieber and invite him to come back
3. Apologize to Bieber publicly
4. Respond with humor to Bieber publicly
5. Fix the revolving door then assure the public what happened was a one-off

Justin Bieber currently has over 4M “likes” on Facebook, over 2.6M followers on Twitter, and has 2 videos on YouTube with over 100M views, one of which, “Baby features Ludacris” is currently the 3rd most viewed video of all time on YouTube.

The correct answer? Any of them, but more importantly, before you chose your answer, did you:

• Click on the link to see Bieber’s Wikipedia entry?
• Check out his Facebook fan page?
• Look at what his most recent tweets were about?
• See if he tweeted about running into the door?
• Watch all or part of his video?
• Google Justin Bieber to see if you can find out anything else about him?

If you did, you’d find, among other things, that Justin Bieber regularly creates mobs with his appearances.  In New Zealand the crowd of teenage girls knocked down his mom at the airport upon his arrival.  He is sad because Twitter changed its algorithm so that he’s no longer a trending topic which he has been for a long time.  And also, several articles have already covered his unfortunate head kiss with the revolving door.

Although Bieber is only 16 years-old, his entire life is digitized in an accessible way that allows someone to easily understand his personality, fan base, actions, aspirations, and why he’s become such a phenomenon.  Some of the content come from Bieber himself, and some are collaborative content from people who either know him or think they know him.  Nonetheless, the Radisson Blu in Frankfurt can get to know Justin Bieber quickly with the aggregate information that exists.

To summarize, Justin seems to be a wonderful and talented human being, one with passionate fans.  He was discovered on the internet as a result of his mom uploading him singing onto YouTube.  He has been praised as being down-to-earth and homemade, not manufactured like so many other pop stars.  His wipeout was covered by the Associated Press, HotelChatter.com, and was on the front page of MSN.

Justin was very gracious about his own unfortunate encounter with the door.  In his own words:

i think my head still hurts from running into that door…haha. only thing u can do in times like that is laugh at yourself…and laugh hard    3:07 PM May 20th via web

In the age of social media, the question isn’t which customer do I have is a “Justin Bieber.”  The real question is, what is my brand doing to get to know every customer as though s/he were Justin Bieber and actively incorporating his/her public social profile to provide better service in a non-exploitative way?

Justin Bieber may share a lot in his social profile, but not a lot is needed to gain a better understanding of a customer.  Every service provider in the travel industry should incorporate looking into public social profiles as a standard part of their operating procedure for customer service (and for that matter, employment as well!)

As for Radisson Blu in Frankfurt, given what we know about Bieber, any of the responses listed above would have been fine.  Because Radisson Blu Frankfurt has a Twitter page, a Facebook fan page, and is already active in social media, at least from a guest perspective, I think a public response would be great and appropriate given Bieber’s (and his fans’) preferences for this medium.

As I noted at the Web-in-Travel Conference last October, Facebook was already the most visited website in many Asian countries, and according to Hitwise, for the first time ever more people visited Facebook than Google in the week ending March 13 in the US.

Hitwise also noted a consolidation of web traffic as the 2 sites accounted for 14% of all US internet traffic.  Further Facebook’s growth YOY vs the same week in 2009 is 185% vs Google’s 9%, showing that Facebook still has a lot of upsides.

For brand marketers, the major takeaway is this: if your 2010 marketing plan is essentially the same as your 2008 plan, your emarketing strategy is operating in 2^nd gear in today’s world.  Your brand has likely fallen behind, or soon will, in its ability to effectively engage with customers.

Also, with the online landscape consolidating, the longer you wait, the more resources you will need to invest just to catch up and stay relevant.

Furthermore, it’s time to have a conversation with the owners about how social media is shaping consumer expectations more quickly and forcefully than industry or brand communications.  For owners that are building new properties, social media can be especially illuminating to help developers build a product for tomorrow as opposed to yesterday.

Finally, please don’t hire a junior person to run your social strategy.  Facebook is a powerful communication platform with over 400M members worldwide.  Senior brand marketers are needed to understand how your brand should be represented.

The good news is that there is still time, particularly because social media favors creativity.  Due to its viral nature, your brand can go from unknown to superstar quickly (think Susan Boyle).

But your brand has to be good, authentic, and different.

Will social media go from a cultural phenomenon to a commercial force?  Yes, I believe so.  If last decade’s new new thing for marketers was SEM, I believe this decade’s new new thing will be SMM (social media marketing).

However, for SMM to become legitimate its efficacy must be measurable, otherwise it’s tough to justify devoting any resources to it, particularly because in the last decade marketers learned how to calculate ROI by looking at conversion revenue from CPC traffic referred by their Google (and subsequently, other online) campaigns.  Not only did ad budgets shift, discipline was instilled.

We advise our clients to think about ROI of SMM in 4 major categories:

Brand satisfaction – how do operational improvements and investments increase your overall guest satisfaction over time?  In Brand Karma it’s the Guest Satisfaction Index, which is a composite index of your perception from various public sources, but if you don’t have Brand Karma you can also use something simple like your ranking or ratings on a review site.  When your guests post reviews about you, they’re giving you feedback on their stay.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape how favorably viewed your brand will be for consumers researching your property.

Brand loyalty – related to overall brand satisfaction, the loyalty measurement lets you know if the guest stay experience is compelling enough that it moves your guests to recommend your brand.  Like satisfaction, this is a measurement that needs to be trended over time as well.  In Brand Karma it’s the Loyalty Index, but again, if you don’t have Brand Karma you can look at the “recommendation” rate on reviews that are written about your brand.  Different sites do this differently, but most have a way for their reviewers to recommend a property.  This index and the Guest Satisfaction Index gives you a good idea of how favorably the public perceives your brand.

Many internal guest surveys also measure satisfaction and loyalty.  Just keep in mind that the surveys guests 1) give you solicited feedback — i.e. questions you ask, not necessarily what the guests want to evaluate, and 2) aren’t viewable by the general public — so they don’t give you insights into how public perceptions may be impacted.

Guest Satisfaction Analysis in Brand Karma

Brand awareness – how do sites with social media increase the awareness of your brand?  In the social media world, in addition to the traditional metrics having to do with volume, awareness metrics must take into account the idea of relative frequency.  Relative frequency lets you know how recent is the content about your brand vs. your competitors.  This is important because if people haven’t been talking about your brand recently, then either you’re not interesting or your competitors are more interesting than you, neither of which is good.

Campaign performance – the ultimate metric that measures ROI.  Suppose you run an ad on Facebook, you’ll want to see what is your ROI for every dollar spent.  This means that you must have a way to measure what you’re advertising.  For example, to execute you can set up a landing page on your ecommerce site so that you can track the referrals and conversion rate from that specific campaign.  Use the traditional ROI formula to calculate what your return is (should be no different than your calculation for search engine marketing).  As you get more advanced, try to establish a link between your brand satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness to your campaign performance.  For instance, how much better does your campaign perform after your brand satisfaction has increased by 10 points?  If you have lower brand awareness than before, do you have fewer click-throughs?  Is there a correlation between guest loyalty to your campaign responses?

In a way, the above points are the fundamentals of marketing, and that’s precisely the point.  Brands wanting to leverage social media for marketing should measure what they’re getting out of their investments in it.  However, like traditional and other online marketing tactics, SMM takes a bit of trial and error to perfect into a strategy, particularly because the ability to micro-target is superb, and so brand owners should consider developing an expertise over a few marketing campaigns.

Some progressive brands are considering hiring a marketing manager to focus on social media in 2010.  Once again, this person’s salary minimally should be considered an investment to improve brand satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness.  List the activities that your social media manager engages in with your fans, followers, and friends, and see how much time they take.  From there, you can calculate the dollar investment (percent of time to salary).  Over time, see what activities lead to gains in satisfaction, loyalty, or awareness, and what activities don’t make a difference.  If you’ve established a link between increases in satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness to increased campaign ROI, then you’ll know how much your social media manager can help you improve your bottom line and guide him/her to engage in activities that increases your key metrics.