brand-e

By Hugh Jordan. Brand listening. Francesco D’Orazio is an advocate of UGC, but for the md of co-creation planning agency Face Wired, ‘c’ doesn’t stand for content, but rather, context.
“Content is not that useful when it comes to brand strategy,” says D’Orazio. “[At Face] we understand a brand’s issues by talking to consumers, listening to what they have to say, then involving those consumers in trying to solve the problems.”
Carphone Warehouse recently tasked Face with helping to define its social media agenda, and the agency has applied its tried and trusted model – listen, plan, engage – to do just that.
First, Pulsar, the outfit’s ‘listening’ technology, tracks online conversations and charts all the topics, issues and perceptions associated with the brand. Then come the online collaboration communities – in this case, headbox and mindbubble – where consumers are invited to take part in co-creation, ie a structured debate about how to tackle the issues raised in phase one. Finally, phase three sees Face working closely with Carphone Warehouse to address all issues and outline a coherent social media brief.
D’Orazio enthuses about the potential for brands in using this type of feedback mechanism.
“Social media is the richest insight field we have ever had,” says D’Orazio. “Brands traditionally tried customer immersion with focus groups, but the information gathered was based on such a small amount of people it wasn’t a realistic representation. With social media you are conversing at a very high level with thousands of people”.
Pulsar is no more advanced, technologically, than other monitoring devices on the market, according to D’Orazio. Its real value lies in not just being able to record what is said but also provide a visibility index weighting that measures the influence of the different conversations taking place.
This information helps Face identify the influencers who should be involved in the co-creation process.
“There is a meteorological limitation if you do not know which conversations are influencing the online debate,” says D’Orazio. “There might be 98 people saying that a brand is bad and only two saying good things about that brand. But if those two people’s comments have more back-links [websites linked to them], then their comments carry more weight.”
Like a virtual cartographer, Face is using Pulsar to map out cyberspace for brands’ benefit. “The same way that galaxies form, clusters of information gather around certain blogs and sites in cyberspace,” explains D’Orazio. “Brands need to engage with hundreds of different media, but realistically they can’t engage them all. We discover the hubs so that a brand like Carphone Warehouse can target them.”
The iPhone launch demonstrates his point perfectly.
[Blog] Engadget might not be a focal point in many brands’ marketing strategies, but, by Face’s reckoning, it gathered twice as much visibility for the iPhone’s launch as the Guardian and BBC’s technology blogs put together.
As technology advances, though, is there a danger of Pulsar and other monitoring devices being misused?
D’Orazio says not.
“Pulsar only captures what is already in the public domain,” he explains. “Over time consumers will become more careful about what they make public. Right now with the Internet, people are going through the anthropological discovery of a new space. Human behaviour is always slower to evolve than technology. Gradually people will discover and learn the boundaries.”
But the key to soliciting useful information, according to D’Orazio, will always depend on how a brand approaches the consumer.
“People own the [online] space, not the brand,” he says. “Brands must put the consumer at the heart of what they are doing… If you build a strategy around the consumer, they don’t feel targeted; they feel involved. The brand is then not just some distant entity – it is part of the game.”