B.Lab

Seventh Generation – Green Company Uses Social Media to Build a Tribe

Monday, July 26, 2010

On Tribal Marketing
At the core of marketing and communications is building a relationship with a customer, but the key to that is being authentic and relevant. With green product brands there is a unique opportunity to build what John Grant (Green Marketing Manifesto) describes as “green tribal brands” or a form of marketing that allows customers to collaborate with companies to actually create brands. Grant uses the word tribe to connote membership in a group of like-minded people. One well-known non-green example of is the tribal nature of the Harley Owner’s Group (H.O.G.) that takes on the coloration of a cycle gang but is made up of middle class, midlife bikers.

People today identify with brands but since postmodernism, norms and social diktats have been fragmented so that people can truly pick and choose what they will wear, buy, act and be. The job for life is gone, the Internet has changed information access and people have lost trust in traditional institutions. Brands have a much harder time today than in the 1950s and the tribe is one way of dealing with this. From the perspective of a green business, building a tribe is key to attracting and engaging both light greens and dark greens alike. In the past, green was associated with a particular style group such as vegan, hippy, conservationist or NGO. Part of the problem was that dark greens were seen as too exclusive to the point that it sabotaged their cause. Green marketing now means building iconic green brands that create exclusive aspiration and desire around green lifestyles and choices.

But the format of this membership has changed with culture and technology. Grant writes this tribal culture is “folksy, going back to the time when stories and other cultural memes were all like urban myths; the good ones spread. The tribes are perhaps re-emerging online, but they are now fluid networks of inclusion, rather than static, exclusive sets.” In Web 2.0, what this means is building an iconic brand around a community or a social network.
This is exactly what has happened with leading green household products company Seventh Generation, building a tribe of light greens and a fair share of dark greens through a variety of social media channels and engaging in conversation around environmentally safe lifestyle choices. As will be shown, the company has made good use of this tribal approach in social media to build customer loyalty, create relationships with customers, inform about green benefits, collaborate by asking and listening to customer opinion and achieve a new kind of transparency to build trust with it’s customers and employees.

About Seventh Generation
Seventh Generation, Inc. is an American company that sells cleaning, paper, and personal care products. The company was founded in 1988 and is based in Burlington, Vermont. The company focuses its marketing and product development on sustainability and the conservation of natural resources. Seventh Generation uses recycled and post-consumer materials in its packaging and biodegradable, and phosphate- and chlorine-free ingredients in its products. The company takes its name from the Great Law of the Iroquois that states, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

CEO and “Chief Inspired Protagonist” Jeffrey Hollander founded the company after being an entrepreneur in the adult education industry and audio publishing industry which he sold to Times Warner, initially taking partial stake in energy conservation product mail order business and then launching Seventh Generation in 1988 in Burlington, Vermont. After his son suffered a serious asthma attack that was cured partially by the use of non-toxic cleaners, creating a healthier home environment hit home for Hollander. An avid entrepreneur and environmentalist who believes in total transparency of organizations, his leadership has been key to the formation of a green marketing company that makes the best use of social technology and education to effectively market the company brand and products.

In kind, Seventh Generation describes its business practice as “focused on offering people ways to express their idealism, passion, and commitment to causes larger than themselves at every point along its supply chain—from suppliers and partners to shareholders, customers and its own staff.” With an education focus to the organization, it sets out to help customers make informed choices and provides information through a variety sources including packaging, its website, newsletters (“7th Gen News”), a variety of social media websites, booklets and presentations by CEO Hollander himself.
On the product side, Seventh Generation offers a wide variety of environmentally safe products including non-chlorine bleached, 100% recycled paper towels, bathroom and facial tissues, and napkins; non-toxic, phosphate-free cleaning, dish and laundry products; plastic trash bags made from recycled plastic; chlorine-free baby diapers, training pants, and baby wipes; and chlorine-free feminine care products, including organic cotton tampons.

Communications in the Social Media Age
For the purpose of this paper, I contacted Seventh Generation after noticing the company’s active use of social media and recent Webby Award nomination of their digital marketing campaign “Million Baby Crawl” in the Best Green category. In a very social media like way, I tweeted under the #greenmarketing tag and was soon contacted by Seventh Generation’s web editor and web marketing specialist Chris Middings who offered to let me interview him about the company and their use of social media for their green marketing. The following is based on two telephone conversations we had.

Seventh Generation first began experimenting with social media a few years ago and started out using a familiar mix of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. In the past year they have added Twitter, FriendFeed and Google Buzz as they have expanded social media use. This was lead by the web team that is part of marketing but a variety of other departments interact in the social channel including communications/PR, customer insights and customer service. The company originally decided to engage in the social web when the leadership realized there was a conversation occurring with or without them in blogs, forums and social networks; and they came to the conclusion that it was in their best interest to join in or have their position be ignored.

When asked what social media has accomplished for the company Middings answered, “Timely conversations and no ‘wasted’ advertising. The old shotgun approach using TV, etc. just leads to mental pollution. Social allows us to talk with those who have raised their hand to talk with us.” In this way, social media for green companies could even be seen as changing the game of the ad business. By speaking directly to customers, they have greater impact and can fine-tune messages in real-time, redefining the brand message as they go along. Of course, this sort of communications might not be that easy for large corporations with strict brand and PR guidelines (for example P&G), but for a small to medium size green company like Seventh Generation, enabling employees to reach out to customers can give the company competitive advantage over larger competitors.

Facebook
Middings said that their Facebook page was by far the most active of all the social media channels. Combining both employee and customer posts and questions with remarkably long lists of comments (often over 100 comments per post) the Seventh Generation Facebook page is a best case for social media being done in great frequency and depth. One reason that explains this success of Facebook pages over Twitter is that is that it fits the tribal nature of Seventh Generation’s employee and customer communications. What the Facebook becomes for green marketers and their customers/advocates is space where customers can self-identify with the green brand, bounce ideas off one another and make friends of shared passions. It’s centralized enough that people can have conversations together as well as easily pop out into their other groups or social networks.

Twitter
Twitter on the other hand appears to be more an effective transmission channel to give updates about what’s going on in Facebook, the site community, simple product advice and green news. In this way, Twitter seems more like a traditional marketing tool for the company to broadcast one-way messages. Like a funnel, subscribers get channeled into more educational or communicative platforms. This is a popular way many brands use Twitter as well as a form of buzz marketing that goes viral when subscribers retweet Seventh Generation tweets or post their own related posts to #7thGen hash tags. In this way Twitter transcends one-way communication by empowering its customers to spread the word and attract new customers who are interested in creating an environmentally safe home.

The Nation Community Site
Besides the off-site social channels, Seventh Generation maintains its own community as part of their main site that they call in true tribal language “The Nation”. It consists of a series of forums that provide a centralized, controlled social space for the company to facilitate conversations and conduct focus group like interactions to better understand customers’ reactions to products. On this Middings said, “The Nation asks folks to register to post to our forums, download coupons, etc. We also send them a twice-monthly newsletter. It is a great way to educate them about the other issues in their lives that can be made healthier. Our primary goal is education.”

Listening Through Social Media
At the same time, Seventh Generation’s customer service staff take a non-PR tact closer to what traditional call centers did for them before they went online. Customers pose questions, health problems, recommendations and praise directly to these customer service reps who in turn answer directly back in an open way that all subscribers can read and gain insights from like a call center gone public.

Measuring Success
The next important question is how does Seventh Generation measure its social media effectiveness? Social media monitoring and analytics have developed considerably in the past few years however Middings answered, “Measurement is harder to define. We’re not using an analytics package for it but overall it has been a very effective way to talk directly to consumers.” Like many companies first starting out with social media, Seventh Generation looks at a disconnected mix of data from weblogs, survey results, numbers of comments and followers, overall sentiment, etc. to get a general idea of how communications are going. At this point, more than effectiveness, they appear to be focused on the content of the dialogs they are having with customers (ie. What do people think of products?)

In the future, says Middings, the next step for the company would be to start using a social media analytics package like Radius 6 to measure quantitatively if each of their campaigns, product launches and channel usage are creating real value. The question immediate surfaces: “If you don’t measure your social media, how do you know if you are being effective in communicating and listening in the social web?” Unlike Web 1.0 (ie. static corporate or ecommerce websites) in which we used to only track our website clickstream data (via Webtrends or similar tool), tracking the social web and decentralized web is a lot more challenging due to the fact that users are posting to “living pages” through comments, off-site content in feed readers and aggregator sites (can be measured via Feedburner) and Citations of other people talking about you (measured via Technorati), for a starter, not to mention social networks Twitter and Facebook. The following diagram and next two sections are discussion of fundamental social metrics the company could use to start monitoring their success (if they are not already doing so). As Twitter and Facebook are clearly the most actively used services by Seventh Generation, there is a discussion of metrics for each.

Twitter Metrics

In the case of Twitter, the company is posting with several accounts so it could be useful to learn which accounts are getting the most success around growth rate of followers (percent change of growth/loss to total in given period), number and frequency of tweets, shared link click through rate (CTR), amplification (# of retweets) and the most popular tweets.
The number of retweets is key to gauge whether something of value is being tweeted to followers.
Average CTR for shared links is key to understanding the impact of links that point back to Seventh Generation’s websites.
Both retweets and CTR can tell them about followers’ preferences and help focus Twitter efforts. Comparisons across accounts could also allow experimentation with different communication styles. This can be done using a variety of 3rd party applications. Web-based Hootsuite is a free solution that handles many of these metrics.
Another advantage of Hootsuite is it allows teams to coordinate posts and replies by creating “Assignments” to delegate specific tweets or replies to specific accounts and individuals while avoiding redundant reposting of the same messages. This could be key to Seventh Generation for focusing their team efforts while keeping track of metrics and overall sentiment of user comments.
Conversion rate for replies can be used to benchmark how many replies are sent and received with the account compared to a Twitter average or some other goal. High conversion rates tell whether a conversation is actually being had, not a one-way transmission. TwitterFriends is a good analysis site for this (http://twitter-friends.com/)
Another Twitter analysis tool that has very useful analytics is Klout.com where the key measurement is “Influence” which is based on 25 variables, with 3 categories: True Reach (engaged followers), Amplification Score (chance that you’ll be retweeted), and Network Score (your engaged followers are influential). The main account @SeventhGen received a 48 Klout Score which is comparatively very high (only slightly lower than Starbucks which has a much higher True Reach or number of followers)

Facebook Fan Page Metrics
As Middings mentioned that their Facebook fan page was the most active of all their social media channels, it’s important to discuss about how they could go about measuring effectiveness.

All Facebook fan pages have a free analytics tool called Facebook insights (pictured above) built into the page that is accessible by the administrator (the person who set up the page). It measures user exposure, actions, and behavior relating to your Social Ads and Facebook Page.
Facebook uses an algorithm that calculates your number of posts, total interactions received on posts, and your page’s total number of fans as well as “other factors” over a rolling seven-day period – and generates a single number called “Post Quality”.
The charts also tell you the growth of your fan base over time broken down by country. As a KPI, the company should set a growth rate to try to stick to.
There are charts for most user interactions such as the total number of times a page was viewed per day; total photo views, audio plays, and video plays for the content you have uploaded to your page. This should be analyzed to focus on the kind of content users prefer.
Overall, Insights is pretty limited but Webtrends has just come out with Facebook support including Twitter activity driving to Facebook Fan pages, Facebook Fan page activity overlaid with corporate blog posts, Conversion performance if they happen in Facebook, Custom applications, Facebook page tabs, and Facebook ad click performance.
Facebook page tabs in the case of Seventh Generation are important to see how much users are interacting with the latest campaign Million Baby Crawl, their coupon promotion page and their RSS feeds page.
Overall, looking at the large volume of comments to both company and user posts, the positive sentiment and the successful way promotions appear to being used on the fan page, Seventh Generation does not seem to have any major problems and should now focus on fine-tuning their communications through experimentation and paying attention to Page Insights and possibly the new Webtrends to offer customers the most engaging content.

Seventh Generation Customers
To get a better understanding of the Seventh Generation customers, I asked Middings how green their customers really were. To answer this he provided results to a survey users fill out when they join the community website (see the survey in the Appendix, Exhibit 6) for the question “What are the two main reasons you are interested in Seventh Generation products?” The first most answered at 36% was “Personal/Family Health” which puts them in the light greens camp, seeing green as a personal choice of purchasing products for their family. They would most likely be turned off by preachy green messages but are eager to insure their family’s health. The second most answered at 24% is “long-time interest in the environment” points to a more dark green leaning. At the same time 12% say they have a new interest in the environment and another 15% say they have a new baby.

Considering their products, Middings has come to realize their green household products are unfamiliar and even strange to many people and they are up against people’s mother-in-law’s who attempt to preach old (toxic) brands they are familiar with. In addition, young mothers are a main target for their communications and education programs, as these first time customers become interested in non-toxic, safe products for their new babies such as the biodegradable diapers and green cleaning products. Then as these mothers become more informed and loyal to specific product brands, they have the potential to migrate to other products and categories.

Summary: Seventh Generation’s Transparency
When asked what the company’s overall social media strategy was, Middings answered, “We see it as a way to interact with customers. We sell B2B, so this is a great way for our Consumer Insights Team to directly interact, in real time, to answer consumer questions. Social is like an 800 number that everyone can see.” When asked whether the leadership and president of the company gained from the findings of the Consumer Insights Team, Middings said that they make regular presentations to the management to share consumers’ issues with products and areas where they could improve. From this the company makes proactive changes to products as well as marketing style. These insights also help Middings’ communications team know what sort of information is needed by consumers to be as transparent as is being demanded of them. He said, “Social works best when a company is transparent and social is forcing transparency overall so it’s a great fit for us. We have nothing to hide and welcome dialog allowing us to improve products, gauge interest in new products, etc.”

Transparency is a clearly stated mission of the company president Hollander. He published a management book titled “Responsibility Revolution” where he talks about “for purpose (and profit)” business leaders who first must stand for something before considering how to make a profit. He points to the start of the recession as the investment banks lacking accountability and transparency. He also underlined the greenwashing taking place in CSR programs that merely try to cover up wrongdoing. To be truly responsible, he makes the point that companies must be completely transparent in what goes into their products, what processes were used in manufacturing them and how waste is managed. It is inferred that companies in the future will not be competitive or sustainable unless they become more and more transparent to provide customers with the information to choose them over competitors. Hollander and Bill Breen in a corporate responsibility manifesto in ChangeThis.com say, “By publicly baring its less than admirable impacts on society and the environment, the transparent company takes the first step toward collaboratively fixing its problems.”

In this way, Seventh Generation attempts to provide customers with as much sight into the company and its products as possible. The style of its communications and social media reaffirm this commitment and bring customers closer to the brand and compelling them to join the tribe of other customers to spread the word to their friends and families.

Filed in Green Marketing, Social Media | Comments

How Twitter Has Changed the World Cup

Sunday, June 20, 2010

One thing that is different this World Cup season compared to 4 years ago, is the popularity of Twitter today has changed the way people communicate about the matches. Twitter actually started out in March 2006, the same year as the last WC, but the service hadn’t reached any real popularity worldwide yet. Now what we see trending on Twitter is posts to #worldcup (as well as #wc2010) occurring during matches at a frequency so fast that your own tweet only seconds before gets lost 3 page scrolls down.

What is interesting about this is the wide diversity of languages and nationalities posting about their national teams as well as their favorite celebrities (Christian Ronaldo playing for Portugal got huge negative sentiment because of his over dramatized falls). As for myself watching the matches starting at 11pm here in japan while tweeting via my iPad (Osfoora twitter app of choice), I find myself watching BOTH the game on TV and the game at #worldcup. The variety of ways sports fans are communicating with 140 characters is quite entertaining to say the least. Sneering slights to other nations and players, nationalism of the innocent kind (“go japan!”), actual smart commentary putting announcers to shame, and of course the usual complaint about the vuvuzelas.

Another thing I’ve noticed, while only tweeting in English myself, a large portion of the tweets are in Japanese which says a lot about the huge adoption of the service in japan. I’ve even had bilingual tweet conversations with unknown people: me in english and them in Japanese.

I’ve also seen little to no posts from brands looking to take advantage of the trending #worldcup for advertising purposes. This could be probable for companies close to sports like Nike or ESPN. In a way it’s probably best for their precious brands that they don’t as they could get clobbered by beer guzzling sports fans worldwide. That said, it seems like a missed opportunity nonetheless for ad guys.

So if you’re not following the conversation at #wc2010, I encourage you to jump right in and cheer and yell with the rest of us. This intersection in sports and social technology may not happen this way again since in 2016 who knows how social media usage will have changed and how fans will be watching, sharing and cheering it up.

Some of my own tweets from last night during the Japan-Netherlands game:

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Filed in Social Media, Twitter | Comments

iPad App Report: Pulse vs. Reeder

Monday, June 14, 2010

What makes one iPad RSS news reader better than the next? It’s really a question of design versus function. Pulse has the former and Reeder has the latter.

Pulse News Reader
On the one hand, Pulse News Reader (itunes, $3.99) designed by two students at the Stanford Institute of Design has been praised as a shining example of what the iPad can provide through the larger visual interface. Steve Jobs himself actually featured it in last week’s WWDC 2010 keynote, using it to show off how cool iPad could be. What makes it so good? The large graphical thumbnails that act as your main cue for navigation are something new to iPad experience as the iPhone simply didn’t have this much real estate while the flick-and-scroll is also perfect for the iPad screen. The thumbnails truly do make looking for feeds more intuitive, at least for content like NPR blogs that have taken the time to choose decent images (in the case where bloggers haven’t it’s simply vanilla text.) Pulse looks great and usability is way up there. The other interesting feature it provides is a “manage sources” which includes a feature list to choose from popular feeds as well as being able to add up to 25 feeds of your own from Google Reader.

So with such an applauded, well designed interface, what could go wrong? Well, the main issue isn’t the menu but in the content display. For some strange reason, these two design students got so excited about the look and feel for the big thumbnails that they forgot what a news reader is really about: showing news in all it’s hypertext glory. The feed text is stripped of links making it difficult to follow sources (in text view) to get a background on the story. While it comes with a web page view where you can use hypertext, the web view space is too small to easily read the text at such small size. It makes up for this with choice to open the link in Safari. I like that the app let’s me post on my favorite social media sites Facebook and Twitter. But I wish that I could add articles to a favorites list. Overall, well designed, easy to use news reader that is great when I am short on time and can use the thumbnails to quickly scan for interesting “looking” content. The hype around the iPad launch and Job’s keynote as well as New York Times outcry to pull the app from the App Store have led to a lot of buzz about this Pulse.

Reeder for iPad
I should start off by saying I am a bit biased towards the slightly more expensive Reeder for iPad (itunes, $6) as I have been using the popular Reeder for iPhone for a few months now with great pleasure. Like it iPhone brother, the iPad app drags in all your Google Reader feeds in a minimal and elegant format. What it adds to the iPad is a menu of stacks which represent the user’s feed folders. I like the clean look of the stacks of “documents” as it represents feeds in a nice analog way. It’s also reminiscent to the stacks in the iPad Photo app menu. However, I am not really sure what they add to overall usability without having any unique visual info such as photo thumbnails. Pulse app clearly has the upper hand here. It does seem to show thumbnails for individual feeds not in folders.

At the same time, I think where Pulse was weak in showing content, Reeder excels. The text view retains all the hypertext and when clicked opening up fullscreen views of the actual webpage. Just like Pulse, you have a choice to open content in Safari where you can bookmark it. Like its iPhone app, Reeder brings a wider selection of actions users can take such as posting to twitter, delicious, leaving a note, “read it later”, Mobilizer and Instapaper. Another cool feature is that remembers what state you were in previously to return where you left off. Sometimes killer functionality is in the details as the text view includes the page’s “share” links retaining the format of posts that the original author intended. Geeking out a bit, I really like the star feature as it retains the best of Google Reader to add some order to your sea of feeds. One thing I wish it had was the ability to create new folders inside the app. Having to go to Google Reader every time is a bit of a drag. Overall, I think Reeder is a fine app when I have enough time to peruse my news feeds and publish them to my favorite social media and bookmarking sites.

Wrap Up
Like my current switchhitting with Twitterrific and Twittelator, I don’t think I’ll be deleting either Pulse or Reeder. They’re both serve the purpose for what they were made for. The visual cue design of Pulse is great when I’m time starved and in need of graphic stimulation. The flick to swipe menu is cool and fun to use adding an interactive layer that I expect in the iPad. Reeder on the other hand is more my super user app that makes a full use of Google Reader and more some with its unique actions one can do with content. I also am a sucker for its minimal design and function first styling.

Filed in iPad | Comments

My 1st eBook Experience with “Facebook Effect”

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Just got my first ebook to read on the iPad and guess what it’s about? “Facebook Effect: The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World” by David Kirkpatrick (Senior Editor, Internet and Technology at Fortune Magazine). Looks like a good read tracing how FB became the most trafficked site in the world. Kirkpatrick chronicles its successes and missteps, and gives readers a complete assessment of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As a newbie ebook reader, one reflection on the reading experience is I read like the night reading mode (white text on black background) as I can read in bed with the light off. Also the Kobo reader on the iPad has nice large text making it an easy read. Buying from the Kobo store was easy enough even though it jumped me to safari to go to cart. The check out form was a whole lot easier to use than Amazon.

Filed in Business, Facebook | Comments

My iPad Gripes in Nippon – Part 1

Saturday, June 12, 2010

By now 100s if not 1000s of posts about the iPad in Japan have rained down on the blogosphere since Mr. Jobs launched it into the market the week before last. Japanese people are clearly going nuts for it even more than the launch of the iPhone. Practically everyone I knew from the most tech savvy to the office lady who only tried twitter in the past month have lined up to get their magic pad. But having to wait more than a month longer than folks in the US must have something to do with it. Delaying the release of a product or media is something Japanese are used to with movies and music, an effective marketing technique to build up expectation before launching it outside of US. I for one couldn’t wait.

Now for a few belated reflections from a Saturday in the suburbs of Tokyo. As a lot of bloggers have already covered a lot of ground in the US, I’ll try to keep it as Japan centric as possible. Here goes nuthin:

Why wifi makes me cry?
When I picked up my iPad at the Apple Store in Shibuya, they gave me a special sealed envelope from Softbank promising 2 years of free wifi hotspots all over Tokyo. While had planned to get the wifi (instead of the 3G) from the start for the lower price and to be used with my home and office wifi, I felt like I was getting sweet bonus to be able to pop into a McDonalds or a coffee shop to surf the web or check my mail. It turns out after much search around that Softbank has told a fib. The free hotspots don’t seem to work much of the time. First, why would Softbank offer anything for free? It was explained to me by friend Enrique that Softbank would prefer to keep iPad users off the 3G airwaves as the big downloads are sure to clog up the mobile pipeline. OK, I can see the point. But why not follow through? Well, it may be cheaper to talk and not deliver. I mean, they can’t be held accountable as there’s no binding contract between softbank and wifi users. So smokescreen away Softbank but your brand just slipped in my book.

Developers are sitting on their hands
In the past week I’ve spoken at least two people who should be super excited to start proposing iPad apps to clients to clients but could only imagine developing new iPhone apps still. The reasoning is the reach for iPad apps will be small in the immediate future so one should wait until the market really embraces it. Hmm, by that time it will already be too late, no? It seems clear as day that if you’re going to develop anything new from this point on it HAS to work beautifully on the iPad or you might as well be making tofu in old Kyoto. Come guys, pluck up some courage and be a leader. New users are starved for Japanese apps and by being first to market you’re bound to get the most loyalty and a headstart on refining your app. Conformists beware!

I want to spend money on my ebooks, pleeeeeasssse!
What the f$@k? I got this wonderful ebook experience that is ready to crunch the Kindle and put Amazon on a quick slide to the obsolete tech junk pile and what do I find here in Japan? The brand new iBook app doesn’t have any ebooks for sale! Just the usual free project Gutenberg stuff that I’ve been yawning at for years like Pride & Prejudice and Sherlock Holmes. Ok, free is cool for the first few downloads but i wanted to use iBook to grab some O’Reilly books or new bestselling fiction. I have this creeping fear that it’s going the same way as Apple TV, not being able to download movies from the US due to Japanese media distribution laws. Yikes! Of course that doesn’t mean i can’t get my ebooks with Kobo HD but come on Apple, get your act together. Or is this the Japanese government I should be whinging at? Clearly, this is the same thing that has slowed down Amazon Japan in launching it’s own e-books for Kindle in Japanese and English. Fear of putting publishers out of business by selling directly through the digital channel. The time is coming but how long will us Japan residents have to wait? Apple seemed to be able to negotiate it’s way into the Japanese music market through a Japanese version iTunes. What about doing the same with the books Steve?

That’s it for now. My body has atrophied since i got this iPad and i need to get to the gym. Reporting more via my new iPad and the improved WordPress app soon. Stay tuned!

Lance in Tokyo

Filed in Japan | Comments

Japanese like their web content free!

Sunday, May 30, 2010

According to a Nielson Net Ratings March report, Japanese web users (33%) are less willing to pay for online content when it is readily available offline than both the global average (47%) and the Asian Pacific average (57%). Of the Asian countries Japan is at the very bottom range.

A few noteworthy stats I’d like to point out is that surprising only 10% of Japanese have experiencing paying for online games compared to the Asian average of 18%. Paying for online radio like Last.fm is even lower at 1% compared to the 5% Asian average. Paying for online news (7%) is only slightly behind the global average (8%). One area that Japanese users are slightly more willing to pay is social media with a 25% “intent to pay” compared to the 24% global average. However, their actual experience with paid for social media is only 1% compared to the 4% global average.

What this appears to mean is that the rise of Chris Anderson’s “freeconomics” as described in his book “Free” has very much come true in Japan compared with 69% of Chinese users still willing to pay for online content. Even in Anderson’s home country the U.S. 40% of users are still willing to pay. Anderson’s point that the costs of the growing online economy is trending toward zero and how users are increasingly less willing to pay for microtransactions online. Is this what has happened in Japan or is their just an overwhelming loyalty to offline media. With the steady decline of print media (magazines and newspapers), I would side on Anderson’s point of view about Japan. My guess is that Japanese users have so many choices of content both online and offline that they’re less willing than most to pay for it on the web.

What this means for web marketers, entrepreneurs and publishers in Japan is a free approach is needed. Try-before-buying, free content bundled with services and premium accounts are some possible ways that come to mind. Whatever approach is used around content Japanese customers are a lot tighter with their purses and new approaches to entice them to part with their yen needs to be innovated on. As marginal cost to distribute content online goes down (especially with similar products), there may be a place to charge for marginal utility, in other words the product/service is superior to all the rest.

So while Japan being content-saturated is certainly a major reason for the free ride propensity, options with superior utility could also be scarce. New and unique content channels (think iPhone, Last.fm, Mint.com) need to be further developed and marketed. Copycats increase commoditization and lower price. And in Japan this could be to zero.

Filed in Business, Featured, Japan, marketing | Comments

The BP Oil Spill: Social Media and Crowdsourcing

Sunday, May 16, 2010

On April 20, 2010 a BP oil rig went up in flames, killing 11 workers and beginning a disastrous oil spill that dumped 210,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. Three weeks after the explosion, BP has tried a variety of solutions to stop the spill from the 21-inch wide pipe including a preventer blowout switch, 200 ton box lowered over the leak and the third attempt was to run a mile long tube into the pipe in hope of sucking up the oil. With little success from either of three solutions, BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA having set up Deepwater Horizon Response (DHR) to manage response operations. The DHR describes itself and its website on its About Us page as:

A Unified Command links the organizations responding to an incident and provides a forum for those organizations to make consensus decisions. This site is maintained by the Unified Command’s Joint Information Center (JIC), which provides the public with reliable, timely information about the response.

Underneath these words are a long list of logos with BP at the top and followed by 15 other logos 8 of which are Department of the U.S. government (Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, the Interior as well as the National Parks Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife and the Coast Guard.) What isn’t clear and draws doubt to this whole exercise in communications is who is really behind it and what are the true intentions of it. How can BP and the National Parks Service be part of a “unified command”? Besides the DHR website, the DHR is also using a variety of social media including Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, and a YouTube account.

The question I have is how much is this damage control green washing for BP and the U.S. government and how much is this an earnest attempt to keep people informed and gather solutions to stop the spill? To answer this, both the usage of the media, the quality of the communications and the character of the social media responses should be looked at.

The Website (http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com)

Deepwater Horizon Response website includes the latest news of clean up activity, FAQs, Hotline contact info, report incidents and claim submissions, volunteer opportunities and suggestion submissions of how to stop or clean up the spill. The top page shows Flickr photos of a random selection of disaster control activities and YouTube videos. Much of this is clearly meant to be useful for people living in the Gulf area and citizens interested in environmentalism to give as much info as possible and give people a chance to contribute their own ideas. A question again is who is providing the information and for what reason? It appears to be fairly governmental in nature so a user can’t help coming away with the feeling that this is not so much a brand play for BP but an effort by the government. At the same time, it feels like a weak attempt as the level of information is shallow and there’s no sense of the true position of the organizations backing the site.

On the bright side, the Suggestions page is a rather innovative way to use crowdsourcing to increase the number options BP and the government agencies can use. The site says about suggestions: “BP has established a process to receive and review submitted suggestions, on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill emanating from the Mississippi Canyon 252 well. Proposals are reviewed for their technical feasibility and proof of application. More than 4,800 ideas have been proposed to date. Given this quantity of technical proposals suggested by industry professionals and the public, it may take some time to technically review each one.”[1] The key takeaway here is most likely that a) the government and BP are aware of the fact that crowdsourcing is an effective way to gather ideas from environmentally engaged social media users, b) they understand that by allowing people to submit they are gaining some favor from them as social media users appreciate being able to give their opinions. At the same time though, looking at the number of suggestions and the number of Twitter followers 4300, this number is not large enough to really come up with truly value added ideas. So in that way it could appear to be more a gesture than an actual innovative way to solve the spill problem. Also, the PDF suggestion form itself seems awkward and hard to fill out and the site says that reviewing each idea takes a great deal of time, bringing the whole process into question.

Social Media Usage

The DHR Facebook Page has by far the most active user generated content and where you can see the green sentimentality of the angry citizenry coming out. If anything, the page is a venting stage for enraged users to express their feelings on the disaster, a large volume at BP such as the comment “Obama needs to immediately seize all of BPs assets, it should no longer be called BP, but rather a state controlled cleanup organization and any other oil income should be utilized for ongoing cleanup work.” Whether this is an effective green PR tool is questionable and as neither BP nor the government is in dialog with the protestors only make them seem more guilt ridden. The DHR’s use of Facebook as well as Twitter is pretty much the same, a space to disseminate the latest news release while maintaining a distance from the crowd, which shows a disconnect from the people you’re supposed to be gathering ideas from in order to solve the problem.

Incentivizing Through Social Media

Better methods would be to post questions to stimulate more positive input, to post responses to commonly expressed negative opinions to bring the conversation into a more civil dialog and possibly even incentivize the crowd to generate a larger volume of high quality suggestions by rewarding the selected solutions with a suitable amount of money. This last idea of using money to motivate social interaction is usually not an effective means to nurture engagement but in this case the level of seriousness and potential ecological and economic loss that the spill threatens to cause, requires a different sort of entrepreneurial user to help better quality crowdsourcing. Along this line, rather than using Facebook and Twitter, the DHR would be better off setting up a system similar to InnoCentive (http://www.innocentive.com/) to more effectively connect with inventors and technologists needed to find the right ideas. The incentive/prize would help to spur the competitive behavior of the participants producing potentially better results.

Failing Grade for BP Unless It Succeeds Through Action

In 2000, British Petroleum launched its go green campaign, “Beyond Petroleum” and for almost a decade it invested heavily in it to position itself as a socially conscious oil company that recognizes the link between fossil fuels and global warming. While criticized by skeptics and environmental groups and chided it as “Beyond Preposterous” and “Beyond Belief”, it was also shown to be amazingly effective. Sales from 2004 to 2005 rose from $192 billion to $240 billion then to $266 billion in 2006. A Landor Associates survey of consumers found that 21% of them thought BP was the greenest of oil companies, followed by Shell at 15% and Chevron at 13%. The company also claimed that the green campaign in 2000-2007 increased brand awareness from 4 to 67%. Most critics agreed that the company was just using green language to change people’s perceptions (ie. greenwashing), however they could not deny the effectiveness, such as this comment “BP is running a greenwashing campaign,” said John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy, “and from a sales and marketing perspective, it is brilliant. They’ve positioned themselves where everyone wants to be today, especially oil companies.”[2]

In 2008 the success of the ongoing campaign had compelled Adweek to ask if advertising, as much as action, can change public perception. What we see in this most recent oil spill disaster is there is no good in trying to talk their way out of this one. There is simply the action left to do in order to save the company’s name and future business off U.S. shores or any other country’s that will look on BP with suspicion. Whatever it can do to minimize the damage to the Gulf of Mexico ecology, will in turn help to reduce its increasingly tarnished green brand image and goodwill. No CSR program or ad campaign could deal with this, at least not for many, many years. If BP hopes to take action on their own or use crowdsourcing to do it, the company must take more extreme steps to diligently do the right thing so people can see this and start to forgive them. No one stays mad forever.

[1] http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/

[2] http://www.environmentalleader.com/2008/01/15/beyond-petroleum-pays-off-for-bp/

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Poll: Is BP’s use of social media green washing?

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Techcrunch’s post about BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA having set up Deepwater Horizon Response to manage response operations raises some questions about green PR. With a website and a variety of social media sites including a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, and a YouTube account, Techcrunch’s POV is that the organizations have run out ideas of how to deal with the spill (a 100 ton box lowered on the leak didn’t work) that is rapidly filling up the Gulf with pollutants and have turned to crowdsourcing to gather ideas. Having looked at the Facebook comments it seems that it’s more a venting by onlookers and an attempt to appear transparent by BP and the government. With only 4000 Twitter followers, as the Techcrunch writer wrote, it’s hardly enough to really take advantage of the power of crowdsourcing.

The question I have is how much is this damage control green washing for BP and the US government and how much is this an earnest attempt to keep people informed and gather solutions to stop the spill? In the hope to hear people’s opinions, I’m posting a simple poll. As the poll might not be enough to share one’s full opinion, feel free to leave comments too. Also you can choose up to two answers.