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Yes, representing number two and especially number three in a given category is tough. You are too big for startup status and too small for the top dog position. You have fewer resources at your disposal and a smaller share of the media’s attention.

Over the years, I have worked for challenger brands. With MCI and EarthLink, I did not represent the market leader and rarely called the shots with national reporters. Challenger PR poses an interesting set of, well, challenges. But with challenges come opportunities. I keep thinking of the book, The Art of War. Sometimes in battle, the weaker opponent can use its position to gain a strategic advantage.

Rather than a sign of weakness, I view my experience as a badge of honor. The idea of positioning oneself as a challenger PR expert came to me by way of a former EarthLink colleague, Jerry Grasso. And like any good PR pro, I will gladly attribute, but freely appropriate.

Challenger PR Rules of Engagement

Whether it’s beverages or e-commerce, challenger PR follows a common set of rules.

You rarely get stand-alone coverage about your company or client’s company in the national press. You are generally a foil to the larger player, an alternative to the market leader. Your role is to validate the leader’s position or reveal its weaknesses. Conversely, you also don’t get the benefit enjoyed by a start-up whose size makes an interesting angle or whose product or service creates a whole new category.

But fortunately, the race is not always to the swiftest or the battle to the strongest. The key is to play off their strength to make your company stand out. As part of a communication strategy, challenger PR involves:

• creating a rapid response team that combs the morning headlines about the competition and offers reporters a fresh perspective to extend the story.

• pitching features that deliberately include your top competitor to help reporters convince their editors of an article’s merit.

• managing expectations of clients and bosses so they understand that success is generally about inclusion not necessarily an exclusive.

• using social media to engage customers.

I know big companies use social media, but it poses an interesting challenge for them. Remember market leaders have more resources, but generally take fewer risks; the stakes are too high. Market leaders are bigger and therefore less nimble. They are more centralized and therefore less open. And because they are the leader, they have less incentive to change. The status quo is fine with them.

Here’s what was said in a Shel Israel and Robert Scoble podcast last year:

17:15 "Microsoft & Sun use blogs to their advantage. Google & Apple not so much. What gives? MSFT satisfaction levels up; new product ideas; Might take years to see impact of blogs; Companies that are winning maybe don’t need to change."

And social media is about change.

Social media is not about convincing gatekeepers, it's about creative story telling. By leveling the playing field, social media gives you the freedom to tell your story in the way you want and when you want. Social media allows you to circumvent traditional channels to share your story directly with customers. It gives you a forum to experiment with a new medium whose rules are a work in progress.

In analyzing challenger brand culture, Adam Morgan cites Hans Snook in his book, The Pirate Inside. He writes: “The role of the challenger is not to unseat the Market Leader, [sic] it is to reframe the category. Meaning we need to get the consumer to see the category on our new, redefined terms, rather than the way they have always seen it.”

Social media can help companies to redefine their category. As John Moore said, "Blogging can make big companies small and small companies big." A word of caution, however: all the reframing is for naught if you lack a compelling story and a useful product.

Brady Bunch Wisdom

I am reminded of the wisdom of The Brady Bunch television series and Jan Brady’s lament: “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.” Stuck in the middle between Cindy’s curls and Marcia’s good looks and numerous accomplishments, a number two or three is neither a start-up nor the market leader. But as Jan Brady learned in another episode, wearing a black wig to stand out just makes you look silly.

Gimmicks and tricks are not the answer; an effective challenger PR strategy involves taking risks and engaging customers in open conversations that capture a company's passion.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Challenger Brand; Underdog; Market Leader; Adam Morgan; The Pirate Inside; Challenger Brand PR;

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The trends raised in the new book by Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark J. Penn are bigger than the title suggests. Like the warning on the passenger side mirror (objects are closer than they appear), Microtrends examines “under the radar forces…which are powerfully shaping our society.”

Famous for identifying the importance of the "soccer mom" demographic, Mr. Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends, which collectively embody a larger marketing strategy. Like microelectronics and microfibers, so goes marketing. He predicts that microtargeting will come to dominate advertising and marketing. In time, we will witness a huge expansion of personal communications where the right products are advertised to the right niches of people.

How big these small forces actually are is a matter debate, but when I got an email from Burson Marsteller asking me to review the book, I accepted the opportunity to comment.

Mr. Penn cites many compelling microtends, but just as it is dangerous to go too macro, it is also risky to go too small. The small picture can distort, drowning us in a sea of details, with each trend as important (or unimportant) as the next. Many of his examples are counterinituitive like Long Attention Spanners in the age of ADD and Shy Millionaires in era of bling and conspicuous consumption.

One microtrend I found particularly relevant looked at DIY Doctors – Do It Yourself Doctors. These are people who research their own symptoms, diagnose their own illnesses, and administer their own cures. It’s big business. In 2002, a growing number of American adults say they have used non-doctor provided alternative medicines, and the number of Direct to Consumer ads by the drug industry has risen from $1 billion in 1997 to $4 billion in 2004. People are making their own choices when it comes to medical care.

The Internet’s easy access to medical information is putting expertise in the hands of the DIY Doctors. What goes for medical information also goes to book reviewers and bloggers. Take a look at the number of non-professional book reviews on Amazon that are helping drive sales. And consider the power of citizen journalists to topple newscasters like Dan Rather and senatorial candidates like George Allen.

Technology is the great leveler turning amateurs into experts. As a communications professional, I grapple with how blogs, social networks and other forms of social media are challenging our assumptions about expertise, opinions and authority. In the age of social media, an individual or small group of individuals need only a computer and Internet connection to bypass traditional communications channels and power elites.

Reading Mr. Penn’s book, I kept thinking about two theories that have gained popular currency: the butterfly effect and the long tail.

The butterfly effect states that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can lead to a typhoon in another. Or more broadly, small variations of the initial condition may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the overall system.

Coined by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, the long tail theory states that the total sales volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items if the distribution channel is large enough.

Together these laws reinforce Microtrends larger premise that “small trends” and “slight changes” will “trigger profound changes in the shape of our globe and the character of our society.” Going forward, the challenge won’t be the loss of identity associated with mass communications; it will be trying to find consumers though a ever-widening number of niche markets

As a pollster, Mr. Penn puts a lot of faith in the power of statistics. Most of us don’t have his level of experience and expertise. Thought provoking, engaging and useful, the book’s insights beg the next question: how do you spot a microtrend ahead of the competition?

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Microtrends; Mark Penn; Burston Marsteller; Long Tail; Chaos Theory; Soccer Moms;

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Ahh, what confusing times we work in.  The Daily Show makes fake news more popular than real news, and marketers pass off professionally produced advertising as amateur content.  Where visibility was once the name of the game, companies are choosing to obscure, not highlight, their involvement.  At the same time, we celebrate candor, openness and authenticity.

Welcome to the world where PR and marketing professionals must navigate between real and fake, news and entertainment, deception and transparency.

When it comes to leveraging user generated content and social media, should we reveal ourselves or hide in plain site?  The new rules of transparency afford us both options.  Sometimes good publicity entails anonymity – lest we reveal the man behind the curtain.   And sometimes it is the man behind the curtain, the inside story, that we want to highlight.

It’s no wonder that Newsweek Senior Editor Steven Levy recently asked YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen at the D Conference this past spring how they felt about YouTube viewers being duped by advertising masquerading as amateur content and what they can do about it? 

For marketing professionals and, increasingly, PR practitioners, it is not enough to be informative, we have to be entertaining.  We can’t be straightforward, we have to be edgy.  We can tease and redirect, but we can never deceive. 

Clearly, hoaxes and fake news are not a new phenomenon.  Well placed disinformation has started wars and ended careers.  But as Robert Love asks in his excellent article, “Before John Stewart: The truth about fake news.  Believe it,” in the Columbia Journalism review,  “Can we continue to trust ourselves? Are we prepared for the global, 24-7 fake news cage match that will dominate journalism in the twenty-first century?...The boundaries have vanished, the gloves are off.”

Consider the following: 

• We accept television ads for pain relievers knowing full well the testimonials made by actors are fake because we know the ground rules; we’re used to the form.

• We tune in the Daily Show and while the subjects are real, the treatment is not.  They know it; we know it.  We laugh; it’s funny; it’s entertainment.

• Or the other hand, it’s decidedly unfunny when Wal-Mart Stores set up a pro Wal-Mart blog and didn’t fully reveal that the bloggers were tied to Wal-Mart.

• Or possibly it’s illegal as in the case of John Mackey, chairman and chief executive of Whole Foods who used a fake name to post pro Whole Food comments on an Internet message board.
   

So when is “fake” acceptable?  Talking to marketers and social media experts, I believe it comes down to intent and context.  Make believe is appropriate when it’s intended to entertain; it is completely inappropriate when it’s deception designed to mislead or advance an unstated agenda.

A wink and a nod to the audience may be the difference between a wildly successful viral campaign and outright hostility.  It’s the difference between the saga of lonelygirl15 who was in fact just an actress and the fake blog of a cosmetically-challenged woman Claire who was just a creation of Vichy, a division of French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.  The former was entertainment; the latter was an attempt at a fast one.

Consumers need to be in on the joke, not made to feel that the joke is on them.  At some point, there must be a sign or signal that what they are seeing, reading or listening to is entertainment or make believe.

And that’s exactly what The Lenovo Group did. Most people don’t they are the world's third-largest personal computer maker.  What did they do?  They went viral with a spoof Web site.  As Steve Hamm reported in BusinessWeek that the site attracted 3 million visitors in first few weeks.  The campaign pretended to let viewers in on some super advanced technologies being tested by the company. The site's anonymous producer had supposedly received some videotapes revealing the secret research. The joke is apparent once viewers click through to the tapes.

So how did the YouTube founders answer Steven Levy’s question?  Chen responded that it came down to a question of trust and individual decision.  He felt that it was up to informed users to decide. 

I think that is true, but it is only half the equation.  We as marketing and PR professionals must act responsibly and respectfully.  The mixed signals in the marketplace don’t give us the right to deceive even as we take advantage of new technology, new forms of content and changing consumer expectations to entertain, inform and ultimately promote our companies and our clients.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Daily Show; Jon Stewart; Steve Levy; Lenovo; Robert Love; Chad Hurley; Steve Chen; D Conference; Marketing; PR; Fake News;

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Here is my take on a story by Alice LaPlante in last week's Information Week

Social media and new technology have changed the balance of power over who can influence and how they do it.  With blogs, message boards and chat rooms, you need not be a star journalist or celebrity to shape opinions.  Citizen journalists can topple news anchors and Senate majority leaders. Everyday individuals can influence purchasing decisions of entire online communities. 

As the former head of Word of Mouth Association (WOMA) Andy Sernovitz wrote to me:

“Forget about celebrities.  No one cares.  In the age of word of mouth marketing real people are the true celebrities.  The opinions of people like us are the only thing that matters any more.  I don't care which movie star or athlete uses a product -- if the reviews on Amazon are bad, I'm not buying it.”

Books like the Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point have popularized the notion that there are special individual experts out there – connectors, mavens, etc, if you will – who are driving buzz and influencing consumer buying habits.  Tap them and their network and the crowds will tip your way.

Armed with this insight, marketers have sought out and enlisted these thought leaders to drive online word of mouth efforts. 

But new research and marketing results may dispel this latest conventional wisdom.  Information Week’s Alice LaPlante looked at how new opinion leaders drove buzz on the web and suggests in a piece last week that this new way of thinking “may be overly simplistic.”    

She writes:  “Indeed a growing school of thought is that influentials aren’t so much leading trends as acting as mouthpieces for underlying social movements that are either in progress or lying fallow waiting to be triggered.  Thus successful marketing doesn’t depend so much on finding influential people and seeding them with ideas so much as doing the kind of research that exposes embryo trends and then helping influentials discover them.”

So where should online marketing dollars be spent – seeking out key influencers to drive opinion?  Or should marketers first identify trends and then look for individuals that embody that trend – whether they are opinion leaders or just ordinary folks who want to talk about their product experience?   

Finding an answer may be like trying to determine the order of the chicken or the egg.  It is true that you can’t manufacture a wave of support within a community by just identifying opinion leaders.  It is also true that a wave won’t swell without the backing of influencers.   

Organic Advocacy

I asked Rob Fuggetta, founder/CEO of Zuberance, a Silicon Valley-based start-up what he thought.  His firm helps companies identify, mobilize, and grow communities of authentic advocates.

Fuggetta wrote that ‘there is no doubt that certain people have more influence over purchase decisions and perceptions than others. These people may not be trend-setters or early adopters, but they are indeed more influential because their opinions and recommendations are more trusted than others. 

“Therefore, the goal for all of marketing -- indeed for the business itself -- is to create a vibrant community of advocates from and among these influentials. We call this ‘organic advocacy.’ Companies can then amplify this organic advocacy by linking communities of advocates with other communities and individuals in authentic, relevant ways both online and offline."
 

Authenticity is Key

Marcus Colombano, over at Avantgarde has actually had success enlisting celebrities to use the products he has marketed. 

His take: Throwing tons of money at all the influentials in the world won’t work if the product itself doesn’t meet a genuine unmet need.  The brand experience has to be a reflection of the personal creativity of the user in order for a product to translate from a small circle to mass consumption.

In the end, it may not be about monitoring trends or recruiting influencers.  LaPlante quotes Steve Rubel who addresses the growing prevalence of “influence fatigue.”  To influence, companies need to directly engage in the communities themselves.  They can’t buy their way in.  They can’t force their way in.  They have to join communities or create legitimite ones, be active members and build influence through trust, candor and the strength of their product.  As Steve points out, “that’s an extremely labor intensive process.”  But in my view, the results are well worth the price of entry.

Let me get back to you. 

Technorati Tags: Alice LePlante; Andy Sernovitz; Malcolm Gladwell; Rob Fuggetta; Zuberance; Marcus Colombano; Steve Rubel;

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When it comes to consuming web 2.0, are you, as Charlene Li described in her recent Forrester Research report Social Technographics -- a creator, critic, collector, joiner, spectator or an inactive? Or are you an omnivore, connector, lackluster veteran, productivity enhancer, mobile centric, connected but hassled, inexperienced experimenter, light but satisfied, an indifferent or an off-the-network as John Horrigan calls Internet users in the Pew Internet and American Life Project report issued last week?





                                    Source: Pew Internet and American Life Study

There seem to be a lot categories to choose from.   But as Greg Sterling and Curtiss Thompson point out, the implications are important for companies and marketers.  Millions if not billions of dollars are being spent trying to determine the best way to reach you and the less web-enabled.  With market segments increasingly more fragmented and consumers more indifferent to traditional marketing, how do you target the largest base or a narrow niche?  And with what tools? 

Companies are calibrating product and marketing strategies to identify those who have or who are inching toward a web 2.0 lifestyle.  They also realize they can't ignore the other half of all Americans who, that Pew Study reported, are only occasional users of modern Internet gadgetry.  Making my living in the blogosphere, I tend to forget how few users have fully embraced web 2.0 -- a point that John Paczkowski, Rex Hammock, Dan Farber and Larry Dignan all emphasized on their blogs last week.  On the other hand, Mathew Ingram, George Nimeh took a more hopeful stance.  Nimeh, for example, saw the 31 percent of American adults who are “elite tech users” as “incredibly encouraging.” 

With the growing number of studies and searches slicing and dicing the American consumers’ Internet usage patterns, I asked Charlene what distinction she draws from her study and that of the Pew report.  

Praising the Pew study for its comprehensive segmentation, Charlene wrote me:  

"Our Social Technographics was designed to be a strategy planning tool, and deals specifically with people’s actions, and primarily online. It’s not a strict segmentation in the way that Pew has done it, but rather, a categorization that helps understand how people move up and down the ladder depending on their participation levels. My belief is that people can be motivated to be Creators or Critics in different areas of their lives. My personal example is I’m a Creator when it comes to social media, but a Spectator when it comes to the environment and politics. But I can easily see myself moving “up the ladder” in these two areas. Social Technographics thus becomes a strategy planning tool for deciding how to approach social strategy, based on the specific Social  Technographics profiles of your target audience."

It seems then that categories are a useful framing device and that one size may not fit all.  As for me, I am clearly an amalgam but according to the Pew Internet Topology Test, I am a connector. Larry Dignan reports that he "is a cross between an omnivore and a lackluster veteran," while Rex Hammock jokingly discovered much to his surprise that he is "a male in his mid to late twenties."

Using Pew’s segmentation terminology,  I don’t have the many gadgets of an omnivore, but I “voraciously” participate in cyberspace, express myself online and do a range of web 2.0 activities.  At the same time, I'm like a mobile centric “feeling less technologically competent and definitely needing help getting new technology to work.” And like an off the network user, I am probably more likely to flip on an episode of South Park, without Tivo, on Comedy Central on a non-plasma television than download the latest YouTube video.  I recognize the value of user generated content as entertainment and know where to find it, but I don’t live it.  Social media is much more professional; it’s business and source of much intellectual curiosity.

Ultimately, given the myriad Internet usage patterns, companies are not well served by merely jumping head first and deploying a laundry list of Internet tools to reach the growing number of web 2.0 users.  As Forrester advises, “a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Social Technographics; Forrester Research; Charlene Li; Social Media; Pew; Pew Internet and American Life Survey; John Horrigan; Market Segmentation;

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And I thought I left high school 25 years ago.

Did any of you read Janet Kornblum's piece in last week's USA Today about "friending" -- MySpace users who obsess about building a robust list of MySpace friends?  Apparently, competition for friends among the younger set can be fierce. Too few friends, and you are like way uncool. 

I am glad that when it comes to links and Technorati rankings we adults don't worry about things like that.

Apparently, though, friending has become big business.  And I don't just mean the upwards of a $1 billion price tag that Facebook might fetch according to a Wall Street Journal front page story.

Rachael King recently reported the following in Business Week:   "As companies try to build or keep relevancy among young people, they're increasingly tailoring marketing campaigns specifically to social networks. These go far beyond placing banner ads on a site, and involve interaction with users over time in what companies hope will be a memorable way...Burger King, for instance, created a MySpace page for the King, the weird character that appears in their commercials."

King (the reporter) goes on to report, that Burger King's King has collected more than 120,000 "friends," or fellow MySpace users.  Of course the King she writes "buys his friends with free episodes of Fox shows such as 24 and American Dad."  Fries with that?

I am having a hard time digesting this "friends" concept.  I remain skeptical about whether those 120,000 friends of the King (Burger King) are actually meaningful.  

There are some who think it is no longer a matter of numbers anyway.  There is an emerging school of thought that says - when it comes to social media -- the level of customer engagement is the more meaningful metric.

I am currently reading Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture. Jenkins writes:

"In the past media producers spoke of 'impressions.'  Now they are exploring the concept of 'expressions,' trying to understand how and why audiences react to content."

It is the quality of the engagement that is most important.  A vocal and committed few help drive the brand more than a non-committed majority. 

More broadly, however, I am not sure whether a transactional relationship really constitutes a friendship anyway.  Brand loyalty clearly exists, but the foundation will always be shaky when dollars must first exchange hands.  Just like a manager can never truly be a friend of his or her employees, I am not sure a company can be friends with its customers or a PR professional with reporters that cover them (and I like the folks who work for me and the reporters who cover us).  Committed yes, honest for sure, but friends?  

I think we need to formulate a new term somewhere between friend and customer to reflect the new types of relationships spawned by the dynamics of social media.  

Personally, when it comes to my friends, I have learned to pick them carefully.  I am going to avoid succumbing to popularity contests. 

See ya in homeroom.

Technorati Tags: PR; Social Media; MySpace; Friending; Burger King; Henry Jenkins; Facebook;