As is customary at top-end press-conferences, there was a schwag-bag for all attendees containing various branded giveaways. Mouse mats, mugs and stuff — it saves having to buy Xmas presents for a lot of journos. *cough*

(As an aside — Yay! that more bloggers and vocal fans are getting their hands on this stuff.)

But the cleverest bit (for me) was that this also included an online keycode for WoW that would allow players of that game to gain a new companion for their online avatars — the characters they play in the game. Remember, they invited guild leaders and fanatical WoW bloggers along**.

The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.

Get it? The WoW pet is a viral promo-item for Diablo III! It’s limited edition, so it’s sought-after; it’s a sign of prestige in the community; and it’s constantly in the face of relevant audiences.

Pure genius. Or evil.

________________________________

*World of Warcraft — or WoW to its friends — an online roleplaying game which charges a monthly subscription — to around 10mn people.

**WoW players organise themselves into ‘guilds’ to assemble teams for online combat and for social reasons — their leaders are the most visible, longstanding and respected players.

Via. Kotaku

I was totally taken by surprise by this one.

(A little further research has revealed that it was created by WCRS, and that there is some controversy over the originality of the idea. What a shame.)

Created by digital agency Poke, who’ve documented the site here. Apparently, there’s a Christmas version on the way soon.

Personally, I thought the article offered some really useful information for anyone submitting a video to get it noticed among the other 19,999 videos submitted to YouTube on any given day. The initial tips for creating videos that appeal should be written on the bedroom walls of some of the aspiring ‘film-makers’ that appear on the site:

• Make it short: 15–30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

Anyway, those who were shocked might want to Google ‘viral marketing agency‘  or ‘buzz marketing‘ and peruse some of the 1,980,000 results. What was it that you thought these people did?

Professor Robert East of Kingston Business School has been researching the impact of word of mouth. He’s of the opinion that there’s a lot of hypothesis and speculation around the subject and has recently finished conducting some proper empirical research about it.

First of all — how do people make decisions about new products and services? Surveying people to create over 10,000 data points about their purchasing decisions on matters ranging from restaurants to ISPs to cars and supermarkets, he found that on average:

31% make their choices through recommendations from other people.

22% say they conduct a personal search, which might include newspapers, magazines, online and sampling. [East suspects this number may be higher than the reality. We like to think we make our own decisions, don’t we?]

14% agree that they are most influenced by advertising. [Similarly, this may be an under-estimation, for the same reason]

The remaining 32% fall into the ‘other’ category. This might mean, for example, that there’s no choice. If there’s only one supermarket in your town, or someone takes you to a new restaurant, then your choice is pretty proscribed.

These percentages vary, of course, depending on the type of product or service being chosen. Your choice of car and beauty products is more likely to come through advertising. On the other hand, choosing restaurants is very likely to come through recommendations.

Positive word of mouth is much more common than negative word of mouth. Perhaps up to a 3:1 ratio. The reasons for this are unknown, but perhaps people just prefer to recommend things than slag things off.

In addition, contrary to what most people, and perhaps most marketers, believe, positive word of mouth has a stronger effect than negative word of mouth. On average, PWoM has a 22% effect, while NWoM has a 16% effect. In other words, if you start from a position of 0% — that is to say, you have no intention of switching from your established restaurant, for example, then it will take just under five recommendations or six-and-a-bit criticisms to make you change. The warmth of the criticism or recommendation will obviously change that percentage, but we’re talking averages here.

Most people actually start from an average position a little over 50%. We’re not especially averse to making a switch or trying new things. Therefore, two recommendations or three criticisms are enough to make Mr/Ms Average jump.

What does this mean for marketers involved in using social media to help their brands? It is a lot more effective to encourage supporters than it is to try to convert or discourage critics. You only need to create two evangelists to win new customers, whereas you’ll have to convert or discourage three critics. In addition, your brand evangelist is likely to recommend three times more often than your brand assassin is likely to criticise. Add those two together and the evangelist has four times the power of a critic. Take marketers and PR people engaging with blogs, for example. Going along to a critic’s site and countering all their objections is arguably a lot less effective than going to a neutral observer’s site and thanking them for their work and feeding them with new information and other rewards. In an ideal world, of course, they’d be able to do both, but most companies have limited resources in one way or another and this research gives a valuable steer to what might be the best use of their time.

This is quite counter-intuitive. Companies are terrified of “bad PR” but maybe, while it’s not true that there’s ‘no such thing’, it’s not actually what they should be focused on.

One last point. According to Professor East’s research, solicited word of mouth — e.g. I ask you which phone to buy — has around 1.5X the effect of unsolicited word of mouth e.g. you tell me I *must* see this film. That is good news for marketers interested in viral campaigns. Even if I’m not asking for your opinion, your words have only 33% less power than if I was.

20% of online advertisers surveyed by Jupiter Research say they plan to test viral marketing in vehicles such as blogs this year, but Jupiter also found that most consumers don’t trust product information they get on social media sites. The winning advertising campaigns will plan for this by supporting viral campaigns with more conventional forms of online advertising…

…The Jupiter report points out that because the social media space is just emerging, viral marketing within social media is faced by a degree of mistrust from consumers. The survey determined that 69% of consumers don’t trust the product information they get on social media sites. Consumers were twice as likely to trust product information on a company web site or professional review site.

It seems odd to me that the report suggests that greater familiarity with viral campaigns on social media sites are likely to increase their success. I would have thought the opposite would be the case: if I know someone is trying to market to me, surely I’m likely to be more resistant to that effort?

This is what the public thought, comparing the takings from it’s opening weekend in the US to those of other summer blockbusters:

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 — $135.6M
Cars — $60.1M
Superman Returns — $52.5M
Talladega Nights — $47M
Step Up — $20.7M
World Trade Center — $18.7M
Snakes on a Plane — $15.8M

OK. and err… here’s what the blogosphere was saying about the film prior to last weekend: “the event of the millenium”, “viral marketing management genius”, “It kind of points to the power of the Internet and in some way the evolution of the Internet”, “the folks promoting the upcoming movie Snakes of a Plane have managed to turn a somewhat silly sounding B-List movie into what will undoubtedly be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters”.

Well, they haven’t and it looks a lot like it isn’t.

So what does that mean? Is the blogosphere completely irrelevant to what happens in the real world? Has the viral marketing lobby been carried away by its own hype? Last Sunday, Advertising Age wrote a salutory reality check, reminding the blogosphere that there’s actually not that many of us and that few people are listening:

According to Jupiter Research, 7% of American adults write blogs and 22% read them; about 8% listen to podcasts and 5% use RSS feeds. According to a separate study by WorkPlace Print Media, 88% of the at-work audience doesn’t even know what RSS is. And recent data from word-of-mouth research group Keller Fay indicate 92% of brand conversations were taking place offline.

The scepticism about blogs that these figures suggest may well seem proven by opening weekend of Snakes on a Plane, which appears to have completed defeated the internet’s expectations. (USA Today emphasises this point, as you might expect).

In some repects it is proven, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Snakes.

First of all, as Tara Hunt suggests, the film is quite a different sort of movie to the others on the list. Not only is it certain to have a pretty niche appeal, “this is a movie about the audience”. Think about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Disastrous opening run in 1975, followed by thirty years of packed cinemas every week. Like Snakes, it had the same ‘so bad, it’s good’ appeal, which is hardly a mass-market hook. The same element of cult interest is there, albeit transferred to the geek space. There’s the same audience participation elements, with moviegoers shouting out, joining in the dialogue and taking along rubber snakes to make the experience less about watching the film and more about taking part. And that is how the film has been for months, with New Line re-shooting sections to match internet fans’ perceptions that this is a film about Jules from Pulp Fiction in an aeroplane disaster movie. The film’s future prospects are perhaps a lot stronger than its current figures show.

The same thing goes for the statistics quoted above about the blogosphere. Writing, reading and commenting on blogs isn’t all that important right now to the majority of the population. That is changing every week. As the Ad Age article goes on to suggest, their power of influence is already very high, considering they’re so far from being mainstream. In six months, the number of blogs appears likely to have doubled, and the same six months after that. The space between niche and mainstream depends on how fast you’re moving.

Fact: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (bloggers) Fact: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (viral marketing) Fact: people once again hunt and gather in a group (del.icio.us) Fact: people once again group things using words like small, big, happy, sad, funny, food rather than detailed hierarchical structures (tags) Fact: impulsive production (minimal upfront planning vs. a lot of upfront planning) is back in style (Google “betas”) Fact: once again, sharing between people does not conform to a strict concept of economic reciprocity but rather to the concept that what is good for all is good for one (YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.) These are all traits of a hunter-gatherer society, i.e. a pre-agricultural society. Tens of thousands of years of behavioral evolution wiped out in just a few years.