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Archives for 2009

Traackr: Spotting the King-Whisperers

Noon here means nearly breakfast time over in the States…

How heroic, then, of Derek Skaletsky to spend an hour taking us through the Traackr system – before breakfast.

And what an interesting hour it was for us. Traackr – in case you haven’t had the opportunity of a demo yet – launched their Authority List product at DemoFall09.

influencer social webWe all know that people are talking about you and your products online, or at least about your market and their issues with your competitors – or even just complaining about the problem that your product or service is intended to resolve.

Listening to what they’re saying is highly recommended. You can find out what they like/don’t like about you or your products, and about those of your competitors. You can maybe even uncover what the real problem is that they’re trying to solve – and how you can improve your product to meet that need. It’s like having a full-time focus group.

But who are your target audience listening to?

We all also know that some people have more powerful voices than others. These come in a variety of guises: some people are broadcasters, with a wide reach; others are conversationalists, who spark discussion; some are expert commentators on a topic, and seen as authorities in their area; others are connectors, who put topics and people together in an interesting way. Some are just plain mavericks, who touch on a topic briefly and move on to the next. And the different outlets people find to share their views have an effect too – some people have a strong video voice and impact but don’t use the written word; others talk a lot on one network about your topic, but very little on another.

And even the smallest voice can have a big impact online – if it whispers into the right ear.

This is the idea at the heart of the Traackr system.

The origins of the Authority List lie in a tool that was available a few years ago to help people assess their own influence on the internet. I’m sure you know the kind of thing; we’ve almost all played with tools like that to see how we’re perceived. (What, no-one’s even done an ego-search on Google? Not sure I believe you there.)

Then someone had a inspired idea: turn the thing around so that it could identify the people with influence, and sell that information to those who need to know.

That’s you. The business that needs to know what is being said out there, so that they can then connect with those people, and maybe influence them in turn.

Gaining the ear of the king

a word in the ear

This isn’t a new idea: if the customer is king, finding the right online influencers is like dealing with the royal favourites and courtiers, who potentially have influence over the king.

There’s been much debate about how objective online influencers can be when presented with goodies and freebies, so consider carefully your approach to the influencers, and bear in mind that courting the courtiers has always been a complex and sometimes dangerous affair in the cross-currents of a royal court.

But Traackr looks like a good implementation of a solution to make finding the right influencers possible – even easy.

You, the client, set up a project, agree how many influencers you want to identify, and work with the Traackr team to identify relevant keywords. (Not always as easy as it sounds).

The Traackr search engine then finds people who discuss these topics online – and then tracks those individuals across all their other outlets.

This, I think, is the really exciting bit: pulling together all the places where that person has an online presence to provide a unified view on that individual.

When complete, the information is available via an online dashboard. You can see a list of influencers, and a breakdown of type (activist, reporter and expert) and location. Each influencer has a profile page, detailing their latest posts, which social outlets they use, the extent of their network and their score (reach, resonance, and relevance). It’s up to you to make the connection, but you can note on the profile how well the contacts have gone, and what your next steps might be – the beginnings of a relationship management system.

Traackr doesn’t assess the sentiment of their discussions about you/your products, but at this point you know who the key relevant influencers are, and since you’ll need to tailor your contact approach to each influencer, you’ll want to check them out individually yourself anyway. And you do need to know the bad as well as the good news…

Questions?

Can you track the effect of your contact/s with the influencers? That’s the point of Traackr’s Performance Report, which tracks the changes in coverage from those people from week to week.

Can you change your keywords? Once the report is generated, you get an interface to the Traackr system which lets you run a live search on keywords before setting up a new campaign, to be sure that you’re picking valuable keywords.

Are the influencers self-selected? Only by dint of their own efforts to become influential – the influencers haven’t volunteered to be included. All the material on their profile is publicly available, just not all pulled together in one place like this. As I said: this is the most exciting element of this tool, and Traackr does have plans to provide access to these pages for the influencers, so that they can make use of it too.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some idea of sentiment? I think it would, and this isn’t provided by the Authority List. I think you’d like it all: who the key influencers are, whether they are generally positive, negative or neutral about your keywords, and how this view changes over time – and even what triggers the change. Your contact with them, some independent event, a contact with a competitor, a discussion with another key influencer…?

Couldn’t you do this yourself? Well, yes of course you could, though it would be time-consuming. And the Traackr team have found that their system has identified powerful influencers in places it wouldn’t necessarily occur to you to look. You just need a bit of imagination to work out how to approach these unexpected influencers in ways they’d appreciate…

Thanks Derek!

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 6: Eye Candy for Stock Charts

The old adage is that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you translate that into stock charts, you can rephrase that to come out, “A well constructed graph is worth a thousand data points. (For people really interested in this stuff, see “The Visual Display of Quantitative Data” by Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, or visit www.edwardtufte.com.) The thought behind all this is that there are a number of things that companies can do to make their stock price charts more informative.

First, some contradictory thoughts: Avoid the overuse of color, and, consider the use of color to help highlight information. By this I mean that good visual design for charts often means first stripping away meaningless color that junks up the chart. Once visual clarity has been achieved, the judicious use of color to draw attention to information that might otherwise not get noticed can be helpful.

EADS

I’ve set out the share price chart from the EADS site. It’s quite nicely done in that it has a clean, white background with a faint grid to help the viewer orient themselves as to price and date. Below that, the volume chart uses color to illustrate the volumes on days when the share price rose (green) versus days when the share price fell (red).

Note also that the page allows for a number of viewer options, including choice of time periods or customized dates, comparisons to indexes, competitors and major customers, scale and moving averages. To top it off, they even provide for downloading of historical quotes, all in one neat and efficient package. To me this is a very well designed page. Everything is where you can see it, eliminating the need to go through menus and click through pages.

Cadbury-chart

Another chart that utilizes an element I like is the Cadbury share price chart. (In this case it is emphatically not their use of color, although I am purposely steering clear of the color issue here as I learned earlier that criticizing Cadbury’s use of the color purple is a hot button with certain U.K. readers.) Cadbury builds into their chart an interactive feature that pops up the date, price and volume as you scroll over the chart. Given that the graph draws a vertical and horizontal axis as you scroll, Cadbury could even eliminate the grid on the stock chart, faint though it is. Now if they would just add in a feature that also popped up major corporate announcements had been made, it would be close to perfect.

In this series:
Previous post: Historical share price information
Next post: Financial information

Is The World Bank Gaining An Ethical Tinge?

South Africa Government Mining FiguresAn interesting story from South Africa has caught my eye. It demonstrates how fraught the introduction of sustainability related legislation could be, and perhaps contains a signpost as to what the future may hold.

In an unprecedented move the International Centre for Investment Disputes (ICSID) at the World Bank has allowed non-disputing parties (NDPs) to give evidence at a tribunal and ordered the parties in dispute to reveal their evidence and conclusions to the NDPs.

This implies that while the ICSID may feel itself competent to rule on purely business grounds it needs additional input to ascertain the “softer” issues in the case: in this case, the human rights of South Africa’s long oppressed black majority.

[Read more…] about Is The World Bank Gaining An Ethical Tinge?

7-Eleven Debuts TV and Pushes Private Label

7-elevenIn a series of strategic and tactical moves, 7-Eleven has announced its plan to boost private label product shelf space and debut in-store television to help suppliers promote in-store specials and brands.

Just last month, 7-Eleven launched 15 new private label products and announced its plans to launch 40 more by the end of 2009.  With 200 private label products in production, 7-Eleven also announced that more private label product roll outs will happen in 2010.

One might wonder how suppliers of branded products feel about 7-Eleven’s private label push.  For some reason, I don’t think the introduction of 7-Eleven TV which should roll out to 6,200 7-Eleven locations by the end of 2010 is going to fully appease them.

7-Eleven TV will play a loop of 4-minute messaging (the average time consumers spend in 7-Eleven), which companies can pay to advertise on. 7-Eleven private label brands will be promoted on 7-Eleven TV in 7-15 second commercials every 4 minutes (20 spots will run per hour).  Content will also be provided by news and weather organizations, RSS feeds and other partners and will be timed to air at the most relevant times of day.

No word on how much it costs to advertise on 7-Eleven TV.

Of course, it makes sense for 7-Eleven to introduce more private label brands.  Companies typically make more money on sales of private label branded products than products from other companies.  Why not fill their store shelves with as many private label products as possible?  And why not fill 7-Eleven TV with ads about its own, higher margin, private label products?

But what will suppliers think?  Do you think they’ll mind the potential loss of sales at 7-Eleven convenience stores?  Already, 7-Eleven reports seeing sales of some of its private label products, such as chips, at higher levels than popular brand names.  If you combine the horrible economy with a private label push, is the 7-Eleven business model poised for a major change?

What do you think?

Read more about the private label trend in these Corporate Eye articles:

Image: Flickr

Successful Investor Relations Communications on Twitter

A well-followed and useful business Twitter strategy can be a powerful new investor relations tool for many companies. However, an unfocused, boring, and ignored Twitter feed will not only fail to provide new channels for shareholder communications, but will also drain resources that could be better utilized elsewhere. While the IR community is rife with admonishments about why you have to be using Twitter, it seems painfully lacking in information about just HOW Investor Relations should be using Twitter.

Get Twitter Followers By Being Follow-Worthy

When Twitter first came out it was widely regarded as a plaything for kids and certain kinds of Internet obsessed geeks. As Twitter’s potential became more widely recognized, more and more uses were found. These days, it is not uncommon for people from all levels of business to be involved with Twitter. However, those early days are not easily forgotten. Most interviews with high-ranking business people regarding Twitter include a semi-defensive cliché about how they “don’t tweet about what they had for dinner.”

As an IR professional of a publicly traded company, there are obviously some issues regarding what kind of information a company should not tweet, and what a business should tweet; we aren’t just talking about not telling people what you had for dinner last night, either.

Investor Relations professionals should already have a feel for the big red flags such as undisclosed material information. Only the most naïve IR person would post their company’s earnings ahead of the official disclosure and accompanying press releases, but there are plenty of other dangers that aren’t so obvious.

However, the biggest mistake you can make in developing your business’ Twitter strategy rollout is to unduly limit your tweets until they become either too sporadic, or too uninformative for anyone to care about. Otherwise, your Twitter campaign is no more useful than standing out in front of the building with a white board. Simply tweeting about your press releases might sound like a good strategy. However, tweeting links to press releases is the corporate version of telling everyone what you had for dinner last night.

Twitter isn’t about getting second hand news via a link to something you already told everyone somewhere else. To build up a useful number of followers on Twitter requires tailoring your strategy to the specific appetites of the Twitter microcosm.

So, just what do the users of Twitter want?

The answer to that question lies in the nature of Twitter itself. Remember that Twitter’s value is that it provides its users with an immediate, ongoing, brief, stream of information delivered directly to the user in real-time without any action being taken other than choosing to follow another Twitter member. Developing a useful and follow-able Twitter feed requires nothing more than incorporating those elements.

Keys To Successful Investor Relations Twitter Feed

Taking into account how Twitter works and what Twitters want generates a handful of rules for a successful corporate tweet strategy.

5 Keys To Good IR Twitter Tweets

1. Tweet Now – Immediate information is the cornerstone of Twitter’s value proposition. Don’t tweet tomorrow about today’s news.

2. Tweet Often – Engaging followers requires feeding the beast. Tweet every business day.

3. Tweet Short – The big power of Twitter requires getting re-tweets. Leave enough room for the “standardized” RT @ information.

4. Tweet Value – Whatever you tweet, make sure it matters to someone besides the people on the org chart.

5. Tweet Community – Twitter isn’t a lecture; it’s a conversation.

At first glance, the keys to the best IR Twitter feeds can seem daunting. How would event the best IR group come up with useful, real-time, information, on a daily basis?

While Tweet Community is the fifth element of good IR Twitter usage, it is also the most important secret to success with Twitter by not only Investor Relations, but corporations, and businesses as well.

The reason a daily tweet seems so daunting is because, most IR professionals are used to one-way communications. That is, investor relations creates a press release or other investor materials and then distributes those to investors and potential investors. Any feedback comes in the form of phone calls, emails, letters, or even articles published in the media. In other words, IR talks, the others reply.

With Twitter, things are very different. The IR Department using Twitter will, of course, make tweets of their own accord, but the real value in maintaining an active presence on Twitter is interacting with other Twitter users. Read beyond the headlines of all those articles out there proclaiming that your company must be on Twitter and you’ll find that the examples they cite about Twitter’s power aren’t about sending out coupons or linking to your press releases. The examples all relate to engaging the user community on Twitter by answering questions, reading reactions, providing useful information, and so on.

It all adds up to the best investor relations strategy for Twitter not being creating great tweets, but rather, responding to other user’s tweets. Answer not only the questions you get directly, but also those that are posted by users as a broadcast or “open-letter” type of tweet. Respond to innuendo and suggestive tweets publicly before they can turn into “facts” by repetition alone. Don’t forget to ask questions too! Ask what people want to see more of, what they want to see less of, what they think has value, and what they think is nothing but a waste of energy.

While it may start out small, a useful corporate Twitter account will grow quickly adding lots of followers, sometimes in spurts, and sometimes in a trickle. Either way, a few months down the road, the question won’t be how can we possibly come up with one useful tweet per day, it will be how can we possibly tweet only once per day?

Potential Legal Trouble – Twitter and Investor Relations

A Ten-minute Tour: Ideas and Info on Timely Topics


Stopwatch

Here’s the itinerary:

1.Start at Inflexion Point and read The Future of HR—Why “Do Nothing” Is an Option to see why Mark Stelzner thinks the “transformation” of HR is highly desirable, but probably unlikely.  (My paraphrase, in a nutshell:  Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

2. Click on Comments and scan the interesting discussion that follows.  Susan Burns wonders “whether or not HR is evolving in sync with the broader transformation taking place in business? With the societal and cultural shifts taking place locally, regionally, nationally and globally?”

3. Skim through Deloitte’s HR Transformation Survey, mentioned in the Inflexion Point post. One highlight:  Of the C-level executives surveyed, more than 90% think Compensations/Benefits is the HR task most likely to be outsourced, less than 40% point to Recruiting/Staffing.  Another highlight . . . more than 80% see cost savings as the key driver for HR transformation, while a mere 30% want to free up HR for a more strategic role.

4. Side trip:  Rosabeth Moss Kanter offers a list of Top Ten Ways to Find Joy at Work–and the advice is not actually what you might expect.  Favorite quote:  “exerting leadership is the surest route to joy (other than going fishing). The key is setting the agenda and starting the pieces moving towards a purpose-driven goal. If 90% of success in life is just showing up, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor advises that when you show up, you might as well run the meeting.”

5. Wind up at Learning Putty for 7 Creative Ways to Introduce Social Media to Your Team.  I like them all, but “Give the Gift of Social Media” is my favorite.

    Okay—that’s two minutes for each stop.  Read fast!


    (Thanks to wwarby for the timely timepiece.)