Porter Novelli and horizontal influence

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This paper on “Horizontal Influence” is critically important. As I spend time with our clients, I hear over-and-over what clients are demanding of us. They simply want innovative and continuously relevant solutions to their marketing and communications issues based upon a deep level of insight into their consumers’ behaviour. Not always so simple, though. They want the big idea – thinking that’s outside the box. If we could just get rid of that box. They say they want something so uniquely different from us. Our role: to arrive at the core idea that’s grounded in insight – an understanding so compelling that the idea and the brand are inseparable. We discover the DNA of the brand. We express the idea through avenues that are relevant and that create a desire to use and re-use the brand. That is a desire to invest in the corporation. Public Relations has the innate ability to prepare a brand for the market while preparing the market for the brand. It can recommend relevant avenues for idea expression to its clients that create the most appropriate marketing mix because it is not overly invested in any one avenue but intellectually vested in them all. PR tends to be innovative by nature, by harnessing word-of-mouth, horizontal-influence strategies early to support clients and their brands. Because of this, and because integration is core to its business, Porter Novelli is at a perfect point-of-power in the new model which our clients demand.

Tom HarrisonChairman & CEO Diversified Agency Services

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Word-of-mouth has always been the most influential communications channel. Until recently, however, broadcast messages were louder, and reached more people. Now things are beginning to change.

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God tells Adam, “Don’t eat the apple.”1 A few days later, Eve says, “Eat the apple.”2 Adam chooses to listen to his wife, and ignores the voice from on high telling him what to do.

Since the beginning of time, people have been more inclined to act on the recommendation of someone they know, and who they believe has no vested interest, than on messages from unknown organisations and individuals who clearly have something to sell.

However, the impact and credibility of these word-of-mouth communications is undermined by the small size of first-hand social networks. Most people only communicate personally with a few family members, friends, and colleagues. Only first-hand experience seems to count: the impact of second and third-hand recommendations citing a friend’s (or a friend-of-a-friend’s) experience tapers off rapidly. Low reach has always mitigated the effectiveness of word-of-mouth recommendations. A happy customer might recommend you to one other person, while an unhappy customer might complain to ten others.3 No matter how powerful the individual result, these are not very big numbers.

This is why mass media communications dominated the twentieth century. Large-scale influence remained in the hands of the relatively few organisations that could afford sophisticated broadcast advertising campaigns and media-relations programmes. Broadcast communication compensated in volume for what it lacked in proximity.

But now things are changing fast. On the one hand, the volume is being turned down on mass media channels. Increased media fragmentation among traditional channels, the appearance of new channels, the erosion of trust in institutions like governments and large businesses, and changing audience behaviour mean that broadcast is no longer the influential force it once was.

On the other hand, the volume is being turned up on word-of-mouth channels. Instead of reaching only their small first-hand networks, now satisfied and dissatisfied customers alike can publish their opinions for the whole world to see. When they do this in sufficient numbers they can influence the opinions and attitudes of large sections of the public, and become the basis of mainstream media stories. Audiences are still acting upon “word-of-mouth” endorsements from their peers, but peers whom they may never have met. Technology has freed word-of-mouth from its one-to-one limitations, and amplified it to a level where it can compete with formal advertising.

This is the world of Horizontal Influence.

The setting

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The setting

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Challenge oneIn a world of Horizontal Influence, customers publish their opinions about products. When products and services displease enough of them, these complaints become causes célèbres that may be heard around the world, rapidly working their way into mainstream media, and companies’ bottom lines. Well-publicised examples of these complaints have cost Dell4 and Apple5 dearly.

And unlike professional journalists, the Horizontal Influencers aren’t bound by codes of ethics, or standards of journalistic objectivity: they can make biased, rash or unfounded criticisms with impunity. The worst aspect of Horizontal Influence is that it is governed by the same rules as gossip and rumour. Personal opinion, prejudice and conjecture can masquerade as fact, and one-off, highly-specific events can be blown-up out of all proportion in a way that is grossly damaging to hard-won reputations.

On the other hand, if many customers approve of something, the amplified word-of-mouth generated by Horizontal Influence can rapidly tip it into mainstream consciousness, and into the mainstream media.

Many brands and organisations owe their success – even their existence – to the power and influence of mass media advertising campaigns. But things are beginning to change.Forward-thinking organisations are well aware of these changes, and are already making significant investment in new communications technologies, staff, and processes. But a changing environment constantly throws up new challenges, and techniques and practices must evolve to meet these. Let’s look closely at the challenges we face...

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Challenge twoAs the effect of Horizontal Influence becomes more apparent, attempts to harness it can be accepted or rejected by customers, as Wal-Mart9, and Chevrolet10 learned in 2006.

The power of Horizontal Influence derives from its perceived authenticity. Suspicious audiences respond poorly and vocally to what they see as dishonest attempts to leverage this. So, too, do the mainstream media. When a “concerned citizen” posted a video parody of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on YouTube11, the Wall Street Journal rapidly exposed the DCI Group, lobbyists and public relations firm for, amongst others, Exxon.

Horizontal Influence cannot be faked. But positive word of mouth can be encouraged. Record labels, sports clubs, television studios and games developers have a long history of working closely with unofficial fan clubs – to their mutual benefit. The new technologies are making it easier than ever to identify and support fan activity.

Challenge threeNot every brand communication originates from the company that owns the brand. In one example, creative team Dan Brooks and Lee Ford created a short viral film about the Volkswagen Polo12 called “Suicide Bomber”, for their show reel. The film leaked and spread rapidly on the web, causing considerable problems for Volkswagen, who were forced to threaten legal action13 in an attempt to stem rumours that they had commissioned the viral. The controversial film spread so widely across the web that a Google search on the slogan “Small but tough” returned nothing but references to the viral film, eventually forcing Volkswagen to change the Polo strap line.14

But passionate users have – unprompted – created their own successful advertisements for loved products15. Others parody, celebrate or remix well-known advertisements, most notably MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign which caught the imagination of a generation of spoofers. Most famous among these is Scott Quigly’s 2001 film, “Indecent Proposal”16. On the whole, MasterCard recognises that it has benefited from this activity, eventually setting up Priceless.com and encouraging its audience to “Write a Priceless Ad.”

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Case Study: Arctic Monkeys vs. Sandi Thom

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The success of the Arctic Monkeys no.1 single, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, is widely credited to positive word-of-mouth generated by online file-sharing and promotion on the band’s MySpace page.6 The popularity of Sandi Thom’s no.1 single, I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker is widely credited to positive word-of-mouth generated by a series of “basement gigs” broadcast free online.7 Both phenomena represented a marketing shift towards a direct interaction with fans. However, whilst the Arctic Monkeys retained a sense of credibility, Thom’s supposedly “DIY publicity campaign” was accused of corporate fakery, resulting a backlash that saw a UK national newspaper columnist described her as “the musical Antichrist”.8

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Case Study: Mentos vs. Diet Coke

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In 2006, a pop science video showing the explosive effects of placing a pack of Mentos mints into a bottle of Diet Coke17 began making the rounds online. It rapidly gained in popularity and within months had inspired hundreds of copycat videos.18 The reactions of the two companies could hardly have been more different. Mentos, estimating that the videos amounted to about $10million worth of free publicity, declared themselves “tickled pink”19 and began organising online competitions for the best video.20 Coke, on the other hand, declared that the videos didn’t “fit” with their “brand personality” and distanced themselves from the phenomenon.21 “It’s easy to see who spends too much on advertising,” wrote Jackie Huba, bemoaning Coke’s wilfully missed opportunity22 – a sentiment echoed by the Motley Fool website: “Coke is an Idiot”.23

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Faced with a world where it seems that their traditional communications strategies may be undermined, and that established relationships between brands and their audiences are becoming confused, clients are seeking quality, independent advice. To whom should they turn?

We believe that it is essential that they seek advice from those who have no vested interest in any one particular answer, or channel.

As a public relations agency with deep roots in both innovation and integration, Porter Novelli is helping its clients understand and respond to these new challenges. We have the experience, perspective, existing tools and processes, and R&D investment to help clients navigate the landscape of Horizontal Influence.

Indeed, for us, some of these challenges are not even so new. While consumers’ expectations of how companies interact and communicate with them may be changing, people remain the same. The public relations business has always concerned itself with monitoring and responding to public opinion, and with generating positive word-of-mouth.

We already engage our clients’ many audiences in their communications strategies through listening (and helping our clients respond) to their concerns, and identifying and supporting customer advocates.

Our Communications Architecture approach helps organisations to co-ordinate their communications across multiple channels and audiences. The new Horizontal Influence channels fit seamlessly into this model.

These are the very skills needed in what, to other marketing disciplines, may feel like a foreign land. To Porter Novelli, Horizontal Influence is just business as usual.

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The truth is that public relations firms like Porter Novelli have been helping clients deal with Horizontal Influence for a good many years. Despite drawing on “Internet stories” to illustrate the challenges faced by today’s organisation, we know that the new information and communications technologies are not themselves the root cause of Horizontal Influence. We know that they are, in fact, accelerating and amplifying deeper cultural changes.

If we are to respond effectively to the challenges presented by Horizontal Influence, it’s essential that we understand not simply these technologies, but the human and social context from which they arise.

We believe that – in addition to the new technologies – there are three key drivers of Horizontal Influence: a gradual but long-standing erosion of trust in authority; an increasingly fragmented media landscape; and the blurring of the boundaries between creators, broadcasters and audiences, between brands and consumers.

What’s causing these changes

Trust in authority is erodingAlongside many violent upheavals, the Twentieth Century witnessed an extraordinary period of social change and liberalisation. In many ways, authority became something to be questioned and resisted.24

This shift in perception was in many ways due to the news media increasing public awareness of the human frailties of authority figures.

As confidence in authority continues to wane and people are more likely to place their trust in the experiences of people like themselves, so Horizontal Influence begins to outweigh the voices from on high. As one journalist notes, “People don’t care to be lectured by professionals...” instead they are looking for “just-plain-folks authenticity.”25

Media fragmentationThe widespread adoption of new technologies has led to a mass of new channels and devices.

The cost of developing content and running a commercial media channel has radically decreased. This has led to an increase in niche media of specialist channels and magazines catering to small, interest-led audiences.

At the same time, media consumption habits are changing. Once passive audiences are increasingly involved, scanning multiple channels or devices simultaneously in a behaviour that has been described as “continuous partial attention”.26 Time spent watching television or reading newspapers is down in Internet households.27

Where media planners could once reach large attentive audiences using only a very few channels, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to plan and optimise campaigns to target mass audiences.

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Basic human needs

Media convergence

Changing role of audience

Media fragmentation

Device convergence

Mistrust in authority

causes

accelerators

Blogs

Communities

Search

Social networks

Forums

Recommendation engines

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Boundaries are blurring between creators, broadcasters and audiences The mainstream media increasingly focus on and represent the lives and experiences of the average audience member. Increasing availability and quality of home video equipment are creating a new mass of content. News channels are increasingly likely to feature video and photography from ordinary people (or “citizen journalists”28). For example, many of the first images and footage from the 2005 London terrorist attacks came from the cell phone cameras of those caught in the attacks.29

From game shows and reality TV to YouTube the boundary between what is “audience” and what is “content” has become increasingly blurred.

The desktop publishing revolution that followed HP’s invention of the mass market laser printer opened up journalism to individuals who might previously have relied on typewriters, stencil duplicators and photocopiers. Because it has made self-publishing straightforwardly easy, the web has fostered a correspondingly significant generation of independent citizen journalists, powering the growth of Horizontal Influence.30 And it has provided a ready-made audience.

At the same time, online marketplaces like eBay have not only created a global ‘yard sale’ (by the end of 2005, almost one in ten Americans had sold something online31), but created new small businesses. Consumers are becoming resellers, with an increasing ability to set prices. When H&M released a low-cost clothing line from designer Stella McCartney, it sold out immediately. However, within a day, items were changing hands on eBay for twice what H&M had been charging.32

These changes are being amplified and accelerated by the dramatic technological developments of the past two decades. This is only likely to continue as emerging technologies that reinforce Horizontal Influence gain wider adoption:

artificial intelligence to learn people’s preferences, and create “personal” television channels that show what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. Music and television content is increasingly available on the underground download market, and consumed on devices that carry no commercial messaging.

news feeds that focus only on what they think they want to hear, drawing from both the mainstream media and their peers.

to avoid commercial messaging on the web, in their email, and on their televisions.

audio, and video are making it easier than ever for users to publish their ideas, opinions and creations.

helping to sift through these oceans of new content, learning and predicting our individual tastes, and increasingly replacing the editorial function that has – until now – justified the existence of some huge mainstream media and entertainment organisations.

discover and communicate with other people who share their interests, and putting them into direct contact with the experts and opinion-leaders, bypassing the gatekeepers who once brokered these relationships.

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Changing audience

roles

Theatre

Game shows

Reality shows

User content shows

youtube

Audience role

Broadcasters role

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On the one hand, there is an increasingly complex media landscape matched by changing media consumption patterns, making it harder to reach large audiences. On the other there is an increasingly technologically empowered audience of media-literate consumers who are less likely to act upon commercial messages.

As brands and organisations that want to survive and thrive under these circumstances, it is clear that you must change the way you engage your public. But what should you be doing? By definition, Horizontal Influence is something that organisations and their agencies can’t exert on their own behalf. Horizontal Influence relies on peer-originated communications: that’s why it works, why it’s “horizontal”.

A little insight into human nature and motivations helps place brands in the proper context for the new environment. Your public are not your employees, your lobbyists, or your agents, or your media channel. When they endorse your organisations, people, or products, they are not your paid hacks – instead, they are doing it for their own purposes. You must understand this motivation, and do whatever it takes to encourage the Horizontal Influencers to promote your products.

What makes people share their opinions about products and services? At its simplest level, they just need for something to talk about – what social commentator Douglas Rushkoff defines as “Social Currency.”33

At a deeper level, they are searching for individual recognition (whether professionally or socially), and the need to express themselves. They are keen to share their expertise and opinions somewhere where their contributions will be valued. They might be promoting their professional expertise, trying to help a stranger, or just sharing their pleasure or frustration with a product or service.

The web provides the platform for self-expression: the ability to find an appreciative audience of peers, among whom people can invent, re-invent, and promote their personal brands.34

Putting it simply, people want to define who they are, and to promote their own personal brands and to achieve these aims they’re prepared to let certain third party brands help them.

Understanding this, and from many years’ experience dealing with multi-channel communications, Porter Novelli can recommend four very simple (but effective) communications strategies.

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very simple (but effective) communications strategies...

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very simple (but effective) communications strategies...

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Listening, and paying attention to what you hear, is the essential first step in your approach to Horizontal Influence. If you’re not already doing this, any activity that you currently plan and implement to help you adapt to the changing landscape exists in a vacuum. You haven’t established the benchmarks you need to assess the impact and longevity of your activities in this space. And above all, you don’t know how, when, and where to respond.

Before you start planning any activity, you must map the landscape of Horizontal Influence as it applies to you, and your marketplace. You must listen to what’s being said and you must create or access comprehensive historical archives of digital content that will inform benchmarking and research.

Be sure that you understand the key issues that define the conversations around your category.

Know who your high-priority stakeholder communities are, what roles they play, and what they currently think, feel, and say to other people about your organisation.

Listen to and value anecdotal evidence from your staff: they bring you news from the front line.

Make information from customer touchpoints (retail centres, call centres, websites etc.) immediately available across your entire organisation, and encourage everyone to use it.

Invest in technologies that scour blogs, forums, wikis, newsgroups, email lists and websites, for mentions of your brands, your competitive set, and the key issues that affect your market.

Develop a list of key words and phrases that should alert you to opportunities and threats, and use them to trigger activity when they turn up in consumer communications.

Cross-reference online activity and customer-relations information with mainstream media coverage, and other marketing activity. You should be able to identify the mainstream media stories that create the most online buzz, and the online stories that eventually surface in the mainstream media.

Track these stories as they ebb and flow over time, and learn to identify the trigger points that affect the Horizontal Influence news cycle. These will differ from market to market, from brand to brand. This is some of the most important competitive knowledge that you will ever gather because:

your customers are saying about you, and about your competitors.

potential trouble spots.

effectiveness of marketing campaigns, events, and media-relations activity.

1. Listen

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Professional product reviews

Chat rooms

Consumer advocacy sites

In-store

Wikis

Consumer product reviews

Blogs

Staff

Mainstream media

Call centre

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If you know something, and don’t act on it, you might as well have never known. Listening isn’t enough. Once you have put in place the tools and processes, you need to know what the Horizontal Influencers are saying about you. You must quickly establish a response strategy.

We recommend that you build this around four key ideas:

i. Be FastTimeliness of response is essential: news spreads much faster on the web than it does in traditional media. The global Internet audience is “always on”, and doesn’t adhere to predictable news cycles. Stories can blow up quickly as audiences in different time zones and countries come online. Plus the Internet doesn’t stop working at weekends. However, a good monitoring system should always give you enough advance warning to respond speedily to both good news and bad.

So you need to be prepared: establish clear policies and crisis management procedures that describe who should respond, under what circumstances, and the nature of the response. Above all, establish clear responsibilities.

ii. Be HonestHonesty is essential when trying to encourage, or respond to Horizontal Influencers. Spokespeople must make their position clear, and not pretend to be anything, or anyone other than they are. Painful experience shows that the public are much better at uncovering commercial activity masquerading as grassroots communications than organisations or agencies think. Do not underestimate them. Furthermore, spokespeople must be honest in what they say and the way they say it: their response will be picked over by many readers and commentators.

Bear in mind, too, that each and every employee of the company will be perceived as a spokesperson. In most cases, they will be your best ambassadors to the Horizontal Influence because they are real people, and real people are what drive Horizontal Influence. Blogging policies and social media policies should make it clear to them that they must always identify themselves as employees, even when the views are clearly their own.

iii. Be RelevantThe world of Horizontal Influence is a global conversation, where you should follow the usual rules of polite society: don’t interrupt or try to change the topic. You should be sure that what people are saying is relevant and adds value to what has already been said, not simply cut-and-paste a pre-agreed company line. Above all, you must take their time to familiarise yourself with the opinions, attitudes, and conventions of the community or blog in which you are responding.

iv. Be Personal Understand and adhere to the basic principal of netiquette, “remember the human.” Be personal. Just as you should try to get to know the person, or community before they begin to respond, you should work to make yourself known, and establish yourself as a real person.

People respond better to people than they do to anonymous positions or roles, and that’s part of the attraction of Horizontal Influence. Phone conversations, or even physical meetings with key Horizontal Influence stakeholders will help develop personal relationships that will afford your responses better reception.

2. Respond

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2. Respond

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In September 2006, Hasbro recalled quarter of a million Playskool toy tool benches35 because of a choking risk. They were responding to a customer story posted on Amazon.com, picked up during a routine review of customer comments.

Case Study: Customer review prompts product recall

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In September 2004, a post on a cycling forum showed how a supposedly impenetrable Kryptonite bike lock could be picked using a Bic biro.36 The information was picked up on by blogs and quickly became a major news story. Kryptonite were aware of the story from day one, but did not announce their “lock exchange” programme until eight days after the story broke, nor did they interact with the bloggers who were pushing the story. Whilst Kryptonite’s head of PR, Donna Tucci, notes that the company were not slow in developing a solution, she admits that if the situation occurred again, the company would be much quicker in responding to bloggers – thereby avoiding the creation of the myth that Kryptonite were clueless about new media.37

Case Study: Kryptonite Bicycle Locks

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Content development programmeA passive listen-and-respond strategy still won’t meet your

needs: you should expect to exert your own influence in the debates and conversations that cover key issues in your market. How you do this will depend on your audiences, but – at the very least – you should invest in both a Content Development Programme and a Blogger Relationship Programme.

Content Development ProgrammeHorizontal Influencers have an insatiable appetite for all kinds of content: news, photographs, research, opinions, statistics, anything. It’s up to you to feed this appetite as best you can.

Carry out research to understand what your various interest communities are looking for, and how you can help them. What do you have that they want that no one else can offer? Think about what they want to hear and do, not what you want to say.

Review the information that you already publish against these needs, and adapt it for an online audience. Make content available in as many formats as you can: supply PDF files, text files, spreadsheets, photographs, audio files, and video. Have documents “chunked” into short, easily re-purposed files. Publish clear and friendly re-use licenses. Ensure that your answers are as easy to find as possible, by optimising carefully for search engines, and investing in link-building programmes.

Publish your content widely, and not just on your own site, instead seeking out content repositories where users are likely to be looking – you might, for example, consider publishing photographs and images on Flickr. Don’t be precious about bringing audiences to your website. One of the paradoxes of Horizontal Influence, after all, is that audiences are more likely to believe your information when someone else presents it to them.

Put systems in place to monitor content re-use, so that you can learn what content best attracts the Horizontal Influencers, what is most likely to be picked up and used, and what attracts positive word-of-mouth. Use this knowledge to implement a content development programme to create a steady stream of attractive, re-usable material for the Horizontal Influencers.

Blogger Relationship ProgrammeFrom your online stakeholder analysis, you should be able to identify the key horizontal influencers and opinion formers in your field. Seek their opinions, and ask for advice. Treat them as though they were journalists, get to know them, invite them to events, and send them news updates. Consider running blog “roadshows”, offering exclusive interview opportunities to key bloggers and communities.

3. Influence

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Content types

Content development programme

Input Press releases

Product demos

White papers

Expert opinions

Properly tagged assets: video, audio, photographs

Research results

Blogs and forums

Mainstream media

Niche publications

Community sites

Content repositories eg. Flickr & You Tube

Consumers

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Recall that the insight in dealing with Horizontal Influence is that people need to define and promote themselves. Bearing this in mind, the final step in addressing the challenge of Horizontal Influence is simply to accentuate the positive. Do what you can to make your promoters louder than your detractors. Ensuring that your customer advocates have a visible platform from which to promote themselves will help them promote your products and messages.

You should develop ways of identifying those who regularly pass on positive word-of-mouth. There are many ways you could perform this research, from straightforward desk research and customer satisfaction surveys, to the more technically complex sentiment analysis.

Involve them as much as you can. Seek their advice, speak to them, send them free trial products, backstage passes, and ask their opinion. Let them try out new products before anyone else. Invite them to try out new web services, create special areas for them. Making it special means making it exclusive – you can’t let everyone in. Maybe let them invite a few friends – by making them the arbiter of who’s in, and who isn’t, you’ll give them a reason to tell their friends. When Google set up Gmail, their free webmail service in 2004, the scarcity value of the invitations meant they could be traded on eBay for up to two hundred dollars.40

4. Enlist

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250,000 American teens are members of Tremor, P&G’s nationwide “seeding trial” panel. An online screening process ensures that members of the “Tremor Crew” are both influential amongst their teen peers and likely to recommend products to their friends. The teens involved are given pre-launch samples and previews of products. They are also invited to have a say in the way that these products are marketed, frequently becoming loyal advocates of the products.41 Because teens are more likely to trust other teens (see the tobacco “Truth” campaign), Tremor has had remarkable results – as a launch optimisation tool, it is reported that Tremor can generate a 10-30% sales increase measured against a location where Tremor is not used.42

Case Study: Tremor

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Lego Ambassadors are not employees of the company but, as one AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego) puts it, “trusted allies”.43 The Ambassadors are influential members of the enormous global Lego community who liaise between the company and their consumers. Ambassadors are not paid in cash, but receive free Legos, special offers, and are invited to one-off Lego events. Actively embodying the Lego values of creativity and connectivity, the unpaid Ambassadors monitor consumer opinion, provide feedback, and help develop new Lego products, of which the popular bespoke ‘Lego Factory’, where consumers can request specific legos, is the best example.44

Case Study: Lego Ambassadors

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Porter Novelli has always helped its clients listen and respond to what’s being said about them, and to direct their internal and external communications as effectively as possible. We have helped our clients gently exert a positive and responsible influence in the media, and in public affairs. We have been able to apply what we have learned from many years’ experience of encouraging positive word-of-mouth to each new medium as it arises.

Today our proposition is stronger than ever. The gradual erosion of broadcast advertising’s dominance over the communications and marketing mix is forcing organisations to re-think their strategic relationships. Porter Novelli has the experience and the tools to give its clients a competitive advantage today and a commitment to research and development to face future challenges.

Public relations practitioners have always recognised that each of our clients is a very important stakeholder among many in the much larger conversations that surround them. Porter Novelli’s job is to help our clients navigate these conversations, promoting their point-of-view, and responding to the point of view of others. To do this, we plan and execute across all channels but the democratic new media channels with their multiple stakeholders and conversational subtleties are particularly suited to our more collaborative approach.

We are good at identifying and engaging key influencers and opinion formers within our clients’ many audiences. We know how to engage and amplify genuine grass-roots support, and we know how to create customer advocates. We know how to monitor sentiment, how to create positive word of mouth, and how to smooth away potential crises. These skills translate neatly and directly into the new world of Horizontal Influence.

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In 1998, Porter Novelli helped the State of Florida develop the highly succesful anti-tobacco “truth” campaign. The success came from the insights and involvement of those the campaign was aimed at: teens. Teens helped develop the message and, through a teen advocacy movement, made the anti-tobacco message cool in a way that previous campaigns had been conspicuously unable to. With teens driving home the “truth” to other teens that grown-up tobacco companies had lied to them, the percentage of Florida middle schoolers who smoked fell from 18.5% to 8.6% in just two years.45

Case Study: Florida Truth Campaign

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SeaWorld has rides, facilities and animals but it doesn’t really become SeaWorld until the visitors are there too. Porter Novelli brought that insight to the redevelopment of their web site, removing the slick professionally developed imagery and photos and putting customers front and centre as the storytellers for the park experience.

Porter Novelli contacted hundreds of SeaWorld visitors on photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa asking them for permission to use their photographs on SeaWorld’s website.

Case Study: SeaWorld

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With help from Porter Novelli, Crayola is reaching out to new mothers. Crayola has launched a collaborative project with parents to produce a book about the importance of drawing and “scribbles” to child development. We asked parents to submit their child’s first scribbles to Flickr, tagging them “Crayola Beginnings.” Their child’s drawings are automatically included on the Crayola Web Site, and a select few have been included in a coffee table book developed in parallel with the website, and featuring a well-known child development expert.

Children whose drawings are used receive full acknowledgement, and a large collection of Crayola products. In addition, a product’s donation is made in their name to the top 10 US children’s hospitals.

Case Study: Crayola

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Existing tools, practices and research scale well to the emerging landscape

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Our tool kit scales well to address the changes brought about by Horizontal Influence. Where others can get bogged down in detail, the Communications Architecture framework that lies at the heart of our business is a model that helps us to see the big picture by understanding how to combine channels, and by identifying which tactics will achieve our clients’ strategic communications goals.

Using the Communications Architecture framework as our guide lets us take a holistic view of our three core communications disciplines – marketing, public affairs and corporate communications – and the multiple stakeholder groups they reach. We understand that the interplay of Horizontal Influence and mainstream media is key to managing the success of any and all communications plans. Our robust, straightforward approach has enabled us to integrate Horizontal Influence channels and tactics into our clients’ communications planning, not as a knee-jerk reaction, or opportunistic posturing, but as carefully considered and valued activities.

Built on the foundation of Porter Novelli’s proprietary Styles consumer surveys, our Viral Mapping tool identifies groups of individuals who are NetFluencers™— those who both know and connect a lot of people and are recognised by others to have authority or expertise for specific categories of goods and services for example technology or health.

Analysing the data lets us identify the individuals most likely to serve as trendsetters and “spreaders” for particular product categories. By combining this information with other Styles survey items we can create detailed audience profiles of these NetFluencers™, mapping (among others) traditional and new media consumption patterns, political attitudes, and leisure-time activities.

We create panels of NetFluencers™ to collect more detailed information, and to track shifting attitudes towards issues and events. Using a combination of online surveys, more detailed interviews, and focus groups, we define how Horizontal Influence operates in specific product categories from the perspective of those who are most likely to spread it.

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Porter Novelli is investing in new tools and research

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We have invested in new monitoring technologies that let us track consumer conversations, opinion, and reviews across the web. We can set keyword triggers by client, by industry, and by issue to alert us to sensitive issues on blog posts and Amazon reviews. New sentiment analysis technologies let us identify our client brand’s promoters and detractors, and let us track overall audience response to triggers such as news stories, campaigns, launches, and competitor activity.

We are also investing in tools that let us map the relationships between the stakeholders in a conversation. Using tools and techniques well established in academic disciplines such as mathematical sociology44, economics45, information sciences46, and artificial intelligence and linguistics47, we can analyse data in ways that let us plan effective activity.

various stakeholders relate to each other, helping you understand where to focus your attention to avoid wasted effort.

newsgroups and other Horizontal Influence stakeholders, not just the most popular. Often, “influence” will go hand-in-hand with “popularity”: the more people who read a communication, the more influence it exerts. But when we understand the network map, we can see that who reads a blog or message can create disproportionate influence (imagine, for example a blog with only ten readers, one of whom is the news editor of a national TV station). When everyone can publish their opinion about our clients’ products, knowing who exerts influence and who doesn’t is key.

understand what mainstream media stories create online buzz, and vice versa. Increasingly, we can use the mainstream to promote online buzz, and anticipate.

client brand’s promoters and detractors, and let us track overall audience response to news stories, campaigns, launches, and competitor activity.

Porter Novelli is committed to further research and development in these areas.

44

How should organisations meet the challenges that are thrown up by the rise of Horizontal Influence?

How will they anticipate and respond to the threats presented by a space where audiences comment freely on their products, services and communications, where their control over their brand and the way that it is presented is increasingly shared with their consumers? And how should they build a communications platform that will let them take advantage of the new opportunities that are presented by Horizontal Influence?

Porter Novelli’s long-standing experience in managing multiple audiences and channels, our market-proven tools and processes, and our unique approach to communications strategy help us answer these questions for our many clients.

At the same time, we have been investing in new research, people, training expertise, and technologies that will help our clients seize strategic competitive advantage.

The more things change, the more our clients need seasoned partners whom they can trust, and who have the skills and knowledge to offer sound advice.

Porter Novelli is confident that, with our help, our clients will thrive in a world of Horizontal Influence.

Conclusion

Conclusion

46

1 Genesis 2:172 Genesis 3:63 TARP Coca Cola Study (1978)4 Jeff Jarvis, Dell Hell (June 2005) see: http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/

cat_dell.html5 Matthew Peterson, iPod nano flaw (September 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/

hi/technology/4286294.stm6 http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1599974,00.html

7 http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1786403,00.html8 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1793785,00.html9 1) Working Families for Wal-Mart (December 2005)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Families_for_Wal-Mart 2) Walmarting Across America (October 2006) http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061009_579137.htm

10 Chevrolet Tahoe 2007 User-Generated Media campaign (March 2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/business/media/04adco.html?ei=5088&en=280e20c8ba110565&ex=1301803200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&adxnnlx=1173194193-9g29dHWa2AEGAFYIiw8szw

11 Al Gore’s Penguin Army (August 2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore’s_Penguin_Army

12 In terms of Horizontal Influence, viral videos are just advertisements without a proper media spend; when one person passes it on to another, they are probably endorsing your advertisement, not your product.

13 “Volkswagen to Sue Polo Duo” (January 2005) http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,7492,1398392,00.html

14 “Volkswagen unveils new Polo slogan” (January 2006) http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,7492,1680922,00.html

15 Wired “Home-Brew iPod Ad Opens Eyes” (December 2004) http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/commentary/cultofmac/2004/12/66001

16 Indecent Proposal (2001) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416850/

17 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zh1jYN2JPs18 http://futurewire.blogspot.com/2006/06/coke-mentos-lessons-in-viral-marketing.html19 http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/mentos_and_diet.html20 http://www.mentosgeysers.com/21 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115007602216777497-1mzdx_

pOFlMBwo9UAiqbsgY6MZ0_20060619.html?mod=blogs22 http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/mentos_and_diet.html23 http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/06/12/coke-is-an-idiot.

aspx?ref=foolwatch24 See, for example:

Michael Schaller, Present Tense: The United States Since 1945, (2003)\ Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945: The Penguin Social History of Britain, (2003) Anthony Aldgate, Censorship and the Permissive Society: British cinema and theatre, 1955-1965, (1995)

25 Lev Grossman, “Harriet Klausner” (Time, December 2006) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570726,00.html

26 Linda Stone: http://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome27 Many studies exist, but see for example, the Yahoo!/OMD Study “It’s a Family

Affair: the Media Evolution of Global Families in a Digital Age” for a view of how families use different media for different purposes: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=212192

28 We Media: how audiences are shaping the future of news and information http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php

29 Washington Post: Camera Phones Lend Immediacy to Images of Disaster (July 8, 2005) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/07/AR2005070701522.html

30 Pew Internet Report “A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers” (July 2006) http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf

31 Pew Internet Press Release, “17% of internet users – about 25 million people -- have sold something online” (November 2005) http://www.pewinternet.org/press_release.asp?r=117

32 SFGate “McCartney Fashion Designs Lead to eBay Stampede” (November 2005)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=175333 Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out (2005).

See also: http://www.rushkoff.com/columns/social_currency.html34 See: Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)35 Washington Post: “2 Deaths Prompt Toy Recall” (23 September 2006)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092201370.html

36 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64987,00.html37 http://www.intuitive.com/blog/debunking_the_myth_of_kryptonite_locks_and_

the_blogosphere.html38 http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,63786,00.html39 Paul Marsden, ‘Seed to Spread’, in Kirby & Marsden (eds), Connected Marketing

(Oxford, 2006), p.13.40 Ibid., p.14.41 http://www.communityguy.com/index.cfm?commentID=42142 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9109661503152931862&hl=en43 http://www.social-marketing.org/success/cs-floridatruth.html44 Social Network Analysis: See, for example, Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of

Weak Ties” (1973) or Valdis Krebs, Social Network Analysis, A Brief Introduction (2006)

45 Input-Output Analysis: See, for example, Wassily Leontief, Input-Output Economics (1966)

46 Citation Analysis: See, for example, Eugene Garfield, “Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation” (1972). Available at: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p527y1962-73.pdf

47 Discourse Analysis, Sentiment Analysis: See for example, Bo Pang & Lillian Lee, “A Sentimental Education: Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity Summarization Based on Minimum Cuts” (2004). Available at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/papers/cutsent.pdf

References

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