The Basement

When I first started looking into measuring blogs it was with the notion that blogs could be used for market research. After several weeks I've learned that lots of great companies seem to be taking advantage of this already - Intelliseek/BlogPulse and BuzzMetrics for example. What I hadn't really thought about was the idea of trying to motivate, instigate or manipulate WOM in general and through blogs specifically. I guess that's because I think these types of antics are the stuff that made us tune marketers out in the first place. I think that if you do great things that WOM ensues. But seeing all of the attention paid to the second M in WOMMA, I've started thinking - what can marketers do to affect WOM?

Hmmm. Do great things and WOM will ensue. I believe this. I think most of us do. If this is true it means that around great things revolve a social network of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen (I did mention that I was reading The Tipping Point didn't I?). Great things can be brands or products or concepts. So what happens when you combine two great things? What happens to their social networks? Can WOM cross pollinate between the social networks that surround two great things? And if so, can we measure it?

These were my questions and as almost always, the great and powerful BlogPulse was my answer.

I had questions, I had a tool, now I needed two great things - two Wonder Brands to combine - preferably in the recent past so I can look at the before during and after. Can you think of two?

I thought of the premier music download service and it's companion digital music management software - iTunes - and the marvelously poplar fusion of homegrown mp3 files and RSS feeds - Podcasting. As everyone on the planet knows Apple has recently added Podcast support into the iTunes product. The headlines all read "iTunes Legitimizes Podcasting" or some such - but this, as you'll soon see, is not the complete story. [DISCLAIMER: I know that Podcasting, strictly speaking, is not a brand, per se, but if you call it one it makes for a funny headline - at least for those of us that grew up with Zan and Janna]

If we believe everything we read, iTunes pulled Podcasting into the mainstream. From this we expect buzz around Podcasting to increase - but what of buzz around iTunes? Think back to a couple months ago - how often did you hear people mention iTunes and Podcasts in the same post? Were social networks around iTunes and Podcast different or did they overlap? Yes, yes, the suspense is killing me too. Here's the BlogPulse Trend graph:

So what do I have here? Well, I looked at posts that contain mentions of iTunes but no mention of Podcast and vice versa - the idea is that these are folks are in one camp or the other and not the folks in the overlap of the Venn diagram. The green line then is these overlap folks - folks that mentioned both iTunes and Podcast. Okay, what do you see?

The first green spike, May 23^rd, Steve Jobs announces iTunes 4.9 to support Podcasts. The big green spike, June 28^th, iTunes 4.9 released - we're off to the races.

But wait, according to the graph, the buzz around Podcasts was overtaking the buzz around iTunes before the May 23^rd announcement. Furthermore, the buzz around iTunes was in slow but steady decline. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Who saved who here? Hmmm, but that's another post. Both brands - iTunes and Podcast - had strong respectable blog buzz, for the most part their respective buzz was mutually exclusive, then... WONDER BRAND POWERS... ACTIVATE!

BANG! Cross-buzz-pollination-o-rama! Just like an old Reese's commercial...

PODCAST CROWD: You got your iTunes in my Podcasts!

iTUNES CROWD: You got your Podcasts in my iTunes!

ALL TOGETHER: Mmmmmmm.

For a couple of days nobody can type iTunes without typing Podcast - it's contagious, it's a short and powerful epidemic. But then, it gets really interesting. People go back to talking about iTunes without Podcast and Podcasts without iTunes but both have a significant uptick in buzz. For iTunes, this means the reversal of a six month downward trend! Good thing Apple rescued Podcasts when they did, while they still had buzz left.

This is a little counter intuitive to us. Everyone assumes Podcasting got its name from the Apple iPod and thus is inextricable from its namesake. Wrong. iPods aren't talked about when people talk about Podcasts and vice versa. But people do talk about iPods and iTunes. So how does the iTunes/Podcast thing affect Apple's iPod? Here's a BlogPulse Trend graph:

Before you get too excited, note the scale - this is half the scale of our last graph. So what do we see here? Pre-June 28^th announcement, iPod is something like twice as likely to be mentioned with iTunes as it is to be mentioned with Podcasts. (As you'll see in the next graph - this is nothing compared to total mentions of iPods or Podcasts.) After June 28^th - iPods are twice as likely to be mentioned with Podcasts as they were before the wonder brand powers were activated - and this trend looks to be sustained, particularly compared to the decline of combined mentions of iTunes and Podcasts from the above graph. This is important - building Podcast support into iTunes DOUBLED the association of Podcasts with iPods. Apple's hitching its wagon to the rising trend.

For some perspective, let's look at one more BlogPulse Trend graph.

Here I've pulled out the stops and shown total mentions for each iPod, iTunes and Podcast. For scale, I've also included iPod and Podcast which is the same trend as in the last graph (blue in both graphs). Look closely, iPod was also in slow and steady buzz decline - until Apple boosted Podcasting.

The lesson to marketers here is obvious (I think it is anyway, but marketers are kind of slow and I can't help but over state the obvious) - if you can couple your brand with a buzz brand whose social network is mutually exclusive of yours, you can, dare I say, create WOM for each others brand. The caveat here is that that you must combine you brand is some real and meaingful way (notice the announcement of the combination did little or nothing in any case we examined) - which is to say the combination of the two brands must be some new great thing.

EXCERCISE FOR THE READER: Who lost here? Since BlogPulse reports percentages, someone has to lose buzz. Who was it? How does this all affect Microsoft, WMA, Windows Meida Player, Media Center and the like?

Do you know of two brands that have recently combined? Post them in comments so we can all go investigate the buzz.