Episode 103 - Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Shiv Singh. Shiv’s the VP of social media and global strategic initiatives at Razorfish. Yes, we recently interviewed Clark Kokich, who in the time that I interviewed him just got promoted to chairman of Razorfish Worldwide, and he and I had a lot of conversations about social media, and he said, “You know the person you need to talk to? You need to talk to Shiv.” So we have Shiv on the phone for you. Now he gets to play around with social media, introducing it to clients like Carnival Cruise Lines, Microsoft, Citi Bank, Ford, Panasonic, Navarta Starwood and Chanel; great brands to play with. Interestingly enough Shiv has his Master’s in research from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he focused on social network theory, so we’re going to talk a little bit about that. And he’s working on a book for the Dummies series tentatively titled Social Influence Marketing For Dummies. So we’re going to talk about social influence marketing for smarties, ‘cause that’s what you are. And lets get Shiv on the show. Welcome Shiv.

Shiv Singh: Hi Susan. It’s great to be here.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to have you here. It’s so funny, I though you were based in Seattle, but turns out you’re my New York guy today, huh?

Shiv Singh: That’s right, all the way across the country.

Susan Bratton: Perfect. Well when Clark was on the show we talked a lot about the findings in the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report 2009, which is available online, you can just Google it and find it. It’s a, I got a nice hardcopy Shiv. It’s a gorgeous book, and one of the articles that you wrote in the book was Trends in Social Influence Marketing. I really liked it because you had top, top ten trends that you saw in social influence marketing. The first thing that I want you to do is I want you to talk to me about why you call it social influence marketing and not just social networking marketing or social media marketing, which is what most people are saying. And then I have just a couple of those top ten that I want to talk about. So first tell me about social influence marketing.

Shiv Singh: Sure, I’d be happy to. You know what’s really interesting about this, and I think is probably the most important, is the big change that we’ve seen in marketing is not the social platform itself; it’s not Face Book, it’s not You Tube, it’s not, you know, MySpace or Linked In or Twitter even. It’s really how people are influencing each other. And that’s what’s at the heart of what we’re talking about, and that’s a huge phenomena, that’s a huge shift that we’re seeing. People are influencing each other everyday in unique and so powerful ways, the way they never have in the past. And that’s why what we’re seeing is this new phenomena and this new age market that we refer to as social influence marketing. It happens on these social platforms like, you know, MySpace and Face Book, but it can also happen on your website, it can also happen through a widget that sits on a blog, it can happen on your mobile phone where it has location and GPS. The fact of the matter is that we are more influenced by our peers when we make a purchasing decision than we are by any traditional advertising today. And to understand this and to market in this world of social influence requires social influence marketing. So that’s why we call it that and not just focus on the platform.

Susan Bratton: It also strikes me that there are two forces at work here. One is that consumers have always been influential around brands and their preferences, and they’ve, there’ve been people who are the more influentials who’ve been more interested in being recommenders or leaders around brand choices and product choices. But what I see in the market around social influence marketing is that even those people who heretofore had been influentials are becoming more influential and more people are becoming influencers because there are the tools to both promote their opinions, as well as interact with brands.

Shiv Singh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that’s a great way to put it. But the fact of the matter is that, you know, we are digitally connected to each other so much more, more than we ever have been in the past. But we are voyeuristically always watching what, you know, our friends, our peers, our office mates are doing. And based on what we see we respond, we part a space, we form opinions, and we tell them what to think now. You know, in the good old days if someone worked in my San Francisco office or my Seattle office, other than, you know, several, you know pretty less engaging email exchanges in a day I’d have no idea what their world was like what they were thinking about and what kind of decisions they were making. In today’s world because we always are connected on these social platforms we have richer more personal relationships with them and watching their lives and inviting in because we all have strong opinions and sharing that and influencing them in new ways. And even companies that reach out to Razorfish and try to market their self to us know that they need to reach out to a lot more people than they earlier did.

Susan Bratton: And they can. And they can reach out to a lot more people. That brings me to one of the trends, it’s your trend number six in your report, and you say “it’s not just friends but friendsters that will start to matter”. I really see that happening. Why don’t you tell us about that.

Shiv Singh: Sure. So Susan, for example, and, you know, you’re probably going to want to kill me for saying this, but I have to lament for the moment you’re in friendster category, not a friend.

Susan Bratton: Well we just became online friends just before this interview today so I was, I never heard of you ‘til Clark told me your name, and then we just connected on Linked In and Face Book today, so darling we are friendsters and it doesn’t break my heart, but by the end of this interview we’re going to be friends.

Shiv Singh: That’s right. So through the course of the interview and just for this period you’re a friendster because I don’t know you very well, but I do know all of a sudden that you matter. I was able to see that you have thousands of friends on Face Book and what you say is probably influential. Now separate to you I have, you know, my college friends who I know very well, I probably know them too well. They have 200 friends in their social graph. You know, I can pick up the phone, call them, harass them about something, but the reality is that I’m going to be more influenced by you than I am by them. And that’s an example of the friendsters mattering a lot more than just the friends.

Susan Bratton: See, I like you better already. I’m warming up to the whole friend thing with you Shiv. What I thought was interesting about the friends and friendsters… I loved just using the word ‘friendster’. First of all I like that friendster gets a little credit for kind of being early in and I like the, I like the idea of friend and friendster. I’m stealing that, it’s mine now, going to use it forever. And what I think is interesting is a year ago I went to the South By Southwest show and I felt alien there. I really didn’t know very many people. I, you know, I met Chris Brogan for the first time and a few people, and then I had a year… I’d been all these services since they’d been invented, but I had this year of like massively expanding my network and really following people on Twitter and getting to know them online, my friendsters. I went to South By Southwest this year, and I had the best time connecting with people who really had been my friendsters and turned into my friends. So I think you’ll start to see those things moving back and forth as we find each other in meet space at Tweet Ups and things like that.

Shiv Singh: Yeah, and you know what’s interesting about that too is there’s sort of been a backlash in the last two years about friends, where everyone says, “Oh, those aren’t real friends of mine. You know, I don’t really care about them and I feel obligated to make them friends on Face Book or Linked In or something.” But the reality is those loose friendsters, and this ties back to some of my academic research, are the ones that are the most useful and the most powerful for you, because they connect you to whole new networks of people, so friendsters are incredibly important and I would ensconce that.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Certainly one of the beautiful things about watching your news feed in Face Book or watching your Twitter feed is that the people who aren’t as connected to you that are part of your network are bringing in a whole raft of new ideas to your life and almost providing maybe more fuel for some of us than the people who are more close and intimate friends.

Shiv Singh: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So you say another thing, another one of the trends that you say is the portable social graph will fuel marketing innovation. Now I’m absolutely fascinated by social graphs and I want to go into some detail on this one. Tell me what you mean by the social graph fueling marketing innovation.

Shiv Singh: Sure. So, you know, social graph has a lot of different meanings and I want to say right off the bat first that, you know, the history behind this and social network theory going back to the 19, I think the 1940’s and the 60’s and the 70’s and Mark Renovator and a lot of others have done incredible research in it. What you’re starting to see is all those amazing theories that influence the way people live and connect with each other in the physical world is starting to be replicated online. And the shape that takes is, you know, so we have our social graphs, which is basically a mapping of all our relationships with everyone that we know and their relationships with everyone that they know. And because of the social technologies like, you know, and the platforms like Face Book, we actually have a physical tangible mapping of it. Now what makes it really interesting though is when you take that social graph and you put it on any other website, imagine for example – and CNN did this. You know, I actually wrote that article before CNN did this…

Susan Bratton: Yeah this is a, that’s a great example. That was the first one I thought of too.

Shiv Singh: Yeah, the CNN Face Book…

Susan Bratton: Election.

Shiv Singh: example, yeah. The time of Barack Obama’s, you know, when the election results and his presidential inauguration where all of a sudden you could watch, you know, his speech live but at the same time be talking about it among your friends on the CNN website at the same time, and these friends would be coming off your Face Book social graph. You take that one step further; imagine you’re doing that but through your television. Or imagine you’re walking into a restaurant and you have your iPhone or your Windows mobile device or whatever it may be, and it’s telling you, “Shiv guess what, these five friends ate here last night. They rated it a two out of a ten. You may want to walk out.” So all of a sudden your social graph is guiding every decision that you make, and not just that but it’s with you in real time when you want it to be. And that’s the idea behind the portable social graph, and the providers in terms of the social networks are doing more each day to let us take up our own social graph portable and doing, you know, amazing new things about it. That’s what is at the heart of it.

Susan Bratton: When we were prepping for the show I asked you what social media companies you thought were doing some of the most cutting edge work, solutions or had the most cutting edge ideas, and you said there were two big categories that you were particularly interested in. One was social graph analysis and the other was Appvertising. I’ll come up with Appvertising in a minute; I want to get right into the social graph analysis companies like Media Six Degrees and Unbound Technologies. Now I haven’t played with Media Six, but I have played with Unbound Technologies. As a matter of fact I’ve done a little bit of affinity mapping on my own name and some other things just to see how it all worked. Would you explain the social graph analysis category to us and then lets talk a bit about that.

Shiv Singh: Sure, absolutely. First you have the 101 level, you know… Imagine a social graph in its abstract form and all these nodes that (unintelligible) people links to one another. And when you look at this map of nodes and people linked to each other you automatically can tell who are more central than others, through who more information flows throughout the largest networks, and who sort of have the most influence. So that’s some of the social network theory piece. What companies like Media Six Degrees and Unbound Technologies do is they say, “Okay, so that’s that theory. It’s incredibly strong, it’s based on amazing research. Now lets see how we can apply that to marketing to drive rare and how marketers advertise”. And that’s a very powerful thing because rather than just marketing and, especially in the digital realm, marketing based on someone’s behavior or based on, you know, metrics that a publisher provides to their website, you’re actually now focusing your marketing and your media buying efforts driven by who is networked to whom and who gets influenced by who. So what Media Six Degrees does, they did a lot of research to discover that friends who talk a lot to each other on the phone invariably end up making similar decisions, because they sort of share the same behavioral traits, they have the same interests, influence one another. So they were able to rationalize based to look at that when you’re marketing to a group of people think of them more as a group rather than isolated individuals operating on the web, and that’s very much a mentorship and it’s, you know, it’s seemed to be very successful.

Susan Bratton: A couple of things that I think are interesting; one, I read in the digital outlook report that, I don’t think you wrote this one but, ‘cause it was a collection of different people in your organization who wrote essentially papers on trends… One of your market research groups, when they pull a person into a focus group they not only pull that person, but that person’s five most closely associated people into the group to expand the possible market and understanding of the market of what they’re doing for that focus group, and I thought that was interesting. And it kind of parallels this idea… I’m looking at my report on my name, just Susan Bratton, from Unbound Technologies and it’s really interesting to see who the people are that have the most number of matches with me, like Charlene Li and Joseph Jaffe and C.C. Chapman and people like that, who are running in my circle and we have a lot of common friends. But what I also thought was really interesting was what celebrities and public figures or products or services or things like that were all my friends fanning on Face Book. The most common celebrities that the people who follow me fan are Guy Kawasaki and Ariana Hovington. Products are Guinness Beer and the New York Times. Non profits are the Interactive Advertising Bureau, I’m one of the founders of the IAB. It was just really into those… Barack Obama and Gavin Newsome. It’s just really interesting to see what brand affinities there are that cluster in these social graph groups. And the next question to me is where do we innovate here? How do we take that? Right now you’ve got market research is pulling in, you know, five people out of a social graph instead of that one person to a focus group. How are brands going to start leveraging these clustered affinities in clever ways?

Shiv Singh: Well, I think there’s an incredible amount that Marxus can do with it without, you know, invading on anyone’s personal privacy, you know, and that’s important to say that first. But to give you an example and to, you know, carry on you, Susan, as an example… So I’ve just learned that, you know, you cluster around Guinness and you cluster around… what was the other product?

Susan Bratton: It was Guinness… Well there’s the Museum of Modern Art, Guinness, The New York Times…

Shiv Singh: Yeah, The New York Times…

Susan Bratton: Do they help you?

Shiv Singh: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Shiv Singh: I automatically know now that if I’m creating an online community and I want to capture your interest and to, you know, turn you into a marketer for my brand, I need to do something around those key areas, around Guinness, around The New York Times, around Mormar. What’s more important is I need to connect too with other people who share those interests, and I need to think about as a marketer that is there some pattern I’ve never realized that people who like Guinness and The New York Times and the Mormar, like my brand, lets say hypothetically Poland Springs. So there are a couple of things that I’m learning from all of this. One is I’m learning some brand new insights about my consumer. You know, what works in their world in terms of the different brands. I’m learning what their networks are more similar to so I can get a better sense of, you know, how I look at my segmentation. I’m also starting to realize that, ah, you shared the similar traits to Charlene Lee and, you know, to these other guys, I should market to you in the same way that I market to them, or maybe I should ask you to market to them on my behalf and I should find a way to incentivize you. So all of a sudden I’m learning more about you as a consumer and figuring out that, wow, you may be in touch with people that I want to reach and I should incentivize you, and I’m able to sort of form this complete map of who you are, both online and offline, just by virtue of the social graph analysis. So, you know, it’s a kind of data and it’s on a more personal level that we’ve never had before, and if I know you have, you know, ten thousand friends and that you, you know, can get very high in terms of social activity, I know you’re probably an influencer of a certain type and I should market you in a certain way so that you then spread that message among other people. So, you know, I could go on and on in terms of the possibilities. As you can tell I’m salivating out here now.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, we both, we both really love this, what can you do with all that data? We’re going to go to a break, and when we come back, I’d asked you if you were a CEO of a billion dollar company how you’d allocate your teams and budgets, and it ties right in to what we were just talking about. So when we come back we’ll talk about your billion dollars, okay?

Shiv Singh: Sounds great.

Susan Bratton: We’re with Shiv Singh. Shiv is with Razorfish and he’s the vice president in charge of social media and global strategic initiatives. We’re having a lot of fun, hope you are too. Stay tuned. Lets thank my sponsors of Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and we will be right back.

Susan Bratton: We’re back. I’m Susan Bratton, your host. Thanks for listening and I hope you’re enjoying getting to know Shiv Singh. Shiv’s VP of social media and global strategic initiatives at Razorfish, and Shiv and I were talking about this idea that you could actually look at a person’s social graph and also all of the things that the people that their most closely associated with, what those people are fanning on Face Book, for example, using Unbound Technologies data mining capabilities. Lets take that another step down Shiv. When I asked you if you had a billion dollars what would you do, you know, how would you parse it out, SEO, advertising, social media, you know, where would you spend all your money? You said, “That’s not what I’d ask. I’d first find out who the social influencers of the brand are. Lets do some social influence research first before we decide how to allocate the budget.” I thought that was clever because in reality what you’re saying is lets find out who those people are that have the most social influence about our brand. Tell us how you’ve been doing that for some of the brands that you’re working with, or just generally if you can’t - you know, I don’t want you to share information you can’t – generally how a person can go about finding those people.

Shiv Singh: Sure, absolutely. You know, the first step in all of this is to recognize, you know, all influencers are not created equal, and they all have their different categories of influencers and they work well at different stages in the marketing funnel, and this comes from a lot of great psychology research. And I’m married to a psychologist, research and that sort of influences my thinking more and more everyday, and I see those books on the bookshelf and it’s sort of like changing me in weird ways, but that’s another story. The point is that there’re different types of influencers; they vary from expert influencers to what I call positional and referent influencers, and depending on the type of purchase, they play either a big role or a very small role. So just to give you a practical example; imagine, you know, you’re a very large auto manufacturer and you’ve brought out a car that you’re targeting college students. Now when this college student is making the purchase, we know their different circles of influence. There are his or her, his buddies, they’re going to be other people on campus who he thinks are cool, and they’re going to be  his parents, they’re going to be people he, you know, celebrities, they all play different roles as influencers. We know that invariably the guys dad might be, you know, the biggest influencer if he’s signing the check. It makes sense in that case to market to him about the car as well. So that’s an example of sometimes, you know, identifying who the social influencers are. It can be really simple just by doing the basic research and then measuring and figuring out, you know, what reaches their influencers, and then by seeing where that influence takes place and marketing to it as well and not just to the customer. So that’s how they do it. Now here’s the other interesting piece of this. You asked me if I were a CMO of a billion dollar company, you know, how would I allocate my budget. I’m going to say something else. I’m going to say I’m not going to put it… and this was, you know, and I might lose my job over this, but I’m going to say I won’t put it in TV, I won’t put it in print, I won’t even put it in digital, you know, and god forbid in a digital agency person. What I will do instead is if I do the social influence research and I discover that for the, you know, five million people or the ten million people I’m trying to reach, there are a hundred thousand people who are really big influencers I’ll throw that billion dollars just at that hundred thousand people to get them to influence my customers. And I would do that by incentivizing them in some form or the other. Who knows, I might even say, you know, you divide a billion dollars into a hundred thousand people and they’re getting a lot of money to do the marketing for me. But the point is that when you target the influencers, all of a sudden your marketing to a more finite list of people who have an outsized influence on a customer and has often trumped any traditional form of marketing or advertising, digital or in the offline world.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Here’s a interesting thing; Ford is giving me a Lincoln MKS for a week next week and they gave me a flip video camera and they said, “Hey no pressure. Write whatever you write, whatever. We know you’re a blogger, we’d love you to do a blog post or two about your experience. Take the car.” I’ve been a Lexus owner for 17 years. I don’t think I’ve, beside crappy little rental cars I haven’t driven much besides a Lexus, so I’m actually looking forward to getting this, and here I am talking about it on my podcast that thousands and thousands of marketers are going to listen to, right. They’re very smart. The interesting thing about it is that the people that I’m connected to are also, also have really big followings. So if I podcast or I blog or I Tweet and they reply… Let’s just say that my, so what I did was I Twittered this week that I want people to take some joyrides with me, any of my blogger friends or my Twitterer friends who are in the Los Altos area, I want them to come over and we’ll go on a joyride and I’ll get out the video camera and we’ll have some fun and I’ll post some of that video, ‘cause I think it’s more fun to do it socially and to have this experience than to just drive around and, drive my daughter back and forth to school and her pony lessons, you know. And so I’ve been Twittering in advance of the experience and looking for people who are also willing to talk about the experience that they’re going to have with me in this. And I’m really interested to see how much that particular incident can radiate through the networks. Just for fun, ‘cause I find it fascinating.

Shiv Singh: And you know Susan, what’s really interesting about that is you hardly talked about the platforms, your focus has been on what you’re going to do and with whom.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Shiv Singh: And that’s what makes it social influence marketing. Had you spent the last five minutes just saying, “I’m going to do this on Twitter and that on Face Book and this is how I’m going to do it”, I’d of said, “Yeah, that’s social media marketing.” But you’re really thinking about one is bringing your network into this and then influencing them or just, for you it’s not influencing, it’s sharing and getting feedback and it’s an experiment. But from Ford’s perspective that’s social influence marketing, and they don’t care whether you do it on a social platform or in the real world.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Shiv Singh: Yeah, that’s phenomenal.

Susan Bratton: It’s fun. I’m glad that they asked me to do it, ‘cause I love these kind of experiments, you know, where I get to be the person that the marketers are experimenting on. But I like, I bring it full transparency, which is fun. Alright. There was another area where you said you had a lot of interest and that was in this Appvertising, a-p-p-v-e-r-t-i-s-i-n-g. And I was looking at some of the companies that you’ve been watching… I haven’t paid at all attention to this space, so you talked about Context Optional, Buddy Media and socialmedia.com, and that is kind of speaking to another one of the trends in your book which is social advertising will grow up. That, you know, we’re going to find over the next few years how we can take advantage of advertising in these platforms, not just listening which is, and social influence marketing, but more about actually reaching the people who are in these huge places with all this opportunity like Face Book and MySpace. So tell us about Appvertising.

Shiv Singh: Sure, absolutely. You know what it starts with is the notion that we live in this world that is, you know, fundamentally a social ecosystem and digitally even more so now because it’s so easy to connect with friends and peers and the broader world digitally than any other means actually. In this world it’s not enough for a brand to just craft a very smart clever message and push it out there and expect everyone to listen and pay attention to it. We’re too busy viewing each others media, we’re too busy having fun talking to each other, we’re too busy, you know, leading our own lives to simply pay attention to that message. Now, you know, that message and pushing it out does have its space, but it’s important ‘cause it has lessened. What brands have to do now is they have to participate, they have to be a social utility, they have to create and provide a much stronger value exchange for their users. And one way of doing that is through Appvertising. So Appvertising is taking the word ‘application’ and the word ‘advertising’ and mashing it together. And a good example of that is, one of my favorites is what Trip Adviser does on Face Book where they have this wonderful little app which is called Cities That I’ve Visited. Now, you know, Trip Adviser had the choice; they could either buy traditional banner ads on Face Book or they could build this little application. They chose to build this little application, which I’ve got on my profile page and it tells all my friends the cities that I’ve visited around the world, it’s sort of a badge. And the Trip Adviser logo is down there at the bottom. It’s such a fun thing to share, you know. I love my friends to see where all I’ve traveled to, they love showing me where all they’ve traveled to, so we’ve all installed the application. And that’s an example of Trip Adviser providing me an application that’s really useful. Because it’s sponsored by Trip Adviser I remember it’s from them, I see that. It may not directly do with the Trip Adviser business - in this case it could be well tied to it – but it provides a lot more value. And these vendors help us create some of those little applications and market and promote them digitally. And I think in the next five years, I wouldn’t even say the next two years but the next five years, they’re going to see Appvertising play a much bigger role in marketing because, you know, the digital natives that are getting older and more mainstream everyday are going to have less and less patience for this traditional forms of marketing. Traditional, and when I say traditional I mean traditional online and traditional offline, and that includes a micro site, display banners and TV ads that don’t have, you know, interactivity with them. They’d be good for basic awareness building, but they won’t engage the consumers.

Susan Bratton: Shiv I could keep talking to you about all of this for a really long time, but we have to respect the Dishy Mix listeners time. So you have a fantastic blog, and you actually have a really good number of slide decks too, that could help anyone who wanted to learn more about all of this. To close the show would you just share your blog URL and let us know what the couple slideshows are that people are grabbing from you these days, ‘cause I know they do.

Shiv Singh: Sure, absolutely. My blog address is goingsocialnow.com, and I suppose I should mention my Twitter address as well, my…

Susan Bratton: Oh, of course.

Shiv Singh: handle is Shiv Singh, so it’s twitter.com/shivsingh. Two slideshows I’d like to highlight in particular; one is called Portable Social Graphs: Imagining Their Potential, which along with the (unintelligible) we published this in December ’08 and as of today it has nearly 40,000 views on it, and anyone who’s interested in digging deeper into the potential of the social graph, they’d find that really interesting. The other is something I just published a few days ago, which is Big Ideas For Social Influence Marketing. It’s five top line CMO level ideas, and last one, the last idea within it that I want to really highlight is it talks about the fact that marketing departments are not organized to take advantage of the social phenomena and they’re not organized to take advantage of, you know, the worlds that we live in today more broadly, and that one needs to think about reorganizing the marketing department for the 21st century. I won’t tell you more. I’ll let you, you know, take a look at the slides yourself.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. I will also make sure that I publish a link to Shiv’s blog on the Dishy Mix site, so when you come to Personal Life Media and you just, you can just search for Shiv and you’ll find his page with the transcript of this episode and all of the links and everything so you can find it again, because that’s always the problem. If somebody’s listening to Dishy Mix while they’re on the treadmill or the airplane, you know, ahh, how do you get it. So we’ll take care of you, don’t worry. Shiv, it’s been great to have you on the show. I’ve really enjoyed both the theoretical conversation and the practical conversation and the way you can combine those two things. That’s been great. So thank you so much for that.

Shiv Singh: Thank you for having me on.

Susan Bratton: My pleasure. So I’m your host, Susan Bratton. It’s been great to connect with you. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you’ll listen to me next week. I’ll have somebody else really fun and interesting to talk to. Have a great day. Bye-bye.