Rohit Bhargava

Most people are now looking for products and services on the internet so they are going to come across your brand in that way. Is that the primary reason, really why you should be involved in social media? So you can meet them at that point and then take them on a journey?

The argument for using social media is very simple. The number one most effective form of marketing that most marketers already know is word-of-mouth. Everybody knows that, that getting a customer or someone to recommend your product or service is the most impactful way of marketing in terms of actually selling and getting a high conversion rate.

But the question was, how do you actually pay for that because it loses its authenticity, it’s not necessarily something that brands knew how to spend money on. And the way what we talk about social media very often is that people are sharing these opinions online and now you can listen to it, which you were never able to do before, and you can participate in it and spend money on it, which you were also never able to do before. So what social media allows you to do is scale and spend money on the number one, most impactful thing that you already know works in your marketing. So why wouldn’t you start to figure this out?

If this is working, if this starts to work and in some cases we are seeing it do so, what is that going to do to some of the older professions like research focus groups, what’s it going to do to mainstream media? What could you see the future there?

Well, I think those areas are already starting to evolve. If you look at research groups most already have an online component, or they are using online surveying, using social networks, in order to get people to share information and watch their behaviour. So research firms and research in general is getting much more sophisticated as a result of this.

I think on the media side, this two-way dialogue that we often hear about or talk about where people can communicate back and forth and share their points of view, is really becoming accelerated when you look at some of the largest media properties. So when you look at The New York Times or The International Herald Tribune or The Sydney Morning Herald, they’re all enabling this ability for people to share commenting back and forth and to take pieces of content out and spread them out to someone else, share them back and forth and all of this is unlocking this content. So content no longer just lives and is stuck in one location, it gets passed on around the world.

On the readers’ side, that is the truth but on the advertising side they have always depended on revenue from the advertisers. How do they need to change to incorporate more of the social networking word-of-mouth?

That’s a tough question for a lot of them because it does dramatically change the model that they have gotten used to.

One of the things we spend a lot of time talking about is the almighty unit of measurement brands have used for the longest time when it comes to traditional marketing as well as online marketing of impressions, are starting to become outdated. And the reason for that is first of all impressions aren’t created equal, and second of all impressions are often empty – they flash up but nobody notices them, you do your TV spot but it is on DVR and somebody fast-forwards through it, and those things are being counted still even though they have no impact.

So the real question is, and what we talk about a lot when we talk about measurement and measurement model for social media, is called conversation impact – how do we measure what is actually happening and how people’s perception is actually shifting? That is a big question in PR. We actually focus a very long time on trying to measure because to some degree PR is very much about creating that awareness and creating that shift in perception. In advertising they are just starting to latch on to that idea that reaching 1,000 of the right people is much more impactful than reaching 5,000 of the wrong people.

And how do you measure that impact on brand?

There are a number of ways. One is share of voice within a category. There is also ways of measuring conversation tonality, positive or negative, there is a whole host of other ways, in this measurement model that I mentioned there are actually six different criteria that have sub points of many different sub criteria and it is a very mathematical formula for figuring out whether we made an impact and to measure if we actually made an impact and if we actually moved the needle.

That is really what brands are looking for because when it comes time to take this activity that they tried out and explain it to the CEO and why it was worthwhile and why they might want to invest more money in it, that is a necessary piece to have.

Thank you for that. So where are you off to now? Off to Washington?

I will be heading back to Washington after the weekend.

Can I just ask, if you actually had to pinpoint anywhere in the world, is there actually any place that is leading this change?

I think that there is a lot of innovation that typically comes from San Francisco, because so many Web 2.0 start-ups that are based there.

So tell us one exciting thing that is coming out of there.

There are a number of services that are starting to offer this idea of location-based information.

Points for example, is one of these tools that you can broadcast out to your social network where you are and what you are doing, so other people can engage with that and perhaps meet up with you. I think for a certain generation of people or a certain group of people who broadcast their whereabouts and what they are doing on places like Twitter, and have their GPS enabled phones, the ability to have these fortuitous meetings that happen by accident, they would still happen by accident but could we get these people together more frequently. So that if I was in a coffee shop and a good friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a year was in the coffee shop right next door I would know that, somebody would tell me that so I could then connect or choose not to connect.

Sounds like a nightmare.

Yeah, sometimes it is good and sometimes it is bad. I think the thing with a lot of these tools is that it is all up to you. It is definitely not for everyone but you asked me what was next and that is what I think.

Thank you very much for your time.