Circos Brand Karma

Recently I was trying to buy a ticket online on Tiger Airways, a budget airline that operates out of Singapore and serves Asia.  Though I knew about Tiger, I’ve never flown it.  So I did 2 searches, one on Google, and one on Twitter, both using the keywords “tiger airways.”  Here’s what I found: Google’s first search result page returned 10 results, 6 led to a booking engine, 4 to information (including wikipedia).  Twitter returned 20 results, 0 led to a booking engine, 4 tweets were positive, 3 were neutral, 2 were questions, and a whopping 11 were negative (for math lovers that’s a -35% net favorability if you consider questions to be neutral).  Below are screenshots of the top 5 results from each service (click the image to zoom in).

google v. twitter results for tiger airways, July 2009

As you can see, while Google does a sufficient job at presenting facts, Twitter is much more human with personal pet peeves for all to see.  Also, I had no idea how old the sites Google pointed me to were, but I had a pretty good idea that the tweets about Tiger were all very recent, and therefore, more relevant to me.  Finally, Google abstracts are often an incomplete description of the website, whereas Twitter posts are mostly complete thoughts.  This slight difference is the pivotal one as it relates to brands.  In this example, whereas Google invites travelers to find out more, Twitter users unabashedly present their point of view so travelers don’t have to find out more.

For a traveler deciding, let’s say, between Tiger and Air Asia (another low cost carrier), you don’t have to read a lot of tweets to quickly form an opinion for how they’re regarded by their customers.  As the tweets predicted, I encountered a problem buying my ticket on Tiger’s website, and was instructed to call customer service.  While on hold, I was reminded at least 5 times that Tiger won the Best Low-Cost Airline of the Year in 2008 from CAPA within the on-hold loop music, which ironically made me question the validity of the award.

Why?  Not because I don’t respect CAPA, but because the tweeters’ complaints were entire consistent with each other and with my booking and customer service experience.  Some were further backed by links to news reports that reported on similar incidences.  On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea who at CAPA selected the airline and under what criteria.  The tweets I read made the professional CAPA opinion and award seemingly obsolete and dated, and the award did not lessen my growing doubts about Tiger Airways.

Is my brand experience typical?  I think more and more so.  A brand’s story becomes fragmented when there’s dissonance between what it tries to portray vs. the actual customer feedback.  That “promise gap” can shred a brand and render its messaging useless if the feedback is antithetical to the brand portrayal, and the brand either ignores the feedback or insists that the opposing feedback came from outliers.  In the past, customer feedback have been exclusively behind the brand’s firewall or embedded in private conversations and emails.  Message forums led to review sites led to blogging, each made customer feedback more public.  Twitter is all of those combined, with rocket boosters, and equipped with efficient search internally and to be externally discovered (via Google).

While consumers may initially approach Twitter with high skepticism, if they consistently read tweets that mirror their own experiences, they’ll start to accept and believe in the wisdom of the tweeters.  This is why the “follow” function is so powerful.  On Twitter, you can follow anyone you trust, and stop following anyone who gives bs, which is unlike Facebook where the person you want to friend (in order to see what they have to say) has to accept your friend request.

Given the rapid growth of Twitter, learning from travelers who are otherwise inaccessible to you but who happen to know what you need will become even more pervasive in the coming days.  The operative word here being days.  Where else in the world can a traveler go to find the right micro-segment of travelers who have the exact relevant, current, and credible knowledge they need?  Not travel agencies, not brands, not travel books, not travel magazines, not CAPA, and I posit, not even their friends and family.  This, coupled with the speed and reach of Twitter discussed in part 1, are the key ingredients to a paradigm shift for brands in the travel industry.

If you want more context about why Twitter works, you can read Granovetter’s seminal work on the Strength of Weak Ties.  For a non-academic version, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covers the main idea as well.  From Wikipedia, the central premise is,

In marketing or politics, the weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties.

That, is exactly what Twitter does with amazing efficiency.

My Mahalo launched today.  It’s an additional service on top of Mahalo, which allow you to see search for things and have the results come back ordered first by your friends’ recommendations, then your trusted Mahalo advisors.  To make this easy for Mahalo users, you can import your social graph from other sites into your Mahalo account.

I think this is a good step forward for Mahalo, and something that we think is important.  The convergence of social graph and search is going to be an important theme as social networks continue to become more ubiquitous, something that all of us at Circos are very excited about.

FriendFeed is a cool service that allows people to stay up to date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing.  It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

I find the search functionality on FriendFeed to be really interesting.  It shows the conversations that contain the keywords to what you’re searching for.  Since the social media applications that FriendFeed supports are the ones that very social/viral people would use, you can get a sense of the zeitgeist for just about any topic.

Only thing is that the search result is ranked in reverse order of recency, which means that you still have to sift through what comes back.

I just read Revenge of the Experts from Newsweek and it hit upon something that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks.

In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. “People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a “perfect storm of demand for expert information.”

I agree that a more reliable and bankable web is needed, but I wouldn’t have necessarily gone to expert information as the logical conclusion. I would have thought better filtering of all content, regardless of source, would have been a more logical solution.

There are a lot of things that are absolute truths (e.g. San Francisco is in the State of California, a part of the United States of America) — facts like that I’d agree should be vetted by the pros. But aside from that, there are a bunch of things that are opinion or experientially based, and their “truth” is relative to the perspective of the person consuming that piece of information. This is where user generated content has a huge role to play.

The road to a bankable and reliable web isn’t to swing the pendulum one way or another between experts and average Joes. The example in the article of “Paris hotels” returning the Top 7 from “experts” actually shows why the expert approach alone may not work: what experts take into consideration for a Top anything may be different from what I’d take into consideration as my Top 7, criteria that ultimately determine where I choose to stay.

The approach that makes sense to me is to leverage the best of both experts and Joes and put the seeker of information in the driver’s seat to determine the quality and sources of the content they want to see, or not. Towards this mean, I think Google has the right approach, albeit too comprehensive — I don’t know anyone who sifts through millions of pages of results; the experts probably don’t even do this.

Much of the web commerce investments over the last decade have been focused on the transactional side of the purchasing process. These investments have reduced the barriers to entry for merchants of all sizes in every vertical to list their products or services in an online catalog (e.g. eBay, Amazon, Expedia), to drive traffic to the catalog by placing online advertisements in niche and highly trafficked sites (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN), and to make it easy for consumers to pay with confidence (e.g. PayPal, VeriSign). However, not much has been done on identifying and satisfying the personal drivers of purchasing.

The rise of social networks and communities has created a lot of user generated content. This “We-Me” web intersects with web commerce in the form of reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. These user reviews enhanced consumer knowledge beyond the information sellers disclosed; their presumably unbiased feedback enabled consumers to better understand what to expect. The increase of user reviews as a result of the growth of the social web has created a long tail of reviews, which means reviews that address specific personal needs and preferences probably exist for most product and service categories. The content to address your personal drivers of purchase is probably somewhere in the long tail.

But the trick is finding just the reviews that are relevant to your personal purchasing criteria, and if you can find them, how do you know you may trust the sources? In this scenario, using popularity (measured by views or external links to pages) to determine relevance and trustworthiness is like seeking medical advice by surveying the entire medical community and having the doctor with the most patients bubbling to the top. This type of approach may work for common ailments like “how to treat a cold,” but it wouldn’t work for more specialized needs. Just as current methods of finding personally relevant reviews on the web doesn’t work when your needs extend beyond things like brand name, price, product attributes and location.