We spent a lot of the summer visiting the senior executives at major agencies, talking about the world, figuring out what we could offer them and what they could offer us. It was an interesting experience because the overwhelming sense we got was that the communications world was on the cusp of a big transformation.

The structure of communications in large companies is that comms and marketing directors come and go. They have between 18 months and 3 years to make their mark and they depart for another brand and another gig. The agency world is structured to respond to this. Every few years a major account is repitched as the new guy or girl comes in, and everyone does their best job of reinventing the brand, putting a new stamp on it. All of these pitches are done on spec, rather quickly and with very little budget for detailed research. The results can sometimes be wonderful, but they are overwhelming driven by anecdote, by instinct and by sheer creative flair.

Brands and businesses in all the all the other aspects of their existence operate a very different ecology. They try to acquire parters, resellers, customers with long term value, cherish them, develop them, nurture them. An 18 months or even a 3 year relationship would indicate a major failure. Real value comes from consistency, honesty, trust built over a long period. The lessons learnt by brands who listen to online conversations are that their good name is hard won and easily lost. Social media marketing when it is effective attempts to build on the micro-interactions (thank you David Armano) of brand and customer. Spending is on good customer service, small but incremental improvements in product. Not on bold statements.

So the big agencies like Tribal DDB are launching start ups (step forward Radar DDB) created from a core team based on one techy, one adman and one PR person. The structure of the new agency has to be more geared to creating longterm value by doing small things well over a long period. Customer understanding is very important, as is a longterm relationship with the client.

This creates a challenge on the client side too, because the client to be effective needs to be in place for longer. Marketing people need to be recruited from customer services, from product research, from PR. The marketing of brands and companies in a bold, splashy cycle with a 2-3 year interval won’t go away, but it will gradually lose ground to an approach based on slower, incremental changes. This is the “everyday value” idea of the retailers. It brings us closer to a view of the brand being driven by customer experience, not by billboards.

The business of Market Sentinel and companies like us is not data, but intelligence. It is about discovering the relationships between brands, businesses and their stakeholders and helping our clients find the right metrics to discover what they need to know to grow their business. What we have been discovering in the summer and since is that there are some agencies, or teams within those agencies, who instinctively get the importance of using the technology of the web to understand and link with the customer. Beeline Laboratories, Edelman, Web Liquid, KMP all do a good job here. But their lives are still difficult. The world is still set up for the old way of doing things.

In the meantime the impact of the credit crunch is like a glacier bearing down on the industry, ripping apart traditional structures and budgets, destroying the fabric of the old agency. My hunch is that these techy agencies, with their emphasis on technology and long term relationships and with their lower cost structures, will inherit the world.

Charles Cooper on CNet points at Dell’s neat use of Twitter to spread the word about bargains.

The New York Times has an interesting network map (an ego-net) featuring the disgraced Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois politician charged with hawking President-elect Obama’s Senate seat. It is interesting how much of the doubtful behaviour complained of apparently happened via the Governor’s proxies.

Paul Fabretti of Manchester-based digital social media agency KMP and recorded a podcast yesterday about methodologies for measuring the ROI on social media marketing. Facebook Connect loomed large in our conversation as did the differing requirements of clients from a marketing or a corp comms background. The podcast is here (24mb; about 25 minutes)

On E-consultancy.com I examined the potential for TV programme makers to use social media as an tool to monitor viewer opinion.

See the article here.

By Leon Bailey-Green.

Motrin is a US pain killer. They have posted a video ad on YouTube from the perspective of a Mom who resents having to carry a heavy infant and is looking for pain medication to cure her back problem. (Why doesn’t she just stop carrying the baby, you may ask.) This is the wrong message (too negative), and the wrong audience (nursing moms). I came across the story because it was the most linked video in Technorati. Motrin are getting a public lynching in YouTube comments. They have withdrawn the ad and apologised.

We were talking to a pharma client yesterday about the rules of online communication. They were discussing how difficult it is to put across “negative” messages, being specific about the problems drugs are supposed to address: back pain, bad breath, period pains etc. This is only an issue with “push” ads, though. Clients should be educated away from using virals to address these kinds of problems. Search is much better. Customers with young kids go to the web to search for the answers to all kinds of problems.

Motrin had a perfectly sensible idea - a Mom with a bad back might need a painkiller - but the way to communicate it was not through a viral ad. They should have created “pull” resources for young mothers, about common problems experienced by young mothers and put the information about Motrin into an FAQ. Their target audience would have found the content through Google and noted the benefits of the practical information about motherhood, as well as the association with Motrin. Positive, warm feelings would have resulted.

Not the current mass freakout by angry Moms.

Unable to get away from headlines of an economic crisis, who better to make sense of how to manage fiscal change than the woman at the helm of a company who survived the stock market crash of 2001?

Promoting entrepreneurialism for Enterprise Week Lastminute.com’s Martha Lane Fox told the BBC that online is key to the solution for businesses to survive the global downturn.

 ”A pound invested online is far more effective than one spent offline” say Martha, who is sure the harsh economic climate will see organisations forced to turn to online because of its ability to “track impact carefully”.

More than ever knowing what’s delivering ROI and brand awareness is important.

The beauty of the internet is that it can be used to measure and track both online and offline campaigns, something that can’t be said the other way around.

By monitoring conversations in social media, brands can cleverly find out whether above-the-line campaigns have the necessary impact in the psyche of target customers to positively affect purchasing decisions.

Online campaigns by their very nature are the most measurable of all. Whether its purchases or data capture, brands have the ability to track actions made by customers on their website.

Bob’s Guide points at a new report from Corporate Insight looking at how the Financial Services sector is adopting social media.

Here is a précis of Bob’s summary:

The brokers: OptionsXpress, Scottrade, Vanguard, Wells Fargo and Zecco have YouTube commercials based on their web offer, E*Trade reruns their TV commercials. TradeKing (10,700+ participants) and Zecco’s (38,000+ participants) communities feature open membership with full participation for individuals whether or not they have an account. Members who hold accounts are allowed to display their portfolio performance on a percentage basis. Schwab and Scottrade’s online communities are for customers only. Schwab’s (approximately 4,200 members) is restricted to active traders who make more than 36 trades per year, while Scottrade’s community (approximately 8,000 members) is open to all clients. TD Ameritrade offers a sentiment tracking tool on its website that allows clients to vote on the daily performance of a stock and see how other traders are voting. Fidelity has taken a cautious approach to social media; the firm hosts a community for its WealthLab Pro users but not for its broader client base.

Banking/Credit Cards: 8 of 20 companies surveyed use YouTube. Wells Fargo participated in the virtual world Second Life before branching out with its own Stagecoach Island community targeting Gen Y customers. American Express, Bank of America and Capital One have also developed their own online communities to serve small business owners. Visa has launched its own Facebook application targeting small business owners, a one-of-a-kind in the industry.

Annuity Issuers: Annuity issuers target older consumers who are the least likely to participate in social media. AXA and TIAA-CREF maintain online communities directed at retirees. New York Life lets public site users rate and bookmark pages using popular share sites like Digg.

Mutual Funds: Mutual fund company executives say they are being held back by compliance departments, but are pretty conservative about the web in general. T. Rowe Price uses social media for internal training of seasonal tax representatives.

There is no word on how many are tracking ROI on these activities, which perhaps chimes with the companies’ characterisation of their efforts as “experimental”.

Hearty congratulations to Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States. The big difference between Obama and first Senator Clinton his Democratic rival and then Senator McCain his Republican rival lay in his power to motivate grass roots support and then harness it using the internet. Whilst his competitors relied on paid workers for many tasks, Obama used volunteers sourced from the internet. Half of all the money he raised (a staggering $650m) came from small donations of less than $200.

Bloomberg’s Jonathan D. Salant has a good piece about this:

“Obama, 47, went after the small donors early and returned to them often. He took in $8 million online in the first quarter of 2007, quadruple the campaign’s goal of $2 million, [Obama strategist] Axelrod said. At a February 2007 rally in Las Vegas, Obama volunteers fanned through the crowd, gathering the names and e- mail addresses of people who could be asked for small donations again and again.

“Almost half of Obama’s money came from people giving $200 or less, compared with 34 percent for Arizona Senator McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group. In 2004, 31 percent of Massachusetts Senator Kerry’s money and 32 percent of Bush’s funds came from donors who gave $200 or less.”

Obama’s success in raising small donations made it possible for him to eschew Federal funding, which came with its own limits. This meant he could outspend McCain and he did so handsomely. Salantz again:

“With his extra money, Obama almost tripled McCain’s advertising expenditures as Election Day drew near. He spent $21.5 million to McCain’s $7.5 million from Oct. 21-28, according to a University of Wisconsin study. During the last weekend of the campaign, Obama ran 5,947 ads in seven competitive states compared with 3,358 for McCain, 77 percent more, according to the Nielsen Co. On Nov. 3, Obama ran 3,410 ads in those states; McCain ran 1,900.

“Even before the final ad blitz, Obama had spent $190.2 million on media, compared with $76.7 million by McCain. The money allowed him to both fend off McCain’s attacks and go on the offensive. In addition, he was able to expand his campaign to states traditionally inhospitable to Democratic presidential candidates, such as Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana.”

It didn’t stop with money. On election day campaign volunteers who wanted to help get out the vote could go online, log in and to pick up the phone numbers of fellow Americans to urge them to go the polls. How much more effective this was than the alternative “robo dialler” methods (where the potential supporter is contacted by an automated phone call) can be seen from the results. Obama’s success derived in part from empowering grass roots support using new technology to allow participation.

Whereas in previous campaigns gurus like Karl Rove had used a sophisticated understanding of social networks to target key communities with messaging in relation to key voting issues (gay marriage, abortion), Obama used the Internet to galvanise key communities into active practical and financial support for his campaign.

There are lessons here for anyone who wants to understand to communicate and to connect in the new economy.

David Armano of Critical Mass, author of an excellent blog on social media - what he calls micro interactions - gives us his perspective in a podcast interview (10 mins) on ways to measure in social media, and how to judge ROI.

(P.S. Because I couldn’t figure out how to work the CallBurner software the conversation ends with a namecheck for French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard - coiner of the term “grand narratives” - whose idea of “petits récits” has some resonances with David’s micro interaction idea)

To get a better understanding of what constitutes best practice in social media measurement and evaluation, we thought the simplest thing to do was to “eat our own dog food” and use our own social media measurement tools to determine who had influence on the topic of “social media measurement” and then look in detail at what they had to say. We wanted to know who owned the consensus around the topic.

First we used Market Sentinel’s proprietary web crawler to undertake a MarketInfluence study. In this case, a “stakeholder” is any individual or organisation who is mentioned in the context of “social media measurement”. Our web crawler finds these stakeholders by following a three step process:

1) Search the web and identify documents (web pages, Word, pdf or PowerPoint documents) that reference “social media measurement”

2) Search those documents for references to other documents

3) Visit the referenced document and determine whom they reference

The analysis is focused on identifying who references whom. The process continues until the context is lost. When all possible citations have been found we perform a “citation analysis” to determine who in the conversation is

a) most popular (i.e. most linked in the context) b) most influential (i.e. most linked by those who themselves are most linked) c) more central to the network

Citaton analysis has been used since the sixties to calculate the authority of academic journals. Here, we use it to analyse web documents for references. For example, a document by Seth Godin refers to a document by BBC News in the context of “social media measurement”, then we take it that Seth Godin deems BBC News to be relevant to the issue. It also means that, on average, BBC News to some extent influences Seth Godin. References like these are turned into systems of mathematical equations which we can solve to determine “popularity”, “influence” and centrality.

Our influence metric works much like that of academic journals, where academic authors cite the works of other academics. They mainly do this because they believe that the articles they cite are relevant to the context. In doing so, they point to other publications that are relevant to their topic thereby revealing which publications have influenced them. We use a similar approach to measure influence in social media measurement.

At the heart of this type of influence measurement is a simple idea: Person X has influence on Person Y regarding a particular issue if Person Y is dependent on Person X for information or to support point of view about the issue. For example, BBC News influences Seth Godin regarding “social media measurement” if Seth Godin depends on BBC News for information. Seth Godin may demonstrate this dependency by linking to a BBC News article in a blog post. Our influence measurement works by searching relevant documents for such links and transforming these relationships into a system of equations which we then solve as a relative measure of influence.

What emerges from this process is a league table of influencers, which might be compared to Google’s pagerank, except that it is topic-specific, a network map showing how these speakers or entities are linked, and various mathematical measures showing how their status in the network can be determined.

The value of this procedure, which Market Sentinel has used many times for its large brand customers, is to achieve a God-like understanding of any given conversation, who is involved in it and how it is articulated, and to understand where the major themes in that conversation spring from and can therefore be influenced.

Here is the leage table of influencers, showing who is most authoritative on the topic of social media measurement/evaluation. [Update in response to Katie Paine’s comment] The analysis was completed during August 2008 and updated earlier in October.

[Click for full table]

In calculating influence, we obtain a “virtual social network” which shows how the top influencers influence eachother. The map helps us determine if any stakeholder groups cluster together in interesting ways.

(Click for full-size network. Please note that the figure does not show all the stakeholders, but just a very detailed close-up of the centre of the influence network. If all stakeholders were included it would be virtually impossible to identify individual stakeholders.)

The size of each stakeholder’s marker indicates their relative influence.

The network maps are constructed using an approach called “minimum spring force layout”. Imagine the relations between the nodes are springs and that the stiffness of each spring is proportional to the strength of the relation. The nodes are then arranged so the total force used to “stretch” all springs is at a minimum.

The main advantage of the network map is that it clusters stakeholders based on the strength of their influence relations. The closer two stakeholders appear on this map the more they influence each other, even if that influence is indirect via one or more other stakeholders. This gives an idea of how closely related individual stakeholders are.

So what’s the story here? Google is here because of its omnipresence in matters internet-related. It has also recently applied for a patent for applying a version of pagerank within social networks. YouTube, Facebook, Technorati and Yahoo! are prominent for similar reasons: a combination of mindshare in the context (particularly true of Facebook, where the lack of metrics is a major issue) and of relevant content.

The story thereafter is of a conversation dominated by Forrester, whose Charlene Li (she left in 2008, but has been consolidated in this data) has been extremely important in atomising the debate around the development of social media and whose “Groundswell” encapsulates many of the great cases studies of the last 3-4 years. Her co-author on the book Josh Bernoff maintains the Groundswell blog. Next is Jeremiah Owyang. He has not been consolidated with Forrester because he was part of this conversation in his own right before he joined them. Jen McClure’s Society for New Communications Research has - equally - published a number of great resources on the topic. Katie Paine is a guru of PR measurement in all its flavours and so finding her here is no surprise.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and Robert Scoble are here in part because of their relevance in two of the stories that defined the era which witnessed the arrival of social media: Dell Hell (the story of Dell’s failure to comprehend social media and then their enthusiastic conversion to it) and in Scoble’s case the opening up of Microsoft to the outside world (symbolised by Scoble’s work) and Scoble’s own subsequent career as a “star” of social media in his own right. Scoble’s co-author Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods follows hard on Scoble’s heels.

The presence of Seth Godin (marketing guru) and of Steve Rubel (PR guru) demonstrates the twin poles around which the area of social media evaluation revolves. Marketing folk need to understand how people have responded to their campaigns, public relations folk want to understand key conversations and influencers with whom they can connect.

Actually, they have interests that are increasingly identical and interchangeable, but marketing and PR stubbornly refuse to converge, partly because they employ such different methods. Marketing people create assets (campaigns, websites, virals, creative) and PR people create conversations, person to person engagement. The pressure of social media’s rise is forcing the two disciplines to borrow increasingly from one another’s toolkit, but they are not yet in the same world.

As we examine the measurement methodologies each apply it will be interesting to establish how much they are beginning to ask the same questions of the data. How many responses received? How many conversations started? What is my awareness level? How many products have I sold?

An interesting sidelight on this story is provided by a glance at the list of the top ten connectors. This group is defined by their characteristic of disproportionately citation of the most authoritative sources.

1. Jeremiah Owyang
   
2. Constantin Basturea
   
3. Josh Hallett’s Blog
   
4. Livingston Communications
   
5. Forrester
   
6. Peter Kim
   
7. Kami Watson Huyse’s Blog
   
8. Shel Holtz
   
9. Market Sentinel
   
10. Nathan Gilliatt
    

These folk offer a kind of directory of quality sources in this context and I suppose this blog post continues Market Sentinel’s work in this area.

In our next posts, we will look in detail at the ideas of individual stakeholders about how social media should be measured and see if we can define a growing consensus.

Well, here is a concrete example of the return on investment from monitoring and responding to social media. Last year our client Cadbury relaunched the Wispa bar in response to a campaign for its reintroduction, advised by us. Their UK sales are up 11% over the quarter, global sales up 6%.

The huge success of Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live parodies of Sarah Palin (see above) has pointed up something the TV networks increasingly see as a great new opportunity. Great TV is finding a big part of its audience online. Fey’s hilarious (and kind of affectionate) Palin impersonation in the VP debate parody has received 5m views online in the 48 hours after broadcast according to the New York Daily News. This points up something brands are beginning to spot too. If you find great content, and distribute it online, it will take your brand along with it. Congratulations to Oil of Olay, who have made the trip on this occasion.

How do you build brands post-Google?

As the recession begins to bite, brands are finding that getting through to customers is tougher than ever.

Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

This is partly because online media is growing at the expense of offline. A UK survey by Media Week showed that time spent for both live/realtime TV and teletext tv decreased by 1% and 2% respectively between 2006 and 2007, while internet usage by 50%; an IDC study of U.S. consumer online behavior found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

It is partly because of the rise in ad avoidance strategies. DVRs owners (according to an IBM survey) watch at least 50% of television programming on replay, thus avoiding television advertising. It is partly because of a major decline in public trust in brands. People trust people more than they trust the media. In a 2006 survey of U.S. consumers, Forrester found that 83% of respondents trusted friends’ opinion, but only 75% trust product reviews in a newspaper, magazine or TV. (Groundswell, Charline Li and Josh Bernhoff).

The answer would seem to be to move the business online. More than half of the world’s Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen. The web also seems to offer promising growth for advertisers: Nielsen estimates that spending on online advertising will escalate at 19.2 per cent annually till 2012 and will surpass the TV advertising budget in the US in the next decade.

But advertising on the web poses challenges. Online banner click-throughs on Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have declined from 0.75% to 0.27% according to ad monitoring firm Eyeblaster.

Paid search ads now represent the lion’s share of online ad spending. Contextual search ads are great for selling specific factual propositions (flights to Malaga, hotels in Brussels) but they are less effective at communicating emotion. In a recent report from The Wharton School, marketing professor Patti Williams observes that it’s unclear how a company like Crest can leverage search advertising: “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand-building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”

A 2007 global Nielsen survey found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78 percent of the study’s respondents. And there are perhaps clues for advertisers in the shift of online consumers to social networking sites. In the UK, social networks overtook webmail by percentage of visits in 2007, with social networks accounting for 5.17% of all Internet visits compared to 4.98% for email services. Advertisers want to follow consumers but that’s difficult. When you are chatting to a friend the last thing you want is to be interrupted with a clumsy brand message. Privacy settings in most networks preclude direct marketing. Facebook recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual advertising.

So how do Brands engage with the consumer in a way that provokes conversation and endorsement? The most successful strategies for engagement with social media is for a brand do something which allows people to pass on a key message about your brand.

People can talk about you for three reasons:

You have given them useful information.

H&R Block set out to build awareness of their online tax return offering by creating content customised for channels. The budget was 5% of their annual digital spend only 0.5% of their total ad spend. They grew awareness 52%, and saw an 11% growth in tax services business, feeding net income which rose to $544m from an $86m loss the previous year.

Giant Food Stores increased monthly consumer website visits by 400% after lauching a “Super Shopping List”, which lets customers easily browse recipes, view weekly specials, and create a personal shopping list.
Brand discussion goes beyond the product itself. The entire process and value system around which a product created is also a source of conversation.

You have entertained them.

The hugely popular Cadbury Dairy Milk campaign which featured a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” received 7m views online, more than 6,000 comments and boosted Cadbury revenues by 5% for that year. (Gorilla ad works its magic on sales of Cadbury bars ).

This jokey video from Philips Norelco Bodygroom raised the issue of persuading men to shave “below the neck” in the summer 2006. The video (cross-posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com) has been viewed 1.8m times, it boosted unaided awareness 8% and contributed to year-on-year growth of 17% for the DAP division (of which shavers represent 45%) to Q1 2007.

There is something in your product that they respond to.

Jeep’s “Have fun out there” website aggregates communities from where they already exist, such as Facebook and Flickr, to create its own uber-community where members drive the content.

The t-shirt company Threadless has used community as a mode to build its business by allowing members of the website to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. The top designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store with winning designers getting a cash prize and store merchandise. What started as a hobby in 2005 by founder Jake Nickell has been growing quickly with annual sales on track to hit $5 million in 2008.

The last is the best because it means that consumers have engaged with your brand and are doing your marketing for you. With the additional benefit that they are marketing to people who are inclined to believe their testimonials. It is also the hardest to achieve. New online measurement techniques (such as those used by Market Sentinel) offer the opportunity to chart how effective brand building in online by directly measuring response to creative campaigns, by gauging consumer engagement and by changing the creative to take account of live consumer responses. But how do you measure such responses. A consensus about this is only now beginning to emerge and we will deal with this in our next post.

Market Sentinel were lucky enough to be selected to take part in the UK department of Trade’s “Digital Mission” to New York’s Web 2.0 exhibition. We will be in New York throughout the coming week 14-19th September, contactable via Crowdvine or on the normal email addresses.

Mark Rogers recently did a podcast for the company Knexus looking at the next generation of social marketing. We looked at how to do social marketing using case studies from Cadbury, Sony, Avis and H&R Block, and assessed how to measure the results. Here is the deck to accompany the podcast.

Today I interviewed a job applicant who had recently completed a stint at a well-known financial public relations company. I asked whether she had used any tools to understand online conversations. To my astonishment she said that not only was this not the case, but that the PR company in question actually banned their employees from using Facebook.

A new survey bears out that banning social media applications is pretty common amongst UK employers. Comprehensible behaviour for some businesses maybe, but for a PR business whose major interest is in communication, in creating links between people, in understanding opinions and trying to shape them, this is strange behaviour indeed. Understanding Facebook, and applications like it, is a key part of the public relations function as it should exist in businesses today. PR practices that don’t engage with these media will find over time that they are addressing a smaller and smaller part of the market.

Web monitoring throws up anomalies. When is a story marked as new and date-stamped? When the page is updated? Or when it is crawled?

Since the process is totally automated errors can occur. For example when an old news item about United Airlines filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection got picked up from The South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s website by a financial newsletter it got pushed into the “most-viewed items” section”. Google news gave it a current datestamp and courtesy of the Bloomberg wire service it was syndicated to the markets. The stock briefly crashed from $12.30 to $3 before the error was spotted.

[Update Saturday 12th September] The Times of London has a good follow-up to this story, tracing the exact sequence of events and drawing attention to the role played throughout by automated systems. Automation caused the story to be listed as the most popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel website, Google News picked it up automatically, traders responded to the headline, Bloomberg cited the headline when the stock started moving and automated selling programmes did the rest. Anyone who stopped to actually read and understand the story (complete with references at the stock price of $0.97 which clearly signalled its inaccuracy) would have known the story was old. But they would have been the losers, because every other system was in full “sell” mode.

When we first started pitching to institutions in the City of London a few years back a big fund manager said: can’t the analysis of stories be totally automated? We replied that it could only ever be semi-automated because human intelligence was required to interpret the patterns of sentiment, volume and authority. Part of their questioning leaned on the idea that automated tools for understanding conversations could be linked to automated trading tools. This is a dangerous idea - as the United Airlines story proves.

Penguin books have teamed up with Match.com to allow book lovers to find others with similar tastes. It adds value and shrewdly targets UK readers, who are predominantly female. Congratulations on a neat idea. It could be the start of a terrific online community - the best idea since the London Review of Books opened a tea shop.

Cadbury have announced the momentous decision to bring back the Wispa bar permanently. The Wispa was originally reintroduced in a limited edition in 2007 after Cadbury’s responded to an online campaign for its return*.

23 million bars were sold in seven weeks and the success of the revival has encouraged Mars to rebrand Snickers as Marathon and Starburst as Opal Fruits.

Mark Borkowski is the legendary publicist employed by Cadbury to tell the world about the return of the Wispa. He comments: “A consumer campaign like this is a Godsend to a brand. It tells you that there are people out there who are passionate enough to badger their friends about your product. That means you have a large, unpaid sales force out there banging the drum for you.

“The temptation is to interfere, to market to those people. But they don’t want to be marketed to, they just want the product. The best thing you can do for them is to act. And that’s what Cadbury have done, by bringing the Wispa back.”

Borkowski this week publishes The Fame Formula a study of how celebrity is achieved and maintained. He has discovered that the natural lifespan of a celebrity from a standing start is 15 months. Are brands subject to the same law?

Borkowski thinks they have something in common: “The most long lasting brands are the ones that people bring into their lives, and make an emotional connection with. Some brands share the characteristic all celebrities aspire to: they achieve our loyal affection. The feeling for Wispa lived on even after the brand disappeared.”

*Full disclosure: Market Sentinel are retained by Cadbury and monitored the consumer campaign campaign for the return of Wispa on their behalf.