Thorell Associates

We do.

On June 19, I leave for Petrapavlosk in the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia where I am promised  "mountains raising their gleaming white heads into a cerulean blue sky, of hillsides covered in a profusion of wildflowers, of stretches of Siberian "raiga", of rivers fringed by reeds and woodlands, of forest of birch and conifer". Only accessible by land or by sea.

Surrounded by 100 volcanoes,68 of which are active (comprising 10% of the total Earth's active volcanos----hence the Russian's have their Institute of Vulcanology here) this truly is a place for those seeking TNRIs (Totally New Retinal Images) as well as  those of us who might just be a tad jealous of John Muir's wintering in Yosemite Valley. For this is a most volatile region of the Earth called The Ring of Fire--part of the high tectonic shifting along the Pacific Rim, it comprises part of the string of volcanoes that mark this rim of the Pacific Ocean.

Unlike San Francisco quakes and Mt St Helens, these do not make the news: They are too frequent and obviously too remote.

From PBS' Siberia's Ring of Fire: Forbidden Wilderness...

 A region of Kamchatka called the Valley of Death has been especially lethal to animals. Numerous vents in the Valley release a heavy, odorless, toxic gas. When the wind blows from a certain direction, the entire Valley is filled with this gas, suffocating any animals (and humans) present. During one recent year six bears, four foxes and three hares perished, along with dozens of crows and assorted rodents.

All of the above may have you asking: Why am I going there?

Then of course there is Gorely Lake - in above photo. No,that's not photoshopped. That's a lake of pure hydrochloric acid.

This too may have you asking: Why am I going there?

Loaded into zodiac boats with Russians (and hopefully a good supply of caviar and vodka on occasion, given the risks and consequences of being here) I cannot think of a place more remote and free from civilization and pr agency discontents.

And a place to meet surely one of the 120,000 remaining walruses in this region (see map above).  As impossible as it is to envision this from my desk here in Orlando, I do hope shortly to blow a puff of air into a walrus' face -- a gesture  they apparently appreciate. And to hear them sing. This all seems quite wonderfully eccentric to me for a 2,200 lb "perverse lump" as a Times writer dubbed walruses.

But sad to say, to those of us who track global warming data, I'm afraid the geologists in our group will be pointing out that the ice caps on the mountains, in previous years an everpresent fixture of the landscape, will not be so thick or everpresent. 

My greatest fear is that I'll actually see walruses fighting over the few scant ice floes they leave their young on when they hunt. After all, I've read in Imaging Notes that scientists have been studying the recent exposure of over one million square miles of open water, as measured through remote sensing satellite monitoring. As reported in the New York Times (Andrew Revkin, Oct., 2007), satellite and buoy data show that winds have been pushing think old ice out of the Arctic basin past Greenland, leaving behind only thinner ice that melts more rapidly under summer conditions. (Note being a PR person - I love satellite data as it is relatively difficult to "spin".  It is not that the data cannot be visually biased to omit a scientist's bias, eg. setting the threshold value for pseudo-coloring to be high or low,  so much as the peer group which guards this easily dispells such a bias.)

 The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center had previously projected a 2050 or 2070 ice-free summer ocean in the Arctic, and now have moved that projection forward to as early as 2030. 

Since it's 2008, well, I have my concerns.

So I've come to see if the dots connect between what we witness in this remote place of ice and what is projected to come, far closer

 to this desk I sit at in Orlando.

Sea-level  rise simulations by Jared T. Williams Copyright (c) Daniel P. Schrag. Source: Fueling our Future, Harvard Magazine, May 2006

To read more why we are going to this strange remote place, check out this great NY Times piece on the walrus.

And though we're a bit south of this, we're greatly inspired also by Imaging Notes, The Need for Mapping Polar Bear Habitat Collapse written by Timothy Foresman, President of the International Centre for Remote Sensing Education.

Yours truly- speaking for the walrus and polar bear - the only PR I'll be doing for the next two weeks is Planet Reverence.

lisa

  (psst....click to enlarge)

Yes, we have a lobby.

A great conference room.

High security (okay, a surveillance camera & a shredder)

A utility room (no more expensive restaurants, we're crunching away on client projects)

Oh -  but when you visit us,

the BEST sushi restaurant in Orlando (perhaps even outside Tokyo ;-))

And there's more....

The Orlando Executive Airport for you to fly your private jet in. (We're on their property.)

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and for the rest, here are driving directions.

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As an occasional reality check, most CEOs like to know how their attitudes and actions on a business subject compare against those of their peers.  How are other CEOs establishing and extending their influence with their industry?  What investments are they making to stimulate word of mouth about their company? Such regular comparisons are useful in identifying areas where one's thinking might need midcourse correction.

Recently, PRWeek and Burson-Marsteller published their annual survey of 144 CEOs, asking them about their attitudes and actions on a number of public relations fronts. (Note 70% of those surveyed ran a company with an annual revenue of $10 million or more.)

Below we present six key findings that  you can compare against your own company's PR initiatives.  Many of their views  and PR investments should not be surprising.  However,  if you,  as a CEO yourself, find  many surprising -- well, that's possibly a warning signal  for a midcourse correction.

Key Findings from The 2007 PrWeek CEO Annual Survey Findings

Being an Industry Influencer

No surprise -some 85% of CEOs believe it is "extremely important" to be perceived as an influencer in their industry. (We've provided an iconic example in our photo. Mr. Jobs and his iPod epitomize the advantage of calling out new rules for competitors. After all, defining new rules is the height of "influence".

Speaking of Speaking...

  79%  of CEOs include the following two tactics to increase influence: Speaking at community events and personally communicating with top customers.

72% of CEOs speak at conferences, participate in corporate sponsorships and use opportunities to  network with other CEOs.

68% state they provide online tools for their existing customers to tell  others about the product or service experiences with the company.

          

55% collect information on which customers operate within larger social networks that might be leveraged.

 

Nearly  51% state they have designed a marketing program to generate word-of-mouth.

How Does Your PR IQ Compare?

While we do not suggest that the answers to any one question from this multi-industry group of CEOs  represent a standard, we do believe the entire group of answers provides a useful benchmark.   Minimally, if your own company's actions diverge markedly from not one, but  several of the majority opinions and actions here, that may well indicate unexploited PR opportunities (best case) or competitive exposures (worst case).

Certainly,  not making time for speaking opportunities, not outreaching to peer CEOs to match perspectives and not investing in word-of-mouth marketing programs --- all these co-occuring in one company -should cause a CEO to reconsider and revise his/her PR strategy.  With increasing consensus that we are heading into a recessionary business period, better communications with key customers is a corporate "nutritional supplement"  that few can afford not to take.

A simplified but still useful view of today's E-commerce environment is that the world is divided into two discrete spaces: Places that sell and Places that provide news, reviews and ratings of the products or services for sale. Much of the PR (public relations) world infrastructure is in fact dedicated to connecting these two spaces, whether the reviews & ratings are from traditional print and broadcast, industry influencers, customers or new media such as blog pundits, social networks or podcast shows.

WOM as a Sales Supermagnet

Within the past three years or so, there's been a growing awareness of the role of Word of Mouth or WOM as an influence  in customer purchases. And it isn't just any mouth that matters. There's a growing mass realization that WOM in the form of recommendations and testimonials from friends, family and co-workers may serve as a form of sales supermagnet, pulling forward a customer buy decision.

Here are some examples of data supporting the view of WOM as a sales supermagnet:

•  According to a 2006 survey of by the Annenberg School of Communications and PR firm Ketchem, advice from friends and family is used by nearly half (43.7%) of consumers, while nearly one out of four (or 23.2%) follow advice from co-workers. The slide shows the strong impact of friends and family across a wide range of buy decisions (though significantly, not your cousin Harvey's stock tip to you)

• A study by e-marketing expert, MarketingSherpa, cites that 86.9% of consumers say they trust a friend's recommendation over a review by a critic.
• As described by the Center for Media Research, a recent survey by Deloitte Consumer Products Group finds that 62% of consumers read consumer-written online reviews - and significantly- 7 out of 10 pass this information onto family and friends.

As of a few months ago, the most popular application on Facebook was ilike. iLike’s music application enables Facebook users to:

• Learn when one of their favorite artists is going on tour in their area, and see who among their Facebook friends will be attending.
• Search and add streaming music from their favorite artists to their Facebook profile.
• Discover new music by following what their friends like and via personalized recommendations of free MP3s.

Today's Rule-Changer: BazaareVoice's ShareThisTM

Enter: The WOM Supermagnet, tunneling customers from product review spaces to product sales.

In an Oct 19th press release, BazaarVoice launched ShareThis, a new service complementing their enterprise social commerce  platform. (BazaareVoice's software enabling product reviews is already in use by the likes of Dell, Macy's, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC and Sears.)  In a nutshell, ShareThis is an app that integrates onto a retailer's product page within the review summary, as well as with each specific reviews. Consumers can click on a ShareThis icon to publish any review - their own or some else- to Facebook, Digg or del.icio.us. The published review includes the retailer's logo and the review itself, as well a direct link back to the retailer's web site.

What Rules Will It Change?

Applications like ShareThis and other social media apps promise to change the boundary between reading reviews of a product and purchasing it, directly transporting a reader from awareness and education into the purchase experience.

And indeed there's a lot of market. Only 25 percent of online retailers have incorporated customer reviews on their e-commerce sites, according to a January 2007 Forrester Research report. (The low adoption is because many e-tailers fear losing control over their marketing messages.)

Exactly What will it Change?

We believe apps like ShareThis, or more realistically, the open source clones that will follow, have the capability to trigger a host of market changes.

• Proliferation of Consumer-generated Product Reviews. It will become common for an online purchaser, post two weeks after a product purchase, to receive an email including a widget,  inviting them to post a review, enticing other prospective purchasers to cross the line.
• Review Sites lose Ad Revenue. Because of this fundamental sea change, there will be less necessity for sellers to solicit formal expert reviews, forcing a contraction in the advertising spending on formal review sites.
• Ecclipse of Blog Punditry. In this not-so-distant future, with so many genuine customers now enabled to post their reviews, we anticipate lower influence for blog pundits who currently hold much sway in product reviews.
• Rise of Authenticators. Related to the above, we believe there will be increasing necessity to establish the authenticity of posted reviews, hence we expect the market for 3rd party clearing houses providing authentication systems verifying the credibility of reviewers, making transparent the identity of 'paid for' commenters. (To a certain extent,we have already seen this emerge in systems like the Technorati 'authority ranking' of posters - still vastly unexploited yet.)
• "Blink and It's Gone" Product Cycles. Finally, with the  capability for the "real scoop' on a hot new product or service being so widely disseminated, sales cycles of products are expected to shorten.  (The good news is faster uptake and market penetration; the flip-side is still newer, hotter competitor's products also come up on the radar more quickly).

But We Already Knew All This!

In some ways, there is nothing new here. The buzz is on that buzz is working. Readers of Gladwell's The Tipping Point are familiar with the concept of 'mavens', people who set cultural trends, who know what's cool before the rest of the world even knows it exists. Or 'connectors', people with immense rolodexes, who can spread a trend extremely widely and quickly. And of course, the sales power behind "people like me" reviews has been well appreciated since Amazon's succcessful software feature, "People who bought this book also bought...". Simply put, consumers have a keen interest in what people like them (or who'd they like to be) are buying.

 In a social media network setting, the viral spread of purchasing excitement has in fact become a core goal on online retailers. The success of Woot.com and Stylehive.com amply demonstrates the point: When surrounded by a community of "think-alot-alikers", a pre-purchaser's uncertainty and doubt can be gloriously swept aside in a wave of enthusiasm, a rapid flow of information including knowing "what's truly cool", all culminating in a purchase partially motivated to be cool too. For what some of these retailers have learned is that there's a double cachet: Buy a cool product and you can  turn your friends onto the product. (Voila- you're a maven!)

For marketers, what is different  about the new conversational marketing tools and what promises an exciting new e-commerce future is simply this: The space and time between learning about a product and buying it is contracting rapidly.

Related Links:

Bazaarevoice ShareThis^TM press release

'Reinforcing the Blockbuster Nature of Media': The Impact of Online Recommenders (Knowledge@Wharton)

In commemoration of Blog Action Day, we post one sentence and its context which captures the exigency surrounding the topics of Global Warming and Climate Change. 

Action is necessary now before climate change grows beyond man's control."

  Source: Last sentence of the announcement of the  2007 Nobel Peace Prize