Rhiz.Antho.Us

Using online social networks for marketing purposes has been a dream of advertisers for a long time. Many efforts have been made to influence the hearts and minds of the online communities ranging from creating large-scale profile pages and launching undercover marketing campaigns to buying banner ads directly from social network sites and paying millions of dollars for search ads.

• Consumers as producers in the digital world

  Unfortunately for advertisers, it is not that easy to harness the power of social media, and only a small number of their initiatives were able to generate sufficient amounts of word-of-mouth and increases in sales.

  
  

  The main reason for this is that the majority of advertisers are still underestimating or ignoring an important trend, which evolved from the emergence and proliferation of social networks, a trend for consumers to produce and distribute their own content instead of passively receiving information from outside sources.

  
  

  It is important to understand that modern consumers are informed, innovative, connected as well as empowered by the social media to voice their opinions and tell the corporate world what products they want to use and how they want to be talked to.

• Co-creating with consumers using rhiz

  The most exciting benefit of rhiz is that it builds on a viral video's ability to distribute consumer-generated content in a broad, yet reliable way, in other words, to create authentic word-of-mouth or buzz about your products or services.
  

  By offering a financial incentive to video producers for product placement in their videos as well as for designing the most creative commercial content (this fee is discussed on a project basis), Rhiz creates an atmosphere of competition among users, which motivates them to put more efforts into their work and spread word-of-mouth about it.

  
  

  It is important to note, however, that the main incentive with social networks is not so much the cash, but an opportunity to be discovered. For them, Youtube is an online version of the American Idol with nobody but their peers to judge.

• Threadless - an example of social network advertising experiment gone right

  This concept was tested on other social networks with many positive results. Consider an example of Threadless - a T-shirt company, which has been recently featured in Inc. Magazine for its amazing success in working with online social networks.

  
  

  Threadless is built around Dreamless.org, a large artistic online community, whose members participate in weekly design competitions organized by the company. The members of this social network submit hundreds of designs each week and vote for the ones they like the most.

  
  

  The winner of the competition gets his/her design printed and receives proceeds from sales of those T-shirts. Threadless annual sales hit $5 million in 2008, with no advertising, professional sales force or developed distribution channels - all profits are driven by word-of-mouth created by the online community.

  
  

  Members of Dreamless network spend numerous hours online buzzing with their peers about their designs and asking each other's opinion and advice. They also post links to their submissions on their personal websites, Myspace, and Youtube pages asking their friends and acquaintances to vote for them.

  
  

  In this way, the Dreamless community generates tons of word-of-mouth (buzz) about Threadless not only in their own community but also in other social networks either online or offline (Inc. Magazine, 2008).

• Utilizing opinion-leadership potential of Youtube users to build buzz

  It is important to note, that Rhiz does not discriminate against ideas because word-of-mouth formation does not always depend on ideas' quality.

  
  

  While it is important for consumer-generated content to be original or contain some unique informational value to be widely promoted by social media, distribution of buzz in smaller groups inside social networks often times is driven by the popularity of the person who created this content.

  
  

  This is due to the fact that word-of-mouth or buzz generation is closely tied to the concept of opinion-leadership.

  
  

  For example, a popular girl from a local High School creates a video on how to apply a new Cover Girl foundation to treat problem areas of teenage skin. This video is not original or innovative, in fact, there are thousands of videos on social networks with similar content, however, because this girl is a local celebrity, her work will receive special attention from her classmates and probably create a substantial amount of word-of-mouth about the product in this particular High School.

  
  

  This is a phenomenon most easily seen in closed social networks from school settings to the workplace. The truth is, we never grow out from under other people's opinion leadership, we just get better at hiding it.

  
  In this way, whether users come up with a great idea or are just riding a popularity wave, word-of-mouth about your products can penetrate all layers of Youtube social network.

• Yes, we can measure the results of your campaign!

  Another great advantage of Rhiz is that it can measure the success of buzz marketing campaigns by tracing views, embeddings, and video ratings.

  
  

  Rhiz can also tell you if members of the network perceive your company positively or negatively by observing their comments about your company's products or services.

  
  

  This insight can be crucial to understanding if your company is headed in the right direction. Recent research on word-of-mouth for the US domestic airline industry showed that the percentage of negative or positive comments (buzz) about an airline company is highly predictive of its operational profit (Ferguson, 2006).

  
  

  Another important finding of this study was that negative word-of-mouth has about 2.4 times more financial impact than positive word-of-mouth, so it is crucial for companies to understand how consumers perceive them in order to stay competitive in the future.