RT:  Great post by Remarkablogger Michael Martine outlining the top twitter faux pas made by marketers, summed up in the following paragraph.  The advice may seem like common sense but is a great reminder of why the word social appears in the wikipedia entry for twitter.

“If I could distill these five points down to one main message it would
be this: act like a normal person as much as you possibly can.
Providing value to your followers instead of sales pitches is the best
marketing you can engage in on Twitter (or in any social media
environment).”

Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), Social Media Best Practice // Add Comment »

A colleague of mine, Victoria Petrock, recently introduced me to a site she currently writes for called marketingcharts.com. The site provides free downloads of useful marketing charts and spreadsheets, as well as links to relevant articles. Today, one article in particular stood out to me. A recent study shows that young adults (ages 18-34) are more receptive to email ads rather than ads that pop up on their social network sites, such as MySpace and Facebook. I found this surprising considering the intense growth and popularity of such networks among this age group.

Anyway, I find this site to be a good source for quick marketing insights.

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“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says The Man to our hero Cool Hand Luke and that characterized the marketing world of Web1.0 and may have inadvertently helped lay the social media foundation that is Web2.0. The Web2.0 revolution has now matured into a new stage, moving from initial confusion (and no doubt a bit of “surprise!” from the vantage point of many corporations) to a rolled-up sleeves practicality of how to manage the relationship now that we’ve gone beyond the first date.

There are obvious benefits for companies in terms of getting involved with their consumers (and prospective consumers) via social media. A perspective that is often not considered is the benefit that online consumers themselves gain with this new desire to engage on the part of corporations. It’s been said before but it’s fascinating to me that marketing strategy in the social media arena necessarily has to move beyond projection and into conversation. Conversation is not a poorly targeted banner ad or a link to your website inside of a clever blog - it’s about establishing a dialog with individuals. The opportunity to engage individuals online opens a conduit through which information flows, which in turn provides a closed feedback loop (and benefits – that’s the symbiosis) between you and your customers. And you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars in survey research or focus groups.

According to the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, “56% of American consumers (who use social media) feel both a stronger connection with, and better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.” Additionally,

• 43% say that companies should use social networks to solve my problems
• 41% want companies to solicit feedback on their products and services
• 37% feel that companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand
• 33% of men and 17% of women interact frequently (one or more times per week) with companies via social media

Engaging your customers can now serve marketing, customer service, and primary research functions. But how does one go about obtaining valuable information about your customers?

Kevin Mannion of Sky Road Consulting provided some wonderfully basic advice for social media approaches to primary research and engagement, including:

• Visit Quantcast and look at the kinds of information that “Quantified” sites can offer about who visits their sites. In my consulting work with the company, I know that Web publishers are enabling advertisers to understand better the demographics, business and lifestyle profiles of their audiences. See the wealth of audience info under Bloomberg’s Quantified Profile, for example.
• Take Avinash Kaushik’s simple advice and ask your visitors in an unobtrusive pop-up survey some basic questions about what they are doing on your site and how your site is helping them accomplish their goals.
• Talk to them. There are many great ways to identify representative visitors who can offer you a gold mine of intelligence about your site, your clients’ brands, and the best ways for your advertiser to win their minds and hearts.

Of course, not every social media effort needs to be about harvesting information – successful social media strategy can simply be building a consistent, entertaining, and engaging message strategy about your products and services using a variety of social media tools. Social media marketing drives awareness through entertaining (but transparently honest) communication to catch and keep the attention of voracious online consumers of information.

Remember, online consumers were here having vibrant conversations before you arrived – when you’re late to a party that’s already been going on for awhile, it’s better to take some time and figure out how to introduce yourself instead of barging in and grabbing the mike for a little unsolicited marketing karaoke. You might learn a few things along the way.

Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Social Media Insights, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

In his recent book, “What Sticks”, Rex Briggs estimated that over one-third of the $300 billion dollars in annual advertising spend in 2006 was wasted. Of this amount, approximately $23 billion dollars was wasted simply because the allocation of media spend across channels was not optimal. Put another way, re-allocating media dollars to channels that work harder for your brand or products can optimize your marketing spend to the tune of billions of dollars.

Last week, I was honored to be one of the panelists associated with a very interesting measurement discussion. The purpose of this panel was to explore how industry is progressing in developing digital marketing metrics to drive more consistent and higher ROI through less advertising spend waste– with better optimization of media mix, combined with a data-driven digital marketing approach. This session was part of a “digital immersion day”, hosted by McCann Worldwide in San Francisco for one of their clients. I was joined on the panel by Dan Neely of Networked Insights, Konrad Feldman from quantcast, and Will Hodgman from Comscore (M: Metrics), so a wide range of measurement angles was represented.

Anna Banks with McCann expertly moderated a vibrant discussion by posing challenging measurement questions, including examples such as:

· Can digital and social media metrics be used as leading indicators of business? Which ones?

· How can companies quantitatively understand the lift that active participation in social networks can give to their lead generation efforts? What about PR? What about aircover advertising?

· What’s the potential of Atlas’ engagement mapping, or other similar mechanisms to track the impact of a series marketing tactics (or user actions) beyond the last action?

All panelists provided well-thought answers that predictably highlighted their company’s ability to help drive towards a better estimation of marketing ROI. As a Collective Intellect employee who fulfills the twin roles of client services and social media analytics, here are some general impressions on measurement in a social media world, which were also discussed to some degree last week:

It ain’t easy (to estimate ROI)

Measuring ROI within the social media channel is not a white-jacketed, scientific affair (yet). And while I do believe it’s possible to move beyond the fuzzy warmth of the adage that “social media is more about the ‘I’ in Return on Investment”, measuring channel-specific impact of social or digital media marketing endeavors is not for the faint of heart. However, it can be done and there are digital research firms such as Insight Express or Marketing Evolution addressing this very issue. For example, Insight Express is charged with quantifying ROI across channels as part of BzzAgent’s recent challenge to competing agencies, the “WOM Guarantee Program”.

Doing it right may not be the best approach

Although it sounds counter-intuitive, digital and social media marketers need to make decisions quickly about what is working and what is not. Asking them to provide the inputs needed to build a complex, black-box, neural net or marketing-mix model– that may be statistically rigorous but mildly obsolete by the time it is complete– doesn’t help with the daily challenges of managing your campaigns. A “good enough” approach may work for many marketers. Begin with key social media performance indicators which, in turn, can be correlated with success metrics to gauge impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, or brand awareness.

Liberty! Give me the data

Database marketers and business intelligence experts are quite comfortable in terms of mining their own data for information. Can social media information become part of this world? The answer is a qualified “Yes!” However, there are fundamental challenges incorporating social media data feeds into database and reporting systems. Enabling savvier clients to make their own channel-specific ROI estimates (at whatever level of effort they choose) is an attractive option. Social media data can be integrated with alternative marketing data to help understand more fully the relationship between marketing action and downstream success metrics.

Conclusion

One of my favorite words is “nascent” and, to me, it describes the current state of social media analytics. There is no solid, industry-wide, currently accepted approach to measuring ROI for this channel. A wise person once said that it is not the destination but the journey that matters – as in traditional media, social media measurement approaches will become formalized over time and that journey will be fun.

Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

U.S. athletes met with great success at the Olympics, as did theseven global sponsors that CI tracked. Our final social media Olympic analysis focuses on the overall brand lift and % change of Olympic conversation around selected sponsors over two two-week time periods: pre-Olympic (7/22 – 8/7) and Olympic (8/8 - 8/24).

Visa’s Olympic-focused online activity yielded the highest lift with a 211% increase during the Olympics. McDonald’s followed with a 144% increase.

CI also measured overall brand lift by tracking mentions of each sponsor apart from Olympic-focused conversations. Using this metric, Beijing-based Lenovo Ltd. came out on top. Although the company only showed a 68% increase in the above Olympic activity calculation, general conversation around Lenovo increased 37% from the pre-Olympic to Olympic time periods.

Sentiment was also highly positive for Lenovo for both time periods, increasing slightly during the Olympics.

CI collected and analyzed this data set for all of the seven selected sponsors; feel free to contact us to get the full report.

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