I was invited to speak at the following event yesterday by JohnstonWells.  They’ve just moved into new offices in Denver so was a great way to show off the new digs.  The event was well run and well attended by a number of local companies so hats off to the folks at JohnstonWells.  The purpose of the seminar was to discuss how in a social media world brands are losing control of the message and what can or should be done about it.

There was a lot of discussion around authenticity and measuring results.  Times are particularly crazy for the traditional PR house since a lot of what they have done in the past is changing rapidly from an offline world with well known pundits and analysts to the online world of the masses where the pundits shift like sand in the wind.  Many companies are still afraid to allow their employees to publish blogs and the transparency that comes with it.  it’s going too far to say authenticity is foreign, but it is scary.  This is truly the point of the discussion.  Social media is about engaging your customers where they live, where they participate, with whom they discuss.  To enter into this community, this discussion, with the mantle of PR and legal loofa sponge cleaned copy is an invitation to alienation, or worse, flaming.  The communication must be authentic, in that it must come off as honest and concerned.  If the product has a flaw, admit to this, if there is a problem, fess up and tell people how you are going to fix it.

This is why we got into the discussion that customer service is the new marketing.  It is because this is where the conversation is occurring.  Scrub marketing down to the bare metal and where the discussion meets the consumer is the conversation around how well the product meets their needs.  This is customer service and where the battle for the hearts and minds of the consumers will be won in social media.  Someone (Efrem I believe) brought up the story about Timbuktu packs.  He had a clasp break off from a 5 year old pack.  Not completely gruntled, he contacted customer service.  They were able to get him a replacement clasp to fix his pack.  Even though it was at cost he was very pleased that they responded so quickly and solved his problem.  He wrote it up in his blog.  Marketing.

So how do companies manage their brand in this brave new online world?

• Monitor the conversation.  Where is it occurring?  Who are the key players?  Are they positive or negative?
• Provide prompt feedback to customers, offer solutions.
• Engage in the conversation.  Use this as an opportunity to gather customer feedback.  Listen and respond.  Be honest with people when you aren’t able to solve their problem.
• Be as transparent as you can.  And communicate with integrity.  Say what you mean.

Just spoke on a panel

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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 »

It’s Election Day, and some pundits are predicting a landslide win for Obama, while others say that McCain has a slim but very real path to victory. In other words, no one knows anything for sure.

We decided to apply the same methodology we previously used to predict individual primaries, to gauge social media’s feelings on the two candidates. I won’t call these results a prediction– because there are too many variables this time around– but it gives a clear picture of who’s winning in the blogosphere.

We first looked at CI’s home state of Colorado, for the 7 days leading up to Election Day (10/28-11/3). We measured and averaged the mentions of each candidate, along with the sentiment, within a sample set of 30 right-leaning and 30 left-leaning Colorado-based blogs. When we translated these numbers into percentages (see methodology), Obama emerged the clear winner– 55% to 45%.

We also performed a national pulse-check, where we used the same metrics (avg. sentiment multiplied by number of mentions) and timeframe, but did not take party affiliation or location into account. This produced almost exactly the same result– Obama with 55%, McCain with 45.

Both metrics have their weaknesses. The Colorado sample set is very small; and on a national scale, Obama has been dominant in the social media space for over a year now. But the fact that both produced a ~10% point advantage for Obama, using separate sample sets, is definitely interesting.

Will this translate to the polls? We’ll see tonight (hopefully).

Tags: Blog Analysis, Event Tracking, Politics, Social Media Metrics // Add Comment »

The recent malaise brought about by this month’s collapse of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and worsening economic conditions have brought into sharp relief the budgeting challenges marketers face in 2009 and beyond. Despite the economic doom and gloom, understanding who your customers and potential customers are and what they are saying about your company, your brand, and your products is as important ever. How do market research groups continue their focus on brand analyses and customer insight?

Leveraging social media by listening to, monitoring, and most importantly understanding the content and themes emerging from unstructured text (conversational) data is a cost-effective alternative to more costly primary research initiatives such as surveys and focus groups. In the best of times, social media analyses can play a supporting and synthetic role by augmenting primary research findings with insights derived from consumers about products or brands. Weaving social media research into traditional market research creates a more holistic approach to understanding customer attitudes and opinions, based on semantic analyses of publicly available content. In times of budgetary constraints and cutbacks, social media analytics can actually play a more prominent role as an alternative to more resource-intensive market research techniques.

“The world’s greatest focus group” is “out there” constantly discussing your company, your products, and your brands. Monitoring conversations through budgetary lulls enables companies to keep fingertips on the pulse of consumer brand and product discussions. Well-conducted social media research will also suggest areas of interest for traditional approaches to research once budgets have been restored to pre-apocalyptic levels. Using social media to research consumer attitudes has several advantages over traditional approaches:

1. cost-effective

2. no selection bias

3. cost-effective

4. no experimenter bias (these conversations are unsolicited and unedited and unaltered by response-bias associated with the presence of a moderator)

5. cost-effective

6. open-ended (conversations are user-generated content (UGC) as compared to conjoint analyses or survey approaches that fundamentally involve constrained choices

7. cost-effective

Finally, providers like Ripple6 specialize in integrating social media based consumer research within dedicated online communities. Price points for more comprehensive and rigorous approaches to online market research may vary but the point is that more, not less, attention being paid to online consumer content and sentiment.

So, if budgetary cuts have been handed to you and you’d like to keep an ear to the ground and continue to listen to your consumers and prospects, consider the Internet and the conversations taking place every minute as a bountiful and alternative source of consumer or brand marketing insights and data mining.

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Uncategorized // 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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Social media agency Room 214’s co-founder Jason Cormier interviewed Collective Intellect co-founder and CTO Tim Wolters for a podcast last week. The wide-ranging discussion covered social media monitoring best practices and thoughts on emerging social media technology, as well as a host of other related topics. Check out the podcast on Room 214’s “Capture The Conversation” blog.

Tags: Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

It’s been a while since we tracked the election campaigns in social media, so we decided to do a couple quick measurements to see if anything had changed.

Unsurprisingly, Obama has maintained a consistent lead in mentions across the blogosphere since September 1, but his lead has widened considerably over the past couple weeks. Only two days (9/1 and 9/2) saw McCain gain a lead (and marginally at best) in mentions.

Political sentiment is primarily negative, given the general tone and subject matter of most political conversations. We looked at the sentiment for each candidate within their own politically-leaning blogs. McCain’s sentiment on right-leaning blogs was initially much less negative than Obama’s sentiment on left-leaning blogs. But over the past few weeks, the two have blended closer together, and swapped spikes and dips.

What was much more surprising, however, was that on blogs on the opposite sides of the aisle, Obama’s sentiment was much higher than McCain’s. In other words, it appears that Obama is portrayed in a much more favorable light within right-leaning blogs, than McCain is on left-leaning ones. This points to a couple possibilities. So perhaps the online Left is much more vitriolic against the other candidate than the Right. Or alternately, there are many more traditionally conservative bloggers who have become sympathetic to Obama.

(We’ve tagged approximately 500 blogs as “left-leaning”, and another 500 as “right-leaning.” Our sentiment algorithm works on a 1, 0, -1 scale (1 being positive, 0 neutral, -1 negative). For each day, we averaged the sentiment of each post on a blog with its respective politically-leaning tag.)

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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 »

“Analysis paralysis” and “desktop fodder” are two phrases I’ve heard over the years associated with reporting and analysis that subsequently takes you on the road to marketing nowhere. Moving beyond reporting, dashboards, and analysis is not rocket science – what is required is a desire to test some of the conclusions out in the marketplace. Action tends to generate inspiration while the reverse (for me at least) is more difficult to achieve.

A few brief examples of acting on social media analysis:

1. Blogger outreach – Susan Getgood has an excellent post on reaching out to bloggers, which starts with social media analytics to identify relevant individuals
2. Improve natural search through social media campaigns – often this involves nothing more than consistently and diligently “spreading the word” about your current assets and can be done through a vendor partner or by dedicating resources internally
3. Optimize SEO – based on themes (like those listed below) extracted from unstructured data using semantic analyses, tags can be created to automatically (and dynamically) update sites based on conversations people are currently having about your products or services
4. Modify existing digital assets (e.g., messaging) based on emerging concepts – use modified targeted banner ads within social network communities through ad networks if you have a bit more budget
5. Tap into your favorite social network community to spread your message (based on concepts gleaned from social media analyses) – setting up a Facebook profile is an obvious beginning but note that Facebook is looking to move beyond the “walled garden” by providing the ability to externalize profiles – more to come
6. Learn how to do a bicycle kick on a beach in Brazil (OK, no connection but what is a blog entry without a little fun?)

Conclusion

Testable marketing strategy can be implemented quickly and, in the quick-time world of social media, its impact can be measured on the back end by examining common social media metrics (e.g., activity and sentiment) as well as other web and primary research metrics.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “Never confuse movement with action”. So dive in, engage, and act upon data with testable strategy. Because Hemingway also said* that “understanding social media is a crucial step in implementing a fully developed brand strategy.”

*No he didn’t.

Tags: Brand Management, Social Media Insights // 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 »