Strategically Speaking

Measurement & Reporting: How much budget should I allocate?

2012-01-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

It’s a logical question. One that many marketers are thinking more deeply about these days, and for good reason. The expectation is that marketing and advertising should be more accountable. With more sophisticated marketing measurement tools and increased digital spend, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to quantify the results of your marketing investments.

However unlike other more established business disciplines, marketing and advertising measurement best practices are still being formed. So how do you determine how much budget to allocate to the measurement of your programs?

How much is “normal” to invest in measurement and reporting?

In my research I’ve seen everything from 2% - 20% of your overall budget recommended, but to really understand what this relates to you need to be specific about what is included in the figure.

So it depends, and there is no perfect answer or clear best practice as of yet. However, there are various perspectives and guidance that can be analyzed to develop a reasonable approach.

For starters, you need a minimum level of spend to think in terms of a percentage allocation. For example 5% of a $1 million dollar media budget makes sense, whereas 5% of a $25K asset development budget might not get you very far, or at least would provide only rudimentary metrics.

Ultimately though you should never think of measurement as an optional nice to have. You should always establish key performance metrics and have a method to track the success of your programs, whether it’s manual of via a more sophisticated tool or system.

As such, tasks such as initial set-up and configuration of measurement systems should likely be treated as a separate type of cost. This would be distinct from the dollars you will invest in measurement of ongoing performance, for providing regular reporting and generating optimization recommendations to test.

To provide perspective from what others think on the subject of budget allocation for marketing and advertising measurement, I’ve aggregated reviewed examples of the best thinking that I could find publically available online.

Jim Sterne a well-respected expert in the field of web analytics takes a firm stance and argues that 20% of your marketing budget should be allocated towards measurement. His view is more holistic and includes both measurement and optimization. You can read more of his thoughts here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2026285/investment-measurement

Keith Dawson of The CMO Site launched a simple online poll to ask: “what percentage of your marketing budget is devoted to analytics?” Here are the responses thus far:

Image Source: http://www.thecmosite.com/author.asp?section_id=1200&doc_id=205085

A quick analysis of the results shows that the most common answer is less than 5%, certainly a far distance from Jim’s 20%. However a key difference here is that Jim has made a recommendation on what to allocate, whereas those responding to Keith’s poll in theory are reporting what they do currently spend.

My simple recommendation would be to start with 5% of your project budget devoted to measurement and reporting. Treat system configuration and measurement tools set-up as a separate cost. Also begin by reserving 10% for optimization.

For additional perspective on measurement budget allocation here’s a list of articles and whitepapers to get you started:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2026285/investment-measurement
http://www.thecmosite.com/author.asp?section_id=1200&doc_id=205085
http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/B2B_Content_Marketing_2012.pdf
http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/6_ways_to_determine_your_PR_measurement_budget_43450.aspx
http://www.omniture.com/offer/357
http://www.marketo.com/library/definitive-guide-to-marketing-metrics-marketing-analytics.pdf

Social Media Strategy Fundamentals, Social Business and the Digital Agency Client Relationship

2012-01-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

The Transformation to Social Business
Social media has become an integral component of the modern marketing mix. And social as a channel for communication, innovation and customer service has the opportunity to transform how brands conduct business.

However, the concept of “social” and what it offers for business growth, innovation and customer relationships is far bigger than simply “social media”. Social media is simply part of a larger transformation happening in business today. When building the right social strategy for your brand, consider what social business might enable for your organization.

To leverage the opportunities afforded by social business transformation, brands need to recognize that:

Social properties are part of a connected digital eco-system and cannot be treated as isolated islands; customers expect an integrated experience.
Customers are more than ever in discovery mode and content distributed through social channels empowers the customer discovery journey.
Social technologies enable brands to uncover powerful customer insights not available through other research methods.
Social media will only amplify the truth about a bad product or service. Make sure you build great products and services first, then amplify them through social.
Innovation around products and services can come from anywhere. Employees, customers, partners AND those responsible for product development. Social technologies often enable innovation at greater speed.
To realize the most value from social engagement, brands must be present in and listen to online dialogue on a consistent basis.

In order to build momentum and acceptance with your social business agenda, it’s best to take a pragmatic approach to social media. With respect to managing ongoing programs, evaluate your needs based on the stage of sophistication of your social initiatives.

For example, listening on a consistent basis for conversation around your brand and products is a fundamental building block. Beyond this, evaluate your programs based on your social mix.

Are you managing a presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube?
Maintaining a corporate blog?
Running a brand-sponsored community?
Have you created relationships with bloggers or other online influencers?
Do you have an internal social community to connect employees and drive business innovation?
What else is part of your social mix?

From an agency perspective I’ve supported clients in many ways, including being the voice of the brand on external social properties, acting as the eyes and ears to regularly listen for opportunities and threats. At a certain point of program growth though it makes sense for brands to have a dedicated employee or more to support the continued nurturing and growth of social programs, along with your agency partner.

On a very practical level, when an agency is engaged in supporting a client with social programs, regular and frequent communication between agency and client-side teams is important to being as proactive and responsive as possible.

Social Media Plans and Deliverables

Let’s start by acknowledging that there are different levels of plan depending on your situation and business needs. For example, a holistic social media plan would encompass a wide range of properties, tactics, campaigns, programs, integration points, measurement criteria and so forth. An outline for a holistic social media plan might look like this:

Objectives
Social Channel Mix
Foundational Programs
Measurement Approach
Immediate Action Plan
Short-Term Action Plan (next 3-6 months)
Longer-Term Action Plan (Next 6-12+ months)
Appendix

Whereas a social media plan for a specific advertising campaign or even for a presence on a specific property such as Facebook or Twitter would be more focused in its substance. That said, broadly speaking there are 12 important questions to consider when developing a social media plan, the answers to which will provide the inputs for the substance or your plan, they are:

What’s our strategic vision and business goals for social?
What does integrating social mean for our organization?
From a marketing and operations perspective where does social fit?
What are realistic objectives to pursue?
What's our social channel mix?
What role does each social channel serve and what's our approach to each?
How will we measure success?
What content should we invest in?
What else should we invest in?
How do we get people to share?
What's the 90-day plan?
What's next on the 12-month horizon?

Example Social Media Strategy Approach
As a caveat, any recommended strategy should be based on research-driven customer insights, the outcome of collaboration between agency and client teams and competitive analysis, but sometimes you’re missing that, so here’s a straw man you can use as a start.

Let’s use the following criteria to think through developing a social media plan:

Objectives
“Sales growth through transactions at retail locations, both corporate and franchise stores, as the primary objectives, followed by brand awareness and affinity as secondary.”

Program Approach
One might consider the following elements as foundational building blocks for a social media strategy and set of initial tactics:

Shared vision amongst the executive team regarding the role of social for the brand and realistic understanding of the timeframes required to achieve results.
Online community manager regularly monitoring brand properties and online conversation, multiple times per week.
Using a professional grade listen tool to monitor conversation across blogs, forums, Twitter, online communities, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Signage at retail locations promoting the value and benefits of participation with the brand’s social properties.
A presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
A corporate blog.

Beyond these foundational elements, as a first pass at relevant programs to pursue, you could consider the following tactical program elements:

Seasonal campaigns and contests.
Real-world events that are amplified through social broadcasting.
Social advertising leveraging interest graph targeting.
Invite-only customer product innovation community.
Mobile check-in rewards program.

With respect to evaluation criteria, for any program there will be both marketing metrics and business performance metrics. For example:

Marketing Metrics may include:

Participation rate
Social reach
Amplification rate
Total program participants
Fan growth rate during and after program compared to baseline
New versus existing customers

Business Metrics may include:

Net new customers
Total sales
Incremental sales
Incremental profit
ROI

How to approach integration across consumer marketing, customer service and corporate communications departments

It all starts with open communication and a culture of collaboration. If your organization is highly siloed and departments are used to protecting their turf, and therefore not sharing, these behaviors need to be addressed before you can effectively integrate departments for the purpose of a coordinated social strategy.

Assuming you have established a culture of collaboration and there is support from the executive level for pursuing a social business agenda, it often comes down to clearly establishing roles and responsibilities, appending those to existing job functions, providing incentive to share and collaborate rather than rewarding the hoarding of knowledge and information.

In addition to behaviors and acknowledged job responsibilities, there are tools that can help to coordinate participation by the right people in the right conversations. Many listening tools on the market today offer a social CRM and/ or engagement management set of features for routing, responding and tracking brand engagements with customers. It’s still important to remember though that the technology will not solve behavior problems. The right behaviors must be established, acknowledged and rewarded before you can benefit from process automation tools.

Content, Community and Influencer Outreach (Social PR)

Content and social media
Content is the lifeblood of social media and inbound marketing. If you are not willing to invest in the creation of original content, the repurposing of existing content, the curation of quality content and the intelligent distribution and publishing of content, then you’re missing a fundamental part of the equation for social media success. Content - quality, contextually relevant, timely content – is critical to the success of your social media programs. Plan for it.

FTC guidelines and how they impact influencer outreach programs
The FTC guidelines are common sense. They are not new rather they have simply been updated to incorporate guidance for social media since it did not exist when the guidelines were originally developed. So if you’re an honest, responsible marketer and advertiser who sells good products and services then the FTC guidelines should be nothing new or scary to you. On the other hand, if you’re a marketer and advertiser that has trouble with transparency, is trying to hide defects in your products and overall OK with being in the gray zone with communication, then you might have problems with the FTC guidelines.

With respect to influencer outreach programs, you as the brand are ultimately responsible for the legality of claims that your brand-supported influencers make on their blogs, in their tweets, on your Facebook page or anywhere else online. As such, the simple truth is that if you are planning to leverage and benefit from the voices of influencers that you have some known relationship with, you need to have clear policies that they agree to AND you as the brand must dedicate resources to tracking and managing what your influencers publish.

So in terms of the impact of the FTC guidelines on influencer outreach programs, the impact is that you as the brand need clear policies and you must dedicate resources to tracking and managing the programs. You simply cannot put an influencer outreach program on autopilot, you must remain involved to oversee and manage it.

Defining and determining “influence”
First off let’s start with the understanding that influence is a relative measurement. You must always ask yourself, influence relative to what?

Online influence and the ability to identify relevant online influencers for a brand, product or service is not only a hot topic in marketing today but also a field of measurement that is rapidly evolving as we continue to learn more. With the ability to observe connections between people and uncover individuals whose opinion matters within different spheres of conversation, services like Klout and Kred are giving marketers more sophisticated tools for analysis and interpretation of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

With this perspective, here’s a framework to evaluate and measure influence by three criteria:

Topical: where someone has influence in a topic of content or expertise
Temporal: where someone has influence within a defined span of time
Identity-based: where there is life-style association and affinity amongst the audience and influencer

As influence measurement tools become more sophisticated and accurate there will undoubtedly be new ways we’ll seek to quantify and quality influence that matters to a given brand.

Identifying influencers within various social media channels
Identifying influencers within social channels begins with defining a clear vision for the attributes of the people a brand is seeking as well as the actions the brand desires for the influencers to take on behalf of the brand.

With this, working with influencers is not simply a function of mathematical calculation, looking at whose numbers are best. Rather it’s a process of relationship building. And relationship building starts with getting to know people. If it’s Twitter then you may look at the subject matter a person is tweeting about, their follower to following ratio, the frequency of their publishing and also look at tools like Klout and Kred to get a directional sense for social reach and such.

In all cases look for people who have a contextually relevant audience of audiences that are associated with them through their social graph.

With respect to other social channels such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, online communities and such, each channels has its nuances with respect to the granular data points that are evaluated, but the common thread is that you’re looking for people with an audience engaged with an influencer around topics relevant to the brand.

Outreach process for communicating with identified online influencers
Outreach begins with getting to know potential influencers through familiarity with their content. This means reading blog posts, Facebook updates, Tweets, forum entries, watching YouTube videos and so forth. Before approaching an influencer, you need to understand their perspective and be familiar with their content. This way you can be as relevant to them as possible. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a value exchange that needs to take place when a person, identified as an influencer, agrees to act on behalf of a brand.

Once you have context and an angle to reach out, use channels such as email and phone as a primary means of contact but also use Twitter, blog comments and even a hand written note to make initial contact with people. Tailor ongoing communication with influencers by the level of participation in the influencer program.

Integrating influencer outreach with traditional communications and/or marketing campaigns
From a strategy perspective integrate influencer outreach with traditional communications and/ or marketing campaigns by using influencer content to engage people at points of interaction such as on landing pages, emails, integrated within online ad units and print communications.

Fundamentally it’s about finding ways to elevate the voice of real people to connect with others around the brand, it’s products and values. In addition coordinating real world events with online influencers can often be a great way to generate more online content and buzz. This includes contests with rewards for social sharing activity connected to your various key influencers.

Nurturing your relationships with influencers once an initiative is completed
Depending on the expectations you’ve established and what brand value exists for continuing to be involved with a given influencer, how you continue to invest in a program or individual will vary. Different influencers will impact your results but only once your program is underway can you see what’s really happening. Given this your initial plan may need to be fluid and change relative to different influencers. This will dictate whether you wind down or crank up a given influencer relationship per your original plan.

Content versus context
Great content, provided out of context will never be as successful as great content provided in context. It’s simply not one or the other; they are both extremely important in today’s world where there is often a high level of noise to filter out before we get to what we are seeking.

The key for brands is to figure out how to be contextually relevant and match the right content to the opportunity for interaction with the brand.

Given that as consumers and business people we are often online in a discovery mode, and it is content that we are ultimately seeking, the right context often leads us to the right content.

So in brief summary, make sure you’re building great content, that’s your entry ticket to the game. Work diligently to identify points of interaction where your content will be contextually relevant to a person. Continue to test and refine your contextual placements and content over time. And assume that continuous optimization is the new norm.

Social Business, it's time to digitally transform your brand

2011-12-31T12:39:00.000-08:00

When one of the biggest global management consulting firms decides to build a social business consulting practice, you know that big business is taking notice and asking for help. In a recent blog post Mark Fidelman profiles how CapGemini is making the move to help its customers figure out their social business strategy, very interesting I think.

Social business is far more than social media. Even using the term "social" in this context seems to trivialize what is a radical transformation in the midst where corporations and businesses of all sizes, in all industries, are finding innovative ways to leverage social technologies to foster innovation, deepen relationships with customers and connect employees in new, more meaningful and efficient ways.

As we enter 2012 and beyond it will be fascinating to watch which brands get it and which ones do not. Those that fail to evolve and adopt a real social business strategy will likely not survive in the long-run as customers will defect to brands that truly listen AND act. And employees also gravitate towards careers with businesses that empower them through the social technologies they have in place; allowing for accelerated career and idea advancement without the more traditional structures of power and control that still exist today.

You can read more about this in the full report from MIT and CapGemi, Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for Billion-Dollar Organizations.

Measuring Content Engagement with Share of Choice

2011-11-21T23:55:00.001-08:00

So I've been working on and refining my perspective around social media measurement for the past five years and I feel that I've been exposed to or heard the vast majority of ideas around metrics. Recently though while at Pivot I heard something new that stuck with me. The concept is "share of choice".

Whereas "share of voice" is a competitive metric I've been measuring for years, "share of choice" is a nice twist and meaningful competitive metric. It offers a new way to move beyond comparing conversation volume and to evaluate the important area of content engagement. While you want people to talk about your brand and products online, what you really want them to do is take action and demonstrate preference as well.

To make this distinction more clear, share of choice can be understood and defined as how often your brand is chosen to be engaged with versus your competitive set. As compared to share of voice, which evaluates the relative volume of conversation around your brand or products versus that of your competitors. I like how share of choice offers a view into understanding brand preference through people's direct actions of literally choosing to click on and view your video content.

With the increasing use and consumption of online video, I believe that determining how often your content is chosen versus that of your competitors is not only a relevant information point but can sincerely help you evaluate how well your content is resonating with your target audience, and in cases where it's not, enable you to learn from what your competition is doing well.

Online Influence and The Nuances of Measurement

2011-11-19T07:15:00.001-08:00

Online Influence and the ability to identify relevant online influencers for a brand, product or service is not only a hot topic in marketing today but also a field of measurement that is rapidly evolving as we continue to learn more. With the ability to observe connections between people and uncover individuals whose opinion matters within different spheres of conversation, services like Klout and Kred are giving marketers more sophisticated tools for analysis and interpretation of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Pivot Conference in New York city; an event focused on the connected consumer and how this new breed of customer is having a sincere impact on the ways that brands market, communicate and build trusted relationships. There were many fascinating sessions and topics discussed at Pivot. For me one of the more interesting was a panel led by David Armano discussing online influence. The panel included Joe Fernandez, CEO and Founder of Klout, Larry Levy, Co-founder and CEO of Appinions, Elisa Camahort Page, Co-founder and COO of BlogHer; essentially people who should be quite well versed in the theory and practice of influence and influencer identification.

While I've personally been working on influencer programs and discussing with clients all the various attributes that constitute influence, I think the panel did a great job of distilling online influence into a few logical categories that made a lot of sense to me. They broke the forms of influence into the following schema:

1.) Topical: where someone has influence in a topic of content or expertise
2.) Temporal: where someone has influence within a defined span of time
3.) Identity-based: where there is life-style association and affinity amongst the audience and influencer

While there were certainly other nuanced definitions and sub-categories discussed such at likeness, experience and expertise, these three seemed to bring clarity to how you should be thinking about the influencers you might be looking for.

The Social Media Marketing Plan: 12 Critical Questions for Planners

2011-11-18T12:20:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

Faced with the request to create a social media marketing plan for your organization?

Crafting a defensible social media marketing plan can be time-consuming and even frustrating if you don't have a good framework to build your social media plan around. By considering the right questions up front you'll set yourself up for success.

The following 12 questions are helpful to consider when creating your social media marketing plan. Thoughtfully answer these questions before you jump in and start posting content, engaging with customers and orchestrating conversations around your brand.

1. What are our strategic vision and business goals for social?
2. What does integrating social mean for our organization?
3. From a marketing and operations perspective where does social fit?
4. What are realistic objectives to pursue?
5. What's our social channel mix?
6. What role does each social channel serve and what's our approach to each?
7. How will we measure success?
8. What content should we invest in?
9. What else should we invest in?
10. How do we get people to share?
11. What's the 90-day plan?
12. What's next on the 12-month horizon?

By taking a methodical and analytical approach you'll be prepared to measure social media marketing tactics and analyze results, learn what really works for your business and ultimately understand the relationship of social marketing programs to your business objectives. However, having consensus on the right social media strategy for your brand is critical to making smart decisions as you gain momentum and grow your social media programs. Plan accordingly and get your internal and external stakeholders on board before just doing something for the sake of doing something.

An additional concept also worth considering is the bigger-picture opportunity that developing a social media marketing plan brings up. What I mean is the bigger picture of social business and what else you should be considering beyond just social media marketing.

Think about what it means to integrate social into the way your brand conducts business. Consider what this means, for example, in the context of driving real business innovation and connecting people globally to harness the collective intelligence of your organization. Social can play an important role.

Social Branding: Is Social Marketing Right for My Brand?

2011-11-18T12:11:00.001-08:00

This post was originally conceived and written by Derek Phillips when we worked together at The New Group. I subsequently edited some of the content. Derek is a seasoned content strategist whose opinions and work I highly respect. Derek is currently a Content Director at Critical Mass.

Originally published on The New Group blog.

Social branding: Is social marketing right for my brand? It's an important question. Fundamentally I believe there is opportunity for all brands to leverage social marketing, but it all depends on how broad your perspective is.

Many brands today think of social marketing as simply Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Others understand the power of monitoring and nurturing conversations in public online forums, and even fewer are yet to tap into the power of private online communities to spur innovation around their products, marketing and business model. The point here is that social marketing and social media are much bigger than just "likes" and "retweets." While those are aspects of social marketing, the bigger conversation is about social business and how to leverage social channels, technologies and human behaviors to build better, more responsive and ultimately more profitable brands.

As digital marketing strategists we're often asked how we can prove ROI on social marketing investments. Honestly there are a variety of answers to that question, but it often helps to consider other parallel investments that you probably already budget for today. Ask yourself what ROI metrics you and other companies apply to public relations, customer service, customer insights research and business innovation.

Too often people see social media as simply a marketing channel where the point is to gather as many "brand ambassadors" or "evangelists" as you can and the measure of success is how many people have liked your brand page on Facebook. While it's true that some brands can motivate legions of fans on their behalf, that's not necessarily true of all brands and misses huge opportunities that the social space offers outside of messaging and promotions. Below are some further thoughts on how you might think about social media as it relates to areas of your brand that you likely already invest in today.

Social Branding Through Public Relations
It used to be that companies hired PR professionals because those people had access to and relationships with the gatekeepers of media, thus providing access to audiences. While the value and need for PR professionals remains, the way these professionals do their jobs has changed and it's something we can all learn from.

1. Access to audiences is no longer gated by mass media (which doesn't mean that mass media doesn't have its place—it does, it's just not the ONLY way to access audiences).
2. Conversations about your brand are happening now and you can learn from them even if you decide not to engage.
3. It's easier to put out a small, smoldering fire than a raging blaze.

Even if it doesn't make sense (either from a legal or an organizational politics perspective) to directly engage users who speak ill of your brand, wouldn't you like to know what negative messages are resonating with real customers so you can prepare and take action before it becomes a much larger and more complicated issue?

Social Branding as Social Customer Service
One of the most overlooked opportunities in social marketing is what some are calling SCRM or Social Customer Relationship Management. In its simplest form it's applying a social layer to standard CRM practices and has value across each of the three phases of traditional CRM:

1. Acquire
2. Enhance
3. Retain

Acquisition can be achieved through a variety of social marketing promotions that encourage people to engage with your brand and are propelled by leveraging their social networks. We've all seen those campaigns:

* "Retweet this for a chance to win!"
* "Like our page and get 10% off your next purchase!"
* "The foursquare mayor of this establishment gets a free dessert with every meal!"

Enhancement can include access to exclusive content and events or direct interaction with people of interest. TV shows have leveraged these opportunities to keep viewers engaged beyond the 30- or 60-minute timeslot. From online chats ("Real Time with Bill Maher") to deleted scenes ("The Office") to extended interviews ("The Daily Show"), there are countless opportunities for creative brands to keep that audience engaged…and it's not just media companies.

The true genius of the notorious Old Spice campaign is that it took a TV commercial character who was resonating with fans and extended the campaign to a social sphere where those fans could directly interact with the character—and spread word of the campaign as a result. The millions of dollars in earned media are still being tallied.

Customer retention is a challenge for most companies, and a costly one at that. Most people, even the loudest and most obnoxious among us, just want to be heard. We want to feel good about our purchases and be acknowledged when we have issues. Social media allows savvy brands the opportunity to not only address the person who is directly affected, but show others that you're doing it. Most customer service complaints are related to common issues (that's why so many companies employ scripts). Address once and resolve for many. Even if you can't come to an immediate resolution, the fact that you're engaging and treating your customers with respect has resonating value.

Customer Insights from Social Brand Building
There are enormous opportunities to gather customer insights via social channels. The short story is that people are out there talking about your brands and your products and you can listen in to find out what they really think about your latest ad campaign or how they're actually using your products. Customers can be very clever in discovering new uses for products, and understanding that can lead to optimizing how you market and enhance those products.

Social Branding Through Business Innovation
An area that forward-looking social brands have already benefitted from is using social technologies to connect global internal teams as well as connect marketers and product developers with passionate customers to decrease time to market and unearth new directions to pursue.

This is a meaty topic deserving of a dedicated blog post, but for now let me just say that building internal social communities to connect employees around ideas and to connect customers with the people shaping your products is an area that many brands could benefit from.

So is it appropriate for all brands to have social outreach and engagement programs? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean there aren't real opportunities in social marketing, and the ROI on those activities can be substantial.

Social Monitoring for More Effective Media Planning

2011-11-18T12:07:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

Given the current and growing trends in business and consumer usage of social media, it's quite clear that media planners need to incorporate not only social properties into their mix but also social monitoring insights in order to build the most targeted, cost-efficient and results-driving media plans.

This means taking a comprehensive view with respect to how we as people interact with brand-produced, earned and consumer-generated media, and using these insights to architect the most relevant touch points for consumer and business customer interactions with brands: at the right time, within the right context, at the right place.

Using social monitoring is an important topic that we as marketing strategists continue to learn more about and refine our perspective on. I'm happy to have found a great presentation from the smart folks over at Forrester Research and Networked Insights that digs deeper into this topical area.

Since I'm a concept guy, I thought I'd share a few of the most interesting concepts presented in this presentation. Here they are:

* Incorporating social conversation catalysts into creative
* Starting with digital first, then editing for TV
* Next layer filters
* Directional indicators
* Contextual discovery
* Spending the "minimal effective amount"
* Making your TV media buys work harder with social
* Social data as a leading indicator to project audience growth
* Dynamic segmentation
* Real-timing sensing
* Using social data sequencing
* Social lift scores

I've long held the belief that you need to go beyond psychographic and demographic data and tap into an understanding of influence to make your media dollars work harder. This presentation really helps take that concept and add some further detail around how and why.

How to Infuse Media Planning with Social Data - Networked Insights & Forrester from Networked Insights on Vimeo.

Bottom line, great presentation, excellent ideas that really add value to where media planning is and needs to be going, thanks again to Forrester and Networked Insights. If you've got 45 minutes to spare, grab a coffee and check it out.

Social Media Monitoring—Choosing the Right Tool

2011-11-18T11:31:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

If you're a marketing strategy professional you know the importance of customer insights. Additionally, you know that you must incorporate the behavioral and conversational insights from the way business people and consumers are using social media today. With this an important question rapidly becomes: what's the best social media monitoring tool for my brand or business unit?

Well, it depends. Do you need to conduct historical analysis—and if so, over what time frame? Or do you need a tool that excels at real-time monitoring—if so, what social channels are most critical for your social media programs? Are you trying to identify and track your interactions with online influencers—and if so, do you need to coordinate the outreach efforts of multiple people or departments in your organization? Is closed-loop tracking of your outreach efforts a requirement or just a nice to have? These are not all, but certainly some, of the important questions you'll want to consider as you evaluate what the best-fit social media monitoring tool will be for your brand or business unit.

Over the past five plus years we've seen a plethora of social media monitoring tools enter the market. At The New Group we were early adopters and have used a number of tools including Social Radar, Radian6, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Buzz Logic (before it turned into a social advertising network), Scout Labs (before it was purchased by Lithium), Alterian SM2 and Sysomos. We've conducted our own research into more than 30 tools and generally take a deep look at the social media monitoring tool market about twice a year.

Currently our tool of choice is Sysomos. Far and away, our favorite feature is speed, and the user interface is pretty friendly too. Speed is crucial to our social media listening workflow. Social media isn't slowing down anytime soon, so tools that cannot return real-time results are quickly becoming obsolete. However, depending on your particular situation, a different tool might better serve your needs. There really is no perfect one-size-fits-all social media monitoring tool on the market today. If you start with that mindset then you'll be a happier camper with the tool you end up selecting in the end.

Behavioral Advertising Units Informing the Consumer

2011-11-18T11:01:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 7.2.10

Would you like to learn more about why you are seeing this ad?

Behaviorally targeted online advertising has been under increasing scrutiny lately; here's a good example of enabling consumers to be more informed about what they're seeing, and to make a choice. You're still going to see advertising online, but you may now be getting just a little more choice about what.

Mobile Content Engagement and Usage Trends

2011-11-18T10:56:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 6.17.10

I know how much I use my iPhone and how often I check my surf forecast and weather apps, but some recent stats published in the MediaPost Mobile Insider newsletter are worth considering for a moment.

"the iPhone version of GQ magazine is seeing almost the same levels of monthly engagement (65-70 minutes) as the print magazine (80 minutes). Compare those numbers to GQ.com, which gets a measly 10 minutes a month."

If these early trends reported by publishers continue in the direction of heavy mobile engagement, the bigger question really becomes about the role of a "traditional" website meant for viewing via a laptop or desktop monitor. While I don't believe these form factors are going away anytime soon, one interesting question for me is what will mobile innovation look like over the next few years?

There's more stats in the full article if you're curious about this topic: Mobile: What the Web Should Have Been?

Mining Social Relationship Data for Serving Your Online Ads

2011-11-18T10:35:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 5.26.10

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

There’s a handful of new measurement technologies in the market that are enabling this type of contextual, socially-targeted advertising. Through sophisticated data mining and relationship mapping, leveraging people’s social graph of connections, companies are now able to target messages and offers to the peers of their customers. Pretty cool I think, but I’m sure there’s others who will be paranoid about this stuff.

With all the scrutiny of behavioral targeting going on these days, this will likely be another interesting space to watch. It sounds promising, and I look forward to testing it out. While data-mapping connections between people seems to be a powerful way to target your ads; will it survive legislation that regulates it? I’m not sure yet. For the moment though, here are a few of the companies who are making it happen:

Meteor Solutions
33 Across
Media6degrees
Lotame

Measuring Twitter to Understand Personas

2011-11-18T10:29:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 12.7.09

Do you know the psychological profile that your trail of tweets tells about you? TweetPsych just may be able to tell you. Another new entrant into the ever expanding world of Twitter measurement tools,TweetPsych is uniquley different in that it seeks to provide a psychological profile of a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. I'm always looking for tools that can provide insight into people's mindset and provide data that helps to build a more accurate persona, TweetPsych is a facinating discovery. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.
Here's what I just learned about myself (although it would help if I had more tweets for the tool to analyze!)

Furthermore tools like TweetPsych hold great promise for helping us (as marketers) better understand the people we want to interact with through Twitter, thus providing insight to fuel content and related marketing strategy decisions. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to Avinash for blogging about this and other new Twitter measurement tools recently.

Real-time revenue optimization, metrics for multi-channel retailing

2011-11-18T10:23:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 11.23.09

I was recently blown away at seeing the sophisticated measurement and real-time optimization systems of a large multi-channel retailer and their ability to not only measure, but influence in real-time the metric of revenue per minute. It was almost like watching a highly active trader on the stock exchange make minute-by-minute decisions on buying or selling stock. Very cool stuff.

While not every business has the integrated measurement systems, high transaction volume and purchase activity required to use revenue per minute as a key metric, the ability to define, track against and measure KPI’s is something that every business should have in place.

Back to my story though, what was even more impressive about interacting with this retailer was that in speaking with employees throughout the company it was clear that this KPI of revenue per minute was fully ingrained. When new ideas were discussed, new marketing programs or advertising tactics, the conversation usually got back to evaluating those ideas against their ability to impact this KPI.

This is another really important point…while it’s great to have KPI’s, if they aren’t communicated broadly and referenced in decision making around the rationale for your marketing investments, then you’re simply not getting the full value and power out of defining your KPI’s.

So what are your KPI’s and how do you communicate them throughout your organization?

Social Optimization and Measuring Engagement

2011-11-18T09:36:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 11.4.09

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?
While it would be great if there was simply one universal system that I could share with you and say, "this is it", it just doesn't work that way.

Engagement measurement is something that needs to be tailored to your brand, the initiative, the social properties you are utilizing and ultimately against what your core business objectives are. Measuring the impact of social interactions with your brand is interesting stuff that many marketers are just getting their minds around.

Here's a great post from the Econsultancy blog and a list of 35 social interaction metrics to measure.

Social Media & Financial Performance - new study findings

2011-11-18T08:54:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 8.10.09

A recent study has found a linkage between social media engagement and financial success and profitability. In the first study of its kind, Engagement DB has provided the marketing community with some compelling directional findings. While the study findings can not show true causality, it's very exciting to see the linkage between deep engagement within social channels and the financial performance of some of the world's leading brands. Some key findings include:

* "Socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful."
* "Companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference."

In addition to some compelling findings regarding financial performance the study also presents some qualitiative findings relative to best practices; things like how these major brands are staffed internally, how they are procuring and producing content as well as how they are leveraging external partners such as their agencies. All in all this is a great study and a very worthy read.

Longer-form video content on the web

2011-11-18T08:46:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 7.6.09

Recent consumer research regarding online video consumption behavior combined with production trends expanding beyond the 30-second spot are ushering in a new era on the web for online video.

Where once it was thought that the Internet was not the venue for such content, apparently many of us are now choosing to watch longer-form online brand videos and short films. In this 12-minute piece the Schweppes brand only appears twice. The content is an engaging story. It would be great to hear from Schweppes how they measure the impact of this investment on their business. Did this increased awareness drive more people to go buy Schweppes sodas?

While not entirely new, BMW films being one of the best original examples, this new 12-minute film "Signs" from Schweppes is an interesting entry into this new era of longer-form online video.

Lead quality or quantity: what's your goal?

2011-11-18T08:41:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 6.29.09

Hopefully it's a no-brainer that closing deals and generating revenue from leads is directly tied to the quality of the leads you generate. What's the focus of your lead gen programs? And how are you cultivating a stream of sales-ready, high-quality, qualified leads?

Here's an interesting recent study by MarketingSherpa that points to the necessity of optimizing your digital media for organic search as well as ensuring that your PPC search ads are sending visitors to content that delivers on the expectations set by your ad copy.

How to read this chart
CHART NOTE: Marketers were asked to rate the quantity and quality of leads generated for each of the search tactic listed at the bottom of each column using the scale shown to the right of the chart. The total percentage of each column reflects those who are using that tactic. For example, 71% of respondents use 'Search engine optimization'. The remaining 29% do not use this tactic.

Should you create a formal brand ambassador program?

2011-11-18T08:38:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 5.20.09

The short answer is yes. The bigger question is how and what will it cost you.

It seems that every business today wants to discover, interact with and harness the connectedness and influence of brand ambassadors. Why? One great benefit is to stimulate authentic word of mouth through people that other people already trust and listen to, AND are outside the formal corporate brand marketing and messaging machine.

Numerous studies have been done which point to the reality of what information sources people trust and it has become clear that brand messages are way down the list while information from colleagues, peers and friends is squarely at the top.

Intel is one of a number of corporations to jump on this trend over the last year and proactively develop a network of brand ambassadors. They’ve reached out to bloggers with influence, who are articulate, opinionated and have a following of readers who listen…and likely act on the ideas these brand ambassadors put forth.

As with many programs of this type, Intel did invest some dollars in making this happen. They pulled the bloggers from the virtual world of the Internet into the real world of the Intel campus, got to know these people better and in-person, gave then an incentive of a free Mac book Air and sent them off to continue putting forth perspective on Intel products. Pretty simple, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of this program to see how the investment of time, energy and dollars pays off, I think it will.

You can read more about the “Intel Insider” brand ambassador program. Great to see big brands that get it that organizing people with influence online often involves getting people together in the real world to further solidify connections.

Do consumers want to know what online advertisers really know about them?

2011-11-18T08:34:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 3.23.09

A recent article on the New York Times blog, An Icon That Says They’re Watching You, brings up a fascinating issue in the area of behavioral analytics and consumer control. I guess the answer really depends on who you are and what the context of your desire to know is. I mean, I’d be fascinated to know what a given online advertiser knows about me that triggered them to serve me a particular advertisement or offer. I already have fun guessing when I see surf trip ads on facebook or a Jenny Craig ad on snow-forecast.com...clearly someone is targeting me by my behavior, and that’s fine, I get a kick out of it.

Maybe that’s just because I’m in digital marketing. However, I’d wager that there are many consumers who would be curious to know, if they were aware the information was available to them.

Apparently Google is blazing a trail to make this happen in the near future with its new behavioral targeting system by including the phrase “Ads by Google” on all its advertisements. You’ll be able to click on a link and access a limited profile of what Google knows about you, and even edit some of the preferences. It will be interesting to see what percent of consumers choose to access the data, and even more fascinating, how many edit any of their information.

While many in the advertising world may see this transparency to show consumers what we really know about them as a negative, I see it as a positive. If people don’t already get that advertising is in many cases necessary to fund the production of the content they consume, then that’s a fundamental piece of reality to acknowledge. Beyond this though, what if the ability to target brand advertising actually got better because people knew they could edit their anonymous online identity with ease, and trusted the systems that managed this information?

Consumers giving brands more information to better target offers and ads – it certainly brings up controversial issues around trust with online data. It will be interesting to revisit this thought in five years. I bet I’ll have more control over editing my anonymous advertising data. What do you think?

Practical tips for Conversational Marketing Outreach Programs

2011-11-18T08:29:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 1.6.09

Harness the social capital within your organization & leverage your agency to deepen your insights.

Thinking of moving beyond listening to online conversation around your brand to a mode of engaging with influential bloggers and participants within social communities? There’s a lot of opportunity to join the conversation these days, but prepare yourself and your organization first before jumping in.

Before immediately looking outside your organization for experts to engage in dialogue on behalf of your brand, look internally – you might just be surprised at what you find. Your strongest brand evangelist may be sitting right down the hall, across the country or working remotely from their home office. These people know your brand, can engage as direct representatives and bring an immediate level of authenticity to online dialogue.

However, consider this, while you may find people within your organization with deep expertise in various areas, they may not be comfortable sharing their opinions and thoughts openly on the web. With this in mind, look for people who are both interested in contributing and knowledgeable on topics that matter to your brand. Passion for engaging in the online social mediums will provide the fuel for your program.

Understanding this, while a direct representative of your brand is often the best way to build trust with online audiences who are eager to dialogue with your company, you may want assistance getting started and managing your program as it evolves over time. This is where your agency partner can help you with setting program strategy and objectives, diving deep into conversations to mine for trends and unearth engagement opportunities, amplifying your program with fresh ideas and unique angles to approach your prospects and customers.

Social Media Measurement

2011-11-18T08:26:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 1.25.08

Blogs posts, conversations within social networks and threads of dialogue in message boards, all of this online content represents a potential gold mine to gain deeper insight regarding what people really think about our brands, products and services. As marketers we’re fortunate to have a number of analytical tools available to us today that allow for measurement of conversations occurring across these different social media channels. This is exciting, powerful stuff that offers up many opportunities to gather strategic intelligence that we can weave back into our marketing, branding and advertising initiatives. Generally speaking most brands have passionate devotees as well as a few critics.

Previous to the availability of social media tracking and analytical tools, mining the conversations around a brand was a laborious if not impossible task, today the landscape is much different. Current social media measurement tools offer great opportunities to tap into the conversations occurring around brands, identify people who are influential in these conversations, understand the sentiment that is being expressed and ultimately devise strategies by which to reach out and engage with these individuals and communities in ways that can create positive word-of-mouth momentum, often multiplying the effect of other advertising and marketing programs.

Recently at The New Group we’ve been getting deep with a number of the latest tools that are pretty interesting and offer the ability to mine deeply into and target conversations happening in blogs, social networks, discussion boards and other online spaces. The way these tools work is often similar to a search engine in that you specify query terms or keywords, particular phrases you want to show up in posts as well as other conditions to focus your research.

What’s important to consider up front is the breadth and depth of conversations you’re looking to surface. Thinking this through will save you time from searching through too many off topic conversations…because in the end you still must do some reading of the posts, so knowing how to intelligently focus your queries is pretty important! Something else I’m pretty excited about is the ability to visualize the conversational landscape around a particular topic. Through social maps we can see the relationships between people engaged in a conversation and also get a sense for the reach of each participant’s voice.

I could go on about cool features of social media measurement tools…maybe in another post, but for now I’d like to suggest that if you’re embarking on a social media strategy, remember to keep your mind open to learning something new because you just might find a nugget of insight that you could have never anticipated.

Still pushing your USP? It's time to connect with your UBT.

2011-11-18T08:22:00.001-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 11.1.07

The days of the unique selling proposition (USP) are over. People don't want to be sold to anymore, they want to be part of a community, associate with others they trust and consume the products and services that their group of like-minded souls supports. Think Amazon reader comments, customer reviews on CNET, niche communities in B2B spaces of all sorts, people want to hear the objective opinions of peers to inform their purchase decisions.

Enter the concept of the unique buying tribe (UBT). This is a concept woven into a great book about branding, ZAG by Marty Neumeier - check it out on your next plane trip, it's a quick insightful read. People want to trust the brands they support and the companies they purchase from. More than ever people trust the opinions of their peers above and beyond your marketing communications and advertising.

So consider thinking of your audience as a tribe and think about how you can provide ways to build trust with that tribe, they'll tell others why they trust your brand and provide a powerful source of influence in the market.

Strategies for Capturing & Transferring Knowledge

2011-11-18T08:21:00.000-08:00

Originally published on The New Group blog on 9.26.07

So I just attended an event put on by ASTD Cascadia this morning. It was a small panel event with senior learning and development professionals from organizations like PGE, Nike and Boeing, plus a variety of other people who've been in the training and development fields anywhere from 10 to 25 + years. Aside from bringing to top of mind some basic but often overlooked practices, things like documenting processes, conducting "lessons learned" de-briefings and developing easy to use job aids like diagrams, check lists and such, a few of the more interesting topics that surfaced were:

1.) the fact that learning happens all the time, not just when we intend it to happen
2.) recognizing and tapping into communities of practice
3.) the notion that storytelling is fundamental to the knowledge transfer process
4.) the simple act of asking people to share their knowledge can be incentive enough for them to participate in the knowledge transfer process
5.) "tacit knowledge" - that which comes only from experience - is one of the toughest yet most important types of knowledge to capture and transfer

What I'm most curious to explore further are the types of internal communications that can impact employee behavior relative to participating in the knowledge capture and transfer process and how to make the captured content not only accessible but easy to consume.

Build Your Brand Tool from HP

2007-08-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting tool...all flash of course...but it has tools & storytelling combined

Toshiba Superhero Campaign

2007-08-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

A successful creative campaign by Toshiba, worth a look:
http://www.xario.toshiba.com/

Write-up on B2B available here:
http://btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070809/FREE/70809001/1116/FREE

Shell Interactive Video Stories & Games

2007-06-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

View Online
Some well done online video with interactive components.

Create your own video online - Weather Channel

2007-05-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Interesting Flash video application that lets users create and send action-sports oriented videos to friends.

Personal Video Story Vignettes - Visa

2007-05-10T22:01:00.000-07:00

http://usa.visa.com/microsites/security/index2.html

nice use of video - personal, relatable stories delivered in a quick format...first found these on a side bar advertisement on weather.com.

Storytelling through video - Hitachi

2007-05-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hitachi has done an excellent job of showing the impact that their brand and solutions have made on real people in real communities and delivered these stories in a very real and powerful manner.
http://www.hitachi.us/truestories/

B2B online advertising - humor connects - Xerox

2007-05-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

Xerox has created a slightly off-beat, humorous online ad that pushes the brand in a fun and playful direction to promote a somewhat commodity product, nice work.

http://www.extremeoffices.com/