Marketing Tactegy

Haiti and Twitter - Interesting analysis

As I have mentioned to many of you we are close to completing our book project on the ROI of social media and we decided to take a quick look at trending topics and thought about what the response was in the Twitterverse.

Below is a chart from Trendistic.com – I think you’ll like this application.  Anyway, this chart shows the level of 'Haiti' activity once the earthquake hit.  It hit about 4:30PM local time or 2:30 PM EST.  

 

It took about 2 hours for news of the event to hit the Twitterverse (this is our estimate), because you can see when CNN latched on to the catastrophe story they, too, became a major topic in the Twitterverse.  So within the time CNN (here, used as a proxy for all news sources) picked up the story, about 3% of the tweets had a mention about Haiti.  The next day, they continued with the story and it was obvious how big of a disaster it was.  Haiti traffic exceeded 6% and then generally has leveled off to the 6% level for the last few days, with various ups and downs.

 

Also, of course is the incredible response using mobile donations (Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross).  Already, the 90999 text message has delivered millions of dollars to relief for those in Haiti.  I hope you, too, will also contribute.  In the near future I will look at this 'campaign' as well to discover some interesting insights.

Check us out here for some upcoming events.

Let me know what you think

Building a business case for social media marketing

I will be moderating a panel discussion at the upcoming Measure Up Conference in Chicago March 10 - 12, ( http://bit.ly/4zkuuD ) on this topic. If you have any thoughts or questions you would like to ask the panelists, please let me know. It would be great to start a LinkedIn Discussion on this and use the issues brought forward here as input for the conference. 

Actually, there are also a bunch of sessions on WOM and social media, and measuring results so this will be a great way to start the discussion ahead of the actual physical conference. 

The panelists include the VP of Marketing at the San Diego Zoo and the CMO of Atlanta Gas Light. 

It should be pretty interesting. 

Social media, ROI and birthdays

Does it make sense to get birthday wishes from a hotel that you stayed in over a year ago?
Today was the nth re-celebration of my 29th birthday and I have been getting many birthday wishes from friends and acquaintances.  Thanks to all of you.  Social media makes it so easy to reach out (and remember to reach out.)

But I have also been getting birthday wishes from many unlikely sources, including a hotel that I stayed at over a year ago.  And I hope I never have to stay there again.  It was a 2-star hotel holding itself out as a 4-star in dire need of renovation.  I don’t think it has really been a 4-star hotel for a few decades.  I guess now that they have my email, I will always smile every year when I think about that hotel.  I also received birthday wishes from a social community that I don’t pay for and a discussion forum that I gave up long ago.  It really shows, that if you don’t have a real connection to a brand, don’t send things that should have meaning but really don’t.  You definitely will deliver a negative brand experience and generate no ROI.  Now if they had done some analysis of my behavior and use of their service, I might have had a different response.

Now on the other hand, if I got a happy birthday from the Ritz Carlton in Kuala Lumpur or the Nikko, that would be something I would want.  Especially if it offered me a really nice, free something.  I would definitely do everything I could to make sure I stayed there on my next trip.

Let me know what you think.

Social Media ROI Interview Series

Steven Groves of the Social Media Bible and I are embarking on a series of interviews on the topic of the ROI of Social Media.  The first in this series was with Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6.  We will be doing many more and it should be a very interesting series of metrics and measurements to drive increased ROI in Social Media.

Check them out here: http://socialmediabible.ning.com/profiles/blogs/roi-of-social-media-series.

Let me know what you think.

ROI of Social Media White Paper

It’s been awhile since I have had time to post anything, but I did want to finally get this white paper up on social media metrics and ROI.  I was traveling in Asia and Australia, talking about the ROI of social media and I received some great input.  Although the US is definitely winning the race with social media, China is on the rise.

Interestingly, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (these are the ones I tested) are all blocked.  Renren and Douban, Xiaonei and many others are already hosting over 100 million accounts and it will be hard to keep up with that growth.  It will also be interesting to see how this growth will be affected by the use of non-latin characters in domain names.

The ROI of social media is clearly a hot topic and one that will have a series of posts from me and certainly many others.  I think the big issue is how to differentiate from the simple measurements typically associated with the Internet and Web 2.0 and move into the more complex measurements of indirect, combined and brand effects. This white paper is a first attempt to start to delineate these key issues.

Please go to http://www.marketing-calculator.com/DownloadNow.aspx

I look forward to your comments and input.

Also, I started a ROI of Social Media group on LinkedIn.  Please join to learn more about this hot topic.

The top 3 Marketing Inventions/Innovations

Last week I kicked off a short survey of what the top 3 marketing inventions/innovations are.  The answers break down into a few categories.  You may disagree with my classifications, but here are the results:

Historical (not listed in historical order)

• The Internet
• Television & radio
• The Gutenberg printing press
• The wheel
• The microprocessor
• Fire

Market modeling related

• Predictive modeling/churn modeling
• ROMI/ROO, MMM, Return on Brand Investment

Great marketers

• Steve Jobs
• Guy Kawasaki
• Mark Cuban

Technology and tools

• Internet (also mentioned above)
• LinkedIn
• Spell Check
• Personalized broadcast Integrated email and CRM
• Internet
• Social Media
• Twitter
• Online advertising
• Infomercials
• FSIs

Marketing Concepts

• Understanding consumer behavior
• Value appropriation
• Adaptation to new technologies
• Fully integrated Marcom processes
• SPIN
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Lead nurturing
• Strategy
• Retention
• Innovation
• SWOT Analysis
• Ansoff’s Matrix
• The art of differentiation
• Become part of the customer’s life
• Continuous product innovation
• Listen to the customer
• Alphabet soup:

The 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)

The 3Cs (Customers, Channel, Competition)

The 4Cs (Customer needs, Cost to customer, Convenience to customer, Communication)

+3Ps (People, Process, Physical evidence)

The 4Rs and a P (Referrals, Retention, Repeat business, Reactivation, Prospecting)

The 16Ps

• AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Changing people’s attitude

Blatant self-promotion

• (none repeated here)

It’s great to see the diversity of input on various marketing terms and techniques.  I also like the historical references which make it all possible.  It is also a pretty good list of different concepts that marketers feel strongly about.

As for the three top marketers offered, they represent sources of great ideas and to stay abreast of hot new topics we should be following their blogs and other writings.

Thanks to everyone that provided feedback.  Let me know if you have any other thoughts.

Interesting read on the marketing effectiveness of commercials…

At the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC, August 1st – 6th there was an interesting presentation about the effectiveness of advertising and commercial viewership.  (as summarized by Laura Sanders in Science News, August 29,2009).  I was unable to find the original article electronically, but here are a few summary points.

Advertising Effectiveness of commercials

For example, during the research period the cooking reality television show Hell’s Kitchen drew 2.96% share as measured by the cable box, but its commercial audience was 2.42% for a drop of 18%.  On the other hand, high retention took place for NUMB3RS drawing 1.90% and 1.78% during the commercials.
David Schweidel of the University of Wisconsin – Madison did the research and looked at the drop off rates based on:

• Audience size
• Genre
• Network
• Time of day

Some conclusions:

• People were less likely to avoid a commercial late at night.
• The length of the commercial break
• Whether there were other channels with simultaneous commercials
• Dramas did better than reality TV

This is an interesting initial research based on a regional analysis (a large West Coast metropolitan area.)  Losing up to 20% of an audience during the commercial break is a big difference and clearly will have an impact when the commercial ratings system starts to be implemented.

Let me know if you have any other research along these lines.  Or if you attended the presentation, and have any other insights, I would love to see it.

Social Media - To measure or not to measure? That is the question

I've been following a number of blogs and other posts and thoght I would put this out there.  Obviously, I think you know where I believe the answer to the title question lies, but it also shows the trepdidation that many marketers have in  measurement and ROI, especially when it comes to a new media channel.

Measuring Social Media ROI

It's very interesting to read these discussions about ROI when it comes to social media.  They are very similar to the discussions from 10 years ago when it was also 'impossible' to measure ROI from a website.  Now Internet ROI is measured everyday and generally very accurately.  ROI needs to be thought of as a tool to not necessarily get approval, but as a method to do better. We may not know how much incremental revenue social media marketing is going to deliver, but we know that it is worth the risk.

Companies that have never done TV advertising before, set up their first spots so they can test to see if they worked.  If they do, they invest more.  If they don't they tweak their plan to make it work.  We need to think of social media in the same way.

1) Take the risk and take the plunge
2) Measure results to see where we can improve
3) Determine whether it's making a difference and keep measuring.

No one disagrees with the fact that social media is the place to be and that it will be a major place to be for a very long time. 

Our company has been measuring the impact of social communities for a few years now.  It isn't that hard.  You just need to want to do it and have the measurement know-how.  Please reach out to me on twitter at @GuyPowell or go to my book site at http://www.marketing-calculator.com

Social Media Metrics & PR Camp Atlanta

inally getting a chance to put down my thoughts from PR Camp Atlanta.  It was billed as the un-conference and that’s what made it very interesting.

There were four teams, each working through a number of similar questions and that led to some good discussion and learning.  The key session topics were:

1. Get clients and bosses to extend their interest in new media
2. Help senior professionals tap the social media experience of junior colleagues
3. With PR and marketing blurring, determine the best ways to measure success

The biggest insight for me was the concern for marketing ROI and metrics.  In social media, there are quite a few metrics.  Certainly Facebook isn’t delivering everything that’s needed, but there are some early signs of good metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Overall there is definitely some (to put it kindly) confusion as to the use and purpose of metrics.  Applied generally to marketing and to social media specifically metrics have two purposes:

• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site and actions in the community.  For example, Twitter now has a strong following of third party metrics and analytics software providers to help Twitter users grow their follower base and to follow others.  These include TweetBeep.com, TweetDeck.com, Tweepular.com and many others.
• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site to drive revenue, profit, brand and share (These I define as the true measures of ROI).  There are a number of tools that provide the kinds of outputs that can be analyzed to determine the net effect of social sites on critical ROI measures.  In order to make the connection with revenue or other ROI measures.  For example, how many click-throughs were received from Facebook or MySpace?  As for sentimentality and other important metrics Scoutlabs and Radian6 offer some interesting capabilities that can be used to analyze social media at a deeper level.

Once you have these numbers and with some intelligence you can then measure and analyze how each of these communities are delivering on the business goal of revenue, profit, brand and share.
If you have any thoughts or questions, please let me know.  You can also follow me on Twitter at @GuyPowell.  Please tag with #ROMI.

Is BANT dead?

BANT & Marketing ROI

I was talking with a friend in B2B marketing and we were working through the issues with BANT.  In particular the ‘A’ of BANT.  ‘A’ stands for Authority.  That is, does the lead contact have the authority to make a decision on the item being promoted?  And, how can this lead classification improve marketing ROI?

Target Marketing and Corporate Decision Making

In selling business-to-business (B2B) products & services, the question has to do with the decision making process within the target organization.  In large organizations and depending on the value of the capital good being sold, there is usually a committee.  Certainly, there are specific individuals in the organization that have more sway in the decision than others.  Certainly it is better to have VP or C-level backing for your proposal.  But do they truly have the authority to make the decision?  Most efficient managers have a vision and the proposed solution has to fit within that vision.  But there are always competitive solutions and there are almost always others involved to some extent in the decision.  And smart VPs and C-Level executives are going to want to delegate the decision into the organization so that they can own the choice and further enhance the success of the implementation.
The decision making group is either a formal or informal committee.  The committee can be made up of just direct reports in the department or it can be a multi-departmental group across all of the key departments in the organization.  These can include:

Finance
HR
IT
Marketing
Operations
Purchasing
Research & Development
Sales
Security

Some of these individuals can’t say ‘yes’ to a particular investment but they can say ‘no’.  Some of them are just worried about how the solution is going to affect their jobs.

B2B Purchase Authority

The definition of Authority needs to be expanded to now include terms, such as:

Individual is a ‘member of the committee’
This solution needs his/her blessing
This individual will be the prime mover in the implementation
This solution will impact my/my department’s daily workflow

Further, how should an inbound call be classified when the administrative assistant or a low level manager asks for information about your product/service?  Are they gathering information for the VP?  Are they just trying to learn about a topic?  Are they providing informational materials for the purchase committee?  Will they be recommending the solution to their boss based on their research?  Are they a member of an informal or formal purchase committee?

Enterprise Marketing

This has clear implications for how services are marketed to prospective customers.  For enterprise sales the primary objective for marketing is to support the sales team in developing and expanding their key relationships with each of the members of the purchase committee.  Without these relationships, sales will be at a significant disadvantage versus the competition. Using this new definition of contact and authority classification, marketers can improve their targeting to better support the sales team in accelerating sales and growth.

Here is another great post on this topic.  It compares BANT to SCOTSMAN and another mnemonic, but in each case we need to further detail out the Authority term:

(http://blog.market2lead.com/blueprint/2009/03/the-scotsman-vs-bant-for-effective-lead-management.html)

Let me know what you think.