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

Last Touch Attribution

DemandGen Report just published an article of mine on Last Touch Attribution (The first word on Last Touch Attribution, DemandGen Article).  This term clarifies one of the key areas of marketing measurement and accountability.  A related term has to do with marketing contributions from an Integrated Marketing Campaign which I will talk about in my next post.  Last Touch Attribution was coined a year or so ago to help marketers communicate some simple steps relating to marketing ROI. It refers to attributing all of the weight of the results to a single marketing activity.  It disregards all other touches, whether they are prior or parallel touches using other media.  Synergies, halo and cannibalization are ignored.  So if a single direct mail piece is dropped all of the responses to that piece are attributed directly to that direct marketing activity.  All brand effects are ignored as well as all other components of other marketing campaigns.

Last Touch Attribution

I just spent a day at a ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) session with a major high tech company that is actually pretty advanced for their ability to track marketing costs and results.  Marketers have been struggling for a long time to finally differentiate and communicate this type of measurement with the measurement of response to an integrated marketing campaign, where all of the direct results can’t be directly measured.  In my example above, response codes clearly delineate where the specific attribution came from (ignoring all other unmeasured effects.)   In an integrated marketing campaign, each of the campaign elements contribute to the overall response, both in the short term and in the long term (e.g., brand value). 

Integrated Marketing Campaign Contribution

So the IMC Contributions represent the value that each of the campaign media elements contribute to the final result.  There are a few other terms that must be covered to deliver the final picture.  But those, I will talk about in my next blog.

If you have any comments, please let me know.

Sneak preview of my new book

My new book, Marketing Calculator:  Measuring and managing return on marketing investment is about to be published and should be available shortly.  It has been exciting but also time consuming to actually go through the publishing process.  Nevertheless it will be available in the next few weeks, initially in Asia and then in September in the US.

New marketing effectiveness concepts

There are a number of new concepts that I think you will find valuable, namely:

• The Marketing Effectiveness Framework
• The Marketing Effectiveness Continuum
• The Marketing Effectiveness Culture
• Last Touch Attribution(TM)
• 4P3C1E Framework

Drive Marketing ROI

Each of these will help marketers to prove and improve their marketing effectiveness to increase ROI and drive revenue profit and market share.

Stay tuned.  I will have a bunch more to say in the coming weeks.

Web 2.0, marketing analytics and marketing effectiveness

One thing I’ve learned through the last few years is that many marketers look at ROI simply in terms of Last Touch Attribution.  That is they only look at the last touch and ignore the value of all the previous touches.  Because of this calculation method the marketing effectiveness and marketing ROI don't tell the whole story.  Marketing analytics needs to include alot more than just the last touch to get it right.

Well the same phenomenon is occurring in Web 2.0 and social networks.  In reality when we look at Web 2.0, we need to look at the impact of all media and the cross-impact of each of the media channels.  The model has progressed along the three dimensions shown below:

• The past:  Traditional media drives the brand and sales conversion
• Now:  Traditional media drives the brand, sales conversion and web activity (on our branded site)
• The future:  Traditional media drives the brand, sales conversion, web activity (on our site) and community involvement and activity concerning the brand

With this new dimension in place we can now start to look at establishing the right kinds of success metrics in all three cases.  Interestingly, traditional media is still a major component of the past, now and the future.  Without it, most social communities would have a lot of trouble getting off the ground.  With it, the web and web 2.0 social community activity surrounding the brand are greatly accelerated.  For us marketing analysts the fun starts with determining the value of traditional media in context of the results in the social community.

If you have any comments just let me know.  I would love to get your feedback.

Multiple airings, interesting statistics and marketing ROI

I read with interest the article on Nielsen’s new measurement statistics (MediaDailyNews, Nielsen Sings New Ratings Tune: 'We Can Be Heroes, Not Just For One Day', September 26th, 2007) and I was surprised to think that the new numbers to be provided will be the unduplicated reach for the new show “Heroes” on NBC.  This will certainly be very important but some additional research will also be enlightening:

It would be interesting to know:

• How many viewers will watch it twice
• How many households will be counted only once, even though different family members will view it during the first airing and others the second airing

Since we know that every impression received by a viewer adds additional value and marketing ROI to the brand and their advertisers, just providing the unduplicated reach won’t tell the whole story.  Secondly it will be interesting to see how this will work when we finally get commercial viewership which is what the advertisers really care about.

Catalytic Marketing and Marketing ROI

There hasn’t been much discussion concerning catalytic marketing and marketing ROI, but there are clearly some issues that need to be dealt with.  Business to business marketers have been dealing with this for years, but it is now becoming more prevalent in the consumer space. 

If marketing delivers leads to a sales force through a trade show, shouldn’t the trade show marketing get the attribution for any deals that come out of it?  This is a typical situation in a business to business environment where marketing generates leads and sales works to convert them.

Using traditional media to drive non-traditional

In the consumer space a similar pattern is coming about where traditional media drives traffic to the web and that traffic is then marketed to in some fashion.  This might be with follow-on email campaigns, direct mail or even telemarketing.  A good example would be the recent Dove Cream Oil Body Wash, where traditional advertising was used to invite consumers to develop their own consumer generated advertising spots, where the chosen winning commercial would be played at the 2007 Oscars during a commercial break.  This initial traditional advertising delivered over one billion (and still counting) downloads on uncutvideo.aol.com.  Not only did the catalytic advertising deliver brand impressions, but the billion downloads did as well. 

In the Dove example in order to determine the total impact of the traditional advertising, the impact of the billion downloads would also have to be counted.

Catalytic marketing requires adjustment to our marketing analytics

There are a number of conclusions that we can draw from this discussion:

• Proper attribution requires that all follow-on results be correctly attributed
• Traditional advertising isn’t as dead as some would have us to believe
• Current analytic techniques must be adjusted in order to take this into account

If you have any comments on this I would love to hear them.  Please let me know.

Product Sampling and Marketing Analytics

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion on the use of sampling which I will attempt to repeat (in a disguised fashion) here.  Certainly sampling can be a great way to seed the market with to induce trial and hopefully repeat consumption.  But the question is how do we account for the results from the sampling?

Multi-step marketing

Let’s say that we offer samples of a new product at some major event.  Let’s assume it is a food product costing less than a dollar per serving.  The assumption is that after the sampling event, the consumer will go home and then purchase it again (and again) in the traditional outlets of food, drug or mass.  As opposed to a typical television commercial, this is a two (or more) step process begun with the initial sampling event leading to further purchase actions.

Sampling and marketing mix modeling

The traditional marketing analysis technique, marketing mix modeling (MMM) has difficulty capturing the results from a sampling event, because it doesn’t capture the true purchase dynamics.  MMMs try to correlate the bumps and wiggles in the marketing inputs with the bumps and wiggles in the outputs, sales to determine the relative impact of each of the marketing activities.  In the case of sampling, a multi-step marketing tool, the follow-on purchases can’t easily be determined because the increases in the output bumps and wiggles don’t easily correlate back to the inputs, although some synergy elements can be tried.

Because of this, attribution back to the sampling activity is potentially misrepresented and in the usual case under-attributed.  Smart marketers know this and continue to use sampling knowing that the traditional analytics don’t correctly account for these types of multi-step marketing tools.

Agent-based modeling and multi-step marketing

In order to measure these results or those of other multi-step marketing activities, we need to use other analysis techniques.  Survey techniques can determine the propensity to repeat immediately following the initial trial and deliver reasonable results, although they may not be able to include all of the nuances of synergy and other surround-sound marketing effects.

In order to properly account for sampling amidst all of the other marketing activities, a consumer-centric approach is required and agent-based modeling can be one of those methods.  Because agent-based modeling can accurately represent the impact of this multi-step trial and repeat process it can easily deliver the necessary analytics to determine the true impact of sampling on the marketing mix.

There are many other examples of multi-step marketing.  Certainly in the business-to-business marketing environment where marketing delivers leads to a sales force is one.  Catalytic marketing also has elements of a multi-step approach.

If you have other examples of multi-step marketing that fall into this discussion please let me know.