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

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.

It’s not share of voice it’s share of conversation

I was just working through a social media strategy session and realized that many companies still don’t quite realize the value of social media and that it’s not just about running a good (or bad) social media campaign.  It’s about understanding the strategy for your social media, including short and long term results.

Competitive social media strategy

Looking at social media isn’t about Twitter, blogs or Facebook.  It’s about how your actions compare to the competition and how you can deliver your share of conversation.  Just as it’s about market share in the physical world, it’s about share of conversation in the social media world.

Share of Conversation

Share of voice sounds like a great outcomes metric, but voice implies a one-way conversation, not to mention the fact that it is already used to measure the value of traditional media in a competitive market.  Social media is about engagement and a two-way conversation.  There is value being transferred from the brand and value being provided by the consumer.  There is a conversation taking place and it needs to be the goal of social media activities to determine an effective strategy to improve the share of conversation.  Once that has been done, the social media strategy can start to determine how to increase share, beat the competition and do it in a way to drive brand value and market share in the physical world.

I’d love to hear from you to see if this makes sense.  Just let me know.

DemandROMI partners with iFusion Marketing and Resultrek to offer valuable Marketing Workshops

My company DemandROMI has been offering workshops on topics concerning marketing ROI, marketing effectiveness and social networking and other critical topics and we have decided to partner up with two great firms to offer new value to our audiences.

I think you’ll find them very interesting and I hope you will be able to attend.  For more information, please visit www.immergize.com – immerse and energize yourself to drive extraordinary returns for 2008.  There are four offerings:

• Social Media Marketing
• Marketing ROI for B2B and Consumer Marketers
• Success in Asia
• Product/Brand Strategy

I hope you’ll find time to attend.

Surround-Sound Marketing

Surround-sound, or 360 degree or integrated marketing campaigns have become hot topics in the last few years and have enabled marketers to design and deliver very effective marketing campaigns.

Surround-sound marketing and psychologics

Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart describe the process in detail in their book ‘What Sticks,’ but let me give a brief overview here.  At a high level the interaction between media is more than just providing multiple touches about a specific message.  The idea is that the messages are reinforced between each other.  In particular, the concept of ‘psychologics’ means that, for example, a print ad actually helps the mind conjure up the imagery of a corresponding, previously viewed TV ad.  Because of this the value of the print ad is actually higher than the value of a print ad where there was no corresponding TV imagery.  This is probably the reason why many non-TV ads are improperly attributed to TV because they trigger the mind to conjure up the images from the TV commercial.

If, for the moment, we leave aside the active or passive exposure to a media type and if we assume that the viewing of a commercial on television delivers the most imagery, because it has both video and audio components, then it should be that a single viewing has the largest influence.  Radio has only an audio component.  Print has a visual and written component (and sometimes odor), but does require more active participation to read and absorb the message in the ad.  In this case in order to get the biggest bang for the buck out of a surround sound marketing campaign, then the most imagery oriented ad should be run first followed by the other media.

Traditional media analytics may be wrong

This has a lot of implications to help marketers improve media buying and flighting.  It also has implications of how marketers measure the results of their surround-sound marketing campaigns.  Simply correlating impressions of the various media elements to bumps and wiggles in the outputs may provide incorrect conclusions as to what is working and what isn’t.

We now need to know which consumers actually saw one ad only, two ads from different media and so on.  Only with this detailed viewership model can we truly see how effective one media channel is versus another.

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

Ingredient Branding

I have been invited to participate in the early stages of a hot topic called ingredient branding.  The topic comes about because of the effective marketing of such brands as ‘Intel Inside®’, Dolby®, Teflon® and Stainmaster®.  Each of these brands is purely a component or ingredient combined with many others to deliver a final consumer or business product.  This field of study is just starting up and should lead us to some interesting marketing applications as we determine the value of the ingredient brand. 

The Choice Model

Consumers make choices along three dimensions: 

1. The utility derived due to the preferences for the attributes
2. The utility derived due to the preferences for the brand
3. The disutility of price

With ingredient brands the preference for the brand bifurcates into two sub-dimensions:  The preference for the brand of the product and the preference for the inclusion of the ingredient brand.  How many consumers (or businesses) would pay more to have the same capabilities in a Dell® laptop with Intel Inside® or with AMD® inside?  In this case we are looking at understanding a two by two matrix, where the choice is between Dell and some other brand each with either Intel or AMD inside.

The Channel Choice

In a similar way consumers make choices of a channel based on the expected value of a brand purchased in one channel versus another.  I used to work with an upscale marketing professional that would brag that he bought such and such brand in such and such store.  When I asked ‘why didn’t you buy the same product in Wal-Mart and save 25%’ the answer was typically ‘I don’t shop at Wal-Mart’, or ‘they don’t provide the same level of service’ and so on.

So in some respects the product and the brand have different values based on the ingredients and based on the channel where it is offered.

I will keep you up to date as we learn more on this fascinating topic.  If you have any specific questions or comments about ingredient branding, please let me know.  I look forward to hearing from you.