Category Archives: Return On Investment

May 6, 2011 · 9:00 AM

More Marketers Getting Engaged

Two great articles from last week on marketers’ shift from impressions to engagement as key performance measures:

The first, from our good friends at the Harvard Business Review, authored by Coca-Cola Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer Joe Tripodi, profiles the corporation’s growing interest in harnessing the power of brand advocates in pursuit of doubling worldwide revenues by the year 2020.

“In the near term, ‘consumer impressions’ will remain the backbone of our measurement because it is the metric universally used to compare audiences across nearly all types of media. But impressions only tell advertisers the raw size of the audience. By definition, impressions are passive. They give us no real sense of engagement, and consumer engagement with our brands is ultimately what we’re striving to achieve. Awareness is fine, but advocacy will take your business to the next level.”

Tripodi notes that Coca-Cola-related content generated 146 million views on YouTube, but only 26 million of those views were of content actually created by Coke! Wouldn’t it be great if you had your marketing messages amplified by a factor of five-and-a-half?

The second article, by Weber Shandwick’s Tim Marklein, offers an excellent practical guide for marketers seeking to align impressions with expressions when measuring the impact of traditional and social media messages. His advice:

  1. Integrate analytics across multiple channels;
  2. Track engagement and impressions in parallel; and
  3. “Contextualize,” which is my favorite point of all:

“[I]f you’re targeting consumers, then USA Today (3.3 million daily readers) might be valuable to you because of the audience and media context within which it appears. If you’re targeting business leaders, then  WSJ.com (12 million monthly readers) is probably more beneficial in reaching your broad audience.  The industry blog (10,000 daily readers) might be a more targeted way to reach specific decision-makers who would buy your company’s product.

Now let’s add engagement into the mix. Generally speaking, people consume daily newspapers in a passive way with limited engagement.  While newspapers certainly impact opinions and behaviors, that impact is hard to track and fragmented across a broad audience.  With the WSJ.com piece, by contrast, advocates and detractors alike can easily share it via email, blogs and Twitter.  The industry blog might only have 10,000 readers, but they might be ‘the right 10,000′ — and if it’s a good blog, then they’re actively sharing, debating and commenting on the post, which extends the reach through trusted peers and leads to even more engagement.”

There is strength in numbers to be sure, but real growth comes from engagement.

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April 12, 2011 · 8:45 AM

When Who You Are Matches Who You Say You Are

I’ve puzzled over the value of social media for a long time, vacillating between “snake oil” and “the next big thing.” So far, the only concrete conclusions I’ve reached are:

  • Social media is a time suck.
  • Social media can elect a president.
  • Social media is a powerful branding tool if you have an unlimited amount of time and money.
  • Social media is nearly impossible to quantify using traditional ROI measures.

But leave it to Brian Solis to point out the true value of social media.

I think Solis is under the impression he gets paid by the word, and one has to sort through the psychobabble to get to the meat, but the point is clear: honest engagement in social media enables a brand (or an individual) to demonstrate that you truly are who you say you are.

In his April 8 post, “How do you increase social influence? Don’t think about the score,” Solis states that one should not mistake “influence” (the number of connections, posts, “likes,” retweets, friends, etc. one acquires) with “social capital,” defined by Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam as, “[the] collective value of all ‘social networks’ and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.”

“[Putnam] believes social capital can be ‘measured by the amount of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals’.”

In other words, your ability to influence action is in direct proportion to the amount of trust you engender from those in your social community.

“Influence is not measured by a score, but instead by the culmination of resulting actions…If you invest in the value of the community and seek to improve the experiences of those to whom you’re connected, your influence and presence is in turn symbolic of something that escapes a number. Your investment then pays off in the form of self actualization [emphasis mine], reaching higher potential without any attachment to success or reward.”

Capitalists (myself included) will have a difficult time grasping this altruistic philosophy, especially if our number one goal is to sell stuff.

However, when paired with more traditional marketing communications, social media efforts over time build trust and demonstrate a commitment to the well-being of those you value the most—your customers.

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April 5, 2011 · 2:13 PM

Coupons Dazzle But Brands Still Matter

Great post on Forbes.com today from Robert Passikoff, speaking to the proliferation of Web sites, apps and social networks that enable consumers to buy stuff at a deep discount.

Passikoff admonishes marketers not to allow the lure of a quick bump in sales to distract from the perceived value only a good brand can offer:

“Yes, everybody is delighted with a deal—or they were. But given the current state of consumer knowledge of the marketplace and access to information not controlled by the brand, what used to be ‘delight’ has turned to ‘expectation’.”

My former client, hotel magnate John Q. Hammons, used to say, “the only person who ever got rich selling on price was Sam Walton.” And he was right.

When the only feature you have to sell is the fact that you’re cheaper than the other guy, you’re always susceptible to someone else undercutting you by a dollar and taking your customers away.

What are you doing today to win the hearts and minds of consumers, whose choices, access to information and access to discounts is greater than ever?

What tangible and intangible benefits are unique to your product or service?

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March 8, 2011 · 10:41 AM

Can Marketing and Customer Service Share Social Media Responsibilities?

Thought-provoking article in MediaPost today on how companies plan to use Twitter and Facebook for customer service in the coming year.

According to a Gartner, Inc. report referenced in the story, roughly one in three large companies will begin using their online communities to improve customer service in the coming year (that’s up from a mere five percent in 2010).

Right now, most companies manage their social media presence through their marketing departments, which works pretty well for proactive communication, but few companies have found a way to effectively respond to customer complaints and constructive criticism using social media (after all, marketing is about making promises, not keeping them)

“[Gartner] identified several hurdles slowing the shift to customer care through social sites. Despite the hype surrounding social media as a customer service tool, there is a lack of back-end technology in place to support customer service operations through online social channels. ‘There are a myriad of technology and process issues that arise when you go from ad hoc support to scalable and structured support,’ said Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner.

Kraus cites HP and Drugstore.com as two companies that have figured out a way to use social media to improve customer response, but they are on a very short list.

In recent years, we’ve all been working hard to integrate sales and marketing to ensure that the promise (marketing) is living up to the customer’s expectations and serving her needs (sales).

We now need to incorporate customer service into the mix. I think that’s what Philip Kotler et al. are talking about in their book Marketing 3.0. Randall Ringer has a nice viewpoint that you can read HERE.

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December 21, 2010 · 12:02 PM

#BrianSheehan Taken to Woodshed for Social Media Column

Poor Brian Sheehan. He’s taking a real beating for his column in Ad Age last week on how big brands are beating the little guys in the realm of social media.

Sheehan cites campaigns such as the Ford Fiesta and the Old Spice Guy as examples of how big brands have leveraged social media to connect with consumers.

To date, he’s attracted 21 comments, the majority of which read like this gem from pedels01:

“Do many small brands have the budgets to locate and enlist 100 major influencers and hand them all cars? Do they have the resources to create one of the most popular ads of the year and THEN create a series of viral videos that people go wild over? Do ANY of the small brands have the kind of brand name, awareness and connection that gains instant attention, awareness, and engagement?

This isn’t a crisis of imagination–it’s a crisis of resources. Sure, you have some small brand outliers who do clever things, but reality is, more resources, more people thinking at your behest, and more agency support yields more buzz, and that’s final.”

There’s no doubt that both Ford, Procter & Gamble and others have done a masterful job of leveraging social media to drive awareness and sales, but consider that the Fiesta launched involved giving away 100 cars to socially connected millennials and Old Spice invested millions in mass media advertising to drive its social media campaign and his argument falls short.

The best-ever example of the little guy using social media to get ahead is BlendTec, with its “Will it Blend?” video series, which remains the all-time most-watched viral video series, and in my opinion, does what any good marketing campaign should do—it showcases the superior features and benefits of the BlendTec blender.

If their blender is good enough to pulverize an iPad, it can probably handle a frozen margarita.

As I see it, social media works and can work well, provided you abide by the tried-and-true principles of marketing communications. If you can answer four basic questions, you dramatically improve your chances for success:

  1. Who are you?
  2. What do you do/what are you selling?
  3. How is your product/service better than your competitions’?
  4. Why should I care?

Sheehan’s not wrong; he’s just comparing apples and oranges.

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December 20, 2010 · 10:35 AM

Who’s Watching Whom? Do We “Deserve” Privacy at All?

As a marketing guy, I like the concept of being able to send a targeted ad directly to the consumers most likely to respond to my message.

And according to the Wall Street Journal, DirecTV is about to do just that, offering household-specific ads based on demographic data collected by “reputable” third parties. (I find the use of the word “reputable” disturbing, as it implies there are all sorts of dastardly entities out there tracking your ever move and offering up your deepest secrets to the highest bidder.)

DirecTV says households will be assigned a code, which does not correspond to the set-top boxes that will collect and “select” the appropriate ad that will be shown to a particular household. And I believe them.

But this won’t stop Congress and other inquiring minds from exploring the privacy issue ad naseum. And I suppose that’s their job.

Where does commerce end and privacy begin? Especially when we’re so interested in letting the world know the minutest details of our lives via Facebook and Twitter? Do we “deserve” privacy anymore?

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December 15, 2010 · 10:27 AM

How Do You Measure Your PR (Wo)man?

“By height.” (Sorry, Caddyshack reference there.)

Or by using the new Barcelona Principles, crafted by the 200 of the public relations industry’s leading researchers. Personally, I think they were all just looking for a way to write off a vacation to Catalonia, but I would have done the same if they had invited me. (I have attached a copy of the Power Point from posted by the PRSA that you can download by CLICKING HERE.)

The seven basic measurement principles emerging from Spain:

  1. It’s important to set goals and measure your PR efforts (duh).
  2. Outcomes are more important than outputs (in other words, don’t confuse activity with achievement)
  3. PR should impact your bottom line (it’s more important to look good than to feel good)
  4. One should measure the quality of the messages that appear in the media and not just the volume of news coverage a PR program generates
  5. Advertising equivalency is not an accurate measure of PR value (hurray!)
  6. Social media can and should be measured
  7. Transparency and “replicability” are important

I am pleased to see the PRSA get behind these principles and hope that marketers around the world will invest in the pre-, intra- and post-campaign measurement programs that will bring accountability and credibility to the PR industry as a whole.

I’ve been earning my living in PR for 18 of my 21 years in marketing communications, and I’ve had more than one disagreement over how to quantify my teams’ efforts for clients. I’ve always suspected that advertising equivalency and gross impressions were bogus numbers and fuzzy math, but in many cases, they were the only numbers on which client and agency could agree.

I see hope for the industry now that we’re applying sound logic to measuring all facets of PR and its very real impact on sales and revenues.

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December 2, 2010 · 9:24 AM

The Five Types of Media All Marketers Should Measure

Nice piece today in Forbes.com from David Edelman and Brian Salsberg on the changing world of media and how marketers should adapt their thinking when forming communication strategies.

While traditionally marketers have categorized media as “paid” (advertising), “owned” (your company Web site, e-mail blasts, etc.) and “earned” (PR story placements).

Edelman and Salsberg suggest adding two categories to the mix: “sold” (such as when other marketers purchase advertising on your Web site or blog) and “hijacked” (when social media agitators take it upon themselves to besmirch your brand’s name).

Additionally, the “earned” media category is taking on meaning beyond the traditional “advertising equivalency” measure traditionally used to evaluate public relations’ ROI.

I would suggest that “earned” and “owned” are merging, as Edelman and Salsberg observe with Starbucks‘ achieving 10 million fans on Facebook and leveraging this fan base to energize its “My Starbucks Idea” site, drive customer loyalty and sales revenues.

Donna L. Hoffman and Marek Fedor offer ideas on how to measure the value of these strategies in this essay.

It’s a new world out there. Consider all avenues and evaluate how each works with the others to deliver sales, revenues and customer value over time.

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November 19, 2010 · 11:00 AM

What’s Wrong With Media Relations?

I’m trying to get my brain around an article posted to Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog today.

The (nameless) author’s contention (as I understand it), is that PR pros are still focused on delivering information in a traditional media relations style, rather than adapting to the needs of the market.

“The current buzzwords are all about engagement, experience and influence – which would seem to imply a receiver-oriented approach to public relations. But if you look at most of what is being done in the name of journalism or public relations, it is one-way dissemination of messages seeking to inform, persuade or possibly entertain others in order to achieve return on investment.

So it is classic media relations even if we’ve swapped journalists for bloggers or we’re abandoning the press release for 140-character Tweets. There’s a message we’re trying to communicate and we focus on the medium as the means to achieve this. We aren’t really having mutually-beneficial conversations most of the time.”

I get the whole “mutually beneficial conversation” thing, but at the end of the day, isn’t PR (like other forms of marketing communication) about selling more stuff?

Most of us have mutually beneficial conversations everyday, but outside of a direct sales environment, how many of those conversations result in one of us buying a product, service or idea from the other?

It’s absolutely important to listen to the needs of the marketplace and responding accordingly, but that is the role of research and planning, whose job is to define our revenue opportunities and the audiences who are most likely to get us there, and our sales force, who are most engaged with our best customers and key prospects.

As PR pros, we are trying to drive a message that persuades and motivates a specific subset of the public to take a desired action—which could include “liking” us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, or going to our Website to purchase our product or gather more information.

Over time, these engaged individuals can and do offer an excellent source of feedback, and we should by all means listen to them and respond accordingly. They most likely are the 20 percent who account for 80 percent of our sales.

But therein lies the difference between media relations and customer relationship management.

“If arguments for public relations as a relationship-oriented function are to be credible, we’d need to change our entire approach. Instead of looking at writing skills as the core competency, PR education should consider aspects of communication that encompass listening skills, negotiation and compromise.”

I disagree. When we have an actual relationship with a particular individual, public relations can and should enhance that relationship. And listening is a big part of that relationship.

But negotiation and compromise may ultimately prove counterproductive in that they dilute our brand message and open the door to confusion in the marketplace.

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October 4, 2010 · 12:08 PM

#HBR: The High Cost of Responsibility (or Why the Lawyers & The Government Have Won)

Reading an essay on responsibility by Rosabeth Moss Kanter appearing in the October edition of the Harvard Business Review has me troubled.

On the surface, taking responsibility is a noble endeavor. We all should respect and admire the person who raises his hand and says, “my bad.” It’s a lesson we all learned from “Leave it to Beaver” or “The Cosby Show.”

But Kanter, appropriately, points out that The Buck Stops Here is not an inexpensive strategy:

Selling a simple cup of coffee, for example, already requires much more knowledge than how to brew and serve it. Where was the coffee grown, under what labor conditions, and with what pesticides? Is the cup made from recycled paper, and how many trees were cut down and how much water was used to manufacture it? Does the plastic lid leak toxins, and does it snap shut well enough to prevent burns from spills?

My read: activists, government and plaintiff’s attorneys are now dissecting every move you make. And every move made by your suppliers, vendors, partners, friends and the people who re-sell your products and services—so watch your butt.

From a PR standpoint, I believe that taking this “total responsibility approach,” telling the truth and dealing fairly with others is the right thing to do. And business owners should consider all aspects of their business to ensure they (and their business partners) are doing the right thing in all facets of their operations.

It’s just a shame that simple mistakes are more likely than ever to subject otherwise well-meaning and honest people to endless government regulation and/or devastating lawsuits. You can’t legislate honesty, but you can make life a lot tougher for honest people.

So while you’re huddling with your lawyers, your accountants, your risk management advisors, etc., be sure to include your communications officer, s/he’s the one who’ll be responsible for telling the world how “responsible” your company is. Or dealing with the consequences if you aren’t.

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