The Marketing Consortium

Welcome Rand Schulman and Steve O'Brien

Today I have the privilege of passing the torch. It's been an unexpectedly rewarding 2 months. I accepted this guest-blogging gig as a way of stepping outside my familiar bloggng perspective and taking on a topic that was interesting to me, with a focus I don't usually apply on my own blog. It turned out to be a smart move. I have a much greater appreciation for how a topical approach can bring focus to a blog, even if it's only for a month or two at a time, and I've met some incredibly smart people that I'm looking forward to collaborating with in the future.

On Monday, Rand Schulman and Steve O'Brien, respectively the new General Manager and the Vice President of Unica's Internet Marketing Group, will take over blogging with a focus on Internet Marketing. I don't know Steve, but I've had some great discussions with Rand, who is one of the pioneers of Web analytics, and I'm really looking forward to what they have to say about Internet marketing. Rand is also a fellow mountain biker, so I know it'll be a white knuckle ride.

Thank you, Carol Meyers and Unica, for the opportunity to spout off about social media, and for the freedom to say whatever was on my mind. And thank you to everyone who commented on my posts. Best of luck becoming an active member of your own market community.

Social Media as a Service

Today will be my last substantive post on the Unica Marketing Consortium blog. Tomorrow I'll be introducing next month's bloggers, Rand Schulman and Steve O'Brien. So I wanted to leave off on the one area of social media that I haven't really discussed in depth, the impact of social media on agency services, since that's where I spend most of my time.

Social media is dramatically redefining the role and relevance of the marketing services agency. Unfortunately, I don't believe most agencies realize how. With the advancing popularity of all things "Web 2.0", agencies are jumping on the bandwagon in droves, maxing out capacity in every conference and seminar on Web 2.0 and social media topics. It's becoming a feeding frenzy.

But in this flood of newfound interest in social media, there's a surface current and there's a deeper tidal shift. The surface current is the Buzz. It's all about social media applications. Blogs, and wikis, and forums. Viral video. Consumer generated content. If an agency isn't offering it, they're falling behind. Quick, get someone on staff who can build a blog. Grab a Web guru who speaks XML and Ajax. Post an offering on your products page that is socially savvy.

Technology has always been a challenge for marketing agencies, and they'll get all caught up in trying to keep up with the flood of new Web 2.0 tech. But the deeper current is what really matters, and it runs directly opposite from the entrenched world view of most agencies. Think about it. How many fake quotes have you signed off on in a press release? How many "thought leadership platforms" have you seen embraced with no input from customers or the market? Most agencies pride themselves on their strategic and creative brilliance in getting attention--not in listening and responding to customers and the market. Over the years that has elevated quite a number of rather ugly and manipulative practices that consumers resent--spin that positions fantastic product and business capabilities that no one believes anymore.

The tidal shift that social media represents is the ability for consumers to see beyond the packaged spin and hype. The technology is merely a vehicle. Agencies need to embrace the technology, but far more important, they need to bring a new game to the market that helps businesses enage with their market communities responsively and responsibly, and not simply embrace the new technology as a shiny new club to hit consumers over the head.

It's not an easy shift. Just a few weeks ago I relaunched my own agency to focus exclusively on social media programs and techniques, and struggled for a long time over positioning. If I publicly embrace the Web2.0 ethic, I run the risk of being categorized as just another "me too" agency serving up social media. But if I don't embrace the ethic, I run the risk of failing to connect with the obvious trend that most marketers recognize. In the end, I decided to fully embrace the social media ethic and vocabulary, but to focus on programs that go deeper than just viral video and blogs, and develop programs around the creation of customer communities and marketing innovation. I'm hoping to rebuild a clientele of customers that understand both the surface trend and the tidal shift, and that see the opportunity to leverage the interest in social media as a way to build more meaningful and profitable relationships with their market community.

If you're exploring programs in social media, have fun with all the new tools and technologes. Whether you're trying out viral video or a corporate blog, there's an endless buffet of opportunities to gain attention. But don't lose sight of the deeper trend. How do these tools help you build a sustainable relationships with your customers? How do they help you earn a role as a respected member of your market community? Every effort and campaign should be taking you one more step in that direction, and your agency should help you get there.

I'll continue to participate as a member of this community, and I'll be launching a blog in the next few weeks to focus on the same topics I've been discussing here. It'll be called Social Plug, and it will be part of the network of marketing-related blogs based at my agency, MotiveLab. I certainly hope to see these discussions grow with meaningful input from people who value a community like this one. Thanks for reading. Tomorrow, I'll have the honor of introducing Rand Schulman and Steve O'Brien.

/chris

The Dark Side of Social Media

One of the most prominent bloggers on marketing and social media, Kathy Sierra, has blogged that she's been receiving death threats online. Ironically it's other prominent bloggers, including Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke, whose blogs were the source of the threats. So far, the motive is murky but the impact is disturbing--on both sides of the equation. There's not much for me to add to the conversation. Read Kathy's summary for the details, and read Chris Locke's response.

Another Rant On Social Media Metrics

If there's one phrase I could forever eliminate from the marketing handbook, it would be "What's the ROI on Social Media?" The question is completely inane, and belies a lack of meaningful understanding about metrics and performance measurement. It's a clear sign of a marketer who has embraced the language of accountability, with little understanding of the mechanics. You get the sense that because there's no prettily packaged Social Media Dashboard ready to bubble up impressive graphs for the CEO, marketers are adrift without a paddle.

Meaningful metrics come from defining your business objectives and key performance indicators that demonstrate whether or not you're making progress toward specific goals. If one of those indicators is not a clear increment of revenue or cost reduction, there won't be an ROI measurement. Sometimes that path is not easy to measure. Sometimes it's even more trouble than it's worth. What's the path to revenue for your corporate identity? What's the path to revenue for your business cards? Some initiatives are just a cost of doing business, and you rely on other justifications that are more relevant than an absurd and paralyzing devotion to ROI.

The point is, there isn't a magic formula for ROI or other marketing performance metrics. But there are building blocks and strategies for developing meaningful metrics that help you determine whether your programs are working. And that's no less true for emerging social media programs than it is for traditional direct response programs. You start with clear business objectives, develop  KPIs, and then come up with ways to track them. And it turns out there are a lot of things you can measure in social media.

If your goal is to develop a position as a market thought leader, there are ways to measure influence. How many blog posts are you writing? How many other blogs are linking to yours, and at what level of influence as measured by tools like Technorati or BuzzLogic? How many people are commenting on your blog? How many people are subscribing to your feed? How is your traffic growing within your target market? What's your search engine rank for keywords you're blogging about?

If your goal is to drive leads and sales, there are ways to measure impact on cross-channel campaigns, and even direct click-throughs. It just takes the same kind of discipline that's always been leveraged in direct response campaigns. Tests and controls. Launch a control without a social media component, and a test that incorporates social media--like a campaign launch via blog, or customer participation in campaign creative. Launch a string of product offers via RSS and track click-throughs compared to an email campaign.

I won't trawl through the litany of business objectives, but if the objective is clear, the path to metrics isn't far behind. It's just not waiting on a silver platter with a big red bow. So please, don't ask what the ROI is on social media. Tell me what your business objectives are and what indicators would demonstrate progress, and odds are we'll be able to find ways to measure meaningful KPI's in social media--and even pit them directly against other programs you already reflexively invest in.

Unica has just released a relevant whitepaper on Web2.0 and Rich Internet Applications, that talks specifically about meaningful metics. Unica didn't ask me to plug the paper--it was brought to my attention by a friend and co-conspirator outside Unica, Mike Moore. But it's a useful read if you're  looking for more ideas on how to approach social media metrics.

The End of Media as We Know It?

A couple of interesting threads came together on Stowe Boyd's /Message blog over the weekend. One thread examines the death throes rocking the newspaper industry; the other looks at the social music scene, and how it may impact the traditional radio industry, or "terrestrial radio". In both cases, we're seeing stalwart industries losing revenue rapidly to new forms of media. And they're not alone. CD sales in the U.S. are plummeting as consumers go online to download music, and television networks are struggling with content to maintain advertising rates, scrambling for cheap format programming like game shows and reality tv.

Unfortunately, as an article in the New York Times points out, the growth in online ad revenue is not enough to make up for the losses traditional media are taking, so the prospect of large media companies simply transitioning to online channels is not so rosy. Consider the partnership of NBC and News Corp (FOX's parent company) in that context. YouTube is phenomenally popular, but they're not making money on ads yet. Somehow NBC and News Corp think they're going to be able to leverage their vast pool of advertisers to monetize their vast pool of content online. But let's face it, most of their content just isn't that good, and when consumers are constantly adapting new ways to ditch or tune out commercials, why will it be any different online?

It's nice to know that the media companies aren't taking this all lying down. In fact, they're dreaming up novel  new ways to try and keep viewers in front of the commercials. Good luck with that.

The impact for businesses will likely be mixed. Advertisers will have a lot more options and leverage to drive advertising prices down, but they'll have to deal with the uncertainty of new advertising and marketing models, and the slow evolution of metrics to measure performance. That spells a lot of disruption in marketing ranks, forcing marketers to keep up with a stream of new technologies and metric models. Are you already feeling the shift? Where are you placing your bets?

Some Good Social Media Sources

Here are a couple of good resources on Social Media that have been passed along to me over the past few days.

The first is a white paper from Nielsen BuzzMetrics titled Consumer Generated Media 101, Word-of-Mouth in the Age of the Web-Fortified Consumer. The paper gives a very solid and concise background on social media and the specific content vehicles that directly impact consumer purchasing decisions. Of course, it's written to enhance the perceived value of offerings like those from Nielsen BuzzMetrics, but that's not a hard sell. Gaining direct insight into the conversations that are shaping your market is increasingly mission critical.

The second is an SEOmoz roundup of social media tools that marketers should be familiar with, including Digg, Flickr, Technorati, JotSpot, StumbleUpon, and many more. 30 to be precise.  If you're not familiar with SEOmoz, you'll want to tag it. They have a lot of very good content.

A more extensive list, though not nearly as useful because it's just a raw list, is "Seth's List" over at Statsaholic. Statsaholic itself is a useful tool for marketers to bookmark, providing a comparative graphing of Web traffic, reach and rank. They draw their data from Alexa, and just changed their name from Alexaholic to Statsaholic to bring an end to trademark litigation. More on that at MarketingRev.

If you've got a favorite social media site or resource, let us all know about it. There's too much happening out there for one source to keep it all straight. That's why we have social media!

Social Media Comes Home to Roost

If you want to know how Social Media may change business communications tomorrow, watch politics today. Unlike the 1960s, when politicians were just waking up to advertising and direct response marketing, politics operates today with the money and sophistication to drive innovations in social communications. Many of the most powerful and engaging social media sites on the Web are political, filled with impassioned citizen activists who generate immense quantities of insightful and compelling content--along with a lot of conspiracy theories, petty arguments and personal bashing.

Today, the Web is buzzing with the mysterious source of a brilliant attack ad against Hillary Clinton, in support of Barack Obama. The ad appeared on YouTube, posted by someone named ParkRidge47. It was not financed by the Obama campaign. It was not financed by a 527 committee in support of Obama. For the moment, it appears to be an ad by a loyal fan of Obama, possessing nothing more extraordinary than a good sense of theater and a computer with video editing software.

Political pundits are immediately tagging this as the phenomenon to watch this coming election season--ads created by independent citizens, without the backing of a campaign committee. The FCC has been grappling with this concept for years, especially after the success of 527 campaigns like MoveOn. Should ads like these be regulated? Should they be considered campaign contributions?

I'll leave that discussion to the political forums. But the implication for business is no less powerful. User-generated commercials are not entirely new. A few years back a school teacher named George Masters became a Web sensation with an iPod commercial he created with no cooperation from Apple. It was not only brilliant creative--it demonstrated the level of sophistication consumers can reach in creating media in their own homes. Fast forward a few years, and the tools are cheaper and easier to use, and the distribution far simpler.

I posted yesterday about the dangerous potency of disgruntled customers. As the tools for creating media become more accessible, we'll undoubtedly see more commercials like this famous spot by a couple of iPod customers who were among the first to realize the unexpected problems of iPod batteries. The furor generated by this home video commercial caused significant policy changes at Apple, and a lot of scrutiny into their environmental record.

So what should businesses do about this growing reality? It's really just a piece of the larger trend in "democratized content". Businesses are open to a lot more scrutiny--not just in regard to their products, but in every way they connect with their constituencies. Your customers, partners and suppliers are comparing notes and sharing ideas--and if they're not today, it's only a matter of time, for the simple reason that it's in their best interest to do so. Every businesses should be trying to understand how their stakeholders are connecting, what matters to them, and how to join the conversation. Being engaged won't elminate the challenges, but it will make you more prepared to respond, and to leverage opportunities at the same time.

Signs of Social Media

I'm going to keep it light today with a couple of amusing bits about Social Media and its implications that are making the rounds.

The first is a claim of Wiki-tampering that has been leveled against Expedia. It seems that in Expedia's entry on Wikipedia, that portion of the entry that would contain critical comments about the company's services keeps getting whitewashed. A disgruntled Expedia customer noticed the frequent deletions of criticism, and decided to investigate. They discovered that the IP address of the editor who kept changing the entry in Expedia's favor was owned by, well, guess. Yup. Expedia. And thus the coverup becomes bigger news than the crime.

You can take a few things from this story. First, disgruntled customers are not a species you want to poke with a stick. And disgruntled ~travel~ customers are like rabid grizzlies. I know. I've been one. I, um, own the number one spot on Google for "Travelocity Sucks", and it's one of the most visited entries on my blog.  Am I proud of that? Not really. But when your Christmas vacation is ruined by bad service, you can understand why someone would dig through Wikipedia's editor logs to find out who is erasing the criticism.

Second, maybe instead of paying someone to track and erase criticism, Expedia should pay someone to resolve more customer service complaints. Yes, I know, there are some customers with unreasonable demands that will never be happy. But that's a necessary cost of doing business. Getting caught trying to whitewash your reputation is not. It just tends to make your customer service priorities look a little tweaked.

Third, if you're going to do it, for pete's sake don't leave a trail back to your front door. Doesn't anyone watch CSI?

Another story that's been going around the past week is the unlikely success of American Idol contest Sanjay Malakar. In a prime-time grudge match of aspiring divas and rock stars, Sanjay has the most talented hair. It's not even close. But since the show is actually about singing, Sanjay's weak performances have a lot of people wondering how he has managed to survive. Rumours abound. Some say the show is rigged. Others say it's a diabolical plot by Indian call centers to overwhelm the vote-by-phone system that allows the public to determine the fate of Idol contestants. (Really. I didn't make that up.) But the most intriguing answer to Sanjay's absurd survival is VoteForTheWorst.com--a dark and dangerous counter-culture group dedicated to keeping the worst Idol contestant alive until the final weeks of the show.

Think about that for a moment. You have what may prove to be the most popular and successful television show ever. It's in its 6th season, and viewers may be getting a little bored. So someone comes up with the idea of generating a voting campaign for the worst contestent. Add to the entertainment by forcing the judges, and the public, to listen to the worst contestant week after week. It's cruel--not least to the hapless contestant. Though not so cruel as feeding people to the lions for entertainment, and when you open up a show to mob voting, you're likely to see the uglier side of society emerge.

What I find interesting about this story is that it's a perfect example of social media, and its unintended consequences, for better or worse. Whether VoteForTheWorst is actually preserving Sanjay, it shows how  public involvement can change the nature, and in some senses even the intent, of even something so sacred as the world's most popular television show. People can make content their own in ways that producers might never anticipate.  Who knows where this may lead.

It's a brave new world.

Where Marketing Communications Begins

I had a great conversation this morning with Bob Schettino from BuzzLogic, a company that provides an application to track conversations in the blogosphere. We were talking about the Social Media bandwagon--all the hype and buzz that in many ways obscures the real trends that are effecting marketing and that won't disappear when people get tired of hearing buzzwords. It's kind of like Marketing ROI--it was off the charts as the flavor-of-the-month trend way back in 2002. But guess what? It's a fundamental part of the marketing mentality today, despite its annoying trendiness as a buzz topic 5 years ago.

We were talking about various ways in which social media is changing the marketing landscape. I've been talking a lot recently about one of the most fundamental new realities of social media that's very easy to understand and experience: Your customers are comparing notes on every meaningful aspect of your business. Word-of-mouth has always been a critical aspect of marketing. Social media just adds a huge amplifier.

A lot of people in social media have also been talking about how social media changes the relationship between businesses and customers, by making information more democratic. It's no longer a one-to-many broadcast reality, where businesses transmit carefully crafted positioning messages to a market audience. That still happens, but now customers can dramatically impact and even alter the brand image of a company through their own communication channels. Since many consumers now begin their purchase decisions with online research, they're likely to hear a lot more about you from the market community than from your latest campaign.

I was talking last weekend with Russ Baker, one of my former business partners in the brand agency Cymbic, and he put a fascinating spin on the notion of how the identity of businesses is changing. Corporations have been classified legally as persons for generations. That's an interesting theoretical notion with a lot of realworld implications. But it's also a fascinating metaphor. Since the high cost of broadcast communication effectively restricted the information available to consumers for decades, consumers for the most part only saw what companies projected. Their brand. Their image. In Russ' estimation, it's the equivalent of only seeing the face of the person, and with a whole lot of makeup. But now that communications channels are wide open and everyone can dialog and discuss every aspect of their experience with business, it's like we're suddenly seeing the whole person. We see how they behave to employees, to other customers, to suppliers, to entire communities. We see how they conduct themselves everywhere in the world. In a very real sense, companies are becoming more like persons than ever before--persons that are functioning members of a market community, with all the repurcussions and accountability that implies.

But I want to leave off with something Bob Schettino said. It's a very basic and very applicable idea about one of the most tangible ways that social media is changing marketing, and it brings a lot of these broader notions together in a simple truth. In a world of social media, marketing communications no longer ends with the publishing and distribution of your message--that's now where marketing communications begins.

Social Media Metrics

One of the biggest concerns about the growth of social media is its impact on marketing metrics. How do you measure influence? How do you measure engagement? How do you measure the ROI of a blog, or a wiki, or a forum? There are a number of facets of this discussion that are worth pulling apart and clarifying for debate.

First and foremost, the struggle over defining online performance metrics significantly transcends social media. This is a challenge that is more accurately located in the broader category of advancing Web technology. As Tom Hespos points out in a great article on "The Death of the Page View" , technologies that have no implicit connection to social media, like AJAX and Flash, are causing significant disruption to accepted Web metrics like the page view. Web publishers are already struggling over the definition of new metrics for reach and engagement because the ways in which information is published is making older metrics obsolete. Social media as a set of technology tools is simply an extension of this issue, while social media as a social communications trend--the changing ways in which influence is shaped and transmitted--is amplifying the challenge. Simply stated, we need new measures of communication flow that are rooted in the way new technology works--and we have a long way to go. But you won't skirt the issue by avoiding engagement with social media.

The lack of robust metrics makes a lot of marketers gun shy. If you can't demonstrate clear ROI, how can you justify the budget? I don't want to be flippant about this, but I think marketers need to bring a little balance to the justifiable demand for performance accountability. We do need to be accountable, and we do need to show that we've thoroughly vetted the investments we're making. But when you're in a competitive market that demands innovation, you have to get in the trenches to help innovation along, instead of just throwing up knee-jerk stop signs to every project that doesn't come with a business case tied up in a neat bow. It makes me think of a prehistoric fish in a receding inland sea saying to an amphibian "so, what's the business case for legs?"

The best approach I've seen from a marketing group that needs some space to innovate is to allocate a percentage of their budget--let's say from 2 to 10 percent--to emerging marketing programs. Boards that are spouting wisdom about innovative cultures can put their money where their mouth is by sanctioning a small percentage of the budget for programs that may not have a clear cut metric for ROI. Having a dedicated budget then puts a greater focus on how programs are selected, and how performance against business objects should be measured rather than just a slavish devotion to fitting innovative programs into an expected ROI mold.

And that brings us to another significant problem in the typical discussion over metrics. I say this so many times I think it'll wind up on my gravestone: You can be incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things. The vast majority of program metrics are internally focused--they only tell you whether or not your proceeding efficiently. They don't tell you whether you're going in the right direction. Campaign metrics? Market share? Very important. But are you winning the right customers? Are you pursuing the right markets? How much revenue are you leaving on the table--or wasting on marketing programs that won't increase your market share? What's missing is a wider frame of marketing metrics that account for your performance within a competitive set of businesses. Victor Cook is the visionary who's been hammering on this idea for 40 years, and recently published a book that provides a framework for externally focused metrics. I extensively reviewed his book online, and he's recently launched a blog to discuss marketing finance.

Finally, social media is a very thrifty way to fail. There are so many small programs leveraging cheap or even open source technology, that the "i" in ROI is very small compared to any marketing program that involves traditional media. I launched my marketing tech news blog MarketingRev at a total cost of $175 and 40 hours of my own labor, including design, programming and hosting costs for a year. The ROI was astronomical with my first speaking, and just accelerates with consulting referrals, and emerging technology partnerships for my agency. But the payoff in the way that blog keeps me informed and fully engaged in my market would be worth the investment even if I didn't make a dime in revenue.

Performance metrics are an important reality for marketers to understand and embrace--but that also means having a balanced perspective. If the only lens you have for looking at marketing programs is a simplistic formula for ROI, you'll have another important metric to face up to in the future: opportunity cost.