During the holiday season, online media gives you twice the time of a TV ad to get your message through. Combine that with the added advantage of interactivity, and you have a tangible audience engagement with your brand – which helps drive conversions. Select campaigns showed over 30% synergy as Search clicks were revealed to have been preceded by Display impressions.
Despite the damage inflicted by the financial crisis, turnover with advertisement banners, sponsored links and other online advertising format will grow.
Social networking sites thriving (login required) in tough times.
Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies. Forrester can quantify the number of online consumers within these groups using their consumer surveys.
The study of socio-technical phenomena is about understanding the intersections between technologies and social practices. Researching socio-technical phenomena prompts questions like:
How does technology inflect old practices in new ways?
How do people adopt and adapt to the emergence of technologies?
How do technologies configure people and how do people reconfigure technologies to meet their needs?
How do these dynamics play out on individual, group, and societal levels?
Networked publics connect people through networked technology and create public spaces through networked technology in which people can come together. User-generated content is a core part of networked publics. People don't just consume together - they produce together. And, ideally, they consume and produce as part of everyday participation. Four unique properties of networked publics lead to three important shifts in dynamics.
Persistence: What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronous interactions, but not so great when your boss gets to read what you wrote in Usenet back in the 80s.
Replicability: You can copy/paste from one place to another, taking a conversation from IM and making it available via social network sites. This is also the crux of bullying and how politicians take everything out of context.
Scalability: The average blog has six readers. Just because things might be public doesn't mean that they automatically will be read by all people across all space and all time. What scales is variable and, often, it's often what you least want that is most visible.
Searchability: My mother would've loved to scream grep into the air and suss out where I had run off to. She couldn't; I'm thankful. Today, through social media, people are tremendously searchable.
These four properties fundamentally shape three different dynamics that alters how people interact in social media environments.
Invisible Audiences: I can look around here and see who is in the room, but I have no idea who is on the other side of that camera. While I'm at M.I.T. and can make Unix jokes because y'all know what I'm talking about, I have no guarantee that the invisible audience is coming from the same perspective. Online, people have to always negotiate these invisible audiences and that can often be tricky.
Context Collisions: Part of what makes invisible audiences tricky is that they often represent different social contexts. The properties of networked publics collapse contexts and force people to address social situations with different - and often conflicting - social contexts. This is very tricky.
Public and Private Convergence: Public and private are usually framed through spatial metaphors with the home being private and everything else being public. Social media confounds this and public and private turn out to be more about control than anything else. Still, it's a matter of collectives and the properties discussed earlier complicate people's ability to control the publicity of any given situation when others around them have a different perspective.
These dynamics have significant social and cultural implications. They radically alter how people work out identity in relation to those around them. They introduce new structures for social interactions.
Establishing the right metrics Metrics being used to measure the impact of campaigns using corporate blogs depends on the organization.
For corporate blogs, some are using the "conversation index," which is the ratio between postings and comments. Others are using a more complex combination of rankings, comments, links, trackbacks, time spent at the site and number of visitors.
External blogs are being measured by the percentage of key corporate messages they contain, what percentage of these messages are positive or negative, and the shape of positioning on desired issues.
On YouTube, communicators are looking at the degree to which their own content is being picked up, as well as the tone of other videos about them.
On FaceBook, pros look at the types of conversations in which their brands are mentioned, and the number of friends and groups that their brand is involved in.
On Twitter, they are keeping track of their brand via TweetScan and they are monitoring via their own Twitter accounts about them.
Word-of-mouth - or digital buzz - is being tracked by what people are saying anywhere they can using products like Radian 6 and IceRocket.
Interaction (on conversations) with corporate customers are being monitored with regard to exchanges, positive or negative trends, watching for emerging problems, counting the conversations, and looking at the percentage of positive and negative comments
With regard to search engine optimization of press releases, Paine explains effective measurement involves looking at the amount of pickup, as well as creating unique URLs to track the actions people are taking.
Once these online media types have been measured, "what you do not want to do is equate it to advertising or traditional media. You need to define the purpose and goals of the social media program first, and then measure accordingly. So if you are doing it to improve customer service, you need to measure improvement in customer satisfaction. If you start an internal blog to improve employee morale, you need to measure retention, turnover and employee engagement. If you start an external blog to measure engagement with customers or constituencies, you need to conduct a relationship survey to determine whether or not you have changed or improved the relationship."
A growing percentage of consumer behavior is being shaped by what they see in search results. And, according to Bell, social media or word-of mouth needs to be compared to empower marketing communications executives to make budget decisions. As a result, "We use a custom model each time to establish value - it's accurate, but painstaking."
As the term “cause-related marketing” reaches its 25th anniversary and a sea of pink ribbons washes over the U.S. this month, a new consumer behavior study confirms that cause-related marketing can exponentially increase sales, in one case as much as 74 percent, resulting in millions of dollars in potential revenue for brands.
The 2008 Cone/Duke University Behavioral Cause Study, released today by Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, validates for the first time that cause-related marketing can significantly drive actual consumer choice.
Substantial cause-related sales lift for two of the four consumer packaged goods categories tested:
74% increase in actual purchase for a shampoo brand when associated with a cause
(47% of participants who saw the cause-related message chose the brand while only 27% of those who saw the generic corporate advertisement chose the brand)
28% increase in actual purchase for a toothpaste brand when associated with a cause
(64% of participants who saw the cause message chose the target brand vs. 50% who viewed the generic corporate advertisement)
The rapid growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. Marketers are failing to tap the digital world’s full power. The inability to make accurate measurements of digital advertising’s effectiveness across channels and consumer touch points will continue to promote the misallocation of media budgets and to impede the industry’s growth.
The measurement challenge Respondents whose companies are introducing rigorous measurement techniques report a higher level of satisfaction with digital marketing. In fact, 55 percent of them are cutting their expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts, compared with only 43 percent of the respondents whose companies don’t measure the impact.
In response to a question about how budgets are allocated across different media, 80 percent of the respondents say that their companies either use qualitative measures—that is, subjective judgments—or simply repeat what they did last year.
The European broadband study showed that 60 percent of online purchases involve an offline touch point.
Emerging solutions
“If we can’t measure it, essentially, we don’t do it.”
As for allocating ad budgets, leading marketers are now using metrics that permit comparisons between offline and digital spending. One marketer used a method called RCQ (for reach, cost, and quality) to optimize its allocation of spending among ad vehicles. It also includes a quality factor based on changes in engagement, attitudes, and behavior.
The campaign, targeting online customer segments, sought to maximize the ROI of each individual ad opportunity by serving whatever ad most promisingly combined likelihood to convert with profitability of conversion. After the company segmented its customers by the sites they visited online, it could use each person’s past behavior to deploy the most appropriate ad vehicle—e-mail, graphics-rich media, or video. This strategy raised conversion rates by 50 percent.
McKinsey research on telephone users’ social networks suggests that even they can be measured to allocate marketing budgets more successfully. One telecom company, for example, has learned how to retain phone customers by assessing the strength of the relationships among them. The company used call patterns, changes in call volumes, types of payment (prepaid or contract), handset types, and other traits to identify customers likely to leave for another carrier. Meanwhile, it constructed a diagram of their social ties, derived from the people they called, the people those people called, and how often. In general, the more closely anyone was tied to someone who unsubscribed, the more likely that person was to unsubscribe in turn. In this way, the telecom company improved its churn prediction model by 50 percent. Moreover, by identifying the most influential potential churners and working to retain them with new services and price plans, the company not only retained a quarter of them but also reduced the churn rate within their social networks by almost 40 percent.
Contagiousness isn’t just buzz, it’s a way of building brands sustainably through great experiences that get people talking positively about the brand. In our definition, the role of contagiousness is to ‘change the conversation’ and the brands that do this best are ‘conversation leaders’.
Eight Rules to Flourish in the Contagious Era:
You’re part of the conversation, whether you’re managing it or not.
Everything you do creates conversation, whether you think it’s marketing or not, and whether you know it or not. The single greatest driver of positive recommendation is ‘experience beyond expectation’.
Changing the conversation to your advantage is what grows your business. Brands with the most recommendation in their category grow 4x faster than the category average (London School of Economics). Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth (Bain Consulting).
Most of what is currently positioned as buzz or word of mouth is completely worthless.
You have to be talking about something that really matters to people to really change the conversation.
Great brands lead the conversation by having a point of view that transcends even the category.
Broadcast marketing can change the conversation too, but to do so you need to apply a higher standard.
Symbolic actions have immense contagious power, if they crystallise a powerful vision.
Some marketers have rushed to embrace any and every new digital tactic.
This has resulted in a scenario where some digital tactics are dangerously close to "jumping the shark." Everyone is doing them, so they're not original anymore. They generally are not done well (i.e., in a way that builds brand equity, awareness or sales), and they may be so commonplace that rather than making a brand seem current or hip, they have the opposite effect.
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