The Innovative Marketer

What's your big idea?

I was having dinner with a super smart marketer a few weeks ago, and I asked him what his big idea was for 2010.  And this bright guy articulated a strategy of media dominance, of placing his brand everywhere that his market looks.  I said to him, "no, what's the big thing you want to do, the thing that when you point to it later on, you can say to yourself 'I did that.'"  He smiled and said he hadn't thought about it, hadn't come up with the big idea.

John Landau, Oscar-winning producer of Titanic, spoke to the CMO Club last week.  He described Director James Cameron's process of putting together the Terminator movies, that he originally wrote the story as one movie, but realized he needed to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision and so split the story into two pieces.

In marketing, we typically follow technology -- blogs, podcasts, social engagement sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter -- all have pulled marketers into having conversations with customers.  And it's great that leading marketing organizations are following the customer conversations, engaging with our communities of users and embracing the 10-year-old tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

But what's the next big idea?  What's the vision of marketing that will drive the technology?   How can we as marketers create a huge wish list of technological advancements and ways of interacting that will help our customers buy, use and recommend our brands?

Interested to have a conversation ...

Everybody talks about measuring social media, but nobody is doing anything about it ... are they?

I'm at the CMO Club conference in San Francisco this week, and while the audience of 80 texted "Doing more with less" as the number one issue facing marketers in 2010, the real buzz around the show seems to be ROI of social media.

Blake Cahill had a post over on VisInsights on the value of social media for B2B companies (he's doing a webcast with Sirius Decisions' Jonathan Block), and one of his lines stopped me:

A key data point was that while 40% of B2B companies are using social media channels to market their products, 50% are still at a loss as to how to show the impact that social efforts can have on their business.

What I wanted to know when I read this was, who are the 50% who know the impact of social media on their business?  They're certainly not at this show, and I would venture to say that the CMO Club attracts fairly progressive marketers.   What about those in the hinterlands?   Fifty percent seems a be a big improvement over one survey two months ago, which reported that 84% of social media programs have no ROI attached to them.

If you do a search on Google for "measuring social media" or "social media measurement," you get nearly a million results.  But typically what you get is a list of things to measure that looks something like this:

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

These, indeed, are things you can measure, but it's kind of like measuring the volume of your house when you're remodeling your bathroom: the data doesn't apply to the problem at hand.  And companies like Radian6 are doing some interesting work around measuring "share of conversation."  What we're striving to do is to tie marketing performance to revenue, and if we're going to invest more than the 2-5% of total marketing spend of many companies in social, we need to come up with relevant, credible measures.

I've started measuring engagement in a number of ways:

1.  Using social media instead of or in addition to traditional media outlets to promote programs.

Twitter, blogs, Facebook and LInkedIn have proven to be effective tools for getting the word out about compelling content -- eBooks, audio eBooks, white papers, webinars and the like.   You have to use a tool like bit.ly or some other link tracking product in order to credit the inbound link to the proper source.

2. Tracking the velocity of deals when a prospect uses social channels.

Again, you have to do inbound link tracking, but adding the person's use of social media (and response to an offer via a click through), is a crude but important way to start assigning numbers to your social efforts.  Once you've tagged activity, you can measure whether deals that have engaged, active customers in the social media channel are more likely to close or close faster.

3.  Creating special promotions on Twitter

Twitter is an easy, cheap way to test instant marketing promotional ideas.  Guy Kawasaki calls Twitter the "ultimate tool for marketers" because it offers a way to get immediate feedback on your offers.   Whether you're offering a sneak peek at a new product, an enhanced eBook or a behind-the-scenes interview, offering it first on Twitter gives you the opportunity to measure the impact the channel has on your business.

What are you doing to measure the impact of your social initiatives?

** Update **

A number of folks have asked about URL tracking/shortening services.   Lee Odden posted a good roundup of them earlier this year on the online marketing blog.  Here's a link.

Q&A from the B2B Magazine Social Media Webinar with David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott and I went over time on our B2B Magazine Webinar on social media and agreed that we'd handle Q&A on this blog (and perhaps over on David's as well).   I consolidated some of the 50+ questions we received, answered a few specific folks privately, and posted the answers individually below.

If you have any additional questions, post 'em in the comments below this post.  Otherwise, we'll carry on threads under the questions posted below.

By the way, is this the best way to handle Q&A?  Let us know.

Question #1: Old-time Thinking of Print vs. Online

Stephanie writes:

Hi You hit it right on: Must Unlearn what you Learned. My struggle is old time thinking. 'How come we aren't in print magazine and our competitor is.' How do you convience old time thinking of Print versus Online?

It's important to reframe the question differently:  Are we where our customers are?   You'll often have competitors who are in marketing channels that are irrelevant or distracting to you.   Do you follow them, or do you find where your prospects are gathering today.  The other thing is that this isn't an either/or situation.  We're too early in the game to say that "x is dead," where x is anything that marketing was doing more than 10 years ago.   Consider adding new media to your existing tactics and dial back the old ones slowly.  And make sure you have a solid set of metrics in place so you can assess your results more objectively.

Question #2: How Much Info to Give the Customer Up Front

Zoe asks:

Is it better to market a product without telling the consumer what it is? Or giving them all of the information up front? What I mean is, is it better to make the consumer want the product before knowing what it is?

I'll let David comment on this one, but gosh, if you deceive or ignore a consumer these days, you'd better expect that the blogosphere will uncover it pretty quickly and spread the word.   Just ask Whole Foods or Kryptonite locks.

Question #3: Measuring Effectiveness of Social Media

Jennifer said:

How do you measure effectiveness of social media if you're not gating content?

There are a bunch of metrics you can use.  Links from other web sites.  Mentions on blogs.  Print publication pickup.  Increases in numbers of speaking opportunities offered to your social media participants. 

Question #4: Calculating the ROI of Social Media

Derick, Stefani, Andrea and a least a dozen others asked questions which I can best summarize as "How do you calculate the ROI of social media?"

I'm hoping that you asked these questions, before I did my little spiel on the webinar.  If you can, have a look at the on-demand version and let me know if you have specific questions about the calculation I walked through. 

You can find the excellent ROI of Blogging report from Charlene Li on the Forrester web site (note:  you have to be a subscriber to download it).

Question #5: Determining Which Social Media Channels Your Customers are Using

Robin and a few others asked:

How you can tell which social media channels your target customers are using today?"

Usually, I ask.   We do customer surveys.  We have user group meetings.  We talk to sales and account managers about what their customers are up to.   And we'll seek people out on Twitter, on Facebook, through Myspace, on blogs.  And then we... and this was another great point David made during the Webinar .. we start to participate in those conversations.  So we don't attempt to start our own networks until we've engaged with people where they already are.

Question #6: Blog Spamming

Roy asked:

Could you please explain blog spamming and how to avoid being considered a blog spammer by search engines?

Wikipedia has a great definition of blog spam.

Question #7: Blog Comment Strategy

Donna asked:

How do you comment into existing blogs without sounding self serving sales pitch? Suggestions would be greatly appreciated on strategy around this?

Donna, what a great question.  Look, buyers aren't stupid.  If you post something that is bright, funny, smart, empathetic, relevant and honest on a web site, they will seek you out where you are.   

My rule of thumb on posting blog comments is that if it's not something I'd say during the reception at a professional event to people I'm looking in the eye, I'm not going to write it on a blog. 

We've all been at shows where there's some jerk pushing their business card into your hand and giving you the "elevator pitch."   And we nod politely and wonder to ourselves whether we can gnaw our leg off to get away from this knucklehead.   Don't be that guy online.