Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Gread Ideas I Learned in October, Part 4

ROMO COP.

No, this is not a new Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick. It's the right approach to marketing measurement.

Back to Rex Briggs' and Greg Stuart's What Sticks for this one -- or actually two -- ideas: Return on Marketing Objective and Communication Optimization Process.

I really like the distinction Briggs and Stuart draw between ROMO and ROI (Return on Investment). I've ranted that the measurement obsession is wrong: ROI (usually defined as immediate sales spurred by an individual ad) is NOT the only valid measure of marketing effectiveness. If it were, all we as marketers would do is a bunch of couponing and discounts, and as the authors state on page 50 "If you condition consumers to wait for price discounts..then you're also conditioining them to switch from your brand to a very similar competitive brand that may be offering a price deal this week."

(They refer to breakfast cereals in this paragraph -- I wonder if this is the old (circa early '90's) General Mills market mix model study by Promotion Decisions, Inc. authored by Greg Ambach and Mike Hess. They proved that promotion generated immediate sales but not repeat sales while advertising generated repeat sales, both at higher price and higher frequency. I was going to link to it from this post, but couldn't find it online any more. It's an oldie but goodie! If anyone knows if it is still online, leave me a comment.)

But back to the real story. ROMO is so important because in so many catagories and many media, it is unrealistic to expect a person to drop everything and make a purchase that moment. When they purchase later, the last ad/marketing piece/brochure, etc. that he/she sees gets all the credit, discrediting all the other previous marketing stimuli. Market mix modeling is a great tool to straighten out the misallocation of credit, but it is costly and complex.

Boosting consideration and purchase intention provide a return because the indicate that the consumer is moving toward a purchase. Rex's Cross Media Optimization methodology is a great tool But since these metrics are softer than revenue, the process behind measurement is as important as the metric itself, the authors argue.

This is where COP comes in. The authors lay out and illustrate three critical steps: 1) to get everyone to agree on the primary goals of the campaign;  2) create the right measurement tools, processes, and metrics; and 3) devise scenarios on how to change the campaign as results data come in.

It sounds deceptively simple, but in reality is hard. They bring this to life with the example of the McDonald's chicken flatbread sandwich. The company had to answer the following question: if the ad increased traffic, but people ended up buying a Big Mac and not the chicken sandwich, was the advertising successful?

What Sticks provides some great advice on how to apply this discipline to benefit the quality of marketing programs, improve the ability to rapidly respond to results of the campaign, and appropriately get recognition for marketing success.

Great Ideas I learned in October -- Part 3

Conversational Marketing

With all this talk of "the consumer in control", the waning effectiveness of traditional advertising, and the new models of Web 2.0, most marketing models haven't really changed, witness the growth of regular banner ads and Google AdWords appearing on blogs.

But social media are about conversations. Putting Web 1.0 banner and search ads in social media is like putting a radio ad on TV and leaving the screen blank. It probably works to some extent, but it doesn't really use the unique qualities of the medium to their fullest.

I've had the good fortune to work closely with Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing and Tom Troja of Pajamas Media this month, helping them flesh out the implementation of their concept of Conversational Marketing. The insight driving the idea is deceptively simple: if consumers go to blogs to be part of a conversation, the ads should invite them to enter a conversation with the marketer.

Tom Troja conceived of an advertising concept he calls "Can We Talk?" which uses ads not to push messages at the target audience, but invites individuals to begin a dialogue with a brand. To make this a practical program, we've combined Cymfony's tools to monitor and analyze topics discussed in the blogosphere, with the Pajamas Media blog network, and the strategy and creative skills of Underscore. Together, we've created a process to identify relevant topics, pose these topics to consumers on sites where they are in conversation mode, and give them an immediate opportunity to begin a conversation with the company.

Stay tuned for more on this innovative model!

Great Ideas I learned in October -- Part 2

People, not consumers

At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference, P&G's Jim Stengel said, "Let's stop talking about consumers. Let's talk about people."

This is an echo of a conversation I had with Rishad Tobaccowalla, CEO of Denuo, earlier this year, as well as the rant he went on at OMMA.

The statements that "the consumer is in control" and "markets are conversations" are ubiquitous, cropping up in almost every presentation at every conference. Stengel and Tobaccowalla rightly point out that you don't have a conversation with a consumer, you have a conversation with a person. Products aren't used by a target audience, they are used by a person. This is more than a semantic difference.

At the IIR Market Research event, P&G's VP of Consumer and Market Knowledge, Kim Dedeker, carried on this theme, describing P&G's "Walk a Mile" program which encourages senior managers to walk a mile in the shoes of the people who use their products. She told the story of one executive who lived for 2 weeks on the budget a single mother might have, describing how at the end of the period, he had to make a choice he had never faced before: buy milk for his kids, or buy presents for their teachers.

If consumers people are in control, then brands must know those people better than they ever have. If not, they can't offer the benefits those people seek and that person will seek the benefits from some other brand.

Also at the ANA conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Lauterborn, Professor of Advertising, of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I had interviewed Prof. Lauterborn years ago when I was at Forrester. He quoted me the mantra he instilled in his students, which I've quoted frequently since then. It is truer now than when I first heard it:

"The only sustainable competititve advantage is superior consumer insight."

I don't think he'd mind if I revised it slightly to "The only sustainable competitive advantage is superior insight into people -- and their wants, needs and motivations."

marketing advertising consumers P&G

Great Ideas I Learned in October -- Part 1

I've been traveling attending conferences, and not blogging much in October. Now it is time for me to catch up and share with you several of the best ideas I've picked up along the way.

There will be more to come over the next few days, but the first is 70-20-10...

Idea 1 comes from the plane time I've had to catch up on reading several of the new marketing books out. On one flight I read What Sticks by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. This is a must-read book for marketers of all levels. Beginners get a solid grounding in the immutable fundamentals of advertising and media veterans learn some new twists on old rules, folk ways, and unspoken assumptions about how advertising works.

There are many worthy ideas in this book, but the one I'll share now is the 70-20-10 rule:

• 70% of a marketer's budget should be spent on proven tactics, media, and program that can reliably deliver business results.
• 20% of the budget should fund tests within these proven vehicles. Some tests will fail, some will succeed, but in aggregate you probably end up with the same business results as if you had spent the money on the tried-and-true -- but your knowledge base is much richer and you will have discovered one or two new things to scale up the following year.
• 10% should be used to test the newest and latest developments, things like podcasts, a MySpace page, or YouTube. But don't judge these types of programs on their ROI. As rapidly as the world is changing, some things have to be tried because your target is trying them before you are. Whether a success or failure from an ROI perspective, the knowledge gained is a valuable investment in the evolution of your marketing strategies.

So much is changing in the worlds of media and marketing, that no company can afford to stand still. This formula does a good job of balancing the neeed to deliver sales and revenue today with the imperative to evolve for tomorrow.

What Sticks marketing advertising media

The real story of the State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry's latest State of the Blogosphere report notes that the blogosphere is maturing. Forget the 57 million total blogs. The interesting number is that there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.

It's time to stop citing that there are 57 million blogs -- it is a pretty meaningless number. Since 26 million are spam or abandoned, they don't count. I'm not even sure the 31 million active blogs (that have been updated at least once in the past 3 months) is a very meaningful number -- in the blog world this isn't very active. At best these numbers serve as a proxy for the growth of CGM. But with comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for YouTube and MySpace, I think this number has outlived its usefulness.

The number that really caught my eye is:

• 30,488 high authority and very high authority blogs

For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research, "Left Brain Marketing")

In other words, authoritative blogs are  more numerous than any other single traditional medium. That alone is a number a marketer or public relations person needs to take seriously.

blogosphere CGM media

Another Example that No New Medium Ever Killed an Old Medium

The New York Times reported that "Junk Mail is Alive and Growing". Despite being 10 years into the Digital Revolution, this isn't really a surprise.

It has often been noted that radio didn't kill the newspapers, TV didn't kill radio, and VCRs didn't kill network TV programming. So why should any one be surprised that electronic media haven't killed traditional media?

Max Kalehoff's post laments that this means that the consumer has to pick "Which Spam is Least Offensive?" While I agree with his objection to the deceptive design tactics often used, I think he misses the point. The only way to eliminate spam in his definition (which seems to be anything that doesn't generate an immediate response) is infinite, perfect information about every individual. I don't know about you, but I'm not giving up that much of my privacy.

The real point emerges from these three consumers quoted in the NYT article:

Andrew Shivone of San Antonio TX says, "I pretty much throw them out, but I have no problem with getting it."

• Sorting mail is such a minor annoyance that it doesn't rise to the level of being considered 'spam'.

Jim Killeen of Sierra Madre, CA says, "At least with mail, because of the cost,they have to put more effort into it. Its applicable because it is useful to me."

• Targeting may be imperfect, but a high enough percentage of mail is relevant that it isn't junk. And the costs of mail are a built-in spam deterrent.

Julie Grayson of Winter Park FL says, "But I do love catalogues. I try to throw them away but they get me. And I'm hooked."

• There's some thing about the tactile experience that strikes a different chord than the digital experience.

The last time I looked, DoubleClick's email division reported that each email a retailer sent generated $.25 in sales. A little quick math on catalogues (4 - 5% reponse to a house list, average order around $100) means each catalogue mailed generates $4 - 5.

So the question for marketers remains not "how do I replace my traditional media with digital media" but "how do I integrate multiple media, using the unique strengths of each to create the best experience for my target?"

Direct Mail Junk Mail Advertising Spam Marketing

What does Sir Tim Berners-Lee know that we don’t?

While all the talk of the consumer being in control dominates conversation about the impact of social media, the inventor of the Internet is worried that “undemocratic forces” could take control.

Here is the introduction to the BBC article:

The British developer of the world wide web says he is worried about the way it could be used to spread misinformation and "undemocratic forces".

Maybe Sir Berners-Lee has just re-read Orwell’s 1984 and sees potential for a new Ministry of Truth and Thought Police to inject Newspeak into the Internet.

Looking at the controversy over Google agreeing to censor itself in order to provide service in China, maybe he has a point.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee social media Internet

IBM's Corporate Blogging Guidelines

We attended the Society for New Communications Research's first Research Symposium in Boston this week.  This is an impressive organization attracting some real innovative thinkers. One of the discussions from the event that I felt that this audience would find valuable was from IBM’s "chief blogger", Christopher Barger. He spoke on a corporate blogging best practices panel where he provided some colorful insights into IBM’s approach to the blogosphere.

IBM sees the critical importance of blogs and the tremendous opportunity it is for their business.  Employees all across the company are encouraged to participate on their blog and communicate directly to the public. Chris said that in the past communicating to the public was a fire-able offense for people outside the communications department.  He admitted that changing this mindset was a groundbreaking effort requiring a major cultural shift for IBM.

To help ease IBM’s management into the blogosphere, corporate blogging guidelines were needed. Chris talked candidly about these guidelines and pointed to the IBM site where these were posted last year for all to see.

While you may not work for a company as big (or as blue) as IBM, there are a lot of ideas here you can use to develop your own corporate blogging guidelines.

Here are a couple interesting points from Chris presentation: 

• He made it clear that these guidelines were meant to be just that. They are not meant to micromanage people.  Basic parameters prohibiting posts on politics, religion, and taking personal shots at people are in place to keep people focused on the standard they want to achieve.
• It is OK for employees to disagree with IBM on the blog. This is important for building the credibility and trust of the blog.  This proves that the blog is authentic and not just some corporate spin.
• If the company cracked down on a blogger making critical comments about IBM, they know they’ll run into more problems than they had before. (He referenced Google’s firing of Mark Jen last year)
• It is OK to moderate comments. Let people viewing the blog know the standard you are looking to achieve, comments must be constructive.
• Chris said that clients expect companies like IBM to have a corporate blog and not having one is akin to not having a website in 1998.

 If a lack of control over the blogging activities of your employees is stopping you from embracing a corporate blog. Take a look and learn from what IBM is doing.