Traditionally, marketers think of outcomes like they think of the weather – you sit back and see what happens. Suffering from the lack of true and authentic knowledge of their audiences, or any provision for real-time data or analytics, they are consigned to a passive role: spend money and hope it creates the intended outcome. Well “hope” isn’t a strategy.
Not so with Social Media. With Social, there is no passive tense. Social media allows the marketer to jump into the fray and to CREATE outcomes instead of being a victim.
Take for instance the example of TV. In the traditional model, media buyers would buy spots, ensure that the commercials ran, and then get feedback on their reception 3 months after the fact. Furthermore, the feedback they got was not particularly nuanced. So if change was in order, they had to employ their best guesswork based on 3 months of retroactive data to tweak and hone. Then, another “Hail Mary” pass resulting in hope becoming the marketer’s best friend.
Today, the opportunity to make the switch from hope to strategy abounds. With over a billion people offering opinions and discussing their likes and dislikes on the social web, marketers have an incredible opportunity to understand their audiences in real-time and to use this data to make instantaneous data-driven decisions across a host of areas from; new product development, creative messaging, campaign development, TV buying, digital media buying, keyword buying, content creation and the list goes on and on. With the data, smart marketers can make mid-stream changes to the expressed interests and attitudes of their target audience. At the heart of this is technology and an interpretation methodology that offers deep insights and takes the guesswork out of marketing.
Passivity is anathema to today’s marketer, brand manager, media buyer/planner, advertiser, and content creator. Real time-data-driven decisions allow for the industry to get on its front foot and create more engagement and dynamic outcomes.
Let’s be clear. Most people who write on social media outlets don’t do so just for the sake of doing it. Some might, but the vast majority of people who share content, post comments, or offer sentiments and opinions online do so because they are in what Andrew Jeavons of Survey Analytics calls “the point of emotion.” In other words, they are emotionally invested in the product, service or experience about which they are opining.
As Jeavons points out, most feedback is conducted via traditional methods that suffer from huge structural deficits.
Surveys – break-down for four reasons: they are episodic, have limited sample-sizes, the answers are effected by the way the questions are posed, and because they rely on the concept of “recall.” And recall is imperfect because it asks a person to offer information on a past event outside of the context and situation in which he or she experienced it.
Focus Groups – are skewed in three ways: small sample sizes, self-selection population, and the dreaded “decibel rule’ – the loudest person in the room wins. They are not real-time or data driven and they don’t parse their findings with the objective use of technology.
It appears to us that companies that make million-dollar decisions on this kind of “static” data are doing themselves a disservice. We believe they should be using more authentic and real-time data in order to make data-driven decisions.
That is exactly why Social Media is so special, so different. Because with Social Media, people become “micro-authors” when and where it matters. Instead of a laborious production process, Social Media reduces the distance between the production and consumption of opinions; in fact, it even obliterates it.
In some contexts emotions are considered bad. But if you truly want to know what consumers really think and want to be able to predict how they might behave, find them at the point of emotion. Very likely that means you’ll find them on Social Media.
The opportunity is yours for the taking! What you really need is real-time data, gathered and interpreted by smart technology and then put into practice by a team who now understands your customers’ REAL attitudes and interests.
Businesses use enterprise data and metrics to manage business performance and drive efficiencies across the organization. But when it comes to marketing, there has always been a bit of the “black box” effect. Marketing is the one major budget item that traditionally has been the hardest to understand and measure from a traditional business performance standpoint.
Quarterly and annual reviews provide some idea of how the money is being spent, and frequency, reach, target rating points, media impressions and clip counting are among the longstanding measures of marketing effectiveness. But these are becoming less and less informative as the world moves at Internet speed.
Now CMOs can create the same level of visibility into their marketing spend that other operational areas have done for years. The efficiency of marketing – especially spending on advertising – can be improved by analyzing customer “conversations” carried out across social networks and other channels. Advanced techniques and capabilities are available now to capture the pulse of the marketplace as never before.
Armed with this information, CMOs can work with their CFOs more closely to identify — really, for the first time — the minimal effective amount of spending needed to drive the greatest market awareness. This new form of “marketing intelligence” can dramatically reduce “spray and pray” spending and contribute more effectively to earnings per share improvement. In this way, both CMOs and CFOs will understand and track — with far greater accuracy — marketing’s accretive value to the enterprise and shareholders.
As fans of the movie Talladega Nights would know, stock car racing in the United States has its origins in bootlegging during Prohibition, when drivers ran bootleg whiskey made primarily in the Appalachian region of the United States. Bootleggers needed to distribute their illicit products, and they typically used small, fast vehicles to better evade the police. Many of the drivers would modify their cars for speed and handling, as well as increased cargo capacity, and some of them came to love the fast-paced driving down twisty mountain roads.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 largely dried up their business and today NASCAR is the largest sanctioning body of stock car racing in the United States.
The audience that follows NASCAR racing is a very loyal bunch of followers that average over 30 Million, which is on par with many sporting events such as the Stanley Cup, the World Series, and the NBA Championship.
But when we think about the advertisers to that audience its mostly CPG brands: Skoal, Budweiser, MillerCoors and M&Ms or more Retailer brands such as: Home Depot, DuPont, Caterpillar, BF Goodwrench and Lowes.
So we thought it would be interesting to track and analyze the social data surrounding NASCAR over the last 30 days in order to reveal audiences segments that are under loved by brands. And then we took it a step further to suggest brands that should be advertising that aren’t on NASCAR by looking at what else that exact audience talks about.
As expected what we found in the social data was quite interesting. The audience beyond the NASCAR sports fans actually ranked well with one of our audiences that we call “Fashionistas” this audience has a great interest in fashion and they love finding ways to get fashionable brands for less. Next most popular audience was the TV Fanatics, which seems reasonable to us, perhaps MTV or USA Networks could have their own car. Home Owners was obvious since may home owner brands already advertise on NASCAR. However the Consumer Electronics audience was a bit of a surprise to us. Our thoughts ran wild thinking of the Samsung Galaxy II car or an Apple iPhone car. And then Millenials and Gamers were the next most popular audiences. And brands like Monster headphones and World of Warcraft we big with those audiences.
The point being for a brand like NASCAR that has such broad appeal – using a stereotype for an audience description can be inaccurate. Pockets of highly engaged fans that could make great targets for some brands will be overlooked. For NASCAR this is a lost revenue opportunity and for brands this is a lost awareness opportunity.
After last weeks show, guest host Jeff Ogden and B2B marketing expert, Paul Dunay discuss:
- Marketing at a small company versus a larger company
- Buyer personas and the importance of knowing your buyers
- Approaches for creating engaging content
- How writing a book can help generate awareness and build reputation
MadMarketingTV is sponsored by Act-On Software: Marketing Automation for the Fortune 5 Million. Visit http://actonsoftware.com to learn more.
Join guest host Jeff Ogden and special guest Paul Dunay, CMO of Networked Insights and author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, as they discuss:
Recent changes in B2B marketing
Influencer strategies and why they’re important
Facebook’s IPO and what it means for marketers
New social media tools for B2B marketers
Social data and what it means to B2B marketers
Join Jeff and Paul as they discuss how Paul has made the shift from working within a large company doing B2B marketing, to thriving in a start up environment where he’s focusing on social, amongst other things. Paul delves into the development of an influencer strategy and what that means. Jeff and Paul also address the Facebook IPO and the opportunities Facebook provides for marketers. Paul ends with an introduction of various new social media tools for B2B marketers, as well as the explosion of social data and what that all means.
To hear more from our special guest Paul Dunay, read his blog or follow him on Twitter.
Don’t forget to join us for our next episode when we discuss creating the life you really want with Randy Garn. Also, look out for special “After Party” footage from this interview with Paul Dunay coming next week.
MadMarketing TV is sponsored by Act-On Software: Marketing Automation for the Fortune 5 Million. Visit http://actonsoftware.com to learn more.
Social data is becoming increasingly important in the new product development processes of many companies. In particular, manufacturers are tapping into social conversations as they explore new product ideas in order to learn what consumers are interested in and talking about. Later, when launch is imminent, social channels are becoming a key factor in setting media and advertising strategies.
These applications of social media analytics only scratch the surface though. Social data can be a unifying thread of information that supports decision-making at every stage of product development – discovering a new product idea, building a business case for it, developing the product, testing and validation, launch, and post-launch review.
For example, during discovery, social media data can help uncover ideas for new products or product line extentions to existing product lines. Then, as you’re building the business case and developing the product, social analytics can be used to monitor the pulse of consumers, alerting you to changes in their attitudes and interests.
During testing and validation, social data could play a crucial role in deciding to stop a project. Information gathered as part of market analysis might signal that customers are showing strong preference for the features of another company’s competing product. Pulling the plug on your development efforts could potentially save millions of dollars.
Social data can also be invaluable in the media planning and buying process. By assessing the potential “social lift” that social media can provide to your paid media initiatives, social analytics can help you commit the minimum effective spend needed to achieve the maximum effective return on media expenditures.
In our most recent white paper entitled Stage-Gate success: How the social web drives product development, we examine the role of social media analysis and data in the product development process, using the example of the highly regarded Stage-Gate® Product Innovation Process.
So I was talking with a CMO buddy of mine the other day over dinner and this topic came up. Of course you know as a CMO of a leading Social Media analytics firm – I think you can guess which side of this argument I was on. But seriously, my buddy honestly wanted to know – so what can you do with all this good social media analytics that you talk about? He really didn’t know.
So here is what I told him that marketers should be doing with analytics but haven’t truly adopted. I think part of the problem is that some of these tactics haven’t become a standard operating procedure but I can tell you folks that is exactly where we are heading. Marketing is the last big spend on the income statement and its our turn to show how we can be more effective with the same dollars.
One way is to use the analytics to create your ideal customer persona by interviewing your best, most profitable customers who have had the highest velocity in your pipeline. Use this persona to drive any ad plan, sponsorship plan or event plan.
Another way is to use the analytics to inform your media plans and to predict the outcome of a specific campaign.
Another way is to use the analytics to zero in on new messaging or even use those words to inform the SEO and SEM that you should be doing or buying.
Another way is to use it for product innovation, some companies are not crowdsourcing ideas for their products rather they are using the analytics to find a “white space” in the market where there is an unmet need – then launching a product or service to fill that need.
These ways are guaranteed to make you dollars more effective since you will know with certainty how effective those dollars will be in hitting a predefined target. How can you hit a target you can’t see – with good old gut feeling – I doubt it!
My son is a senior in high school and I am beginning to help him with his search for the right school. One of the aspects of college life that he is looking forward to is belonging to a university with strong school spirit. So to help with this, I suggested that we use football teams as a proxy to find the right environment.
With this in mind, we set out to find a simple list of “2011 NCAA Football Rankings” – an easy Google search is there ever was one. I assumed that the top result, ESPN’s 2011 NCAA Football Rankings, would be the perfect match for our search, until I looked at the data.
ESPN’s site lists one ranking by the Associated Press, one from a USA Today poll, one from an ESPN poll, and one from ESPNU fan ranking. This made me wonder which one of these polls was best for my son as the intended audience. The intent of these polls was purely statistical and did not meet the needs of a college bound high school senior, and therefore provided little help for our cause.
After this discovery, I contacted my Audience Development team here at Networked Insights and asked them to develop a series of lists of the top NCAA football teams for various audience categories. I wanted to focus my research on Millennial Males, Moms (of course his mom is going to have a say!), and a list of teams by Geeks who love Consumer Tech (my son and I both fit into that one!)
The research that I received from the team was really interesting because each of the audiences had completely different lists of favorites!
The Millennial Males would say LSU, Oregon, and Auburn are tops; while their Moms would prefer Florida, Alabama, and Auburn; and the Geeks like Texas, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Whether you agree with using ESPN’s Top Ranked College Football teams as proxy for strong school spirit is not the point. If you are marketer – you need to know what your specific audience cares about. High-level survey data (like the data from the AP, USA Today and ESPN) can lead you in the wrong direction if your target is Millennials, Moms, or Consumer Tech buyers!
For years I have kept tabs on the Edelman Trust barometer report, which comes out every January in Davos. And this year was no exception. After last year I figured this years report could make an excellent gauge of the economy worldwide!
Simply put the report states: Trust is down in every industry and every country across the board by an average of 6%. So what does this mean for marketers and for major brands in an era of social media?
Well 2 things …
Hidden in the data is the fact that CEOs and Government officials are at the very bottom of the totem pole when it comes to delivering a message that people trust. So welcome to the era where the average “Joe” employee is considered the most trustworthy corporate spokesperson. This is clearly a boon for the all of us who have been clamoring for our in house engineers to be out there blogging and tweeting with the public. Effectively they are now the only ones that the general public will trust to speak about your brand.
But to me that’s a quick fix on how you get information out of the company that the general public would believe. To really change the tide of this era of declining trust you need to consider what I’m calling “hyper-transparency.” For example look what Apple is going through with its overseas vendors. How can you company do the same or even take it to the next level. And be vigilant with those vendors that aren’t in compliance. You would need to say “here is where we are and are not compliant with our overseas vendors and here is what we are doing to fix it.” This would send a clear message that the corporate message can be trusted.
But where do you start?
There is obviously a clear need to understand what the general public perceives as your biggest issues and to have a feedback loop to measure your progress on these key issues. Which to me clearly underscores a need for trend analysis around your brand (think Google Trends for your Brand) to understand what to attack first to raise trust in your own company. This can’t be solved with typical social media software. You need to analyze trends of what’s being said across the issues that are important to your company. This doesn’t come from reading tweets everyday about your brand it comes from analytics of all forms of social media – blogs, microblogs, social networks and forums.
With the right technology and the right partner in place you can rebuild that trust that so few (if any) companies have these days.
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