Social Media Darwinism » Advertising

There is NO Passive Marketing with Social!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:00:23 +0000

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.

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CMOs: Shedding light on marketing performance

Paul Dunay — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:19:01 +0000

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.

Download this report to learn about the emerging role of social media analysis.

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NASCAR appeals to more than just Sports Fans!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:34:39 +0000

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.

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Changes in B2B Marketing — Mad Marketing TV Ep 13

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:00:16 +0000

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.

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Gut Feeling or Analytics – which is better?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:34 +0000

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!

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Kim Kardashian Wedding – Social Intelligence Report

Paul Dunay — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:00:23 +0000

With the recent divorce of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, many people have started questioning the authenticity of the wedding, and if the brands involved had wasted their money. We here at Networked Insights measured the social lift around several of the brands involved to determine if they received a return in earned media value from their integrated sponsorship.

Social Lift can be considered online word-of-mouth. It’s a way to measure the ripple effect in media after an event either in conversations or the sharing of content. Download the Social Intelligence Report – Kim Kardashian Wedding to learn if brands like Vera Wang, People Magazine and Perrier-Jouet received social lift from their association with Kim Kardashian.

In this report you will discover:

The earned brand value from celebrity endorsement
Why branded conversations in social media are important
Which brand received the most ROI for their sponsorship

While brands may still be uncertain about their optimal balance of paid, owned and earned media, the value of celebrity endorsement and how it impacts branded conversations is clear. All that is left to uncover for marketers is the right celebrity for your brand and target audience as explored in our Lady Gaga Social Intelligence Report.

What do you think about celebrities and their role in branded conversations online? Submit your comments and let us know if you’d associate your brand with a reality TV star.

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Use Facebook Data to Unlock Consumer Affinity

Paul Dunay — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:48 +0000

When I started this blog back in 2006 Facebook was just getting going but nobody had a clue on when it came to the volumes of valuable data that they would ultimately produce. Today we are talking about almost 1 billion posts on Facebook per day, the same happens on Twitter every 4 days.

When I first saw the way in which Facebook data could combine with Twitter data, blog, forum, search and web data to make a rich profile of your consumer – I was blown away by the possibilities of knowing your customer better and knowing what really makes them tick.

Check out me and Dr Manuel Aparicio from Saffron Technology discuss the possibilities of harnessing the power of Social Data on yBCtv!

Special thanks to George Barker, the man behind the video magic, over at yourBusinessChannel the people who love “telling business stories and getting them out via a network of networks” for producing this video. See yourBusinessChannel for more videos with key thought leaders on the topic of social media and beyond.

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Why Your Marketing Needs Real-Time Data

Paul Dunay — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:26:34 +0000

Another Advertising Week in New York is upon us and so far I have seen some great presentations from companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quantcast, comScore, and even Yahoo!. However, if there is one thing that is becoming painfully clear to me is the need to be relevant to your audience – whether you are advertising to them, being social with them, or just creating the right kind of conversations about your brand. We often throw this idea around as marketers – “being relevant”, but few people discuss how!

I presented at Advertising Week and that is the exact topic I wanted to drill into – How to be relevant by using real-time data about your audience!

So to illustrate this, I decided to run a research experiment to show at IAB MIXX. This was research that was exclusive to IAB MIXX, but you can now see below. The idea focused on how I could show the IAB MIXX audience how to target marketers like themselves with real-time data.

To do this, I asked our research analysts at Networked Insights to study what marketers talk about. We created a custom audience based on social data from blogs, microblogs, social networks, and forums. We then added to that with web information from Google, comScore, and Quantcast. Together, this information tracked what topics were important to marketers over the last 4 weeks.

As a seasoned marketer, I came to the table with my own ideas of what topics marketers discuss, what media they consume, and what popular culture they talk about. The results were different than I thought (see below).

IAB Mixx Research

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It proved to me that even though you think you know your audience, you can never know them well enough! Real-time data can give you incredible Intelligence and can make marketing decisions like sponsorships, product placements, advertising, and content development much easier!

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What Moneyball Teaches Digital Marketers About Winning

Paul Dunay — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:41:29 +0000

“Adapt or Die” – Billy Beane

Moneyball, a book by Michael Lewis and now a movie starring Brad Pitt, is an amazing story of how Billy Beane, the then Oakland Athletics General Manager, chose to abandon baseball’s collective wisdom and applied what many considered to be “outsider” thinking to develop a winning team. Hindered by a small market budget, Beane embraced alternative statistics, or what marketers might call “KPIs”, to find undervalued players.

The parallels between the almost ten year old book and the experience of marketing in today’s digital world didn’t escape me. Now more than ever marketers are asked to achieve increased performance (usually this quarter), prove ROI, and demonstrate how a throng of marketing activities generate sales. Linear thinking applied to what is often emotional human behavior seems to unnecessarily complicate things to me, but I digress. As brands adapt to keep pace with the changes brought on by today’s demand economy, the budgets and line items need to demonstrate the same agility in order to stay in sync with consumer trends in our growing social and mobile world.

When everyone’s way isn’t working for you, find your own path

Social media technologies, along with rich internet enabled mobile devices, have catalyzed a decade long trend of evolving digital behaviors by consumers. But when you look at the methods brands use to understand consumer behavior, develop marketing strategies, plan fully integrated campaigns, evaluate activation tactics, and measure performance, they are sometimes processes that are 50 years old. The technology and techniques marketers frequently use are outdated, broken, or unscalable. When making marketing decisions, how many of them gather information from the mountains of data that surround us about the consumer and our performance?

When you are choosing the same activity and seeing diminishing returns, it is time to embrace change. As brands shift from advertising to engagement marketing, the models to measure performance will change. Rather than looking for new standards to develop around engagement, or methodologies to build digital word of mouth, brands must develop models that work for them and their customers. You need to tailor this evolving media world to work for you and employ social and targeting technologies to deliver marketing messages that inspire action and loyalty.

“We’re card counters. We’re going to turn the odds against the casino.” – Billy Beane

The effectiveness of mass marketing methods is fading in proportion to the shrinking signal strength of media in these “social” times of the internet age. The story of Billy Beane and his Oakland Athletics inspires me to follow my heart instead of my head as I track my target consumer across digital platforms to deliver timely and relevant marketing messages. I encourage you to find your brand’s optimal marketing mix from the voice of the consumer in explicit and implicit digital data that is all around us.

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Why 2,000 Facebook Likes Won’t Save Your Job!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:00:12 +0000

“I wish we didn’t have to spend 10 hours creating a report every month to show [advertisers] that what we’re doing is worthwhile.” Victoria Harres, PR Newswire

Does that sound like your job? I know it sounded like plenty of roles I had within major companies!

But as a Social media marketer, we believe in the power of a world where consumers are more connected to friends and brands, but when it comes to convincing the C-suite how and why, oftentimes they find themselves pointing to indeterminate measures of success such as Facebook Likes. In fact, 68 percent of companies don’t know or can’t measure social media ROI or worse 62 percent of CMO believe that social media will pay off … eventually!

Well that day is already here for the enlightened CMO which is exactly what I want to talk about at this years SXSW event. In my session I will elaborate on over a dozen proven social media strategies from brands like Dell, Jive, Avaya, SAP and the NCAA to establish targeted social media programs that delivered real results. My session will explain how to combine social monitoring with analytical firepower to go from reactive social media—such as customer support and crisis management—to proactive social strategies that lead to product innovation, lead generation and interactive buying.

But I need your help to vote for my session! So if this sounds good to you I would appreciate it if you would click here and vote for my session!

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