Social Media Darwinism » Media

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!

Small Budget – Big Impact So let me ask you a question – if...
Ideal Customer Persona – made with Social Data Some advertising agencies charge you hundreds of thousands of...
How important is real-time data? It’s all relative The speed with which social media spreads ideas and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How Social Media Gave True Blood a Transfusion

Paul Dunay — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:00:11 +0000

The first episode of a new TV season needs to grab the audience, and social media campaigns have become an integral part of doing just that. But counting the number of conversations won’t by itself tell a producer or network executive that a show is going to continue to attract viewers and remain popular. Instead, deeper analysis of social data is needed to gain insights into which promotional elements are working and which topics are creating buzz among viewers, including featured characters, plotlines and featured actors.

So in our latest Social Intelligence report, Networked Insights set out to analyze the social media conversation surrounding the Season 4 premiere of HBO’s hit series True Blood. Our research provided insights into who is watching the show (moms!), what they care about (the relationship between main characters Sookie and Eric), and the channels they use to follow the action and communicate their feelings (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, HBO.com and mom-focused websites).

Our methodology for analyzing the True Blood social media conversation comprised four key elements: audience definition developed from discussions on social media sites; impressions, which provide an estimate of how the media is consumed and account for the many users who do not actually create posts; sentiment, which captures conversation volume and whether posts are positive, negative or neutral; and topic discovery, which uses advanced clustering technology to extract key sub-themes and reveal engagement drivers.

Engaging fans across the social web serves as a catalyst enabling advocates to promote your brand or television show. Through social media, broadcasters and brand marketers can capture awareness, which builds an audience and then inspires them to take action – whether to watch a premiere or purchase a product. With the added dimension of a shared, digitally connected viewing experience, fans can now have social interactions with your show and its viewers, everywhere. Learn more about the growing importance of the social conversation in building and maintaining an audience in Networked Insights’ Social Intelligence Report: True Blood.

Don’t tell Jelli there is no ROI in Social Media! I had the pleasure of meeting the team from...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Marketing needs to be more Adaptive!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:00:42 +0000

Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever heard of – but hear me out – its time we really changed a few things in the marketing organization.

So its easy to see that today’s marketing teams are not that well equipped to handle “real time marketing” as David Meerman Scott defined it. We need better systems to take in data and analytics in order to make smarter better business decisions.

I would argue that you have to have several sensing mechanisms in place – one that is a data set that is always looking backward (like a rear view mirror) so see what has been said and is always listening and watching the conversations, in addition to that you need a forward looking data set (like a windshield) to help drive decision making on what new products or services to launch, what will be the effectiveness of this campaign, what new hyper customer segments can we go after, and then of course you need a dashboard that pulls all this together in one place so you can see across multiple forms of media.

With today’s fragmented media landscape no single individual can pull together all these media channels to orchestrate and master them. And as a result you get silos of sub-optimized media.

In a real time marketing world speed will be key. So how can you even think of making a yearlong media plan? But that’s what some media planners are doing when it comes to TV and Print. As marketers we need to be optimized for speed and rapidly effective decision-making. Having said that I know we have a long way to go but anything is better than making gut level decisions or worse taking advice from your CEO on a media plan!

Small Budget – Big Impact So let me ask you a question – if...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Small Budget – Big Impact

Paul Dunay — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:00:03 +0000

So let me ask you a question – if you could get more mileage out of your existing car – would you do it? Of course you would! So if I could show you how to improve the “gas mileage of your existing marketing budget – would you do it? Same dollars just more effective. Of course you would!

Years ago John Wanamaker once said – 50% of my marketing budget is wasted I just don’t know which 50% – I would argue that right now that dynamic is even worse – with the fragmentation and choices available in media these days that has to be more like 75% of my budget is wasted!

So how do you make a marketing budget more effective without changing the dollar amount, it sounds almost like a magic trick. Well you take the program budget (non compensation dollars) and you rank order them by spending level. What you get is a list of media type, sponsorships, and events.

The kingpin of the spend is usually some sort of TV ad spend (if you are B2C) and print/online media spend (if you are B2B). It’s easy to see how social media data can be used to optimize major media spending like TV ad for B2C by aligning the shows you buy with the best fit for the audience you are trying to reach. Easily done now with the mounds of social data out there.

For B2B you certainly can use social data to optimize the effectiveness of your search spending by mining what words your ideal customers use to describe your products or services. Again easily done now with the reams of social data out there. You can also look at what sites your ideal customers go to online to better inform where you deploy your display ad budget and perhaps even what sites and events you sponsor.

With all this great data on what your ideal customer are actually doing online, saying online and spending time online, you can make better more informed and more effective decisions on ad spending. Now that’s how to make a Small Budget have Big Impact!

Paid Owned and Earned media – the benefits of owning them all Few marketers today have the luxury of being about...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Paid Owned and Earned media – the benefits of owning them all

Paul Dunay — Wed, 18 May 2011 18:00:05 +0000

Few marketers today have the luxury of being about to combine all forms of media under one umbrella. It takes a certain size company to be able to take one individual and let them control all forms of media. If your company is too big then you get owners of each media and the silos they create – minimizing your chance to optimize across them all. If your firm is too small then the paid media budget is meaningless and you’re really just maximizing your earned and owned media mostly.

I got a chance a few years back to be the Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint where I had all 3 forms of media under me – Paid advertising and sponsorships (like our sponsorship of Phil Mickelson and the PGA), plus Earned media (both traditional and social) and our Owned media (meaning our interactive and email lists). I would like to say it was a very “enlightened” leader who asked me to take on that role but in reality it was born out of necessity to ensure we got the maximum benefit of every dollar we spent. So the big goal was optimization of message across all channels.

The business objective was simple – make our $10 million dollars in media spend feel like our competitors (who by the way were spending $65 and $100 million on media). Simple task but hard to deliver in reality since there is no way to buy bargain basement priced media and get Madison Avenue results. There was also no way to gauge just how effective that media was with our target audience. I remember buying media on the Golf Channel because that’s what the CEO told me his friends’ watch. Talk about gut level media planning!

But today is a different day. Today you can use the world’s largest focus group (ie all the social data from the last 2+ years) to find your audience online and model them to predict how effective your media purchases would be. With a bulk of my media purchase going toward TV, Print and Radio – it would have been great to be able to say to the CEO that I found a way to make his media spend feel like so much more instead of wasting it on golf to please a few friends.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Use Social Media to set Smart Media strategies

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:00:01 +0000

Let’s make the assumption that you’ve successfully integrated your paid, owned and earned (POE) marketing efforts across the board. You’ve cut off a lot of fat and reduced the amount of money thrown in more directions than you can pay attention to. Now what?

First, recognize that there are too many potential consumer touch-point opportunities offered by owned media channels. It’s inefficient to spend your money, time and resources trying to reach out through all those channels at the same time. Instead, be strategic and smart – use social data analysis to measure campaign effectiveness.

It’s possible to outspend a single competitor if that’s what you really want to do. But it’s impossible to outspend all of your competitors. As the advertising landscape continues to fracture into hyper-segments, both opportunities and dead ends increase. Analysis of social data can provide a different lens through which to evaluate media planning and buying. It provides the competitive advantage because it employs different metrics from those everyone else is using. Those metrics will point you toward new opportunities to prioritize and sequence the way you use and invest in POE media. Get on that track now, and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors — and end up spending the same or less than you did before.

Check out this webinar to learn how to infuse your media plan with social data in order to make smart media decisions!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The End of Traditional Marketing

Paul Dunay — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:00:46 +0000

Paid, owned and earned media. Those three words, often shortened to “POE,” have bounced around for years. And, like the contemplations of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, they have taken on new meaning with the collision of traditional and digital marketing strategies.

In 2009 Forrester issued a report that outlined the world of interactive marketers in the digital space. Since then the volume of “conversation” has increased dramatically over the entire social landscape — to the tune of BILLIONS of posts each year.

The effect of this growth is far more than a dramatic increase in possible consumer touch points and increasing consumer participation in social media. It’s about the death of traditional marketing. And, ultimately, it’s about using social media analysis to make your spending more efficient in both digital and traditional media.

Social data analysis can help you improve media strategies and spending because it can reveal new ways to prioritize, sequence and invest in POE. Done properly, social data analysis can help you make your million-dollar media budget perform like a million-five, two million or more.

And that’s the point Forrester was making in its report: measuring earned media and shifting resources from paid to owned media is what will empower your brand in today’s world – not hanging on to traditional media planning and buying strategies.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Social Lift is the Ultimate Rate of Change

Paul Dunay — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:00:19 +0000

You have a killer piece of original content that starts rippling out from its source. The two things social lift analysis can tell you are how far and how fast those ripples move. If the content ripples 900 times, but that takes 10 years, you won’t see much benefit. If it ripples 900 times in 28 days, that can be really valuable information. Those rapid ripples are an indicator of what’s happening to the things that you’re doing. They help identify valuable, highly efficient venues in which to place your brand.

Celebrities can be one good source of social lift. In using celebrities, it’s not just about the number of followers or fans someone has. That’s just a point in time.

Instead, you want to know how likely that number is to grow. The best celebrities for delivering social lift are those whose following has increased and will continue to do so over a period of time. In thinking about whether to select a celebrity, a key indicator of his or her potential is, when other types of content feature this person, how far does it reach and how fast does it get there?

Another source of social lift is TV shows. There are two types that exist today, those that are currently on the air and those that are in development. For the ones on the air today, you have to determine what happens when certain types of content, celebrities and advertising appear on that show. What does the overall social lift look like?

In considering shows that are yet to air, you should assess the overall reach of the show concept by finding corollaries to it. What is the overall reach of this type of content? What is the overall reach of celebrities that appear in those shows?

Want to learn more? Read: “Social Lift: How to make your media plan go further.”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

iPad saves the Page Advertising Business

Paul Dunay — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:44:34 +0000

I was just reading BtoB Magazine’s latest issue and an article called Publishers pin hopes on iPad caught my attention enough to blog about it. According to the article Jason Snell the editor of IDG’s Macworld – is building an iPad application for his magazine with the promise of a digital version of his magazine on the iPad.

What’s really interesting about this is idea is – could it save the Page Advertising business and Magazine industry which has been in a long steady decline?

Answer – Yes I think it could!

The numbers coming in about the iPad is already staggering (The iPad already has sold over 500000 units since it went on sale April 3) without what some would consider being key features (no camera, no phone, no flash, no multi-tasking etc)

But what Jason sees is a device with a vertical orientation like the print magazine, a much more elegant design than the Kindle, and most importantly with the interactivity of the web. So as a publisher I would be gearing up my sales force to sell rich media page advertising on the iPad.

Totally awesome concept – as an advertiser I finally have the option to have a page ad that actually clicks through to my website directly and that can be totally tracked like all my other media, digitally!

The future of the iPad for as an advertising medium via any publisher is an outstanding idea. Right now we can barely imagine the possibilities of this medium but the promise could really revolutionize the Page advertisement which is long overdue for some innovation.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Influencers vs Advocates in B2B Marketing

Paul Dunay — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:35:55 +0000

According to Wikipedia – Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

In my own words – Influencers are individuals that write about Avaya but they also write about Cisco and Siemens in social media or otherwise. They are non partial and therefore they write about many firms. Which is why I prefer to have my communications group work with them much like they have always worked with the media.

I draw a hard line between Influencers and Advocates.

An Advocate is an individual we know perhaps via social media that tweets about Avaya or retweets about news coming from Avaya. My social media team deals directly with them and they rarely talk about other firms in our space. They are “advocates” of the Avaya brand.

Over the last year we have really grown our base of Influencers and Advocates. But the group that excites me the most is the Advocates – I want to grow that budding community – I want to offer them special access to news and previews of our latest product. I think growing and focusing on this group is the key to igniting more WOM in your business!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.