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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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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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.

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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!

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Imagine a company that has upscale retail locations around the United States receiving tens of thousands of customer visits. Now imagine not having anyone there to greet and interact with those customers. What’s the point of the storefront?

Facebook fan pages are much the same thing. But only 0.2 to 2 percent of fans go back to a page. Why? Because there is nothing going on that interests them.

Fan pages are a unique marketing canvas to connect with avid consumers. Yet some brands are terribly underutilizing these pages, making them basically brochureware repositories — essentially inviting customers in but not engaging them or giving them an incentive to return. More so, they don’t understand what their customers want from them. Fans may “like” the page, but what good is it really doing the company or its customers?

Other brands are working harder to tap their pages’ potential, inviting fans to post on the page, using brand-generated posts to ask them questions, and offering promotions that capitalize on the fan base’s affinity. The fan page becomes a focus group that can be mined for consumer insights, which can feed back to content creation, stage gate development and campaign tracking. It isn’t the “like” that matters; what matters is creating conversations to understand the consumer.

A two-prong approach of audience discovery and competitive analysis can help uncover what motivates and energizes your consumers.

Audience discovery is the use of social data to segment those who talk about your brand into their affinities. When you understand your audience, you can tailor the message and campaign to generate more fan attention. And if you understand what to do with your fan page, you can give it a new place in your owned media platforms. Rather than investing in media properties that become more expensive as they become successful, you’re now on your way to developing owned media that increases in value the more it’s used.

What do your consumers want from you – coupons, product updates, cutting-edge video, exclusive deals or contests? What are they interested in – sports, music, TV? Do they care about your brand affiliations or sponsorships? A “like” is a passive response to content, while a comment is engagement.

Brands need to mine competitors’ fan pages for insights. Competitive analysis provides insight into what your fans and their friends find engaging on other brands’ sites. What do your fans like on the competitor sites? Are your competitors treating your fans in ways that provide an edge over your company?

If you were running a bricks and mortar store, you’d expect your floor people to find out what customers want when they come in the door. In the same way, audience discovery and competitive analysis can help you be in sync with your Facebook fans. Knowing their interests can help you establish a road map to effective fan engagement. You can then repeat the analysis periodically to capture nuances and shifts in fan interests. Now that’s something you and your customers will really love.

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The speed with which social media spreads ideas and information has led many marketers to place a premium on capturing data in real time. But should real-time data be such a priority?

Real time means different things to different people when the term is used as a proxy for recency. To an evolutionary biologist, real time could mean thousands of years of species development data. To a 911 dispatcher, real time is a few seconds worth of critical information from a telephone call.

What about marketing and advertising? This notion of “relative real time” extends there, too. To a marketing executive, real time may be data necessary to make annual, semi-annual and quarterly budget decisions. Real time to a media buyer may be several weeks of ratings data to understand what target consumers are viewing. To ad networks serving targeted banner ads Web visitors, real time is microseconds.

Ultimately, gathering the most data possible to inform a decision or solve a problem — in the window of time that best suits your need — is more important than having instantaneous data access. And to do that, you need to start with how you’re going to use the data. What do you want to accomplish? What business problem are you trying to solve?

While social data is exciting because it’s abundant and easily accessible, it’s still relatively new for corporations and how they’re integrating the voice of the consumer into business processes. Real-time social data is just another information source to be incorporated into your decision-making process, from problem definition, to research analysis and, ultimately, project execution. Data doesn’t need to come to you any faster than the time frame that process allows you to act on it.

At Networked Insights we help brands analyze social data for improved decision making — daily, weekly and monthly. While access to a rich data set sounds appealing, sometimes more is not better. Rather, understanding the behaviors of your target consumer is the quickest path to achieving marketing success.

Start by analyzing the decision cycles within your organization or department and how you want to engage data. The timeline of that process will determine what, relatively speaking, real time means to you.

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Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI?  Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like:  “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people.  Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along.  A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday.  If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search.  All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

• Users
  • Generated 32% more ideas
  • Sent 27% less email
  • Found answers to questions 32% faster
• Employees
  • Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
• Results:
  • Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
  • Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

• Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Enlist them for your brand
  • Get them to make recommendations
  • Build your brand with the power of their voice
• Results:  5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

• Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
  • Earned 2000 product recommendations
• Results:  500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

• Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
  • Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

• Results:  $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

The media landscape has evolved tremendously over the last quarter century. Consumers have evolved even faster with the advent of high-speed Internet-enabled mobile devices and social media. Have your marketing efforts evolved with them?

Marketing at the peak of the television era was relatively simple. There were broadcast shows that could give brands tremendous reach. There were also a growing number of cable channels that allowed smaller brands to afford broadcast advertising that could be delivered to more precise audience segments. It was easy for media agencies to find your target, and almost as simple to measure the response.

Now we’re in an era of continuous messaging that ultimately is tremendously fragmenting. Everyone is clamoring for consumers’ attention, from TV and Web content they’re genuinely interested in, to an onslaught of thoughts and activities of friends and relatives, posted via every social media channel. Additionally, consumers are smarter and savvier in their use of the extensive toolset that the Internet provides to make more informed decisions.

As a marketer, how do you possibly compete for attention within this constant stream of information? The answer: You don’t.

How do you speak to consumers who don’t want to hear traditional marketing messages? The answer: Give them what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.

Competing for attention is simply no longer sustainable. It worked when you were basically interrupting what your target audience was doing—watching TV. Marketers can no longer program consumers with advertising; instead, now your imperative is to attract people through unique content and authentic brand experiences.

As a marketer, you need to identify the various vehicles for conveying messages to consumers, and then constantly measure engagement, as defined by each brand, at multiple touch points. Are you delivering value at this point of contact? Are you establishing a connection with the customer? Are consumers entering conversion pathways that lead to sales opportunities?

To succeed, you’ll need to understand where your brand fits into your customers’ lifestyles, become a member of those conversations and/or communities, and continually evolve your advertising efforts into opportunities to engage and connect.

There’s certainly no silver bullet approach. Content will be different for every brand. But this can be quite liberating, as you’ll have to become more comfortable with who you are as a brand and how you define success for your business—standing for what you believe in and developing content that’s consistent with the product and values that will attract others.

Everything is pointing to digital technologies and social media, even in offline experiences. The next generation of retail is a blended in-store experience enhanced by digital technologies. Is your business making the necessary steps to advance to the next stage of this marketing evolution? Are you working to get in sync with your consumers?

Sound daunting? It shouldn’t. Remember: There was a time when no one was email-marketing. And it’s hard to remember when selling products online used to be a foreign idea.

Consumers led the way then, as they’re leading into mobility and Internet-enabled devices now. Wherever they’re taking these devices, that’s where you’ll need to be—learning more about your customers preferences, and using that data to inform marketing decisions. It will be survival of the fittest—you just need to get in shape a different way.

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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).

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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