What makes these tasty?

I have just been asked “what makes effective digital marketing?”

And I think the answer is the same as the answer to the question; “What is effective marketing?”

It depends on what objectives you are trying to acheive.

A further question might then be “Well okay, but how can I tell if its effective digital marketing?”

In this case I think a simple way to expose the objective achieving possibilities of digital is to break down the objectives into three measurable areas like this;

1. Coverage: who saw it where and in what numbers; Because awareness is frequently a factor and we are still addicted to numbers as a result of our junkie-like usage of broadcast media
2. Engagement: once exposed, what did they do with it; click on it, share it, embed it, comment on it, forward it in an email etc.; What is measured here is very tactically specific; a video on you tube will have different engagement metrics to a banner advert, a PPC advert or a search optimised landing page
3. Conversion: what business or marketing objective did it acheive in what numbers and at what cost; Often referred to as ROI, but if taken in isolation can lead to short term tactical activity that doesn’t grow the audience for the brand or their relationship with it

And then there is a bonus set of metrics if the activity results in user ratings, reviews or even online conversation around the activity;

4. Sentiment: what did those who were exposed, engaged or converted by the activity think of the activity, the brand, its products and services?; Clients are very familiar with this from services like Milward Brown’s brand tracking, the difference here is that it’s not a sample of those exposed and therefor doesn’t require mass exposure for the activity to make recruitment possible. Instead it’s taken from all of those who have been exposed to the activity and who have made their sentiment known online (allowing for varying degrees of accuracy in the level of NLP in whatever tool you are using to measure sentiment). You’d need an econometric statistician to explain the qualitative differences in those two sets of data; I’m just saying their different.

So Wired is predicting The End of The Web.

Using data from Cisco the Wired graph shows not just a decline in Web based traffic and email but also a concurrent phenomena of traffic going to apps and other off web locations. As various commentators have pointed out, and Boing Boing graphically illustrate, the story is not as straight forward as the Wired article and graph make it seem; there are different ways of illustrating the data and the idea of many environments is not new. There are similar sorts of thoughts expressed in Forrester’s Splinternet view of the internet back in January this year.

But to paraphrase lots of other people; an exaggerated data point is a terrible thing to waste, and if all this does is gets us thinking about the non-web internet, then its a good thing.

So what implications does this have for how brands communicate with their audiences?

4 threats:

* Less contact through traditional owned media of email and brand web sites
* Less exposures (really can it get any smaller?) to audiences through online (web) ads
* Questions around the role of search in all of this; if audiences are not on the web as much how are they finding brand’s content and services?
* More reliance on user recommendations, not on searched discoveries

4 opportunities:

* Mobile and desktop apps and advertising (not new news but perhaps a bit more urgent)
* Content feeds via twitter / rss / podcast (really not new, but perhaps renewed relevance)
* Internet services to mobiles, tablets, social networks, fridges and in-car? (the day of the networked toaster is coming and you know it)
* Built in sociability: not just ‘share this‘, but real (compelling) reasons to invite others to use / subscribe / view

Stimulated

We received a brief at DraftFCB recently that asked for advice on using all three areas of search; SEO, SEM and “stimulated”. I think this is a really useful distinction and an obvious corollary to the oft quoted “three types of media”; paid, owned and earned which is neatly summarised by Forrester here.

What does it mean? If SEM is paid search and SEO is what you can do to optimise your own web site in search then to my mind stimulated is what you can do to activate both of those. In this interpretation, stimulating SEM would be driving users to a search engine with a specific search in mind, against which you have bought specific terms; Compare the Meerkat comes to mind as an example.

But it is the stimulation of SEO that is really emerging as an area of interest; how to harness the growing tendency of users to link to sites they like (which builds you-in bound links) and to write descriptions of them, which contributes to the meta data that search engines use to understand what your site is about.

I first noticed the impact of inbound links working on the Sony BRAVIA Balls campaign when one of the unintended consequences of creating the BRAVIA blog and the associated distribution of blog assets was that lots of high ranking blogs linked to the campaign site bravia-advert.com. The net result of this was that the site was the number one result in Google for the search term “advert”. For two years. Genius. If what Sony sold was adverts…so be careful what you optimse for.

As often seems to be the case whenever you get into the murky world of search there are myriad issues to consider including the follow / nofollow; the practice of marking links as ‘nofollow’ to exclude them from various search engine processes. This varies on different bookmarking sites and so can impact on their contribution to your SEO. With the rise of twitter and other mocroblogging platforms there has also been a huge increase in the use of URL shortening servcies like Bit.ly and TinyURL. Again these vary in the way that hey attributte links, although it seems most of them do fact act as stimulus to your SEO.

Putting these areas of pernickety technical detail aside it seems that overall social media links help browsers find your content and they contribute to your SEO to help serchers find your content. Both good things. So to get a handle on what kinds of social links you’ve got going on go and play with some of the tools that Lee Odden profiles on Social Media Today here. Or simply put your latest blog post into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

And happy stimulation.

Rant: Social Media is a widely [and wildly] misunderstood and misused phrase.

Antidote: so in lieu of banning / replacing it here are some things to remind ourselves of;

What social media is not

• It is not an alternative to broadcast media (it is slow and starts with small numbers)
• It is not free: it takes great assets and constant execution (and ideally amplification in broadcast media, see Big Seed article from HBR
• It is not a strategy in itself, it is an environment that a strategy and subsequent tactics can exist in
• It is not an objective in itself; don’t just do it for the sake of doing it; for god’s sake have a business / marketing objective in mind
• Facebook, twitter, Youtube, foursquare, flickr and their ilk are NOT social media; they are social media platforms; just putting things on them does not count as social media it is, at best, publishing.

What social media is (and questions to ask ourselves / our clients)

• Social is about developing relationships and having conversations with communities (can the brand spare the time and provide constant attention?)
• Social is about being nice (what does the brand have to offer to the conversation / community?)
• Social is about starting small and growing from a relevant base (who do we already know that is is interested in what we’re doing?)
• But we can use off-social (ATL) to make that base bigger (what other marketing has the brand got that we can leverage?)
• Social is very effective at getting a brand close to its audience (why do we want to be this close? or are we just being a bit creepy?)

Thursday night saw the 2010 rebirth of Laptopdance; a networking, info sharing, drink sipping geek-out. The Laptopdance events have had a varied past ranging from four of us in my basement flat eating a rather fine monk fish saffron paella to 120 of us at the Forrester Marketing Forum in London and pretty much everything in between.

The concept is pretty straight forward; Every day as you meander across the web you discover and play with new applications, web sites and services. Laptopdance is a chance to share those discoveries over a few drinks with some likeminded folk. To make sure we can find them the next day we bookmark everything on Delicious.

To help us find things in the wider web I encourage you to use the hash #laptopdance as demonstrated here on twitter and flickr.

To get some continuity back into Laptopdance I am committing to holding them regularly on the last Thursday day of each month. Accordingly we kicked off the year with the first one at the award winning Lantana cafe (http://www.lantanacafe.co.uk) which is also owned by my sister. Due to capacity issues, both bodily and digitally I’ll be looking for a new venue and moving the invite engine to eventbrite.

Laptopdance events are ably assisted, co-hosted and orchestrated by dance masters Mark Palmer, Mat Morrison and Iain MacMillan.

• Consumers are increasingly having direct relationships with brands (not mediated by a media channel) thereby pushing DM much higher up the marketing agenda
• Consumers are having more and stronger relationships with each other, in which brands might be included if they have something relevant to offer thereby making the value to the specific consumer of what brands offer more important than the amount of consumers they offer it to: quality over quantity (but no, this time it really matters)
• The variegated nature of communications in this socialised environment will mean that ‘Direct’ will become a far more nuanced term; what is an email open rate compared to a re-tweet, a friend message or a nudge? How will we measure and value these different responses? How will we encourage consumers to participate in them?
• What will be the regulatory framework that evolves to manage all of this? One of the drivers of regulation will be consumer demand for transparency no doubt, but what about their demands for control? At the moment we can opt-in, and in more sophisticated systems check our own details and update them. If you’re a bricks and mortar business with a legacy enterprise customer database go freak yourself and check out what I can do to update any aspect of my Google, or any other online network profile. Take note; that will quickly become the default for what consumers expect to be able to do to any of their customer profiles. And what customers expect can often become what legislators mandate.

So how to prepare?

I’m going to start by thinking about CRM as a much looser idea more fitting with the ambiguity of the social environment: CRM = Audience Dialogue Participation

• Customers are now audience members; audience could include customers, resellers, reviewers, staff, media, legislators etc. And they could all be more than one of these at the same time.
• Relationship becomes dialogue; this audience is not someone you send emails to but someone you have a dialogue with; a dialogue that could include a passing friendly nod through to a deep conversation over a shared passion.
• Management evolves into participation; if this is a dialogue then the brand isn’t in control and they are not ‘managing’ anything; rather they are a participant.

So I’m going to take these three principles and look at DM programs with a social skew; strategy, objectives, tactics and measurements. How could they be loosened up?

So the two things that keep kicking around in my head are

1. Apps matter. And in an off-deck or multi deck world, apps with social traction will matter the most. Because the mobile networks are going to gradually lose their control over access to audiences, apps will need to gain users because they are good and because they have some level of ’socialbility’ or network effect, in other words they get better the more people that use them. We’re seeing this (partially) with the iPhone and it is only going to exacerbate as the Android platform gets its act together, Ovi grows etc etc.
2. That the collision of geo-specific nature of mobile that is already informing apps and the huge uptake of social networking (including via the mobile) is going to be a significant factor in the development of both.

I was also asked to comment on;

• What role for advertising; minimal I’d argue
• What role the mobile in customer journey; integral I’d argue
• And future trends; I think it will include APIs as marketing tools, not advert campaigns

C’mon, tel me I’m wrong or add your thouights. Think Tank is 9AM tomorrow at Redwood.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been planning and launching social activity for clients and in the process developed a measurement framework for that activity.

This has come about by looking at what clients are aiming to achieve with their activity and what we are able to measure in terms of demonstrating that those objectives have been achieved.

The framework captures

• Coverage: How many times the activity is seen
• Engagement: What does the audience do with the activity
• Action: What business or marketing objective is achieved
• Sentiment: Did the audience like / not like what they saw (simplistically)

So in the interests of eating my own dogfood I’ll be applying the framework to the metrics of Burning Head and using the following tools;

• Coverage: Views: Google Analytics
• Engagement: Subscriptions and clicks on links: Feedburner & Bitly
• Action: Inbound links and authority (influence): Google inbound links (0) & Technorati
• Sentiment: Positive comments: Possibly Comentful, I’ll do some research and let you know.

To add my smidgen to the sum body of knowledge about social metrics I’ll be letting anyone who is interested know about the blog’s results, which I’ll endeavor to report once a month.