ABCi Releases New Mobile Audit Report

Folio, 8/26/10

Audience, download, usage metrics featured from range of devices and platforms.

ABC has finished its reviews of mobile audit partners Verve Wireless and Handmark and has released its new mobile audit report, called m.Audit Report. The report is a 5 paragraph, standalone statement that’s released via ABC’s interactive unit ABCi.

The report is not required like a traditional publishers statement and publishers can be flexible with the information they want displayed and the frequency of the report itself, says Neal Lulofs, ABC’s senior vice president of communications and strategic planning. Reports can reflect monthly, quarterly or six-month periods, for example.

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Marketers Finally Turn Toward Metrics

MediaPost, 7/28/10

One-third of U.S. companies plan to maintain or increase marketing budgets in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and a higher percentage will set up guidelines and metrics to prove accountability, according to a study released Wednesday.

The Forbes Insights and software and analytics firm MarketShare Partners reveals marketers and agencies continue to struggle with finding the metrics to justify dollars spent on campaigns. Fifty-eight percent of companies working with budgets up to $1 million admit they will implement tools that measure return on investment (ROI) to measurable outcomes, compared with 40% for those working with higher budgets.

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ComScore Admits Errors in its Yahoo Data for June

ClickZ, 7/27/10

Online audience measurement firm comScore underreported data on Yahoo’s page views and duration metrics for June, the companies announced today.

According to a press release issued by Yahoo, its U.S. page views were down 4.7 percent, month-over-month, not 7.4 percent as reported by comScore. In addition, the average period of time users spent on its properties was down 4.3 percent, not 6.4 percent. In real numbers, Yahoo’s audience was underreported by more than 1 billion page views and its duration metrics by approximately 850 million minutes.

The error concerned traffic to Yahoo’s news, sports, finance, TV, movies, music, and health properties. Overall, it affected data for a total of seven territories, including Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K. As a result, comScore’s aggregated E.U. and worldwide data will also be impacted.

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‘BtoB’ survey reveals marketer skills, challenges

5/3/10, BtoB

The conventional wisdom that marketers struggle with a broken, dysfunctional relationship with their counterparts in sales may not be entirely accurate, according to the results of a just-completed survey by BtoB and SaaS solution provider Genius.com.

The “B2B Marketer Skills Snapshot Survey,” conducted in March and April, asked marketers to rate their skills, favorite success metrics, challenges, technology adoption and use of social media.

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What metrics are advertisers really interested in?

4/29/10, eMedia Vitals

Online publishers should always be striving to better align their offerings with the needs of advertisers. With marketers demanding clear ROI from their ad spend, and transparency in verifying that ROI, it’s more important than ever for publishers to understand the audience metrics that advertisers believe in. I asked Drew Neisser, CEO of NYC digital agency Renegade, for his thoughts on what metrics advertisers really care about.

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The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter

3/19/10, ReadWriteWeb

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

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Social Media is Not Marketing…Yet

Rich Vancil

I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix.

The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing.

What is most promising is that “Social” will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice.

But Social Media is not Marketing…Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through.

Social Media will become marketing when two things happen. First it needs to contribute to the “inbound” side of marketing. Web 2.0 conversations about your company’s product and services need to be mined and gleaned so that they become valuable components of your product management decisions. The litmus test here is that your product managers start to depend on those contributions.

The second thing that needs to happen is on the “Outbound” side of marketing. The litmus test here is that Social Media needs to become a primary preference for how buyers inform their decisions. IDC research shows that buyers almost always prefer to receive information from independent third parties and from their peers. So, Social Media should really shine in this application.

There is important work ahead to make it this happen. It’s all about how to operationalize your marketing organization to reap the benefits of Social Media. “Operationalize” doesn’t make it through your spell-checker… but it is on the lips of the best marketers in tech, today. Only with operational depth will Social earn its way into the marketing mix. In our latest survey of CMO’s less than one-half said that they were making “significant” progress on this task – and that’s from an audience who tend to self-rank pretty high.

Here are three operational Best Practices that I see marketing leaders taking, right now. These leaders, by the way, are moving quickly on these. My sense is that they know that these basic operational tasks need to be completed well before the inbound and outbound marketing benefits can be realized.

1. Centralize. If you have followed the IDC CMO area research, you know that we are not great fans of heavy-handed corporate marketing. But in this case we are pressing hard for this. The issue is that (Congratulations, by the way) everyone in your company is now in marketing! Well-meaning engineers are merrily blogging about a new technical advance. Your sales reps are tweeting about a local seminar that they are setting up. The problem is that we are creating the perfect environment for a major breach of data. A privacy issue will be violated; an important confidentiality will be disclosed. When this happens, the blame I think is going to wind its way back to the marketing department, regardless of marketing’s role in the breach. So, corporate marketing needs to have the basics of governance and policy in place.

The second opportunity for centralization is for shared service creation. One of my clients has five major development groups and the lead developer in each group took a separate initiative to construct a community site for the development community and their most engaged customers. Couldn’t the deployment of a master community site with five sub-divisions have saved money? Yes. And wouldn’t it be easier to then deploy a single mining tool across those sub-divisions? Yes.

2. Train. I don’t think that there is a lot of good external “courseware” for how to conduct Social Media Marketing. But wait! Remember that everyone in your company is now in marketing?? I would bet that for every 100 people who are involved in Social conversations, that you have two or three real sharp-shooters. Find those two or three, and have them train the rest.

3. Measure. Poor metrics can give good marketing activities a bad name. One of the basic faults in metrics development is measuring activities and not results. Measuring the number of Tweets or enumerating the cast of your Followers are stark examples of these errors. Measure how many buying decisions you influenced. Measure how many customer service issues you identified and passed on to the right area for resolution. It seems basic but I am surprised at how many marketers still measure just the volume, the activities. Why? Because it’s easy. You have to be willing and able to do the harder work.

“Operationalize” for Social Media. An important initiative for 2010.

How to approach social media marketing

When having a conversation, it is usually helpful to check to make sure everyone is on the same page. To that end, when I talk about social media marketing I am referring to the process of applying traditional marketing principles/disciplines to rapidly evolving communications that allows for real-time, 1:1 conversations with your target audiences. Above all, it’s about creating a dialog with your current and future customers by providing content & functionality that users find relevant and engaging.

In speaking with clients as they begin or evolve their social media marketing efforts, perhaps the most important realization is that social media marketing requires a long-term view and commitment to be successful. You are establishing a dialog with your customers and once you begin, your audience will expect you to hold up your end of the conversation. Just like in any conversation, you may not always like what the other person has to say, but smart marketers value and learn from that input.

While there are many ways to approach social media marketing, here is what I suggest:

1. Listen
   Before engaging your audience, the first thing you need to do is listen to the conversations that are going on about your brand, your product(s), the broader business marketplace or between the people that make up your target audience.
2. Understand
   As in any marketing plan development, it is necessary to determine your objectives, targets, strategies and success metrics before launching into program development and execution. While it is fine to test, learn and evolve, try to avoid “random acts of social media” whenever possible.
3. Prepare
   Content is king in social media. It is important to map and maximize your content in order to increase your Share of ConversationSM . Please remember, content in social means a variety of things: a blog post, a webinar, a whitepaper, a contest, an offer, a poll, etc.—whatever fits your objectives. The key is to understand what you need to hold up your end of the conversation.
4. Engage
   After you have listened to the conversations about your brand/products, clarified your objectives, developed a strategy and prepared your content map and initial content, the fun begins. There are various ways to engage with your audiences depending upon your objectives, but the key to creating any dialog is to remain truthful and real. This is what generates trust.
5. Measure
   Measurement ties the outcomes of your efforts back to the objectives established during the planning stage. Whether it be engagement trends like Share of ConversationSM or changes in brand sentiment, to tracking impressions, links, leads, registrations, event attendance, influence rankings, etc., you need to establish clear success metrics from the beginning to maximize and showcase ROI.
6. Integrate
   Finally, social media marketing does not operate in a silo. The knowledge and insights gained via your social media marketing efforts should be deeply integrated into your overall marketing communications and your traditional marketing efforts should promote your social media programs and touch points. Remember back to your Marketing 101 classes? It ALL works together!

While this is how I recommend approaching social media marketing, what are your thoughts? Does this approach resonate with your experiences to date?

Deidra Bodkin is VP, Client Services with IDG Strategic Marketing Services. She leads the team responsible for developing and executing social media marketing programs for IDG’s technology clients. Follow her on Twitter at @deidrabodkin.