Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

April 1, 2009 • 4:53 pm 0

Online Personality: Who Am I Really?

For all of you that love finding out more about yourself through tests like Myers-Briggs, now you can see your online personality.  A new tool from HubSpot, Personality Grader, allows you to enter in your name and it will pop-up an overall personality score plus scores across 4 areas.  It is as easy as putting in your name and getting a result. Scores come with why you were scored in such a manner and how to improve.

Frequency – Online usage
Sentiment – demeanor in online interactions
Reach – overall network
Intelligence – how smart you come across

HubSpot Blog:  Personality Grader Makes Marketing Less Manic

I tried it out.  I plugged in my name and I watched the program as it told me it was sifting through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook wall, Flickr, Blogs.  Then it spit out my score.  Some of my ratings I saw some validity in, others I would argue against.  

So, I wondered how did it know one Michele Goetz from any other Michele Goetz online.  If you search my name on Google I find at least 3 including myself with presence.  Going back to the HubSpot Blog  the answer to this from Dharmesh Shah:

“This was a difficult one to solve.   What we ended up doing is putting in some Javascript code so we could watch each character of the name as it is being typed.  Based on the typing speed, the application determines which of the “candidate” profiles that match the name have the highest probability of being a match.  For example, if you type really slowly, it is unlikely that yours is the account with 17,000 twitter updates.  It’s not perfect, but we’ve found that this is close enough for our purposes. We’ll continue to refine this part of the software.”

Alright, let’s see what happens when I change the speed of my typing. No change.  

If you think about it, what this tool is really trying to help with is personal brand.  So I tried variations of my profile from user names to email addresses and behold, different scores.  What I wonder is if Michele Goetz accounts for aggregation of the right user names and emails in the aggregation.

One last interesting thing, I figured I’d plug in some well known online brands and check out the results.  I’ve included the links below. Let me know what you think – are they correct?  

Also, try entering these names in lower case letters and watch the difference.  Facebook was hilarious.  For Intelligence it said, “Your evaluation indicates that your intelligence is average; engaging in more meaningful conversations and sharing less about your personal life may improve this grade.”

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March 16, 2009 • 2:52 pm 0

Creating Endurance in Social Media Marketing

Endurance

Social media marketing is about endurance, not the blips and clicks you watch daily.

As a runner, I think about this constantly. Now with spring starting, I hit the pavement for the first time this weekend since snow started falling. This point of endurance resonates with me as I think about how to get back on my game. I move along my route listening to my body to determine how I’m doing: too fast, too slow, do I need to change my stride, what is the next landmark in my route, can I go farther today?

Social media marketing is the same, as is marketing in general.

You may have sprints through your marketing vehicles, but it is how you create endurance through your total efforts that is the real pay off. Social media marketing has a variety of tools to use: blogs, networks, micro-blogging, advertising, etc. Each one is your sprint or a segment of your run. Combining these vehicles you create your long distance run. Think about the fact that you have different levels of success across various vehicles and there are peaks and valleys. What you are shooting for is that through a combination of vehicles you marketing efforts increase the connection to your audience over time and drive your business.

Relationship building takes time. You’ll get initial successes as you enter the market through social media because what you offer is new. It is how you continue to provide value in the conversation and engagement that will determine if you social media marketing efforts will continue to provide ROI. After the launch, do you maintain your engagement levels and grow them? Or, is there a drop and leveling off? Is there a drop and then nothing? You have to continue to focus and work on it.

Some of the things that I’m looking are measures that tell me that I’m building trust and relationships. These measures are based on trends rather than points in time.

  • Subscribers – Is it increasing? What are the retention rates?
  • Comment trend – Is it increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same?
  • Readership trend – Is it increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same? Are readers going deeper into additional content (more views)?

One other thing I’m thinking about is the steepness of trends. You may get a big benefit from a steep and fast growth but, it may be better to be slow and steady. It’s the runner’s pace. Until you reach leader status and have the reserves and resources, it sometimes pays off to create a pace that is aligned to your resources that will let you stay in the race rather than peak early. Peaking too early may deplete your resources and you are left without the ability to sustain the relationships you were acquiring.

For social media marketing, think marathon, not the sprint.

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March 4, 2009 • 6:10 pm 0

Metrics and ROI: Bonfire of the Vanities

“Is social media effective?”

“How do you measure ROI in social marketing?”

“What KPIs do you use for social media?”

Sounds familiar, right?

Inevitably, when you see someone talk about how to measure social marketing effectiveness you have someone focusing on hits, page rank, sharing, links, and the like.  Then, another voice comes in saying that is is about the business outcome, metrics should tie to business objectives.  A third pipes in that you can’t reabigstockphoto_adjusting_the_data_1234568lly measure marketing to revenue, it’s too fuzzy.

This was evident in a post from Chris Brogan – Moving Needles.  He mentions several things to look at and what they indicate.  Then, someone commented that social media is a tool and that KPIs that exist today are still valid for social media.  What the needle measures never changes.

Well, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.  It depends on what your role is in monitoring social marketing effectiveness.  Are you the direct marketer, PR person, the web manager, a program director, or a marketing executive?  The difficulty in all this is that everyone has a different way that they measure their own effectiveness.  Each is silo-ed.  In fact, many times it is the function that defines what the metric is for success rather than CMOs driving the scorecard and dashboard.

Successful measurement of social media, as with any marketing tool, is the ability to take tactical metrics, see how they link to KPIs, show how KPIs drive business outcomes, and then be able to predict how changes in strategy and tactics fuel the cycle again.  Simply showing the end result of marketing effort contribution to business outcome is great for marketing executives.  But, marketing managers, web teams, and specialists need more detail to manage the tactics that drive business outcomes.

As it pertains to social marketing, I think it is opening up things that should be measured as part of web marketing that hasn’t been looked at before.  Web marketing has always been internally focused on website hits, traffic patterns, and how visitors enter the lead funnel.  Social marketing is opening up an understanding of how word-of-mouth influences website visits and brand interaction.  So, it goes without saying that things like trackbacks, linking, conversation, and bookmarking are important to watch.  What we need to figure out is how do these new metrics fit into our dashboard framework to measure impact on desired business outcomes.  What is also important is that some of these metrics may be better to use when looking at our traditional web mediums.

So, while I agree and continually evangelize the need to have marketing executive dashboards that ensure marketing is aligned to business objectives, de-emphasizing web stats that contribute to outcomes won’t help manage effort and resources.

Related articles:

Social Media Metrics: ROI or Just Numbers

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

Web Metrics Don’t Cut it for Social Media

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March 2, 2009 • 7:49 pm 2

Social Media Metrics: ROI or Just Numbers

I’m looking at various ways people are trying to attach social media marketing metrics to ROI.  Some of the insights being provided leave me wondering if we are really measuring ROI or if it is just reach within the online community.

Leading the way on social media metrics is Networked Insights.  Their measures of interactions looks at reading, rating, sharing, linking and inviting is one way to determine impact.  They are coming to be the source of social media metrics as Nielsen is for TV ratings.  They released two grids of information connecting off-line media with social media – one in October looking at TV ratings and social media interactions and the other with Superbowl ads and social media interactions.  If you’ve been tracking, I’m sure you’ve seen these.

I’ll say this, I love the numbers coming from Networked Insights.  It really puts together an easy way to monitor and measure social media.  However, there are a a number things that bother me with how the metrics may be used as well as inherent bias in these numbers.

  1. On TV ratings: Interactions are a measure of topic interest.  Viewership is about a single event.  The program is a catalyst or topic of discussion.
  2. Advertising winners in the the Superbowl ads are more closely related to social trends as opposed to real marketing effectiveness. Winners are associated to key events in people’s lives: jobs, taxes, Valentines Day, need for money.  Many of the losers are for big ticket items that are already hurting.  The only one that stands out is CareerBuilder vs. Monter.com.  The other point is how much social media marketing is available for thes loser brands?
  3. Inclusion of “reading” in the interaction metric is a huge bias.  This is like saying that someone that opened an email is really engaged.  In terms of ROI, there is no value in “reading” unless there is an outcome.  I think this inflates the ROI value of a social media property.
  4. Interactions to rate a program are biased based on the overall bias of social media community.
  5. Interactions as a rating don’t account for the fact that some programs have more emphasis and effort on generating social media buzz and interaction opportunities.
  6. The Social ROI score is great if you are focusing only on the online interaction conversion.  But, the real goal of marketing spend is to convert to purchase.
  7. Each of these reports is focused on lift in a specific point in time.  Real ROI is over the course of a sales cycle.
  8. Are these interaction unique individuals, households, or an overall impersonal and duplicative/exponential number

When leveraging social media metrics such as provided by Networked Insights, it is important to remember the business objective you are trying to attain rather than just the number of impressions and interactions in the online world.  How do you tie these metrics to your business objectives?  Ultimately spend on social media needs to generate a financial gain to the company either directly or indirectly.  Similar to traditional marketing vehicles, we must start to recognize social media interactions as part of the strategy rather than just the strategy.  So, when we do measure, it connects to what we are really trying to accomplish, growing our business.

measurethesocialtv

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February 25, 2009 • 3:42 pm 5

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

Anyone that tells you it is simple to get real engagement from your customers through social media – call their bluff.  If they can prove they did it, hire them!

We all know that social media is the wave of the future.  Every marketing department is putting more effort and resources toward it.  The problem is that no one can really get their arms around how to engage the customer.

Eric Brown is on target when he says:

“If there are no comments on you blog and nothing on your facebook wall except from posts from you, You have an ELECTRONIC BILLBOARD, Which is NOT Social Media”  see article

He is right.  You are really just creating another brochure website.  Why do you want to do that?

It’s only been a few weeks since I started Brain Vibe and have found that the easiest part of the processes was getting some traction.  By leveraging social networking venues, letting friends know, commenting, and paying attention to SEO, I’m pretty happy with the results.  People are starting to subscribe and follow, bookmarking is happening, syndication is working, and I’m getting good feedback and comments.   Here’s the thing, those comments, they don’t come in how I expect.  I get emails.  People don’t comment on the post, they go to my contact page and send me an email.  I also get voted up without any feedback and commenting.

I’m not getting a ton of feedback. I’d love to get more, particularly on the articles that seem to be driving viewership, subscriptions, and bookmarking.  I do what everyone says, ask for comments, create interactive posts, put up polls.  I tried a Blog Improv to get participation as well.  Interestingly, the Improv only generated 2 comments (1 from a new professional connection and I’m extremely greatful!).  But, it drove subscriptions and traffic.  Go figure.

Particularly for business marketing, I’m finding that people have preferences in how they want to interact with you.  Social media is one of those avenues and even within it is a microcosm of conversational preferences.  How we measure our success around commenting and interaction needs to be looked at in its entirety.  If I only used direct comments on my blog to determine effectiveness, I miss out on the fact that the way people are connecting with me is through email.  Some people may only vote up your post.  Sometimes, the value is “paying it forward” through reblogging or re-tweeting.  Measuring success of your efforts early on may be looking at indicators that show traction that should lead to participation and interaction.

Look at the big picture:

  • Are people sharing?
  • Are people bookmarking?
  • Are you receiving email comments?
  • Are you receiving tweets?
  • Are you getting comments in syndication but not on your site?
  • Are you finding doors opening because someone saw your work?
  • Are people voting you up?

If these things are happening, it is only a matter of time before people will comment and interact with each other and you.

Here’s what I’ll say about conversation and interaction.  It is something that you will need to nurture and develop.  What I’ll add to Eric’s perspective is that unless you already had a strong following and network to begin with, it is going to take time.  I’ve seen numbers ranging as high as 99% of blog readers are lurkers.  In social networks, there was usually an offline connection that helped to generate interaction on walls and blogs.  For business marketers that are trying to build networks with their customers, a different mindset is needed to get commenting and participation to happen.  You may need to seed participation by leveraging your offline relationships.  And, even then, if you are in PR, you know how hard it is just to get references.

What have you done to get comments?

Please, leave a comment…  :)


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