Search Engines and Brand Lift

Adweek recently published the results of a new study conducted by ZAAZ, Wunderman, BrandAsset® Valuator, and Compete that explores the relationship between the search engine that consumers use to find a brand’s website and the consumer’s perception of that brand. The study found that loyal users of Bing, Yahoo!, and Google have distinct characteristics that benefit some brands more than others.

“This research demonstrates that marketers have a real choice to make when formulating search strategies,” said Shane Atchison, CEO of ZAAZ. “The search engine acts as a kind of ‘train’ on the Internet. Each train provides a different set of unique results or ‘destinations.’ Consumer preference for a specific train demonstrates a unique demographic and psychographic profile.” That preference, the study found, can have enormous impact on any brand a consumer searches for.
 
ZAAZ led the analysis portion of this pioneering research study, which combined attitudinal and behavioral data to draw a more complete picture of consumer search behavior.  In this two-part post, we’ll first discuss our methodology;   in the second post, we’ll discuss the findings and how marketers could put these findings to use.  (Note: this research was independently conducted, and was not funded by any of our clients.  You can view a version of the results presentation here: Search Engine Research (pdf, 850 kb)
 
Our team combined two extensive databases from BrandAsset Valuator (BAV) and Compete. Both BAV and Compete own the largest databases in their areas of expertise.
 
BAV’s databases contain a range of attitudinal information – focusing on 72 brand metrics – and use the world's most comprehensive database of brands. Its BrandAsset Valuator model has measured brands since 1993; today, over 35,000 brands have been evaluated, and over 600,000 respondents in over 50 countries have been surveyed. To find out more about BAV data, try comparing a few of your favorite brands using the ZAAZ-built interactive tool: http://thebrandbubble.com/explore/.
 
We also used behavioral data provided by Compete. Compete combines site and search analytics and surveys on a diverse sample of more than 2 million users in the U.S. to understand what people are clicking on and why. Compete manages the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry.
 
The datasets from BAV and Compete  both contained information on the same brands across verticals including retail, travel, wireless, and automotive.  Additionally, both data sets contained a field with information on a consumer’s primary search engine. Taken independently, each data set provides insights into search engine use.  However, when ZAAZ combined and mined the data sets, we found a much more powerful and complete story.
 
At ZAAZ, we live in a world of disparate data sources; we have data for Web analytics, social media, usability, optimization testing, surveys, and more.  Almost always, this data is supplied through different tools and in different formats.  Most online marketers will be familiar with this scenario: too much data, too few connections, limited insights and action.  We’re constantly looking for new and innovative ways to combine data and tell a true 360-degree story of the customer.
 
The research published by AdWeek is certainly not the first time we’ve been through this process.
 
Working with Ford we’ve joined attitudinal survey data to behavioral Web analytics data, and analyzed this data by unique user.  With this combined approach, we are able to map how different user journeys affect customer’s brand perception and likelihood to purchase a Ford vehicle.  As a result, we have quantitatively identified what areas of the Ford site and types of content are most effective at driving sales – an insight we never could have gained by analyzing the data sets in isolation.  Ford has used this data to channel media, redesign site architecture, and run a data-driven optimization program.
 
Working with Dell, we combined site optimization testing with in-person usability testing to understand why a particular creative treatment won. For a particular campaign, we found from our optimization tests which page variants generated the greatest interaction with the page. In addition, our analytics data showed that there were several key places in the purchase path where users were abandoning at an alarming rate. To gain insight into why this was happening, we conducted usability tests in our Seattle lab with Dell consumers, having them step through the purchase path and describe their process. We were able to uncover how participants’ attitudes toward the site and the brand changed through the process, why parts of the site became annoying, and why they decided to jump out of the purchase path—either to find a different product, or to go  a competitor’s site.  The insights gleaned from combining optimization and usability test data helped generate  site changes focused on improving user attitude and increasing conversion.
 
With the search engine research, the objective was to understand the relationship between a customer choice of search engine and the brand perception of products being searched.  Once we had the data sets combined we set to work looking for trends.  Using a series of aggregations, drilldowns, and data visualizations, we were able to observe trends in the data common across attitudinal and behavioral data sets. Once the trends in the data were clear, we pulled together stakeholders from BAV and Compete to build consensus on the interpretation of the data as well as actionable strategies.
 
Next week we’ll discuss some of the findings from the research and how to take action on these findings...

By Erik Koto and Anders Rosenquist

Ligers- At Home in the Optimization Department

 "A Liger, it's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic."

How did I become an Optimization Test Designer in a world that just now understands what the heck Optimization really is?  First, I got lucky.  I was working at ZAAZ as an accountant, a workplace that is way ahead of its time, and I was working in a field where I used the left-side of my brain daily.  Second,
I committed to learning something new.
At ZAAZ, we have bi-monthly meetings where we discuss the great work we do, which is when I first heard about Optimization, about 2 and half years ago.  This new field was just being discovered, and turns out, uses both the left  right side of your brain… very appealing to someone who speaks in debits and credits 40 hours a week.

You see, outside of work, I am actually a creative person.  I paint, love photography, cook, knit, grew up playing the piano and have an eye for interior design.  I longed to find a career where I could blend the two, which is exactly what Optimization does.  I liken it to the life of a Liger,
an anomaly in the workplace, and now I've found a home in a place that accepts me 100 percent. 

Let's look at the steps that go
into designing an Optimization test:

1) Examine a website and determine the areas you think could use improvement (creative)

a) Look at high-level analytics data to help determine the best areas to test, whether it be high-traffic pages or problems within the purchase funnel resulting in high bounce rates (analytical)

2) Look at the logistical aspects of running a test (analytical)

a) Determine the amount of traffic coming into that site to ensure actual results (analytical)

b) Determine how many variants to include to determine how long you need to run the test (analytical)

c) Run a duration calculator with the aboveinformation to nail down specifics (analytical)

3) Work with the additional departments to establish the best possible variants (creative)

a) Consult with the UX department to consider the usability of each variant (creative)

b) Work with the creative department to determine the best look and feel of each variant (creative)

4) Work with an Optimization tool to actually run the test (analytical)

5) Determine a winner based on statistical significance (analytical)

a) Run a difference of means test to determine a winner at 90 percent confidence (analytical)

6) Create a results document to be presented to the client (creative)

As you can see, having a career in Optimization is like having the best of both worlds.  It's the perfect career for someone like me, someone who enjoys being creative but just happens to also like math!

Optimization, it's pretty much my favorite job. It's like an accountant
and designer mixed... bred for its skills in awesomeness.

Mobile UX and the Google Phone

[cross posted from mobileux.net] My colleague Chris Kerns gave a shout out earlier today about Techcrunch's reported existence of an Android-powered device that will be offered directly from Google. There have been rumors for months about a Google Phone (even hints back when Android itself was first announced many moons ago.)  Now this device from Google hasn't been officially announced - just tweets from some Google employees who have be using the device, and some rumors at this point.  The early impressions are very positive and the specs do look impressive: thinner than the iPhone, 1Ghz+ Snapdragon processor, unlocked, OLED display, great camera, sound-canceling technology.  This all sounds good, but good specs don't necessarily make for a good mobile user experience. However, there are a few "features" of this device that stand out and stand to make the Google Phone a game-changer. Here's why. 

First, this is Google's first hardware entry into the mass market. This puts Google in the position of owning both the software and the hardware, and being able to optimize the user experience.  They of course have to get it right - tight integration of all aspects of the device - but this puts them much more in the Apple and RIM (Blackberry) camp of being able to call the shots on all aspects of the device and how the user interacts with it.  The fast processor will help as well. My experience from owning a G1, and more recently a Motorola Cliq, is that Android needs something fast under the hood to make the screens and interactions move fluidly. Both of my Android devices get bogged down easily from background processes, screen refreshes, and network activity, which make for a painful experience at times. I'm particularly not very fond of the unregistered screen presses and choppy scrolling.

The second "feature" worth noting is that the device is rumored to be sold unlocked by Google itself. What is this a big deal, considering you can already buy many unlocked devices? Several reasons:

• Google will most likely offer an attractive and competitive price point. Google will want to get these devices into many hands, and may be willing to cover the subsidization costs (that the carriers normally absorb). If any of the free (read: company subsidized) products that Google currently offers is any indication, the Google Phone may carry stong price appeal in the market.
• The device-network balance will shift. By buying an unlocked device, you get to choose the device first and then shop for the carrier. This flips the model we are used to in the U.S. where carriers tend to have "exclusives" on mobile devices - subsidized devices in exchange or 1- or 2-year contracts - thus locking the user onto a particular network if they want a particular device. Want an iPhone?  You're stuck with AT&T.  How about a Palm Pre? Hello Sprint. By putting the device first, you are able to select a carrier that meets your particular needs, be that best nationwide coverage, lowest-cost plans, discounted international calling, etc.
• Carrier contracts may change or (hopefully) go away. If you buy an unlocked phone and can go to any carrier, what will the carrier be locking you into a contract for?  If you are not getting the device subsidized by the carrier, they are really acting as your ISP and providing the data pipe. Aside from startup costs to joining a new carrier like porting your number or activating an account, the whole idea of the Early Termination Fee will become irrelevant.

Oh, and the Google Phone is rumored to have Google Voice included, which allows you to make VoIP calls and bypass many of the services offered by carriers such as visual voicemail, low-cost international rates, and built in SMS messaging - all additional charges by the carriers. Another thorn-in-the-carrier-side and disruptive  (did AT&T Apple ever get around to approving Google Voice for the iPhone?) I haven't heard (beyond speculation) about ad integration. It would seem that a phone built by Google would naturally integrate advertising (and they did just buy the mobile ad network AdMob.)  Perhaps the device will be free, but will have banner ads in your calendar and music player. Who knows - we will hopefully see soon.

With the Google Phone, I see several potential wins for users here - the user experience win that comes from tight hardware and software integration, and the consumer win that comes from changing established models in the wireless industry. These aren't a given, but we've seen boundaries pushed by the introduction of the iPhone - perhaps Google can push them even further.

Anders Rosenquist is a Senior User Experience Researcher at ZAAZ and works on a variety of usability and UX issues. Anders is particularly interested in the multiple faces of mobile, including UX design, usability testing, strategy, and the mobile ecosystem/devices.

Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture.)

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

 

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

 

• It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

 

• Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

 

• In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

 

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture.)

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Too Much Marketing

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture)

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”

Web Analytics for Social Media

Most marketers approach social media in the same way they've approached broadcast media for decades. And that's true of measurement as well. But with social media, the old rules don't apply.

Traditionally, marketers focused on quantity metrics like impressions. As the Web emerged as a marketing platform, we translated that approach to digital, emphasizing quantity metrics like unique visitors and page views. Later, as the Web matured into a bona-fide business channel, transaction became important: sales conversion rate, average order value, and so on.

Web analytics, like much of the marketing world, has tended to focus on the short term, measuring marketing to do better marketing.

But social media is different than transaction, and it calls for a different approach to measurement. Today we look at the quality of relationships, experiences, and, yes, transactions, and we look at them over time. Unique visitors, for example, is still an important metric, but so is registered users. And more important still are metrics like return visitor sign-in.

We also look at the amount of user-created content, but we're more interested in measures of qualified content consumption. It's great if someone comes to your site and buys your product, but it's even better if she returns for service, tells her friends about the product, buys an upgrade, submits a suggestion, blogs about your response to her idea, and so on.

True Business Intelligence

On today's crowded Web, the winners are the people who create the most value for both the customer and the business over time. And value happens not when people buy your product but when they use it and love it. Not when they upload a video, but when someone else watches it.

Is it still important to strive for quantity? Absolutely. Awareness, for example, is key and always will be. But you get what you measure. Focus exclusively on quantity, and you're guaranteed to compromise quality. So make sure your KPIs reflect the creation of value, not just the number of widgets you sell.

Here's the other thing: traditional (broadcast and transactive) marketing measures tend to show campaign efforts' effectiveness, and Web analytics tends to measure Web site effectiveness. But social media, because it enables you to listen as well as speak, offers the opportunity to generate true business intelligence.

Measuring marketing in social media isn't about measuring your marketing to do better marketing, it's about understanding the customer, uncovering opportunities, and informing strategy to run the business better. The real opportunity in social media measurement isn't to see how well you're doing in social media but to translate online conversations into true, actionable intelligence that informs business decisions.

How Do You Measure Social?

Some great tools can help you monitor the online conversation, ranging from free (e.g., Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to, uh, committing (e.g., TruCast, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony). The more expensive tools are worth what they cost, but the free tools are easy to set up and, well, they're free.

And sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. You may just want to get something going on the cheap, show the value of your effort, and lobby for a robust, programmatic solution to monitor online activity and engage your customers where they hang out. You'll be surprised how much you'll learn, and you'll probably really enjoy it.

The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous.

So don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.

Translate Insight Into Action

And don't stop there. Where the rubber really hits the road, and where social media has the potential to transform your business, is where insight gets translated into action. And that's where analysts, as the translators of social media data, have the opportunity to position themselves as crucial mediators of customer/business relationships.

Advertising's Changing Landscape

In July, Forrester Research released its "U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014" lead by Shar VanBoskirk. A key highlight: "Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing."

A few key shifts caught my eye:

• Social media will quadruple to $3 billion in the next five years. This is defined as social network campaigns and agency fees and excludes display advertising on social media sites.
• As pointed out in the main takeaway, 2014 interactive marketing is forecasted to be 21 percent of all marketing spend, growing from 12 percent in 2009. That's a huge shift in five years, while overall advertising/marketing budgets won't be growing.

In a blog post about the research, VanBoskirk writes:

But to me, the most interesting take away from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline. Yep. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals. But reasonable marketers won't relinquish budget because their programs are running too efficiently. Instead, marketers will allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing's strategic influence within their companies.

This is great news for most of us in the digital industry. But there are a few scary trends in here as well. The dot-com days were a lot of fun, offering a lot of excitement and changes, but those days weren't based on true business performance. People were caught up in the excitement of something new and the promise of the future. Too many people flocked to these avenues without clear success metrics and eventually failed. I'm not forecasting a repeat of the dot-bomb era in any way, but it stands as an example of companies needing to be smart about what they are doing rather than throwing money at potentially promising things without specific goals.

Read that last line again. The key words are "without specific goals." A lot of people are sprinting toward social media. That makes sense for many companies, but often they get caught up in the hype and being part of the new way of doing things. They're less focused on what they and their customers can get out of it.

As money continues to pour into social media and other digital marketing initiatives, companies must get smarter about defining success and measuring results. If this money continues to be spent on these areas without a focus on measureable performance, at some point something else will come along and people will put budgets to the newest thing.

That's one reason people are moving away from traditional media. The famous saying "I know half my marketing works, I just don't know which half" rings especially true during these times. It becomes difficult to justify that additional newspaper or TV spot. In this day and age, marketers are learning that they can determine which percentage of their marketing is working. They care becoming accustomed to knowing the conversion rate of an online campaign, of their Web sites, and of specific banner ads on specific sites. They can see what's working and what's not and quickly make changes to things that aren't working to improve them or reallocate that money to areas where they know it is working.

Marketers have concrete ways to determine how well something is working. So instead of having buckets of working marketing and not working marketing, marketers can dissect the working group and shift money from campaigns that are returning a positive ROI toward better-performing areas.

Technology is allowing marketers to become smarter about determining where to spend their money. But it all starts with defining success. Don't allow yourself or your company to get drawn into the newest hottest things without defining what success means and how it impacts your customers, prospects, and your bottom line. By setting goals and understanding the impact, you can ensure that you spend money in the right areas and won't lose money to the next big measureable thing down the road. If you don't define those goals and measure the impact, your days of increasing budgets are most likely numbered.

Let the voting begin.

Below are the submissions for our next social media event. We're taking votes over on our  Facebook page. The eight with the most votes will be our presenters for 21 Slides!

1. Lessons Learned from LOLcats.
There's a lot to be learned from the popular LOLcat meme. Why is www.icanhascheezburger.com so successful? What attracts users and keeps them coming back? Are there lessons to be learned from this phenomenon? (yes!) My presentation will include a brief history of the LOL meme, explore the magic ingredients of this social media success story, and present a few key takeaways that can be applied to social media and digital marketing in general.

2. Pulling the Pages out of Facebook: Social Web Optimization
Recent moves towards the vision of the Semantic Web by Google and Yahoo! are accelerating adoption of geeky sounding things like XFN, Microformats, and RDFa. These standards have the potential to move social networking out of walled gardens and into the open Internet itself. I'll look at how semantic markup adds social value to Web sites now, and speculate on what the social future of the Semantic Web might look like.

3.The Social Media Mindset: An InfoCamp case study
The 15th of October is 4 days after the 3rd annual InfoCamp (which I can already tell you is going to kick ass). This year, attendance grew sharply, and interest in InfoCamp hit a critical mass of sorts. InfoCamp is a crowdsourced conference. It is real-time, in-person social media inside a conference format. It is the wikipedia to more traditional conferences’ Encyclopedia Britannica. This gravitation towards InfoCamp is part of a larger expectation that drives social media – that users can and should generate their own content in a variety of formats, not just digital ones. I’ll show how we used social media to promote InfoCamp. I’ll show examples of how people used our Wiki, twitter, and facebook presence before the event. I’ll show examples of how social media was used during and after the event.

4. Social Media: All that Glitters is not Gold
A covert mission of exposing a very traditional retail company to social media. One woman. No budget. Few tools. And now with internet restrictions!

5. OMG my (online) life is over. Mom's on Facebook.
How to gracefully deal with the generation gap as your parents, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents join in this "social media" thing. Mom keeps spamming your Facebook posts with mom-comments, Dad got lost in quizzes, but at least neither of them Twitter (whew).

6. The Desperate Housewives of Facebook: Why are they so goddamn bored?!
Facebook recently published an audience statistic that stated the most prolific segment on their site was maried women between the ages of 35-40. Basically, housefraus. And honestly, we know it's true. From their seemingly exhausting ability to post up-to-the-minute updates on their over-achieving children, their opinions of Oprah's afternoon guest, how precious someone's twins are, and what god awful family vacation they're planning. Why do they torture us so? And, more importantly, why are they addicted to FaceCrack? This presentation works off this crazy data point to get to the bottom of the Facebook Housewife craze -- and exposes the horror below.

7. Cinching All My Love to You: A Social Media Romance
Here’s a little story about Jack and Diane two American kids growing up in the heartland. No wait, that’s been done before. This presentation is the story of Jo and Nancy, a relationship that starts, develops, and ultimately meets its end on CinchCast.com. Through the words, voice, images and text of our two love birds, attendees will experience the excitement new love can bring...and the drama when things don’t work out as planned. This presentation will be better than any Knot’s Landing or Melrose Place re-run. It is love social media style.

8. Humanizing Social Media: A Few Stories.
Social media is the place where stories are shared and experiences are formed. Only when brands provide return on emotion to their customers, can they fully benefit from social media. People want to know that they’re being heard. By acknowledging their contributions, and teaming up with their most loyal customers, brands can begin to build stronger relationships with their fans. I’d like to share some collected examples of how companies are using social media to build deep and long lasting relationships with their enthusiasts. Some you’ve heard of, others will surely be new.

9. Are you ready for a mobile makeover?
I spearheaded a campaign in which I was able to get the attention of the powers that be over at Waggener Edstrom. A very special twitter page, a facebook fanpage and some fabulous videos on youtube, helped me break the mold.

10. Government is no longer the bureaucratic monolith you thought it was
At the Washington State Department of Transportation we are using Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr and other social media tools to reach audiences. While I don't want to focus on any one element or tool I plan to share amazing stories of how we used them during "snowpocalypse" to help people get home, and won several national awards for it. Also we have incredible direct messaging features that folks in seattle should be aware of. Did you know you can get seattle area travel times, mountain pass reports and border wait times via Twitter direct message?

11. Social Telephone Game :: It’s never what they say, it’s what they mean
Do you flinch every time you see your brand muddied up on the social web? Are your inboxes across various social media channels filling up with hate mail? Here's some encouraging news for you: your unhappiest customer is not likely what they appear to be. Learn how to read between the lines of your social community and harness them for the brand advocates they are. 

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12. Defamation and Social Media – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
Should you really send that tweet calling your competitor a “douchebag”? What about that status update letting the world know how your mechanic is a “lying, cheating scumbag who would steal medicine from a pediatric ward?” How liable are you for giving all the baddies out there a well-deserved, spleen-filled bitch-slap? In this session, I will walk through a very quick explanation of defamation law and explain how it might apply to the social media landscape. I will also provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

13. An Ecosystem Approach to Social Media: Turning Crap Into Fertilizer
The landscape of social media is a complex system. So are ecosystems: gardens, wetlands, and forests are full of complex webs of dependencies (nutrients, shelter, food) and controls (checks & balances). There are well-established methods for describing and designing ecosystems to produce desired results - and revenue. So the question is: how do we design social media to satisfied customers and cold, hard cash? The answer: Crap. In nature, it's the "nightsoil" that keeps the system going. One creature's crap is another's food. We can identify the byproducts of social media - the waste, the shite, the cruft, the fluff - and find ways to make it feed the system, we've created a self-sustaining Poop Loop. In fact, if we DON'T have a strategy to process the crap, it'll poison the system. So we need to find ways to turn social media manure into fertilizer. How is it done? First identify role types. Then map their inputs and outputs. Finally, design mechanisms to connect one entity's outputs to another's inputs. Congratulations, you've just turned crap into fertilizer. Just one of the many lessons we can learn from ecosystem science.

Cast your vote on our Facebook page!

Social Media & SEO: You've got it whether you want it or not

When we talk about media strategy with clients, it’s helpful for us to categorize media into three buckets: Bought Media (Display, Email, Paid Search, etc.), Owned Media (Web-sites, landing pages, etc.), and Earned Media (SEO, Social Media)

The first media types, Bought and Owned are generally controllable – Earned Media, while manageable, is NOT controllable. Whether your business has a deliberate strategy for Earned Media or not – your business may still have a presence.

Perfect Example: Dominos Pizza.

Remember last April when an unfortunate viral video was distributed through YouTube and elsewhere that exposed some subpar food preparation practices? Dominos employees Kristy and Michael filmed themselves doing some rather non-appetizing things to the food prior to serving it to customers. The Consumerist has a nice write up of the incident.

It’s an excellent example of the viral impact of social media, whether intended or not, and how social media relates to SEO.  Shortly after Kristy and Michael uploaded their video to YouTube, it was being spread around the web at one of the faster rates recorded for viral content.  On its first day, over 1 million people viewed the video – even before news stations started running the story.

The larger-scale effects of the video were seen shortly after the story was reported on the nightly news and in newspapers across the country.  The video had such a negative impact on Dominos that a search for their company name at the time returned one result for official Dominos site, followed by a long list of pages of bad press – including the actual video content related to Kristy & Michael’s food-prep adventures. 

 

Prior to the incident, Dominos did not have a concerted earned media strategy. This was evidenced by their lack of saturation in search engine results pages (SERPS).  Having a high SERP saturation not only allows corporations to control the messaging for their brand, but it also helps engage your brand with customers who have expressed some degree of intent or interest. 

To their credit, Dominos’ reactive handling of the event was well-executed.  They started out by posting a reply to the original video right on YouTube.  Instead of burying their response in a press release that hardly anybody would see, or buying a full page ad in the New York Times, Dominos took their response to where the discussion started and was still taking place.  They also created a Twitter account and hired someone to monitor Twitter and answer questions from anybody who would ask.

These were all the right things to do, but the fallout could have been managed with less negative exposure had Dominos established an earned media presence prior to the video incident.  If they had an already established presence, a search for “Dominos” would have shown fewer negative news pages and more of their Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube videos, and other pages.  They could have achieved a much quicker response addressing the issue using SEO results as well.

Conclusion:
The example above illustrates the importance of using earned media for reputation management. And while PR crises may be rare -- earned media channels like SEO and Social Media are still critical for establishing your brand, engaging with customers, and driving business performance.

Understand that social media has converged benefit as an important SEO driver as well.  A good social media offering can benefit your SEO position by increasing exposure in search results, building relevant inbound links (Dominos has 16,300 links to the rebuttal video for the allegations), helping control brand perception, and increasing universal search presence.

Earned media isn’t necessarily the most appropriate channel for broadcasting or advertising – but it does provide a highly effective and efficient way to listen and engage with customers and audiences. Social and SEO should be an essential, ongoing part of an Earned Media campaign -- rather than an afterthought or a reaction to a crisis.  

Authors:

Rich Devine (richd@zaaz.com)

Ryan Jones (ryanj@zaaz.com)
Justin Schoen (justins@zaaz.com)