Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

The buzz surrounding Social Media is deafening in marketing today and every marketer is under pressure to deliver smart, powerful campaigns that utilize Social in relevant and effective ways.

However, a lack of benchmarks, combined with a massive amount of data possible to capture has made the actual choice of what to measure no easier for most Brands.  Some experts offer suggestions in the form of lists of possible individual metrics, but I’m not sure this is as helpful as it could be for the people struggling to decide how to invest. What marketers need are strategies that help them craft objectives that can be measured in ways that make sense to the marketing organization.

Garrett Ira (guest blogging here on Kylelacy.com) has collected some great examples of key metrics to track, but the real secret is how to set up objectives for your campaigns (and I do mean campaigns, not just social actions) that include social objectives which can then be measured by actions that the user takes, like clicks, likes, shares, check-ins and tweets.

Some campaigns are about getting the word out about a product, service, activity or cause, so those should have key metrics around both impressions/reach of the campaign message, as well as the viral aspect of how much the message was shared onward from the initial share.  These metrics feel a lot like media numbers, and can be better understood by stakeholders if they are presented as purely that - “Here’s your awareness.”

Some campaigns or actions, however, are aimed at involving the consumer in something - getting them to participate in meaningful ways - and these actions should be measured using brand and impact studies, since you want to know if the people have changed their relationship to the brand in some way, due to the interaction.  Tracking the interactions themselves without examining the underlying impact to building meaningful connections is a quick way to confuse senior management - “Are that many downloads a good thing?”

Lastly, if the campaign is about sales, then don’t be shy - use a panel and find out what your campaign in social did to impact their purchase behavior.  Using proxies for purchase intent is always tempting here, but keep in mind that there really is a difference between a purchase and signing up for coupons/email (or asking for more information).  Be firm and decisive here, and if only a panel will deliver it, then get a panel together - “What means a ‘win’ for me in terms of sales?”

Naturally, some situations and organizations will pressure people to avoid picking a focus (we all want it all, right?), but asking the team to consider “What are we REALLY doing with our consumers?” can help to guide the right choice of metrics for social, and ensure that the team aligns behind a cogent, clear goal.

Photo: D Sharon Pruitt

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When beginning the planning process for a social media presence for Brands, one truism always trotted out is the “Top-Down, Bottom-Up” paradigm.  From the beginning of our partnership with our friends at Facebook, we have heard the phrase repeated and repeated - but where was the data?

At last - recent figures from DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research support the conclusion, and we have solid data to reference when we make proclamations like “You have to do more then just build it - they won’t come without an invitation!

On the off-chance you haven’t heard the whole Top-Down, Bottom-Up thing, I’ll summarize the basics for you.  The top-down element is explained nicely by the first bar in the chart above - showing that  75% of fans’ activity is spurred by ads from the Brand.  We call this fuel for the fire, and without it, brands are challenged to grow their fan bases on the platform.  The bottom-up element is represented by the second bar, which shows the ‘viral’ impact that brands benefit from when users interact with the brand’s page.  Their actions generate posts (”Jamie liked Cheez-It’s video”, Susan wrote on Special K’s wall), which show up in the news feeds of their friends - valuable earned media (called Friend’s Invitation above) that can drive new fans.

The secret sauce is therefore a combination of paid and earned media, where increasing your relevant presence on the platform goes most of the way towards fan acquisition goals, and ensuring that you have an active and engaged community gets you the rest of the way there.

Read more over at: eMarketer

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A recent study by core metrics shows that German marketing decision makers are more into cost/benefit analysis of their online spend than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. Culturally speaking, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. We are talking about Germans, after all.

However, what is interesting is that the study says that the reason for this is to get a sense of transparency in the time of a looming crisis, and that it is hard for Online Managers to really measure the success of online tactics across multiple channels, and how different channels influence each other.

In other words, no one really knows if online media is actually really working if you take a look at campaigns as a whole.

This is a problem we have we’ve noticed as well. After years of promising real-time ROI numbers in online media, it turns out that it’s not what it was cracked up to be. In fact, it might be wastful use of marketing budgets.

There are the following difficulties we see, plus recommendations to avoid them:

a) to start with, most online campaigns are set up badly for ROI measurement to begin with, even when it comes to just measuring online online media activity. Clients still think: hey, it’s digital, so it’s faster. It’s not. Sometimes it’s even a lot slower.

Set up your metrics and measurement strategy in the very beginning.Not only does it help in having results you can tie back to objectives, it also helps in identifying objectives for the communication strategy of how to build the digital (non-media) experiences that follow after the Click-Through.

b) secondly, yes you can measure more stuff online, but most brands don’t use or understand what you can measure and how these data influence each other. Because of this people don’t look at more than reach and click-through or time spent. There is little to no integration even between the different types of digital metrics in campaigns. Mostly, clients get numbers back on CTR and such from the media agency, but no one considers the effect on the user interaction afterwards, even though tools are readily available to integrate media traffic data with site usage information.

In the end, what you measure online shouldn’t just be the traditional reach and GRP numbers, or time spent. This an interactive medium, so your ROI needs to have data points from which you can infer the effectiveness of the digital experience, not just the ad message, you give people.

c) Online media plans suck 70% of the time. We’ve seen some outrageously boiler plate media plans, obviously made by media people, who, even if they work in an online media, don’t really know what they are doing online. We’ve even seen the SAME exact media plan for 2 totally different campaigns for 2 different brands with 2 totally different target audiences. This sounds harsh, but it’s really frustrating. If the media plan isn’t right, you waste money and the chance to activate the right people with your digital creative platform.

Make sure you get either a pure play digital media agency, or have your creative agency (the people who actually create the digital platform strategy and digital experience behind the banner), have a sanity check run over it, or both. There are exceptions where traditional media agencies also know their stuff, but it varies from country to country.

d) Another phenomenon is the tendency to forget your CRM program. Oftentimes, CRM Programs run alongside campaigns with little integration, or an after-thought. This is a shame not just because you could have optimized the overall campaign based on database insights and created awareness through DM or e-mail, but also because you missed the chance to generate more names.

Call up your database guys: sometimes they can even throw a piece of budget at you because they haven’t thought about how to use the names yet or if they have, they didn’t have money for a bigger campaign. And alas, suddenly, you have more data points from direct response elements.
d) And finally, to address the cross-channel measurement issue: the biggest reason for not being able to achieve comparability is the different types interaction (or lack thereof in traditional channels) people can have in different channels  (i.e. banner vs microsite vs widget vs print ad) and the target’s context (ie Bustop vs. sitting at home in front of the PC). The numbers are channel specific because the medium is a different one, and also their meaning is different from the user experience point of view. Communication objectives of a print ad campaign don’t sync up with numbers you get from how much traffic you got on a website because maybe you didnt need to measure the reason to believe of your message but the reason to interact on your flash app.

When intending to achieve comparability between channels to measure effectiveness you should start with a measurement plan that includes all channel measurement opportunities (meaning every data point you can get in all channels) first, starting with the most complex channels first. Then you define Channel specific measurement that achieve communication or interaction objectives in THAT channel. Then you define commonalities between channels (e.g. a bus stop ad could have a measurement commonality with an iPhone application, simply because the person’s context is the same) which should inform and validate your measurement strategy overall and in the end you KPIs overall. There will always be a grey area of interpretation necessary, but if you have measurement integrity on the channel commonalities, you can make a lot more sense out of the data for your overarching KPIs than when you take boiler plate KPIs first and then try to find them in each channel. They just don’t map.

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O’Reilly Radar recently published an update of Facebook demographics - the number of users by country and region, along with growth rates for some regions and countries. Over the last month, the fastest growing regions were in Latin America:

Looking closely at the top 30 countries, a few European countries have grown more than ten percent over the last four weeks (France, Spain, Germany, Italy), with France having the most number of users (approx. 2.5 million). Skyrock remains the largest social network in France. Norway saw a decline but is still home to more than a million Facebook users. O’Reilly will continue to track how Facebook is doing vis-à-vis other leading regional social web sites and whether their disputes with other companies affect their growth rates.

As far as recent trends in the Facebook app platform O’Reilly has detailed reports on the subject. The number of published apps continues to grow steadily (to over 32K) but total usage remains flat. Besides the fact that the top 10% of apps account for 98% of total usage, aspiring Facebook app developers should know that only about 6% of apps average at least 500 active users per day.

Finally, as noted in a previous post on their site, the most popular applications on the Myspace platform continue to account for slightly less users than their Facebook counterparts.

Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/07/facebook-growth-by-country-and.html

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