PR Communications

Measuring Brand Experiences In Social Media

What if a company was able to segment how their market perceives their product by each brand experience? Wouldn't such an ability to segment enable a company to guide product development by keeping tabs on the pulse of the marketplace, and how a company is measuring up to the competition in the market place?

To illustrate, let's use the example of a webinar software company, where the company might have three brand experiences its identified the company wants to succeed within the marketplace, those brand experiences would be a) easy to use, and b) how the company explains how to present a good webinar, and lastly c) how the webinar company integrates web 2.0 technologies into the product like twitter (twebinars).

Using social media monitoring technology the webinar software company would be able to determine the volume of conversations around each brand experience.

In addition the volume of conversation around each webinar software brand experience could be tied to a vendor/competitor in the marketplace.

However, the volume of conversation around a brand experience or competitor may not be an indicator of success. One or two competitors who have a significant volume of conversation, but those conversations might have a lot of negative sentiment. Therefore its important also to segment competitor brand experience conversations using social media monitoring tools, and at the same time measure the sentiment of each brand experience by competitor. Here, we'd show a bar chart for each brand experience, sentiment rating (positive/negative/negative-positive) by each competitor in the marketplace.

Looking at the volume of conversations, the sentiment about brand experience and as they relate to a competitor will enable the webinar software company to determine what are the most important brand experiences for customers within the market, and how each competitor measures up by conversation market share and sentiment rating. Using this information the webinar software company might then model its product development strategies on the volume of conversations around brand experiences and the competitive landscape. We'd track the progress of the conversations around each brand experience by competitor. As the webinar software vendor runs campaigns the company would be able to track how each campaign influences the marketplace.

Using social media monitoring software in this way, a company can conduct initial and ongoing market and competitive intelligence, one, to manage strategy, and two, to track progress.

I'd be curious if the volume of conversation and sentiment matches the market share of competitors, or their relative growth rates. It would be great if the industry could conduct a study both on these factors, plus in measuring how a competitor compares in the market place with the recommendations of analyst firms.

If your company has a case study, with publicly available data to show on the marketplace, let me know I'd like to write up the story.

Autos, Social Media & Pitchmen: An Interview With Peter Drakulich

Peter Drakulich has 17 years in the automobile dealership industry, today he runs a company that optimizes sales for companies, Driving Up Sales. We were chatting recently and talked about the lead generation approaches using social media and trade shows:

What's Your Next Marketing Role, John?

I’ve been asked by quite a few people what I am looking for in my next role. Given my experience in marketing, 20 years, it all started with IBM in Hampshire, United Kingdom in 1988, and involvement in the online marketing industry, BioData in 1995 in San Mateo, I’ve worked at both brands and agencies. Though my focus since starting this blog has often been social media, really what I am looking for is a job with a company that really understands what marketing and brand is all about. Here’s an overview of the types of roles where I think I’d be able to add a lot to the company:

1) Working for an agency providing social media strategy and campaign implementation services. I've worked for a number of agencies since 2005 providing this sort of service.
2) Working for a brand managing a budget for social media marketing, including customer service, marketing and product marketing.
3) A director of marketing for a brand, managing a budget and team of marketers or interns.

Experience includes running four corporate blogs, affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC ($750k in 2005 for 48hourprint.com), email marketing, market research, blogging, social media, trade shows, website development.

Particularly good in b2b, but also have national experience and perspective on running large scale public company social media engagement.

Boston Director Of Marketing Role

Last week I was laid off from ideaLaunch, one of the company's large accounts was in chapter 11 and did not renew a big contract. The company will downsize, and move offices, but still continues to do good work for clients in content marketing, and with the LifeTips.com website.

I really enjoyed working at ideaLaunch and all the work my team and I did for the company. Thanks so much to Brindey W, Brian S, Max G, RJ and John S for all the work they did for me in marketing and ideaLaunch working as interns.

I’m looking for a Director of Marketing role again. If you have recommendations or want to share job hunting tips contact me at jcass @ nwlink DOT com.

Boston Venture Capital Chart

Is Boston in danger of losing its position as the second technology venture center in the United States?

According to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree website investments by region in the first quarter of 2009 indicates that not only is Boston losing ground, but that the NY Metro area is growing its percentage of the national venture capital pie.

 However, one quarter's numbers do not tell the whole story. After contacting PriceWaterhouseCooper via their Twitter account I downloaded the Regional Aggregate venture capital Data from 1995 to the first quarter of 2009. Using that data I developed the following chart.

 I don't think New England is losing its position as the 2nd venture center in the country, though the region has declined in recent years. What's more interesting is the growth of Silicon Valley to 38.45% in 2008.

How High Should You Set The Bar For Customer Service With Social Media Engagement?

If your internet access was down or your cell phone did not work, would you expect to be able to contact the cable company or the phone company through a land line? Probably yes.

Would you be frustrated if all you got was an engaged signal, or say you left a message and did not hear back for several hours? Would you be frustrated in that instance, again, probably yes?

For most consumers, when working with large brands, there's a certain expectation that if you contact a company during the day, customer service will be available. If not, you'll probably start thinking about looking somewhere else to get that cable or phone service.

Is that expectation about the level of customer service response too high, on the part of consumers?

Steve Furman, a colleague in social media, and a community supporter and customer when I was at Forrester Research thinks this expectation is too high, in a blog post he wrote called, "Note to consumers, operators are standing by."

In the post, Steve writes "I’m concerned that the speed of social will cause consumers to think traditional communication channels are obsolete and have been disconnected from the grid. Big brands have spent millions of dollars staffing call centers and maintaining web sites to provide customer service. They won’t be chucking those investments any time soon. Folks… folks… Let’s get real. A single consumer will always be more agile than a large organization on almost everything. Companies have not promised, nor can they right now, monitor hundreds of millions of conversations and respond as part of their service contract."

I have to disagree with Steve on this one. I don’t disagree that companies have to promise they will monitor social media and respond quickly. Many companies are not as adept at social media response as pioneers like Comcast or Dell.

Where I disagree with Steve is that consumers have the right to expect companies will respond in this way. Once the bar for customer service has been set higher, I think consumers will come to expect higher standards, that bar has been set higher.

While a consumer might not be able to find their expected level of customer service from most companies, isn't a consumer want, like this, what the market and marketing is all about? Listening to customer needs and wants.

If customers want a quick response, but a company will have to charge more, isn't it up to companies to set expectations? A company can set the expectation that if a consumer wants a faster social media response it will cost more, or if the company does not provide that higher level of response, a company can set expectations about what they will do and what they will not do.

I’d also question whether big brands need to throw away their investments in traditional infrastructure. If you look at some of the best case studies around, existing departments reorganized them selves to adapt to the new social media communications tools. Instead of responding to a call by telephone, Dell customer service people reached out to customers on blogs and twitter. With Comcast, Frank Eliason’s described to me, in a SNCR case study, how he finds customer complaints online and then responds to people via the telephone.

I don’t know if Dell & Comcast have run the numbers, but has customer service through social media actually helped to reduce customer service costs, partly because you nip issues in early before they develop too fast.

I know from Steve Wilder at Intuit, the big reason they have established a big social media presence using forums is because the forums are helping to reduce their support costs by having customer evangelists help answer customer service issues.

Now I don’t expect a customer evangelists’ in a forum community to monitor and respond to a customer blogger’s issues with a company, but I do think that having a community of customers who have received support in social media, makes it more likely that a friend or reader of an irate customer’s blog will drop them a note about how to solve their problem. Again, Comcast documents this happening in Twitter.

Marketing Resource Management Book Review

During my Presidency of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association in 2005-6 we developed some great events. Most of the events were related to promotional activities, some brand building and others, about client case studies. One topic we never touched on was how marketing people organize their work.

A book I’ve just finished reading “Marketing Resource Management” by Romek Jansen & Frans Riemersma addresses the issue of how marketing departments are behind the curve when it comes to creating and publishing marketing content. The reason, there’s no standardization of content templates; every new piece is a unique rather than new content that fits into an existing template, which can be reused by fitting new content into the content template. Because of the efficiencies in marketing departments content is produced that sales people don’t use because the content is past due on arrival.

The big idea I came away with from the book is that if you develop any content it should fit into an existing template. 

Many Chief Marketing Officers at large companies have only been in their jobs for less than 12 months, while the tenure of most Chief Marketing Officers is only 35 months. Companies focus on the short term and don’t enable CMOs the longevity to build the sort of marketing resource management system to enable them to produce efficiencies. Using statistics to illustrate their point, Jansen & Riemersma describe how most large marketing departments have marketing resource management problems partly because of the problems with marketing leadership longevity and strategy.

I remember that when I worked at Portent Interactive, Amazon.com went completely gaga over a simple content assets management system Ian Lurie threw together for them in 2000. The content assets system allowed their marketing department and Amazon.com’s agencies to manage all of their content assets.

Jansen & Riemersma provided a roadmap for Marketing Resource Management:

1.    Publish an easily accessible online brand manual (Knowledge.)
2.    Migrate content to a central content repository (Content.)
3.    Prepare a subset of publications for automated publishing (Publishing.)
4.    Implement a central ordering platform for all channel partners (Ordering.)
5.    Implement a central campaign calendar and add workflow elements (Planning.)
6.    Add financial information to the planning tool (Budget.)
7.    Top it off with a balanced scorecard creating transparency for all the above (Reporting.)

While I think the big idea in the Marketing Resource Management book is important for any marketer to consider, I don’t give the book high marks for readability. The real meat of the book came at the end, I think you could flip to the last few chapters read those and get the most value from the book.

Trade Show Card Tricks

I attended the executive committee meeting for the AMA Boston this morning. The American Marketing Association’s executive committee meetings are typically held on Saturday mornings at a cafe or board member’s house. At each meeting we pick a topic to discuss, and team members pitch in to work together.

Today’s project was the New England Business Xpo, a big event AMA Boston is supporting to be held on May 19th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Over 10,000 people are expected to attend this free event on the theme of growing New England business.

The Boston chapter is supporting the event in a big way – a booth, eight seminars in two meeting rooms, three workshops and an evening social networking event.

Today’s meeting was very much in the weeds of event management…Decisions about ordering banners, the booth, sponsorship and volunteers. We talked about the details of the design for the booth including; plasma screens, computer stations and logo positions.

The discussion about the management of the Xpo is exactly why I joined the chapter; whether its booth management, social media, or CRM, as a member you get to see volunteers work on projects, learn from them and pick up professional skills and experience you might not have the opportunity to do so at your job.

Bob Hackenson, Director of Membership for the chapter, runs a company that specializes in rocketing client’s event management techniques at a trade show. He gave us a demonstration of how to attract people to a booth.

Bob made the point you how you approach prospects at a trade show is very important, you also have to invite them into your booth space as that will increase the chances of the prospect staying to learn more about your company.

Bob then surprised the group by conducting a card trick with Cecil and Myles. Bob pretended to invite Myles into a booth and gave Myles one of his business cards; he then invited Cecil into the booth and asked him to pick a card from a deck of playing cards. He picked a card, and Bob asked Myles to turn over his business card, the name of the playing card was written on the business card and suggested that the trick would be an opening to introduce the company’s booth.

I agree with Bob, waiting for trade show attendees to approach you is a recipe for disaster when it comes to booth tactics, be proactive, introduce yourself to passersby, and ask people if you can introduce your company.

Attendees go to a show to find vendors, get ideas and be entertained. Most people will smile and listen if you introduce yourself as they walk down the aisle. If you give a short pitch about what your company does and start asking questions, if the person is looking for your services they will most likely be okay with passing along a card or having their badge scanned.

Getting Up To Speed At My New Marketing Job At ideaLaunch In Boston

In for 8:30am, checked out my new office at ideaLaunch. The ideaLaunch offices are right on the border between the Rose Kennedy Parkway and the North End in Boston.

Met Aaron Robinson for the first time, ideaLaunch's Director of Technology, he has developed all the web applications at the company. Later was given a warm welcome and introduction to the rest of the company by Byron White, President of ideaLaunch.

Met with Byron White to get a deeper understanding of the company's tip and advice center content development process. I will be developing several tip and advice centers for ideaLaunch's core services, content marketing services. Byron and I thought it would be a great time for me to use the process so that I get up to speed in how ideaLaunch develops content for clients for our content marketing services and specifically for tip and advice centers. So I will take the role of the writer and Byron the role of the customer.

Next we spent some time going in depth on the products ideaLaunch provides to clients, and the rest of the afternoon was spent preparing for the trip down to New York for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Easy trip down talking about marketing strategy and the growing importance of social media in company's marketing plans.

Dinner at Rue57 with the team, I had the salmon it was good.

Marketing The Daily Boston Public Market

I read online yesterday at the Boston Globe that a daily public market is going to be developed here in Boston. That's a great idea, and I think will bring further vitality back to the Downtown Boston area. Already a jewel of a city, Boston with its historical buildings, open spaces and active sporting culture could do with a vibrant marketplace.

Six years ago I moved to Boston from Seattle. Famous for the Pike's Place market, Seattle retained its daily public market right in the heart of the city. Pike's place was always one of my favorite spots to visit in the city of Seattle, and the market was a big tourist attraction.

Seattle’s market was one reason I was surprised to see the public market in Boston relegated to the weekend, pushed down a side street and only consisting of street vendors. While I understand it is not possible to take over the old market halls, the idea of re-establishing a daily market makes a lot of sense to me, and the establishment of the greenway gives the city of Boston the opportunity to bring back a lost daily institution.

I did not grow up with a market in my village in the UK, Bramhall, a village of 60,000 people is a suburb of Stockport, and the far larger metropolitan area of Greater Manchester. The nearest market was in the Stockport, where the public market has medieval beginnings.

My college town had one of the largest covered markets in Europe. The market at Leicester is spectacular, over 700 hundred years old, many, many food vendors, a covered outdoor area, and covered indoor market space. I used to buy food every day from Leicester market when I travelled home at night. The market also helped to develop my love for Leicester cheese, as the indoor market has half a dozen cheese vendors.

Another market I enjoyed when I lived in Seattle was on Granville Island in Vancouver, British Columbia, that market has a lot of deli's, small bakeries and cheese shops. The French bakeries are amazing.

Two factors stand out for me in building a successful daily market:

Variety - Lots of food vendors, but a mixture of household goods and unique shops. Granville & Pike's place score highly in my book for variety, and Leicester managed to combine food vendors with cloth and china stalls.
Character - Color and sound are what I recall of Leicester's market; vendor's shout out the price of produce. Pike Place in Seattle features flying fish. If Boston can research what makes a successful market, and gives tips to the new producers. For instance, ask the vendors to call out the prices of their wares, I used to visit the market in Leicester just for the sounds of the calls I think Boston will go a long way to building a successful daily market.

I was also thinking that as this new Boston market is founded in the 21st century, perhaps the market should use some social media tools to promote the market, from feedback from the public on the market, to encouraging people to connect via social media when the market is established, I am sure there are many ways the market will use some new social media tools to become successful.

What about you, do you have a favorite daily, or farmer’s market, and what got you coming back for more business?