Behind the jump are my notes from sessions today. I inputted some of my thoughts when I wanted reaction, also have them in my moleskine. The last session was a bit difficult to follow along with, as there was a lot of information in a short amount of time. I can only type so fast. 
Slides are available at www.marketingprofs.com/events/11/handouts.
Session 1: Measuring Marketing Success against Business Goals
Marketing programs costing millions, C-Suite questioning –
Spend X amount in sales, what are we getting for it?
Marketing claims the program is effective, with no facts.
Decision making has transformed.
Decision make 78% intuitive, 20% fact – has switched now to minimally intuitive
Intuitive decision making is too risky, C-Suite needs numbers to back it up. We still need gut feeling, but to turn on a dime, we need facts to support decision making.
Through predictive analytics (example: speedometer on a car – you know exactly what it will tell you) It will tell you right speed, or too fast/too slow. Predicts if you go too fast, you will get a ticket.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. (LAF: You have to maintain client expectations with this – some benchmarks are not measurable.)
Measure what you and your company require/expect.
Three questions execs ask marketing:
How much revenue and profits are coming from marketing efforts?
How can we optimize results?
How can you prove your positive financial impact to the organization?
REMOVE SPEND FROM YOUR VOCABULARY
Companies would prefer to hear it as an investment v. spend (LAF note: Time is an investment. You don’t spend time with people that waste it or have no mutual respect for you. Compare this to the brands that you work with and represent.)
A marketing program that impacts the bottom line and can prove it is effective. (Uhm, duh.)
What position is running companies? CFO’s are running companies. (LAF Note: All departments need to be aware of this and work together. A true integrated approach has each department utilized in different steps of the overall process, coming to one solid conclusion. Same with social media – it’s not just PR/marketing. Utilize everyone, depending on the step.)
What is ROI? We have to have a good answer for this. You have to be able to prove it.
SAtisfactor return on investment – CFO will keep investing. If not, he will cut it off. Marketing budgets are cut because leaders do not have an appreciation for ROI. (LAF Note: Or the marketer didn’t know how to measure consistently and properly.)
How do you measure success?
Audience:
*Talked about setting goals up front. (I disagree – set up your tactics/objectives, and how you’ll benchmark to reach set goals. Those should lead to it. A “forecast” means zilch because it will probably change.)
Marketing against biz goals
Marketing: 3 key goals, research/analysis, increase awareness of products/services/support and align to sales strategy
Has completely shifted to Quality suspects, quality leads, revenue
Sales: Trying: Selling more sooner for less (Marketers help with this)
Most companies have an on-demand marketing dashboard
Should have biz goals
How what you’re doing is matching up to it
What are the key metrics I need on my dashboard? (LAF Note: Depends on what you need to measure. Clients vary, dependent on industry, type of consumer and what product/service they have.)
Loyalty indexing: Satisfaction surveys unless properly done are useless. 85% will say they are satisfied before taking it. Emotional response (LAF Note: As marketers, have to work with client/brand to determine what type of questions should be asked, what is important, target demographics)
60-80 percent of accounts who defected declared themselves satisfied or extremely satisfied on their last survey.
Dependencies move the growth
New product penetration 25 percent
Penetration 43 percent
Share of Wallet 31 percent
Review/Re-purchase 14 percent
Metrics will be gone in 3-4 years – not valuable enough.
Sales and Marketing Effectiveness – Internal Loyalty Metrics
Less money, less people
Give retail sales force a voice
Use a real-time tool (not anonymous)
Roll up the feedback for analysis
Needed to close the gap – figure out what was working, what wasn’t
Program v. Execution
Knowledge based approach to producer marketing
Economy is going a certain way – should focus on what people think, their opinions, how each dept is being effected
Session 2: Proven Success Stories with Social Media in Overall Strategy
NOTES:
Ron Casalottie, Social Media/PR Bloomberg L.P.
3 main goals for BW “Professional media v. social media – were targeting professionals”
- Increase user engagement on our sites
- Participate in the conversations that are important to our users (and targeted users) outside of our domain.
- Extend the useful life of our business oriented content beyond the typical magazine or online news-site lifecycle.
Went into public alpha – tested in house, and invited people to look at it. Are you filtering out any e-mail addresses from Forbes.com?
*Be transparent to be successful in social media (?)
Facebook is about you and the groups you belong to (False.)
We want to be a place where you can go to and see BusinessWeek articles, but whatever is on the Internet about the topic. Can see what cursory subjects are being pulled, can see articles that BW members finds interesting. More comments, more re-posting, the higher up they went.
*Over 40K key influencers contributing over 1MM article links added.
7.2 Twitter followers in 18 months grown organically w/o use of inflationary user-purchase programs (My question: HOW did you do this, WHY did you do this?)
Over 60 current and former business-side and editorial associates
We use people at BusinessWeek as a bed of story ideas
As people became more engaged, started to develop more levels of brand loyalists (why have diff levels? Create ambassadors based off the loyalist foundation)
Lesson learned and top tip: Ignore the numbers. The key is in engaging.
Busy execs go to topics and see what are popular articles.
Deidre w/ National Instruments (Community and Social Media Manager)
Spend time w/ the socks and sandals wearing crew
Global community of 140,000 engineers worldwide
Responsible for strategy, YouTube, Twitter
For us:
Wanted to build community because of the nature of the business
Goals:
Ensure Customer Success
Obtain Valuable Product Feedback
Drive New & Repeat Business
Increase Awareness and Loyalty, Reputation Management
Foster Community Growth and Engagement
Community and social media is truly integrated throughout the business.
Span traditional things such as support, sales and marketing
Have tech and tools to incorporate SM throughout entire company
Driving customer support
50 percent of all questions asked on support forum are answered by other members of community
Four Key Areas of strategy:
To make it easy to share technical content (Built a code exchange)
Focusing on technical collaboration
Rewards and reputation
On-and Off-Domain technologies
Points of ROI
50% of community questions answered by members
Shared more than 2,700 code files
Engineers at 250 companies have submitted 6,000 instrument drivers
Product Feedback
12 new LabVIEW features were developed based on user ideas since August
Industry experts provided feedback prior to LabVIEW Robotics Launch
Track #of brand mentions
Manually provide how many conversations support objectives
Were we increasing awareness of new and existing products?
Are people clicking on it?
Many companies want to track small changes – what makes things easier?
Top tip:
Easy to get overwhelmed with platforms – having a strong framework like the P.O.S.T. method (people, Objectives, Strategy, Tech outlines in Groundswell to develop your plan.”
Mike Travis, President, Equation Research
Go rent a list, leverage and survey prospects (30 percent opener v. 10)
Smaller version – first hooray into SM
Mistake: Think it’s another channel to mass-communicate to your audience. (Don’t have the credibility or audience to do so.)
Goals:
Increase brand presence in the B2B space.
Position our business as a truly different kind of market research company with a unique approach
Grow a permission based network of sales prospects
Funnel to get into social media – didn’t create our own channel, but found communities that were entrenched in SM
Mid-level w/o high level SM strategies are well ept to do this.
ROI perspective:
200% increase in website traffic
Prospect database: Five-fold increase in amount of leads generated over all other marketing programs to date, with 400 new prospects that opted in to be contacted by Equation in the future.
Kirsten Watson, Kinaxis
Knew about B2C with social media, and B2B is more skeptical.
Teamed up with Forester, learned about their online communities
Didn’t want them to come back and say build a community – but it was one of their core recommendations.
Goals
Building critical mass at some level – don’t become an overbearing type of community
Where are the fish? Where are they already? Knew where the supply chain thought leaders were, started there.
Double Web traffic
Double conversions (leads)
Foster a greater awareness of the company’s supply-chain management solutions
Took an approach from syndication of blog
Have a humor section because of how chaotic it is
At a high level, marketing employed a 3-pronged strategy:
Find out where the audience hangs out
et involved in key online locations
Drive interests from there to the Kinaxis Web properties by adding value (not selling) through the creation of a highly engaging, content-rich “home” for supply chain experts to LEARN, LAUGH, SHARE and CONNECT.
Traffic:
2.7X increase in traffic to Kinaxis.com
3.2X increase in conversions (leads)
5.3X increase in traffic to blog/community
Community:
6X increase in registered community members
Today: Over 2,300 registered members (35 percent increase since Jan. 2010)
Keynote Session: (computer died, will input moleskine notes at some point)
We build Fort Business – trying to keep people out from learning information
Engagement is taking decisions out of business practice – consumers are dictating what people think of products.
Conversations take place over networks
Markets are conversations
Businesses are conversations
Markets and businesses are networks
Customer, employees and partners are on social media channels. Everyone is on it, they are all mixed up.
Things are being done in public – mix it up.
Properties of the ‘Net:
Become properties of your supply chain, customers, employees – media, we take it on
Trillion pages on the internet – Large amounts of knowledge, large amount of links (pile of digital paper)
Large community on a network, inevitably, those that are really smart will contain some people who are experts at what you do.
People are linked, they are engaged.
New ideas emerge – Networks are always different
Network example: Parents with sick kids.
12 hours later, its different – kids get better, new kids are sick.
Conversation is always changing; can’t step into the same network twice.
Trad marketing: divided world into chunks in consumer-based, lumped people together who didn’t know each other
Traditional markets are stable, and we can control them. Networks are different – literally composed of differences, when you link to something, you link to something besides your own page.
Transparency – more or less building the nature of the network
- Transparent Sources
- Sarah Palin – no one knew about her, and major news sources hadn’t been tracking. Best source was actually Wikipedia (Encyclopedias aren’t supposed to be the best source for breaking news.)
Transparent humanity
Transparent interests
Three things that need to be transparent: Sources, Self, Interests (Trust your facts, trust you, trust what you’re up to)
Pretending to only being in it for corporate responsibility but really wanting a profit? Not transparent
Information medium = communications medium = social medium
Interests level rank – makes your role less important, less visible – people want to know about you. Sometimes they want to know that you’re an expert (healthcare) but typically, people hide their rank on social media. (This makes SM a level playing ground.)
People go on the net because they care about something – it goes from aligned to at odds.
Session 3: This Isn’t Your Mother’s PR
Public Relations is not solely media relations – what it is: Marketing is very similar to PR. Make sure your company continues to make money
Seven Areas of PR:
Media Relations
Advertising – Taking an ad out to get your message out; when someone gets a story wrong, there is a way to do so (Social Media has taken over this role)
Publicity
Public Affairs (Govt) & Public Affairs (Community)
Issues Management/Crisis Communications
Lobbying – Depends on your company
Investor Relations – SEC and FCC do not prohibit you from talking; only certain topics
So what?
PR Touches everything (Marketing, Sales, customer Service)
This doesn’t work – you can’t shout at everyone. The louder you yell, the more defensive you sound. Your “Publics” Have Something To Say
Publics want to be heard – PR hasn’t listened, now they want to be heard
Why integrate?
People interact with the brand, the story about the brand (they stop, they read, they take the time.
Fox News: Up Next, Brian Solis (Would have never done it 5 years ago, but she stops and pays attention)
Tactical/Strategic perspective:
Best Techniques and Tools – when you take your PR and make it social
Hybrid – Taking the best of the past, and blending it to make it social. Media Relations is not going away, newsletters, etc. are not going away. Less news conferences, but a lot of great things in PR 1.0 are moving into 2.0.
Define your reach – many companies don’t have the resources, so use free tools if needed.
Commenting on different blogs – financial and can see through backtype
Measurement – Weekly, plot benchmarks, how many times certain keywords were used, checking out influencers, robust dashboards (addictomatic.com)
Wherever the client is, you get a client feed that is very healthy and robust.
- External is something such as a jobs widget- people put a widget on FB and can receive jobs alert
Session 4: Marrying-up Your Measurement Results to Make Better Marketing Investment Decisions
Quantitative v. Qualitative assessment
James
B2B spend was down 1 percent 2009 from 2008, after growing 11 percent
- Contacts cut back on spending – with 6 percent less annual spend per contact
- In 2009, there were more buyers who were active, and bought more frequently but spent less per order.
From two years of market trends by month – shift of dollars, month by month percentages Q2-Q3 lagged behind 2008 compared to 2009
Channel trends: The proportion of transactions made over the web has increased 16% from 2007 to 2009 (59% to 69%)
Mrs. Fields case study:
B2B division with over 8 MM in annual catalog circulation
B2B division asked to cut circulation in tough economic times
The Corporate Gifts division needed a data analytics solution to prove that existing circulation volume was beneficial
Greater clarity and insight is the metric focused.
Lifetime value v. near term (focused on near term, could better allocate their marketing spend on a customer-by-customer basis)
Segments included
Prospecting Circulation Source
Initial Spend with Mrs. Fields
Purchase Channel
Prior Spend w/ Competitors
Results
15 percent improvement in $/bk
Takeaway:
Forester did research on their consumers, found that they were indeed social (want to interact with consumers more)
Have to figure out what channels work (depending on country)
Information syndication
Determine high level objectives by being a detective.
Where are the conversations happening?
What are they talking about?
What form/s of media are being consumed?
LISTEN BEFORE ENGAGING
Put yourself in the fabric of the community,rather than be in the corner.
Tools:
Not every tool will find everything
Become comfortable with knowing that some conversations will still go unnoticed
Timeline and frequency. Where are conversations happening, what are they doing?
What you put in is what you get out – put in an hour, you’ll get that type of effort (My note: What about the domino effect? Utilize your community to start different conversations. )
RSS
Google Alerts
FeedMyInbox
Social Mention
Omgili
advanced Twitter search
Backtweets
YouTube
Facebook (limit)
LinkedIn (limit)
Industry specific type sites and blogs
Board tracker
using ‘Similar’ in Google Search results
blog searching (Google blog search and Technorati)
delicious
Flickr
SlideShare
e-pinions, GetSatisfaction, Yelp
Created to track some of the mentions that people follow
Impractical to track all mentions
Focus only on Location (platform)
How to quantify something that is qualitative: (Use these values)
Tone
Onpoint
Reach
Unique
Lessons Learned in Listening exercise:
Learned something new about product
FOCUS ON THE WHY, not the “We do it because it’s social media”
Hester Tinti-Kane, Director of Online Marketing, Pearson Learning Solutions
Success Stories/The Music
Student Survey
Student Advisory Board Video
Why? They wanted a student to student message. They utilized peer to peer video, got student perspectives on customized textbooks, paid attention to key message from key influencers
Their student success story is the #1 video they have on YouTube. Posted 12/31/2009, 1230+ views and counting
Look at embedded player v. YouTube watchpage for analytics purposes
Looks at authenticity and the value of questions
Summary:
Every business has success stories
Create quality content to house in online venues
Use social media to serve up this content, play this music, engaging potential customers in persuasive content to drive sales.
RD Whitney:
“Push” marketing is unsustainable
The only 2 measurement that remain constant (and really count) B + S = BIS = $
What does the shift have to do with a pregnant woman?
Light the match, fan the flame:
Leverage “Wikinomics” and “mass collaboration”
