There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
This is essentially a list of some ideas which have been sitting on my iPhone for a while. I’ve even gone as far as crafting 3 drafts which have been drafts for over 6 months. To that end, I would like to share these blog project concepts for YOU to use. Below are the ideas for you to blog on.
Can sales grow a market? - A concept of how sales activity can influence not only a single entities execution in the market, but actually GROW a market. This could be any functional group - marketing, customer support…
Marketing as Geography - What are the common themes and areas of expertise shared across discipline.
Business Travel Best Practices - Would be cool to have some very bTravel oriented lifehacks. I bet other people would dig this as well.
How do you explain social media to friends? - What is your elevator pitch when explaining social media. Can you get it narrowed down to 140 characters?
The 3 differences between product management and product marketing - plus or minus 2.
Share YOUR 3 Favorite blogs no one knows about - Who, Where and Why
The current state of X is unsustainable - Business practices, political activities, environmental actions…..
My favorite country to visit is XXX? Business travel or vacation destination, you don’t even have to have been there, just explain.
Share 3 wordpress template authors: Finding templates are a bear, who do you like? let folks know.
Is business blogging effective? How do you see this phenomenon? What are the key metrics to track? Is the ROI really the return on influence?
If you find one of these useful, consider linking back to spatially relevant as I would like to see what great ideas you share.
So there are 2 things I think are really horrible about hotels - room service fees (food quality too) and Internet fees. I’ve seen some really crazy fees for both, but internet fees are just illogical. I paid ₤22,00 once for a day and a couple of weeks ago, I paid for €88 for 5 days. I paid for five days because I could get 2 devices and share the connection.
So types of things I have seen in the marketplace:
Swisscom: multiple plans, but the most interesting was a time AND bandwidth limited account with overage fee (what?!?!), as i noted above I opted for the multi-day and multiple device plan
Four Seasons: I don’t remember the location but it was like $24.95 or almost the 50% of my monthly bandwidth fees from my cable provider.
t-Mobile: I like t-mobile’s hotspots, but I normally only use a connection for 2-3 hours, since its typically a airport stop. I have been lucky enough to stay at a hotel which had t-Mobile, but only like twice. In that case it was well worth the $9.99 fee for the day pass.
But the winner on weird configurations for the week was Wayport, a session until 3PM. The session is static and I only got like 1 hour in my session for like $9.99, apparently these folks cannot program the logic to manage dynamic sessions or maybe they are just greedy. The art of effectively pricing a captive audience.
Optimistic Prediction: Cell phone wireless cards will more or less obsolete paid wireless connections just like pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I used a pay phone and I long for the day I can’t remember typing in my credit card number for an abusive rate to rent a commodity pipe from a hotel. Although, the real irony is that low end hotels offer FREE wireless - why is that?
Have to give credit where credit is due. First I love slideshare.net, this is the coolest thing for me. Mainly because I don’t edit video, but also because I just like PowerPoint. The other piece which requires credit is the presentation by Rohit Bhargava on the 25 Styles of Blogs, I also found his blog and his book looks interesting.
I would have never thought to the level of granularity Rohit did, so kudo’s to him as it is insightful and inspiring.
I’m a big fan of the Top X list, but Chris’ wins. He came up with 100 things - yes 100! I had a hard time counting 100 $1 bills when I was a waiter, let alone think of a hundred things at any one sitting which wasn’t a random set of word combinations. Chris’ post is right on - there are too many things to post on. So he not only get’s on my blogroll after trolling his blog for months, but I will revisit his Top 100 list for at least another 99 times.
So what topic shall I leverage? #52. Telling My Boss About Social Media.
I had the opportunity to help bring the company I work for into the Web 2.0 fray and work the justification and value prop inside the business. I work for a technology company and we were SO Web -.5. Bad search, static content and no meaningful way to interact with our customers.
The good news is we had an new evangelist on the executive team to help pave the way and drive change. Smart people with cool ideas on the executive team is always upside. With a trailblazer already there and charging the way it went reasonably well - right up to the “So what’s the ROI?”. (dance… dance… dance…)
My answer was fairly smart ass-ed “this whole interweb thing could change our company and I mean like auto-magically!”. Nearly an exact quote, or not so near - I think there was a Sir or I understand or an equal “I hear you/I report to you” setup/suck up.
Not that I did the topic justice, but my general input/theme beyond my initial remark was “we CAN’T NOT do it - think dinosaur”. I love it when a double negative works, kinda like when Hannibal’s plans comes together!
Passion makes the english language more interesting and improves the outcome of most situations… back to the topic.
I further opined/proposed basically it’s a relevance factor, the ROI will develop overtime and on multiple dimensions, but patience is required. Social media I explained is how business gets done - it drives search, thought leadership and community. All of which are hard to drive metrics against. I explained the first metric we can track is traffic, but the real metric will be in the Win/Loss analysis which should show a growth in the increased blog references as a relevant factor for inclusion in a sales cycle.
To that end, where I rant, rave and typically require metrics - this is the one area where the metrics are not immediate and require active participation throughout the whole business to be effective. Social media is effectively table stakes in 2007, which until recently I was the only guy who was interested in anteing up, but wasn’t very effective previously on previous efforts.
So I’m in the midst of a cultural change in the company I’m in and I look forward to this Web 2.0 cultural revolution, but as will all revolutions it takes passion and action to be successful.
As a middle manager, this is the type of change you can help bring to your company as a leader/sponsor, contributor or supporter. Using social media can drive increased value for your shareholders and improved customer intimacy which will drive sustainable relationships for current and future customers.
Remember, the revolution will not be televised, but it will be searched on.
While a fairly straight forward question, the reality is more than you think. The other reality is it is more than I thought I would need to as well. So here is yesterday’s inventory of tasks:
C. Find out how to differentiate .5 hours (still struggling for differentiation)
2. Look at the analytics - 1.5 hours
A. Keywords - 30 mins, nothing staggering no matter how I slice the data from google
B. Inbound referrals - 15 mins - not that many since this is a infant blog, but have to look around.
C. Bounce Rate - 1 hour and 15 mins, I have a fairly good bounce rate ~58%, good for me, maybe not for the industry.
3. Read my own blog - 1 hours, I’m happy that it appears I have fairly consistent tagging and content, but give me time it will get tough to find stuff soon.
4. Look at technorati trends 2 hours - People post on the usual suspects, Britney Spears (Las Vegas goof), Noelia (scandal), iPhone and I don’t understand the google or YouTube listings. Odd. The iPhone piece I did on promotion, pricing and market seeding did ok from a traffic perspective.
5. Thinking - 2 hours. This mainly included pacing around the house thinking and trying to identify new content themes or post ideas. My OCD or ADD based approach to thought could easily consume 10 hours, but I force myself to get out of the recursive loop, as soon as I realize I’m in it.
So the net appears that about 8.5 hours is a minimum Saturday investment, although the elapsed time is ~10 hours. This is the classic business issue on margin and ROI - effort vs. duration. Since I have no revenue only effort, it’s a moot point, but if you are in doubt - USE EFFORT, since effort drives capacity.
My big question is: Will an analytics based approach work? I’m starting to think not, but I could be wrong and Tom Davenport could be right in respect to competing on analytics, just need to identify the right analytics to track. I think I just need more data to see if there are patterns which emerge.
The one pattern I have noticed is that old school bloggers are Typepad users in a hosted SaaS environment, does a hosted blog help readership? Curious, will do more work around this. So I’m out there trying to better understand this blog thing, so it could be of more interest to you - the apparently 30-60 regular readers and 10-20 random folk…
