Insights for Marketing in a Digital World

Do you know the psychological profile that your trail of tweets tells about you? TweetPsych just may be able to tell you. Another new entrant into the ever expanding world of Twitter measurement tools,TweetPsych is uniquley different in that it seeks to provide a psychological profile of a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. I'm always looking for tools that can provide insight into people's mindset and provide data that helps to build a more accurate persona, TweetPsych is a facinating discovery.

I was recently blown away at seeing the sophisticated measurement and real-time optimization systems of a large multi-channel retailer and their ability to not only measure, but influence in real-time the metric of revenue per minute. It was almost like watching a highly active trader on the stock exchange make minute-by-minute decisions on buying or selling stock. Very cool stuff.

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?

A recent study has found a linkage between social media engagement and financial success and profitability. In the first study of its kind, Engagement DB has provided the marketing community with some compelling directional findings. While the study findings can not show true causality, it's very exciting to see the linkage between deep engagement within social channels and the financial performance of some of the world's leading brands. Some key findings include:

Recent consumer research regarding online video consumption behavior combined with production trends expanding beyond the 30-second spot are ushering in a new era on the web for online video. Where once it was thought that the Internet was not the venue for such content, apparently many of us are now choosing to watch longer-form online brand videos and short films. In this 12-minute piece the Schweppes brand only appears twice. The content is an engaging story. It would be great to hear from Schweppes how they measure the impact of this investment on their business.

Hopefully it's a no-brainer that closing deals and generating revenue from leads is directly tied to the quality of the leads you generate. What's the focus of your lead gen programs? And how are you cultivating a stream of sales-ready, high-quality, qualified leads?

Here's an interesting recent study by MarketingSherpa that points to the necessity of optimizing your digital media for organic search as well as ensuring that your PPC search ads are sending visitors to content that delivers on the expectations set by your ad copy.

The short answer is yes. The bigger question is how and what will it cost you.

It seems that every business today wants to discover, interact with and harness the connectedness and influence of brand ambassadors. Why? One great benefit is to stimulate authentic word of mouth through people that other people already trust and listen to, AND are outside the formal corporate brand marketing and messaging machine.

Numerous studies have been done which point to the reality of what information sources people trust and it has become clear that brand messages are way down the list while information from colleagues, peers and friends is squarely at the top.

Intel is one of a number of corporations to jump on this trend over the last year and proactively develop a network of brand ambassadors. They’ve reached out to bloggers with influence, who are articulate, opinionated and have a following of readers who listen…and likely act on the ideas these brand ambassadors put forth.

As with many programs of this type, Intel did invest some dollars in making this happen. They pulled the bloggers from the virtual world of the Internet into the real world of the Intel campus, got to know these people better and in-person, gave then an incentive of a free Mac book Air and sent them off to continue putting forth perspective on Intel products. Pretty simple, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of this program to see how the investment of time, energy and dollars pays off, I think it will.

You can read more about the “Intel Insider” brand ambassador program online here: http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/06/intel-insider.html. Great to see big brands that get it that organizing people with influence online often involves getting people together in the real world to further solidify connections.

Aaron Bean is the Director of Strategy at The New Group, a digital marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon. 503.248.4505

A recent article on the New York Times blog, An Icon That Says They’re Watching You,  brings up a fascinating issue in the area of behavioral analytics and consumer control. I guess the answer really depends on who you are and what the context of your desire to know is. I mean, I’d be fascinated to know what a given online advertiser knows about me that triggered them to serve me a particular advertisement or offer.

Harness the social capital within your organization & leverage your agency to deepen your insights.

Thinking of moving beyond listening to online conversation around your brand to a mode of engaging with influential bloggers and participants within social communities? There’s a lot of opportunity to join the conversation these days, but prepare yourself and your organization first before jumping in.

Blogs posts, conversations within social networks and threads of dialogue in message boards, all of this online content represents a potential gold mine to gain deeper insight regarding what people really think about our brands, products and services. As marketers we’re fortunate to have a number of analytical tools available to us today that allow for measurement of conversations occurring across these different social media channels.