Measurement and Analysis

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

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?

Can Omniture and Google Analytics coexist on the same site?

Invariably the question always comes up about whether or not one can have two sets of tags for web analytics in use on sites. More specifically this issue came up recently when we were looking at using Google Analytics as a validator for Jenny Craig and on some microsites, so I decided to ask the expert.

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.

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.