Many thanks to Jeff Glasson and Perkett PR for recording and publishing the video, and to Jeff Pulver for hosting the event.
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It IS A Numbers Game – Thinking About What Numbers Actually Matter
Jeff Pulver asked me to speak at Social Media Jungle: Boston and gave this intriguing guideline:
At Social Media Jungle, our discussion leaders will be presenting their talk as if they were sharing a blog post. And the people in the room will be asked to provide immediate comments to the content being shared which in turn will start a conversation.
So here’s the blog post we’ll be sharing. What numbers do matter in social media? After all, if you intend to use social media for business, then numbers have to enter the conversation at some point – but what numbers? Is it numbers of friends, followers, connections? What about the stalwarts of marketing – leads, conversions, sales? What really matters?
To answer this question, think about your typical marketing funnel:
Audience – who’s eligible to use your product or service
Prospects – who in your audience is most likely to use your product or service
Leads – who in your prospects you’ve reached out to or made a connection with and has expressed interest in your product or service
Conversions – who in your leads has made the decision to get your product or service
Evangelists – who in your conversions to customers loves your product or service so much that they’re eager to talk about it
For any given product or service, you can attach definable numbers to each of the stages. But that’s not enough, not to grow a business by.
See, the trouble with numbers like this is that they answer the question of what. What happened? What isn’t enough, though, because you’re dealing with human beings, and that means in addition to what, you also have to be able to address why. Why did something happen? Why did the lead choose product one over product two? Why did the customer abandon you?
This is where communication matters most. A high bounce rate – the number of people who visit your web site – may mean people hate your site and just leave in disgust. It may also mean people found exactly what they wanted on your site thanks to great navigation and content, got what they needed, and moved on. Which is the truth? If you don’t ask why, if you don’t ask the customer why, you’ll never know – and that means you may be making business decisions based on faulty assumptions.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard a marketing executive say, “Well, I think our customer wants X” or “I think our customers are buying Y on our site because…” and be completely wrong because said marketing executive wasn’t the customer. If you don’t ask, you’ll never get to know why, and that in turn blinds you to the most important question of all…
… now what? You know what’s happening. You know why it happened. Now what? What do you do to steer yourself or your business in the direction you want it to go? This is where experience matters most and where scientific thought is imperative. Once you know what numbers aren’t meeting your expectations and why, you have to come up with a few scenarios to test and examine.
For example, in old school email marketing, we know for sure that the open rate of an email campaign is principally governed by the subject line. The subject line is the digital equivalent of the envelope, and if the envelope is unappealing, no one’s going to open it, even if the contents are valuable. So you test – you fire off a series of test messages with different subject lines and you assess which subject line had the best open rate. Do this over and over again, and you begin to get an instinctive understanding of what subjects work best for your audience.
So those are the three questions that you need to apply to any kind of numbers – what happened, why did it happen, and now what? Let this relatively simple – because simple doesn’t mean easy – framework guide you in judging which numbers should matter to you. Let’s look at a few numbers that might or might not matter.
ROI: ROI is a largely unhelpful number. It’s important, to be sure, because in this economy you absolutely want some idea of what you’re getting for your money. ROI is only a small piece of the puzzle, however, because knowing ROI doesn’t necessarily lend insight into the why or now what, and that’s what makes it unhelpful. Can you judge social media ROI? Sure. Just ask a customer how they found out about you. If the answer is never social media, then social media’s obviously not working for you. That said, ROI doesn’t especially guide you to understand why you’re not getting the financial results you want, nor does it especially lend insight as to what to do next.
Audience: Does the number of followers/friends/connections matter? No. Does the number of right followers/friends/connections matter? Absolutely. My favorite example of this is the Gulfstream salesman. If he has 100,000 followers on Twitter but none of them buy an airplane from him, then he’s not going to get the results he wants. If he has 3 friends on LinkedIn but two of them buy airplanes, then that’s all the social media he needs.
Views/Visitors/Visits: Again, another what number, but at least this one tells you if people are finding their way to the destination you want them to get to. If they’re not making it here, wherever here is, then it’s worth digging into why. It may be something as simple as a URL that no one can spell correctly or as complex as your brand’s association with something unpalatable.
Leads: A what and why number – what happened tells you how many people want your product or service, and communicating with them will lend you the insight you need as to why – what was it about your product or service that made them want to take action.
Customers: A what and why number – what happened tells you that people find your product or service valuable enough to make a tangible commitment to it, and asking why should lend you guidance in understanding what most compelled them to make that final jump.
Do you see a trend here? The more valuable numbers are what and why numbers – they’re numbers centered around a behavior as opposed to a static fact. The more action required of someone, the more commitment given, the more insight you can gain into the number and the more action you can take because of it.
Take a look at your social media efforts. Whenever and wherever you are trying to apply some numbers to your social media efforts, ask yourself the trifecta of questions with an eye towards action. Does this number answer what happened? Does communicating with the customer answer why this number is what it is? Does knowing the business and your fellow woman or man tell you what you should do next to improve that number?
See you in the jungle.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
Interrupting consumers doesn’t work any more. Outbound marketing – direct mail, trade shows, conferences, PR, advertising – just doesn’t work any more. Instead, you need inbound marketing. Attract customers like a magnet to your products or services! The new truth of marketing is that interruption is out. Ideas that spread, win. No one is listening any more. Go viral.
If you wholeheartedly believe every bit of this, stop reading now. Close this browser window, walk away, and have a wonderful, productive day. (more…)
A friend was at a recent business meeting where product marketers were going over color palettes, organization of their stores, and a bunch of other details, all important. What was critically missing, however, was their marketing. When asked, they said that they were doing marketing, that all of the operational details they were discussing was marketing.
Wrong.
They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.
That pizza will never, ever sell itself. At a minimum, the pizza has to be delivered or received somehow. That’s service. Given how much competition there is for pizza joints, even if it’s the best pizza in the world, the parlor will at least initially need to let people know about it, invite them to try it, tell them of its existence. That’s marketing.
Where my friend’s colleagues went wrong was in mistaking the product for the marketing and service. They thought that making a quality product was marketing and wondered why their stores were empty day after day after day. “But we have an awesome product!” “Maybe we need a new color palette for the inside of the store!” “Maybe we should move the register closer to the door!”
They’re rearranging toppings on the pizza instead of figuring out how to get people in front of the pizza to at least take a bite. They’re staring at the pizza, wondering why no one is buying it and eating it.
Are you mistaking product for service and marketing? Are you staring at the pizza instead of sharing it? Ask yourself these questions in the next marketing meeting you sit in, and if you’re in that situation, get people in your company to stop staring and start sharing your pizza.
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I’ve read and heard a lot of buzz about Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 lately. Of the folks who are not wild about the device, the main criticism is that it’s not a book. It lacks the real world charm of books – the feel of the paper, the smell of the book, etc. You’re right – the Kindle is not a book, and that’s the whole point.
A quick story. Last year, I was flying back from Tampa on a business trip and sat next to Grandma Rosenblum, a wonderful 80 year old great-grandmother. I was surprised, amidst the usual contents that an 80 year old carries, to see an Amazon Kindle in her purse, and asked her about it, since my stereotype of 80 year olds generally doesn’t include cutting edge technology. Her response? “I love my Kindle. Everyone I know at my senior center has one. We all love that you can make the letters as big as you want. One of my friends has really bad eyes but she can read again now!”
I asked her about the other features of the Kindle – blog subscriptions, newspapers, etc. and she said she didn’t read anything like that, just books and the occasional article. Except she was wrong. She did read a couple of blogs – Huffington Post was in there, as well as mainstream news sources like the New York Times. She just didn’t call the Huffington Post a blog. It was merely, to her, a series of articles.
The Kindle 2 has even more stuff. Based on initial product description, it’ll have the 3G wireless component, but it will also have document conversion and a basic web browser. Guess what, gang? That’s not an eBook reader any more. That’s a tablet computer. Granted, you may not be working in Excel or playing Warcraft on it, but with the addition of a browser and document conversion, the Kindle is now a computer that can be used for productivity above and beyond reading stuff.
What’s the takeaway here? The Kindle 2 seems to be a workable tablet computer disguised as a book reader, rather like the iPod Touch is a workable PDA disguised as a music player. If you’re a business type, I would bet you’ll get some enhanced productivity out of the new Kindle.
If you’re a marketer, all I have to say is this: you had better be cranking out eBooks, you had better be cranking them out in Kindle-supported formats, and as a bonus, if you have the absolute trust and love of your readers, you might even get them to register their Kindle document conversion email addresses to get new eBooks from you when you have them. (did you know you can email documents to Kindle for conversion?)
Full disclosure: links to the Kindle are paid links for my employer, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Purchasing a Kindle through these links earns my employer the standard Amazon commission.
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Starbucks.
Apple.
Maglite.
Dom Perignon.
All of these are premium brands, yes? They conjure up certain images, certain feelings, certain associations, all of which their respective marketing departments have worked hard to establish over the years. Premium denotes quality of product or service above average, a product you can aspire to as a consumer…
… unless you’re in the middle of a brutal recession. Suddenly, premium becomes a boat anchor around your leg as consumers seek out thrift, value, cost-conscious… cheap.
Sometimes premium can override cost concerns – the old “quality costs less in the long run” hack – but sometimes, it will just kill you.
As a marketer, think carefully about how your brand will be perceived in good times and in bad. Is there a brand association durable enough that it’s appropriate no matter what the economic climate is? Can you play the trend of the day in your communications while staying true to your core value proposition?
Here’s a tip: invest, invest, invest in your customer service, and by that I don’t just mean your call center, I mean every employee in your company. Service costs money, absolutely, but great service endures good times and bad.
When times are good, people love the personal touch and are willing to spend more for great service. When times are bad, people want to stretch the dollar as far as it can go, and if your product or service has value and can be backed up with great service (think a warranty w/a toll free number that humans answer on the second ring), you will endure when everyone else goes out of business.
Great customer service pays huge dividends. You can get more return out of great service than all the PR in the world, because in the uber-connected 2.0 world where everything is online and simultaneously service nearly everywhere borders on abusive, your great service will be worth talking about.
Great service, in other words, is a premium, a premium that will lend a shine to your brand no matter what’s happening in the world – and that’s worth paying for.
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Pixelated Business Marketing Conference
A while back, Mitch Joel posted his Pixelated conference series, a collection of seminars and sessions from conferences that contain the “best of the best” for any set of topics. I’ve been so busy doing stuff that I never got around to putting mine together until now. This version of Pixelated is focused on Business Marketing – ideas from sales, marketing, branding, and new media that should help any business do things a little better.
If this were a conference, a real life conference, I have no doubt that attending it would cost you thousands of dollars, at least for the first sessions. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of conferences and events who post their sessions, you can enjoy some of the best content on earth without leaving your chair.
Treat this as an actual conference. Take a day or half a day to watch the videos and give them your undivided attention. Have a bottle of water, a notepad, and an open mind as you watch the sessions, as if you were actually there.
Rather than just a pile of videos, I’ve also added brief annotations about why I think each session is important.
Updated: refreshed for July 2010, with some new sessions from TED and other shows.
Pixelated Business Marketing starts… now.
Seth Godin @ TED: This is Seth’s newest set of perspectives, based on his book Tribes. The evolution of marketing from mass media to hero culture of sorts.
Rory Sutherland @ TED: An amazingly funny and insightful talk about the creation of non-tangible value.
Malcolm Gladwell @ TED: This session ranks super high on my list because Malcolm gets you to think outside the box. What product or service do your customers deeply want but don’t know it?
Joseph Pine @ TED: If nothing else, this talk should make you think about what experiences are and how to give them to customers, rather than products or services.
Dan Ariely @ TED: Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, is the basis for this talk about how our decision processes are flawed, including why consumers buy things they really shouldn’t.
Garr Reynolds at Google Talks: Garr is the author of Presentation Zen, a phenomenal book that asks you to look at how you present information and how you can make your presentations better, more impactful, and less boring.
Avinash Kaushik at Google Talks: Avinash is pretty much THE bottom line when it comes to web analytics. In this talk he goes over a good chunk of his book and also talks about data-drive corporate culture and its importance.
Seth Godin @ Inbound Marketing Summit: Seth is a master marketer. His talk goes over how you can make your products or services more remarkable.
David Meerman Scott from Inbound Marketing Summit: David’s book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, power part of this talk as he goes over how the ground is changing underneath traditional business outreach.
NEDMA: I talk about email marketing and social media integration.
Optimization Summit: I talk about the best practices of email marketing.
Inbound Marketing Summit: I talk about whether or not your business should be podcasting.
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In reading the latest “controversy” in social media about Burger King’s ad agency tweeting on behalf of the client and the furor over authenticity and transparency, I came to this conclusion:
Burger King needs a new agency.
If you haven’t been following along, here’s the very short summary. CP+B is the agency in question tweeting as the fictional King character for Burger King on Twitter. Some social media folks object to a lack of disclosure by the agency, a lack of authenticity.
Here’s a different perspective on the issue: ROI. What in the world was CP+B thinking? I’d love to see even a back of the envelope ROI argument for creating a Twitter account for a fictional character to sell sandwiches, which is the whole point of Burger King.
Forget about transparency, authenticity, and whether or not an agency should tweet as a client. What in the world is the ROI or even apparent value of this initiative?
Here’s how I would have handled a client’s request to be engaged on Twitter: create a Twitter bot that you can message with your current location. It returns the three nearest Burger Kings so that you can get something to EAT, since the whole point of Burger King is to provide something for me to eat. I’d use it in a heartbeat when I travel. If Burger King and CP+B approached Twitter or social media in general from the perspective of being USEFUL, they’d get more sales and a measurable ROI.
It’s absolutely true that you can’t get precise ROI on social media. My work for the Student Loan Network means that ROI gets fuzzy, but the business connections, enhanced distribution of things like eBooks, inbound links, and other measurable activities are all improved by Twitter and social media. Can I put an exact dollar amount on it? No. Can I say that Twitter has improved the bottom line? Yes. Have I helped folks on Twitter get financial aid questions answered? Yes.
Be useful in your social media experiments. Don’t just do something in social media because it’s what the cool kids are doing. Do something that is useful, that serves a need, and your social media experiment will be a success.
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In a period of growth, your brand is your sword, helping you open up new markets, boldly making an impression on consumers, reinforcing the emotional aftertaste of doing business with you for good or ill. Your brand is what you brandish against competitors, demonstrating with swiftness your strengths and the reasons others should do business with you. Obstacles like barriers to entry are slashed aside as word of mouth of your brand paves the way for progress.
In a period of recession, your brand is your shield, defending you against the onslaught of market forces. Your brand reminds consumers why they did business with you in the first place, the value of business with you versus a lower priced, potentially lower quality competitor. Your brand as shield provides some cover for you to reposition, to adjust, to realign on new terrain, to bide your time until opportunity becomes apparent and it’s time to wield the sword.
If you are skilled only with branding as a sword, then the forces of recession will toast you as surely as a dragon’s breath the moment the market turns.
If you are skilled only with branding as a shield, you’ll be left behind when others charge forward to opportunity and prosperity.
How do you put this to use?
Wield your brand as a sword by creating something worth talking about, giving customers experiences that amaze them. Solve their problems. Cut away obstacles to their success. Deliver what you promise plus a little bit more. Serve them in the truest sense of the phrase.
Wield your brand as a shield by never failing to deliver what you promise, by providing great service as a defensive play, by reminding customers in as many ways as possible why they’ve done business with you and why they should continue to do so. In marketing copy and sales talks, ask customers to recount their experiences to you as a way of self-reinforcing the good. (assuming you delivered on your promises)
This above all else, though: know when it is time to advance with sword in hand or hold your ground behind your shield.
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Social media for business is unquestionably a hot topic in the current environment. Lots of folks want to know how it can help their business, make them some money, or reduce costs, and to a degree, social media can do all that. That said, a real stealth play for social media is using its shiny object status to effect change in an organization.
Consider Fizzcrank Corporation. It’s been doing okay for the past few years with traditional marketing, from brochures to trade shows, but it’s feeling a little stagnant. Products aren’t revving quite as quickly, and buyers aren’t buying Fizzcranks at the same levels they did two years ago. Bob the marketing manager has been wanting to do more field work to see what customers want, but management isn’t willing to step outside its comfort zone. What does Bob do?
Leverage the power of the shiny object! Bob brings shiny objects like Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to the table and says that for no money and just some time and effort, Fizzcrank Corporation can become a leader in the Fizzcrank industry. Management is bedazzled by the shiny objects and says that as long as the no money part is true, Bob can do whatever he wants with social media. The CMO gets all excited and has a press release written (that is ignored) to announce Fizzcrank Corporation’s thought leadership in the Fizzcrank vertical.
Now the real work begins – Bob sets up his listening post tools, tying Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other networks together. (see my Twitter eBook for more details on how) He sets up monitoring for keywords, starts listening for Fizzcrank in global searches, and before long finds out that customers would really like to be able to use a Overcharged Capacitor with their Fizzcrank. Bob takes the idea back to the engineering gnomes who inform him that matching up an Overcharged Capacitor with a Fizzcrank is not only simple, but a really good idea, and Fizzcrank OC is born.
Fast forward three months. Fizzcrank Corporation now dominates the Fizzcrank industry with Fizzcrank OC. Products are selling better than ever, and Bob now talks to customers regularly. Management is happy with profits. Bob is happy to be talking to real people instead of writing press releases and billboards. Customers are happy because Fizzcrank is creating products they actually need and want.
The lesson in this fictional account is that social media can be a way to introduce a cultural change in your company, away from broadcast marketing and toward listening to what your customers are saying. If you work at a company that has not developed a culture of listening, see if you can use social media as a stealth play to begin the practice – after all, your customers likely know better than you do exactly what they want out of your products or services.
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