The first is content. Without interesting content that makes you stop, focus, and respond, your online marketing effort will fail. As I wrote in an earlier post, your campaign needs a value proposition and a large portion of this value is created with really good content. Obvious.
The second factor that gets overlooked a surprising amount of the time is enabling the sharing of the content. Not just enabling it in fact but integrating this act into the very fabric of the user experience. By this I mean, clever marketers (and content creators) understand that a social experience requires involves two or more people. What I do with your content can and should enhance the experience for subsequent viewers. Take YouTube for example. The reason why they display the number of views, favorites, etc. and enable comments is because the perceived popularity (or lack thereof) of a specific video is a key indicator of content quality for visitors to the page. As a consequence of making this information available to the visitor, YouTube increases the probability of the two primary goals of any social media marketing campaign: views and pass-alongs. It’s quite simple.
The next step in the process of engaging users in a truly social experience is to allow and encourage them to share it with others. It’s striking how many online marketing campaigns we see that do not incorporate even the most rudimentary concept of “sharing” into the UI and flow of the user experience.
While all the attention and focus around social media is generally related to the creation of crazy, wacky content and how easy it is for individuals to get their 15 minutes of fame, the real juice for marketers looking to boost the effectiveness of their online campaigns through social media involves the sharing and evangelism of that content across each user’s social graph. Do that and your social media marketing campaign with be a smashing success.
I had a conversation not too long ago with someone from a major advertising agency. We were talking about the approach we take to quantifying user engagement online.
Engagement is one of those terms that means different things to different people. For folks steeped in the world of offline media or the more traditional forms of online media (display/rich media ads), the term refers to time spent with a particular piece of content. For example, a Web page on which a user spends over a minute on average would be considered highly engaging under this definition. The inference in this case is that since the page is loaded for over a minute on average then that must mean the user is somehow engaged with the content.
Another, example of engaging content under this definition is a video that’s watched a million times. In this example, the metric of views is a more active measure of engagement where presumably many hundreds of thousands of people (assuming some folks watched multiple times) took the time to watch.
Incidentally, here’s a highly, highly “engaging” video I was late to discover…
No doubt an amazing video and one worth sharing with friends which leads me to the point of this post.
Proxies for engagement like time on site and views are of limited value to marketers because we need to make too many assumptions about what was actually happening when the site was loaded in a brower or the video was played. In point of fact, both of these metrics are measuring the opposite of engagement in that the actions they’re tracking are of the “lean back” variety.
At Reach Machines, we define engagement differently. Engagement is about people doing things in pursuit of a goal. Learning more, sharing opinions, distributing videos, creating content, etc. On the Web , engagement is a creative process not a passive one. Social media sharing tools and networks ensure that even when I’m in the process of searching for information or organization personal information, I’m interacting with services, apps, and platforms that are facilitating this process at the same time they’re capturing my process and data to enable the next person who’s headed down the same path to do so more efficiently. See Jasaon Calacanis’s Mahalo for an example of how even the seemingly solitary act of searching is creating value for not only me as I search but also the others that follow in my path.
The metric closest to quantifying the somewhat amorphous notion of engagement is links. Jeff Jarvis has written at length about this. I did as well here in June. Links are pointers to information that one person distributes to one more or other people via a variety of passive (blog, Facebook page, etc) and active channels (email, IM, SMS, etc). When I copy and paste a link and send it along to people I know, I do this because I think they’ll find the information I’m sending to them a combination of useful, interesting, and/or entertaining. When I copy and paste a link into a blog post or my facebook profile for example, I do it for reference and/or validation. Active sharing v. passive sharing serve different purposes but they’re both reliable indicators of engagement because they both involve the act of creating a link and making it available for others to find and follow.
So, of the available metrics that online marketers use today, following are some of the ways to monitor and measure that number and velocity of the link creating that’s occuring online:
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) - Where your site appears in results for relevant keywords.
BackLinks - Go to Yahoo! SiteExplorer to get the number of backlinks for any URL
Bookmarks - Use the URL lookup feature at Delicious. Here’s an example for the video above.
“Diggs” - The number of times your site has been “dugg”, the number of times a particular piece of content on your site has been “dugg”, etc.
Pass Alongs - The number of times your site/content has been shared with others through Web, email, IM, SMS, or other media.
The goal of any marketing campaign should be to increase the likelihood that individuals within the target market will purchse the marketer’s product/service. True engagement of the sort I described above is a reliable indicator of interest which is a short hop from intent to purchase. The sooner marketers and their agencies move away from tired and deeply flawed ideas around engagement that are informed by 50 or so years of attempting to reach an audience deeply immersed in the “lean back experiences” of watching TV or listening to the radio, the sooner they will realize, internalize, and adopt the metrics and strategies that really do work on the Web. Campaigns that reach and key off of people when they’re leaning forward, searching, finding, consuming, creating, and sharing content and information.
I am not a recipient of his email newsletter. Nevertheless, I found a recent message he sent out cross-posted here. It’s essentially a “how-to” for startups to generate buzz among the online cognoscenti for little more than a few appetizer and drinks tabs and shameless, relentless plugging to anyone who will listen and has a reason to care.
As someone who’s in the midst of the zany process of building a business from scratch (not doing it alone mind you), I have to say just about everything he recommends hits home. Effective PR is all about conveying your passion for your brand and not kidding yourself that you’re building a brand. Your passion for your product/service is ultimately what will make or break your message provided you can string a few coherent sentences together about who you are, what you do, and why the audience should care.
My only criticism of his post is how it dismisses the value a PR firm can add. Startup life is all about making trade-offs and understanding you can’t have it all, all at once. It’s an iterative process of focusing on the next milestone while at the same time maintaining the momentum (and cash on hand) to conquer the next. This is where a good PR professional/firm can come in handy and deliver a ROI. There are some PR folks out there that can and do deliver fantastic results that would be difficult/impossible for a startup CEO to do on his/her own. I’ve had first hand experience when it works (NYT Business, BusinessWeek, etc.) that would have been difficult/impossible had it not been for the PR professional with which I was working at the time.
That said, outside PR help should be a considered purchase and its up to the PR pro/agency to prove they’ve got a sound strategy and the ability to deliver before you make any commitments of budget. Be open to it, but be careful. It can be a waste of time and money if you’re not.
This article in Brandweek about widgets got me thinking. As the Web offers an increasingly two-way user experience and enables people to discover and amplify content and messages at virtually zero cost, we in the online marketing and advertising professions have to shift our thoughts and actions away from “capturing” eyeballs to “attracting” them.
In practical terms, this means your online marketing programs need to be built around a core value proposition. It’s no longer enough to develop creative ways to “sell” an audience on the value proposition of the product/service we’re promoting. Today, the most successful online marketing programs are the ones that create value themselves which is accretive to the business’s overall marketing performance.
Take search marketing for example. One way to approach the planning and execution of an SEM program is to “carpet bomb” Google et al with text ads and wait and watch to see what pulls. What you will no doubt discover in the process is that the most effective pairings of keyword (ie “customer intention”) with a message relevant to the need signaled by the keyword will perform the best. That’s a simple instance of the online marketer creating value for a consumer. The user asks Google for help finding a solution to her problem and the online marketer raises her hand to help the user out. Think of it as pre-sales support.
What makes search such a perfect medium for the value creation model of online marketing is much less straightforward from other types of content on the Web. How can display advertising be seen as value creating when they’re generally in the way and/or noise that’s easily tuned out by the visitor to a site? Unlike search where the act of searching qualifies the user for certain types of t
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