Reach Machines

The Two Most Important Components of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

bstraley — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:55:33 +0000

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.

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Want to Learn Advanced Interactive Marketing Strategies and Tactics?

bstraley — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:40:06 +0000

Shameless plug here. I’m currently in the process of working with a small group of experienced marketing pros (online and offline) to build the curriculum for a new certificate program to be offered through University of Washington Extension during the Winter and Spring Quarters in 2009. The program is ideal for more junior folks in the industry looking to accelerate their development, career changers who might be familiar with the Web and basic online marketing techniques and tactics but want to broaden their skillset in order to get their foot in the door with a company that is active in the field, and seasoned marketers (brand, mark-comm, PR, etc.) who want to merge considerable offline experience with an understanding of online strategies and best practices.

To learn more about this program, click here.

You can also hear a podcast of me (doh!) talking about the program with Mary Larson, UW Educational Outreach Asst. Director of Academic Programs.

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How Engagement Should Be Measured

bstraley — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:59:28 +0000

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.

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Calacanis Gets it Right (For the Most Part)

bstraley — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:02:36 +0000

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.

Does Your Marketing and Ad Strategy Have a Value Proposition?

bstraley — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:58:17 +0000

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 targeted messages, content sites have to rely upon ad platforms to deliver “relevant” ads. The challenge in this case is to deliver an ad that creates value when the visitor’s intent when landing on the page was to read something, watch a video, catch up with a friend, etc. Except at the margins, it doesn’t really matter what the age, gender, location, income, etc. of the visitor is on most content sites because they have a choice and they choose to not notice ads let alone click on them. A contextually irrelevant banner ad doesn’t create much value and the landing page sitting on the other side of that display ad almost never creates any value.

So what’s an online marketer do beyond ensure her site’s optimized for natural search discovery and creating incremental value for consumers through a savvy search campaign? Find ways of producing content and experiences that:

create value for the target market
deliver messages that are aligned with the brand’s value proposition

In future posts, I’ll identify a few terrific examples of how this can work using some combination of videos, games, and offers. For starters, check out a brilliant viral online marketing campaign gets done.

Advertising Rules and Priorities

bstraley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:00:47 +0000

I came across this speech given a few years back by Dan Wieden and wanted to pass it along. In a day and age where we in the fields of marketing and advertising increasingly rely upon machines to give us the what’s, why’s, where’s, and how’s of things, we sometimes forget that all of this automation is creating the space and opportunities for us to be creative. What a concept.

W+K company rules:

Don’t act big. No sharp stuff. Follow directions. And shut up when someone is talking.

W+K’s priorities

The work
The client/agency relationship
Yourself

Why put the work first? Well…

In big agencies, the client/agency relationship is the most sacred thing. The difficulty seems to be that the work then serves the relationship, and everything becomes political. And when things get political, the work suffers. And when the work suffers, the business suffers, then the client agency relationship suffers, and you suffer.

Wieden on chaos:

Chaos does this amazing thing that order can’t: it engages you. It gets right in your face and with freakish breath issues a challenge. It asks stuff of you, order never will. And it shows you stuff, all the weird shit, that order tries to hide. Chaos is the only thing that honestly wants you to grow. The only friend who really helps you be creative. Demands that you be creative…

The other thing chaos does is challenge authority. It cares more about truth than power.

If you get the chance, read the entire thing. It’s pretty inspiring.

Why Marketers Need to Think and Act More Like CFOs

bstraley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:24:07 +0000

The title of this post caught my eye the other day:

What Do You Do When Old Media Vehicles Are Losing Effectiveness And New Media Vehicles Are Not Proven And Generally Lack Measurement?

What’s interesting about it is the implication that “old media vehicles” can be measured effectively in contrast to the “unproven” online methods of today and tomorrow.

The author has it exactly backwards. The effectiveness of brand marketing via TV, radio, and print has never been something that could be cost-effectively measured. Even when metrics like “unaided awareness” are computed from costly survey data, one heavily discounts the value of this metric as a predictor of marketing spend ROI.

The ability to record, in theory, every impression and every action exists today on the Web, something never before possible with old media vehicles. As a consequence, the online advertising value chain can be constructed with far greater precision and at dramatically reduced cost than anything one could do with off-line media. The issue then isn’t that the data and metrics do not exist for marketers to quantify ROI and justify increasing spend on online marketing initiatives, it’s that “traditional” marketers and their agencies generally do not have the skills or experience required to construct the performance measurement and financial models that transform the presently available marketing data into information and knowledge that can be consumed and acted upon by upper management.

The fact is that the availability of all of this data is creating new responsibilities and opportunities for marketers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, spot opportunities to increase performance, and optimize accordingly. This approach to marketing and promotion is in the DNA of every successful online merchant today starting with Amazon, Ebay, and Google. They measure and test everything they do and use the results to shape and guide their communications and promotions planning. It is also the way more and more boutique online advertising and marketing agencies combine the science and craft of marketing on the Web.

Going forward, marketing effectiveness will be driven by four things:

Strategy - The goals and objectives of the marketing plan must be closely aligned with the overall strategic plan of the organization?
Creative - The message, who it’s for, how it’s packaged, when/where it’s delivered, etc.
Technology - The effective use of technology to drive expanded breadth and depth (aka scale) of your marketing programs.
Management Methodology - Is everything being measured and is the data being transformed effectively into actionable information and insights?

Does your agency of record, or if you don’t have one the team you use internally, posses these three capabilities in sufficient strength to deliver the bottom line results your success requires?

Stride Gum Sponsorship of “Where the Hell is Matt?”

bstraley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:33:45 +0000

Many of you have no doubt heard of or seen the following video by now. Pretty captivating.

Beyond the fact that it’s fun to watch and more than a little uplifting, it’s also a terrific example of how brand marketing can/should operate on the Web. Find innovative content that’s consistent with brand values and messages and sponsor the creation of more of it. The creative ideas are out there and it’s the job of the agency of tomorrow to source and amplify them.

AdAge Guide to Ad Networks and Exchanges

bstraley — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:06:12 +0000

I missed these articles when they were originally published in April. The collection provides some useful stats and perspective from folks on both the buy and sell sides.

See, even the terminology we’re using is sounding more and more like Wall Street traders…

VivaKi’s Audience on Demand Network is a Step in the Right Direction

bstraley — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:58:08 +0000

We work with enough folks in the media planning and buying space to recognize a good idea for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the research, planning, and buying process when we see one. Hot on the heels of Google’s AdPlanner announcement, Publicis Groupe’s new operating unit VivaKi announced the creation of their Audience on Demand Network. While I can’t speak for the effectiveness of their approach, it makes sense in theory.

Of particular interest to us was this quote from Jack Klues that we found in today’s AdAge coverage:

There are a lot of ad exchanges and ad networks out there, but say you are trying to buy any given target audience, like pet lovers, for instance. Right now if you were out looking for pet lovers or [to be more specific] golden retriever lovers, it isn’t like you can’t find those people. But to go find enough of them to generate any kind of aggregated reach would take you a lot of time and effort.

While aggregating eyeballs is certainly the first step in driving up the effective reach of a given campaign, that alone does not solve the “GRL” problem. That is to say you’ve still got to be able to identify where on the Web Golden Retriever Lovers are likely to spend their time regardless of how many networks and/or popular sites you’ve aggregated for the purposes of executing a buy. For that matter, many of the sites that are likely to be popular among the GRL crowd are also likely to be well down into the tail and out of scope for the major networks (AdSense being the notable exception here).

How to aggregate eyeballs without sacrificing the “quality” of the audience is one of the key challenges facing media planners and buyers today and it’s not clear from this announcement how VivaKi is actually going to do this.

Perhaps they should give us a call here at Reach Machines since we’ve spent the better part of a year developing a solution to this vexing and costly problem.