Monday, October 3, 2011
CAN YOU KEEP UP WITH ONLINE TRENDS AND THE ROI POLICE?
2:33 PM | 
Posted by
LEADERHUNTRESS |
Well, the OMMA Show a couple of weeks ago seemed more lethargic than last year's show at the same time-- Where was Arianna Huffington now that we needed her? She linked new trends to content -- and her thoughts were compelling. This year everything was about the ever-evolving way to find the right customers through algorithmics.(Is that like Al Gore-rithmics?)
So now, it's all sounding very technical and you have to multi-juggle your networks. If you do Facebook, you have to do Google+, and Linked In. And kits more. This day-to-day madness, even worse, is well-initiated madness, which means there are a lot of smart thinkers to catch up on- and you will inevitably spend time learning what you don't need to get to that which you do.
"In the few days since I was invited to write this, Google+ went public, Facebook announced Timeline, Amazon debuted its tablet, Fire, and its cloud-based browser, Silk, and the IAB reported ad spending on the Internet grew by 23% in the first half of 2011 compared to last year. The pace and scale of change in media we are witnessing is difficult to fathom, much less summarize in a few hundred words."
He highlights the trends - which we saw at OMMA - this way:
More media fragmentation. How many ways can you watch your favorite TV show? Pirated, DVD, DVR, streaming, VOD, downloaded to mobile, tablet, and on and on. And, oh right, broadcast. The landscape of media is undergoing radical, frenetic change. And beyond an explosion of new technological channels for consuming professionally produced media, a sea-change is the increasing popularity (and competition for professional media makers) of amateur social content, such as blogs, Twitter, homemade YouTube videos, Facebook and so on. This trend will continue. A limited counterbalancing trend is media aggregation platforms, such Facebook, where people browse media from all those channels in one spot. But the main impact for marketers is more work required on the part of media buyers combined with more technology attempting to reaggregate audiences, such as advertising exchanges. Complexity reigns for the foreseeable future in targeting audiences for appropriate brand messages.
More intelligent personalization. Facebook, FlipBoard and Amazon (both as a marketing and in the form of its new Silk browser) are all good examples of how media companies and marketers are harnessing knowledge about people's interests, based on algorithmic analysis of digital media and shopping data exhaust, to better customize unique and hyper-relevant experiences for media consumers. Expect this to continue. The next most powerful shift we should expect is services able to aggregated such data from across siloed data stores presently to improve knowledge of people's tastes across media and shopping experiences. Imagine a service that mashed-up everything Facebook knows about your tastes with everything Amazon does, plus your account info from NetFlix, iTunes, Pandora/Spotify/LastFM, Yelp, IMDB and so on. Rather than hoarding this knowledge in secret for use only in behavioral targeted advertising, a winning service will deliver this as a direct user experience, with superior recommendations for a range of consumer desires.
Advertisers will become "ROI Managers, managing ROI against sales impact. Advertisers are only beginning to get the upper hand on the blizzard of data generated by all of the new media and marketing systems that drive consumers' lives today. Mostly those programs remain disconnected and reactive. Winning marketers of tomorrow will excel at changing their perspective on ROI from simple campaign measurement to iterative, integrated, cross-channel management. At the heart of succeeding in that transition will be spend-to-impact analysis across and among marketing programs, providing an equalized basis for evaluating the impact of every marketing investment from television to direct mail to billboards to search advertising to social media programs.
To this last issue, my fave Social Media expert, Steve Goldner, aka Social Steve, says:
"For the better part of two years, I have been suggesting the importance of the social media marketing funnel within social media. Today, I am here to say it has past its relevance. Key issues are 'sales' and 'ROI'. A marketing funnel has always had a 'sales' stage. I am suggesting that sales NOT be something that is measured for social media. Thus we should not look for social media ROI, but rather social media ROE (return of engagement).
This is not another loose definition of measuring the relevance of social media for business, but rather I provide some concrete parameters that really show a return to the business. Check out his article, “Social Media Model that Defines the End of the World as We Know It” at http://wp.me/pxjrG-k5 and add your thoughts."
What Steve is saying reminds me of how some clients view PR activities as they are practiced through traditional media placements (and now, social media). Small-to-mid sized companies want sales from PR. Corporate communications wants ROI based on reports generated by companies like Cision that have complicated dashboards that measure how much a company is talked about -- where the article appeared-- how many words etc.
There are two things wrong with this:
1. A company's customer may be talking about his/her experience and refer to that company once in a front page article of say, The Wall Street Journal. Cision will weigh the value of that article (which was generated behind the scenes by the PR company) based on the client being mentioned only once -- and the article not being fully about that company. In fact, getting a third party endorsement from a customer in print is the most valuable PR any company can receive. It's real life anecdotes that engage readers' interest and build Reputation and Influence for the client.
2. If some of the most credible, hard-working journalists were aware that their articles are being referenced and rated in ROI shekels, they would not be too happy. As a PR person and sometimes journalist, I always thought this was not only an inefficient way to rate the value of placements, it's also not smart. It means putting CONTENT AND ENGAGEMENT in a numerical system --- and what comes out the other end is garbage.
Yes, I know you need SOMETHING, but I would judge an article by its LEVEL OF ENGAGEMENT AND INFLUENCE, much as Steve has suggested for social media. The same principle applies to traditional media placements.
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