Agent-X » Measurement

AdAge Viral video chart – New Media, New Measures

brian — Fri, 14 May 2010 12:37:59 +0000

The beauty of where this all goes – AdAge Viral video chart

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=143824

As I spent some time today on AdAge getting my daily dose of what’s happening and who’s who, I came across a great article that was talking about the most successful viral campaigns of the week. What was intriguing and also wonderful at the same time is that AdAge was referencing “Visible Measures” viral ability chart as a reference guide to who was winning the race. So there we have it – a publication that was once dedicated to a traditional advertising model paying homage once again to the power of digital and and non-traditional. Google’s Chrome video took the lead with an impressive 1.86MM views on a new spot they published online. Toyota was close behind with 1.85MM views regarding a campaign they put together for the Sienna.

What I love most about this example is the market’s willingness to understand and give credibility to the power of digital and social media. However I must say there is a great opportunity to provide more insight into this report than just how many views have been achieved. There is so much more data available to help you understand the true impact and connection that these impressions have had with the eyeballs that have viewed them. If harnessed correctly, marketers have the ability to make those moments so much more impactful to both the brand and the consumer experiencing them.

Brian

New Strategies for Managing Social Relationships – SRM

Jeff Ambs — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:05:21 +0000

Back in 2002, when we were trying to get our new catalog company off the ground, we quickly learned the value of a customer. The old saying “it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one” came to life when we were buying names of prospects and less than 1.2% of them became customers. The house list was our bread and butter and we learned how to squeeze every last drop of value out of it. We quickly became experts in segmenting our list using the RFM model: Recency, Frequency and Monetary value. It worked well. A new customer was a live customer and we did everything we could to let them know they were valued and keep them engaged. We incentivized heavily to increase purchase frequency and treated our best customers like royalty. Now, segmentation goes much deeper and CRM models have become much more sophisticated, but the same fundamental principles still apply. Today, with brands engaging customers through social channels, how are these relationships managed? What are the rules in a world driven by return on engagement not return on investment? Social Media is changing the brand-to-consumer relationship driving the need for new strategies to take advantage. We call this new strategic approach Social Relationship Management (SRM).

SRM focuses on three areas: Engagement, Crowdsourcing and Monetization. Social Networks offer so many fantastic features it naturally creates an engaging experience. Brand-to-fan dialogue, photos, videos, polls, custom content, etc. It is a rich tool kit for brand managers. And, as fanbases grow, they can be mined for valuable insights. Which name do you prefer for our new granola bar? What feature would you like to see on our next video game? Your fans have opinions and they want to be heard. For most brands, the numbers are not there to be statistically significant, but it is a fast and free way to get a quick read and supplement your market research. The real question is how do we leverage our fans to increase sales? Certainly there are tried and true options: special offers, promotions, discounts, sweepstakes, gwps, etc. However, the risk lies in breaking the brand-to-consumer unwritten social code. “Do not heavy sell me on my social network” or at least too much. Social networks are not advertising channels, and fans are very leery of brands that sell rather than engage. An exclusive offer every now and then is welcome and keeps the site valuable to the fans, but excessive promotion, especially those found in other channels, is just advertising.

So what is an ideal SRM ratio? Certainly there are no clear rules on this, but the 80/20 rule is a great place to start. 80% of communication should be engaging content revealing more brand insights and drawing the fans in closer. The remaining 20% should align with the brand value. I’ve seen a large discount retailer provide numerous promotions and offers on their site and judging by the extensive comments, it is very well received. It aligns with the low-cost value offering and it is what their fans expect. Obviously premium brands would take a different approach. To start, I recommend an 80/10/10 content platform then let the testing begin.

Social media is evolving so quickly, the industry is still determining the best practices to take advantage. We take what we know and evolve, test and mold into actionable strategies for today’s social business environment. If you don’t have a clear SRM strategy for your brand’s social presence the 80/10/10 Engagement, Crowdsourcing, Monetization ratio is a good place to start.

Word of Mouth

brian — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:15:31 +0000

We all know the importance of viral communications in today’s world. We’re learning even more about it during the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit this week in Las Vegas.

The WOMMA Summit is featuring brand speakers that discuss their real world WOM marketing programs from some of the top companies in the world. They are presenting case studies and educating the audience on the importance of word of mouth and how it relates to their company.

We have been working on some great projects involving word of mouth tactics, one of which is a corporate blogger event. What a great way to spur the spread of conversation about your brand. Get people that are passionate about something and give them your brand experience to inspire them to write about it and share it with all their followers -word of mouth!

We’ve met some great people and have seen some amazing presentations here at WOMMA. Tune in with us… Just go to womma.org and sign up for the live feed to see what the speakers have to say…and spread the word!

Event measurement is a science

Jill — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:50:26 +0000

Frequently there is little thought to why a company should (or should not) attend an industry event or tradeshow. Justifications of “we have always gone”, “it would be noticed if we were absent”, and “all of our competition will be there” aren’t really valid business reasons, and more importantly impossible to gauge as a success (or failure).

Evaluating event participation, and the metrics that determine success, aren’t as fuzzy as most people think. There are solid ways of measuring event success that are usable for every sized business in every sized event.

The best article I’ve found that explains key measurement metrics is The Five Key Metrics of Event Marketing. I’ve summarized the main points below.

KEY METRIC 1: TOTAL COST OF THE EVENT

Expense vs. investment. Expense is any out of pocket costs related to the event. Investment includes out of pockets plus your day-to-day overhead, including salaries of all those involved.

“Either calculation is valid. Simply be clear when you are reporting your numbers which approach you have taken, and be consistent over time.”

KEY METRIC 2: REACH AND FREQUENCY

The number of unique prospects that attend each event and if, and how often, they attend in the future. Are you communicating to your target audience and building a lasting relationship with them? Do they find your events valuable? Or do you get a bunch of tire kickers looking for a free pen or tee shirt? Maybe a tee shirt isn’t the best way to reach out to your audience…

“Tracking reach and frequency over time can help you gauge the effectiveness of your promotional efforts, as well as to assess the perceived value attendees find in your events.”

KEY METRIC 3: BUSINESS VALUES OF ATTENDEES

Knowing how much potential each prospect has can be helpful when determining the true value of an event. Getting thousands of attendees may feel like a success, but if they’re not the right audience that will bring in the money, you could be wasting your time.

“It’s one thing to know that 75 people attended your event. It’s another to know that those 75 people represent $750,000 in potential business. This number is called customer or prospect lifetime value, and can be a powerful guide in helping you determine which events — and which attendees — merit your time and budget.”

KEY METRIC 4: SHARE OF VISITS

Used to measure the number of people that attend your event compared to competing events in the industry. What makes other events successful in attracting valuable attendees from your key market? If you are attending a tradeshow as an exhibitor, defining this metric is important in knowing which events have the most value and bring in the right attendees.

“Tracking this number over time can tell you if you are gaining or losing ground to your competition for attendees’ limited time and dollars.”

KEY METRIC 5: RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Are you spending your event budget wisely? What are you truly gaining from each dollar you spend? You cannot answer either question until you define goals and establish what success means to your company for each event. Is it to maintain your space in the industry? Announce a new product or service? Gain the attention of the media? Obtain as many leads as possible whether they’re on or off strategy? Are you only interested in qualified leads? If so, what makes a lead qualified? Maybe it’s all of the above…

Regardless of what determines the success of your event, it is very important to define it at the beginning, and communicate it to all who will be involved in the event (from planning to execution).

Of course, if you need a hand, feel free to give us a call.

How to measure a blogger event using a variation of CPM and quality index

brian — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:57:27 +0000

CPM has been used as an industry standard for quite some time to enable brands to understand their cost per thousand impressions on a given site. The range of expense for CPM varies greatly depending obviously on the quantity as well as on how you measure quality of your impression. Recently we finished an engagement with a client of ours looking to understand the return on investment for hosting a blogger event tied to one of their sponsorship platforms. It was a great exercise and it taught the group at large a lot about the various attributes that can go into a measurement approach. So here’s a quick snapshot of the approach as well as what phase II is shaping up to be:

Background: Weekend event, 20 bloggers, free reign to speak their minds

Tools Used to measure: Radian6, Techrigy, Alexa rankings, Compete scores, Google Alerts (RSS feeds), Tweet Search, and a couple of our own “secret sauce” tools

Approach: Develop a dashboard and knowledge management platform for each stakeholder which would compile key metrics and data points into a usable format to provide relevant intelligence on the success/failure of the project

Key Metrics:

Bloggers: sentiment, social channel followers (Twitter, FB, Blog), monthly impressions, actual posts, tone of posts

Brand: Share of discussion (# of mentions +/- and neutral) for week of and following, competitive discussions, social channel performance (FB, Twitter, YouTube) by fan base and commentary

Executive summary: Total impressions by channel, total mentions, tone of mention, total share of conversation bench-marked against previous weeks performance as well as competition, and most importantly, the ability for the bloggers to actually fuel and continue on discussions with their base.

Phase II – Phase II really started with the last point I mention in the executive summary. The ability to understand and measure the influence blogger’s ability to open and maintain dialogues with their fan base. This is an area that moves past the traditional CPM and really gets at the heart of a quality and return of a discussion (challenge of measuring the value of a two way discussion).

Here’s my latest approach in translating quality into impressions. I’ve structured it this way to try to reverse engineer an approach that allows my client to still communicate using the CPM terminology and provides more clarity in defining a baseline for future events. This is an on-going process… I’m open for dialogue here.

(Sum of Quality Score Multiples/Number of Comments) = Average Multiplier; Average Multiplier X Total Number of Web Impressions = Total Quality Impressions (still can be used in the traditional CPM model then)

Comment Quality score is measured as an index. Range of 0-5.

0 score gets a .75 multiple = negative comment (1 negative comment would equal an impression of .75)

1 score gets a 1 multiple = comment is minimal but positive response

2 score gets a 1.05 multiple = comment is information neutral to positive with industry mention however no brand mention

3 score gets a 1.1 multiple = comment includes a question related to industry

4 score gets a 1.2 multiple = comment includes reader expressing a positive attitude towards industry without brand specific mention

5 score gets a 1.25 multiple = comment includes a positive response directly related to the brand of their products or the reader expresses information in trying their product or the reader “reblogs” the post

In summary, positive conversations surrounding a brand would increase the total number of “impressions” considered for the CPM calculation and ultimately provide a better understanding of value.

In the case of the event we were managing, we found that we were able to attribute additional impressions and bring down the CPM slightly (still high – ranging from $300-$700). Considering the niche reach of the outlets, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Brian Steketee

Marketing is Reborn. Welcome to Communications 3.0…

david — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:48:16 +0000

We’re in an age of open conversation.

The Steketee Greiner Company is a global communications strategy, facilitation and measurement firm based in Grand Rapids, MI. We’re global because you are too, whether you want to be or not. It’s just the way things work now. Your job is to make sure you understand and are involved in the conversations going on about you. We can show you how. And we can do it in a way that shows you the return on your investment.

Communications 3.0
You don’t have complete control of your message anymore, but don’t panic. If you’re willing to listen, you can work with your customers to generate real efficiencies and value.

Here’s How You (and We) Do It
Quit trying to market so much, start listening, analyze the conversation, create a plan, inject a message, measure its effectiveness, tweak if necessary and repeat.

So, What Exactly Am I Buying from the Steketee Greiner Company?
Consulting Group
Research
Strategy
Measurement

Communications Group
Creative
Experiential
Digital
Public Relations

The Payoff
You can expect to know the return you’re getting on your investment, because we track, monitor and report on a regular, recurring basis to insure that you’re on strategy and on budget.

Welcome to the next wave of global communications.

Contact:

Brian Steketee/Partner
brian.steketee@sgandco.com

David Geiner/Partner
david.greiner@sgandco.com

Eric Messing/Business Development
eric.messing@sgandco.com

Phone: 616-855-6368

What’s in a name?

david — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:57:05 +0000

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

QUITE A BIT, ACTUALLY…

We live in the Network Age. It’s viral, it’s social, it’s digital, it’s global and above all, it’s about the individual people that make up communities. And at Context, the strength of our company has always been our community of individual experts. That said, we’ve decided to change our name…

We’re very proud of our people and the insights we bring to bear because of our collective individual experiences. We don’t want to hide those faces behind a corporate name, so as of now, we are no longer Context. We are Steketee Greiner and Company.

Our products and services remain:

Research, Strategy and Communications Management & Measurement
Creative, Experiential, Digital and Public Relations Development & Management

Contact us to learn more about the new age of communications and how we can help you participate in, grow and measure your brand community.

Steketee Greiner and Company

44 Grandville Avenue SW

Suite 270

Grand Rapids, MI 49503

The value of information

brian — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:59:19 +0000

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to sit through a lot of discussions around the use and translation of market intelligence. Most of these have been focused on the usability and functionality of the various sorts of tools that grace our industry and help us “listen to the conversation” in the Social/Digital space. There are a lot of these floating around. From Radian6 and Techrigy, to PR Newswire and my new favorite, Dow Jones. Everyone is casting out lines and focusing on listening to all of the noise out there. What’s even more interesting is the there seems to be such little focus on what all the noise actually means. It’s one thing to display a pretty graph, bar chart, or impression metric, but in the end… What is that really telling you…? It gets even more interesting when you start trying to set up the knowledge paths between business functions (Legal, PR, Sales, Marketing) where you have different audiences with different needs trying to make sense of it all. In the end, the data needs to be real time and have the ability to translate into key insights for business strategies and tactics.

It’s a multi-dimensional world out there. The relational database is so yester-year.

A new process… Our new process. It's a start

brian — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:50:09 +0000

In order to create effective communications, you must always lead with the data.