Agent-X » Methodology http://blog.agent-x.com Agent-X Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:13:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Consumers LOVE the word “free.” http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/03/consumers-love-the-word-%e2%80%9cfree-%e2%80%9d/ http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/03/consumers-love-the-word-%e2%80%9cfree-%e2%80%9d/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:30:35 +0000 Jill http://blog.agent-x.com/?p=404 Consumers LOVE the word “free.” Even more so in recent years. We love it so much that we go out of our way to get some freebie that we don’t even need. Free pen? Yes please. Free t-shirt? Sure! Free dessert? I’m full from dinner and really don’t need… well okay, it’s FREE!

On the flip side, someone has to pick up the tab; when paying for the free ‘swag’ companies often find it difficult to see the value in giving things away for free (rightfully so). In the past, we could only assume that our message would get out there to increase brand awareness and visibility. What if you were able to measure the number of impressions you gained to truly gauge the value of the campaign? With the addition of online forums, social venues and blogs, it’s now easier than ever to measure success and ROI even when you’re giving it away for free.

An insightful article from Event Marketer: “The ROI of Free” http://www.eventmarketer.com/article/roi-free, points out a few examples of companies who were able to get a tangible return from their “free campaign.”

You remember Denny’s Grand Slam give-away during the Super Bowl, right? Last year they gave away 2 million Grand Slam breakfasts in 8 hours, and in return they received “$50 million in news coverage, 47 million hits on their website and thousands of emails.” Little Debbie gave away one million cupcakes and in three weeks their fan base on Facebook grew from 5,000 to 50,000!

Before you just start handing stuff out, there are a couple things you need to do first:

  • Define your overall goal of the campaign as well as what will make it a success
  • Make sure the appropriate channels (website, social, etc.) are set up and monitor and track the numbers!

Now, anyone know of any good freebies out there? Post them in comments!

jill

]]> http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/03/consumers-love-the-word-%e2%80%9cfree-%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 The value of information http://blog.agent-x.com/2009/07/the-value-of-information/ http://blog.agent-x.com/2009/07/the-value-of-information/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:59:19 +0000 brian http://blog.agent-x.com/?p=31 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.

]]> http://blog.agent-x.com/2009/07/the-value-of-information/feed/ 0 A new process… Our new process. It's a start http://blog.agent-x.com/2009/07/a-new-process-our-new-process-its-a-start/ http://blog.agent-x.com/2009/07/a-new-process-our-new-process-its-a-start/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:50:09 +0000 brian http://blog.agent-x.com/?p=11 Flow_chart+diagram

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

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