Friday Addition 2: A True Story About the Power of Negative Sentiment

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 17th, 2010

 

On Saturday, March 6, my neighbor Bill and I were standing in my front yard, admiring my new car (new to me, anyway). It was a generically-colored, 2005 Subaru Outback. I was proud of the new purchase.

I spoke highly of the dealership’s buying process and the wagon’s features. In fact, as I pointed out the multi-function roof-rack, I recounted the ease of the sales process in great detail. I talked of the twist and turns of the negotiation and the willingness of the dealership’s very capable staff to bend to our needs. Just as I’m getting to the part where the dealership threw in four, new, all-season tires at no cost, my fiance hops in the Subaru to run some errands. As she backed out of the drive-way, the wagon emits a loud and shrill squeal.

Bill then turns to me and says, “Where’d you say you bought that car?”

Do you see what happened? Until the moment the car, with a loud squeal, cast a negative light on the car dealership, Bill wasn’t even really paying attention to the details of my story. It wasn’t a priority for him. In the grand scheme of things, the story didn’t affect his life in the least. He was merely passing a pleasant moment with a neighbor. There was no real relevance to him.

The loud squeal set off an alarm bell inside of him. It triggered his evolutionary threat-avoidance system. Suddenly my story did have relevance and the details of the tale became a roadmap for avoiding a potential hazard. Not only did he feel the details relevant to himself but, he felt them relevant to others as well.

Despite only mentioning this to Bill, in the days following this exchange, my neighbors Pat and Pete asked about the situation and the dealership. In my small, Maine neighborhood, negative sentiment went viral right before my eyes.

I contacted the dealership about the squeal. The dealership picked the car up from my house, replaced a slightly rusted brake rotor and returned the car to me a day later with very sincere apologies.

The evening the wagon returned, my neighbors, one-by-one, meandered over to check on the outcome of the situation. Each was pleasantly surprised by the no-hassle, no-questions-asked manner the dealership employed to satisfy my issue. The dealership gained themselves three, maybe more, new admirers that night.

As the situation illustrates, negative sentiment often has a greater potential value than positive. It has an uncanny ability to awaken people’s attention. It can create a strong and immediate relevance where previously there was none.

Negative sentiment also presents brands with an amazing opportunity that positive sentiment sometimes lacks. It provides an often well-attended forum to display genuine concern, a desire to listen and a willingness to act. It allows brands engage with customers on previously unavailable dimensions, those of humility and humanity.

Tags: Customers, Engagement, marketing investment, marketing measurement, marketing metrics, Sentiment Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Strategy
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Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt2: Social Intelligence KPIs

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 14th, 2010

 

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we explored the limitations of channel measurement and how this often silo’d, measurement approach rarely reflects the customer reality:

“Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams . . . It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.“

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A “measurement bridge”, between channels, is needed to create an accurate view of comprehensive marketing performance.

Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

With data carefully gathered from metrics and conversations in the social web and inbound performance metrics, Terametric calculates a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

 

 

Social Intelligence is first calculated for each individual channel based on its inbound performance. Each individual channel’s Social Intelligence is then aggregated into a comprehensive brand Social Intelligence. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss selected KPIs in greater detail, explaining the valuable role they play in providing an accurate and holistic picture of marketing performance.

Engagement
A measure of your ability and willingness to engage with your audience. Ultimately, it is the measure of how much of a voice you have in the competitive marketplace, how much that voice resonates and how effectively that voice captures the interest of your community. Channel engagement is calculated from several data points, through multiple sources. An Engagement Score for the web channel is factored, in part from, an analysis of reviews, traffic sources, content consumption, etc.

Loyalty
Is calculated by measuring the average length and depth of an engaged customer relationship. Continuing with the web channel example, Loyalty is calculated, in part, by factoring depth of visit, length of visit, regency, repetition and average visitor volume for a period of time specified by the channel’s assigned priority.

Retention
As a holistic score, Retention denotes the frequency that you attract repeat engagements across multiple channels and how often a single customer is exposed to more than one channel. As a web channel measure, Retention is factored, in part, by bounce rate and visitor trending over a defined period of time. Much like Loyalty, the period of time is set by the channel’s pre-determined priority to the overall marketing effort.

Sentiment
A hot button topic for many trying to measure Social Media, SOCIALtality creates a multi-dimension Sentiment assessment. For both multi and single channel analysis, Sentiment is scored according to Over-arching reaction, Energy-level and demonstrated Trust. Given the margin of error for existing natural language processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis and the complexity of assessment.

In the next part of our series, we’ll explore the other dimensions of Social Intelligence and share some of our proprietary Social Intelligence data visualizations. As always, if you have any questions, see any holes, object to or rally behind anything you’ve read, let us know in the comments section and we’ll address the with alacrity!

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, social media analysis, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
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Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt 1: The Beleaguered CMO

Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Matt Carter on March 11th, 2010

 

In two of our previous postings, Bridging the Social Media Silo and Are you Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing, we discussed some common themes that emerged during our Alpha Qualification work. Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams. One team has responsibility for the website, another is charged with SEO/SEM and yet another has responsibility for print and/or broadcast. In many organizations, a brand new team silo has been created to leverage social media. Each team is responsible for tracking and reporting on the performance of their designated area.

It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.

The often-beleaguered CMO is then left to make sense of a channel measurement structure that compares apples to oranges and bares little resemblance to the customer reality. How can marketing investments be effectively optimized with only a partial or misleading picture available? Is it any wonder that these under-appreciated, Captains of Marketing have an average corporate life expectancy of 22.9 months?

So, how does a company develop a clearer picture of marketing’s effect on the target? How can companies determine which channels perform and which lag as the target zig-zags across them? How can a company be certain that their marketing investment is optimized to turn targets into customers?

Social Media may hold the key.

In our recent posting, The World’s Largest Source of Target Data, we spoke of Social Media as an incredible collection of data points:

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people . . . More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States.

With such a repository of data available and with the right tool, Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

Our methodology combines the detailed measurement and analysis of each individual marketing channel. . .

. . . with data carefully gathered from Social Media to inform a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

In our next post, we’ll define these KPIs in detail and provide examples of their use and organizational value (dare we say ROI Calculation). In the meantime, if you have any questions, please put them in the comments section and we’ll respond as soon as we’re able.

Photo by PatrickSmithPhotography

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
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Bridging the Social Media Silo

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 6th, 2010

 

 

In the last several weeks, the Terametric team has spoken with several potential, enterprise-level AlphaTesters. It’s an exciting time to be a part of an organization bringing an unprecedented level of measurement, analysis and ultimately, accountability to both Social Media and a company’s full, marketing channel mix. Each week, we’re discovered by a growing crowd of newly-intrigued individuals.

I’d love to believe that our awareness-building efforts are solely responsible for generating this momentum, yet I think it has more to do with internal changes in the organizations themselves. Companies are moving beyond Trial Phase of Social Media Maturity in growing numbers. They’ve become comfortable with entry-level monitoring and measurement and now seek an intelligence solution that can match the organization’s growing desire to leverage Social Media more strategically.

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Yet, we find evidence of measurement silos in many of these organizations. We often begin our presentations with the following graphic, illustrating what our measurement and analysis methodology encompasses:

 

More often than not, this graphic is greeted with a small amount of hesitancy and trepidation. It seems that many organizations divide their communications channel responsibilities among several different groups. We find the biggest divide is often between the Website Team (those with responsibility for maintaining and optimizing the site, often including SEO and SEM) and the Social Media Team. The Web Team is often more closely associated with the IT Group and the Social Media Team seems to be closely aligned with Events or Outbound Marketing Teams.

As companies begin to approach Social Media more strategically, it is essential that they bridge the internal gaps between Teams and responsibility silos in order to create an environment conducive to true Marketing Optimization. Without an integrated, holistic picture of performance encompassing all channels, true optimization may elude even the most strategic organizations.

The first step is to identify a measurement solution that can measure and analyze each channel’s performance and then quantify the relationships between channel performance. A tool like ours can help a company fully understand and quantify how a focused Social Media effort can affect organic search and the receptivity of the audience to the latest email campaign. We aren’t the only tool out there, but I think we might be the most comprehensive. Many organizations rely on monitoring tools yet, there scope is often limited to the measurement of conversation threads, share of voice, etc. We’ve found that reliance on these tools can sometimes strengthen rather than break down the walls that separate marketing teams.

Step two should be the creation of a cross-functional marketing group. Perhaps by taking the leader of each individual team, an organization could create a marketing “steering committee” whose members collectively share the responsibility for marketing’s big picture and report directly to the CMO. This group would share the CMO’s responsibility for the big picture and could be tasked with creating the type of cross-channel, long-term initiatives that can be difficult to create in a more delineated marketing structure.

How have your organizations bridged the marketing silos?

Image by Luke Olsen

Tags: marketing channel, Social Intelligence Engine, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Strategy
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