Archive for July, 2008

Social Media Questions

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

I have some questions on social “media” prompted by Mike’s post and in particular the comments the post received.

First, can we please agree that social applications and social media are different ideas that sometimes happen together?  I think creating this difference would dramatically help the social discussion along by focusing it and making sure people understand exactly what is being discussed in context.

Now, I suppose you could argue that the comments, pods, and so forth are “media”, to which I would ask, then what is your definition of Content?  You can’t have it both ways.  If Comments are Content, how about Social Content and Social Media as two different ideas?

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Posted in Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »

Free Mulch

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

So this over 50 foot long,  Y-shaped branch falls on our house and blows a hole through the roof (click pictures to enlarge).

Bottom of branch

For those of you not familiar with summer in Florida, this is a bigger deal than you might think.  First off, it rains hard almost every day.  A hole in your roof is a serious problem in terms of the potential for a lot of interior water damage.

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Posted in Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations | 2 Comments »

Chief Friction Officer

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Speaking of the Friction Model, I came across an article based heavily on work done by Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research reviewing the state of the Chief Customer Officer position.  You know how I feel about this idea; this CCO function should be performed by Marketing.

Why?  Because Marketing has the ability to measure, predict, and act on the Friction in the system which causes dis-Engagement.  Heck, lots of the time Marketing (examples) causes this Friction.

Here’s an interesting quote from the article:

“This job is about helping the rest of the company improve, not taking responsibility for the improvement,” Temkin said.  “At the end of the day, you still have to have an executive team responsible for running the business.  The only way to proceed is to get customer experience embedded into what they’re doing.”

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »

Friction Model

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

There’s been another eruption of discussion on Engagement.  If (like me) you’re more interested in the higher level ideas not so oriented towards the “tool” aspects of this discussion, make sure you catch this post and hefty comments.  For more, also here, here, and here.

Friction in Campaigns

At a high level, there really are 2 kinds of Engagement, and I think it would be helpful for us to start differentiating between them.

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »

Offline Path Analysis

Friday, July 11th, 2008

It’s always a treat to work with bright, committed people and I’m happy to say this was the case with the folks at the Oriental Institute.  These higher ed environments can be exceedingly complex from a Marketing perspective, and the OI is way up there on the complexity scale.  So much to do, so few resources to do it with.

That said, we came up with a crackerjack plan that should significantly boost paid Membership at the OI without additional time or money resources.  How?  Path Analysis.

Personally, I have never understood why many web analytics folks don’t care for Path Analysis; I can only surmise these folks are simply not doing it correctly.  For one thing, Paths don’t make any sense without the context of a behavioral segmentation – entry page, campaign, etc.  Just like any other web data, Path is useless without segmentation.  Or perhaps these folks don’t know how to interpret the data they see because they can’t survey a Path for the answers. 

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Marketing Research, Measuring Engagement | 2 Comments »

Off to the Oriental Institute

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Oriental Institute

I’ll be spending next week at the Oriental Institute in Chicago leading a good ‘ol Marketing Makeover featuring Database Marketing.  While non-profit environments can be challenging from a resource perspective, fortunately there are grants available to these Institutions, and very fortunately for me sometimes these grants can be used to increase Marketing Productivity.

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations | No Comments »