Marketing Productivity Blog

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice has posted a cogent, well-supported argument on the business benefits of social applications.  Many of the themes will be familiar to readers of this blog, including the substantial cross-functional reduction of Friction that can take place when you have this kind of data, and some of the cultural issues surrounding adoption of the data-driven culture.

Here’s what I don’t get though.  Many of these goals could be accomplished though customer service analysis and other data the company already has.  In fact, you could argue in many cases, the data you get from internal sources would be better since you could work some of the bias out of it and correlate with actual behavior.

(more…)

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?

(more…)

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. 

(more…)

I’ve spoken in the past about our local CBS affiliate WTSP-10 and their Moms Tampa Bay effort as a great example of “old media” that gets Social and has created something quite powerful using that ‘ol stick of theirs.

WTSP’s 6 PM newscast now features “news pics” sent in by viewers in almost every show.  They headline the story, run through the video they have, and on the way out, the anchor says,

“Here’s some pictures of the scene sent in by our viewers”.

Nice effort to be more interactive.  If I was going to Optimize it, I’d like to see it a bit more personalization, which increases the prep time, of course.  But it would be nice to hear the anchor say “Jody in Seminole sent us this picture” or something similar. 

(more…)

So, we had some good ”translation” discussions on the HSN Marketing process document, and the idea that there are a couple of ways to look at “Segments”. 

It’s my belief that if you start with Communication Segments (an idea we finally arrived at with the HSN Optimization in 1993) and then move to Visitor or Customer Segments, you will end up with a clearer, more actionable picture in the end. 

If each Band has a single Objective, and you Optimize to this single Objective, you will end up Optimizing the entire system because Visitors / Customers naturally flow down through the Bands as they pass through the LifeCycle.

There’s really no concrete benefit, on either side, to send the same message to all the folks in these different Bands.  That approach is inefficient at the least and irritating to the customer at the most!

(more…)