Understanding the Business Value of Social Media Marketing

Last week David Carter, Founder and CTO of Awareness, provided insights about how the field of social media marketing is maturing. We are a long way from completely understanding the business results for social media efforts and an even longer way from fully integrating them into a single-source set of marketing metrics. But real progress is being made in understanding and communicating business outcomes.

Awareness has a new ebook, with the lengthy but descriptive title “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” That is, after all, what we as marketers want to do, and we have to link our efforts to actual revenue generation, not just to having a bunch of people who like us! This is the funnel; the entire book is well worth reading. Note that they start with what is essentially segmentation. Their definition of a social profile is the “aggregated interests, comments, and overall behaviors of a fan, follower, or RSS subscriber to a branded social network platform such as a brand’s Facebook fan page, Twitter profile, or blog.” The definition alone is challenging; it requires a full view of the person’s behaviors in social channels which is a big order for the social media metrics capabilities of most firms at this point. However, in order to influence, the marketer must first listen to what the customer is saying. That’s a keystone of SMM strategy.
Next, the marketer must have clear goals that impact the business. Those can range from qualifying and nurturing sales leads to providing excellent customer service and more. Then there are a variety of engagement strategies that marketers can use including engaging in conversation and collecting feedback. Most marketers will find that they need to use all these engagement strategies at one time or another. Which they use will depend as much on the stage of the customer’s relationship with the firm (customer lifecycle) as on the marketing campaign or on the product. This all fits nicely with the organization of Awareness’s social media hub software—publish, manage, measure and engage.

In his presentation he talked about these stages:
• The first is a robust content marketing strategy, deploying (and “repurposing”) your content widely across the web. A large firm will need a robust content management system to both facilitate and control the content marketing process.
• It is essential that the marketer first listen, then engage in the conversation the customer wants to have—not the product-oriented conversation the marketer wants.
• Collecting feedback required monitoring and, carefully done, leads to the social profile.
• Then measure results that can be linked to business outcomes.
The presentation represents reflections on the state of our art from a respected practitioner. Take a look.

My Slides from speaking to Harvard's Social Media Marketing class

View more presentations from Awareness Inc.

In it he asks the question that all marketers must keep asking themselves—for their corporate SMM strategy as a whole and for each campaign they run: what stage of the customer lifecycle do we need to impact? If you buy my argument that all SMM is lead generation, then the practical question becomes “what is the definition of ‘conversion’ for this particular SMM activity?” Is it a fan for our Facebook page, a qualified lead for our sales force—what exactly? Can we link it directly or indirectly to our SMM activities? Those two questions help focus the mind of the social media marketer.

It also leads me to my favorite quote from the ebook. Jeremiah Owyang says, “Don’t give engagement data to executives, as it doesn’t measure the actual effect on business goals.” Ouch; I wonder how many of us have made that mistake.

Social media marketing is moving in the direction of proving its actual business value. It has a way to go, however, and all of us should play an active role in moving it forward.

Developing a Metric for Engagement

For several years the topic of measuring engagement has been important to marketers and still is, according to the recent study quoted in eMarketer (newsletter, January 26, 2010). The most desirable metrics can be interpreted as engagement—with your website or with your ads. As the chart suggests, the state of the art is still single metrics. Here’s another example that's interesting both for content and for metrics; the level of engagement with social media in various countries by comScore late last year. They use time on site and number of pages as the key—and separate—metrics. It seems to me there’s a need for a multivariate measure of engagement. I’ve looked around and have found two different approaches.

Business Week has taken a variety of steps to increase engagement with its readers, including hiring an engagement editor. Here’s an interesting summary of what they have done; I don’t find an update so far in 2010. Most germane to my point, they have developed a proprietary User Engagement Index. Here’s how they describe it:

We developed a proprietary set of metrics to help us both track, and make us accountable for, our goal of being the business and financial site with the deepest and most meaningful engagement of its users. The index is the ratio of our outputs to the world (the stories and blog posts we publish) to the world's inputs to us (perspectives on stories and blog posts from readers as well as their guest columns.)

It makes sense to me and it is an approach any business could sit down, think about, and adapt to its own product category and situation.

If you want a ready-made solution, I found that also. Dutch metrics supplier Nedstat has an engagement solution that’s based on basic website metrics. Web Metrics Demystified recently did a good post, which included this graphic. There are two basic components to the Nedstat approach. First, the user develops her own engagement algorithm; that follows the Business Week example. Engagement is not the same for every product category, every website. Perhaps even more important, it’s going to differ on the basis of your own communications strategy—what you are doing to try to encourage customer engagement.
Second, Nedstat has a solution they call Live Segmentation that allows you to choose a customer segment and calculate the engagement index for that segment. Both the engagement algorithm and the segmentation choice are said to be easily varied as the marketer considers better metrics or strategy options. Aurelie Pols’ post rightly points out that you can do this with traditional web metrics, but it may be easier to work with a metrics company that can guide you through the process.

What it comes down to is interesting. If you are serious about measuring engagement, you need to construct your own multivariate metric. You can DIY or you can engage a consultancy. Either way, it’s going to take some thinking, some work.

Another object lesson reinforcing the fact that none of this is easy!

Engaging With Customers

So far we’ve talked about how to listen to our customers and how (and whether) to respond. The next step I suggested in an abbreviated strategy development process is to engage. This is hardly a new subject; I found some good case examples not long ago.

Since I believe it’s important to have a common understanding of what we’re talking about, I searched “definition of customer engagement.” I got 150,000 hits, pretty much what I was expecting. The Advertising Research Foundation’s 2006 definition is widely accepted; here is a good article with an elaboration of the definition. The common thread in the subset of the 150,000 definitions I read is that we want to encourage interaction with our customers—real give and take that adds value to the customer’s brand-related experience.

A recent publication from Alterian quotes some statistics. Note particularly the second one. Customer service experts have long known that resolving a problem for a customer can make that person more loyal than the person who has never experienced a problem. It also supports my hypothesis that the customer experience concept--if it did not grow out of what we know about customer service management--is at least a first cousin. Contemplate the steps recommended by the Opinion Research Corporation. They say the goal is a differentiated customer experience. The strategic questions are:

1. How well do our employees deliver on our brand promise?
2. What are our customer’s expectations of experiences with our organization?
3. What is the gap between our brand promise and the customer experience/customer expectations?
4. How consistent is the delivery of our brand promise across all channels of customer interaction?
5. What are we doing to deliver a differentiated experience from that of our competition, and/or in comparison to other non-competitive organizations?
6. How is all of this information utilized by our organization to close the gap between the promise and the experience to ultimately enhance the overall customer experience?

The focus on brand promise is the unifying theme—the one marketers want to embed in all communications channels, at all customer touchpoints. While this makes sense to me, it’s more operations focused than interaction focused. Getting customers to interact with us seems to be the goal; it’s not enough that they just go away satisfied.

Let me give you two quick examples. I went shopping over the weekend. I had a few staples to pick up at Macy’s; of course that led to browsing other departments and, of course, that led to buying some stuff that I only needed marginally, if at all. But I was having fun. Sales associates were being nice to me; two of them stretched the definition of “red” to give me the discount for the “Go Red” AHA promotion (note more cause-related marketing here). One associate wrote her name on the register receipt and encouraged me to evaluate my experience. I got good service everywhere I went, so I did write a review when I got home. I thought that would be the end of it, but a couple of days later I got a thank-you email from Macy’s. It’s nice to be thanked and I was interested to see my review was being forwarded to the local store. Too bad they had to spoil it with a lame subject line! But overall good try.
The second is what’s becoming the ubiquitous video contest. This one does seem to tie in well with the brand promise. You probably know Flo, the terminally perky sales rep who sells insurance “packages” for Progressive on TV. Now, apparently, Flo needs help! You can send in a video in a contest for a live tryout, presumably for a lucrative ad contract. You can watch the “tryouts” but I don’t see that viewers get a vote. They certainly are encouraged to “share.” Progressive is clearly serious about it; there have been two days of tryouts in New York already and they are taking the road show to Miami next week. The program, of course, has a Facebook page and is being promoted by Tweets from the Progressive account. As I said, these contests are becoming ubiquitous, but when the campaign needs refreshing can you think of anything better???

Macy’s tried, and I did appreciate being thanked. However, there was no real encouragement to try to get me to interact further. I do expect to get more emails though! Progressive will probably come up with another cute spokesperson—is “young” part of the strategy, I wonder? And what will they do to ensure that all the contestants go away happy, if not richer? And will they use the entries to build any kind of relationship? Keep an eye out.

And if you ever believed in “build it and they will come” forget that now. It all takes persistent effort. That’s what builds a social media strategy!

Digital Moms on the Move

Every so often I get energized to write a post on moms on the web. I’ve done Mommy bloggers—who they are, how to reach them, and the importance of transparency. The latter was before the FTC proposed regulations and guidelines.

Moms have always been purchasing agents for their households; now they have digital tools to do it. The chart from the Razorfish/Café Mom study shows the digital channels moms use, categorized by mainstream channels used by over 50% of moms, mainstream used by about 1/3 of them, and emerging used by less than 25%. eMarketer adds to this picture by pointing out that moms are using their smartphones to do things like searching for recipes online. Think of the opportunities for reaching them in the course of such activities, but also note that the best way is not advertising in many channels, especially mobile. The second chart suggests that ads on social nets get a rather small amount of attention and even less action. Awareness? Maybe.


What made the subject top of mind was a headline in Marketing Charts a couple of days ago: “Retailers Can Lure Moms with Social Media, Free Stuff.” That’s not exactly a surprise, but the chart on what promotions moms find most influential is interesting. It’s also interesting that moms are more influenced by everything than are adults in general—the purchasing agent effect in operation. What interests me even more when I look at this chart is the ways in which marketers can reach moms with the promos they care about. Just a few examples:

• Notify moms of Product Samples In-store on their social networks (message your fans, advertise to others) and by reaching out to the ecosphere of mommy bloggers
Actually, that advice hold true for most of the items on this list.
• Use the database from Store Loyalty Cards to reach moms with permission email and mobile coupons based on behavioral data.
• In-Store Events and Parking Lot Events can be Tweeted to build excitement and momentum.

Think about it: what promotional techniques should you be using? How can you notify moms that they are available?

Ponder this quote from the RAMA study that produced the promotion data:

“Retailers who aren’t engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat,” said Mike Gatti, Executive Director for RAMA. “Twitter, Facebook and blogs are becoming increasingly popular with moms as they search for coupons or deals and keep in touch with loved ones. The web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones.”

He’s being tactful! Unless your women customers are all over 80, you need to be actively pursuing social media strategies—listening and engaging, not advertising. Otherwise, the boat goes without you!

Social Media Readies for Super Bowl 2010

Social media efforts for Super Bowl XLIV are already in full swing. It’s not news to advertisers that there’s lead time for all marketing programs. But there’s a difference in traditional ad planning and execution from social media planning and execution; you have to start earlier in social media if you want customer engagement and participation leading up to the big day.

This chart shows the online viewing of ads, which totaled more views than people watching the game live according to Ad Age (subscription required). The impact of social is interesting as is the difference between industry segments. In case you missed the article here are Ad Age’s recommendations for getting maximum benefit from your Super Bowl ads (assuming you’re planning to spend the $2.5 to 2.8 mil necessary to run one):

• Capitalize on pregame buzz
• Build virality into your creative
• Buy smart search terms
• Think real time
• Don't forget the call to action

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that all of this is aimed at leveraging the impact of a 30-second ad—and that most of it involves social media. The real-time issue I find the most fascinating. Listen to Ad Age:

Gone are the days when a CMO can enjoy an uninterrupted game in the network's luxury box. Today smart marketers will be talking on Twitter, tweaking search campaigns and leaving no rock unturned in their quest to drive impressions. Like E-Trade's baby, the star of H&R Block's spot, Tax Guy Murray, turned up on Twitter and actively reached out to people talking about the ad or taxes -- during the game. "My prediction is this year you'll have armies of marketers fanning the flames of their ads on Twitter," said Pete Blackshaw, exec VP, Nielsen Digital Strategic Services. "'Did you like it? Check out this link. Thanks so much for the high five.'

Oh, those poor CMOs!

One big piece of news is that Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl this year. They are concentrating their money in social media—in a cause-related program that’s almost guaranteed to generate engagement. Augie Ray has interesting commentary on the Forrester blog with good background links. The upshot of it is that Pepsi is spending $20 million on a program to support community-level projects. They are accepting proposals each month during 2010, starting January 13, 2010. Take a look at the top and bottom sections of the project home page. Have they forgotten anything for either project sponsors or the general public which is to vote on submissions?

They’ve also got some interesting things going on. One is that each category has an “ambassador,” one of whose roles seems to be to support applicants in that category. Some are also blogging; I’ll bet all of them will before it’s over.

The other is that there was a lot of buzz last week about initial glitches in the submissions. Apparently some people had problems submitting and others didn’t get a confirmation. Pepsi’s response is a textbook example of community monitoring and response. TechCrunch was quite critical, even though the Facebook page captures they published showed that Pepsi was all over the problem on the 13th, the day the site went live. Even better, go to their Facebook page. The last entry as of this writing is Jan. 15 and at the moment it has 86 comments. Read through them. Some applicants are still having problems, some are seeing their submissions going in properly. Applicants are talking to one another. Pepsi is talking to them. Pepsi is confirming some submissions directly to the Facebook commenter; they are promising to get back to others. They are listening—and responding! I’m not sure it gets any better and the applicants seem to be pretty happy and accepting of the fact that technology, especially in the beginning, can go awry. What’s important is that the marketer pays attention and fixes it, keeping users informed along the way!

Let’s revisit the initial premises. One is that you either do traditional broadcast advertising or you do social media. Wrong. You waste your money on traditional broadcast in this rarefied environment unless you do effective lead-up and post-game work. A lot of that is online and much of it may be social. It’s not one or the other.

The other is that a wise social media investment may pay greater long-run dividends than even a blockbuster Super Bowl ad. That remains to be seen. But stay tuned throughout 2010 to see how Refresh Everything goes. It’s certainly been exciting so far!

Threadless--Marketing Success through Community

Isn’t it what we’d all like to achieve—having our customers do the work for us? We all know it’s not that easy, but t-shirt site Threadless has built a community that powers both product development and sales. Read about it in Chief Marketer’s new e-magazine.

It’s another of those edgy sites that got started almost by accident. They made a lot of mistakes in the early days, when it was described as a “crowdsourcing” model. Today they are careful to describe it as a “community” model, pointing out that crowdsourcing implies a random group of individuals while a community has to be carefully nurtured.

Threadless does that on its own site








on Facebook; this is the New Tees! page












on Twitter.


There are two things you notice immediately.

Ecommerce. Threadless is selling t-shirts on both Facebook and Twitter. Did you know you could do that? Facebook has a Marketplace although you pretty much have to know it exists in order to be able to find it. (Why doesn’t Facebook work on its navigation structure???), Steven Walling of ReadWriteWeb tried the Twitter version and he has issues with it—worth reading!

Privacy. Once again, there is none! I didn’t go as far as Steve Walling did on Twitter, but I did click on the box to find out what was required to sign in on Twitter. What I found was a box requesting permission for Twitter Tees to access my Twitter account. I don’t do that (at least I thought I didn’t). The permission box says you can revoke the permission by going to your Settings page. I looked at my Settings page; there are two apps there that I apparently have given permission to, neither of which I remembered—scary!

On Facebook I found two interesting issues. The more perplexing one is that I was on the New Tees! page yesterday. Today, when I went on again, I found a comment box with my account picture beside it beside every product; and no, I didn’t give either Facebook or Threadless any permissions. When I went to the Marketplace page I found a row of pictures across the bottom—Facebook friends of mine from around the world who are using Facebook Marketplace. They are all connected to me, so I guess that’s ok. I do have a bit of a problem with the fact that they captured my visit and, in effect, reported it publicly. However, I choose not to be upset; it’s what you should expect on Facebook.

So we are left with two questions; does Twitter offer the opportunity to create a stable e-commerce platform. You’ll have to stay tuned on that one. Second, are you comfortable—more important, will your customers be comfortable—with Facebook’s stated policy of linking everyone to everyone and everything? It goes back to my oft-repeated warning to be careful what you do and what you expect your customers to do.

Threadless has made a great business with their community-based model. I’d be willing to bet that their Facebook and Twitter sales account for only a small part of their total revenue. Customer engagement and customer acquisition are fundamental on the network platforms and sales are a by-product. That seems to describe the scene at present; it could change over time.

What should clearly grow, however, is the importance and value of a vibrant customer community. Cam Balzer said in Forbes recently:

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

Amen to that—whichever platform you are talking about!

The Power of Customer Reviews

The e-tailing group and Power Reviews did an interesting study that was published in September—something else that has been sitting around on my desktop. An article in Ad Age (subscription may be required) on small marketers who were successfully using reviews to get their products noticed motivated me to get the report out and look at it again.

Here’s some of the data from the 117 retailers interviewed. They respondents were distributed over large and small firms and their perceptions are interesting. Here are some of the primary ones:


Retailers are most concerned that people will trash their products; don’t have much faith in their own business, do they? It’s interesting though that, when you combine Rank 1 and Rank 2, just about as many are concerned that customers will leave their site for a more socially engaging one. Even more are concerned that they are using outmoded marketing and merchandising techniques. Hear, hear!

Of course retailers want to sell things! But, according to these data, they also want to engage their customers, drive brand loyalty, and stimulate word of mouth. Those all make sense. They also point out that social media isn’t an immediate solution to any marketing issue. It is an investment of time and energy that pays off over time.

Which of the social media efforts are most effective, in increasing sales? Reviews; nothing else comes close. All retailers should ask themselves what they are doing to provide an opportunity for customers to review their products and experiences. What are they doing to encourage customers to provide those reviews?


Which of the social media efforts are most effective in mobilizing advocates and spreading the word about their brand? Facebook! Reviews are at the bottom of the list and Twitter is next to the bottom. People do say that reviews influence their purchases; is that not spreading the word? I hope these retailers were paying attention to this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday Twitter efforts. The good news is that Twitter can have an immediate impact on sales. The bad news is that it takes time and effort to build a base of Twitter followers that permits impactful marketing. Bear in mind that it takes time and effort to build a following of Facebook friends also!

The Ad Age article gives examples of issues. Let me briefly tell the story:

• Shane Faerber is an individual developer who wrote an app, Mall Maps, for the competitive iPhone applications space (over 80,000 of them the last time I looked).
• When the app was launched he wrote the first review—with complete transparency. He said he was the developer, provided a video and invited feedback. He even put his email address in the app itself.
• He reached out to professional reviewers and media outlets, getting some positive notice and a ranking of 26 (out of about 18,000) in his category.
• Apple paid attention and on Tuesday before Black Friday named the Mall Maps a must-have. By Wednesday it had moved up to number 1 in its category. It was originally priced at $2.99. Today it’s on sale for $1.99 but I don’t see a current downloads stat.

Great as the success of the app is, that’s not what I found most impressive. Here’s the quote from Ad Age:

along the way, Mr. Faerber's hand turned a handful of dissatisfied customers into positive endorsers. One customer, whose initial review started with the opener: "SO FAR STINKS!" eventually wrote that he was "impressed with your customer service" and wished Mr. Faerber "the best of luck" after a series of e-mail exchanges with the developer.

What works?
• Reaching out to potential customers.
• Reaching out to the media, especially the online media for an online product.
• LISTENING to your customers. Even more, ENCOURAGING THEIR FEEDBACK!

Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; here's the microsite. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.
How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 Conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.
Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. What do you suppose they have on tap for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Stay tuned!

A Community Manager Dishes

I’ve written about community monitoring several times because it’s key to successful online community. I was interested a couple of weeks ago in a Matt Rhodes Tweet about interviews Fresh Networks had conducted with Shirley Bradley, the community manager at Business Week. The first part of the interview has a lot to say about community management in general; the second is about community management in a publisher setting.

She describes her role as “efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.” Some of her specific duties are:
• Managing customer engagement; see the links in part 1 for the many activities involved. One important activity is to solicit reader involvement. In part 2 she talks more about the “crowdsourcing” techniques they use.
• Included in customer engagement is the monitoring of reader comments. Each editor also monitors his/her own blog. Monitoring is one way of gauging reader sentiment. It also includes removing comments that do not meet community guidelines.

Crowdsourcing is not my favorite term; it seems to smack of an unruly mob running amok. In spite of that, I wanted to see what they were doing, so I went to the CrowdSourcing page. You may have to go there yourself to read the explanation at the top of the page; the relevant phrase is “using large, distributed and minimally directed groups to accomplish tasks.” Ok. While you are there, note that there’s a Featured User—nice pr—and a block of Tweets on this topic (the main filter appears to be the term “crowdsourcing”). Well done!
















When you look further you find that Crowdsourcing is a page on their Business Exchange site (a community site powered by Ning, as far as I can tell). According to the site, “Business Exchange is a Web site that allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.” It has a mind-blowing number of topics (I checked on “Social Marketing,” surprise, surprise!). I registered using my LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure what that adds; it would have been just as easy to fill out the form. However, I may find that I signed up for something else on LinkedIn! Registered users can save content, create a network, and suggest topics as well as simply adding content.

The main take-away is that there’s a lot going on in Business Week’s social space. It’s probably not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a media vehicle that wants to survive in the changing media world. (On that subject, check out the website for Gourmet magazine before it goes away. The home page clearly focuses on content from their writers and editors. There are discussion forums, but there seems to be no serious effort to bring readers into the editorial process.)

Social media is undoubtedly not the silver bullet for survival for magazines, or any other media, for that matter. The more interesting question is whether a given vehicle can survive without enthusiastic reader participation.

While you’re mulling that question, you can learn a lot about community management (note it’s more than monitoring; see a great post by Dion Hinchcliffe) by reading the interviews with Shirley Bradley. Then stay tuned for my next post. I’ve discovered an interesting new community where content creation and monitoring takes on a whole new meaning—and potentially a whole new series of challenges!

Social Media Super Bowl Countdown - The NFL

It’s not surprising that the NFL is taking the opportunity to promote itself on the Big Game! And since it owes its success to loyal football fans, bringing them into the process of selecting the NFL ad, as they have done for the last 2 years, seems entirely reasonable. They call that their Super Ad. This year they’ve added a Super Fan ad contest to the mix.
I checked the NFL ad site today (for the first time; I’m not a follower) and found that the voting was closed and both were being turned into the actual ads for airing on the Super Bowl (the lead time issue I talked about last week). The Super Fan, the “how I see it” ad is being sponsored by Samsung. I don’t see any sponsorship of the NFL’s own ad, which makes sense.
If you’re really at a loss for something to do this weekend, you can see all the videos on each part of the site, one for each of the NFL teams and it looks like maybe 75 videos for the “fan story.” That page opened on a guy with a viking helmet and a purple face shouting about something. That did it for me; who watches all of these???

Or if you want another use of your time between now and the Super Bowl, Ad Age has running coverage organized for you; that’s a nice way to make something easy for readers and goodness only knows there’s plenty of coverage to archive.

The NFL or any other business depends on its customers. Engaging them, bringing them into the process, makes sense. The NFL seems to like the results, having gone from one social media effort in 2007 and 2008 to two such efforts in 2009. Like Doritos, have they figured something out?

Drivers of Consumer Engagement

Yesterday I wrote about engagement—what it is and why it is important. The key take-away is that the combination of consumer and employee engagement improves bottom-line performance. I’ll concentrate on the consumer side and ask, “How do we go about producing consumer engagement?”

A superficial answer is that the new social media are interactive and engaging. That’s true, but it doesn’t provide guidance for marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just add some videos or start a company blog without having clear goals in mind and strategies for getting there. So the real question seems to be, “How do we get consumers to engage with our brand?” The chart from a recent Jupiter Research report distinguishes between interaction-based and communications-based engagement techniques and asks which ones marketers are using. That’s an interesting perspective, but it doesn’t address the strategy issue. Notice that their sample is “social marketers;” usage of these techniques is not this high among all marketers.

Last month I wrote about a CMO study of consumer experience with leading brands across several communications channels. That study focuses on the role of consistent, integrated content delivery across all channels—communications engagement in Jupiter terms. The most important part of the report (download here) may be the latter pages in which they give the items on which they rate the brand performance in each channel. Those items suggest performance benchmarks. However, that still doesn’t necessarily guide marketers in search of their own strategy, particularly which elements of social media will produce the most useful kind of engagement.

A study in 2006 by Carat for IAB in the UK is helpful. It focuses on mothers with small children choosing among several small car brands. The research on their information sources and decision processes summarized in this chart is pretty standard—multiple items (in this case “contact points”) factored into several engagement factors. Assuming typical marketing research, those factors have a significant impact on engagement with the brand. I’m not clear, though, how they measured brand engagement. There is an interesting Guide on this page, along with a series of brand engagement studies including this one, but I haven’t found the specific metric for engagement. I’m accepting it because they seem to be using “brand engagement” consistently, and I'm sure they must have defined it somewhere, perhaps in the IAB member content.

This kind of study (and they find the drivers to be different from one industry to another) illuminates the strategy development process. If the marketer knows the criteria (the factors, in this case) on which the consumer makes decisions, she can work to move the needle on one or more important factors. In this case, style is most important. Which experiential/ engagement techniques will move the needle on style? Video, perhaps? A customize your car, in this case around the needs of your children and resulting lifestyle? Fun is the second most important factor. How do you allow female customers to participate, even help to create, the “fun” part of the car experience? And since they want a feminine car, how do you deliver this to women and not to men?

I keep thinking that there is so much that marketers COULD do in the arena of social media. The strategy question is, “What SHOULD we do?” There is no one-size-fits all answer—this view of engagement makes that clear!

The Meaning and Importance of Engagement

A few days ago I thought I’d do a quick search to find out how we marketers are defining and measuring engagement. It had been awhile since I checked this out and I assumed there would be greater unanimity about what we mean. The IAB has a working group considering related issues, but I didn’t find any public information, so I went looking. I came up with enough for several posts!

Along the way I ran across a relatively new firm that specializes in what Allegiance calls Enterprise Feedback Management. Its Engage Platform facilitates measurement of both customer and employee engagement as a driver of business results. We all know that happy, motivated (read that “engaged”) employees deliver better customer service and create happier customers, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that customer loyalty and employee loyalty are two sides of the same coin.

So with that perspective in mind, what is engagement? We don’t have a commonly-accepted definition yet. Some of the popular definitions are oriented to the impact on the brand, others to how we actually measure engagement. I’ll look at branding issues in this post and metrics in a follow-up.

Let’s start with the idea that it’s more than loyalty. We all know that many satisfied customers defect. I asked a group of students last week how many were “for sale” to better offers from marketers. Almost all of us are. So, as the caption of the graphic indicates, we need to go beyond satisfaction in our effort to prevent defections. Here’s Allegiance’s definition of engagement:

Allegiance considers engagement the emotional bond or attachment that a customer develops during the repeated and ongoing interactions accumulated as a satisfied, loyal and influencing customer.

Peppers and Rogers add that all definitions of engagement have three basic components; intellectual, behavioral and emotional. That’s the basic components of attitude in sociological theory, which tells us something about the concept of engagement. (You can download both Allegiance’s Discover Engagement and Peppers and Rogers Engagement, The New Competitive Advantage papers here.)

The thrust of the Peppers and Rogers paper is that engagement can and should be measured. Their engagement chain concept shows the major drives of engagement for both customers and employees. The drivers are measurable and the paper notes they can be divided into engaged, swing and disengaged customers. They don’t say so, but it seems most efficient to target swing customers in an attempt to increase their level of engagement.

Is it worth the effort? This chart says that it emphatically is. Performance is significantly better on a variety of financial metrics measured over various business units in 10 different companies when customers are engaged. Little surprise there! Similar outcomes for engaged employees are reported on page 4 of the report. Firms with both customers and employees who are engaged are roughly “twice as effective financially” as those who excel on only one type of engagement (page 5), so the combination is potent.

One thing that strikes me is that this is the update to the Bain loyalty studies that made such an impact on marketers in the 90s. Those studies helped realize the importance of customer loyalty and retention marketing programs. Even then we recognized that loyal customers recommended, referred and, in general, were advocates for the brand.

We have now invented the term “engagement” to help explain what happens beyond loyalty. I’ll come back to how to create engagement and more on engagement metrics in days to follow—stay engaged!