Creating Brand Awareness on the Internet

In my last post I promised one more rant before I shut down for the summer—a continuation of my long-term campaign against awareness as an objective, on the Internet in general and in social media in particular.

I wrote about the issue two years ago in the context of metrics. At the time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that if you want to measure the accomplishments of Internet marketing programs you need to set behavioral objectives and collect the behavioral data to measure them. That still seems a perfectly logical argument to me, but it doesn’t make my point explicitly enough.

What I’ve seen in the interim is two-fold. First, endless students who tell me they want to create awareness (of their brand, presumably) in social media or on the web in general. I keep pointing out that it requires marketing research to measure awareness and that takes time and money. If people do something—register for your site, sign up for a newsletter, become a fan of your Facebook page, whatever—they are aware, aren’t they? Ok, the awareness and the behavior can be almost simultaneous, but the behavior is a manifestation of awareness. Not only that, any of the actions I suggested—and many others I can think of—put the marketer in a position to communicate further with the customer/prospect. That’s what I meant in the last post when I said that attitudinal awareness objectives on the Internet simply constitute leaving cards on the table. I like that phrase; it captures the foolishness of the way many marketers still approach the Internet.

The second think I’ve seen is practitioners setting awareness objectives even though I think they understand the argument for behavioral objectives. Behavioral objectives imply measurement. They know that the necessary marketing research to measure awareness objectives is unlikely to be done, hence no measurement. That constitutes hiding behind awareness as a hard-to-measure objective.

Actually, there is a third issue. Most of us have grown up practicing and teaching traditional mass media. That is still the mind set of most marketers. More so older ones, but also younger ones who should know better.

The lack of understanding of the fallacy of awareness on the Internet often leads to a major strategic error. It especially shows up in something like “we want to create awareness in social media.” The question is how do you get people to your social pages in the first place? They have to be aware before they initially visit the page and sign up to be your fan. How do you create the level of awareness and interest that gets them to your page or to your website? Oops, we hadn’t thought about that! Actually, what they often have not thought about is that it’s going to require some money to make this happen.

Yes, there is such a thing as social sharing and it can create awareness. A recent study from ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest suggests that social sharing can create substantial referral traffic. How many of the referrals are to customers who previously had no contact with the brand? That doesn’t seem to be a question the study, based on the ShareThis database, can answer. Actually, I’d like to see the entire study because I don’t understand some of the explanation in the blog. However, their data seems to make it clear that sharing is not likely to create viral content and that people only share in one or two content categories in which they are particularly interested or expert. The latter is what we’ve known about WOM in the physical world for a long time; the more things change, the more they stay the same!

I’d like to encourage you to think about this issue by doing some reading and listening. First, the Bain online branding study “In Search of a Premium Alternative” in which they point out the predominance of direct response ads on the Internet and decry the lack of online advertising alternatives that break through the clutter. Then you need to listen to Randall Rothenberg’s introductory speech to the “Future of Display Advertising” conference last week. He builds on the Bain study and recent announcement of new “Rising Stars” ad formats, designed to allow more creativity and impact in the online branding effort.

But don’t leave it at that. Take a look at the 6 new formats on the IAB site. Look at how many options they give for viewer behavior—from watch a video to download a mobile app—and everything in between. Again, the point is to encourage viewers to take action—action that can be measured. No need for awareness objectives here!!!

Marketers Could---but Should They?

Marketers are faced with an overabundance of options for all types of strategic decisions. This is especially true of channels choices. By that, I’m mostly referring to communications channels, but the same principles may be true of e-commerce channels.

The current atmosphere reminds me of the mid-1990s when companies were waking up to the Internet and asking, “Should we have a website?” It quickly became, “We must have a website because everyone else does.” It was bad reasoning then; it’s bad reasoning now. Only now it’s, “We must have a Facebook page because everyone else does.”

Now every business or non-profit organization has a website. Many of them aren’t very good. They don’t fulfill the business mission and they don’t provide good customer experience. So sadly, before marketers have fully comprehended the issues of ‘traditional’ online marketing, they are faced with the explosion of social networks. And they are FREE! Clearly, we’ve got to do that!!!

I’ve been pointing out for quite some time that social media marketing is not free. It takes skilled people who are committing time to it. So nix the free argument.

We’re back to square one. There are a lot of channels to choose from. Marketers COULD use any or all of them. The real question is which ones they SHOULD use. And notice the consistent use of plural. You do not reach any target audience today with meaningful impact in a single channel. Multiple channels must be assumed.

That makes the real question how to choose the correct combination of channels to accomplish marketing and business objective. I’ll make my recommendations; your additions are solicited.

First, there is your target audience. We know the general outlines. Younger people are more likely to use social networks; older segments are slower to go online, but according to Pew, once they are there they eagerly search for information and engage in gaming, for example. It is important to remember that these are generalizations and the specifics of both demographics and use behavior can change from one product category to another.

Second, there is your position in the value chain. Are you a manufacturer? If so, is your Internet objective to support your retailers and distributors or it is to open another channel to reach customers directly? Are you a dealer or distributor who needs to communicate with and develop loyalty among B2B customers? Are you a small retailer who wants to participate in the frenzy of local marketing? In these cases, channels have been defined and the different channels imply vastly different marketing strategies.

Third, there are your specific marketing objectives. Do you want to sell things? Do you want to generate sales leads? Do you want to grow your social media followers—which is nice, but not enough. What is your PURPOSE (potential marketing uses) for having social media followers? This is about marketing effectiveness, not about bragging rights. Please don’t tell me you want to generate awareness. I’ve written about that before and plan to update my campaign against awareness objectives for Internet marketing soon. The Internet is about generating desired behaviors among targeted audiences. Leaving it at awareness is simply leaving cards on the table.See the video on the McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required)>

The pressing strategic issue is, “Which of the 4Ps comes first?” Ok, I’ll accept that you usually have to have an offering first. But then what? Does your choice of channels (multiple but integrated) determine the outlines of your promotion, including creative as well as the service and tech infrastructure you have to put into place? Take a look at the section of this Eric Schmidt video in which he talks about ‘designing for mobile first.’ He’s talking about disruptive business models, but it also has a strategic lesson for marketers.

As I write this, I realize that we marketers have a semantics problem that we must be clear about in order to make wise strategic channels choices. There are channels of distribution from the traditional Manufacturer > Wholesaler > Retailer to Manufacturer Direct via E-Commerce. Those are choices that, once made, are difficult to change for reasons of both infrastructure and relationships.

Then there are communications channels choices. There are a myriad of those from television ads to a Facebook page. Some of those can be specific to a particular marketing campaign—television advertising, for example. Others, like a Facebook page, need to be maintained once they are established, with involvement in marketing campaigns as required. The point is that the communications channels choices are more temporal than the distribution channels choices, although they have their own elements of stickiness.

My point is that the choice of communications channels sets the direction for a lot of the marketing work that must follow. What do you think?

Identifying and Measuring Social Media Behaviors - Part 1

One of my students just linked to Rick Liebling’s “Periodic Table of the Social Media Elements” post on our class blog. Thanks, Scott! That adds another perspective to Overdrive Marketing’s Social Media Map, Brian Solis's Conversation Tools, about which I've written before, and Robert Scoble’s Social Media Starfish, which I use in the social media course. They’re all useful to those of us trying to keep track of the social media landscape.

Look up periodic table in Wikipedia if you need to—I did. However, I was especially interested in the list of social media behaviors:

Sh = Share
Mt = Monitor
Fr = Friend
Cv = Converse
Cu = Customize
Li = Listen
En = Engage
Di = Dialogue

I tried to do the same thing recently with both a premise and a context in mind. The rather simple-minded premise is that marketers are using social media in order to get people to do something, either in the social medium itself or by driving them to the business’s website. I say that having seen the many studies that show that marketers believe they are using social media for branding purposes. I don’t deny the usefulness of social media in branding. However, the context is one in which there are multiple types of marketing/branding effort--both online and offline, both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 efforts.

Again, a simple-minded argument. Corporate (or non-profit) social media programs should be measured only in terms of behaviors that can be directly traced to the program. Using marketing research to try to tease out the effects of online/offline, 1.0/2.0 may be necessary from time to time at the corporate marketing level, but it makes no sense try to measure the branding effects of single social media efforts. It costs too much and by the time results become available the world has moved on.

That perspective makes it possible to separate behaviors that take place in the social ecosphere from those that take place after the person has reached the website. This is my list, similar to Rick Liebling’s, but not quite the same:

Behaviors in the social ecosphere:
Number of visits, impressions (eyeball measures)
Friends, fans, favs (followers of all kinds)
Install apps (widgets, etc.) offered
Click through to website
Comment/co-create
Attention/engagement
Pages: how much time spent, “heat maps” for content, etc.
Video: watched, partly/completely
Share content
Promote content (Digg, Reddit, etc.)
Number of incoming links

Behaviors on the website
Number of referrals from social media sites
Register for site services
Download—white papers, videos, podcasts, etc.
Rate products
Other content cocreation (photos, videos, written content, etc.)

All the behaviors on the website have the usual metrics problem of multiple visits and the necessity for behavioral tracking to determine, for each conversion, whether the initial referral was from a social media site. That takes some effort, but it’s actually much easier than it was in the world of mass media.

And that’s where I was going with all of this. I’ve been trying to organize the complexity of social media metrics into some sort of coherent framework for my students. I’ll share that effort with you tomorrow.

Whither the CMO?

One of the items that’s been sitting on my desktop for a couple of weeks is a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by Google. It’s entitled Future Tense: The Global CMO, and it represents the views of 263 CMOs from a survey in February 2008 (download the pdf from this page). A few days ago this report was joined by an interesting editorial in the WSJ that talked about the future that confronts the CMO. Put together they provide interesting guideposts for the path marketers need to be following.

When they asked marketers for the top three media most important to achieving their objectives, the response was 1) conferences and events 2) magazines 3) television. Online first shows up at number 6 and occupies positions 7 – 9.

When the question was changed to “in 12 month’s time” the change is stunning. Conferences/events remain in first place by a large margin. Television has moved up to second place! But look carefully; that’s because consumer/business magazines experienced a huge drop; trade magazines declined also. Newspapers continue to decline in perceived effectiveness. When you take that careful look, TV has declined in perceived effectiveness also—just less than their print brethren. Online content sites and search engine marketing experience huge increases in perceived important.

Think a year further on—what is this chart going to look like? More decline in traditional media? Probably. More increase in importance of online? Assuredly. If nothing else, the online media as less costly in shaky economic times. And, as we all know, online has a lot more to recommend it!

What are the marketing tools that support the shift in marketing? The WSJ lists five. I’ve changed the wording to make it more consistent with common usage and in the process reduced the number to 4:
1. From loyalty to attention. I’ve frequently pointed out that attention must be the first marketing objective in the new media world.
2. From audiences to community. Segmentation and audience targeting as we have always known it gets harder every day. The new media world demands communities whether they coalesce around brands, lifestyles, or ideas.
3. From advertising slogans (memes) to communications that people find worth sharing with others (bemes).
4. From siloed channels to integrated marketing. Channels—whether communication or ecommerce—must works together, not in the isolation of silos.

Each one of these, described in the article as Web 3.0 tools, represent a change in the way marketers think about and carry out their responsibilities. I'd stress that they aren’t tools for the future; they are requirements for marketing success today.

The CMO study has some important things to say about desirable marketing objectives in an age of globalization and consumer control. It’s also pretty clear that no one has a comprehensive model for changing the marketing organization to meet the new challenges and achieve the new objectives.

More about that tomorrow!

What Should Marketers Be Measuring?

Last week I missed a webinar conducted for Awareness Networks by Jerimiah Owyang of Forrester. He’s one of the most thoughtful observers of the social media scene, so I took some time over the weekend to catch up. (You can download both the webinar and slides from this page.) That also reminded me of a white paper from Coremetrics on measuring social media (download "Winning in a Web 2.0 World" from this page; they have a webinar by that title coming up soon) that’s been languishing in my files for too long. I thought I’d try to pull together some metrics issues from the two. They take quite different approaches.

Coremetrics focuses on Web 2.0 technologies, roughly divided into User-Generated Content and Rich Media. I’ve selected a few Coremetrics that are most relevant to the content of this blog. You can see the full list on pages 11 and 12 of their report.
Blogs are now considered “mainstream.” How do we know whether they are contributing to our program? First, traditional traffic measures, which are easy to obtain from the blog platforms or metrics programs. Who is adding content could help identify influentials. Since Coremetrics offers an integrated measurement platform, the paper discusses in some detail the issues of following visitors through multiple sessions in multiple media to achieve a conversion. That’s important, but more difficult than simple traffic measures. User reviews need similar measures of traffic and conversion paths. If you look carefully at the Social Networks entry, there are two issues here. One is traffic generated by social network sites/brand-related activity. That’s an entry metric that needs to be carefully filtered to understand traffic sources. The other is results of ads on social network sites which are generally best monitored by ad-specific landing pages.

This is helpful, but how does the marketer know where to start, which of the many techniques and channels to choose? Jerimiah Owyang gives a strategic overview.

His strategic objectives, which are pretty much in order based on a marketer learning curve are:
• Listening comes first. Spend some time hanging out where your customers hang and listen to what’s going on. Techniques of reputation management provide a formal programmatic approach. Tools include Google Alerts, blogs, discussion boards, Twitter and FriendFeed.
• Speaking comes next. We marketers are good at that. Just be sure you’re using traffic, audience and content measurement techniques to know what’s working.
• Energizing may be essentially the same as engaging your audience. Get them to use apps that deliver content and attract them to your site. Try spinning the wheel on Axiom’s PersoniX program site to see a B2B marketer engage potential customers. The easiest metrics are participation/interaction/click-through measures. Following what they do after the initial interaction is the subject of the Coremetrics whitepaper.
• Once you identify the activities your audience is interested in (not necessarily the same as the ones the marketer thinks they should be interested in), Support them. The recent post on the new Harley-Davidson social networking pages is a good example of support. Support also lends itself to traffic measures. Following those through to conversion requires more complex metrics.
• Then encourage them to contribute content, ideas, suggestions. Owyang calls this Embracing—draw your users into the community fold. Make them a part of the community. Give them a feeling of ownership by making them active participants. Traffic/participation measures are important here. Can you follow ideas/suggestions through to successful activities or products and measure the ROI from the activities or products?

On the surface these two approaches to metrics—technologies vs. objectives—look rather different. When you scratch below that surface, you see the same basic sets of metrics, which are essentially based on the techniques you use to achieve the objectives.

The take-away for marketers is not to be swayed by the siren song of technology. Good objectives always come first. Then choose technologies that:
1. Design marketing programs, using appropriate technologies, to achieve the chosen objectives
2. Provide measures of the degree to which objectives are being achieved.

Interesting that good marketing is the same, whichever channels are being used. Without good objectives, nothing else matters much.