Testing To Make IM Fast and Simple

I’ve pointed out that testing is a time-honored direct marketing technique that has taken on greater capabilities on the Internet. Several important items have drifted into my inbox over the past couple of weeks and I’d like to bring them together. Marketers need to be testing and there are an increasing number of services to help them deal with the complexities of doing reliable tests.

Many of you are familiar with the work of Avinash Kaushik, his blog and his book on Internet metrics. Recently he was interviewed by Brian Eisenberg of FutureNow and Grok.com, who has just written a book on testing. It’s a 30-minute interview (access from this page) but worth playing in the background while you read your mail.

Let me give you a brief overview. Kaushik emphasizes how fast the web moves and how flexible marketers have to be to keep up with it. The weeks and months it took to read the old direct mail tests just don’t cut it on the web. What the marketer needs to be able to do is:

• Encourage a flow of ideas and validate the good ones
• Lower the risk of making marketing decisions
• Do it in a way that’s fast and simple.

Testing is the key first step. Success comes from superb execution.

My last post on testing generated two comments that contribute to the discussion. They are from two marketing services firms that appear to serve different market segments with testing products. Both commenters basically agree that Google Website Optimizer may be a good way to get started in testing, but it doesn’t produce results that have a high level of statistical confidence.

Widemile is a service that targets agencies needing testing services for their clients. A lot of firms/a lot of agencies don’t have the in-house expertise. They need services and Widemile concentrates on the optimization of landing pages. They have a brief demo; check it out. Billy Shih has an informative blog that focuses on testing.


SiteSpec appears to serve clients directly with testing services that include A/B splits and multivariate tests. It has an interesting platform, well explained in a demo. There’s also a video on their home page.

Testing is important, but most of us need help. That includes knowing the right questions to ask and the kind of results to demand. Here are some good resources to help you upgrade your own knowledge about this key avenue to Internet marketing success.

Creative Strategy for Rich Media

DoubleClick was one of the first ad serving agencies and now offers a broad range of services to marketers. Because of the ad serving activity they have a lot of data and they’ve used it to provide many useful reports. I recently came across their “Creative Insights for Rich Media” report, which can be found on their Research Reports page (under the Insights and Innovations tab).

I was especially interested in the video formats although the report contains data on standard ad formats, with and without video. Here’s a table that summarizes the data related to video.

Video Formats In-Page Expanding Video Expanding Non-Video In-Page Video	Click-Through Rate	Larger creative sizes give higher click-through rates
	Interaction Rate	In-page and larger creative sizes give higher interaction rate
	Interaction Time	Format plays little role in interaction time (content is key)
	Expansion Rate	Video formats produce higher expansion rates than non-video ads
	Video Complete Rate	More videos are completed in expanding formats; even more in the in-page format. Fewer auto-play videos are completed than are user-initiated videos

The report concludes with two recommendations, both of which sound like no-brainers.

1. The marketer must know the definitions and methodology behind the metrics she is using. We all know CTR; the definitions of the interactive metrics are more complex. Those definitions are detailed on page 13 of the report.
2. "Only compare and contrast data that comes from the same system and that adheres to the same methodology." That sounds pretty straightforward also--right? For example, it's all DoubleClick data; isn't it comparable. No. They point out that they've updated some of the computations of some of their metrics recently--and other producers of metrics do the same. The marketer has to be vigilant, even when tracking the same metrics over time.
   

As I read the report, I remembered that MSN.com used to have a really explanation of rich media formats, including video, on their advertising page. So I went there to look for it. On the way I got sidetracked.

I saw the ABC ad on the MSN home page and decided to "Visit ABC.com."

There's lots of media on the ABC.com site; that's no surprise. Actually, I was most interested in the banner at the top showing Bill Gates. It invited me to "rollover" and I did.

That opened a page at Microsoft; apparently a new marketing program, "A PC is not a stereotype," whatever that means. It's some interactive "advertainment"--you can see who's a pc, or in the other tab you can see what you'd look like in various advertising venues--Times Square, for example.

Quite a few people have uploaded pictures to play their game. I expanded Steve Ballmer's picture. I love it when CEOs participate!

By that time I was tired, and the post is getting too long anyway. MSN has improved their rich media formats page since I was last there and they have an excellent creative gallery. Check them out for yourself. And think about the power of these new media!

DIY Webcasting

Outreach to bloggers continues! Last week I received an email from the PR firm for webcasting firm BrightTalk. It just launched a Web 2.0 platform that makes webcasting a more interactive activity with continuity that is missing from the typical webcasting activity. According to their website, “brighttalk.com is our simple to use live audio webcast platform, built using web 2.0 principles, where business professionals can create and view webcasts through BrightTALK™ Channels.” This platform adds to their existing Conferences and Webcasting product lines.

In my experience, webcasts are essentially stand-alone entities. You do a webcast, publicize it in many ways, and essentially use it as lead generation, for your products, and for future webcasts. I think most B2B marketers who’ve used them regard them as a valuable lead generation and customer support tool. That said, they can get pretty expensive.

The BrightTALK platform offers a couple of interesting alternatives to the traditional webcasting platform. First is the free starter channel. There are other free offerings; for example webcasts can be hosted on YouTube. However, the BrightTALK platform offers a more comprehensive marketing solution. You can make your webcasts as simply as developing and narrating slides, which you can do on other platforms also. BrightTalk promotes your webcasts in addition to your own advertising and promotion. The webcast is hosted and archived and participants who come directly from the presenter’s own website or by direct link from presenter promotion are identified to the presenter.


There are three levels of channels, with the paid channels obviously giving more bandwidth and more detailed reporting. There is also a content management service that enterprises with multiple webcasting programs would find useful.

The webcast channel can be embedded on the firm’s website, blog or whatever. The value of having informational video promotions on one’s site seems pretty obvious. In fact, you might want to watch BrightTalk’s own how-to video.

One of the things Web 2.0 does is to bring interactive tools within the reach of smaller businesses and non-profits. Wouldn’t it be interesting if local and state governmental agencies used tools like this to make life easier for all of us and perhaps to discuss policy questions? There seem to be a lot of options, all of which would lead to better informed—and presumably happier—customers and citizens.

More leveling of the business playing field! The good news is that the platform is free, at least for small volume users. The bad news is that it takes good content and considerable effort to develop a meaningful webcast that will hold users to its conclusion. It is effort worth taking for businesses of all kinds!

Is It the End of Surveys?

You may have noticed an article in Ad Age last week, “The End of Consumer Surveys.” It is based on an ongoing program by the Advertising Research Foundation that aims—not to do away with consumer surveys—but instead to integrate conventional marketing research and social media metrics to give a clearer picture of how well brands are doing to get their message out. “Out” is meant in the broadest sense; not just how much is being spent on brand messages in conventional media but how well that is translating into (unpaid) online chatter favorable to the brand.

ARF is being supported in this effort by marketing research firm TNS and its Cymfony Division, which specializes in social media. TNS has a number of resources posted on their site. The ones I was especially taken with were a 2007 white paper “Making the Case for a Social Media Strategy,” (chart at right) and the ARF webcast ”Social Media Analysis for Consumer Insight: Validating and Enhancing Traditional Market Research Findings.” I’m going to hit some of the highlights and try to bring them together for you. The webcast runs about 40 minutes and is worth listening to in its entirety (access it from this page). There’s another in this series coming up on November 12 and other related webcasts on the ARF events page.

Using brands of HDTV as their basic case study, the researchers from TNS used what could be called marketing research triangulation to look at brand impact. They used:

• Conventional marketing panel research to understand conventional brand metrics like favorability
• They used projective techniques to uncover the attitudinal (“emotive”) dimensions that characterize brands in the category
• They used convention web metrics (e.g. visits to websites) and social media metrics (e.g., brand mentions in blogs) to measure online activity and chatter.

Two key metrics which they report—and which they find to be interrelated—are share of market and share of discussion.


One of the products of their analytics that I found most interesting was a list—ordered by “contact clout”—of various contacts points that affect consumers’ decisions about brands. Experience with the brand is really important—points 1, 2 and 4. The first mention of traditional media ranks 9th—articles in newspapers and magazines. This probably reflects the innovative and technological nature of the HDTV product. TV comes in at number 14, but remember the metric is “influences brand decisions” not “creates awareness.” Nevertheless, the preponderance of personal and in-store information sources is striking.


But the main theme of the ARF/TNS collaboration is the need to combine conventional marketing research and social media metrics. Their argument is that just looking at brand activities is not sufficient. It is also absolutely necessary that you look at what consumers are doing and saying. The tough part is bringing the two together. I’ve argued the point in a somewhat different way; use behavioral analysis—first—to find out what people are doing; then conventional marketing research adds value by finding out why. The TNS analysis adds to that argument by demonstrating that you can get some of the whys from online chatter.

Their recommendation for effectiveness includes two kinds of communication—marketer generated and consumer generated. The marketer needs to work at nurturing (“spinning”) social networks and generating real online dialog between consumers and marketers.

The ARF has long been known for serious scrutiny of marketing research issues. This is an important effort to move marketing analytics in a direction that is essential to marketing effectiveness in the Web 2.0 world.

Online Content Sharing - The New WOM

The company responsible for the ubiquitous ShareThis icon (see the bottom of this post) has just released a study called “The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing.” The study, conducted by Forrester, provides some fascinating insights into content sharing on the web. Let me give you some of the study highlights.


Who Shares?

A majority of Internet users do share. Interestingly, more adults share email. Not surprisingly, youth (13 to 17) do more sharing of other media types. Are you using videos, wikis (that one surprises me; are there wikis that reach young people, or is it just Wikipedia?), and walls/discussion boards to reach young people?


What Do They Share?
Just read down the list. They share a lot of things! And the only content area where there’s a large difference between adults and young people is the entertainment category. That’s not surprising; how similar adults and youth are in the sharing of other types of content is. Are you providing the kinds of content that your audience most desires?

How Do They Share? Adults mostly use email. Young people share through IM, mobile, and their social networks. That’s hardly a revelation. But marketers need to think about their audience and how they want to share information. Are you making it easy for your audience to share content?


Why Do They Share? Read this one carefully—people share because they want to help others. (I’ve seen/heard that before, especially in discussions of travel sites where you can share experiences.) It’s an overriding motivation, and it doesn’t differ much between adults and youth. Users also share because they’ve found shared information useful, to share information about product quality, and just simply to show their enthusiasm. Wow—the top 4 reasons are positive. Dissatisfaction is number 5 and the incidence is much lower. Are you making it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product?

Is It Easy to Share? The good news is that it’s generally pretty easy. The number is well under 50% for most types of sharing. Youth experience more problems. That’s not surprising; they are sharing various types of media and that makes them more likely to run into problems. Are you removing obstacles that inhibit your audience from sharing?

The study also identified an intriguing segment—the Power Sharers. Power sharers use technology other than email to share content at least once a week. They also:

• Share with more people, regardless of the channel they are using
• Share different types of content more frequently
• Share for additional reasons. They are more likely to be motivated by community and by what the report characterizes as “self-expression.”
• Face more obstacles to sharing, especially lack of relevant contact information.

Pure and simple, these are opinion leaders. They’ve always existed and they’ve always been powerful. The Internet lets them exercise their particular expertise and passions in ways never before possible. It gives them the potential to reach more people than ever before.

Are you trying to identify opinion leaders and harness their enthusiasm in the service of your community?

Take another look at the Pickens Plan. I got an email from two individuals as soon as I joined; one was the regional coordinator. He’s being very quiet about how this now-sizeable community is being run, but I assume these people are volunteers. If I’m right, it’s an impressive harnessing of the enthusiasm and outreach of opinion leaders.

The report is lengthy and well interpreted. You can request a copy from Jeremy Bock at ShareThis.

These data remind me that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology. While Web 1.0 was about communication, Web 2.0 is coalescing around the concept of community. This study goes one step further in suggesting that we have to build those communities around (multi-media) content that is relevant to people’s lives (B2C) or work (B2B) and make it easy for people to interact around that content. People are voting with their Send, Forward, and ShareThis commands.

Are you letting them vote for your brand?