Manhattan Marketing Maven

McNamara & Metrics

Robert S. McNamara, who died this week at 93,  was the original metrics wonk. An early whiz kid he pioneered the use of  data to inform and direct the strategic bombing initiative in Europe against the Nazis during World War II. Subsequently he brought process discipline and data-driven decision-making to Ford and to the business world in ways that revolutionized industries and dramatically improved competitive postures.

As the longest serving Secretary of Defense, he brought the orthodoxy of counting, measuring and making data-based decisions to the Pentagon. The effect was to achieve some economies of scale and to reign in the desires of the uniformed services for countless toys and new weapons. But his perspective and process also led to our disastrous extended engagement in Vietnam. 

McNamara's metrics legacy has several dimensions:

1. Data Illuminates. By studying data of what actually happens, we can identify patterns and inflection points and find ways to pull costs out and built efficiencies into many systems.

2. Data is not always clear cut. The numbers can be spun many different ways to support or defend a broad range of inferences, suppositions, resource demands and ideologies. The famous Missile Gap was a politically-motivated distortion of the data.

3. Data People Can Be Neutral Observers. Sometimes the number crunchers are neutral observers. They dig deep and report out their findings to leaders who use the facts to make decisions. 

4. Data Players Can be Advocates. At other times the number crunchers have an affirmative moral obligation to use the data to advocate a point of view. McNamara was unable to persuade his clients, JFK & LBJ,  to make peace when the stakes were much lower.  

In our current fervor to measure, monitor and monetize everything we can, McNamara's experience reminds us that data mining and data-driven marketing are not pure science. They require a fair amount of interpretation tempered by context and conscience.

Thinking about independence and wiggle room at work, at home and in my own relationships and thinking

Read With Your Ears

I’ve been wondering why computers aren’t more helpful. Sure, they connect us and perform a bunch of basic tasks, but I expect our programming ability and artificial intelligence skills should be able to help us understand, grasp and connect the dots much better than they do.

Then I came across ReadtheWords.com, an online subscription text-to-speech service has completed a year-long BETA test and emerged with 30,000 registered users. ReadtheWords.commakes it possible for the computer to read the words on the screen – any written material, any words that appear on a computer screen.

The site is aimed at one-third of the o learners,” the people who comprehend better by hearing rather than seeing.

ReadtheWords.comcan upload text documents of up to 80,000 characters, from Word documents, web pages, RSS feeds, PDFs and many other sources. Users have 15 different avatar and speaker choices which include options to vary the reading speed and instantly save, store or e-mail recordings. Optimized for easy use, home page visitors are greeted by a female avatar offering a free test use and a video tutorial.

 

According to founder Michael Ziman. “Text-to-speech is a utility that helps people grasp concepts, improve reading, pronunciation and language skills, follow audio directions, and remember or review critical information gleaned from notes or documents. A third of Americans understand best when they hear something. We have built the site by relying on input from subscribers who want a simple tool for integrating text-to-speech into their lives. We aim to make text-to-speech easy and fun for everyone.” 

 

Using a 3-step model (select a document-select a reader-listen), ReadtheWords.com can turn 1 hour of reading material into verbalized speech in 1 minute. The 15 avatars vocalize texts in US English, UK English, Indian-inflected English, French and Spanish. 

 

Subscribers can save recordings and switch between avatars and languages with a click. They can create MP3 files, save recordings, e-mail recordings, embed recordings on web pages or turn them into instant podcasts. A free downloadable toolbar to enable routine use of ReadtheWords.com is also available.

 

If you are playing around with this over the long Independence Day weekend, paste in the Declaration of Independenceand then punctuate it to alter the pacing of the reading or switch between avatars to get different readings.      

 

ReadtheWords.comis a subscription service But anyone can try the service for free. Its a step toward the higher order value from computers I've been searching for.

 

Measuring Your Twitter Performance

I wondered how I was doing on Twitter. Just when i thought I was getting the hang of Twitter, I was derailed by Eric Peterson's presentation at the 140 Conference. At the outset  he defined the majority of "active" Twitter users as someone with 403 followers following 398 and posting 44 updates a week. By following 480 with 198 followers and making several posts each week,I'm close enough, given my demographic, to be okay with that.

But then Eric claims the "average active user" has 4664 followers following 1165 others making 108 updates per week. I'm thinking who has the time and who has that much to say? But then he points to the "truly exceptional" user with an average of 46,000 followers, following 8600 others, posting 50 tweets a day or 567 per week. Imagine how fascinating someone's life or someone's brand must be to have enough time to tweet 80 times a day to share the richness of their thoughts, feelings and experience.

Being an alpha male and a data wonk, I just had to know how my Twitter behavior measures up. Fortunately among the 11,000 existing Twitter applications are a bunch that measure your behavior against the 18 million others using the service worldwide. 

To feel less like a twit, I used the Twitalyzer to compare my @flamster behavior to others. What a bummer! The results showed that I have no influence, clout or generosity, little velocity and 33% signal to noise ratio. Not satisfied with my performance I sought out other tools to assess my Twitter performance.

Luckily I found Ron Callari's post on Inventorspot.com which listed 5 tools to redeem my self esteem. 

Tweetstats allowed me to graph my tweet timeline (1.1 per day) my tweet density and track it over days and time periods and track my following and follower behavior. It was colorful and ego-neutral.

TwInfluence gave me a rank of 61,649 or 48% (of what I don't know) with "high average" social capital and 475,964 secondary followers which felt pretty good; a lot like those 8 million people in my LinkedIn network. For a moment I was feeling like my voice was being heard  until I compared my scores to Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) who is the leader in reach, velocity and social capital outpacing Twitterers like the New York Times, The Onion, John McCain and NPR not too mention Larry King or Oprah.

TwitterAnalyzer allowed me to view a full range of graphs outlining my paltry efforts on Twitter. Evidently I fell off the face of Twitter on 5/22 but then bounced back with avengence by spiking in followers. 

TwitterGrader from Hubspot was like an easy-grading teacher. With a grade of 91 and a rank of 223,407 out of 2,335,931 I felt like a top ten percenter even though the graph of my user history didn't print out. 

But the best feeling came from TweetPsych, a tool that uses linguistic analysis algorithms to mine the words you've tweeted to instantly paint a psychological portrait of you. According to the psychologist embedded in the formula, I write a lot about jobs and work plus education and learning, have some insight with frequent positive feelings. In terms of primordial, conceptual and emotional content, I score 75.13 on social behavior, 15.12 on anxiety and 9.13 on taste sensations. If my shrink only knew.

All 5 sites allowed me to store and print my results, tweet my results and instantly follow their authors. Being a neophyte, I did as directed.

As a data-driven marketer its hard to accept and hard to make fun of these attempts to measure, monitor and maybe even monetize my behavior on Twitter. But its clear that understanding your own value and the impact you or your brand might have is in the early stages -- an evolving mix of supposition, science, art and fantasy.

In the short run to protect my fragile ego I'm going to apply a rule I learned earlier in life to Twitter -- it's not the size but what you do with it that matters. 

 

5 Things to Do on Twitter

The aptly named 140 Characters Conference hosted by Jeff Pulver focused as much on the personalities of the presenters and attending evangelists as it did on the uses and qualities of Twitter, the social media darling of the moment. Reflecting on this orgy of self-promotion, I finally have a read on the practical uses of Twitter for marketers. Here's what I learned:

1. Use Twitter to Take the Pulse. Twitter theoretically enables you to find out what's hot and what's not and capture the real-time essence of the vox populi. The only limiting factor is the so-so quality of Twitter's own search tool and the variable quality of search tools created by 3rd parties to achieve this goal. It is widely rumored that Google will establish a beachhead in micro-search by creating a better tool to search and mine tweets.

Assuming the search issue gets solved, the next burning question becomes are tweeters sufficiently representative of any given population to rely on them as a representative or as a directional sample of public or professional opinion? Here you have to balance sheer numbers against a qualitative judgment. Zillions are tweeting. But are they following some party or partisan line (think right wingers who bombard talk radio shows) or are they truly representative of the spectrum of opinion? Does the size and weight of the tweets offset any political or partisan skews?  Do we have enough information to base a judgment call on? 

This is a matter of individual taste or editorial policy. So far many mainstream media types are using Twitter as an opinion direction finder and are counting pro and con tweets as if they were straw polls. They are reporting on the intensity of opinions expressed and taking the Twitter community seriously.

For those participating in events or conferences or watching events on TV, Twitter is real-time reaction meter. By using the hash tag convention, you can group comments and make them more findable. Probably 99 percent of the 140 character participants were madly posting tweets during individual presentations; offering individual assessments of the crowd, the food, the swag, the venue not to mention the looks, words and attitudes of their fellow participants. It was a multi-taskers ball. 

2. Join the Conversation. Tweeting is expressing an opinion -- everything from your mood to a point of view on any topic. Naturally by connecting your tweets to a broader conversation you gain traction and credibility. Similarly by attracting followers you spread your opinion and encourage others to retweet your words to even larger audiences. Brands have an opportunity to craft a Twitter page to reflect the marketplace posture they aspire to. The burden is on the author to say something interesting, different and relevant and to attract sufficient attention for that opinion to matter.

3. Outmaneuver Dictators. Because of its immediacy and broad use Tweeters can finesse government controls on websites, e-mail, SMS and instant messages. In the case of Iranian election protestors this might be short-lived since Tweets do leave a trail that the descendants of the SAVAK can use to hunt you down and arrest you. It has also temporarily gotten around controls of oppressive state regimes in several countries, though its long term viability as a revolutionary communications tool, even with the endorsement of the US State Department, is uncertain. 

4. Augment Customer Service. Several brands, notably Dell, Starbucks, Zappos, JetBlue and Whole Foods have added Twitter as a customer service channel with results that customers have bragged about. We don't know if the channel per se or the small team working on it make Twitter a more nimble tool than an 800 number, e-mail, live on-site chat or web contact forms. Customer value seems to be derived by the perception that brands are listening closely, addressing issues one-to-one, moving quickly in close to real time and then telling others what they did.  

Success turns on communicating the availability of this channel to your customer base, attracting significant numbers of followers and building buzz around your brand's responsiveness. There is also the possibility that by monitoring tweets about your brand that you can discern customer needs, create opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and gather marketplace and product intelligence. 

5. Actively Promote Your Brand. Brands are using Twitter to announce new products and services, socialize news and communicate sales. By telegraphing branded information in short messages, marketers hope to borrow some of Twitter's high tech, fashion-forward equity and to impress online customers with their sensitivity and savvy.  

Success depends on content, relevance, tone, manner and frequency. Brands have the burden to create followers or to inject branded messages into the natural context of ongoing conversations. Tweeters are fairly sensitive about over commercializing the channel and can quickly respond to perceived violations with negative tweets. You must also be forthright and overt about who you are and what you are selling -- all in 140 characters or less.

Twitter is a mass market online phenomenon. Growth trajectory of new users and defectors are both strong. Customers in every psycho-demographic cell and trying it out. It makes sense to experiment with micro-blogging  by crafting a credible brand presence, building a following, following customers and/or competitors and participating regularly in the cycles of tweeting, listening and responding. 

Use Sharing Tools to Multiply Site Traffic

Pass-along has been a constant media multiplier for print vehicles. So its not too surprising that pass-along -- now called sharing or share-to-social -- is becoming an audience and traffic multiplier for online media. In a world where you can virtually broadcast something with a click, enabling pass-along can yield incremental direct and search-driven traffic for a tiny investment in time and technology.

In a growing social media universe, passing along a link can become a tactical marketing strategy to drive direct traffic and to enhance a search effort. The trick is targeting the pass-along options so that your audience will recognize the sharing options and use them in context.

MarketingSherpa ran a test with B2B publisher Smartbrief to test the viability of sharing in a B2B environment and to validate the notion of targeting pass-along links to prospect segments. By identifying the networks most relevant to their audience and embedding icons for sharing on each individual article they increased traffic to their sites from 1351% coming from Facebook to 2070% coming from LinkedIn. 

Keep in mind that mass sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious already have massive audiences and have significant search advantages for driving added traffic. Making your content even easier to share will offer you options to intersect customers and prospects open to your brand in unexpected ways. 

Here's what you have to do to leverage this learning:

1. Identify the content you want to be passed along.

2. Structure where you want to direct traffic to. In the same case traffic was directed to article summaries rather than directly to content assets. 

3. Identify the social sites most used and relevant to your target audience.

4. Test a few at first to gauge pass-along and validate audience appeal.

5. Embed the icons and links from the social sites on each element of content

6. Enable users to e-mail content to friends as well

7. Measure inbound traffic from each source and outbound e-mails

8. Adjust and tweak based on results

 

Dancing with and Dodging Data on Madison Avenue

Whenever the mainstream media writes about what I do, I always get a queazy feeling. The breathless prose touting the obvious always leaves me cold. Such is the case with Stephanie Clifford's piece on the front page of Sunday's NYT Business Section titled "Put Ad on the Web. Count Clicks. Revise." which is more a testament to the skills of Darren Herman's publicist that an insightful look at interplay of messaging and behavior on the web.

And yet my colleagues in traditional agencies and on the client side have not embraced the promise of using behavioral data to improve communication nor have they accepted the idea that web-based data can be a good indicator of awareness, purchase intent, brand loyalty or a tool for on-demand research, So even though Ms. Clifford writes "The shift to data-based campaigns is forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker to Madison Avenue," it ain't necessarily so.

In fact, while John Lovett at Forrester predicts the market for web analytic software will grow at a compound annual rate of 17% over the next five years, a recent study of marketers found that only 30% of those who capture web data actually modified their websites as a result of the intelligence developed. So if only 1 out of 3 among those counting actually use the numbers to impact their communications or business tactics, we still have a long way to go no matter what the great Grey Lady reports.

The "reasons" for not using data are plentiful and pitiful. Consider these:

• There aren't enough data guys to process the numbers and produce insights.
• There's too much data to mine.
• There's not enough data. 
• We don't know what to measure or what to count.
• We don't know how to sequence the data. 
• We can't draw meaningful inferences from the data. 
• We can't see contingencies or dependencies within the data 
• We don't know which software tools to use or to combine.
• We trust or don't trust Google Analytics.
• We don't know which data points are predictive or significant.
• We don't know how to synchronize data from multiple sources.
• We can't understand the interplay of campaigns, search, websites and WOM.
• We don't believe the data
• We don't believe consumers know better than we do

A recent survey by Forbes.com found that 82% of those responding identified conversions as the leading data indicator of online direct marketing success followed by registrations and clicks. And while some brand guys and many online sales guys complain that counting pigeon-holes the web as a direct response or CRM medium these arguments are a red herring.

The web enables us to see and count what consumers do. By understanding what they do we can get them to do it again and we can find more people like them with a high propensity to do it as well. This gauges our ability to persuade and direct behavior. 

The web also gives us an immediate "gut check" to quickly and cheaply validate our creative intuition by testing words, pictures, offers and concepts with target customers. A/B testing allows us to present alternative approaches to matched sets of consumers and quickly determine which approach works better. And collecting data on click streams and purchase history helps us understand why people do what they do and how we can find more people likely to take the desired action.

Data collection and processing  essentially support two key assessments:

1. Effectiveness. The data tells us if we sold something -- an item, an idea, a participation. Use data to measure who bought in ways that suggest how they made a buying decision and in ways that separate buyers from non-buyers. This cues us about which appeal resonated with target customers and identifies how many steps are required to convince customers to act.  

2. Efficiency. By measuring the clicks necessary to convert a prospect into a customer, we assess the ROI of messaging and media used to build awareness and attract audiences. Understanding the cost-per-action compared to the relative value of customers acquired allows us to continuously improve our campaigns and buy media that will deliver the best bang for the buck.

All the rest are vanity metrics.

Google's Radio Gaffe Reveals Their Vulnerability

Google's decision to quit radio after investing north of $100 million and 3 years of effort reveals a great deal about the organization and its vulnerabilities. Keep in mind that Google isn't half as benign as it wants you to believe. They didn't become a colossus by being everyone's BFF.

In this case they started out with a good strategic idea -- marry their price-bid auction technology to an existing radio distribution tool and then disinter-mediate media-buying firms, bring down prices and dominate the $19 billion radio advertising market. But as Jessica Vascellaro documented in her comprehensive Wall Street Journal article on May 12th, getting from a big idea to an agile execution wasn't in the cards.

Google purchased dMarc Broadscasting in 2006 and figured it would roll-up into their overall strategy to apply their auction-bid tools systematically to other media markets. They would amortize the R&D costs of the technology, slaughter the existing players in those markets and become the buying conduit of choice across online and offline media. After all, if you're Google you might as well thing big -- really big. 

They got some initial traction and engaged with some of the leading radio firms like Emmis, Clear Channel, Saga and Greater Media. But they underestimated the power of inertia and conventional wisdom in the radio business and basically ignored the concerns and profits of the companies whose inventory they sought to sell.

So what do does this reveal for those of us eager to handicap Google's current and future state?

1. Google is a large hungry bureaucracy. With shifting priorities and plenty of cash to burn on not-so-hot executions, they can afford to try and fail where others can't. They skimped on the due diligence in vetting dMarc's owners as partners. They didn't talk to many radio guys at the outset and they didn't take the time to listen. But in the end flushing $100 million is just a rounding error for Google which allows them to retreat without feeling the pain and probably without absorbing the lessons.

2. Google believes its own press. The bias toward doing it their way, their hubris about how things should be engineered and their complete unwillingness to listen to willing allies, adopt to market norms and nuances or sell the way buyers buy set them up for failure. The radio ad market was a de facto auction long before they showed up, but they refused to see it. This kind of "we know better" attitude is not unique in Silicon Valley or among high tech giants. But it suggests that in some cases they can't get out of their own mindset or out of their own way.

3. Technology Uber Alles. They built and bought the component parts but they could get them to work together nor could they measure and report on sell-thru or the impact of the ads. Their belief in technology as the universal cure blinded them to the marketplace realities and deafened them to course corrections that could have produced an alternative outcome. 

The B2B Database Dipstick Report

Lists are the bane of database marketers existence. Everyone thinks their own data sucks but the real disappointment usually comes when you rent a compiled list and realize they suck too. Everyone wonders why this is but few have done anything about it -- till now.

Ruth Stevens and Bernice Grossman have been writing white papers on database marketing since 2005. Both are well known independent thinkers and marketers with extensive direct marketing and database chops. For their seventh outing they devised a wickedly simple test titled "Online Sources of B-to-B Data: A Comparative Analysis" to understand the limitations of compiled lists. 

They convinced ten database compilers to participate and asked them to find 10 selected executives from 10 different industry verticals in their databases. It was a dip stick exercise to quickly measure the coverage and quality of leading databases. The vendors ranged from big data houses to online cooperatives. All have online ordering capabilities which generally means they are willing to deal in small lots and/or niche verticals.

Bottom line -- when they had your data it was pretty accurate, though coverage was spotty across databases.

In addition the study turned up a bunch of surprising results:

• There was a wide variance in company and contact counts. In one category -- stone, clay and glass products -- company counts ranged from 386 on one database to 36,382 on another.
• Email addresses were the hardest datapoint to find. Unfortunately these days its the datapoint most in demand.
• When a vendor had your record, there was a good chance of accuracy.
• But many vendors didn't have the 10 executives in their database. In the worst case only 2 of ten vendors could find Jim Carey of Northwestern University. Maybe its a subtle hint about academics.
• C level names seemed to be evident in more databases than lower ranking players. This could speak to the method of compilation. 

So what's a B2B marketer to do?  Bernice and Ruth recommend these steps.

1. Quiz the vendors on what they have and how they got it.

2. Don't assume subsidiaries of large compilers have the same data or use the same compilation or cleansing techniques. They don't. Ask.

3. Be very specific when placing list or database orders. Use SIC codes or other tools to keep 'em honest and to be sure you get what you thought you ordered.

4. Check for industry or vertical specialization. Test their coverage before you buy. Shop for the vendor who has the best data on your target audience.

5. Run a data append test before you buy to test coverage and accuracy and to compare multiple vendors. Build in some house names that you know for sure as an accuracy benchmark. Better yet buy a small number of names and verify the data yourself by phone before you place a bigger order.

There's about 12 million companies in the USA and evidently getting to someone in them still isn't easy as you think it might be. These kind of exercises help us understand the realities and limits of databases which in turn drive our thinking on how best to use the data we can get our hands on.

Measuring Marketing Magic

Marketing remains one of the elusive frontiers for performance management. For years marketing performance measurement (MPM) vendors have been working both sides of the aisle -- the CFO and the CMO -- in an attempt to define and measure marketing's magic and graft onto the marketing department the same fiscal discipline imposed throughout the corporate structure.   

For the last eight years VisionEdge Marketing has been surveying MPM issues and their 2009 report entitled, "Closing the Gap Between Marketing and Business" concludes that 

1. Marketing still has a long way to go to align with the business it supports and measure performance
2. Marketing departments still lack the skills to run themselves like a business
3. When  the marketing department measures; its not measuring the right customer-centric stuff.

You can get a 20% discount on the full report by clicking here.

These are sobering conclusions especially in a recession when every dime of marketing spend is under intense scrutiny by corporate and brand bean counters looking to hold back every marginal idea and expense. It also reinforces the stereotype of marketing guys as frisky kids masquerading as grown-ups in charge of the fun factory and accountable to no one. 

In practical terms, it seems obvious, at least to me, that the 23 month average CMO tenure documents the fact that CMOs are not playing the game as CEOs and CFOs see it. Few have invested in dedicated marketing operations people, essentially a COO for the marketing department, and even fewer have bought MPM packages or vendor services. And while a CMO's ears glaze over with the first mention of so-called "best practices" nobody is really happy with what gets measured or how they figure out how money spent by marketing impacts on the objectives of the business. 

What has caught on are dashboards. There are lots of them ranging from simple graphs to dramatic colorful eye-candy. But these devices are more show-and-tell than useful gauges of business success. Intended to be a "connection between marketing and business which facilitate fact-based strategic decisions", they are more CYA than FYI. The proof of this is that in spite of the dashboards, few top decision-makers see a clear correlation between money spent on marketing and advertising and sales or profitability goals. Herein lies the challenge -- connect the dots convincingly with enough data and intellectual rigor to withstand questions from the finance folks. 

What gets counted is political. Marketing guys count inputs. Finance guys want them to count outputs. There is also a bias toward counting the sexy acquisition programs rather than the under-loved and lower key retention programs which have a much more predictable impact on sales and customer satisfaction.

Since these are not new issues, I quizzed VisionEdge co-founder Laura Patterson , a serial entrepreneur who learned her marketing and measurement stripes in 14 years of service as a marketing executive at Motorola. Laura believes that CMOs need to build-into their consciousness and their tables of organization "a culture of accountability that's native to marketing." Rather than fear measurement marketers have to think about what they are trying to accomplish and craft measurement methods at the same time they craft big ideas.

Laura argues that this orientation starts with looking at the marketing activities that drive business value rather than simply measuring activity. If marketing programs are tasked to find, sell and retain customers, measurement must demonstrate how they did it or didn't do it and take a stab at explaining why. In her experience CFOs are less interested in exactly hitting the numbers than in marketing guys thinking and planning for results using a disciplined process which includes advance planning and post-campaign measurement. Among her clients, Laura reports a huge shift in perception when marketers create a process and set performance targets at the same time that they develop messaging and campaigns.

For top management, in Laura's view, measuring performance versus plan is table stakes for efficient operations and control. Marketers have to plan for expected results measured in business terms -- leads, revenues, share or market, margin contribution or repeat customers. Measuring the efficiency of the production process or the cost-per calculations of media efficiency are secondary. 

Bottom Line: The C Suite yearns for CMOs to tun the marketing department like a business. The 2009 Survey shows we're not even close.