There is a deservedly famous scene in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976) where Travis Bickle, the lead character played by Robert de Niro, tries various lines and deliveries in front of a mirror, angrily and seemingly puzzled at an imagined effrontery, and exclaims “Are you talkin’ to me?!”

This is what I imagine most traditional marketers’ expressions and words to be in the face of the social media explosion: surprised that their consumers are talking to them. And in many cases, talking back.  As well as upset at the loss of control of their carefully crafted messages, unsure of whether to do anything about it, then unsure of what to do.  And in my own reenactment of the Taxi Driver scene, with brands as Travis Bickle, I envision the mirror talking back, in the voice of consumers: “Are you talking to me?!” “Yes, but are you listening to us?”

Since the once one-way monologue from brands to consumers has irreversibly mutated into a multi-way conversations thanks to social media, the need to listen has become a critical part of any marketer’s must-do list.

One could even say that listening to what consumers are saying about your brand, which has been called many things from Social Media Monitoring to Buzz Monitoring to Social Listening, is a matter of survival.  Here are a few reasons why:

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I love food and I love social media. So I have been very taken by the Kogi success story.

For anyone not living in Los Angeles, California, not following social media or not interested in food, a little background is necessary.

Kogi started as a taco truck, a very familiar sight on LA streets and nothing to write home about.  The first interesting twist comes in the food: Kogi takes Mexican staples (tacos, quesadillas, etc.) and “koreanizes” them. Trust me, the result is exciting, different and delicious. The second, and to us social media marketers, more important twist is that Kogi built a cult following using a blog and Twitter.

The blog gets about 21,000 monthly unique visitors (per Quantcast, nothing to sneeze at for what is essentially a very local blog) and @kogibbq has almost 22,000 followers! Twitter was used as a tool to let (hungry) followers know where the taco truck would be on any given day or time and tweets reportedly draw crowds of 300 to 800.   And that’s for a restaurant-on-wheels that launched as recently as November 20, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Online marketing tools have given marketers and decision makers an amazing amount of mostly accurate data to mine.  However, as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing.  As we see it, there are three key issues:

• The mind-boggling amount of data generated by online data gathering tools, be they website server logs, keyword searches, ad impressions, clicks, etc.
• The relative lack of analytical tools to make sense of all that data and transform it into actionable knowledge (data in and of itself is prety useless, as you may have noticed).
• A seemingly total dearth of tools and experts that can take the still-confusing knowledge generated form the data and make it easily digestible by mere mortals, like your typical marketer (yes, that includes us).

There is obviously not much that we can do about the first issue.  And the second issue is slowly but surely being resolved through the emergence of more accurate, more user-friendly and more affordable analytical tools.  The third issue is something we have been bedeviled by with little hope for resolution…until  now.  In the past few weeks, we have come across a very impressive array of tools and companies that are tackling this nagging problem.  Not all of them are directly answering marketers’ prayers but the concepts and the thought processes are great harbingers of what we can expect in the marketing field. Read the rest of this entry »

To recap our previous entry on measurement salvation for social media marketing, we recommended these important steps:

1. Identify what measures can be used to define success for your campaign.
2. Do this for every separate campaign, do not use the same measures for expediency’s sake.
3. Assign benchmark values to each measure as a threshold for success.
4. Select measurement tools/methodologies.
5. Do a pre-campaign assessment on all measures to use as a baseline.
6. Track changes over the course of the campaign but also compare post-campaign values to pre-campaign values.
7. Do a post-campaign analytical evaluation of the tools, their accuracy, ease of use, etc.
8. Feed that freshly acquired knowledge and experience into your next campaign’s analytics strategy.

To help implement the steps above, here are some of the tools, both free, and for-pay, that we have tested and endorse.

FREE TOOLS

• BlogPulse, for blog mentions.
• BoardReader, for forum/bulletin board mentions.
• SiteVolume for Twitter, Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr mentions.
• Twist for Twitter mentions.
• Quantcast for site statistics including demographics.
• Google Trends for search volume.
• Facebook Insights for detailed analytics for Facebook Pages.
• YouTube Insights for detailed analytics for videos.

FEE BASED TOOLS:

• Radian6 for thorough coverage of all social media activity, sentiment (coming soon) and influencer identification, as well as workflow tools.
• Andiamo Systems for the same type of coverage as Radian6 but with the addition of human involvement in tracking and configuration vs. Radian6’s self-supported and fully automated system.
• Collective Intellect for the same type of coverage as Radian6 and Andiamo Systems but with additional bells and whistles and deeper analytical support, for a much higher price tag…
• Meteor/Fyreball to track word of mouth dissemination and virality.
• Divinity Metrics for video analytics across multiple platforms including demographics, and influencer identification.

Every day, there are new tools and ways to measure the impact of your campaigns, just remember the most important measurement tool needs to be balanced against the overall goal.

Not a week goes by without my seeing yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured or touting a new, “revolutionary” way of measuring word of mouth (WOM).

I really enjoy this lively debate but my own experience at KML and beyond has made me a believer: social media marketing can be measured and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis.

There are several issues that I believe create the brouhaha around metrics and social media marketing.

• Most companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms to determine what their success metrics are. And many times, agencies are just as guilty.  As one often says, you cannot manage what you do not measure and you cannot measure what you do not define.

• Every social campaign, even for the same brand or product or property, will have different metrics attached to it. Because the objectives of campaigns and the environment and circumstances in which they are implemented will differ, so should their metrics. A campaign may need to focus on conversions to measure its ROI, another may be all about buzz and awareness with yet another’s success measured on time spent engaging with a specific tool or piece of content.  And too often, we see marketers using the same old, and usually irrelevant, online metrics of pageviews, unique visitors, etc.

• Here’s an ugly little myth: “even if you can figure out what to measure with WOM/social media marketing, the measurement methodologies are so unreliable as to make the results meaningless.” Nonsense. Word of Mouth, social media, non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics, but because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been codified into accepted standards.  And there are sometimes several ways or methodologies to track one specific metric.  This, however, does not make these measuring tools inaccurate but it does make them more likely to be influenced by subjective interpretations.

• Social media marketing measurement tools are developed and released on almost a daily basis and existing methodologies are being constantly refined which will give our industry trustworthy tools much faster in its lifecycle than any other advertising or marketing field before.

Stay tuned for part 2 which will list some of the free and paid measurement tools that we are huge fans of at KARMA Media Labs.

Addicted to old school marketing thinking? Afraid to break that addiction and dip your toes into the social media marketing pool? 12-step programs give us a lot of guidance on how to do just that.

Take for example the 7^th step prayer (our updated, short version at least):

Grant me the serenity to accept the social media conversations I cannot change, the courage to change the conversations I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The 12 steps themselves are just as wisdom-filled:

1. We admit we are powerless over old school marketing think—that our professional lives and marketing campaigns have become unmanageable.
2. We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves, the Wisdom of Crowds, could restore us to sanity.
3. We have made a decision to turn our marketing campaigns’ will and our marketing professional lives over to the care of The Crowds as we understand Them.
4. We have made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves and our marketing campaigns.
5. We have admitted to The Crowds, to ourselves, and to another marketer the exact nature of our marketing wrongs.
6. We are entirely ready to have The Crowds remove all these defects of our marketing character.
7. We have humbly asked Them to remove our old think campaign shortcomings.
8. We have made a list of all the brands and products we have harmed, and have become willing to make amends to them all.
9. We have made direct amends to such brands and products wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We have continued to take professional inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
11. We have sought through research, analysis and meditation to improve our conscious contact with The Crowds as we understand Them, searching only for knowledge of Their Social Media Marketing Rules for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a marketing awakening as the result of these steps, we have tried to carry this message to other marketers addicted to old think, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.