The Millennium Marketer

Continuing on my last post on marketing metrics, I discovered a very valuable post to add to my knowledge base called “The Real ROI of Blogging.”
Traditional Marketers typically ask, “How do you know if social media has a high ROI?”
Lewis Green suggests that ROI does not have to be measured in terms of revenue.

Well we all know that revenue is not the only driver of marketing success. Green lists the following as terms of measuring blogging ROI:
* Create great customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
* Result in loyal clients?
* Result in revenues and/or profits?
* Result in leads and referrals?
* Result in getting us noticed?

I imagine it would take some very tight processes and collaboration with your sales and support teams to identify loyal clients and recognize referrals. This is great for companies who have recognized that organizational process is important from the very start and have been able to maintain a work culture of collaboration. But what about companies that are growing from a traditional, commission-based sales model where secrecy is valued to protect the livelihood of the individual rather than the good of the entire company and customers?

As I understand it, it will take leaders who are driven and committed to start addressing the sales team as a unit, change the way the sales people are paid out and create a network of collaboration across the organization–not at all an easy task.

How have you handled metrics and organizational processes within your company? Feel free to comment and discuss!

Metrics in marketing is a toughie. It is made easier by online marketing tactics, such as Facebook, YouTube pages. Still, the challenge oftentimes with a site like Facebook is that people will join groups or Fan pages, never contribute and perhaps they will not remember that they joined in the first place. Especially if there is not much activity in those places.

There are two big questions for marketers that challenge the profession:
How do you keep customers from being disengaged?
How do you measure their loyalty?

This came about as I was trying to define a set of metrics for a business. Defining a set of metrics is challenging because you have to start with the outcome and then define the issues that would explain whether your analysis is unbiased. It bothered me that it could be so arbitrary, such as “Increase sales by 20%”–and how do you know you are doing that through your marketing campaigns? And does this really matter to your customer? Even if you track page views for a website, there is no real way to know whether someone consistently visits your website, unless they consistently leave comments on your blog.

Here are a few articles that I am reading on the subject. I will update this list with more, but if you know of any good links related to the subject, feel free to comment as well.

This week was blurry. The sky went up in ash on Friday night and I woke up to find my car covered in something. I spent Thursday accompanying a friend in ER (for an appendectomy), and spending time in ER, I saw/heard a few things that can remind us not to take our health for granted–especially bloggers who are said to be at a higher risk from computer strain.

A few things that I saw or heard at ER:
1. An old woman howling and crying from the pain in her ribs
2. A middle-aged man bleeding from the middle of his forehead
3. A young man tied to a machine and obviously disoriented with no idea where he was!

The people that I know are so well equipped. A desktop or laptop computer, a good job, friends, family…
It seems like a good time as any to be thankful for being healthy, alive and safe.
If you are at a computer screen most of the day, check out this read with some good health tips

While there’s nothing absolutely new about it (since it was announced on TechCrunch earlier today), Drop.io and Scribd today announced integration of iPaper and Drop.io.

Anything you put in a Dropio box will be easily opened up in Scribd, and there is no need to sign in or sign up for an account. Interesting–it addresses the issue that is most often complained about, which is having to register for an account yet again on another application.

Dropio’s PR says that the drop box has been historically used to share photos from family events and auctioning farm animals.

It’s like mailbox meets online library. While I like the Scribd function to see all files in PDF, which avoids storing things in my cache, I would stay tuned to see if this has changed anyone’s life yet.

This and other apps like Box.net are good indicators that storage is moving online as well, which can quickly make 2 GB USB pens obsolete. This is also good news for the server and storage folks, as data clustering in the cloud becomes the upcoming trend.

There have been some ongoing conversations this week where people are saying, “Should I join Plurk?” or “I joined Plurk…am figuring this out.”

I say, who cares? We’re so caught up in how many people are following us or how many people we are following. I’m bemused at my current follower to following ratio of 73% because I know it’s the high school instinct of “wanna be popular” kicking in every time I take a look at those numbers. Then again, there are a few “spammy” followers who want to say, “Hey I’m a company you should know about” or “I have a blog you should read.”

Followers like “CashGiftingPays”…I’ve now caught up to your games and I’m saying, dude that does not work. I’m getting over the excitement of having followers, so there!

Here is my personal policy on “following.” I think marketers have to pay attention to this because I’m not talking about simply advertising things. I am talking about engaging your consumers.

Let’s not forget that the value in any one of these tools is in the conversations that we have with one another. At least that is true for me. I look at the links that people attach to their brief 140 word bios to see if they are worth following. If you are a business trying to say, “Hey, I’m here, and I’m following you,” that doesn’t create any relevance.

I follow people I admire and also my due diligence in following others back as a thank you. These make up my group of peers and mentors. Then, there is a third group of people who are the most serendipitous: the ones I start having conversations with elsewhere. They make up mainly two groups of people
1) Co-workers, meaning people I work with on projects of interest
2) Fellow bloggers

The value in this is having conversations that lead to events, the discovery of new tools and new insights, and most importantly having a supporter or two in my daily life in a space that is still very elusive to most.

So, before you join Plurk and get all overexcited because you now have a new opportunity to be popular somewhere or follow social media gurus like a sheep following the herd, think it through. (I am guilty of both) but I think in the case of Twitter and sometimes FriendFeed, it was a good move. I am learning so much from everyone.

Do you really need a new app to manage and are you having solid authentic conversations right now? Make sure you have friends, fans or followers that you can trust and give them the quality time that they need. Find quality conversations instead of quality apps.

Also, if you are someone with a ton of followers, does it creep you out when you get a few more? For example, I follow people I respect and/or admire, but would you find this weird?

This in vague response to: Human3rror.com, What the Plurk?