He promoted his latest, Wait for Me, by booking a spa so that journalists [including some extremely tech-savvy writers], could listen while getting massages.

How ironic that the way to these journalists’ hearts should be through unkinked necks and loosened shoulders. Not that such novel — and decidedly low-tech — promotions of new albums are particularly new. You may recall the impact that Trent Reznor (a.k.a., Nine Inch Nails) had when he leaked new songs to a pre-release albums through MP3s loaded on USB sticks left in the restrooms of nightclubs. That was more than two years ago. (Here’s an account of that promotion, on MediaPost. Registration is required.)

My take on Moby’s high tech / high touch ploy is simple: If you’re trying to break through the drone of network buzz and isolating keyboarding, look to its extreme opposite.

Google describes a wave as, “Equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” Here’s the video:

This video is a full hour long, so let me help you with a couple pivotal features.

The developers who will be taking and running with this new system will be setting the limits for how we all work together in the next decade. Just as apropos to Online Community Month, they’ll be doing this development in a spirit of true collaboration: open source and forever free to be tweaked and refined.

Marshall makes some excellent points (he’s not @WebMetricsGuru for nothing!), including this one: “Social Media isn’t really designed, at this time, to analyze Acquisition or Retention - but Web Analytics, is — and I maintain this is one of the strongest arguments to merge the two, in a formal way, rather than in an informal way.”

Datamining and CRM

How do you begin merging these data in a “formal” way? Tools are emerging to allow for the mining of conversations, and linking them where possible to a CRM database. Here’s Marshall’s take on this process:

David Berkowitz talks about Target Audiences, but you’d first have to figure out what your Target Audience is for your Brand or for a particular product or promotion of your Brand - then do CRM datamining using house database lists, or the Social Media CRM outreach to collect names and classify them according to Target Audience Segmentation — best done with data analytics.   Let’s say, that for the purposes of this post, my article on Entrepreneur.com on Learn to Measure Your Web Presence using Unbound Technology or Rapleaf, is the way to go.

If you’re a mom-and-pop shop, you’d do nothing as elaborate, more just Twitter research, much as I’ve shown above, but if you’re Zappos, or Dell, well … that’s another story — the story I tell in Learn to Measure Your Web Presence and others, like it.

Of course, a big brand can make a lot of money whereas the mom and pop shop, probably won’t — so a big brand can afford to spend a lot of money on data mining — and it’s well worth doing because of the potential money and value that can come from it.

Scarcity of Resources

The biggest constraint in doing this sort of work isn’t technology. It’s time. Even properly guided, the process takes many people-hours, and that is a resource in short supply for most businesses today. I see a major challenge in the linkage between prospects / customers and Twitter profiles. (Ack!, I can hear you yell. Yet another datapoint to capture in our CRM databases: The client’s Twitter handle!)

But it is becoming clear that this is an area where a business should focus some of its energies — assuming the business passes David Berkowitz’s Ten Ways test.

Years ago, Don E. Schultz co-wrote Measuring Brand Communication ROI. In this marketing chestnut, he and his co-authors built a surprisingly relevant model for tracking spending and estimated returns for each brand communication (How old is this book? The included Excel file was loaded on a 5.25″ magnetic diskette). A huge category — and ROI black hole — was customer service.

Twitter is a communication channel more than a marketing tactic, and this channel has more to do with customer satisfaction and brand education than driving sales. It’s another touchpoint and nothing more.

But like email and other important touchpoints, it should be measured. Conversations like the one taking place today will help determine how this measurement takes place and to what end.

One Day Event, Tuesday, Jun 09, 2009
9:00 AM	Welcome & Opening Remarks  MC   Jodi McDermott, Director, Data Strategy, Clearspring Technologies
9:15 AM	Keynote- The State of the Union for the Metrics Industry We are well past the first 100 days of 2009 and a lot has changed, yet nothing has changed.  New technologies and social media have invaded the online channels that we’ve become accustomed to. Yet the foundatiolid.   Jeffrey Eisenberg, CEO of FutureNow, will walk us through a report card of the online measurement industry and address what’s next and what we need to do better as marketers, practitioners and vendors in order to support the shift of ad dollars from offline to online.  Keynote   Jeffrey Eisenberg, Co-founder & CEO, FutureNow, Inc.
9:45 AM	Audience Measurement How is the role of the audience measurement firm evolving? We’ve got panel, direct measurement and hybrid approaches to address today’s industry challenges. Who’s on top? Which approaches should advertisers and markw the approaches differ and the impact differences make on the numbers we are trying to study. We will also touch on the new IAB industry guidelines and what they mean to the standardization of reporting on audience metrics.  Moderator   Joe Laszlo, Director of Research, Interactive Advertising Bureau  Panelists   Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer, comScore Adam Gerber, Chief Marketing Officer, Quantcast Yaakov Kimelfeld, SVP, Director, Digital Research & Analytics, MediaVest Mainak Mazumdar, SVP, Global Measurement Science, Emerging Media, The Nielsen Company
10:30 AM	Coffee Break
10:45 AM	The Analytics Food Chain How do you use audience measurement, campaign analysis tools and web analytics to plan and measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns? With standards set by various organizations and new technologies providindecisions from. This panel will focus on understanding the differences and synergies of panel and census data from the various parts of the analytics food chain – what to use and when.  Moderator   Jodi McDermott, Director, Data Strategy, Clearspring Technologies  Panelists   Andy Fisher, VP, Analytics, Razorfish Dennis Mortensen, Director of Data Insights, Yahoo! Judah Phillips, Senior Director, Global Site Analytics, Monster Worldwide Greg Smith, Chief Operating Officer, Neo@Ogilvy Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research, Hitwise
11:30 AM	Measuring Video and Virality The video market is exploding with numerous vendors, business models and technology. What are the metrics and how do they fit into measuring user engagement and advertising models within video? This panel will exploity, and tying the stream back to site activity and customer conversion.  Moderator   Tania Yuki, Director, Product Management, comScore  Panelists   Scott Ferber, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, TidalTV Jayant Kadambi, President and Co-Founder, YuMe Matt Langie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Omniture Inc. Keith Richman, CEO, Break Media Brian Shin, CEO, Visible Measures
12:15 PM	Luncheon
1:30 PM	Keynote: Measuring Madison Avenue Campaigns have moved well beyond the impression and click in today’s distributed and fragmented world of online advertising.  Interactive campaigns that include the ability for users to share, respond and mashug dollars. Curt Hecht, President of the VivaKi Nerve Center, will  take attendees through the measurement challenges that are facing agencies as they introduce new methods and new media for reaching their client’s target audience.  Keynote   Curt Hecht, President, VivaKi Nerve Center
2:00 PM	Campaign Attribution If the click is dead, how do I know how to attribute success to my campaign? Should it be on the first impression view, the click or the viewthrough? As debate continues in the industry over how to gauge campaign sends are emerging and if there is a solution to the question that has been plaguing the industry for years.  Moderator   Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief, MediaPost  Panelists   Michael Brunick, VP Media Technology, Cadreon Ari Buchalter, Chief Operating Officer, MediaMath Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing Katrin Ribant, Director of Product Development, Artemis, Havas Digital Esco Strong, Senior Group Manager, Atlas Institute, Microsoft
2:45 PM	When The Numbers Speak For Themselves Do you know when to pull the plug on a campaign that is performing poorly? Or how to take action on the data once you have the results? Taking the metrics and turning them into actions is often a forgotten or weaknd optimization in meeting the goals of your marketing initiatives.  Moderator   Joshua Koran, VP, Targeting and Optimization, ValueClick  Panelists   Srishti Gupta, Senior Partner, Insights & Analytics Director, MediaCom Interaction Ben Seslija, Senior Director, Acquisition and Analytics, Clickable Mark Wachen, Managing Director, Autonomy Optimost
3:30 PM	Coffee Break
3:45 PM	Integrating Online and Offline Data Tying the shelf or online purchase to the campaign data that you collect is a great concept, but not easy to implement in reality. This panel will expose you to companies who have e stronger relationship with their customers and control costs.  Moderator   Doug McFarland, Co-CEO, Dimestore Media  Panelists   Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media Jarvis Bowers, VP, Research and Analytics, ESPN Roman Bukary, VP, Marketing & Business Development, Truviso Corporation Ryan Christensen, VP, Media Operations, Brand.net Jason Harper, Group Director, Marketing Intelligence, Organic, Inc.
4:30 PM	The “Ins and Outs” of Measuring Social Media Are your customers on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace? You are naïve if you say “no”. People of all demographics are engaging with each other and brands online like never before. Marketers trying to reach this audien this panel we will cover topics such as application installs, engagement, widgets, blogs, corporate Twittering and more.  Moderator   Nick O’Neill, Founder, Social Times Inc.  Panelists   Maurice Boissiere, Vice President, Client Solutions, Clearspring Technologies Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i Ed McLoughlin, Managing Director, MindShare Jerry Needel, Senior Vice President, BuzzMetrics Product Leadership, Nielsen Online Jason Richman, Director, Digital Product Strategy, NBC Universal

Are you attending? If so, please contact me and let me know your thoughts on this first-ever event. But don’t go on too much about how terrific it was. That will just break my heart.

If they don’t, you’re not getting out enough.

By that I mean, we’re in a time when organizational and categorical “silos” must come down. The reasons why at least two of those silos should come down are presented well in this post by Augie Ray of Milwaukee’s own Fullhouse Interactive. Augie’s post focuses on the divisions between finance and marketing. But there are many others, including, most notably, the walls separating marketing and technology.

The reason for much of this lack of communication and collaboration is conflicting priorities within the organization. And depending on the organization, one department’s priorities supersede the other’s.

The lion and the lamb shall lie down together… but the lamb won’t get much sleep.
–  Woody Allen

Where does this power imbalance leave marketing, and specifically, CMOs? Augie’s post includes as an illustration this survey of CMOs. It is used as evidence that current business’s emphasis on short-term profits invariably favors finance:

Let’s call to the stand CMOs themselves to testify as to their place in the corporate world. The CMO Club recently polled its own members about who has the most credibility to the CEO. The results? Of the CMOs surveyed, 31% said the CFO, 24% said Head of Sales, and just 13.8% felt the CMO was most credible.

Placed as a family dynamic, the CEO (i.e., “the parent”) favors one sibling over another. Sorry, Marketing. You’re usually not that Golden Child.

Breaking down silos requires leadership from above. So the CEO has a key role in knocking heads and telling the kids to grow up and play nice.

But there is plenty of blame to go around. So what can you do to start removing a few bricks from the walls that hinder your future success? Do what our parents told us to do on the first day of kindergarten. Mingle. And treat others the way you’d like to be treated.

Un-networking is smart. It can also be fun. Case in point: likemind

I co-host Milwaukee’s likemind because I recognize that I need to get out and mingle. But I don’t want to do it in the echo chamber of yet another trade organization or rigid networking event (although each have their value).

Instead, I embraced the “un-networking” concept of likemind. Its diversity and lowered expectations suit me well. I also like drinking coffee, which is important.

If you are in the Milwaukee area, read about likemind, then come see for yourself at one of the monthly meeting. If you’re not, find something similar in your community. Then, talk to someone you’d never otherwise dream of approaching. You might be surprised with the results.

Also, I and a few experts on the subject, talked about historical trends and recent measurements in what has been termed social capital.

Results we a mixed bag, as this last post of the series reveals.

Over the course of this month, I’ll be focusing more on how technology is helping communities come together from two perspectives:

• How is micro-blogging connecting unlikely groups of individuals for the common good?
• How is technology making remote work more “social,” and doing more to forge the type of friendships and camaraderie we usual associate with physicial workplaces (of the fortunate!)

More discussions of marketing technology ROI

Along the way will be a few suprises. Just as important for my regular readers, you can still expect news and trends directly related to digital marketing will also continue to be explored in Jue — all filtered through the wide-ranging experiences and passions of a Midwestern marketing wonk.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Kevin Hillstrom, author of Multichannel Forensics, suggests a reasonable way to approach web campaign valuation. It works well for e-commerce site visits, and even sheds light on valuing other types of visitors.

Placing value on non-buying visitors

Start the valuation process with the obvious: Visitors who immediately convert to a sale. But then keep going. Apply common sense numbers to those visitors who do not immediately buy. And why not? Visitors may come back two, three or more times before making a purchase. Like a fish that nibbles before biting, these “lost” visits aren’t so lost after all. They should be fairly depreciated, not totally ignored.

Here’s what Kevin says about ignoring all but the “one-visit” purchasers:

We try our hardest to allocate orders to the advertising vehicle that caused the order, seldom considering a series of events.

Take paid search as an example. Assume that a paid search campaign results in a 3% conversion rate and a $100 AOV [Average Order Value]. We run a profit and loss statement on the 0.03 * 100 = $3.00 demand generated by the campaign, factoring in the cost of the campaign.

What about the 97% of visitors who did not purchase?

Hillstrom asks, “What if you had this data?”:

• Of those who are left [i.e., 97% of the base], 50% will visit the website again within one week, with 3% converting, spending $100 each.
• Of those who are left, 50% will not visit again. Those who are left will visit again within three weeks, with 3% converting, spending $100 each.
• Of those who are left, 50% will not visit again. Those who are left will visit again within one month, with 3% converting, spending $100 each.
• Of those who are left, 50% will not visit again. Those who are left will visit again within four months, with 3% converting, spending $100 each.
• Of those who are left, 50% will not visit again. Those who are left will visit again within six months, with 3% converting, spending $100 each.

He goes on to explain:

There is value in each case, value that most of us choose not to measure.
When I iterate through the five cases above, I calculate an additional $2.75 of future visitor value. [I get $2.68 in my number-crunching, as the number in the lower right of the graphic shows. Here's my math in a Google Spreadsheet.]

In other words, we measure the $3.00 generated by short-term conversion. We don’t always measure the $2.75 of future conversions.

Now there may be additional expenses associated with the $2.75 number — that customer might require additional paid search expense or might use a shopping comparison site, whatever. So we need to run a true profit and loss statement on the additional $2.75 generated by future visits.

If each first-time visitor (one that doesn’t convert immediately) is worth $0.30 profit over the next twelve months, you think differently about attracting visitors, don’t you?

I agree. The BrandWeek article I linked to in the first paragraph said that the CMOs surveyed, “Expressed an awareness of digital’s potential, along with a recognition that they weren’t close to tapping it.”

Building sales models that take into account the messy realities of online behavior is one way we can start.

Last night I got a few answers.

Among other marketing innovators, I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Woelfle, owner of Blatz Liquor. He was co-hosting a Tweetup in collaboration with JSOnline.com. He contends microblogging has produced tangible results.

Last month Journal Sentinel business writer Tannette Elie (@Telie) cited Woelfle as saying that Facebook is responsible for 10% of his sales. This, he explained, was primarily through the soft-sell of publicizing wine- and beer-tasting events.

One tenth of a “bricks-and-mortar” retailer’s business attributed to Facebook? It seemed a lofty claim, but when I asked Joe earlier today if he would revise that estimate, he said only to throw his newest tactic — Twitter — into that mix.

The wall-to-wall turnout at the event last night certainly suggested that Twitter was powerful at something. But what? Skeptics would say you could use plenty of other methods to spread the word about a free event at a beer, wine and liquor store — one that included plenty of liberally-poured product samples!

Time will tell how effective @BlatzLiquor’s Twitter efforts are at growing real sales and loyalty. But in the meantime, someone else at the Tweetup has a Twitter-fueled business already road-tested by other entrepreneurs.

Korean BBQ Tacos and Pizza By The Slice

Scott Baitinger is co-owner of Streetza Pizza (@StreetzaPizza). I was excited about connecting with him for two reasons:

1. His business just had its official launch this Memorial Day weekend and I was eager to find out how it went
   
2. Scott’s business is a glimpse at a promising future for retail — for everyone from food vendors to dry cleaners to banks

Streetza’s business model uses Twitter to tell hungry customers where its truck will be parked next. It even polls followers on questions such as future locations and product offerings. I wrote about this business model — this promising taste of the Web 3.0 world — last week. It was in a SOHOBizTube article. In that piece, I cited the wildly successful Zogi BBQ, a Los Angeles purveyor of “Korean tacos” that informs its tens of thousands of Twitter followers (@KogiBBQ) where it will be next.

As odd as it sounds, these customer-centric Tweets are truly a taste of things to come.

That’s because the next meaningful digital innovations won’t provide consumers with cooler web sites and more content. They will be mobile applications that provide exactly the content we crave, talking to us when we are physically in a place to scratch the itch.

The future of the web is about place. And like Kogi, Streetza Pizza, in sleepy little Milwaukee, will be leading us there one slice at a time.

(Although we never met, I am to this day indebted to her for inspiring me to move my career from a direct response to a digital marketing focus. She also, during her talk, introduced me to the jargon-y word paradigm. For that I’m not so grateful, and do my best to use this MBA-scented doozy of a word only with heavy irony.)

The book, and the new “paradigm,” quickly generated its detractors. But much of the book has withstood the test of time.

Remember, 1994 was practically the digital stone ages. The year the book hit the marketing mainstream, was a time when frequent flier programs were still in their infancy, and the concept of “free, advertising-supported email” was one of the few internet developments worthy of mention in the first edition of the book (Hotmail was founded three years later — and went viral shortly thereafter — gobbling up market share until purchased by Microsoft).

Pioneers are often criticized for events beyond their control. I suspect that Peppers and Rogers felt more than a little queasy as they watched one corporation after another buy into large, expensive, and mostly doomed customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. Most of the initiatives were predicated on grossly unrealistic expectations.

I predict that current and future investments in this type of marketing intelligence will deliver on the vision of this seminal book.

The truth will bear out, and we’ll see that the problem with the “one-to-one future” wasn’t the vision itself, but a dearth of analytical vigor coupled with poor training for the people actually expected to use the systems.

What will be different now? I see three things:

1. Post-boom sobriety — If Pepper and Rogers had been doing business in a less explosive business environment (read: abundant venture capital mixed with what Greenspan aptly called “irrational exuberance”), their message would not have been so quickly and rudely out of fashion.
2. The growth of small business — Good CRM must be wired into every part of an organization. That is nearly impossible in large, hide-bound companies. Expecially if they have two dozen databases that need to talk to each other. (Yes, two dozen. I wish I was kidding.) Thanks to the phenomena of SaaS (Software as a Service), cloud computing and good ‘ole Moore’s law, powerful business intelligence is now within reach of small and mid-market businesses. But that just the technology. Here’s the biggest difference:
3. A truly plugged-in workforce — By far the largest barrier to successful implementation of automated systems is getting the workforce to recognize them as their friends. This is happening more today, as a new generation is becoming more familiar with the vast world within their web browser. It’s an entirely new way that small organizations are growing into bigger ones that I wrote about in my post on networked leadership.

For these reasons I’m optimistic about a future that fulfills Peppers and Rogers’ promise.

No, it won’t exactly be “one-to-one.” Even Peppers and Rogers conceeded that economies of scale call for more of a mass-customization of contacts and segmentation than the portfolio-based management they first discussed. But this “future” will bring us to the same destination.

It will be a scalable way to extend a business into niches as narrow the miriad reasons we choose one brand over another. Fifteen years ago I thought this book might be on to something. In spite of the economic jolt we’re experiencing (or maybe even because of it! ), the last year has assured me I wasn’t wrong after all.

1. It’s inexpensive to use online marketing
2. It stretches everything!

Chris’s post describes how online social network tools can improve event outcomes by helping with all five of its phases:

• Awareness
• Attention
• Engagement
• Execution
• Extension

Are social media efforts the meat? No way. But they can be used throughout to maximize effectiveness.