In a previous article, I took a look at the assertion that Groupon’s traffic lift from its Super Bowl ad was inconsequential.

Here I want to take a look at a different part of the Fast Company article on Groupon’s Super Bowl performance: Buzz.

The article shows a graph put out by Nielsen showing that Groupon had a very large amount of buzz relative to other digital brands that advertised during the Super Bowl. While I’m not a huge fan of sentiment (it’s still very much an inexact science), it seems clear that some concept of sentiment is missing from the FastCo article. If the majority of buzz is bad, then it wouldn’t be surprising to find that actual direct response to the ads was low.

More importantly, however, this reinforces how important it is to not live by buzz metrics alone. It’s easy for people to say something about your brand one way or another. What is more telling is what they actually choose to DO. Lots of talk (even very positive talk) doesn’t guarantee any impact on your brand. People may have had an interaction, fired of a tweet about it, and then totally forgot about it. Sure, there would appear to be more opportunity for people to do something, and certainly more opportunity for brand impressions on a person’s followers, but the relationship between buzz and actual response is not straightforward, and likely differs not just between brands, but between kinds of efforts inside a brand.

It’s best to measure not just what people say, but what you are trying to get from a campaign so that you can get a sense of what kinds of buzz actually move the needle on your business, and what kinds are just hot air. And, of course, if you can’t do that, we can do it for you

First, the article uses % increase in traffic week-over-week as the primary metric. That certainly makes for a dramatic looking metric, but it probably doesn’t give you the insight into “success” that you might think it would. First of all, for this kind of performance, you need to be looking at raw numbers. Percentages are great for comparing things that are directly comparable, but if we’re looking at direct-response-type metrics (which site visits would be), then what you care about is how much you had to spend to get a volume of response. So knowing that Groupon’s 3% increase – which seems paltry next to HomeAway.com’s 27% – accounts for 420,000 visits (as pointed out by commenter Rob Day) compared to HomeAways’s 230,000 provides a more meaningful comparison.

And if you’re looking at direct response, then what you need to know is what the cost of the effort was versus its value.

Assuming that the cost of a Super Bowl commercial is $10 million (and I have NO idea what the actual cost was), then we’re looking at about $29 per visit. Is that worth it? Well now we’re into the realm of things we probably can’t know. To know for sure, we’d need to know what percent of visitors Groupon is able to convert on their site, and what the lifetime value of each conversion is.

By way of a hyperbolic example, let’s look at Groupon’s numbers versus GoDaddy’s. GoDaddy (again, according to commenter Rob Day) gained 4,100,000 new visits compared to Groupon’s 420,000. If they were both able to convert 10% of visitors, then GoDaddy will have gained 410,000 customers, where Groupon gained only 42,000. But if the lifetime value of a customer is $10 for GoDaddy, and $100 for Groupon (again, numbers pulled out of thin air to make a point here), then GoDaddy has added $4,100,000 in revenue, and Groupon has added $4,200,000, making their overall performance about equal, despite very different seeming traffic percentages.

A final note on this: If they each paid $10 million for their spots, then their ROI is going to be the Return divided by the Investment, or $4,100,000/$10,000,000 for GoDaddy, and $4,200,000/$10,000,000 for Groupon. That’s 41% ROI for GoDaddy, and 42% for Groupon. If neither got any additional value out of the ads, then they are both underwater on this effort – that is, they spent more than they earned – making this not a good candidate to repeat for either one of them next year.

I also want to talk about the “buzz volume” metric in the FastCo article, but I’ll do that in a separate article.

Fight partnered with PGE in creating “Operation Switch” to achieve the company’s goal of moving customers beyond awareness of energy saving issues and into making real change. Key to this program was showing that even little changes, when done by a lot of people, can make a big difference in Oregon’s energy future.

The Award
First presented by The Public Affairs Council in 2000, the Grassroots Innovation Awards recognize the nation’s best grassroots programs and campaigns. Award categories include:

1. Corporate Innovation
2. Association Innovation
3. Social Media Innovation

The Operation Switch program won in the Corporate Innovation category. Last year’s winner in the Corporate category was split between Target and Walmart.

Operation Switch
Operation Switch is an online experiment from Portland General Electric that asked participants to make one simple change in their energy use every couple of weeks, and provided tips and support in making that change. Using a foundation of social media and basic game mechanics, Operation Switch helped PGE customers save an estimated 487,000 kWh of energy in 2010 – enough to power 41 homes for a year.

Fight llc
Fight is a digital strategy firm built from the ground up to respond to the unique challenges and opportunities the digital space provides to brands of all kinds. Unbound by the need to fit ideas into specific executional capabilities, our core focus is on developing strategic plans designed to meet our clients’ business goals; plans that are forward thinking, measurable, adaptable, and designed to articulate a client’s unique value clearly to their customers.

Portland General Electric
Portland General Electric, headquartered in Portland, Ore., is a fully integrated electric utility that serves approximately 822,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in Oregon. Visit our website at PortlandGeneral.com.

But sometimes fragments are really all you need, so I’ve been maintaining a Posterous blog to use for tossing in links or content fragments as reference material to come back to again and again. It tends to shadow whatever I’m currently thinking about (currently it’s filled with theory of gaming, and persuasion) and content shows up in bursts rather than a steady trickle often with no more than a title and a link.

If you’re interested in this more behind-the-scenes aspect of Fight, check it out: deepmarketing.posterous.com.

He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with:  including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each.  He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle.  Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year.  At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.

A fantastic way of using the tools that are out there in creative ways, read the full story here.

Rethink what a helmets purpose is, and work from there.

The Hövding is an airbag for your head. Mounted in a bulky collar, which can be disguised as a stylish scarf, the bag explodes on when you crash and surrounds your delicate melon with an inflated hood.

The collar contains the bag itself, helium to inflate the airbag and sensors which tell the Hövding when to fire. The sensor unit consists of gyroscopes and accelerometers which constantly monitor movement and deploy to bag when you’re in danger. The Chieftain is charged by USB (firmware can also be updated via the same port) and you switch it on by zipping the collar shut around your neck.

IOS hacker p0sixninja, aka Joshua Hill, has jailbroken the new AppleTV. To do it, he used an unreleased version of the tool greenpois0n, an exploit designed to crack iOS version 4.1.

The v2 AppleTV runs on the same iOS that Apple uses for all its mobile devices, and shares the custom A4 chip used in the iPhone 4, the iPad and the latest iPod Touch. Greenpois0n, like other jailbreak exploits, hacks the operating system to give the user access to the file system, and from there the ability to install third-party applications.

Read More [ On Wired ]

This time it was Justin’s turn to choose and he picked Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The book has done the business book of the moment circuit so I’m guessing that a lot of you have already read it. I’d love to see what you thought.

Next month it will be Mickey’s turn to choose, so if you’ve got something you think we should read, send him your suggestions.

So either the youth are using Twitter more and represent a rapidly growing demographic or those that do use Twitter partake in the trending topics games more then others.

Check it out for yourself.

We wanted to have a way of varying this rate that was as objective as possible, so we’re basing changes in our rate on how “utilized” we are. Based on our histories working for various agencies, we set our sights somewhat arbitrarily on an ideal utilization of 80%, and decided that anything plus or minus ten percentage points was probably what we could consider “optimal”.

So, if we’re working within this target, our rate stays the same. If we fall below, our rate falls, and if we shoot over the top, our rate rises ($1 a day in either case). We’re also upping our rate $1 for every serious inquiry we get for new work. Simple as that.

So what has this meant for us so far?

First, deciding what is, and is not, “utilized”. Now that we have established a range of utilization that we want to be within, we need to decide what actually counts as being utilized. So far, this has been fairly straightforward: work on billable projects is clearly utilized; work on getting a billable project defined, signed, and running also seems utilized; business development work for our business development guy (@verymickey, contact him if you’re interested in doing business with us is utilized; internal administration is not utilized; and writing for the blog, looking at our analytics, and most biz dev work for everyone but Mickey seems like non-utilized. There are some grey areas, like do we count it as utilized if Justin goes to a meeting with Mickey to talk to a potential client. We’re going with our gut on these (it does count), and so far they seem easy enough to resolve.

Second, a strong incentive to fill out timesheets. We’re pulling our utilization numbers daily based on our timesheets (we use Harvest, in case you’re interested). Since the rate that we charge is directly affected by this, it becomes a pretty good motivator (especially for those of us who struggle to get our time in). Also, since someone is looking at this data every day and taking action based on it, it adds meaning to the task as well. The upshot of all of this is even more detailed reporting on projects in the future.

Third, an evaluation of whether or not 80% utilized is actually optimal. A question that’s starting to surface is whether, given our definitions of what is and is not considered “utilized”, is 80% the right number. We may find out that we do a lot of non-utilized work and that if we also did 80% utilized work, we’d struggle to keep up. We may also find that 70% is not enough or 90% is too much. This may mean that we have to look at changing the target range to more accurately reflect reality. It’s too soon to tell yet, but we’re certainly paying a lot more attention to this.

Fourth, some questions, and some directional answers. We received a few questions about the program pretty much right away (in fact, we got more than a few questions even before we launched). This is great, of course. It’s an experiment for us, and we welcome questions, opinions, and advice. We launched this experiment to see what we could learn from it, so we’re doing a lot of “yeah, that’s a good question” right now. Sorry for that. Hopefully as we get farther into this, we’ll have more definitive answers to share.

Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented.

The big question for me, ‘Why didn’t a company like Nikon or Canon make this app?’
Oh and yes it has a ton of great filters and options.

If you do download it, be sure to friend me.

And just like the internet does, someone created a nice website to house all of these new ‘Instant’ versions of sites, instantise.

I have mixed feelings about them, finding that it works better for some then others. But I do love seeing all of this initial excitement.

We were trying to play off of simplicity. We wanted the appearance of the lock to match that simplicity. It’s really basic—up, down, left, and right—and easy to remember. So nothing too fancy. – Lea Plato, lead designer

Just four directions to make your lock sequence? Awesome. I am going to make mine ‘up up down down left right left right’.

Read the rest of the interview to see what else Lea Plato had to say about their goals and inspiration for the project.

At Fight, nothing ends the week better for us than a good brain stretch.

So, from 3-5 pm on Fridays we’ll lend your organization our brains for free (and, if you’re in the Portland metro area, we’ll even come to you – otherwise we’ll need to meet remotely).

You’ll need to provide us context in advance (no more than an hour’s worth of effort) so that we can have some idea of what we’re in for, but other than that, there’s no cost, no obligation, no anything.

Of course, since we’re doing it for free, there’s no continuation work for free, but if you have a project that could gain from an hour or two of outside pushing, or if you’re interested in seeing Fight in action in a risk free way, then let’s talk!

We’ll be doing this on a mostly first-come-first-served basis, but we may have to move things around from time to time, so reach out today and reserve your time.

Here we go:

Goal

Goals should be the first thing created for a marketing project. A goal is what you are trying to achieve. Goals often break down into two groups: business goals and marketing goals.

Business Goal

A business goal is typically (but by no means always) associated with money. So a business goal might look like this:

• Increase revenue by 5% this fiscal year

Marketing Goal

A marketing goal typically exists to support some business goal. So a marketing goal that supports a business goal about revenue, might look like this:

• Increase product awareness by 25%

Notice that neither goal gives you something specific to do. Goals are focused on the outcomes that you want, not how you want to get to them.

Metric

A metric tells how you’ll know when you’ve reached a goal as well as how the goal will be measured. So a metric for the marketing goal above might be:

• The number of potential clients responding that they are “somewhat aware” or higher on our annual prospect survey will increase from the previous year by 25% or more.

In both of the goals above, the target was given (“5% revenue increase”, “25% awareness increase”). Goals won’t always have these targets right in them, but metrics should ALWAYS include the target.

Strategy

A strategy describes the approach that will be taken to accomplish the goals and should include as much relevant information as possible about why you are taking this approach. The strategy provides the guidance for the individual actions taken on a project. When evaluating what tactics to use, you should be able to look at the strategy to determine what is “on strategy” and what is not. A supporting strategy for the marketing goal might be:

• Since our prospects spend a large amount of time online, conduct high-volume advertising on the online properties where they spend most of their time

Tactic

A tactic is each thing that you do in support of a strategy. There may be only one tactic, or there may be hundreds depending on such things as budget and timing. Some possible tactics for the sample strategy above:

• Buy run-of-site ads on ESPN
• Advertise on Facebook
• Test response to Twitter advertising

So there you go, a quick and dirty overview. Toss your questions in the comments if you have any, and let me know if there are other marketing issues that are causing you (or others) confusion.

When we work on campaigns for clients, our aim is to understand one thing in particular: how much did it cost to get a desired outcome from the campaign? That is, how much did it cost to get a sign-up, a purchase, or the like. This is true even if the primary goal is to create awareness about something, or to create a shift in some key brand perception metric.

Knowing how much it cost you to achieve a goal allows you to compare various ways of getting to that goal to see what the most efficient way to achieve it is.

With that in mind, let’s explore how the Naked Campaign worked for us.

One of the things that we were interested in knowing for this campaign, was how much it cost to get a targeted person to our site. Here’s how that broke down:
“Spend”
Google (after filtering click fraud): $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24

Site Visits
Google: 30
LinkedIn: 14

Bounce Rate (% of visits that saw just one page; we don’t count these people as interested for our purposes)
Google: 96.67%
LinkedIn: 92.86%

“Engaged” Visits
Google: 1
LinkedIn: 1

Cost per Engaged Visit (Cost/Engaged Visits)
Google: $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24

As you can see, ultimately there was not enough “engaged” traffic for us to get a solid sense of how much it would cost for each engaged visitor that came through each of these sites.

If there had been enough traffic to have solid numbers, then clearly Google would be the better candidate for further investment. We could also have used these numbers to establish a success threshold for other acquisition campaigns. We know it cost us $53 to get an engaged visit to the site. All other things equal, activities that had a higher cost per engaged visitor would not warrant further investment.

Ever since July 22nd, about the time the Old Spice campaign ended, I’ve been tracking their twitter stats. How many people they follow, how many people follow them, tweets, and so on. Why track this? I’m not really sure other than that I found the campaigns transition from T.V. to the web unique and I wanted to see what the tail looked like. While I think things like ROI are critical, without continuous access to sales numbers all the industry talk about the role this campaign played in that regard is really just blog fodder. It’s fun, but sort of pointless. What really interested me was the nature of the campaign – how it existed in the context of contemporary advertising.

I’m not an analyst of any sort, and until I heard about Dean’s presentation, I hadn’t done anything other than keep a daily (or nearly daily) tally of a handful of numbers. Hearing about the PAF event though, I decided to dump them into a spreadsheet and see what, if anything, was there. Here’s what I got:

From 07.23.2010 through 08.29.2010 the Old Spice Twitter account looked like this
They followed 719 people
They had 116,848 people following them
They were on 3,669 lists
They tweeted 1859 times
Note: that tweet number is slightly odd though because on 08.26 they had 1909 tweets.

If you’re curious what that looks like – here you go:

Interesting.

Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign – I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers – about 1,000 per day. Basically – @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact – nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.

And here is where I get to the confusing nature of this campaign. For a campaign that’s been regarded as the best social media campaign of the year, and even the best web campaign of the year – it doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve assumed social media and the web look like: It’s not interactive, it’s not communicative, and the one technical boundary it pushed – the video twitter responses – was a boundary of traditional media, not digital. To the extent that there was engagement at all, it was limited to the terms of the brand: they choose a tiny fraction of the communication directed at them to respond to, and then retained absolute control over the tone and length of the “conversation.”

In the end, this all sounds a lot like a different medium: T.V.

Now, it seems like lately, “T.V.” or “broadcast” has become a sort of dirty word in digitally minded circles, but that’s not at all how I mean it here. But everything I’ve written to this point raised a big question for me: was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising – because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content – in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.

this article was originally published on thisisviolence.net

The advertising portion of the Naked Campaign has now drawn to a close.

We divide the execution of a project (versus the strategizing portion) into 5 stages: Execution Planning, Running the Project, Analysis, and Adjustment.

Since we’ve finished running the project, it’s time for some analysis. Here’s a quick it on the base metrics that we were tracking, with more to follow.

Unfortunately, we ultimately had to throw out all of the Google AdWords data from before 20th as it looks like the click fraud that we were experiencing went all the way back to the beginning of the campaign So here’s the adjusted data starting at the 9th of July for LinkedIn’s DirectAds, and the 20th for Google’s AdWords:

DirectAds Spend: $199.24
DirectAds Impressions: 104,229
DirectAds Clicks: 38 (0.036% Click Rate)

AdWords Impressions: 116,092
AdWords Clicks: 78 (0.067% Click Rate)

Twitter Followers (current, all types): 295 (+14% since start)
RSS Followers (7 day avg): 15 (-17%)
Unique Visitors (30 days): 547 (+2.4%)
Comments (campaign, total): 0

I’ll do a deeper dive into the numbers over the next few days, and then we’ll go into the Adjustment stage and see what this all means for Fight moving forward.

(Yes, we fixed the “Z” after this photo

Here’s a movie of this going up:

After 9 days of running ads on LinkedIn’s DirectAds, we’d seen a total of one click. This despite the fact that more than 16,000 impressions had been run, the fact that we took our top-performing ad from Google’s AdWords and put it into rotation on DirectAds, and the fact that we wrote the most pragmatic ad that we could think of.

Here we had free money, and we couldn’t spend any of it.

So we did what we do here at Fight. We looked to see what we could do differently.

After a brief brainstorm, we decided to open up the audience target. We had been targeting people in Marketing job functions at medium-to-large companies and were likely to have control of a budget. Since we had to spend the money or lose it, we decided to go wider; much wider.

We blew away all of the audience targeting options; anyone at on on LinkedIn could see our ads, moving us from about 500,000 potential audience members, to over 70,000,000. Our justification for this (aside from having to spend money by July 31st) was that it’s possible that marketing professionals just don’t use LinkedIn that much (seems unlikely, but our low number of overall impressions is suggestive), and that if we reach beyond the primary network of the people that we’re directly targeting, into the secondary network of people in a company who might refer us along, and the tertiary network of influencers outside of a company, then DirectAds could still be a benefit to the Naked Campaign.

Here’s what happened:

There was an immediate uptick in both impressions and clicks. The click through rate is modest, and the bounce rate for people arriving at the Naked landing page from DirectAds is about 67%, which means that there are likely SOME visitors who have a legitimate interest in what Fight does.

And what ads are getting all of these new clicks?

Maybe it’s no surprise to you, but it’s the top performing ad from the AdWords campaign and the pragmatic ad written specifically for the LinkedIn audience.