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(by Emily Riley)

I've been working a lot recently on what measurement means to the Interactive Marketer. In the midst of my Wave on attribution and as a result of a few surveys we've done recently, I've got a lot of amazing information swirling around me - insights on what works today and what will be possible tomorrow. I put some of that information into a presentation I'm giving tomorrow, and it's free to sign up. If you are interested in hearing more about what current and future measurent looks like, please join me on Thursday the 17th (as in tomorrow!) at 11 am EST (4pm GMT) for a Live Webinar ‘Measure ROI and Justify your Marketing Budget’.

Click here to register: http://www.forrester.com/Marketing/Campaign2/1,6538,2506,00.html

New Benchmark Data is Here!

Forrester has just released the findings from our 2009 Benchmark Survey. If you didn't know, the survey is the second largest in the country - after the US Census. This data is what we use for many of our most popular and important consumer research. For example, it is the foundation for our new social technographics ladder which you can see here.

So, across the survey, what did we find? Consumers of all ages and family situations continue to incorporate technology more deeply into their daily lives.  Today, technologies like PCs and mobile phones, which were once reserved for the most well-heeled tech freaks, are in three-quarters of US households. Forty-three percent of households now have a high-definition television, and nearly one in four have a DVR. And consumers is every stage of life continue to move an increasing amount of their time and attention away from offline channels. Our analysis of four different life stage groups shows that:

Young singles and couples are the most connected.

Young families are heavy tech users, especially for shared experiences. 

Older families are straddling different worlds. 

Older singles and couples use technology more surgically.

The data includes a lot of detail, most of which can be customized to answer questions specific to different verticals, purchase behavior, life stages and attitudes. If you would like to peruse the data for yourself, check out the report here.

Click here to get some additional consumer insights related to this report.

Measurement has room for improvement

We recently surveyed over 100 interactive marketers about their on-line measurement practices for my report "Committing to Meaningful Digital Metrics." I was intrigued to find that interactive marketers are not very confident in their ability to measure their on-line marketing. While traditional media is notoriously hard to measure, it has been around for a long time, so marketers are used to the metrics they have and essentially accept them. However, interactive marketing is still new, so while it seems very measure-able, few marketers have established reliable measurement techniques. In fact, even direct response marketers have major room for improvement. Here is how marketers rated themselves across three different types of interactive marketing measurement.

 

In other words, marketers rated themselves an average of 6.3 out of 10 in measuring direct response, a 5.3 out of 10 for branding and only a 4.5 out of 10 for social marketing. It's not too surprising that social marketing rated the worst overall, but many marketers still feel that they are nowhere near perfect when measuring even direct response.

Where would you rate your own interactive measurement abilities?

It's cool to be uncool on Facebook

  Health insurance isn't cool, government agencies aren't hip and medical equipment isn't very social. However, many companies that pedal these products and services work with me on a regular basis to understand how they can make social media work for their marketing needs. Often they find excellent reasons to use sites like Twitter and Facebook, and typically the ideas are quite practical. For example, one company came up with the idea to tweet lab schedule changes back to doctor's offices so they can in turn reschedule patient appointments. Or this Facebook application from Quest Diagnostics, that they created to encourage their customers to live a healthy lifestyle. These social services are free and can create much more effective pathways for communication, so it's worth looking at social media no matter how un-sexy you think your company is.

Unfortunately, many companies suffer from a strict internal policy around using social media. Often an overly cautious CIO or legal department will restrict employees from even using Facebook for personal reasons, let alone market on it. All companies will eventually use social media heavily. However, the current reality is that many organizations have big hurdles to overcome. Even companies with full access to social media and a few toes dipped in the water such as a CEO blog or Facebook fan page have a lot to think about when moving deeper into social marketing.

If you think you're at an un-sexy company and feel like you need help integrating social into your marketing plans, or need the right pitch to open up your company's social computing policy, come to our Social Computing Workshop in Cambridge on September 22.

What to do with your newer bigger ad budget

 by Emily Riley

Major players are showing signs that marketers are starting to spend more online. Yahoo recently made public remarks that they’re optimistic that advertising revenue will start to increase soon. If we do see a near term increase in spending (Forrester is forecasting general growth in the industry over the next 5 years) then it is probably a combination of things including a turn in the economy and the approaching 4^th quarter, typically the biggest quarter for ad spending.

If you are in the fortunate position to have a planned increase in your marketing budget, you are probably trying to figure out where to spend the money. Now is the perfect time to start using attribution to help you make that decision. I’m currently deep in the middle of a Wave to look at the different attribution vendors out there, which will be out in early Q4. In the mean time, I highly recommend starting to look at what problems attribution can solve for you. Attribution is a form of measurement that will allow you to understand which media placements move the needle from the early funnel branding all the way down to a conversion or sale. If you want a richer definition, check out a past attribution report I wrote that describes it in more detail.

Hopefully, interactive marketing spending does indeed start to increase in the near term. During the downturn, we’ve heard more talk about the importance of measurement and ROI in the past year than ever before, and I have a fear that the pendulum is about to swing away from these things. Forrester predicts that brand marketing will be a big part of interactive marketing spending increases in the coming years, and of course social marketing will be part of that. But there is no reason why “measurement” and “ROI” need to be sacrificed for these things to happen. By including attribution as part of your plans, you can have the best of both worlds.

Why I like the SIM Score

 If you are like most marketers I talk to, you are probably trying to find a reliable way to measure the effects of your social marketing efforts. One of the tactics I typically recommend is to use a listening platform to understand and benchmark the scope and quality of conversations happening around your brand. In Razorfish's recent publication "Fluent"they along with TNS Cymfony introduce a formula that really captures the value of listening platforms for measuring social media. They call it a "SocialInfluence Measurement" or SIM score, and it works like this:

1. Calculate the number of positive, negative, and neutral conversations happening for your brand

2. Use the formula (Positive + Neutral - Negative)/ Total brand conversations

3. Calculate the number of positive, negative, and neutral conversations happening for your industry

4. Use the formula (Positive + Neutral - Negative)/ Total industry conversations

5. Divide lines 2/4 and you have your SIM score

A few people have compared it to a Net Promoter Score, but I think it goes one step further in that it compares your brand's performance to that of the industry.

Not only that, but elements of the formula give you other cool insights. For example, the result from line 2 can be divided by your total brand conversations to give you a "net sentiment" score. You can do the same thing with line 4 and divide that number by the total industry conversations. If your net sentiment score is lower than the industry average, your competitors have better positive sentiment across social media than you do.

You can recalculate this score over and over as you try new forms of social marketing. While the score will certainly reflect larger efforts, such as big TV campaigns or news stories, you can typically correlate the effects by mapping your scores on a time line and plotting all of the different campaigns and news stories to see which things affected your score the most.

If you don't have a listening platform, ask your interactive agency about it, and ask them to develop a SIM score for you and your industry.

Behavioral Targeting is on Everyone's Lips

Marketers are certainly focusing their efforts on improving the ROI of their campaigns these days. Often, behavioral targeting factors into their plans. This must be why I have so many different projects focusing on BT. In addition to my report that recently came out, I will be presenting a webinar on March 5.  You can sign up here. Finally, I'll be presenting after lunch at the OMMA Behavioral Summit on Thursday the 26th.

BT has a lot of great attributes, namely that marketers can find so much value in aggregating behavior over time. However, I also think we need to see more continuity across the market and that consumers deserve a standard opt-out that they can manage across sites. To hear more, sign up for my webinar or meet me at OMMA. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

Math update

So a Platform-A employee pointed out that 1 billion impressions over two days is actually (duh) 500m per day, so the share of voice would actually be almost 17 percent.
Thanks!

Making the web work as a reach medium

T-Mobile bought a one billion impression campaign from AOL/Platform-A last week. The impressions were spread across two days. With Platform-A delivering about 3 billion impressions per day, that's a 33 percent share of voice across their network (the biggest one out there.) I would say that officially, this ad buy proves that you can have simultaneous reach of some kind online.
No it's not the same as a superbowl commercial, but it's pretty important for brand advertisers nonetheless.
More marketers should be willing to pay a premium for this kind of campaign. A site takeover actually already has some traction and is a great way to flood people with your message. However one site is only one site. A giant scale buy on a network on the other hand, can ensure that you're showing a majority of Americans your message in just a day or two. Networks should be selling takeovers every day of the year.

There are a few tactical issues to think about:

The hard part about share of voice using a network is that on each site, the share of voice would actually be somewhat small. Using retargeting can make sure you hit the same person a few times.

There can be several reasons for wanting broad reach. Obviously one of them is to have a lot of people see your ad. But the other goal is typically to have those people remember your ad. Pair this kind of buy with guarantees on some major home pages and you should be good to go.

Networks sell this kind of thing for low single-digit CPMs, a great price in a downturn.

Want to know how budget changes effect you?

We are about to release our updated Internet Advertising Spending Forecast. It is broken out by category, and provides good insight into how the current economic downturn will affect different businesses. If you are interested in discussing this with us and how you should be using the numbers to plan for your own 2009, please contact your account manager to set up a call.