Session Notes: Measuring the Unmeasurable with Matt Toll of Factiva

I’m live blogging today from Phoenix Arizona at Frost and Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing conference. Caryn, one of the event directors said that some guests asked for bloggers to attend all the tracks so all the content is captured. Apparently, I’m one of the few bloggers here, so I’ll do what I can.

Matt Toll of Factiva presents today at Frost and Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing conference, his session, entitled “What have you done for me lately, measuring Marketing’s unmeasurables” is right up my alley. As a former customer of Factiva’s I’m pretty familiar with some of their offerings and products. A few months ago, I helped them with running a Social Media roundtable on Social Media Measurement, do check out the findings.

Questions and tactics
One of the members of our table is from an Online Media company, who brought up some excellent points: For many, measuring Social Media is still a challenge, as these new tools are still foreign to many Marketers. Determining origination point where a company touched a marketer, although the conversion didn’t convert for 90 days, being able to track ‘back to point of first touch’ is interesting. The challenge of determining what other factors came into play during that 90 days was also important.

Sophisticated Traditional Measurement
A senior marketer at our table gave examples of how they’ve deployed very sophisticated measurement techniques for direct, email, telemarkeing and other advertising campaigns. To optimize the campaign they’re using control groups to compare and measure. He defined success criteria as being defined by: 1) Response, 2) Conversion, and 3) ROI

Measurement criteria varied widely
There was quite a few different things mentioned here, it really depends on the Market, campaign, duration and purpose. Some of the common attribute themes were:

-Click through rate (which is a marketing metric, not an executive metric)
-Leads: High quality leads generated from a campaign help to measure ROI of a marketing campaign.
-Various other criteria from events, analysts, press mentions, channel distribution velocity, etc, etc, etc.

Wisdom from the crowd:
The following snippets are opinions shared from the crowd, which include both challenges, ah-has and tips.

-Different Marketers measure different cycles, some on yearly budget, some based upon campaign

-Educating internally the vocabulary and terms to be used across the company, for example, the term “conversion” can take many different forms.

-One member of the table doesn’t do any measurement, this was a great learning experience for him.

-Criteria for measuring success a survey done with current clients and partners was to measure: 1) Level of satisfaction, would the customer renew, 2) would they recommend to a peer 3) Would you secure additional services

-Brand Awareness measurement, (standard survey) as well as niche measurement was done at Avaya.

-Sponsorships: Difficult to quantify what did one get from a sponsorship.

-Sponsorships: Track actual buying changes due to sponorship activities.

-Sponsorships: The more you can craft the sponsorship so that the audience/community goes to a specific url or other action may be helpful.

-Brand Potential Index: A score media impacts both positive and negative.

-Challenge: How to determine customer or prospect origination

-Controlled events: Some Marketers created a special discount for a short period of time to measure a specific campaign.

-Things to Measure: Contact Activity (# of times hit), repate business and tie it back to campaigns, Customer satisfaction vs customer delight, vs dollars spent.

-Some are starting to measure advocates and detractors.

-Some marketers set the measurement criteria in advance for the whole year, and then try to quantify.

Blogosphere and Consumer Generated Media (CGM)
Matt gave a story about the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing (Update: For those that don’t know, this is like putting McDonalds on the Pyramids of Giza, or BurgerKing at Stonehedge) and how it’s inappropriate. 10 days later there are hundreds of thousands of people aware of this and now Starbucks is now under pressure to remove it.

-Some stats indicated that less than 10% of companies have deployed blogs.

-What are the demographics of your bloggers, are they customers? Some marketers don’t care about bloggers that don’t make money.

-What impact does bloggers have on a customer.

-We went around my table and only one person out of seven has deployed.

-There were two people ‘listening to the conversation’ out of seven.

-Concerns of one blogger (squeeky wheel) that represents one person, or are they not reflective of the whole market?

-Questions if are blogs a ‘fad’, can it hurt you more by getting into it vs not doing anything.

-”Only a small amount of internet users were bloggers”

-The conversation quickly shifted to “Why does blogging matter” and then “How to blog”.

-Blogging voices are a precursor to problems that could come.

-Blogging is not a PR self absorbed tool.

Note to self: Wow, I’m definitely out of the bubble. The last time I experience this was a few months ago when speaking at Ragan’s PR conference in Chicago. The “bubble” is what I refer to as the tech bubble in Silicon Valley, where we’re already dealing with “how do you deploy” vs “why should I care”. There are so many companies that have not yet figured out Social Media.

Update: Here’s some info about Hillary, and Internet Videos being the new ‘kissing babies’.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Conference, Social Media Measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.