I'm Blogging Over Here, Now...

I've moved my blog to WordPress, and I've posted a new post about my departure from Webtrends.

Sentiment Marketing is Coming - and it Looks More Like Direct Marketing than You Think

Sentiment marketing, the practice of engaging consumers directly with the express purpose of influencing consumer opinion about a brand, is coming fast. Sentiment marketing is being enabled (or, maybe more accurately, made necessary) by the proliferation of social media and the inherent trackability of the conversations that occur between consumers online.

The goal of sentiment marketing is to drive continuous improvements to consumer sentiment about your brand. You could argue, of course, that sentiment marketing is just PR; same practice, new channel. It's related, for sure. But this is different. A radical change has occurred: consumer conversations and the dynamics of consumer influence (word of mouth) are happening on the network. Word of mouth, influence, and shifting consumer opinions now happen at lightening speed across intertwined networks of connected people. This is fantastic if you are the purveyor of a darling brand, and can be hell if your brand has some tarnish. There are multiple upsides, though: sentiment and influence can now be measured directly and in real time; you have the opportunity to engage directly with consumers and influencers to impact sentiment.

If You Can Track it, You Can be Accountable for It

Practically speaking, this means that marketers can now directly attribute to their work both positive and negative changes in consumer sentiment. With measurability and attributability will come accountability. Marketers and advertisers will increasingly be held to account for their impact on consumer sentiment. The days of being able to defend lack of measurability and hide behind "it's a brand effort" are numbered.

This brings brand marketing and PR a whole lot closer to direct marketing. Direct marketers have been able to easily track and measure the performance of their work, in real time, allowing them to make midstream adjustments to programs that under perform. Direct mail, infomercials, call centers, and e-commerce are all deeply measurable, and the people who do marketing in those areas are held accountable for their performance. Brand marketers, on the other hand, if doing any measurement at all, have relied on dubious backward-looking analysis of past programs and consumer attitudes that provides little actionable insight that can be put to use in tweaking today's efforts.

More than Buzz

Many people are talking about measuring buzz. Companies have been built around the concept. Buzz isn't new, however. The PR folks have always been able to measure buzz; it's nothing more than media mentions. It's equally simple to measure buzz online by counting mentions in the blogosphere. But buzz isn't a particularly useful metric. What is useful is being able to measure against your goal. Remember what it is? It's all about sentiment, and changes in sentiment over time. The goal of sentiment marketing is to drive or maintain positive consumer sentiment in the same way that a direct marketer drives for a continuously increasing conversion rate. (Or, in the case of a crisis, your goal is to slow and reverse the potential onslaught of negative consumer sentiment.)

Buzz doesn't help you quantify performance against this goal. Think about it. If you're Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol cyanide crisis in 1982, your buzz numbers for Tylenol are through the roof. But that's probably not a good thing. You're getting attention for all the wrong reasons. Or, are you? Maybe the sentiment of the buzz is positive because everyone is impressed that Johnson & Johnson is doing a great job getting the word out, pulling Tylenol off the shelves and has generally behaved like a great corporate citizen should. The only way to know is to measure sentiment.

A Slow Trickle

That's an extreme example, for sure, but it illustrates the importance of sentiment over buzz. In truth, a crisis isn't what brings down most brands. It's like the slow drip drip drip of water onto concrete. Hard though the concrete may be, the dripping water will slowly erode it away until it's worn a hole right through. Similarly, the slow trickle of un-noticed, un-engaged negative consumer sentiment can wear a hole in your brand that can be difficult or impossible to repair.

And that's where the real value of sentiment marketing is: understanding current consumer sentiment and trends; and finding and engaging in the right consumer conversations to keep sentiment needle moving in the right direction and, if you can't prevent the unforeseen crisis, building up enough positive sentiment to cushion the impact of one so that you might survive.

Technorati Tags: social media,direct marketing,web analytics,word of mouth,WOM,consumer sentiment,conversation analytics,sentiment

X Change 2008 - Be There!

I'm very happy to be able to say that I'll be attending the X Change 2008 conference in San Francisco this August. In my book it is the best web analytics conference running due to its intimate, participatory, and conversational format. If you did not attend the inaugural X Change conference last year in Napa, you really missed something special.

Special kudos to Eric T. Peterson and Web Analytics Demystified for sponsoring this year's event, too.

I'm really excited for this year's X Change. It's shaping up to be even better than last year, if that's possible. I'll blog more about it soon.

Eric T. Peterson Doubts the Importance of Twitter

Eric Peterson spoke at Web Analytics Wednesday last night at WebTrends HQ in Portland. As usual, he was engaging and animated. I'd say there were about 30 people in attendance, and Eric kept the attention of every one of them. The question and answer session went on for 20 to 30 minutes.

Afterwards, a smaller group of us, including Eric, went to Dragonfish for beer and sushi (Eric's treat -- thanks Eric!). Eventually the conversation turned to Twitter. I found myself in the unexpected position of being the only one in the room who a) uses Twitter; and b) actually understood what Twitter is, how it is used, and it's potential value to the marketing organization.

Eric actually went on record with this statement (paraphrasing here): "Twitter has no value. You can't measure it. It's just a bunch of people talking." (Cue uproarious laughter.) Eric's a friend of mine, so I'm poking fun at him here. But seriously, I think he's missing the boat.

I can think of a way that Twitter is immediately measurable with web analytics, and some ways that it can be measured or support future measurement outside of traditional web analytics.

Use it as a viral or direct marketing tool. Use a URL minimizer (or smallerizer, as I like to call them) such as Twurl for all embedded links. Twurl has built in measurement, allowing you to see click-throughs on all your links. It's just an experimental tool at this point, but there are a lot of things it's creator, Rick Turoczy, could do with it. Of course, you could put a web analytics campaign tracking code on the redirect URL to track response and subsequent site behavior, too. Seems pretty measurable.

Use it to mine past or monitor for present conversations occurring about your brand. Track those conversations across the social mediasphere as they start on blogs, move to Twitter, and then end up back on the blog again. Use this as a component of buzz measurement. Go a step further and score sentiment. Are people talking positively about your brand or negatively about your brand. Identify the influencers and model the conversations. Are you trending in a negative sentiment direction? Does a negative comment from an influencer change the sentiment of those in their sphere of influence? Twitter's APIs provide access to a massively rich source of data about conversations about your brand, and even provide the FULL TEXT of the conversation. We're not too much engineering effort away from being able to mine that data, follow the conversations to other social platforms, map out who's influencing who, and get notified who you who you should be engaging and why.

As I write this Chris Grant and John Hawbaker are having a conversation on Twitter about the the engagement model Eric Peterson has proposed.

Regardless of measurement, though. Twitter is important for the same reason that blogs you don't write are important. Your brand has an online community whether you choose to participate in it or not. (I read that somewhere, but I don't remember who said it. Citation, anyone?) Participating allows you to impact the conversation.

Update: Forgot to mention, Eric did create a twitter account from his iPhone last night while he was arguing its unimportance. Welcome aboard, Eric. ;-)

Web Analytics Wednesday (as in Thursday) at WebTrends HQ tomorrow.

Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland will be held tomorrow (Thursday) at WebTrends HQ. Eric Peterson will be presenting on The Future of Web Analytics. If you are in Portland, please plan to attend.

More info and RSVP here: http://twurl.cc/t2

Measuring Web 2.0 Technologoes - Panel Discussion

I'll be a panelist on the Web Analytics Association's upcoming webcast Measuring Web 2.0 Technologies on Thursday, March 20, 2008 @ 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT. Other panelists include Brett Crosby of Google Analytics, Brian Tomz of Coremetrics, and Wes Funk of Omniture.

If you want to hear some lively discussion, I recommend that you register and attend.

Narrowing the GAP

Here's another example of a languishing brand attempting a turn-around. The GAP hasn't stood for anything in particular in years (except bland, I guess). I'm not sure they've actually narrowed the focus to a point where they will be successful.

Laura Ries has some thoughts on what happened and where they should go. It's an interesting read, and I recommend it.

This will be another one to watch.

Semphonic X Change 2008

The 2nd annual Semphonic X Change is now on the calendar. Eric Peterson has some good thoughts about last year's conference.

I was a huddle leader (there are no presenters) at X Change 2007, and it was an awesome experience. X Change is different because we are all there to learn from each other in intimate, small group settings. As a huddle leader, what I witnessed was a group of people who realized that each of them held key pieces of knowledge that, if they opened up to the group, became incredibly valuable as a part of the whole body of knowledge and experience contained in the room. We all learned far more from each other through discussion than any of us would have learned just listening to me talk.

If you have a chance to go this year, I highly recommend it. I hope to be there myself.