Office Archive for
As another year begins we all find ourselves looking back and looking forward. Or, as we say in Marketing Science – analyzing and predicting.
We would also be the first to point out that predictive modeling relies on the analysis of historic data. Or, in regular-person speak – only by looking back can we look forward.
So, stick with us in our predictions for 2012 because as we focus on the future we will be taking some detours into the past.
Prediction #1
Social media measurement will focus less on ROI and more on brand affinity and purchase decisions.
Legend has it that once upon a time, in a land far, far away websites were once considered an expensive and optional marketing channel. (“This interweb thing is nothing more than a fad.”).
There was also a time when social media was viewed by many as a fad. 2008-2009 saw businesses start to take social media seriously. (“Maybe this Zuckerberg kid is onto something.”).
By 2010 executives wanted to know what their social media marketing spends were doing and social media measurement took off. The listening platform industry was born and several companies offered products that measured how much conversation was there about a brand, what were the key topics of conversation, and what was the sentiment of those conversations.
As social media marketing budgets grew, those same executives wanted to know how their spends were performing. And so 2011 became the year of social media ROI (return on investment). A prior post speaks more to this topic.
As we turn the corner into 2012 we predict that the focus on measuring ROI will lessen as companies stop wondering if social media has value and accept that it is now a fundamental part of the marketing mix. The measurement of social media will evolve into measuring its impact on brand affinity and purchase decisions. Social media will stop being viewed in a silo and seen as part of an end-to-end marketing mix.
Happy New Year! Our teams are back from holiday time with their families and ready for an exciting year ahead. But before we welcome 2012, we thought it might be fun to look back on some of our favorite stories of 2011. It seemed fitting to pick 11.
Here you have a list of eleven posts from across our offices, spanning topics from customer experience and branding to measurement and mobile. It’s a great overview of trends and technologies that shaped the past year of digital marketing.
We thank you for continuing to read Experience Matters and are looking forward to bringing you another year of timely and compelling points of view.
For years, a truism among social media marketers is that B2B is a soft medium, better suited to raising awareness, thought leadership and passive relationship building than to pursuing hard sales objectives. We argued increased length of B2B sales cycles and difficulty of tracking customers from one platform to another as main reasons for not attempting full-scale CRM activities.
While those are both valid, one of the main reasons we steered clear was the sheer amount of work it would take to identify, track and funnel leads to sales in the absence of a comprehensive social CRM tool. Advising clients to build a custom database and assign community management resources to enter, tag and monitor individual leads by hand never seemed like a winning proposition.
And so, we stuck to strategies that made the most sense, to get the most bang for a client’s buck. And while establishing thought leadership by producing best-in-class content undeniably works, it’s got two things going against it, from an internal perspective. First, producing high-quality content on a regular basis takes a lot of work; second, it eats into time when employees could be pursing shorter-term wins through more familiar channels. Plus, we were always faced with the same measurement issues. If we can’t adequately connect follows, likes and mentions to the bottom line, how can we expect to convince skeptical managers and salespeople to participate in a program that seems like more work for questionable return?
Which is why I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement back in March when I read that Salesforce.com was acquiring Radian6. Could we be on the verge of discovering the B2B social Holy Grail? Read More
Mobile Payments: What’s the freakin’ hold-up?
For the last couple of years, mobile payments have been a holy grail for tech companies, financial service providers, and marketers. Yet, do you know anyone who’s actually making them? I use my phone for a lot of things—watching videos, extending car rentals, tweeting minutiae—but paying for my convenience store purchases is not one of them. And I am a noted smartphone addict (well, “noted” among friends and family, at least). Most people aren’t even excited about the idea. Even among 18 to 34 year-olds, 74% are not at all or not very interested in mobile wallet technology. So what’s the barrier?
Last month, eMarketer published “Mobile Payments: Moving Closer to a World without Wallets”, which surveyed the mobile payment landscape and gave us some interesting insights into why consumers aren’t yet chomping at the bit for a wallet-phone and how they think marketers and technologists will overcome that. eMarketer pinpointed a major fear inhibiting widespread mobile payment adoption: consumer concern about data privacy and fraud. Read More
We’ve asked our team to comment on the changes to Facebook announced at the F8 summit from the perspective of different disciplines. In this second installment, our community moderators, Lauren Lindsay, Steve Mannino and Amy Gosalia look at user reactions and community management challenges.
Lauren: Changes in User Behaviour
Facebook’s move to the Timeline is going to make users focus first on altering and updating their own profiles. The yearbook-like format means a lot of work for people who’ve had Facebook since college and are now going to have to downplay years of partying photos. During this transitionary period, we may see a slight drop in brand interactions, as users pull their attention away from the Newsfeed to focus on making sure those old pictures won’t cost them their jobs.
I’m interested to see how users can take advantage of the organization factor of Timelines without many personal photos. Some people just don’t use Facebook as a place to display photos of themselves – how will they keep their timelines interesting? Will book apps and updates have covers attached to them? Can you put in movie clips attached to the movies you’ve seen?
1. What is your role at CM?
I am a Front End Developer on the Infiniti account in our Toronto office. On a day-to-day basis we are either expanding the current system to accommodate all the nifty things the clients want or fixing bugs (doh).
2. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
I love programming. It’s as simple as that. Being able to tweak a tiny little line of code and instantaneously see the results that it brings to the screen is inebriating. Programming is a delicate mix of science and art, requiring perseverance and creative thinking to be successful. Being a programmer is a constant strive to optimize, refactor and make the solution perfect. The thirst for perfection drives me.
3. What are your passions/interests outside the workplace?
My interests outside of work all mostly have something to do with music. I play in bands, play solo, produce music, whatever I have time for. Other than that, I just love spending time with my cats, my family, my girlfriend and my friends. You know.. the usual!
4. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
People talk to each other. At a lot of other places people will bang their heads against the wall trying to find a solution to a problem, instead of simply walking over to their coworkers and asking their opinion. At CM, no one is afraid to ask a question and everyone is willing to lend a hand.
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