Wide Angle

A few weeks ago, I pulled 10 nuggets from The Economist’s special report on social media. Fittingly, The Economist followed that this week with a special report on managing information.

Managing and making best use of all the data trails that consumers create via digital and social media is critical for marketers (see this prior post on managing information richness). This capability is one of a few that will separate winning marketing functions (and even enterprises) from losing ones in the next 3-5 years.

So, without further delay, here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from the report. Read More »

Plenty of Council members are asking us questions about social media ROI.  As our research team scans all that’s been written on the topic, we occasionally come across little gems.  One that may have escaped your attention is a section of a larger 2007 study, Never Ending Friending, which may provide some valuable rules of thumb and benchmarks for those of you diving into social media ROI.

The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap.  You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat.  Read More »

Marketers would be remiss to ignore the U.S. political events of the past week. Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts’ Senate race removed the air of inevitability from health care reform. President Obama’s plan for a tax on the largest financial institutions sent the Dow plummeting 5% across three sessions. As December home resale data proved less than stellar, the administration announced a wind-down of federal support for mortgage rates – potentially a double blow to that sector’s recovery. Let me back up: why should marketers care?

Political affiliations aside, government touches more elements of our consumer-driven economy than ever before. One policy change here, another there, ripples through the system with unprecedented speed (like perhaps, an unintended consequence). If banks feel less wealthy as a result of taxation and more limited mortgage support, the less likely they are to expand credit. Tighter credit, as we saw vividly in the fourth quarter of 2008, leads to lower business investment and greater consumer savings – starting another cycle of money removed from our economy exactly at the time it needs capital injected.

Senior leadership teams don’t want excuses, though. After two years of stumbles, most executives look to 2010 for growth. Yet the number of extraneous variables affecting that potential growth is incredibly high, hence marketers’ collective uncertainty. Just take several possible scenarios that could happen across 2010: Read More »

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with a second installment of the ‘freaky’ thinking that has now led them to advising would-be suicide bombers to buy life insurance. Over multiple plane rides last week, I scanned through SuperFreakonomics but was struck by one quote in the chapter on apathy vs. altruism: “People are people, and they respond to incentives.” Combine that with their analysis of unintended consequences – “among the most potent laws in existence” – and you begin to see why many marketing schemes fall short of perfect. Let’s take the example of the airlines and baggage fees. Read More »

Someone smarter than me has surely waxed poetic on the virtue of looking to the past to prepare for the future.  Yet if 2009 taught marketers anything, it is that the past is no predictor or guarantee of future performance.  Heraclitus figured it out long ago – the only constant is change.  2009 was the year of assumption upheaval, of predictable patterns overturned by equally unpredictable economic conditions.  How about a few examples? Read More »

The economic outlook has forced most marketers to make some of the toughest resourcing decisions of their professional lives. But this is all going to get easier next year, right? Not really. Findings from our 2009 Marketing Investment Benchmarks Survey reveals that marketers do not expect their companies to loosen their purse strings in 2010.

Results from our tenth annual survey show that in 2009, spend on channels conducive to driving consideration (website, social media, direct mail, PR) held flat or grew; while spend on channels that primarily drive awareness (broadcast, print, online display ads) declined in comparison to 2008. The question we asked was what is driving this trend? Read More »

A recent New Yorker article on the financier Martin Armstrong’s obsession with cycle theory got me thinking: while I don’t know anything about cycle theory, I’ve looked at enough data to observe that some numbers are indeed fixed. Not literally fixed in that they are absolute numbers like pi, but fixed in the sense that they are hard to move and in that they will tend to revert back to the mean. This makes them very powerful from a management perspective in that changes in either direction provide you with a lot of information about what’s happening in the marketplace. Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge Sample "Plan on a Page"

Almost every member I speak to is in throes of planning season, and many are struggling to build plans that reflect a growth agenda as budgets edge closer to pre-recession levels.  In many cases, we see marketers try to make up for lost time, sprinkling in a little bit of everything that they couldn’t afford to do last year.

To help members, we’ve been presenting a tried and true best practice more than ever. MasterCard’s Plan on a Page is about getting back to the basics – mapping your planned marketing activities to your company’s strategic objectives – and scrapping the ones that don’t help meet them.  Easier said than done, especially when your internal partners are grilling you about not being on Twitter or not sponsoring that golf tournament the CEO really likes. Read More »

There you sit, downcast, watching your social media investment proposal burst into flames.  The CFO has just leveled the “fuzzy math” charge at you. The head of sales is yammering on about how he could hire another salesperson for your proposed social media investment, and he could guarantee X incremental sales.

There’s a devilish catch-22 at play here.  As with any new touchpoint or technology, you can’t credibly project ROI until you make an investment, but you can’t get the investment resources without showing ROI.

How to skin this cat?

Click Image to Enlarge

Try the 70*20*10 portfolio argument (illustrated at left).  The logic goes like this:

In any fiscal year, marketing communications spend should be reviewed at a portfolio level.  Roughly 70% of spend ought to go toward “tried and true” touchpoints. Our organization is familiar with these touchpoints.  We know their mechanics. We know the returns they deliver, or at least have benchmarks for what good looks like. Read More »