Tag Archives: intelligence

Word of Mouth

Posted on by Brian Steketee

WOMMA

We all know the importance of viral communications in today’s world. We’re learning even more about it during the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit this week in Las Vegas.

The WOMMA Summit is featuring brand speakers that discuss their real world WOM marketing programs from some of the top companies in the world.  They are presenting case studies and educating the audience on the importance of word of mouth and how it relates to their company.

We have been working on some great projects involving word of mouth tactics, one of which is a corporate blogger event.  What a great way to spur the spread of conversation about your brand.  Get people that are passionate about something and give them your brand experience to inspire them to write about it and share it with all their followers -word of mouth!

We’ve met some great people and have seen some amazing presentations here at WOMMA.  Tune in with us… Just go to womma.org and sign up for the live feed to see what the speakers have to say…and spread the word!

The value of information

Posted on by Brian Steketee

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to sit through a lot of discussions around the use and translation of market intelligence. Most of these have been focused on the usability and functionality of the various sorts of tools that grace our industry and help us “listen to the conversation” in the Social/Digital space. There are a lot of these floating around. From Radian6 and Techrigy, to PR Newswire and my new favorite, Dow Jones. Everyone is casting out lines and focusing on listening to all of the noise out there. What’s even more interesting is the there seems to be such little focus on what all the noise actually means. It’s one thing to display a pretty graph, bar chart, or impression metric, but in the end… What is that really telling you…? It gets even more interesting when you start trying to set up the knowledge paths between business functions (Legal, PR, Sales, Marketing) where you have different audiences with different needs trying to make sense of it all. In the end, the data needs to be real time and have the ability to translate into key insights for business strategies and tactics.

It’s a multi-dimensional world out there. The relational database is so yester-year.

Does the “Free Market” economy make sense for Marketing/Advertising agencies

Posted on by Brian Steketee

I can be a believer at times. Running a small agency over the past two years has given me a new perspective on terms like “overhead”, “profitability“, and “% of billable time”. The model really does need to be changed. Does free work here? How can we change our structure to take just a little % of a brands “win”, or ROI if you will, and still allow us to continue to innovate, share, and grow. I like the concept of the true win/win. The closer you can align your agenda with that of your clients almost ensures a strong finish… If not at least a great attempt. So how do you translate that into revenue? A small % of the total unearned/earned impressions generated from your activities? A “fee” for the number of successful conversations that you have enabled through the use of your tools, platforms, or communication medium? How about a small commission for each new product sampled, believer made, or actual conversion to purchase? I’d be happy working towards that goal. It is in effect the goal that we are always working towards. The difference is how you create a compensation structure that rewards mutual success and is ultimately track-able. Tracking keywords is one thing. Picture tags are another. I’ve seen more tools try to capture this only to not deliver the “real picture”. That picture is something that changes – with each new client and each new business objective.