It always seems that marketing metrics is a fertile topic to discuss and write about but after reading a few recent Forrester research reports I think they really helped me to crystallize how I am going to be tracking metrics going forward but they also gave me a sense of what importance I should give to each of them.

While not plagiarizing them outright – I think I have adapted them to things I have blogged about before. I still feel there is only one metric that counts – SALES. Ringing the cash register is the best if not the only way to prove marketing value (as I have told you in the past). And our lead nurturing platform has been immensely helpful in giving transparency into that process and showing that value.

But many of you have questioned my outright simplicity of just using one metric by saying to me – don’t you measure Impressions? or don’t you measure Cost per Click?

Well of course I do but do I then email those stats to the CEO? No. But I do feel they have a place in your metrics so let me give you my 3 tiers of marketing metrics:

1) Reach metrics – Web site impressions, page views, radio impressions etc…
2) Efficiency metrics – Cost per click, time spent on the website, downloads of a paper or podcast etc.
3) Value – Contribution to Pipeline, contribution to Bookings, ROI on overall bookings.

So there you have it and these tiers infer some priority to them – reach being the least and value being the most.

I am also going to begin to look at reach metrics PAIRED with value metrics – ex – graph my weekly lead flow against my media budget looking for spikes or relative lift. This could be a good way to prove lift on a media budget for those budget discussions we all have.

On July 9, Melanie Notkin, CEO and Founder of SavvyAuntie, launched a community site in beta, SavvyAuntie.com. This site serves a unique niche - that of women (80% of the economy) who have no children of their own (50% of those) and still love children. Nieces, nephews from relatives and from friends, too.

Within an hour of her launch, Melanie had had site reviews published by none other than TechCrunch and Mashable. Eric Kuhn published the first interview at The Huffington Post.

I asked Melanie is she’s be willing to share a few more thoughts with me for readers and community members of Marketing 2.0.

A former interactive marketing and communications executive for global Fortune 500 companies, including New York Times Digital, American Express and L’Oréal, I met Melanie on Twitter. The great equalizer, if there ever was one. Anyone who still has any doubts about the value of social media should think about this for a moment. Where and when would I have met such a talented professional?

SavvyAuntie includes a social network, and other community-based resources like user blogs, expert blogs, activity guides and gift suggestions. By registering and filling out information about nieces and nephews, users get customized gift and activity suggestions. They also have the option of uploading information about themselves so that they can meet other aunts (and uncles).

I like how you described what you learned as a progression - the interactive world and how to reach and drive people online at NYTD, the value of membership at Amex, what women want at L’Oréal. Why a community and not just a web site? Was that a natural progression? What inspired you?

Melanie: In June of 2007, I dreamed of developing a modern online resource and community for cosmopolitan Aunts, just like me. After doing the research, I realized that there were tens of millions of us across the nation. There already was “community,” only no one had bothered to notice.

I never claim to be the uber-all-knowing Auntie. Most of the information I’ve learned about Aunt-hood over the years has come from my community of amazing New York City girlfriends and their experiences as Savvy Aunties. Over brunch, these Aunts in the City would ask each other: “What can I do with my 12-year-old niece who is visiting me for the day?”; “What should I get my twin nephews for their second birthday?”; “If I’m in a fight with my sister, how do I not see my nieces?” And so much more.

“Savvy Auntie” isn’t me. She’s what every Aunt aspires to be. The only way to get there is to connect with the other Aunts on the site. We are inherently a community. I am just providing a larger platform than a table for four.

Of course, it was important to have expert content on the site as well. We have about two dozen experts who write on topics from kids’ health to pop-culture for kids, all told from the Auntie perspective. But because we know our Savvy Aunties have a lot to add, there is also opportunities for members to comment and rate content, as well as add their own “Savvy” to the Auntiepedia application.. They can also submit their own Activities and share their advice in our Forums

I have already learned so much from other Savvy Aunties in the process of developing and launching this community. I cannot wait to learn more, and become that Savvy Auntie we all yearn to be.

You received reviews of your beta site within an hour after the launch from none other than TechCrunch and Mashable. As well, Eric Kuhn published an interview with you at The Huffington Post. Do you think this level of interest is also based on the fact that you are a very active member of social media? Have you had conversations with these individuals in the course of social networking?

Melanie: There are a number of reasons why we received online reviews of Savvy Auntie immediately after launch. First of all, no matter how much of an impression you make through your social media relationships, if you don’t have a product worth reviewing, it’s probably not going to get reviewed. The fact that it got reviewed is a tribute to the smart people at the outlets you mention above, who see potential in Savvy Auntie. For that, I am grateful on a number of levels.

That aside, I met Adam Hirsch, COO of Mashable, and Brett Petersel, Events Director at Mashable, at the Jeff Pulver Media Breakfasts in New York City. I met Eric Kuhn there on a separate occasion. Each one of them has been a supporter of me and my dreams as an “auntrepreneur” since our first meeting. These guys are men to watch in the social media world; while all only in their 20s, they have managed to carve out immense careers for themselves by being smart and generous with their network and their support.

While I never met founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, in person, we did share a few direct messages via Twitter. And while I would love to say that that relationship helped with my placement in TechCrunch, it was his eagle-eyed blogger Calley Nye, who picked up and ran with the story, interviewing me the day before launch.

What should be known is that while these reviews at launch were a huge boost for the site, so are all the posts by bloggers I have met only through social media outlets, such as Twitter and Facebook. In fact, that’s how you and I met, Valeria. The support for Savvy Auntie on Twitter is so enormous that TwitScoop reported it was the most Tweeted phrase on the day of launch.

There is no doubt in my mind that my social media relationships, developed authentically in Twitter, on Facebook, in the social media industry, have helped make Savvy Auntie a success at launch. Savvy Auntie and me as its founder, were welcomed with open arms in the SM community. And I cannot thank everyone enough.

The site is designed to grow by community, which makes it great for the integration of wish lists and affiliate retail programs. As marketers, we know how powerful peer to peer recommendations are. Conversation is also an important component of shared experiences. Do you envision the site’s growth beyond commercial utility? In your interview with Eric at Huffington Post, you talk about capturing stories. Would there be opportunity for expansion into educational tools, for example teaching languages, or support groups for children with developmental problems?

Melanie: That’s a great question, Valeria. And, certainly, there are numerous ways to take our learning from the Aunt community and develop them into tools and resources that help and support the non-mom offline as well. There are no parenting guides for non-parents and we are hoping that Savvy Auntie becomes the resource for Aunts who not only want to learn from each other, but share as well.

We’ve built opportunities for this within Savvy Auntie from the start. The Aunthology, a section within Community where members can share stories about Aunt-hood, is where we hope to learn about many new perspectives on Aunt-hood from different cultures and points of view. Plus, every member is entitled to her own blog, where she can share her personal journey. Finally, because Community is built organically, we hope to gauge interest in various issues important to Savvy Aunties through our Forums and Groups. And since the site is free to join, there are no barriers for participation.

We’ve already been lauded by some who blog about children with special needs for taking care to include content about developing special needs nieces and nephews in our Expertise and Gifts sections. We’re so happy the word is getting out about that. We hope that Savvy Aunties will add their own experiences and their own tips on the site as well.

Aunt-hood, as a universal story, has really never been told. It’s too early to forecast what will come of it. But if there is a way to capture the stories and translate them into solutions for Aunts everyone, online and offline, we’ll do it.

***

Thanks to you, Melanie, the community is off to a great start. Learn more about SavvyAuntie at Melanie Notkin’s blog.

Does Sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation software provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many marketers ignore the equally valid perspective of their sales counterparts. This can lead to diminished success for many marketing-led efforts around lead management.

This is just one of the many disconnects between sales and marketing that we’ve been exploring in the series Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. This is my 3rd such podcast with Marketo in this area. First we started with a CEO’s perspective then we did a VP of Marketing perspective and now we have the VP of Sales perspective. Getting the Sales viewpoint is critical for marketers since lead management initiatives always require buy-in and support from Sales to be successful.

Special thanks to my friends at Marketo for allowing me to interview their VP of sales for this podcast. They use what they sell to create opportunities for themselves, so there is no better place to look for ideas on how to optimize your own demand generation efforts than by talking with the guys who sell and deliver that for a living. I always learn something I can incorporate into my lead nurturing platform every time I talk with them! I hope you learn something too…

About Bill

Bill brings 16 years of best practice sales, leadership, and operations experience to his role leading all of Marketo’s sales and customer success activities. Prior to joining Marketo, Binch was VP and General Manager, Distribution, at AVOLENT, where he managed the team focused on the distribution market, small & medium businesses, and install base customers. Prior to AVOLENT, Binch developed his sales and operational experience at Oracle, PeopleSoft, and BEA Systems, where he built and managed direct, inside, and channel organizations and ran business units ranging from mid-market business customers to strategic accounts. Bill graduated from Arizona State University with a BS in Marketing.

 

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Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage - its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly - what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of “cloud computing” and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.

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One of my goals this year was to do a study on reputation management. As we all factor in the effects of new media on our brands, I felt this was a topic with long-lasting appeal to every marketer.

My hypothesis going into the creation of these questions was that B2B marketers (including yours truly) just aren’t adequately prepared for an online reputation crisis. Dell wasn’t, Wal-Mart wasn’t. If those big B2C brands weren’t ready, I was betting we weren’t ready either. And I was right!

To be totally transparent with you, I wasn’t surprised by many of the responses to my survey. The bulk of you are monitoring your reputation in some way, shape or form. But are you poised to respond in the case of an online reputation crisis? 55% admitted you weren’t.

Perhaps you need stronger guidelines in place, like a blogging policy. Two-thirds of respondents don’t have one!

Many of you are do-it-yourselfers when it comes to monitoring your reputation. Is that perhaps because your company hasn’t made this a strategic priority? 53% admitted it wasn’t a strategic priority for you – yet!

My goal here is to give you the state of the union when it comes to monitoring reputations online. This data is bound to change, so I hope I get you thinking of ways to close the gap with your organization’s reputation!

Click here to download the free research report

Special thanks to my sponsors – Trackur.com, run by the renowned Andy Beal of the blog MarketingPilgrim.com, and Marketing Profs’ equally renowned Ann Handley for their support on this survey.

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!

B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.

Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!

So, everyone I speak to these days that are involved in some sort of Web 2.0 initiative tell me how much effort they are placing on content.   I have to laugh, since many of us have been evangelizing the notion of content setting the context for a customer experience for at least a year now.

I just re-read a post by David Armano on Technorati + Authority, which discussed Technorati’s changes in its rating system.   Related to David’s last year were comments on content in general and its quality.   I’ve mentioned to David that  content “design” and the related experience seems to lag functional and interface components of experience design.  In essence, content is the stepchild of design.
So where is content in your marketing and experience design efforts?  Its been my experience that content design is a continual effort, requiring intensive attention. Your goal?  Getting your content to a level where it becomes a value added part of the customer experience?  I talk to customers weekly. What I hear is that there is always too much, not enough third party or UGC and that the content they tend to come across on on supplier sites is jargon rich.

Content is the cornerstone of a superior customer experience because it provides the context in which the experience takes place.  How do do you ensure that that cornerstone won’t crumble?

1. Dedicate a team to focus solely on the content aspects of the experience.
2. Focus on What you say  - its clear to me that most companies have a lot to say, more than they know what to do with. But what I hear from customers (and this is so obvious) is don’t tell us too much, tell us the right things.  Also, give me two perspectives, one that is role based and personalized to what I do and give me a functional view. In my work at SAP we actually saw clear geographic differences here with NA executives looking more for a role based content experience while stakeholders in EMEA were looking more for a functional perspective.  We don’t have data on APJ yet.
3. How you say it - one thing you need to spend time on is your “Content Tonality.”  Many companies have been accused, and rightly so at times, of taking a rather circuitous route to delivering a message.  To address this issue,  focusing on the source - your content producers.  Train your content producers to align their content with the Voice of the Brand.   Content should be plain spoken - we use blogs in our training as examples of the type of writing we are looking for. We are striving for a conversational tone, honest, impactful, positive etc.
4. Who do you say it to - I referenced this above. The content must align to specific personas based on who you are trying to communicate with.  What is most important is being able to personalize the content during the buying experience so that enables customers to develop an affinity for the brand which in turn will convert into revenues for said brand.

Things like radical transparency, entertainment value, co-creation are all critical elements of a next generation customer experience but without contextual based content, its all just window-dressing.

Supernova2008 just wrapped up this past week. If you’re not familiar with this conference, you may learn more at conversation hub. Last year, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) engaged the audience in a lively and insightful summary. You may watch the video that closes the interactive loop here.

As I listened to these passionate interpreters extrapolate from the experience, a few points jumped at me:

Access is ubiquitous - access to capital, relationships, resources.

Things get better the more people use them - these are betters, not goods.

All of your metrics are crap (they do not look at measures of devotion) - eyeballs and buckets don’t tell you the details about what matters and what’s going to be successful.

We don’t have a culture of getting good data - we have data filtered through the people who often have the least reason to give us accurate information.

Backchannels matter - at the event and to your business. If you’ve failed to engage, you will know because the backchannel will boycott you and join another conversation.

We need to pay attention to humans - we need to make things available to customers. They are people in their normal lives, not consumers, targets, or impressions.

Silence has value - we talked about how silence has a sound and a place at Conversation Agent last year.

Purpose beats profit - craft a strategy by who and why and bake that in the DNA of your business.

Your company can be a platform for customers to remix - firms are one economic component. The others are networks and community.

Plastic beats specific - today the economy is made up of plastic things. Things that can be duplicated and remixed and tweaked and hacked into in many ways.

If relationships are liquid, flows beat assets. How do you harness the power of these new forces for your business? Ask ourself, is there a DNA build underneath these technologies? How does what you do provide an experience, how does it make your customers feel? That is the component that is game-changing, not the technology.

In a post on my own blog yesterday, I wrote about how companies should not think about how to leverage social media as a new channel for doing marketing, but instead realize how social media has transformed the marketing game. I promised to expand on the topic and decided it made more sense to move the conversation to the marketing 2.0 community so we can continue this discussion until way after this post will have disappeared below the fold.

In yesterday’s post I said:

Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.

I further said that the end goal of marketing - creating a customer - had not changed.

Let’s take a quick look at the different elements of the marketing game and how they changed.

The New Rules

1. People do not want to hear from companies anymore
2. People want to hear from other people

Some people will argue that this has always been like that, and they are right. The problem is that prior to this platform of massive participation called social media becoming commonplace, you could not hear from other people in a scalable way - and so you had to listen to what companies were telling you.

The New Players

• Customers
• Employees
• Prospects

Except for competitors not being on the list, it sounds like the old players - doesn’t it?

The difference is what Clay Shirky calls “here comes everyone” in his latest book - which is a must read if you are in marketing. It is not just the employees that are in your direct line of command who are playing key roles in your decision making processes, it is all employees. And it is not just your largest customers, or those you pay to advise you, who will participate in your decisions - it is all of them, including people who have not yet bought from you.

The New Scope

The scope of marketing for many old school marketers was everything pre-sales. Many corporate marketing executives are not even in charge of product innovation - where you bring the voice of the customer back into the process of defining your next offer.

The new scope of marketing is everything pre-sales all the way to post sales customer support and new product innovation. And that for global tribes of people who talk to one another instead of just those who bought from you.

The New Tactics

• Business communities
• Social media & social networks
• People-speak and authenticity
• Speed of response

Those are big changes in how marketing departments will have to think and work in order to create new customers. No more corporate-speak, no more interrupt-based marketing programs, and no more targeting. It is now all about attracting customers, building relationships and trust by helping them and letting them help one another, and leveraging the tribal nature of people.

Is this how the marketing tactics should have been all along? Absolutely! But how many companies were doing that when they did not have to? Almost none.

Now they will have no choice if they are to survive.

The New Added Values.

• People’s attention
• People’s trust
• Talent in employees and customer champions
• Externalized business process that include employees, customers and prospects
• Retell-able stories to market with you customers instead of at them

So out are the switching costs, the better mousetraps, the big advertising budgets, marketshare and other added values that determined your marketing competitive value in the marketplace before social media shifted the power away from companies and into individual’s hands.

Summary

So while the end goal of marketing has not changed, the game you play to get to that end goal has forever been transformed. You can argue that whatever marketing 2.0 becomes is what marketing should have been all along, as I did before, but the reality is that for most companies it never was like that because they did not have to.

And the changes that need to happen are so fundamental that many will not make it.

Classically marketers have always been protective of their content locking them up in PDFs and then putting a registration page in front of them. This behavior is known to have a 1 in 10 (10%) download rate which isn’t bad by marketing standards but on the flip side that means there is a 90% leakage rate!

Studies have shown that a NON protected PDF will get as high as a 20X greater download rate. But then how can you capture registration information?

Peter Nieforth’s company, Vitrium Systems, has created a web-based tool called docmetrics. Their solution moves away from external registrations forms to forms that are embedded directly inside the PDF - this allows marketers to collect reader data while they are engaged in the content and share the content with their colleagues. In addition to the data on who is reading the content, docmetrics provides data on when the document was opened, how many pages were read, and how much time was spent on each page.

To hear more about this exciting new technology with my interview of Peter right on the show floor at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! WARNING: this was recorded on the show floor so it is a little loud (sorry) because there was quite a crowd in his booth!
About Peter

Peter Nieforth is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at Vitrium Systems Inc. Nieforth founded Vitrium Systems together with Narayan Sainaney, Blair Adamson and Alfred Dorey bringing together a core group to crystallize and commercialize the ideas and research of Sainaney. Nieforth specializes in financing, organizing and commercializing promising start-ups, most recently acting as Director of Investment for The Loreto Bay Company (LBC), where he worked on raising a total of 18 million US dollars for the world’s largest sustainable resort community, which is currently being built by LBC in the Mexican Baja. Nieforth has also served as an investment specialist for BMO Bank of Montreal, as Financial Advisor for Yorkton Securities Inc. and as Financial Consultant with Merrill Lynch Canada Inc.

Nieforth studied Political Science at Acadia University, and graduated from Mount Saint Agnes Academy in Hamilton, Bermuda.

 

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