Social Media - 5 Ideas & Sept 2009 Market Share

Social Media is the newest hot thing sweeping web sphere and online marketing world.  As this is a developing area a lot of marketing tactics and strategies are still developing.  Here are some ideas for marketers:

1. Social Strategy: Centralize Social Presence within marketing.  Social presence is another (important) customer touchpoint and should reside in the web marketing group to ensure consistent brand look & feel. Social is a great opportunity to engage your customers (both Active & Inactive) as customers spend more time on social sites.

2. Social Presence: Create customized landing pages for Social websites linked from Profile / Fan pages in social sites. Either on the social site or the landing page, attempt to capture email/ sms information for future marketing contacts.

3. Social Content: Post latest events / programs/ promotions to keep content constantly updated & fresh.  Capture Voice-of-Customer (VOC)/ buzz from thesocial sites. Have a moderation strategy - Is your social presence moderated or free-range (un-moderated)? 

4. Social Data:  Integrate your social data with email & web data to create profile/ behavior based segmentation. Enhance your customer data with a 3rd party social data overlay.  This will inform the social penetration  (& prioritization) in your customer base/ segments & appropriate communication customization strategies can be applied.

5. Social Messaging:  Understanding friend base in each social site & applying a friend of a friend acquisition strategy and message streams that acknowledge social affiliation may prove to me more engaging than traditional email blasts. Engaging customers with large friend networks may be a smart strategy to win over influencers & early champions of new products, new site launch & "peek view" tactics.

facebook.com, myspace.com,  tagged.com, twitter.com, myyearbook.com  are the most popular social sites. I also liked linkedin.com

Here is the latest Social site market size (courtesy of Experian Hitwise) as of Sept 2009.

Back to Basics - 10 questions for your Email Marketing

Disclaimer - this post will not be relevant to 20% of marketers who are more savvy than my target audience.

The latest buzz words in the web marketing & analytics space is all around - 'Social Marketing' - Twitter, Facebook etc. & around 'Mobile Marketing'.   While I agree that these emerging media need to be on marketers' radar, I see a lot of clients putting cart before the horse.  Simpler stuff like optimizing email marketing & website optimization are often relegated to back of the 'budget queue'. 

Email is still a significant media for anyone starting out on digital space.  There is a tremendous opportunity to optimize the email media and marketing.  Questions I would recommend marketers ask themselves:

1. Is your email marketing ad-hoc or structured around email programs and campaigns?
2. What are the goals of your email program?  Opens? Clicks? Web conversion? How do these goals align with your marketing and strategic goals?
3. Do you have a measurement framework around email marketing?- campaigns, attribution logic, measurement, testing and optimization?
4. Can you bring your online (email, web) data together with off-line data (for multi-channel marketers)?
5. In-house email lists are the most accessible (and potentially valuable) asset.  Are you monetizing this asset?
6. Do you do any list selection/ targeting or just blast emails to the entire list?  Do you have any broad segmentation for your email list (Geographic, Value, RFM etc.)?
7. Do you do any longitudual activity views on your email list across campaigns?
8. Are your emails being delivered appropriately? what's your deliverability? What is your bounce and un-sub rates?
9. Are your emails linked to your web analytics software so that click through behavior and content consumption can be tracked back to your customers' email address?
10. Do you do any testing (subject lines, creative, copy, offer, audience, segment) in your email program?

Though these may seem like simple questions, answering these questions and acting on these will help streamline your email programs.  While the emerging media (Social, Mobile etc.) are sexy and cool, focusing on basics such as email could bring more bang for your budget bucks. 

Omniture Discover vs. SiteCatalyst

One of the key differences between Omniture SiteCatalyst and Discover is that the separation between Traffic (sprops) & Conversion (evars) that exists in SiteCatalyst is removed (which is a good thing for an Analyst).  This "opening" up helps to correlate any traffic variable with any conversion variable.

In SiteCatalyst only a few kinds of correlations are possible. (Correlation - is a fancy Omniture term that is simply frequencies or cross-tabs). There are many restrictions in SiteCatalyst around what metrics you add to which reports etc.  All those restrictions are not there in Discover.  I will in a later blog mention the exact specifics (and segmentation), but this is an introductory blog on these differences.

Another cool feature in Discover 2.8 is the Fallout reporting.  There is much more flexibility in Discover such as grouping pages & also adding more than 8 checkpoints. The UI of Discover fallout reporting is also slick compared to SiteCatalyst. Another feature is the "Most Popular Pages" between each checkpoint.