1. The document discusses the divide between creative and analytic types in marketing and how social media presents an opportunity to bridge this divide through new measurement approaches. 2. Key aspects of social media that enable new opportunities for analytics include making previously hidden conversations and customer experiences visible through data capture and allowing deeper analysis through tools like natural language processing. 3. Examples are provided of how various companies have used social media analytics strategies, including developing engaging digital assets to drive word-of-mouth (NBC/SNL), implementing a holistic social strategy focused on customer engagement (H&R Block), and evaluating brand metrics based on customer behavior online (GMAC Insurance).

2. A GREAT MARKETING DIVIDE sep-
GREA (Return on Investment). The CEO would preference, customer experience • Analytic tools draw ever-deeper
arates creative types and not think to ask the director of marketing and other aspects of brand health layers of meaning from data.
analytic types. An ad agency analytics how the company’s reputation are now regularly posted on blogs. Natural Language Processing and
o
lives or dies by its creative is holding up. At best, analytics would be A company no longer has to wonder other technologies for handling large
work, and the crea
creative director is usually used to design and evaluate the results of what people think of them. They just amounts of unstructured data are
the star. This is because creative can af- a focus group or survey. Marketing in on- need to listen. starting to render meaningful insights.
fect many aspects of a company’s brand line social spaces presents analytics with • What was anecdotal is now
and brand is what any company lives or an opportunity to cross this great divide. accessible to automated capture. This article does not pretend to fore-
dies by. In contrast, analytics has tradi- There are three aspects of the social en- Online content may be downloaded cast what will happen in analytics for
tionally been seen as primarily part of a vironment that create the opportunity: and analyzed. Previously, market social marketing or the size of the op-
direct response model or at least focused • What was hidden is now visible. research relied on focus groups, portunity that is unfolding. Instead, I will
on more mundane matters such as ROI Conversations about brand surveys and clipping services. walk through some basic concepts and

3. early experiences based on my role as measures reflect the unique characteris- the exact position of the widget on a interaction metric on the last widget-based
head of analytics at 360i, an indepen- tic of this kind of media’s ability to “travel” page, this can lead to overstatement action will produce a smaller time value
dent digital marketing agency based in though the Web. They include: when the actual impression would than terminating it when the user navigates
Atlanta. The lack of agreed upon defi- • Placements is a measure of the require the user not just to load the away from the page hosting the widget. So
nitions and rapidly changing landscape number of different “locations” that page but also to page down. measuring digital assets requires the kind
means that I will miss much that is impor- the widget has moved to. There are • Clicks – the number of clicks a widget of thoroughness and precision that analyt-
tant. Even the term “social marketing” is a number of variations on this theme, receives is a stronger measure of ics professionals are familiar with. Let’s look
sometimes used to mean marketing in including unique placements, active interaction. at a campaign that leveraged digital assets
online social media and sometimes used placements and new placements. • View Time – the amount of time the to maximum benefit.
to mean marketing for social causes. • Grabs is the number of times that page the widget is on is viewed by the
What I can offer are those items and is- the widget has moved to a new user.
sues that are most in the mind of an an- placement. This is a measure of the • Interaction time – generally measured DIGITAL WORD OF MOUTH (DWOM) is de-
alyst at a digital marketing agency. The action of creating a placement. It also from some interaction start point, such fined by the Word-of-mouth Marketing
foremost item is measurement. has variations including grab rates and as a mouse over, to the point at which Association as “giving people a reason
attempts. the widget interactivity is terminated. to talk about your goods and services,
• Transmission Rate is a key measure • Interaction details – most widgets and making it easier for that conversation
UNDERSTANDING THE PERFORMANCE of digi- of virality, the ability of a widget to offer the user a number of options for to take place.” One of the most effective
tal assets requires a different approach to spread. interaction. This is particularly true techniques in DWOM is to distribute con-
traditional online media. The IAB (Inter- • Hubs is a measure of the domains of multifunction and game widgets. tent, in the form of digital assets, to key
active Advertising Bureau) has standards that provide access to the widget for Each action, as well as the ordering influencers among the population you are
for rich media metrics and WAA (Web placement. Certain domains can be of all actions, provides insight into the trying to reach.
Analytics Association) has developed import distribution points for marketers appeal of the widget and changes that One of the problems with content on
standards for Web analytics, but met- to recognize and cultivate. can be made to enhance that appeal. the Web is that it is easily “borrowed,”
rics for digital assets, such as widgets or • Ad supported metrics – widgets and the benefit derived from that content
games, are only recently finding agreed As a widget expands across the Web it that carry ads must track interaction goes to the “borrower” rather than the
upon standards. For example, distribu- creates a directed network that emanates information about the widget itself and creators. Working with 360i, NBC found a
tion and interaction are the two key areas from seed points. By contrast, interaction for any ad that the widget displays. way to deal with this issue for some of its
of measurement for widgets. Distribution metrics are somewhat similar to more tra- premier content. NBC shared SNL (Sat-
ditional Web analytics metrics including: As with all metrics, the devil is in the urday Night Live) clips with major blogs
• Views – the number of times that details, and variances in the definition of and media sites but wrapped that content
a widget is viewed is generally these metrics can create significant differ- in a portable video player, which could be
It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s FREE!
measured as the number of times the ences in our understanding of a widget’s embedded on sites outside of YouTube
Just visit: http://analytics.informs.org/
widget is loaded. Since we don’t know performance. For example, terminating an and other video sites. 360i developed a

4. DWOM program to promote the clips on
major blogs and online media outlets. In
addition, 360i optimized the player for
natural search.
The result was that the DWOM cam-
paign drove 77 percent of all SNL vid-
eo interactions and 63 percent of daily
unique users. SNL videos were featured
on hundreds of top sites including Pop-
crunch, Defamer, Huffington Post, TV
Squad and The New York Times. Video
views reached almost 1 million on mul-
tiple days during the campaign and hit 3.1
million views following the season finale.
Figure 1: The DWOM campaign drove SNL video views
But digital assets are just one building
to record numbers and hit 3.1 million views following
block in effective social media marketing. Figure 2: H&R Block implemented a holistic social strategy based on listening to their customers and
the season finale.
delivering engaging, educational content.
The following section describes a more
comprehensive social media strategy. The campaign centered on creating • creating a brand presence in social spaces;
a fun and educational online experi- • giving consumers a platform to
ence for consumers looking to find out interact with H&R Block on MySpace,
IN 2007, H&R BLOCK engaged 360i more about taxes and H&R Block’s tax Facebook and eHarmony;
to create a social media strategy for the solutions. Working together, H&R Block • highlighting H&R Block’s digital
2008 tax season that would drive consid- and 360i developed portable assets products through interactive and
eration for H&R Block’s online tax prod- that proved taxes could be fun and en- sharable widgets; and
ucts and build up an online presence for gaging, including games and quizzes, • starting conversations with online
the brand. The goals of the campaign which were then spread across the influencers [1] using Twitter.
were to change perception of H&R Block Web for consumers to find and share
as simply “brick and mortar” to a digital with friends.
W H AT I S A N O N L I N E I N F L U E N C E R ?
brand with a strong online presence, in- In addition, 360i created a robust so- 1. An online influencer is a person whose opinion
crease awareness of H&R Block’s online cial media strategy to distribute these as- matters to a sizable online audience, especially if it
is in a particular area of expertise. A blog such as
Figure 3: Block of Fortune is a fun and engaging widget tax products and build online communi- sets and to support H&R Block’s fictional Fashionista can influence its readers to purchase
fashion products or also blog about them. In the case
that provided helpful advice and information about taxes to ties that engage consumers with fun and “brand evangelist,” Truman Greene. The of Twitter, an influencer would be someone with a large
consumers. educational information on taxes. social media program also included:
number of followers.

5. The effort raised awareness about
H&R Block’s online tax programs that
strongly positioned them as a digital
brand with a strong Web presence. The
campaign results:
• total brand awareness increased 52
percent;
• word-of-mouth awareness increased
55 percent;
• Internet advertising awareness
increased 171 percent.
Figure 4: Online listening takes on many forms.
A simple one-question poll can be more effective
than extensive surveys that tend to have signifi- Most importantly, the social marketing
cant selection bias. strategy put H&R Block directly in touch
with its target customer. Many consumers
began to ask questions about the brand’s Figure 6: A sample Radian 6 dashboard shows historic post counts and up to the minute
tweets and video.
products directly on Facebook, MySpace
and Twitter. In these fun and useful com- At GMAC Insurance, I worked on a percent, a premium of 7 percent is a key
munity-based environments, H&R Block project for evaluating brand metrics explic- competitive advantage.
became the go-to brand for knowledge itly from customer behavior. GMAC part-
about online tax preparation. nered with Insweb, an online Insurance
agency that presented our offers together AUTOMATED TECHNIQUES FOR deriving in-
with competitive offers. By appropriately formation from text data have come a long
THE MORE STRATEGIC APPROACH has more masking our competitors, Insweb was way in the past 10 years. However, most
strategic goals such as brand aware- able to let us see when we won and lost large advertisers still want to know that a
ness and engagement. eMarketer esti- competition for a customer and when the human, preferably an expert in digital pub-
mates that U.S. advertisers will spend customer’s decision was based on price. lic relations rather than an intern, has read
$4.7 billion on display ads and another We estimated that we could command a the blog posts as well. The major steps in
$3.1 billion on other branding-oriented 7 percent average premium in the mar- mining text are: 1) information extraction, 2)
Figure 5: A Google blog search or Technorati gadget ads including rich media and video in ketplace and up to 30 percent for cus- analysis and 3) summarization.
on your home page is a great way to keep track of 2009. Traditional brand measurements tomer segments with clear preference for Technorati and Google blog search
your competitors, your executives, market senti- typically rely on a survey methodology the GMAC brand. In an industry that runs provide broad search capability for the
ment or new developments in your area of expertise.
but the Web offers alternatives. an underwriting profit margin of around 5 blogosphere. Most social networks allow

6. behavior. Specific social shopping sites • “Happy Friday early release day -
such as Kaboodle or Zebo do not have Shopping at 1:30 - here I come”
easy data extraction features, so we
went to Twitter to see what people were And some less useful:
doing as they shop. A simple extract • “Shopping”
from the Twitter API for the keyword • “shopping jobs”
“shopping” on Oct. 16, 2009, produced • “Can I go shopping nooow pleaaase”
1,090 tweets. Nineteen of these tweets One of the nice things about the Twit-
contained the word “earn,” which is a ter API is that the tweets can be tied to
feature of tweets from tweeters look- demographic information if the tweeter
Figure 7: Online Persona are a good way to summarize customer segments derived from demographic ing for marketers to earn money from has provided it, so we can start to build
and online behavior in an accessible way for humans. The information provided by members of online home. After cleaning up the data set we a picture of which age groups, genders
social networks makes this straightforward. start discovering useful tweets: and geographies have distinct behaviors.
varying degrees of access to data though keywords. Promising keywords must be • “shopping via world wide web.” Customer segments, sometimes repre-
developer APIs. Tools such as Radian assigned CPCs (Cost per Click) that we • “At Target...I love shopping so early in sented by online persona descriptions,
6 or Buzz Logic provide great listening are willing to pay in order to make a rea- the day...I got the store to myself!” may closely tie to online behavior.
capability and summarization in dash- sonable return. The Bayesian classifier in
boards and widgets with self-explanatory NLTK does a good job of matching pro-
names such as River of News or Influ- spective keywords with those in the ex-
ence Viewer. isting Paid Search lists. The trick is to
360i Advanced Analytics is also ex- design effective feature extractors. These
perimenting with NLTK, an open source are small Python functions which identify
Natural Language Processing toolkit for features of the text such as contains a
the Python programming language. Our brand term or location specific.
first use of NLTK was to build out “long Accurately assessing sentiment,
tail” keywords for Paid Search cam- even simple sentiment polarity such as
paigns. First we tapped Web server logs “positive” or “negative” is more difficult
and social media sources for prospective than processing keyword lists. Slang,
sarcasm and irony, remarkably creative
spellings, and tortuous negations con-
spire to hide meaning. For example, Figure 8: A quick check in on Sunday, Nov. 29 shows no instances of “earn” in 1,441 tweets. I guess marketers get
It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s FREE! Sundays off. Five percent of tweets indicated they were online and 2 percent offline on Nov. 29 versus 3 percent and 1
a retailer may be interested in under-
Just visit: http://analytics.informs.org/ percent, respectively, on Friday, Oct. 16, which may tell us more about tweeting behavior than shopping behavior.
standing various aspects of shopping

7. The Yahoo Buzz graph shows the of what was to become a large (80 mil- next three months we picked up as many fertile field for forecasting and optimization
build of search volume and the spike lion member) social network. active members as we had in the previ- models focused on tight ROI goals. Market-
for Black Friday, the first shopping day The key metric for viral growth is trans- ous 12. Despite, or perhaps because of ing in social spaces requires rigorous and
after Thanksgiving. mission rate. When the transmission rate this, there was a consistent growth in en- meaningful measurement but also opens
is greater than one for an active popula- gagement statistics such as time on site. up more diffuse challenges around brand
tion, growth becomes exponential. We fo- health and consumer intent.
S OCIAL NETWORKING SITES TEND to value cused on refining the key touch-point for Kevin Geraghty (kgeraghty@360i.com) is vice president
themselves based on their membership transmission: the invitation e-mail that an of research and analytics for 360i, an independent digital
marketing agency based in Atlanta. A graduate of the
rather than visits to a Web site. One of existing member sent to their friends to DIGITAL MARKETING ANALYTICS has tradi- O.R. program at University College, Dublin, Ireland, he
my first a ssignments in the social net- encourage them to join. Over the summer tionally focused on monitoring Web site was a co-author of the 1985 Edelman Award finalist paper
“Revenue Management Saves National Car Rental.” In
working sphere was to develop models of 2005 this was consistently improved performance with tools such as Omniture 1996 he founded Revenue Research, Inc., a revenue
for monitoring and predicting the growth until, in September, we went viral. In the Site Catalyst. Paid search has provided a management consulting firm.
Figure 9: Virality depends primarily on transmission rate. Tweaking the campaign factors that affect
transmission rate is the key to campaign success.