It burns me to write this, but dammit, this is such an epic argument about data vs. creativity. Data that looks backwards vs. ideas that lean forward.
As a marketer and a company, you sometimes have to decide that the data won’t guide you. Today, it’s both easier and harder to take a creative leap.
Testing an idea — creating an ad, buying some targeted placements, measuring the results — is relatively easy. It’s never been easier to produce amazing, compelling stories. It’s easy to test them in a controlled metro area.
However, when you make a really big creative leap, it IS harder than ever to keep them quiet. Especially if you’re a big brand. Social media, YouTube, email, whatever. We’re connected like never before. The new NIKE World Cup video got a few hundred thousand hits on YouTube before NIKE launched any other support for it. People found it and shared it.
There are Two Types of People in the World: Makers and Managers
There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.
Makers Need Uninterrupted Time
Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.
They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
How do you test an awareness campaign with traditional and online display media? What if you ran a Facebook cost-per-click campaign that tested all your messages and offers across your demographics?
By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.
In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.
Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.
Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.
The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
Here’s the link to all the WebVisions chatter on Twitter, using just the #wv09 tag. I’ve been going through and reading it to see what people were commenting on — an excellent reminder about how a hashtag can unify and aggregate people’s experiences at an event. And it makes great notes to crib from later…
My Two Favorite Slides from WebVisions
First day, @bikehugger’s slide about how to be interesting online: “Do Epic Shit.”
Each one of @erictpeterson’s slides had his twitter handle and the (wrong) hash tag in the footer. Super convenient.
I’ll keep reading the #wv09 hashtag comments and see what other interesting tidbits I can pull out. I know @texagonian (Kevin Platt) had some good comments and nuggets, as well as at least one laugh-out-loud putdown. As you might expect if you know him.
I really can’t stop thinking about pushing clients into this idea of having proactive customer support by using the ambient awareness provided by social media. (No one’s biting, of course, because clients’ purse strings have been double-knotted.) More below about how you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create ambient awareness for all your customers.
Qwest began using social media for customer service recently, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. It’s remarkably nimble for a large, bureaucracy-laden, unionized labor force. I mean that as a positive — clearly, this is their social media prototype. They have not rolled social media out to their entire customer service group, but rather have just seven people tweeting.
Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com
Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It
For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.
Sometimes, I gotta write a blog post for the job. So today the focus was on how smart companies are using social media for customer service. I’d met with Martha Brooke from Interaction Metrics in the morning, and she dropped an interesting point: Her company helps businesses get the most out of their customer interactions, and social media is just another venue for those interactions. “Yes,” I thought. “Someone else who gets it.”
September, 2008: Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.
As HP’s experience shows, social media is changing the way we must think about customer service. The cost of poor service, once measured in single consumers, can now have an immediate impact far and wide.
Social Media Implications on Operations, PR, Marketing, HR, Customer Relations
Just like that point in time in the Internet’s infancy, social media has not yet been understood or embraced by most organizations and brands. Even if the ROI is hard to calculate today, it would be wise to consider the harm done by NOT having an organized approach to social media.
A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.
