Ask Away: Storytelling in Marketing, Mark Goren -- Part Deux

This continues the conversation on storytelling in marketing began yesterday with Mark Goren of Transmission Content + Creative. We stopped in medias res, right as we were talking about the crucial topic of measurement.

Bob Glaza asks a very good set of questions: what is it we want to measure? Is it a concrete number like bottom line? Is it more elusive like customer loyalty? How about return visits?

Matt Dickman chimes in with the idea of a balancing act measurement. While some short term goals are easier to measure, the real marketers are looking more long term. How can/should we balance the two?

The key is what you are measuring, responded Mark. And, as Toby Bloomberg wrote late last week: "Good relationships should impact your bottom line." So let's measure the variables that affect long-term relationships, the variables that reflect why and how people react, how they interact, learn from what we can see and adjust as we go along, he said.

Mark also quoted from Greg Verdino's recent post on viral marketing: "You need to produce lots of content, try different things, and get them into the marketplace for reaction. And you can't get discouraged, at least not after one attempt."

Steve Roesler joined the conversation by introducing the notion of time: "Let's face it: whenever we're building trust through relationships, and then asking people to invest in what we're doing, there is a timeline involved." 

See what Mark responds to that in yesterday's post and continue the conversation with us here. Focusing on the long term is not attractive. Especially in the field of new media, it is crucial to track results along efforts. But if you're thinking and worrying only about now, you won't create much momentum to build on for tomorrow. Let's find out how we do that.

Valeria Maltoni: Measurement should be built into every activity in the form of feedback. Online you can use RSS feeds, hits to your site, links to downloads, etc. Offline you start with customer service and conversations in every situation where the organization touches customers. There is no need to complicate things.

Our gift campaign last year included my business card with each package and cover note. I told our sales reps to tell their customers to contact me with any questions or comments about it. They did, we had great conversations and testimonials as a result. Too many marketers work behind the scenes. I truly believe that customer service is the new marketing.

Time is all you've got. No right combination, no sales. It's worth pursuing when you look at it that way. Tweak enough to know what changed and what feedback you have from it, test to find out what works in a way that you can isolate it. And also play with new environments. As an example, we created a self-contained mini site for one of our product lines because we could define the customer segment and their preferences extremely well. Then we built a couple of new elements into the mini site to keep things interesting. We measured the response at launch, through user feedback over time and through the elements we change. It works. Can you think of an example or two?

Mark Goren: I like that your measurement examples are small and easy to implement – feeds, hits, downloads, etc. These are the stats that give you a live take on what's working and what doesn't. As is asking people to contact you directly. Talking to people, getting their first-person experiences and opinions is key to learning, and that's how you know what to tweak and adjust without going through a complete overhaul of your message and tactics. If customer service is about listening and responding well, than I completely agree –- customer service is the new marketing. My TDBank experience can speak to that.

Coming from a traditional agency background, I've seen campaign measurements lead to poor decision making all too often. Measuring things in this world means looking for reasons not to do something, to go safe. Of course, when you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a print campaign, you want to know if it'll work. Problem is, it's a process geared to stifle experimentation and, of course, you can never know what's going to work or not. Sometimes you've just got to test, try, adjust, try, adjust, try, adjust, and try again – and always keep tweaking. And leave yourself the room to do so. I think that's a big part of the problem with the traditional model.

So what do you think – is advertising as we know it dead?

Valeria Maltoni: That's interesting; you say that measuring often means looking for proof that something is not working. So how do we switch to a more open process? Can we borrow the philosophy from positive psychology and devise ways to experiment for meaning? Which then begs the question, how do you measure meaning? I think it comes through impact.

Are people taking your ideas/products/services and using them? How are they using them? Can you evolve the conversation with them? Print can be a way to invite people to give you permission and engage with them. We did a campaign to invite people to integrate a new product into their mix and begin a dialogue on where it fit for them. Despite the increasing market pressure and competition, this long term strategy has paid off.

The traditional model is not working because practitioners often have a hard time using the media in innovative ways.

Mark Goren: Allow me to tweak your last sentence, Valeria: The traditional model is not working because practitioners often have a hard time seeing the value of new media. I think advertisers have to ease themselves into accepting these new options, learn what they can do for their brands and then gradually put more and more money into new media. So they should, as you suggest, add a social component to their traditional efforts if they're set on going the traditional route and then watch how things evolve and make the necessary adjustments.

I also think you pinpoint another key element to all this: patience. The importance of developing long-term thinking here is paramount (as we touched on earlier). Relationships aren't built overnight.

How do you measure meaning? I think the answer is above. Try new things and wait to see how it pays off in relationships – and make sure you have the patience to find out.

Valeria Maltoni: Practitioners will not be able to sell the value (hate this word, it's so... marketers) of new media without some solid ROI in a corporate model. There is also the barrier that many marketing managers in organizations do not understand blogging or social media. They read about them -- now it seems everywhere -- but until you do it, you won't really know how it can apply.

And doing to understand is the only way to add a social media component to broader programs in many organizations.

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It's interesting to note that our comments from yesterday dovetailed nicely into our conversation. Join in, what is your take?

Comments

[Mark Goren]

Funny, Valeria, your last line was exactly what my comment was going to be. Curious to hear more as well.

[Steve Roesler]

Valeria and Mark,

I was struck by where you left off: "Doing (in order) to Understand."

It seems that this would require someone in the corporate environment to take a risk by actually implementing (trying out) something that is unproven. As you are well aware, that's a huge career-limiting opportunity.

Yet I agree that new media is a hands on," let's play with it until it works for us" proposition.

So if we were working with kids to get them to try something new, how would we get it into their hands?

What if we used that as a jumping off question and see where it leads?

[Philippe]

I'm passionated about the measurement debate. In my job, I hate to fill in monthly KPIs but it's important for my hierarchy (even if it's not through KPIs I measure I'm doing good or bad). I understand they need it, though.

Same story towards the advertisers. Most of the advertisers I meet are eager to innovate and develop online strategies but they need, to report to their bosses, a measurement tool, a way to present an ROI of the campaign.

The best models I saw (depending on the advertisers objectives) are the net promoter score that measures brand favourability and an OMD econometric model determining and weighting the variables in sales (base, product mix, seasonality and media contribution)

But beyond existing models, the beauty and the curse of online is in the variety of measurement and reporting tools. It's often a mess but it allows every advertiser to optimize permanently his actions (on TV you optimize based on GRPs and that's it).

[Mark Goren]

Funny, a colleague and I had a conversation about measurement just yesterday with a client. The client was only interested in being able to have measurement built into the project. He didn't know what to measure, only that he wanted to measure something.

When we hung up, my colleague and I talked about how to work long-term measurement goals into the equation for this, the development of a career awareness site.

A few years from now, how could we know that someone who had become engaged in this site ended up a) exploring the possibility of joining the industry and b) did end up working in the industry?

Is there a way to know what the effects of an online initiative are offline? How would you measure this?

[Philippe]

Mark,

I think it's totally the same for any kind of advertising: what is the effect of a TV campaign, a sponsoring, a product placement, an outdoor campaign? I would measure the sales (and test the campaign efficiency with a panel), no matter the advertising technique you chose

[Mark Goren]

True, Philippe. But in this case, it's a little tougher to measure because we're talking about determining how many people are joining an industry and not units sold.

So how am I supposed to know that someone got a job at company X because of the site or because they were job hunting and happened to find work there? Visiting the site may mean you've found information to find the right school to become certified (which could take some time) or it could mean that the visitor found a company that's looking for employees right then.

Would seem impossible to track how many were influenced by the site and ended up with a career in that industry, no?

[Valeria Maltoni]

Steve -- to me doing in order to understand is innovation. Yes, it might be a career-limiting move, that's why you want to select the project carefully. When I selected the Client gift, I knew I would have less of a battle in selling the concept. And I didn't do any selling of *that* concept. I sold my boss and a colleague to attend Seth's seminar in December. Then I went ahead with planning to give the book to our customers.

Philippe -- it's a blessing and the difficulty of measurement to know exactly what you are trying to measure. Methodology should precede outcome, or you can set yourself up to measure for the outcome you want in the first place. Good points on variety of tools.

Mark -- ah, we understand the value of ROI, yet the magic is in knowing what we want to achieve. Case in point is Seth's brand goal: to spread ideas. Making money doing it may be an outcome of his goal, but it is not what he sets out to do. So know what you're going for, and then you can figure out how to measure it.

Philippe -- yes, know what you're measuring as in what you set out to do, not all the outcomes from what you did.

Mark -- that's where feedback comes in. How do you set up conversations to gather and give the right kind of feedback that can be used as breadcrumbs? This will be the topic for a post I'm working on.

Thank you so much, everyone. This is amazing material, which I think Mark agrees, we shall package and distribute once the discussion finds a natural ending point.

[Philippe]

It's a complex question :-s

Especially of you consider the fact that a decision is often based on several factors (website, articles in the press, word of mouth,...)

The website is an element in a chain.

To make a silly analogy: At my office, we have free drinks and free speculoos (excellent Belgian biscuits). Does it have an impact on employee satisfaction? probably... but I wouldn't be able to measure it :)

[Valeria Maltoni]

I did not mean to sound like the conversation is over -- let's hear it from you. I think there is still much to be said around storytelling in marketing and measurement.

Philippe -- I hinted at it in my response above. Feedback is the best juice for relationships. Let me give you a specific example. You come to this blog and join a conversation that gets you buzzing with ideas; you decide to include the blog in your blogroll. I've done that many times, with many blogs. That is feedback and an important piece of information.

We get that type of feedback all the time in offline conversations with nonverbals, calls back (or not), let's meet for coffee offers, etc. There are ways online, too. What we have here is technology. Yet at the end of the day, it's the people we care (or should) about.

I like your example of the cookies. I must visit Belgium soon. Maybe next time I'm in Italy -- I go every year.

[Mark Goren]

I see where you are both coming from, but I'll reword the question: How would you "tag" someone who passes through a website and then goes on to give you the positive result you're looking for (not sales related)?

How can you track and monitor this relationship?

[C.B. Whittemore]

Valeria, great concept and conversations with this series. Definitely thought-provoking, too. Congratulations, too, on being included in The Viral Garden's Top 25!!!

[Valeria Maltoni]

Mark -- you provide opportunities for feedback on your site, social bookmarks already do some of that. Someone could stumble you, etc. without telling you directly, for example. Tracking and monitoring need to be customer/audience-based. An opt in vs. a push through.

C.B. -- we will do more of these in various forms and topics. This is what conversation is all about: peers and ideas mixing it up. Thank you for your kind words.