This session was moderated by Mark Knowles
Tom Critchlow, Head of Search, Distilled @tomcritchlow
- Data is a marketing asset. Not many companies are using data to their advantage. It’s more than just a research tool.
- Infographics can be useful for showing data in a meaningful way.
- It’s easy to get attracted to a bunch of cool tools. Find the metrics which you care about and apply to your business and watch those.
- Also measure things you can control. Find out what you’re doing which works and what doesn’t and make changes as approprite. You can’t change things you can’t control.
- Data is difficult to get information from without context. Make changes and test to learn what happens.
- Set up custom variables so you can track content on a page as well as the page itself or to measure how many Facebook users visit your site. This will give you actionable ideas.
- Don’t forget to include user feedback in your data.
Alan K’necht, Founding Partner, Digital Always Media @aknecht
- Instead of calling it “social media” we should call it social marketing, because we’re all marketers.
- Fires draw people together, since the days of the caveman. We want to start fires in a more modern way.
- You need 3 things to make a fire: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. These items can be measured. Perhaps not perfectly, but they can be measured.
- Our big mistake: measuring head count. How many people follow or like us. Out of context, this is a meaningless number.
- Another measurement mistake: Volume of content creation. While more can be good, but is it quality content and are people viewing and engaging?
- ROI, engagement, and sharing are better tools to add to other measurements.
- Going back to the fire analogy:
- The fuel is the number of fans, followers, etc. You can measure the quality of the fuel to a certain degree. These numbers can tell us how big a fish we are in the pond, and how big the pond is.
- The oxygen consists of those brand advocates. They are influencers who help spread the flames.
- The heat is the content. Don’t measure quantity, measure quality!
- Use URL shorteners and tag them with web analytics code so you can track them. This allows you to measure engagement and what gets shared and clicked on.
- Create a dashboard showing raw analytics data combined with the data from URL shorteners and other sources to show the big picture.
- See if you can correlate increases in sales or store traffic (with physical locations) with upticks in web traffic and buzz.
- Just because you have a bigger fire, it doesn’t necessarily mean increase in revenue. Remember how much people were talking about BP during the spill crisis?
- Measure attraction. Be careful not to compare you company with others, even competitors. You have to make your campaign work for you.
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