May 7: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Each week, the members of Powered's marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. Links are below:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Will the IAB's Social Media Metrics Definitions Help Crack The Engagement Code?   Found this article interesting particularly since we are solidifying our measurement framework and how we define 'engagement'.  The IAB published social media metrics definitions yesterday and while they aren't different from what you expect, it does help advertisers and marketers that are struggling with measuring their social programs demonstrate the value of it.  This would be good for all customer-facing folks to learn these as the IAB is regarding as the standard in defining how to measure online programs/advertising.

Here are a few of the things the IAB doc defines:

• Application and video installs.
• The number of relevant actions, including newsfeed items posted, comments posted, uploads, poll votes, and so forth.
• Conversation size, which measures the number of content relevant sites and content relevant links, and the monthly uniques spread across those conversations.
• Site relevance, which measures the density with which phrases specific to a client concern are brought up among relevant sites.
• Author credibility, such as how relevant the author's content is and how often it is linked to.
• Content freshness and relevance, which defines how frequently an author posts.
• The average number of friends among users of a specific application.
• Number of people currently using an application.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Keeping in line with my commitment to alignment with our Sales Plan, I selected REI as the company to do a search on this week. My post this week is by Albert Maruggi, founder and president of Provident Partners and host and producer of the Marketing Edge podcast. I chose it because I feel like it builds a strong case to support REI as a strong prospect for Powered.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

Jay McIntosh (Business Development)

My weekly share is actually not an article but a few tidbits from a recently released study by Razorfish entitled “Digital Mom."

1. Women control the majority of spending in the US and the world. To that end:
   

• Consumer spending accounts for approximately 70% of GDP in the U.S.
• Women a.k.a. “Chief Purchasing Officers” control 85% of household buying decisions in the U.S. and the majority handle family finances.
• On the business side, women have accounted for 70% of all privately held start-ups over the last 15 years.

Marketers want to engage with people who buy things…women.

1. Women, by and large, are much more “communal” than men. Think about it, women often turn to others for guidance, recommendations, etc., and they love to share (i.e. tell others about their experiences). Guys, we tend to be more independent and hierarchical. We hate to (i.e. won’t) ask for directions, we compete with each other in almost every- and anything, and usually prefer to conduct our own in-depth research rather than listen to someone who may have “better” research than us. Anyhow, the full report is about 37 pages and talks about a LOT of things, however, the three key takeaways that I found most interesting and relevant to us are the following:
   

• Mom’s areas of interest are lifestyle categories…duh!
• Their purchase decision funnel behaviors fit really well with what Powered does.
• The highest value information sources for moms are a lot of what we provide in a Powered community.

Doug Wick (Business Development)

My post this week is from “Social Media Insider” written by David Berkowitz of 360i (cross-posted on the Agency's website).

David does a nice job of offering his experience in running a self-service Facebook targeted ad campaign, including the results he saw. Many of his results are confirming of what we’ve heard – in a pretty targeted campaign he saw very low clickthrough, and he notes that FB must find another way to monetize if it expects to live out its large valuation. The upside is that Facebook ads are extremely cheap to test, and he predicts (I think rightly) that there may be ways to reach very specific, segmented audiences with compelling content-based ads - so he encourages people to test and see.

Don Sedota (Product Management)
A recent Forrester article called, Four Essential Components of Successful Innovation Initiatives, caught my attention due to the fact that, well I’m in the product innovation business ;-). The first two components, “Creating and getting executive support for an innovation strategy” and “Use central management and coordination to carry out the strategy” are pretty straightforward.

The third component, “Use individual contributors to feed the innovation function” struck a chord because it’s something we’re currently trying to implement more effectively for the internal product strategy process. Examples of this include Dell’s Ideastorm and IBM’s annual Innovation Jam. In fact, we’ve been tossing around the idea of creating an internal Ideastorm where employees can go to submit ideas and fellow employees can comment on them and vote them up/down. This could also tie into Yammer so that everyone gets notified when a new product idea is submitted. As far as I know this actually wouldn’t be that difficult to implement internally.

The fourth component, “Ties to community bring objective insight and can deepen relationships” has to do with using community (external resources) to inform product strategy. This struck a chord because it’s something that’s come up recently in the context of our product roadmapping discussions due to interest from Clinique and Sony. This form of product strategy “crowdsourcing” is becoming more and more popular.