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WARNING:  If you are a male advertising or marketing executive over the age of 50 with annual household income above $150k living in or around a major metropolitan city, you will not be interested in this post.  You should not bother reading it.

Let’s pretend that you are a marketing exec at a packaged goods company which is on the verge of launching a new, unique laundry detergent.  Now let’s pretend that I have put together two distinct groups of people to which you could market — but you can only choose one.  The first group is made up of women, aged 25-45 with an average of 1.7 children and average HH incomes above $75k.  The other group is made up of people who are all passionate about laundry and other household chores.  Which group would you pick?

Hopefully, anyone reading this post will choose the latter group…but I’m not sure this is going to be the case.  Many of you will instinctively select the group which is demographically “well defined.”  You will feel comforted by the numbers — the hard data.  This is because, for as long as any of us can remember, demographics have served as the key to marketing efficiency.  They were the light that would guide any campaign.  They represented ‘hard’ data which could and should not be questioned — and they demanded (and received) blind loyalty.  Just define your demographics and market to them — it was just that simple.

But is the proliferation of the social web enabling a “post-demographic” era for marketers?  Is it forcing people to rethink what demographics stand for and how they can and should impact marketing strategies?  I certainly think so…

The reality is that demographics are grounded in, as well as dependent on, some loose, simple assumptions.  Ultimately, demographic-based marketing is an attempt to achieve higher sales conversion rates.  The assumption being that people who fit a specific demographic profile are more likely to be interested in a certain product and therefore more likely to buy it — relative to people from a different demographic.  Marketing to a specific demographic would, in theory, provide “more bang” for your marketing buck.  Simply put, the assumption chain looks like this:

On face value, this assumption chain is logical, but often (like with all assumptions) flawed.  As you move from one assumption to the next in this chain, you lose accuracy.  And, by far, the largest “leap of faith” in this chain is the assumption that one’s demographic defines one’s interests.  Common sense says that the assumption connecting one’s interests to one’s purchasing behavior is a much safer and more accurate assumption.

But historically, locating people’s interests (in any scalable fashion) has been very difficult — near impossible.  So demographics became the de facto method for predicting purchasing behavior.  But today, with the social web, it is much more possible to locate interests and passions — bringing us one step closer to purchasing behavior.  We can now skip the middle-man.  Why worry about demographics when you don’t need to?  Why rely on a predictor of interests when you can uncover them directly?  (Unfortunately, because it’s safe — no one ever lost their job for buying IBM OR creating a demographic-based marketing strategy).

So, is there something wrong with demographic thinking?  Well, not really.  It’s just a bit dated (like Don Draper’s wet bar).  Will the concept of demographics go the way of the printed newspaper?  Probably not.  Demographic thinking is still necessary & valid in some cases, but we will start to see its importance diminish quite rapidly in the coming years.  Even today, demographics should only be one piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing.  We need to realize that what really matters is one’s interests & passions.  NOT one’s age or gender.

A good example of this is a question we’re often asked at Traackr.  Lately we’ve been approached by a lot of clients looking to target today’s hottest demographic — Mommy Bloggers.  The problem with “targeting” Mommy Bloggers is that it is a useless exercise.  There are many Mommy Bloggers out there, however the only thing they have in common is that they are women; have children; and write a blog.  Other than that, they are as different as peanut butter and tennis shoes.  Some Mommy Bloggers blog about high fashion, some about politics, some about technology, some about local diaper deals, etc.  The range of their interests and passions are endless as are the reasons people follow them.  What’s important is understanding one’s passions and what he or she likes to talk about.  Knowing one’s passions is the key to understanding who they are.  And knowing who they are is MUCH MORE important than knowing what they are…

So, are you a male advertising or marketing executive over the age of 50 with annual household income above $150k living in or around a major metropolitan city?  If so, I don’t care.  The real question is whether or not you are someone who is passionate about the future of marketing and the way the social web is and will continue to affect it.  That’s what really matters.

Other than that, you can be a dog for all I care…

DS

The above cartoon by Peter Steiner has been reproduced from page 61 of July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20)

A blog post by Jeremiah Owyang, Matrix: Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights, recently caught our eye. Since we found it interesting, we thought you might too! If you have a minute, check out his post. If not, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered – read on.

In his post he covers a topic that is obvious, yet still painfully far from being resolved – social data is officially a part of business now, but it is extremely overwhelming. Companies know they need to use it to listen and interact with their customers, but they don’t know the best way to go about doing so. Jeremiah’s research in the Social CRM and Mobile/Social space found that Social CRM is, in his words, starting to get wind under its wings, and mobile/social is already around at the consumer level. It’s what’s going to happen next that is the interesting and most important piece.

He states that corporate social strategists need to evolve their thinking right now and find monitoring companies that truly quiet the noise in the social media landscape. The current state of brand monitoring features are no longer useful in a world of 24/7 updates and change – they only allow for reactive responses, not proactive and actionable ones. Look for companies that will help derive intelligence form the excessive data source of social – not just provide monitoring and reporting.

As the era of social media continues to bring more transparency, responsibility and added expectations of companies, they will need services that can assist them efficiently and effectively. What steps are you taking to assist you with these challenges?

Caught an awesome story today from a fun blog for Shoes of Prey, a nifty startup which allows consumers to design their own shoes.  They had a post about how a 16-year old “video blogger” (I don’t like this limiting term, but ok) changed their business (possibly forever).  It’s a great post — you should read it.

Long story short, the company engaged with Juicystar07, a 16-year old YouTuber  who posted this video about Shoes of Prey.

Because of Juicystar’s tremendous audience, this one video was viewed over 477k times, received over 93k comments and absolutely destroyed Shoes of Prey’s previous record for daily traffic to their website by a factor of 10 (actually more).  Amazing show of power from another online influencer.

We found several interesting things about this story (by the way, you can check out JUICYSTAR’S TRAACKR PROFILE here — she’s far more than a “video blogger“).  Some things of note:

• The most obvious win in this story is the UNBELIEVABLE amount of traffic that one video post was able to drive to the Shoes of Prey website.  Since the site’s existence (5+ months), they have generated a total of 700k visitors….this video led to almost 500k of those visits (from what I can tell from the article).  That is simply remarkable.
• Making this more remarkable is that Shoes of Prey had received a good amount of other coverage (mostly traditional media) — both online and off.  None of this other coverage could touch the effectiveness of this single video.
• Michael Fox (from Shoes of Prey) makes a good point – while this video produced a ton of web traffic, was it QUALITY traffic?!?  The problem was that all of this traffic didn’t drive many sales.  Very low conversion rate.  This is because Juicystar’s audience is young (13-17 year olds) and not able to make purchases at Shoes of Prey’s premium price point.  Another piece of coverage drove far less traffic, but more actual sales.  So, was Juicystar’s traffic worthless if it didn’t drive sales?  Obviously not — just the traffic alone boosted Shoes of Prey’s Google Juice for future searches.  Also, Michael mentions how most of the people that came from this video actually ENGAGED with the Shoes of Prey site/application. They designed shoes, they wrote descriptions for their designs…and even wrote about the events at which they would wear their new shoes.  These visitors may not be buying immediately, but in the long run — I would bet that this group will lead to more sales than anything else.
• On a more controversial note, I commend Michael for admitting that they actually paid Juicystar for her review and contest.  Here what he says:

We paid her for the review, though she doesn’t do videos for everyone, she reviewed our shoes herself first before agreeing to take payment and do the video and all this is disclosed on her YouTube channel. And we worked with both Blair and her agency to put together the competition so that it would work best for us and for her viewers.

I, for one, don’t have a problem with this (I know, I know…let the comments begin — not everyone at Traackr agrees with me on this).  I don’t have a problem with brands paying influencers for helping their efforts.  Of course, I believe in full disclosure on both ends and understand that not all arrangements are (or will be) reasonable and right.  But overall, I believe that influencers are talented people who know how to build a loyal and engaged audience.  And I don’t have a problem with them making $$ for their skills and talents.  In fact…I’m excited to see a variety of marketplaces and business models develop around influencers and  the brands they can support.  A new age of Collaborative Marketing   (to that end, great to see that Juicystar has an agency!)

Bravo to Shoes for Prey and Juicystar for a terrific collaboration.  We look forward to following this story.

DS

We are putting influencer of the month on hold this month, but only because we’ve been busy cranking on an exciting partnership that was just announced at SXSW…(btw, we’re here now, so if you’d like to meet up, just ping @dskaletsky).

Official logo of SXSW 2010.

As you can read on the release, we’re partnering with PR powerhouse, Porter Novelli, our long-time friend Crimson Hexagon, and a newcomer  Spredfast to create the ultimate marketing/communication/social media application — complete with sentiment analysis, influencer identification and campaign outreach management. We really like the way this application is shaping up, combining what we consider the three most important elements of any quality social media campaign (at least from a tool perspective) — understanding sentiment, finding the influencers and managing engagement.  It’s a powerful solution and kudos to Porter Novelli for having the vision and commitment to put it all together!  We’ll certainly be talking more about this application and business opportunity as it develops in the coming months.

To learn a little more about it, you can check out the Porter Novelli microsite.  We have a Top 10 Trending SWSX influencers list updating on a daily basis on this page.  Check it out and…as always, let us know your thoughts…

Cheers from SXSW!

We are very excited to release a rare public Traackr A-List today :  The Top 25 Authorities who are moving PR forward.  Check out the list here.  Be aware, however, that if you look at the list now you will notice that the Top 5 Influencers on this list have been hidden.  Why is that, you may ask?  Well because we wanted to have some fun with this list before the upcoming holiday season.  We decided to have a contest and invite everyone to make their best guess as to who they think are the TOP 5 Authorities on our list.

Here’s how the contest is going to work:

The Contest

Rather than just giving away the entire list, we want everyone to work for it a bit.  Not only is there a great prize for the winner, but there are a whole lot of bragging rights too!

Dates:

Opened – Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 8 a.m. EST

Closed – Friday, Nov. 20 at 12 p.m. EST

Winner announced – Friday, Nov. 20 at 1 p.m. EST (Winner announced on the Traackr blog)

E-mail answers to: PRcontest@traackr.com

Make sure to give your answers in ranking order 1-5.  Also make sure that you offer the REAL NAMES of the individuals (as opposed to their blog URL or Twitter handle — we don’t believe influencers are defined by any single platform)

Prize: A $50 Amazon gift card – just in time for the holidays!

Tips from the team: The three Traackr measurement scores, reach resonance and relevance, displayed on the list, can help you make an educated guess. Another tip? You don’t necessarily need to be in PR to move PR forward. The first person to submit the correct answer wins!

Traackr’s Methodology

Traackr’s Authority List is developed through a methodical approach that finds meaning in the massive amount of data that is collected and shared throughout the online space. In other words, we take all the jumble on the Internet regarding online influencers, and turn it into meaningful, understandable and useful information for our clients. Through this approach, we identify the most influential individuals who play a pivotal role in a specific space – in this case, moving the PR world into the next millennium.

*Note: While all of these influencers may not be PR professionals themselves, they still play a significant role online influencing the profession.

Like all of our searches, identifying the top 25 PR influencers began with a keyword-based search using industry terminology. Our main focus for this search was around the PR 2.0 space, so the keywords were made up of more recent terminology trends among public relations professionals. Based on the data received from this keyword search, the influencers were ranked using Traackr’s scoring algorithms; reach (the ability to generate views), resonance (the ability to spark and propagate conversations) and relevance (the ability to cover specific topics or a market).

This methodical approach encompasses all of the social media platforms from Twitter to Facebook through Friendfeed and blogs, which is what makes Traackr’s lists so relevant and useful. Traackr sees the value in each online space, and by focusing on numerous platforms, sometimes it enables us to identify influencers who are making huge contributions to their field but may not have been recognized yet. Our good friends at Corporate Eye put it best; we spot the “king-whisperers”.

If you have any other specific questions about our methodology in regards to this list, just send us a note.

Good luck making your picks.  Don’t forget, we will be releasing the final list this Friday at 1 p.m. EST, right here on this blog…

We attended the Gravity Summit event at Harvard this week and I have to give both @rumford and @beverlymacy credit for putting together such a nice event.  It was much smaller and more intimate than most social media/Web 2.0 events and thus very easy for everyone to interact.  I even got to hang out with @MCHammer for a while at the afterparty.  Pretty cool!

The speakers offered good analysis and thorough case studies taken from the social media marketing world.  I took notes to share with those who couldn’t make it.  Here they are (in all their random glory):

Troy Kelly – Ad Exec., Arnold Worldwide

Troy presented good case studies from his work on the Truth, McDonalds Filet of Fish & Ocean Spray campaigns.

• For Truth, Arnold built off-site web apps that could be passed around. Results: 50% of the online traffic for this campaign was on the Truth site,  50% was off the site.  Lesson: Find the audience where they are and go after them.
• For Filet of Fish, they build a Facebook page that reached over 50k fans very quickly.  They released early special Filet of Fish content to this group and allowed them to comment/give feedback on the campaign.
• For Ocean Spray, they used a community of “Cran Fans” to give feedback on trial products.

He also talked about the evolution of Advertising 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0.  Advertising 3.0 defined not by a “Dialogue between the brand and its customer, but a Tri-alogue between the brand, it’s customer, and everyone that customer interacts with.” He is a big proponent of “listening before engaging” with online influencers.  We actually think Traackr could help him a lot with this listening stage of their campaign development.

Wendy Harman – Head of Social Media for Red Cross

Great woman, Wendy.  She came into Red Cross during Katrina.  They brought her in to “get the bloggers to stop” b/c the blogs were generating so much negative press.  Wendy did the opposite — she embraced them and built an enormous community of bloggers/social media mavens who support and evangelize the Red Cross.  She has developped out a large network of hyper-local Twitter accounts for the Red Cross which have proven to be very popular and effective.  The big challenge for Wendy generating relevant content at the national level with this network of local “chapters.”

Todd Defron – Shift

Todd is always good to hear.  He spoke about this new world from a PR-agent’s perspective.  Some nice take-aways:

• Public Relations has never been about Public Relations.  It’s been about Media Relations.  Now it is really becoming Public Relations.  PR must work to generate and nurture the relationship between the brand and it’s public.
• Everybody counts!  Google records and indexes everything online.  A brand’s interaction with the public is now being recorded.  Everyone counts.  Every interaction counts.  Be good and be consistent!
• How often should a brand be present online?  Everyday!  Via blogs, comments, Twitter, etc…Everyday.  Don’t miss one.
• Great case study with H&R Block — Got them involved engaging on Yahoo Answers and Amazon.  Held offline meet-ups around tax time.  Got very nice responses and created tremendous SEO.  60% increase in sales of their tax software on Amazon.
• Some tips on engagement: (1) Don’t spam; (2) Don’t bore your audience; (3) Don’t only talk about yourself; (4) Don’t ask your lawyers for guidance on online engagement…if you do, you’ll never do it.
• Mass media is dead…real soon.

Andy Mitchell – CNN

This talk wasn’t that informative, but it was cool to hear the story behind the development of the CNN/Facebook platform that was used during President Obama’s inauguration (they tried to get it done for the election coverage, but couldn’t get the coding done in time!).  I think CNN, as a mass-media organization, is being very pro-active and aggressive in their use of social media.  It’s good to see…

MC Hammer

Yup, that MC Hammer.  Well, he’s just Hammer now.  He was inspiring and very excited about social media.  It was key to him remaking himself.  Look out for new album in the near future?!?

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve been a fan of Gary since episode #37 of Wine Library TV.  Good to hear that that he just picked up a 10-book deal with Harper Collins.  Smart on HC’s part. He’s got huge built in audience (1MM+ Twitter followers), so the risk of publishing is greatly lowered.  Here are some of Gary’s gem from Monday (quotes from my memory):

• “I’m sick of listening to arguments about whether or not social media works and if it’s here to stay.  Guys…knock it off.  That isn’t the argument you should be having.  It’s here, it’s big and it works.  Now figure out how to use it and play with it effectively.”
• “Find your passion and create content around it.  Start a site about ketchup, for Christ sake.  I guarantee if you become the top ketchup review site, Heinz is going to have $75k for your ass.”
• “People won’t start making real money in this social media thing for a while.  In fact, I’m going to be like Willie Mays.  In 10 years some young punk is going to start a wine show online and make millions doing it.  He won’t be nearly as good as me, but he’ll have better timing.  Sucks.”
• “True entrepreneurs aren’t afraid to go to zero.  We’ll bounce right back.  In fact getting to zero is an exciting proposition.  I’ll sell anything.  I’ll sell rocks!”

So that’s about it for my notes.  Be happy to hear from anyone else who would like to share their notes and thoughts (or argue my memory!).

Derek

The hype around Social Media ROI measurement has finally gotten to me: I’m growing tired of 140 characters promises, conference invitations, or free trials to the latest tool solving social media ROI measurement and help brands get on the social media bandwagon.

The promise of a silver bullet to approach this really complex issue is slowing down the development and adoption of social media by businesses, not accelerating it.

So let me call it as it is: measuring the ROI of social media can’t be done. I’m actually quoting here the father of ROI measurement, Bob Kaplan (ref. #SMB10), inventor of the balanced scorecard.

Trying to calculate the ROI of social media is the same as trying to calculate the ROI of email or the road you drive to work on. The costs can be approximated but the benefits can’t. Their reach is too broad and too many other factors are at play to even to list them all, let alone attempt to measure profits.

Maybe even more importantly than one’s inability to measure ROI for social media, the main problem of this ROI hype is that it fuels the idea that social media for businesses is an end in itself and can have its own P&L. It’s not, it’s a capability (or rather a very broad set of capabilities) that serves other business objectives and of course one should measure success associated to these business objectives.

I can’t tell you the number of clients of Traackr who asked me whether they should be on Facebook or Twitter. My answer is invariably the same: what are you trying to achieve?

There is no ROI associated to social media. There is an ROI associated to business objectives and social media can help achieve some (many?) of them.

The decision whether to invest in social media doesn’t lie in an excel spreadsheet, rather it’s a leap of faith and a belief by some business leaders that they are better off with it than without it. The tipping point for companies is based on risk tolerance, peer pressure and critical mass, not on a dubious ROI calculation.

Today, the Traackr team is proud to announce the release of our new website. Beyond our cool looking new web pages, our new site represent Traackr’s new Social Media Services for Marketing and PR Professionals.

After months of working on our new offerings and partnering with corporate marketers and communication agencies to fine tune it, Traackr is coming out of the woods and making public our new business vision, approach and solutions.

So, go and check out our new site and tell us what you think!

For our loyal Traackr users, no reason to panic: you can still log in to your account from any page on the new site to get into familiar territory. Though we should warn you that our user site is also about to get a major facelift soon.  Stay tuned!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the new site for Skittles (yes the candy…www.skittles.com).  It has generated an enormous amount of chatter and buzz online this week because they are doing some very interesting experimentation.  At the beginning of the week, the home page was, essentially, one big Twitter search for the term “Skittles.”  The entire page was really a  Twitter search page.  They had a small Skittles box with a nav bar on the top right corner of the page where you could link to other Skittles pages.  I just noticed that they just switched the page to their Facebook profile page.  I am sure this switch will generate another wave of online chatter.  It’s really fun stuff!

We have to commend Skittles for having the chutzpah to play with their main site like this.  It’s a fun experiment and something very interesting for those following the social media world.  But, is it working?  We’re very interesting in hearing what everyone thinks about it so far.

Certainly, it is generating an enormous amount of chatter and buzz.  I’ve received 5+ tweets about it in the past 2 days (and I’m not following that many people).  I’ve seen another 5 blog posts about it (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure).  And here I am writing a post about it myself.  While I don’t know how much traffic it has generated to the site, I would have to say that based on “buzz” as a metric, it seems to be working very well.  It’s an interesting phenomenon – they are using social media tools to generate buzz through social media networks.  Fun.

With that said, is this strategy working for the Skittles brand?  What image is it creating for Skittles?  Is it appealing to the right customers or is this just a “social media publicity stunt” that won’t drive sales or additional brand affinity?  No real way to tell at this point, but my gut says that this experimentation has helped secure a fun, free and wild image for the Skittles brand and that it will ultimately lead to sales.

Love to hear more thoughts, though.

DS