Measurement

Here's one: it just might save your product.

We heard in today's WOMMA Webinar (Achieving Marketing ROI by Harnessing the Power of WOM, available for audio download within 24 hours) of the importance of monitoring the conversations about your products, specific to Tropicana in this case.

Most of us associate Tropicana with its quarter-century old logo, the requisite peppermint straw brazenly stuck into the side of a perfectly ripened orange. The logo may have been familiar, and that's why it worked.

If you've ever taken a journey down the Google Analytics river, you might have discovered that there is a lot of scenery to take in. Organize by visitors, visitor type, country, city, browser, keyword...and the list definitely goes on.

With all of that data available, it can definitely become cumbersome finding a healthy starting place to analyze and sort your website measurement data. With these measurement woes in mind, Web Analytics World has put together a list of "10 Must Track Google Analytics Goals," featuring such items as "Track Newsletter Subscriptions," "Track New Account Openings," "Track Call Back Requests," and many more.

A few months back we reported on Kmart's foray into the world of blogging and social media; their campaign derived equally from a hope to connect with more socially networked persons, as well as a desire to to overturn some preconceived notions about the quality of Kmart merchandise.

Today, three months removed the December campaign, we can take an objective look at the Kmart campaign, and delve into the whys and hows of its decisions. More importantly, it is critical to glean from the Kmart campaign that, without question, the social media results were measurable. At our link to the case study below, take a look at the campaign and at the measurement involved in assessing the campaign.

"I learned a lot about ROI. I learned that no one knows what ROI is for communities so I get to make up whatever i want."

That is a quote heard by Patrick Courtney of Social Media Playground at the Online Community Unconference East 2009 at Baruch College in New York City. The sentiment expressed in the quote may scare you, but it also should empower you. Either way, it's good to recognize that, with regards to community ROI, we're entering a whole new ball game.

We know that ROI is thrown around willy-nilly today. Sometimes, it's evolved to not even indicate an annualized rate of return; instead, it's come to connote more of a general, "is this working?" feeling.

Courtney admits that the quote "defines an ever-present struggle of proving the worth of enterprise social networks.

WOMMA member k-matrix Limited, an innovative digital marketing intelligence solution company based in Hong Kong, recently received the Technological Achievement Certificate of Merit of Hong Kong Awards for Industries 2008.

McKinsey Consultants has some fresh data to ruminate on:
While 91% of the marketing executives who participated in the McKinsey digital-advertising survey (06/08) reported that their companies were advertising online, 80% said that their companies allocate their media budgets by using subjective judgments or by repeating whatever they did the year before.

Simply put, metrics just don't play a part.

To boot, only 50% of those surveyed were using click-through rates to measure online marketing ad effectiveness, and only 30% even "considered the offline impact of online marketing."

The real point to absorb from this post is this: "Surprisingly (not), those who were measuring the impact of online marketing were more satisfied with digital marketing than those who did not."

This may be the most useful tool you find online this week, hoping to answer one rudimentary, yet incredibly important business question: Was it worth it?

As it is explained, "you can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator.

Some companies love their customers and respond accordingly to their comments, concerns, and feedback. Other companies claim to love their customers but ignore their opinions. For most companies, only a few of them actually monitor and utilize customer feedback according to a new CMO Council study.

Some of you may have seen an interesting piece published on Tuesday (12/2) by Jack Myers, entitled “Evangelism, Word-of-Mouth and Passion is the Next Evolution of Advertising Research.” In the piece, Myers argues, “The next generation of communications will focus on passion – defined by word-of-mouth, blogs, evangelism, conversational marketing, and other forms of advocacy.”

The connection between word of mouth and advertising is a topic Ed Keller and Brad Fay will be discussing on Friday at a conference on Empirical Generalizations in Advertising at the Wharton School.

A new study conducted by Society for New Communications Research and Middleberg Communications unveils the disparity in usage of social media tools between younger versus older journalists. Millennials are pushing the envelope in terms of adoption and a new attitude toward social media and citizen journalism in the newsroom.

A huge inhibitor of brands, companies, and other organizations' integrating marketing strategies with word of mouth marketing (WOMM) has been the criticism that it is "impossible to measure ROI with WOMM." As WOMM advocates know, this just isn't true. We're happy to provide to you, courtesy of MarketingProfs Daily Fix, a wonderful post about WOMM Measurement and ROI.

WOMMA Members Bazaarvoice and the Keller Fay Group have collaborated on a followup survey to Bazaarvoice's study from a year ago which found that 90% of US reviewers review to "help others." This year's survey, which asked 3,800 Brits who wrote online reviews of products for their motivation, found that a staggering 94% responded that "important to write reviews to help other consumers make good purchase decisions."

The altruism spread beyond consumers as well.

Recent research from Ipsos MediaCT indicates that the popularity of online video services has grown significantly with women and adults over age 35 in the past six months. Typically the domain of young males, the percentage of female internet users ages 12+ who have streamed a video online in the past 30 days has grown from 45% to 54%.

A new study conducted by Jack Morton Latino, a specialized practice within global experiential marketing agency WOMMA member Jack Morton Worldwide, provides fresh proof of the value of live events for marketers trying to reach US Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing demographic. The study surveyed 500 Hispanic consumers, 66% of those who reside in New York, California, Florida, and Texas–areas with the highest Hispanic concentrations in the country. The US Hispanic population is currently 45.5 million; Hispanics account for more than half of overall US population growth in this decade.

Apparently a lot of people have been asking for the data surrounding Razorfish’s recent Digital Consumer Behavior Study. As a result, Razorfish has released all of the data including questions asked and detailed quantitative breakdown of the responses. First released in September, Razorfish surveyed 475 U.S.