Archive for February, 2010
You Are Ted Turner (or Rupert Murdoch, Depending On Your Politics)
Back in the prehistoric days of 2008, I gave a speech to a group of direct marketers entitled “You Are Me(dia)” in which I talked about how the powerful nexus of added value content marketing approaches and new (mostly elegantly simple and free) communications/distribution channels and streams were transforming the way brands would interact with the world.
Since then, I have watched as our business and our clients have begun to test, tweak and embrace the concept, and recently in rapid succession, thought leaders that I follow have crystallized this vision.
Brian Solis recently put together a great post on Mashable titled “Why Brands Are Becoming Media”. Exactly.
Brian: “As media, brands earn prominence and hopefully influence as rewards for contributing meaningful content.”
In his post, Brian cited the work of Sean Corcoran, a brilliant analyst at Forrester Research.
Sean: “Increasingly, interactive marketers are being asked to manage a wide
range of paid and unpaid marketing communication —- despite the fact
that many marketing departments are still organized around traditional
paid marketing channels. All types of online media (whether ‘earned,’
‘owned,’ or ‘paid’) can play specific roles in meeting marketers’
objectives —- especially when seamlessly working together.”
In his report, Sean provided a great chart that helps to define this new landscape:
Finally, Cory Treffilitti at MediaPost recently posted some great thinking on how brands should operate and broadcast in a connected world:
Cory: “The Always On Brand” is a brand that is actively
broadcasting and listening at the same time, all of the time. It’s the
kind of brand that knows what it wants to say, but is not afraid to
listen to feedback and react accordingly.”
The bottom line: Your brand equity should be based on solid content and immersed in all media…whether owned, paid for or earned, and remember, it’s always on. After all, Ted and Rupert really don’t need the business any more, but you do.
Posted by Clyde Miles
Making an Analytics Choice
There is a saying that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. This tome is the foundation for online marketing analytics. If you don’t really know how your work is performing, do you really expect those efforts to do more for you?
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be writing about how to use analytics to help you measure and improve your online marketing efforts. From choosing an analytics tool, to setting goals and understanding how to make improvements, there are a lot of different aspects of analytics.
Let’s start from the beginning – the analytics tool. If you are not measuring, start now. If you are measuring, make sure you can get enough detail to make decisions. There are several analytics packages available with multitude of price ranges and complexities. Avanish Kaushik, the current Google Analytics Evangalist, put together a great web analytics tool comparison.
If you are just starting out, I would recommend Google Analytics as a solution. Google does not charge you for an account, you only need to have an gmail account to sign up.
One of the benefits of the Google Analytics platform is that is gives you a good view of basic information out of the box, but it allows you to build a high level of complexity as you want to get deeper into the data of your online marketing campaigns.
Contrary to popular thinking, analytics is not only for your website. It can be attached to any of your online marketing in order to measure campaign effectiveness. For example, you can add parameters to the end of the URLS in your email, online display or paid search ads.
In my next post, I am going to cover how to set up Google Analytics on your website and configuring your profile. It isn’t a huge task, but it is one you want to do correctly.
Until then . . . keep measuring!