Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Ive always said that this wall between customer interaction and service, and internal collaboration is largely artificial. Though if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m  the last one to suggest we rush to blindly institute social across the organization and barf on all things process. That simply doesn’t reflect the reality and problem sets that we seen on the ground in our consulting work with larger organizations. That said, there’s a mature, performance centric discussion that needs to happen where organizations can understand the relevancy of this shift in the customers access to information (regardless of whether they actively partake in social network activity) to your business,  and evaluate how your internal processes are wired to deal with changing  competitive dynamics in your business. Surgical and decisive. Not spray and pray.

Comments welcome, as always.

The Keynote video here:

Kunur Patel of Advertising Age covers a Forrester report that advises businesses to hang back on investing in location based social network marketing. The report says:

In a study out today, Forrester finds that only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Only 1% update these services more than once per week. What’s more, 84% of respondents said they are not familiar with such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

I’m not a user of location based networks (a great primer by Marshall Kirkpatrick if your new to this topic). So far, I haven’t seen a personal use case emerge that compels me to stop what I’m doing and declare which restaurant, gym, amusement part I’m entering. And I’ll go as far as saying that when people auto publish their location on Twitter without adding meta data (i.e. something valuable/funny about what your doing at a location), it just clutters my tweet stream.

All that said, whilst the proof is in the quantitative data, I think the resulting recommendation in this report may be short sighted. The big value driver of location based networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla is geographic density. To each user, the breadth of the service and total number of subscribers matters relatively less. What’s more important is usage in each locale by both constituencies – my social network as well as local businesses. That makes it more interesting to the user as well as to businesses aspiring to open up new marketing channels via location based networks. San Francisco and New York seem to be hot. Airports at major cities also seem to be popular locations. Concerts and other events featuring well known performers again seem to be got. So it boils down to location and good old segmentation, like any other marketing program.

Take for instance, the restaurant or most hospitality based business. The big costs are generally fixed. You’ve already bought a days worth of perishable salmon, turned on all the ovens, and secured 8 waiters for the night shift, regardless of how many patrons show up. On the flip side, the good news is that you have a finite number of seats to fill up for each dinner service.

Most consumer tools in the restaurant business, notably OpenTable, are great as a central reservation nervous system but they do little to close the gap between capacity and demand, beyond the segment of customers that plan early. That’s where location based networks can come to the rescue by attracting new customers that happen to be in the area with deals or drive repeat visits based on loyalty. If I can get deals pushed to my phone as I enter University Avenue in Palo Alto at 6pm, there’s value there. For the restaurateur, it gets her closer to covering those every hefty fixed costs.

I get that ultimately, to scale up and improve offers, total number of users matters. But to suggest that most marketers should wait is a bit too categorical for me. I suspect macro marketing principles are being applied to what is an extremely hyper local marketing value proposition. A category of marketing that’s extremely difficult and expensive and one where location based networks offer a ray of hope. Big brands such as restaurants and retail that rely on local foot traffic could really use new approaches to attract customers. And for now performance based marketing offered by location based networks might well be the a promising, economically lucrative option.

Back to that restaurant example, if your brand participates in an area where there’s high geo graphic density of location based social network users and all you need is 200 warmed seats every night, suddenly, ‘only’ a few million users on these services looks like a goldmine.

Hat tip to David Armano for the link

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Ever-Present Debate Goes On: Is Location A Business Or Feature? (networksolutions.com)
• 3 Ways to Market Your Business on Foursquare (thesearchagents.com)
• App Lets You Know When Friends Are Nearby (technologyreview.in)
• Paul Frank and Element Tap Loopt for Location-Based Incentive Programs (mashable.com)

The McKinsey Quarterly has this excellent (and sobering) piece on how a financial crisis can accelerate global economic activity. A central point of the article is that whilst commodities and foreign exchange are truly globalized by Adam Smith’s definition (the Law of One Price which states that when markets are fully formed, all customers can get the same item at the same price, regardless of location), labor continues to offer significant arbitrage in different parts of the world primarily due to exchange rate restrictions that don’t let true currency value adjust naturally. I quote:

But it’s also important to understand that emerging-market economies have a structural advantage that is grounded in the operation of the global economy. Saber-rattling Western trade negotiators frequently focus their attention on the “unnaturally” depressed exchange rates of countries such as China, and this is a component of the structural advantage to which I refer. But its roots run far deeper—all the way down to the fundamental issue that labor can’t be freely traded on a single global market, while capital and commodities can. Any company sourcing its production or service operations in a lower-wage emerging-market country therefore can save enormously on labor costs. That’s painful for displaced Western workers, but it’s good for the company’s profits, good for consumers in developed markets, and good for the newly minted citizens of the global economy who are working in emerging-market factories and call centers. This is a dynamic we take so much for granted that it’s easy to imagine it as a semi permanent condition that will underpin global economic development for the foreseeable future.

Lowell Bryan, the author, opens with the a sharp wake up call:

This article explains why we should consider that seeming improbability and examines the possibility that financial crises may accelerate the transition to a global economy with more balanced trade, capital flows, and consumption.

The write-up is just superb and every CEO whose senses a complacent reliance on current labor arbitrage in her organization (read: her profit estimates depend on it), should think again.

A financial crisis may well accelerate the transition towards a global economy with balanced labor costs, but there are two other factors that are in play here. I briefly covered both these during my keynote at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, earlier this month. Here goes…

First, it’s the developed nations that created the proverbial monster. As the western world sends work offshore, the standard of living and by extension cost of living in emerging markets are rising dramatically. More job opportunities means employees have negotiating power when it comes to wage increases. With rising wages we get shrinking labor arbitrage. So this can’t go on for ever. Labor prices will rise slowly but surely, at least in countries that are both quality labor pools as well as hot emerging markets.

Second, what needs to be taken into account is a phenomena that has far more immediate consequences that we work closely with our customers on, and that all leaders need to consider. In addition to balanced trade and perfect capital flows, we’re moving towards perfect engagement flows. And this will have a profound effect on globalization, financial crisis or not.

The web and now social network connectivity transcends geography and that’s obvious. From a business stand point, this means prospects and customers everywhere are fully aware of the global competencies of your organization (and that of your competitors) when it comes to innovation, product expertise, support and satisfaction.  If your Westin Hotels entering China, Yelp has already informed guests about the heavenly bed you offer in the U.S. If you’re Comcast and you’re entering Malaysia, new customers may want to get support from Frank’s superb team @Comcastcares and not the call center in Bangalore. That’s because the social web is putting fluid and deep engagement flows in place between markets, and possibly long before you even reached/scaled operations in some of these locales.

With emerging markets opening up, most organizations rushed to build locally relevant products and that was a great start. With open connectivity comes engagement and with that, comes knowledge sharing. Buyers today are much more aware of your global portfolio capabilities. So products will need to reflect not only local relevancy, but also global competency.

Customers expect the brightest customer support reps, product innovators, and subject matter experts to wrap around their innovation and support needs. Not where its the most cost effective for you, but where the best answers and experts reside across the globe. And so with or without a financial crisis and with or without your attention, engagement flows will accelerate global economic activity because the customer expects it.

How do you get there? You plan and design scalable 21st century collaborative enterprises that expose the talent and passion of:

• happy customers who can be objectives advocates of your expertise and your integrity
• sales and distribution partners who know the intimate needs of customers
• employees and suppliers who know the true power of your products…

…..where ever they might be.

Are you ready?

It’s fascinating how we consider New Product Development /Research to be investments (by implication, a return can be had on these) on one hand, but we allocate marketing and customer acquisition as an expense. In plain English that translates to: We’re ok with considering what we design, build and sell, an asset that will yield returns. But not the effort it takes to serve prospects and customers that may be interested in what we purvey. Baffling, no?

Marketing has this almost comical, inverted model of inputs and outputs that defies Economics 101. A business typically buys inputs at wholesale and sells products at higher margin retail thereby seeking to make a profit. In contrast, marketing uses big picture estimates such as ‘customer lifetime value’ to estimate how much you can make from the average customer (output). But excluding branding, cost inputs to acquire prospects and sell more to customers are at hefty, mind boggling, retail costs – point advertising spots to sell a product, product launch emails, webinars, promotions, and recently, SEO/SEM campaigns. Hell, we financed Google’s insane success thanks to this model, if you think about it! 

Moving from Transactive vs Relationship Elasticity

I see customer acquisition model as a mindset of ‘transactive’ elasticity. In other words your spend goes only as far as supporting each transaction. So, your spending over and over again to sell new products to the same target customer. And that tactical design can’t be treated as anything but an expense. Conversely, investments are nurtured over time, are less susceptible to cuts in a down market, and yield results at intervals or in perpetuity. 

Contrast this with a model where you invest in relationships with your customers by engaging authentically with them in communities. These communities give the money you allocate to customer acquisition far more elasticity by spreading the wealth across the life of the relationship with relatively smaller spikes in expense that correlate with new product awareness. They center on investing in fostering and facilitating a dialogue with your customers, your partners and your prospects. Dialogues that far outlast single transactions. And via a platform to engage with them between transactions. Sounds like an investment and not an expense to me now.

This is articulated really well in, “CRM at the Speed of Light”, a must read by the terrific Paul Greenberg:

“Transaction is not the paramount artifact of the interaction. Instead a transaction becomes the side effect of rich relationships that are built on conversation. This notion is fundamental, and is a radical switch in priorities for the interaction between customer and vendor”

Edge Relationships Don’t Scale

Creating true relationship networks, whether on third party participatory networks (such as Facebook or Twitter) or on your own branded communities require a clearly defined approach, mindset and interaction design.

Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Labs and blogger at Harvard Business Review wrote a superb post “The Efficient Community Hypothesis”  (that I recommend you read in full):

“People, truth, identity, reputation, values are the five elements of an efficient community”

I agree with that and they apply to communities that foster these relationships.

That said, community building often gets limited to efforts managed by the “social media expert” or the community manager. Its no doubt a first, extremely important step and herculean at that, (just ask Rachel Happe) but edge efforts don’t scale easily. And if the effort is superficial, they quickly start reeking of old school spam marketing (just see many of the groups on LinkedIn, for example, that sport the same old marketing pitches).

To be truly valuable, customers want to bypass marketers and get to those that have the highest quality information. The best information, void of spin or marketing speak, are in the minds of your other customers, your channel partners who may interact with customers more than you do, and your suppliers who know more about individual components that make up your product.

To enable such a design you need a collaborative design and enabling technology infrastructure that allows for the right minds to wrap around the customers needs. Marketing needs to broker and facilitate that, and then get out of the way. That’s the new customer acquisition design for the 21st century enterprise.

For a more in-depth overview of how to respond to this new customer dynamic and to move from a transactive model to a relationship model, take a look at a recent piece I published with Oliver Marks and TechWeb (email required).

Getting There

I’m not suggesting we stop advertising products when they launch. But do we have to buy marketing, over and over again at retail prices to sell that same customer time and again? Instead, why not invest (not expense) in more elastic relationships that defrays a good chunk of that retail cost?

Customer Acquisition seriously needs a new name to affect any institutional change in how organizations consider the actions and investment behind customer engagement. Customers never gave us permission to acquire them and it’s a bloody expensive to acquire them at retail, anyway. Tomorrows winning CMOs and Marketing leaders will be making a case for this to their CFOs and CEOs, today. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of these forward thinking folks. It’s not about big bang, it’s about etching away at it piece by piece and having it emerge, organically.

Here’s a screen shot of a Twitter search result for a blog post labeled “Four Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Communities Fail”

Over 60 Re-Tweets on Twitter as of April 19th resulting in god knows how many tens of thousands of impressions on Twitter. Yay for social media syndication.

There’s only one problem. That link hasn’t worked for three days.

So, basically, this link was never even clicked on before being re-tweeted.

Now these good intentioned folks may have well wanted to read the link later and I’m no one to judge how each of us as participants choose to use the medium. But if Re-Tweets are being considered an acknowledgment of quality content and subsequently relied upon as a metric by marketers, a Re-Tweet itself can clearly be a terrible measure.

I’m a huge advocate for social media engagement as an important component of marketing. It’s got mucho potential. That said, we complain about inaccurate open or click through rates with respect to email marketing but measuring the effectiveness and true reach of social media has a long long way to go as well.

So if a link drops on Twitter but there was nothing there to read, will it make a sound? You betcha. A really really loud, albeit hollow sound.

Hoping practical topics such as this come up at the 140 conference today.

Lots of strong reaction to Union Square Venture Partner Fred Wilsons comments about Twitter (his portfolio company) today.

On the issue of third party applications that leverage Twitters API, Fred commented that a lot of the apps today are filling holes in twitter instead of building substantive businesses.

Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

The media jumped on it. In a post titled “Holy Cow Did Twitter’s Top Investor Drop A Bombshell On Twitter App-Makers Today”, Nicholas Carlson lays out some strong reaction from the Twitter App community.

But we talked to sources at a few Twitter apps, and one of them told us Fred’s message is loud and clear. This source heard, "[Twitter is] going to do mobile apps and URLs. [Twitter is] way playing down the role of other apps. [Twitter] desperately need somebody to do vertical/gaming stuff, since that’s what we aren’t going to do ourselves. Bit.ly (as a URL shortener), TwitPic (as a photo uploader) and Tweetie (as an iPhone app) are now considered ‘core’ to the platform. They will either be bought or competed with."

First, Twitter is infrastructure. And true to that mission, it supports the building of applications and services that sit above it. Over time, applications and services start to get commoditized and adopted widely across the ecosystem. At that point, features offered by these apps are considered infrastructure and as history has proven, get pulled into the core of the application. Phone companies provided phone lines and tele marketing businesses built a value add service on top of that. Similarly, utility companies provided juice that allowed us to go from analog to digital with many of our appliances. If you agree that Twitter is infrastructure, the same thing is happening here. Over time the economics change. AT&T now offers business services that sit on top of its phone lines. That’s natural evolution as the service gets commoditized and there’s wide appeal. The market expects it to come as part of the base package and the stability and assurances that come with such a move. And the same thing is happening here.

Second (and this did not come up in Fred’s comments), Twitters success to-date largely mirrors traditional media – its broadcast for a majority of the users. Not conversations or other kinds of synchronous activity that those of us in the early adopter community have embraced. Don’t know about you but I’ve lost count of the number of mainstream users that fully realize the value and promise of Twitter only after they use a third party client such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck. So unless your only interested in following celebrity tweets, engaging with users or discovering new users via Twitters native interface is nothing short of awful.

Twitter needs to fix that as its price of entry stuff. And so coming out with its own spiffy client is imperative. And there’s similar arguments to be made for URL shortners and mobile clients – both critical to engage in a 140 character constrained world. And critical to Twitter if its to be able to successfully haul the water in the long run.

So it may come of as a harsh warning, but it’s natural evolution.

UPDATE: And just two days after posting this, Twitter announces the purchase of Tweetie, a Twitter client built for the iPhone and the Mac. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has some good analysis on this breaking story.

My good friend (and fellow competitive swimmer, back in the day), Dina Mehta, wrote an insightful post based on her research work around the topic of product durability. Though she refers to her findings based on the Indian market and the changing nature of durability, locally, there’s no question that this is a global phenomena.

The central theme of the research is that consumers value product durability less and less as time goes on. It used to be that when we bought products and services, life of the product was an important consideration and products were advertised as such. In Dina’s post, Stuart Henshall provides the most well known example:

When I think durability I think of Maytag – the washing machines that go forever here. Yet today that “durable” isn’t expected to last 20 years and new features, energy efficiency etc are changing the definition

Dina provides some great local examples of how consumers look at durability today. Based on her research, she concludes:

Thinking thru current Ads on tv – only the infrastructure and paints guys seem to talk about Durability in their communication today.

As Dina points out, its obviously not the case that customers don’t want products that last; it’s just that the markets in India finally afford choice. When I grew up there, you could only by one of 2 types of cars, a handful of electronic or appliance brands or for that matter, chocolate (yes, a travesty). All that’s changed now. And with choice comes the desire and willingness to swap for newer, shiny models at a more frequent pace.

There’s plenty of parallels to be drawn in the rest of the world where choice has been standard for decades. However, the marketing approach to this was to turn up the volume when it comes to badgering the customer with more marketing emails. Or to throw in the towel and compete on price with promotions that were often loss leaders or just a way to empty out the warehouse.

Durable Relationships

The truth is that in this age of transparent and open marketing which is moving to influencer and peer to peer modes, one sustainable approach to respond to this consumer trend is to focus on building durable relationships with customers. Existing customer relationship programs and enabling technologies (CRM) often enforce a fenced-in transactive model where its about that individual sale. That needs to move to a relationship model that can outlast that single transaction. And with the proper strategic planning, create an interaction environment that results in durability. Choice is here to stay. All you can do it make the customer comfortable with the notion that your first in line when they are looking to exercise choice. And one way to do that is to preemptively help them understand exactly why and when you should be in consideration. Thats done through effective customer Networks.

From a programmatic stand point, the answer is not jut Social Media or some other over intellectual way of looking at public or consumer relationships. Social Media is part of the larger tapestry. The answer lies in reworking the process of building and sustaining relationships with customers via social and collaborative forms of engagement. That comes from revisiting the mode of engagement that extends far beyond the nominated “social media leads” but permeates the walls that today, omit interaction with traditional sales, marketing, internal and partner experts who truly have the most substantive knowledge. Anything less will come of as plastic.

In turn, from an enabling technology standpoint, that means rethinking how your Social Media, CRM and so called ‘SocialCRM" and ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ efforts come together to build and foster genuine, durable relationships.

I highly recommend you read Dina’s original and follow up post on the implications of durability taking a back seat in the context of purchasing behavior. She’s got a very passionate community of intelligent folks that have provided comment.

This post is not about what’s right and what’s wrong or whether we should or shouldn’t fight for using one or all of these concepts.  That said, each of these monikers need to be dealt with as they will become increasingly important as organizations begin to consider more efficient ways of interacting and transacting both on the social web as well as in the enterprise.

Here goes…

Transparent:

Transparent just got elevated to the top of the list. Most executives love the idea, just not the potential fall out that can come from transparency. As we saw with President Obama’s I’ll-broadcast-the-healthcare-debate-on-CSPAN unfulfilled promise, when you get into the politics at many large organizations, its as much about the lateral competition (in the case of the government, how the right and right wing media would interpret the open discussion) in the executive suite that worries more people about bringing transparency to their enterprises, as it is about top down / bottom up / emergent transparency.

Consider the recent fall out from Google Buzz. Personally I think its an excellent start to something very useful and promising. As I commented in a post by Alex Williams on  ReadWriteWeb:

The best thing about all of this for me is that Google has recognized and capitalized on the fact that email is the ultimate social network and they are aggregating- which is what they do best,” said Sameer Patel, a founding partner with the Sovos Group that consults about integrating social Web applications and collaborative technologies into the enterprise.

However, Google stepped on a banana peel when they misjuded the level of transparency that the general public would be ok with then it comes to sharing our email contacts.

Its clear that we as social networkers seem to be perfectly fine with transparency when its looking at someone else’s data and gestures. Just not when it comes to exposing our own.

Social <insert enterprise context here>

Clearly the most hotly debated moniker in the enterprise context. A President (not CIO) of one of the largest healthcare organizations that I met with threw me a new curveball a few weeks ago.  As prepared as I was to address the ‘Facebook is too social for us” argument with solid business context, the new one thrown my way was “my kids are leaving Facebook because of the new privacy concerns. If social networks are not good enough for them when all they do there is socialize, how can I bring this interaction metaphor to the office?”

Socialized <insert process context here> with the emphasis on business outcomes or activities seems to be far more palatable but to each his own.

Customer Community

Less contested depending on who you speak with. The problem is that the discussion around community and marketing is often short sold due to lack of depth and process knowledge around core marketing performance.  As I wrote a few months ago in a guest post:

Finally, with respect to marketing, most of the community focus today (especially B2B) is on brand awareness and engagement. Certainly, there’s value to be gained there, however, lead generation is the elephant in the room most don’t want to tackle or acknowledge. Regardless of the economic times, the closer your marketing activity is to generating revenue, the more strategic your program remains to your organization. That’s where customer communities need to go – fast.

Of course there are a few seasoned marketers that can take this on. Not to mention, community as an approach to effective awareness and engagement has benefit. But when it comes to community based marketing, few in the “social media consulting space” want to or even have the credentials to tackle the moolah question.

Second, very few are prepared to objectively say when Community is flat out the wrong approach to accelerating performance for your specific business objective. Here are 2 excellent posts by Gil Yehuda and Rachel Happe about not lazily intermingling different concepts that seem similar when in reality, are very different.

Real Time

Though I wrote a report on this topic, the idea of ‘real time’ is a meaningless discussion in and of itself without core performance context. Worse, it scares the living bejesus out of the seasoned CIO who still sport scars from the millions and millions sunk into integration to come anywhere close to near real time, a decade ago. It’s far cheaper and simpler now but real time for the sake of real time invokes instant eye rolling.

However, customers are intermingling in real time and they increasingly expect feedback in near real time. The reality is that the organization (not just support and marketing) need to have that infrastructure to be able to respond as fast as possible. That’s a very different approach than trying to rudderlessly tune the enterprise for real time and then chase/manufacture use cases to back fill value from the investment.

Enterprise 2.0

And finally, yes, Enterprise 2.0. I could leave you with a link to a Google Search Result to Dennis Hewlett’s Posts (its here by the way), but frankly, too often Enterprise 2.0 gets casted as a solution to a problem that doesn’t give the customer adequate heart burn to become a top priority. Until we see a Chief Sharing / Social / Email-sucks, Productivity Officer emerge (NOT!), lets focus on discrete objectives around leads, sales, innovation, product development and the like. It’s awesome to see a few vendors starting to come around to this in their marketing not just in the context of selling the benefit but also adoption and participation. See this excellent post by the very sharp Michael Idinopulos.

In closing, as I said above, I’m not hoping to start a war on whether we should or shouldn’t use this terms.  Transparency, social, open, relationships, collaborative IS the future of work.

If you have opinions on these or other monikers, chime away, below. But they need to know their place and the context.

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well. 

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

I’m going to be on a panel at the New Metrics for New Media Workshop at Stanford University on August 6th, in Palo Alto. The event is organized by Martha Russell, Associate Director of Media X at Stanford, and Marc Smith, Sociologist and Chief Scientist at Telligent Systems.

Some details about the event here:

The conundrum of the participatory media culture is that participation is expected, but continuous, dedicated attention cannot be assumed.  Legacy audience media metrics, such as CPM (cost per thousand) and CPI (cost per impression), have broadcast media as their reference. These metrics were developed because channel developers, advertisers and their clients needed to quantify the cost/benefit of media purchases. At the time they were developed, these legacy metrics assumed that each channel delivered media to its audiences (individuals, family, etc.) in a singular fashion.  The legacy media metrics assumed that each media exposure occurred in isolation, that viewers were attentive, and that viewers’ attention was dedicated to a single medium.

Consumer generated content has further complicated the differentiation of purchased media (space in the media that is purchased by advertisers) and earned media (space in the media that is acquired without payment through journalistic and public relations efforts).  To more accurately measure the quality and quantity of viewers’ engagement, the distinction must also be made between assumed attention, in which audience metrics count the number of people who could potentially pay attention to a message, and earned engagement, in people actively choose to pay attention.

Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop will cover foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provide hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.

I’m involved in this session:

Day One:
Media usage, measurement and analysis: legacy concepts, forces of change, emerging metrics for social media and virtual worlds, and the creative tension of academic and business influences.

Given my Enterprise 2.0 focus, and in particular, our work with Sales and Marketing groups at large organizations, I plan to focus on how businesses can accelerate performance via new forms of insight, brought about by social media analytics. Something that’s integral to overall Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

Full details on the event and a short video by Martha and Marc available here:

http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/metrics.html

If you would like to see specific data points covered, chime in in the comments or drop me an email.

Hope you see you there.