Michael L. Perry (e) MLPerryNY@mac.com (t) @mlperryny (fb) www.facebook.com/mlperryny (LI) www.MLPerryNY.com (m) 973.229.4695 Harness That Social Vibe Published: 1 Aug 09, Chief Marketer http://chiefmarketer.com/marketing-roi/0801-web-influence-campaign-design/index.html

Measuring Web 2.0 can influence campaign design

As recently as a year ago, most conversations about brands took place in private, either in person or by e-mail. Marketers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tap into those conversations

The current technology explosion, particularly in social media, has made it easier for consumers to have opinions and for marketers to listen to them. At one point, businesses believed they controlled their brands, but brands are now in the hands of strangers.

Isn't it about time everyone got acquainted?

To ask the question in a different way: What are marketers doing to corral and measure this explosion of brand sentiment? The industry needs to start by harnessing social networks and media platforms to drive and refine testing.

PLEASE JOIN US

Harnessing social media does not mean using a focus group of 10 people or an online brainstorming session. It means inviting as many consumers as possible into the process to help build the testing from the start. It creates a sort of “testing before the testing.”

This type of research offers a chance to validate the claim that “none of us is smarter than all of us.” Any research platform is only as smart as the people who create it. Between a brand manager, the marketing staff and a research vendor (or in-house research team), how many people truly have input to what questions get asked? 20? 30? Even if it is 50, that isn't enough.

Campaign testing has to start somewhere, whether it's through e-mail, Web sites or social media. Consider the example of using a panel of 10,000 consumers to evaluate which messages resonate with an audience. Using a collaborative process, a marketer would create the study by seeding the items to be reviewed with his ideas, and then including the opportunity and mechanism for consumers to add their thoughts.

The initial ideas would go to a sub-panel of 2,000, which could rate and rank them (or use some other indexing or weighting method) and add their own input — things they feel are important for the consumer experience.

The results from the first sub-panel of 2,000 (the ideas that resonated with them, both the marketer's and theirs) are then used to create a secondary test battery. Those results are offered to the next sub-panel of 2,000 for their response, and so on.

REFLECT THE OUTPUT

The power of this is that each time a new sub-panel is used, the strongest ideas are presented to them. It is appropriate to add back an idea or two that fell out, just to back-test. By the time a marketer gets through the fifth sub-panel, the output reflects the thoughts, ideas and messages that resonated most with the audiences. In short, only the strongest survive.

One example comes from a study conducted within the timeshare industry (the Timeshare Amenities Study conducted by Group RCI). Resort developers always considered amenities to be items such as pools, washers and dryers, wine refrigerators, fully equipped kitchens and golf courses.

When the above-described method was used to evaluate the idea of amenities, the results were astounding. Consumers thought the pool, golf course and washer and dryer were basics that should be part of the experience, not amenities. Instead, “amenities” as respondents defined them included babysitting services, grocery delivery and concierge services for events. This learning helped developers better refine their value proposition.

The amenities example demonstrates how limiting it can be to be only as smart as a small number of people. Idea generation has entered an arena where “smartness” is limited only by the human imagination.

Is the output a substitute for a strategy or creative process? No, not at all. It should be an input to those processes. It also doesn't tell marketers how to execute the ideas. The process merely helps marketers eliminate meaningless ideas. It also helps target investment and refine messages to consumers.

This method is flexible enough to test a whole host of different elements, such as visual creative, editorial content and Web design. Does the test panel have to be as large as 10,000? No, it can be as low as 2,500 with sub-panels of 500. But why limit it? Why not harness the power and smarts of 10,000 consumers?