Last Wednesday, I attended and spoke at the eMetrics Conference in Washington DC. The timing was certainly appropriate given current economic conditions – as such, key topics that emerged at the event are two that are top of mind for all marketers: performance and accountability. My session centered on social media metrics. My focus was on how to leverage new emerging metrics along with the tried and true online measurements we are accustomed to for measuring success in online campaigns. Li (Liana) Evans provides a great recap here.
While I focused on some real world examples of how our clients are leveraging both old and new metrics to guide their strategies and performance, my co-panelist, Ann Green of Milward Brown took a higher level look at WOM by examining and identifying different strategies based on goals of advocacy or buzz. She stressed taking an integrated approach to determining and measuring WOM success, measuring each channel of interaction with the brand and mapping those back to each stage of the purchase cycle.
One of the most interesting aspects of this conference were the topic tables for attendees to share notes and collaborate. This approach got us to the real meaty marketing issues and facilitated some great brainstorming. I sat at a table on the topic of retention. One participant’s challenge was high churn rates resulting from a subscription-based service that reviews consumer products. Many solutions coming from around the table pointed to integrating a community aspect, whether that be building or hosting a branded forum or network, or simply creating ways to enable reviewers to start blogging themselves as a means to establish credibility outside of the provider’s walled garden.  Gaining more exposure and thought leadership for individual “expert” reviewers helps strengthen the value proposition in a pay-for-content scenario. That said, with a plethora of consumer generated content available for free on the web, consumers need only look to the blogosphere for product feedback. Questions that arose for me in this discussion came back to value of a subscription-based service in today’s world. Why would a consumer choose paid content when quality, credible and trusted content is so accessible?
I also loved the discussion by John Marshall of MarketMotive. His clever analogy compared universal search strategies to the game of monopoly– in search, players want to own key words instead of “neighborhoods” and will use every tool at their disposal to do so. Some tips I found particularly helpful: correctly naming or tagging every photo on photo-sharing sites like Flickr and consistent video creation and uploading. According to John, diligent attention paid to these key areas will ensure your company owns up to 80% of the page with universal search results. Check out his new venture www.brainwavestoys.com –an online toy store leveraging many of these approaches.
All in all a great event, with analytics, testing and measurement proving to be critical pieces to every marketer’s toolbox.