Today is both an exciting and daunting time to be an online marketer – with so many ways to reach audiences, so many mediums in which to do so and so many ways to track success.
Nowhere was that theme more apparent than on my recent trip to the IAB’s Social Media Marketplace event, where the industry attempted to shed some light into the otherwise murky waters of social media and advertising. The event led with the release of two documents outlining Social Media Metrics Definitions and Best Practices. Everyone agreed, these documents are just a start and even while we may never have true industry-wide adoption as innovation seems to outpace us, they do provide a roadmap for the common practitioner.
Some messages that came across loud and clear:

• The Power of Content, which was brought up both by Josh Bernoff and John Batelle – more and more consumers are trusting content created by their peers over other sources. Search results no longer hold the power they once did as readers choose consumer generated results more than company sponsored links.
  
• Traditional advertising metrics and business KPIs aren’t going away anytime soon and while advertisers and marketers struggle to catch up with the new mediums and measurements possible to track performance, (and the newly released iab document does help)…marketers need to be able to tie campaign objectives (especially in a social world )back to real world business KPIs. Was there a trackable shift in consumer attitude? What were the post click actions that are attributable to building brand affinity or product sales?

Content is now social and audiences are having conversations with each-other about brands. As marketers, we need to determine how to leverage these opportunities to reach our audiences. One way is to tap the content rich conversations present in the blogopshere. For my panel: Dealing With Data Overload: Developing Your Social Media Scorecard, I laid out a measurement framework that would take marketers through every stage of planning and executing their campaigns. A detailed walk-through of the framework is laid out here.


Josh Bernoff noted that “people don’t want to talk about products, they want to talk about their passions or their problems and solutions” validating the fact that in conversational marketing, a different approach is needed both in creative execution as well as in targeting.
We have seen performance of several campaigns at BuzzLogic that points to different affinity levels within different categories such as technology and entertainment. One technology focused campaign saw a sizeable lift in performance (CTR) when ads were targeted at conversations about competitors over their brand conversations. Industry conversations also performed better – perhaps highlighting the fact that technology buyers were already aware of the brand. And a desire to learn when engaged in conversations about the industry or competitors, a learning that can certainly help to guide creative development further upstream and create messages that resonate with audiences in the right way.
In the Entertainment category , we saw the opposite affect where brand conversations were the best performers and ads resonated more with audiences familiar with and engaging in conversations about the company – signaling not only different levels of affinity within different categories but also providing opportunities for engagement with an audience more apt to respond to your messages.
Where does that leave us? Somewhere in need of a bridge from yesterday to tomorrow – applying the traditional reach, frequency and demographic metrics we are familiar with yet coming to them perhaps in a different way by adapting to the conversation.
Seeing where audiences are congregating, in addition to the traditional reach and demographic approach, can open up new insights. To use a simple analogy, take a look at the hive where the honey is located, and not just at the bee who may or may not be seeking your brand of honey. In looking at the hive you may uncover new findings about your audience – new bees, behaviors, and conversations that can make you a smarter marketer. Then overlapping reach and demographics back to those conversations to effectively align your media plan.