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Our team at BuzzLogic has been hard at work, with what we believe is a very exciting development designed to help propel conversational marketing and advertising forward - our new Conversational Advertising Dashboard. We owe a great deal to our agency and brand customers for helping guide our thinking (thank you!). Hands down they told us they wanted a clear visual and metrics driven understanding of conversations taking place in blogs and other social publishing platforms, deeper understanding of how advertising performs within specific conversations to help guide their creative and planning processes, and the transparency and control to get comfortable with the sites and content where their ads appear. Today, we're announcing these capabilities for our advertisers.

More and more, we're seeing incredible work in the agency world bringing together Search, Display and Digital WOM. We're big believers in the power of synergy between the three, and excited to play a role in helping pull them together.

We still plan to go further... The technology was designed blog platform independent and ad network independent, and we hope to make it available to the other network and publishing companies who are also working hard to advance our segment of the digital media industry. We're doing our best to simplify the media buying process in conversational media, and we look forward to sharing that capability.

The Conversational Advertising Dashboard was a huge undertaking to develop, I'm very proud of our team for achieving this level of accomplishment.

Rob Crumpler
CEO

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.

When approaching the campaign lifecycle where a component of the media plan calls for social media, specifically blogs, BuzzLogic recommends using the following framework as a guideline for measurement considerations:

The first step to consider in this proposed framework is media plan creation and campaign targeting. In addition to considering traditional reach and demographic metrics in the planning process, why not also consider the topic of conversations around which audiences are congregating? By looking at the conversation first, you surface ad inventory that will resonate with enthusiastic audiences. These current and/or potential customers are already engaged in the discussion related to your campaign objectives. You can then use a traditional measurement service such as Comscore or Quantcast to overlay reach and demographic metrics that your business teams have been using since the inception of the interactive space in the early 1990s.

The second step in the framework is campaign execution. As you or your agency starts to track how campaigns are doing, measuring campaign performance by conversation can unlock new insights. Just like with traditional site or ad size optimization, move more impressions towards conversations that are performing, then revisit your conversation definition, creative and/or site selection for conversations that are under performing.

The final step in the framework, which should also be considered the first iteration of the media planning for the next campaign, is post-campaign analysis and learning. Social media is about iteration, and iteration implies multiple campaigns over time. The frequency component of the “reach and frequency” mantra, is even more paramount in social media. In addition to looking at the traditional performance metrics, e.g. impressions, clicks and CTR, at the campaign level and by conversation, marketers should then correlate those metrics to the language business stakeholders understand, e.g. business KPIs? Was this a branding campaign – what was the share of conversation impact over multiple campaigns or what was the lift in the brand affinity through statistical studies in target geographies? Was this a direct response campaign – what was the lift in catalog assortment or specific SKUs sales over the several campaigns? How were my site’s web metrics impacted as a result of these campaigns? Did I see a spike in a user registrations or requests for my company’s whitepapers as a result of the campaign?

Not every marketer’s framework will be the same but by breaking out the creative cycle out into Pre / During / Post and identifying metrics at the get-go – marketers can ensure they are continuously improving upon their campaigns and ultimately meeting the key business objectives.

Summer is on its way and with the new season, comes the summer action flicks. This month, we looked at the films bringing the most buzz among the influencers looking at conversations between May 1 and May 26. For a full recap see the PR week column (Note: subscription required)

Memorial Day brought lots movie buzz around Star Trek, Terminator Salvation and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Interesting to note that top conversations around these films focused not on the movies themselves, but on their marketing and advertising promotions. For Star Trek, the top post was about the mini-site Nokia created to highlight its product placements in the movie. The most influential post on Wolverine from GoNintendo, actually focused on the Wolverine video game.

Also in the spotlight, the comedy film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian which had one-third of the influencers discussing the performance of Amy Adams as pilot Amelia Earhart. Perhaps even more interesting, the fact that Washington DC-based sites like the Washington Examiner are emerging as influential for this movie, as the setting and film premiere take place in the city's most prominent museum.

Listening to the conversations taking place about these movies surfaced some surprising new conversation themes, such as buzz behind the movie promotions themselves as well as the cities where the movies are based. Diving into the meat of the conversation in this way can create new targeting opportunities. For example, consider also using local angles to reach your audiences, or taking a look at peripheral topics such games and promotions your audience may be discussing. Understanding how consumers are engaged in the dialogue can directly impact your advertising execution and help you create more focused messages that speak directly to your audiences.

Jason Calcanis’ recent Mediapost column from the halls of OMMA Global hit a chord. While he’s right on the mark about user intent on social nets vs. search – there are many vehicles in the social media stratus that lie in between the “dinner party / social network ” and “research / search” associations he highlights.

Type a query into a search box and its fair to say, that as a consumer, you are at some stage of the purchase funnel, whether that’s initial product discovery, researching options or actually making a final purchase. As Jason says “search works” but it works precisely because it captures intent and capitalizes on it by driving users to points of purchase.... otherwise known as the last mile or the bottom of the funnel.

But what is lost in Jason’s analogy is the time the consumer spent on content or the brand impressions seen by the consumer as they engaged with that content, and which ultimately contributed to that final decision. It’s the critical middle phases of the funnel, in which consumers are getting answers and refining their choices all while going to the experts (aka publishers) they know, that will help them get to the final decision.

Our research with Jupiter shows that consumers depend on blogs at critical stages in the purchase funnel with 59 percent using a blog to refine and get answers related to their purchase and 54 percent using information gleaned to decide and execute that buy.

And while, Twitter does offer a new way to reach broad audiences ala Jason’s Superbowl commercial analogy, it isn’t necessarily capturing audience intent or precisely targeting the right audience, at least not yet.

Two factors make advertising (and specifically display advertising) in blogs a unique and valuable part of any marketer’s ad mix:

1) The dialogue that bloggers are able to have with their audiences is one that is both unique and personal in nature, thus making blogs highly influential and trusted by their readers.

2) Display ads heavily and positively impact other online campaigns, such as search. In fact, the majority of search queries occur on branded keyword terms – studies have shown that after seeing a display ad, consumers are 54% more likely to search on an advertisers’ brand keyword- proving that display advertising, not only impacts other consumer behavior, it can actually push consumers further down the purchase funnel to the last mile.

Combine those two factors and you have an effective way to reach audiences gathering around their trusted authors' content and more likely to be impacted by brands they see.

If social networks are the dinner parties, and search is the cash register, then perhaps blogs are the farmers markets inspiring the recipes.

Food for thought. (sorry couldn't resist)

There is a growing interest in sponsored content on blogs – Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang has sparked a good conversation on his blog. While sponsored conversations are not going away any time soon – it is a line bloggers and brands should be treading lightly. Unlike their mainstream media counterparts, bloggers hold very personal and engaging relationships with their readers. These relationships are based on trust. The ability to influence those trusted audiences is a power bloggers should be aware of (many already are) as they investigate writing paid brand endorsements or product write-ups.

Divisions between church and state exist in other industries outside of publishing, such as finance, where endorsements by trusted entities such as an investment bank research analyst could easily trigger buy or sell transactions that contribute to the bank’s bottom line. Otherwise known as chinese walls, these divisions exist because of the potential to abuse powers without them. Think of our own government’s legislative branches and the checks in place to prevent abuse. It is perhaps something brands and bloggers should consider as well.

The big issue here for bloggers is around making money – it’s even more important in THIS economy.  While transparency and disclosure for sponsored posts raise awareness to a blogger’s audience, there are other ways that a blogger can fund their writing. In the case of display advertising, the end objective (getting paid) is still achieved but without the compromise of a trusted relationship, loss of influence and becoming an advertorial blog.  Many could take a note out of Vinography's ethics playbook – Alder Yarrow, well-respected and influential wine blogger refuses to take funds from any wine-maker or conglomerates to “avoid any and all potential conflicts of interest.”

Paid sponsorships of content by brands are not going away any time soon, but the idea is still being worked through and we haven’t seen the full reaction by consumers who are reading these blogs. Our perspective is to provide bloggers with as much opportunity in the form of explicit advertisements, tools to increase their CPMs, enabling them to focus on their core competencies – writing great unbiased content for the topics they are passionate about.

Last night’s Academy Awards did not disappoint, as Hollywood put on its best threads and celebrated its craft. This year, the influential bloggers got their predictions right! 4 out of 5 of our predictions based on Influencer analysis were right on target, and the fifth was not incorrect, so we can say the influencers certainly knew their films.

When we looked at conversations that mentioned “best picture and oscar” it was clear to see that Slumdog Millionaire would take it home with 31% of the Influencers also mentioning the keyword “millionaire” in their posts. And Oscar did not disappoint, awarding Slumdog 8 awards in all, including “Best Director,” another dead-on prediction by influencers.

Influencers, such as Film Experience accurately predicted and supported Sean Penn taking home the best Actor prize. The only category where influencers weren’t 100% clear on the winner prior to the ceremonies was the Best Actress category.  Influencers indicated a dead-heat between Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep, perhaps fueled in part by Streep’s record-breaking 15 nominations – influencers thought this might yet again be her year.

Huliq correctly predicted the “Best Supporting Actress” win of Penelope Cruz, citing her ability to “make you forget she is not the film’s star.”

And winning for the role that is said to have haunted him until his death, Heath Ledger as “Best Supporting Actor” in his role as the the Joker, with an overwhelming majority( 62%) of Influencers accurately predicting his win, including InContention.com.

For a full list of our Oscar predictions, check out our PR Week column.

Influence is a fairly nebulous term – Phil Sheldrake’s Influence Scorecard
is a great step towards making it less so. By using Phil's variation of Kaplans
Balanced Scorecard, there's opportunity to connect organizational performance
indicators to measures of influence, which, looked at independently, can be
confusing or misleading.

As an invited contributor, we’re excited about offering nearly 5 years of
learnings to the discussion. Through our analytics platform and advertising
network, we've conducted influence measurement not only as a way to rank how
influential online consumers are, but as a new method of predict a site’s
likelihood to perform as an advertiser. It's clear that UGC is influencing
both consumer perception and buying behavior – it's by diving into the
characteristics of that influential content and understanding its
connections to other influencers that we’ve been cracking the code to date.
And what we're finding is that the level of influence a site may have on its readership
can directly correlate to how advertising on that site performs. Pretty
amazing, and I expect a framework like Phil's will unearth many more success
stories.

We’ve also been thinking a lot about different influence metrics for the “social
web” – and by that I don’t mean specific platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
As marketers, we need to start looking more holistically at the Web to see how
all online media is becoming socially connected. Understanding the intent
and nature of social connections across both UGC and "traditional" content is
one factor to exposing it’s influence. Analyzing the content itself, and the author’s
credibility on the specific topic, is another. It’s important to remember that influence
is highly contextual, so that should be kept in mind as we drive toward working
models and standardization.

This should be a meaningful discussion – one we look forward to helping to
shape in the weeks and months to come.

Without a doubt, the new administration is facing many challenges as it enters 2009. The topics front and center with the American people are also those that influential bloggers are buzzing about. But the blogosphere has some interesting takes..

Some highlights:
The economy is being widely discussed with more than 1,050 blogs mentioning “Obama” and “economy” in their posts. Noting the not so pretty legacy being left by the former President, our analysis found over 20% of the influencers making mention of Bush in their posts.

Obama’s blackberry addiction is one many of us technology workers can relate to, and bloggers were no different by dedicating more posts to Obama’s “crackberry” than to his decision to close Guantanamo. TechDirt, the most influential blog chimed in discussing its new look as well as the strictly personal restrictions he will have. Only friends and family need apply.

When looking at conversations about the inauguration, influencers were fascinated in particular with the First Lady. Michelle’s classy and fashionable style stimulated 19% of the conversations about the inauguration to also mention her inaugural ball gown…white, floral and modern, truly classy and beautiful.

Also interesting to note and reflective of the grassroots movement Obama tapped for his campaign – the most influential blogs pertaining to “Obama” and “presidential inauguration” were not traditional media sites, but rather grassroots (and somewhat crunchy) blogs, including The Peace Moonbeam Chronicles, Peace Corps Polygot, and Queen of the Girl Geeks.

Check out PR Week for the full report – with many more tidbits and insights from the influencers.