Manhattan Marketing Maven

Engagement is No Real Metric

“Engagement” is being proposed as the new metric for online and social media interactions. Although not uniformly defined, “engagement” seems to be an aggregate measure of a variety of interactions, which include clicks, likes, comments, shares, and re-posts. It’s a proxy for conversion in environments where goods and services aren’t directly sold. 

To the old school crowd, including yours truly, engagement is measured more discretely by counting the number of people who show up on a site, view a desired number of pages, spend significant time per page and per session, and take the desired action. These “engaged” visitors sign up for a newsletter, download something, use a calculator, enroll in a class or webinar, or maybe even buy something. 

Part of the debate centers on a definition and the use of the term relative to media values and media buying. If someone comes to your site or onto your Facebook page, are they engaged or not? If they spend a nanosecond to click “like” or view two pages or less, are you suffering from low engagement? 

In the old media world, we measured time-spent-viewing or time-spent-listening and inferred engagement from lapsed time. So if Nielsen clocked you listening to Z-100 for 45 minutes between 6a and 9a, we inferred that you liked that station, probably tracked with the core demographic, probably listened as much as the average dedicated listener, and probably paid some attention to its content and the ads. 

All media experiences are not equal and, therefore, have different outcomes. Engagement is a catchall concept designed to obscure rather than illuminate these differences in outcomes. 

The engagement debate is a step in the evolution of an elusive advertising rationale to support spending money on social networks where people come to do cool things, but brands haven’t figured out a way to quantify what they do, what it means, or how to justify incremental investments. Engagement will help social networks monetize their inventory but do little to help brands understand how they are interacting with customers or prospects.

 

Say "NO" to Social Media GRPs

The move to use GRPs (Gross Ratings Points) for measuring social media is a confluence of two corporate agendas rather than a real attempt to give brands a viable/realistic measurement tool. 

Facebook wants a shot at TV budgets and needs a way in. Nielsen needs to remain relevant and competitive in the digital world. But GRPs will add zero actionable insight for Facebook or Newsfeed marketers. 

These dominant players are looking to rig the game in their favor. Facebook totally controls access to the audience. Nielsen controls how things are measured. Both can manipulate the game to their own advantage. 

Listen closely, you can hear the pitch in your head. “We can now measure the relative reach of your postings and compare them with the reach of your TV spots using the same yardstick. Now you can easily plan and but social media and TV together or create the optimal media mix.” 

GRPs are a short hand that media guys use to figure reach and frequency for campaigns and limited time buys. They don’t tell you anything about impact of your message, time spent or exposure to your message or engagement; how users respond, react, re-post, share or comment on content. 

Gross Ratings Points and Total Ratings Points (TRPs) became the default measurement to generate a plan quickly when former broadcast planners and buyers became overnight digital media specialists in the late 1990s. Nielsen has trained a few generations of media planners, media buyers and clients so that this shorthand has become the default standard. 

Most working marketers believe that orthodox reliance on TRPs limits media creativity and obscures competitive media opportunities. But it’s a simple and easy calculation to justify a buy recommendation or to back into a budget number. 

Facebook totally controls reach, especially for marketers, with the EdgeRank algorithm. Research indicating that brand access to fan’s walls is less than 10 percent of posts threatens to kill the golden goose. If brands can’t get better access to the Facebook users who have friended us, there’s no way we’re going to pay the ad rates Zuckerberg fantasizes about. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is testing different filters and has hinted that they might even create an unfiltered newsfeed. 

Changing the filter and granting brands greater access will not only improve advertiser relations, but it will multiply the data Facebook can capture and re-sell to eager marketers. It might also provoke a considerable user backlash if endless ads appear in newsfeeds. 

More importantly GRPs don’t measure the stuff we need to know. We need to know what people do on Facebook, what they click or don’t, what content draws them in or keeps them on our page and how much they share what they find with their friends. GRPs offer no answers to these questions.

 

Players & Pervs Come Out After Dark on the Internet

An provocative study of Internet traffic by Arbor Networks, an online security firm, suggests that Americans jump online after dinner to play games and watch porn. 

The study based on traffic data from dozens of ISPs, tens of millions of subscribers and petabytes of daily Internet traffic indicates that "US Internet traffic reaches its peak at 11p ET and stays relatively high till 3 am." This suggests that 8p-Midnight is prime time on the west coast and Pacific Time. The traffic consists largely of consumer traffic which climbs later in the day and accounts for the bulk of after-business-hours activity.

By looking at the sources of traffic and analyzing traffic by host sites, Arbor discerned that video usage increases later in the day peaking at midnight. Similarly servers hosting adult material draw a traffic spike daily between 10p and 1 am. 

Its reasonable to assume that gamers, prohibited by policy, sensibility or bandwidth at school or work flock to the web at night to unwind and to lose themselves in the games, the avatars and their alter-egos. With similar limitations, those seeking more prurient stimulation do likewise.

The implications for marketers are:

1. Primetime TV has serious competition. Either people are bailing out on network fare in favor of more interactive, involving or targeted programming or they are multi-tasking and only partly paying attention to the new Fall season. A roadblock strategy should integrate online and offline media to truly cover the waterfront. Its a fair bet that covering both bases is the only sure way to penetrate the male 18-34 demographic. 

2. Commercial or product placement and/or integration into games and porn have the potential to reach and persuade more people than previously thought. Maybe the early adapters of product placement tactics in games were no so crazy. Naturally this is a sensitive issue in terms of content compatibility, but I have a hunch that daring marketers can achieve breakthrough awareness and brand affinity by strategically embedding brand messages in related online properties.

3. Consider online "appointment" events to reach selected audience segments. Midnight madness sales, special hour-by-hour promotions or pricing, night owl content or copy might have added value and pulling power for those up late and active online.

Crowdsourcing Marketing Research

What if somebody used social media techniques to gather research about the adoption of social media by marketers? Wouldn't it be cool and provocative?

That's the premise behind the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report instigated by Christina Kerley and produced by Equation Research with the participation of many marketers in framing the questions and 1469 respondents representing clients, agencies, consultants, vendors and non-profits. The survey, fielded between June 3 and July 2, 2009, is believed to be the first time the community both crafted the questions and the answers to figure out what's going on.

And while the technique is novel, the results are not. They are predictable and practical.

The survey found that there is a "boundless enthusiasm" for social media and widespread experimentation but there is no consensus on what it is or how best to use it. Is this news to anyone?

Some believe social media is media. Others see it as a distribution or communications channels. Still others see it as a concept or a consciousness about how brands engage their customers. But with 59% of respondents currently using social media it's fair to claim that social media --however its defined-- has reached critical mass.

The biggest names with the biggest traffic (Facebook & Twitter) and established tactics (online videos and blogs) get the most play. Though most marketers are using more than one tactic, often in tandem with each other. Most respondents reported playing around with 5-7 social memes usually in the same time frame though its not clear if or how they are synchronized or syncopated. 

These activities account for approximately one-third of current marketing spend; slightly higher in smaller firms. It's a fair bet that in a sustained tight economy, these lower cost, buzz-oriented media will continue to grow as a percentage of overall marketing allocations. Social media have significant "promise" for the near term future along with other low cost-high return tools like search engine advertising, outbound e-mail and PR.

Mobile media has less traction than social media probably because its perceived to be intrusive, complicated and technically challenging. Easily a third of respondents are content to sit on the sidelines and wait-and-see what happens. 

The data confirms what anyone paying attention could surmise. The technique -- drawing together the marketing community to build a research agenda and then field the survey is cool.

B2C marketers are more aggressive experimenters than their B2B counterparts and smaller firms are quicker to embrace these new tools than larger, more bureaucratic organizations. For many inertia and the usual reasons why not (no plan, no budget, no strategy, no risk appetite, no metrics) are the barriers to adoption.