Measure Up Conference – Day 1

Today was the first day of the Marketing Science Institute’s Measure Up conference during which I’ve been invited to speak to describe how Pitney Bowes is using social media to deliver customer service and how we measure our Social Media efforts as a whole. Here is a copy of my presentation.

While the majority of the Measure Up conference is dedicated to measuring marketing activities, today, the first day of the conference was devoted to measuring social marketing and we’ve heard from several social media strategists including

• Esmee Williams from AllRecipies.com talking about their social media activities. Did you know that they attract over 18 million user generated content pieces a year?

• Maddock Douglas shared with us their strategies for helping companies innovate which for them means 1) finding an unmet market need , 2) meeting that need with an idea/product that consumers are willing to spend money on and finally 3) communicating that idea to the customer in a way to make them want to purchase. What really resonated with me from their presentation was the fact that regardless how innovative your employees might be you need that outside perspective. One of their researchers put it best: “You cannot read the label when you are sitting inside the jar.” Very true!

• Both AllRecipies folks and Maddock Douglas mentioned an agency called Psychster Inc. that specializes in social media technographics research. I will definitely be checking them out.

• Another great presentation came from Matt Moog from Viewpoints who talked about online communities. Definitely Matt is someone who gets engagement in social media and is very smart to monetize on it. I really want to make sure I get a copy of his presentation or link to it from here.

• The final presenter was Avinash Kaushik from Google who really did not disappoint in terms of confirming the fact that Google’s hiring really smart and cool people who know what they are talking about. He was the perfect ambassador of the Google brand, very laid back, dressed in jeans and a stylish shirt. Classic. There is no doubt in my mind that Avinash is brilliant.  He authored two books: Web Analytics an Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0 that I will definitely want to check out. He talked about ways to empower innovation in every company which, in his opinion, can be done through creating a data driven organization. What is a data driven organization? It identifies a company where the majority of employees have access to data and understand how to make it actionable. No more HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) making decisions. Let data influence it. Avinash is definitely someone I will be checking out further starting with his blog Occam’s Razor.

At the end of the day the chairwoman of the conference asked a very interesting question that created a lot of discussion. She wanted to know what type of a tool or measurement strategy we would want to have at our disposal to help us measure social media. While my wish was to have a 360 degree view of what our customers are doing in social media and how they interact with our brand in social spaces there were no shortage of other requests including finding a formula to easily connect company’s social media activities to revenue or finding a way to assign a monetary value to a brand advocate in social media.

Looking forward to tomorrow 🙂