Are you shopping with your smartphone or tablet this holiday season? Are you receiving mobile ads and promotions from your mobile apps? If so, we need your help.
The Marketing Intelligence team at T3 is working on a project for the new year. We’re looking for examples of mobile marketing that rock, and those that fall far short of rocking.
To make it easy to help, we’ve set up a quick survey for you to provide information about your experiences. We hope you’ll take a quick moment in the days ahead to share with us both the shining lights and the Scrooge-able efforts you’ve seen this holiday season related to mobile marketing.
Since it’s the giving season, everyone who participates will have a chance to win a $50 gift card. Please post your examples no later than January 4.
Thanks in advance for your participation. Enjoy the holiday season.
For the better part of the spring, I’ve been evaluating social monitoring tools, what Forrester calls “Listening Platforms”. At T3, we manage social channels for some clients, and metrics (share of voice and sentiment) for others.
We’ve been using social monitoring tools for years. Our needs are evolving just like many other early adopters of these tools. The vendor landscape is complicated and crowded. For enterprise-level customers, there are more than 20 listening platforms to consider. As customer needs evolve to include the need to link to traditional business intelligence metrics, new platforms will emerge as business technology players like Adobe, IBM and SAS get into the fray. It’s important to understand what’s out there now, and what’s in the pipeline for the future.
My assessment initially began for a specific client. It has evolved into an evaluation that we can apply to any client’s goals and objectives. As with most measurement applications, there are many stakeholders and many unique concerns, and it’s no different when considering social monitoring tools.
If you’re considering one of these tools or re-evaluating your social monitoring toolset, I have three recommendations:
1. Determine what to measure.
It’s important to prioritize what you must measure, what would be nice to measure, and what is extraneous to the analysis. For Twitter, is it important to collect every tweet, hashtag and re-tweet about your brand? If so, you’ll want to evaluate only platforms that access the entire Twitter firehose, as opposed to sampling the Twitter firehose. Do you need to pinpoint influencers? Will you need to engage them directly through the listening platform, or do you have another tool you’re already using?
2. Create a framework for the evaluations.
Forrester recently released its Listening Platform Q2 2012 WAVE report, which includes a customizable Excel file. Unfortunately for us, we’d already created our own Excel file before theirs was released. Essentially, you’ll want to determine which pieces of information you’ll collect from each potential partner, then create a weighting system. Note: Don’t forget to take into consideration that many of these platforms are software-as-a-service tools; after some limited onboarding, you may find yourself “on your own”. Buyer beware.
3. Do a trial.
Every platform vendor we spoke with allowed us a limited trial so we could play with the tool. What we found is you learn way more when actually modeling a report than you can ever learn in a demo. We ran comparable counts, mock reports and tested syntax.
Clearly, this is a simplified view of how to evaluate social monitoring platforms. However, if you consider these key learnings, it will make your evaluation process go more smoothly and ultimately help you choose a more versatile, powerful and relevant listening platform.
Something about the end of one year and the beginning of another makes me feel like I need to de-clutter, clean out and otherwise purge things that have been piling up over the course of the year.
Typically, I focus on things like the kids’ school papers, clothes that need a new home and files at work that are rarely opened. A recent article reminded me to include a thorough evaluation of my Facebook account. Yes, Facebook. With the eminent switch to Timeline in mind, the article encouraged folks to take a hard look at friends, pictures, status updates, brands and apps. So I did. And I’ll admit it, I trimmed my friend list. Nothing personal, but if I didn’t like you in high school and we’ve “caught up,” I don’t need to know that you play way, WAY too much Farmville.
I am not alone in my desire to tidy up my Facebook friends list, according to the article, Friends & Frenemies: Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends, from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company.
Many factors come into play when paring Facebook friends. The number one reason someone removes a friend is offensive comments, according to the story. The second reason we remove friends is that we don’t know them very well to begin with. The third reason was a surprise: 39% of respondents stated they remove friends because they were “trying to sell me something.”
So apparently there’s a limit to the amount of “persuasion” a Facebook friend can levy. At some point, if a brand advocate crosses the line into selling, there’s a real chance they’ll be unfriended. Marketers who rely on brand advocates within social networks to promote and propel messaging need to keep in mind the need for their fans to maintain a balancing act. Nobody wants their brand advocates to end up taking them in the wrong direction in their zeal for your brand.
