Marketing Articles About Measurements Search Results

1. Weighing Scale-ACCURATE MEASUREMENT IS A NEED.

   We wonder sometimes, how a weighing scale makes a difference in macro-environment.
   Day in day out organizations use this wonderful scientific device to find out the weight of their produc... (08/24/08 09:00 AM)

2. Google's Analytics: Biased Toward Google Sites?. Some publishers are suspicious about the accuracy of panel-based measurement systems (e.g., comScore, Nielsen NetRatings), believing their count to be grossly underneath the real number of unique...

   

   (08/20/08 09:01 AM)

3. Survey: Better Data, Measurement Abilities, and ROI Metrics Boost Marketing Performance. Want to take your performance to that ideal level of highly effective and efficient marketing? It takes better access to detailed data and ROI discipline, but it also comes along with greater growth and better levels of budgets, according to the recently released study. (07/15/08 09:01 AM)

4. 6 Best Practices for Agencies. A friend of mine who owns a small agency asked for my perspective on best practices for agencies. Here's what I sent her, which after I realized would make a blog post!... I’ve worked with about 10 or more agencies, plus many technology suppliers, and there’s a lot to improve. Let me start a few ideas that come to mind: 1) Pitches are not grounded enough in the client’s business objectives, strategy or measurements. Nor are they tailored to the ‘style’ of the company. The best pitches ‘feel’ like that agency was part of the company. I think agencies should be seen as extensions of the team, and therefore evaluated as if you were to hire them as employees. The further they are along on that path of alignment in the pitch, the better the chance to win. 2) Incentives are not aligned. Agencies want to drum up projects and bill hours. I put bonus plans in place for our agencies at Dell driven by Dell performance metrics. 3) Some agencies pitch with the best team and hand over to new employees. The team you have a year from now is rarely as good as the team you got to kick off. 4) Respect client time. Come in with an ‘answer first’ approach, with the recommendation, and with clear follow through, follow up, action steps, dates, owners…along with what we discussed last time. Clients want a sense of progress and what to do next…but done quickly. 5) Perspective. The agency... (07/09/08 09:00 PM)

5. FAS 157 - Another Annoying Accounting Provision.

   I feel like bitching about FAS 157 today.  I was at the annual meeting for one of our LPs yesterday and there was a long discussion about the impact of FAS 157 on both the buyout and the venture capital business.  Once again everyone was in violent agreement that this was yet another accounting rule - promulgated by the accounting industry - to generate more fees for the accounting industry while burdening companies, especially entrepreneurial ones, with additional regulations that have no real impact on reality.

   If you aren't familiar with FAS 157, it's officially known as the "fair value measurement" rule and unofficially known by some as the "mark to market" provision.  Before you ask, "wait - isn't mark to market the thing that got Enron in trouble and started this whole wave of SOX regulatory stuff", I'll simply answer "yes" and let you ponder that.

   Like our dear friend 409A, FAS 157 has come out of the latest efforts by accountants to create more transparency in financial reporting.  Like 409A, I'm sure these are well intentioned ideas although my cynical side envisions an accountant in a sub-basement of a building NY with green eyeshades and a little green desk lamp sitting around dreaming up ways to torture entrepreneurs while accomplishing his accounting bosses goal of generating more work (and fees) for themselves.  Oops - sorry - back to the main story.

   Since the beginning of the VC business, valuation methodologies were generally consistent and straightforward.  They were usually some variation of:

   1. Value your investments at your cost.
   2. If a financing happens at an increased valuation and is led by a new investor, write your investment up to the new price per share.
   3. If a financing happens at a decreased valuation regardless of whether or not there is a new investor, write your investment down to the new price per share.
   4. If bad things are happening, you can take a discretionary write down based on your best judgement.
   5. If good things are happening, you should not take a discretionary write up.  Only write things up in case #2.
   6. If the company is public, use the publicly traded price but discount it due to illiquidity (usually 25%).

   Pretty straightforward.  Very conservative.  This almost always understates the value of a VC portfolio, which presumably is a good thing since it's illiquid and the only fund performance information that should ultimately matter to a VC (and their LPs) should be the one linked to cash flows (draw downs from their LPs and distributions to their LPs.)

   FAS 157 blows this up completely.  Under FAS 157, VC's now have to mark all of their portfolio company values to market (er - "fair value measurement") qualify for GAAP (which is a requirement for every VC firm - our investors require we have audited GAAP financial statements.)

   It gets worse.  Our LPs (who typically invest in multiple VC funds - in some case many multiples) also have to adopt FAS 157.  So they also have to mark their portfolios to market.  It used to be the case that they could simply rely on the VC valuations.  To comply with FAS 157, they theoretically have to look at all of the underlying assets in the VC portfolios and make an independent judgement on the values of those underlying assets.

   Some VCs (and LPs) are just starting to implement FAS 157.  Ironically, some accounting firms wanted 2007 as the start year; others seems to want 2008 as the start year.  Many VC firms are viewing this as an annual exercise even though they report to their LPs quarterly.  Some VC firms (like us) have already built it into our quarterly reporting cycle (our accountants told us we needed to comply in 2007).  Yeah - it's all over the map. 

   But that's not the real problem.  I'll get to the real problem(s) in my next post on our new friend, FAS 157.

   

   
   (06/27/08 09:00 PM)

6. Boulder #2 CyberCity in the US.

   Here's an interesting stat.  The Rocky Mountain News states that Boulder ranks No. 2 among 'cybercities' with 230 high-tech works per 1,000.  This is according to a study by the American Electronics Association.

   The top five are:

   • San Jose/Silicon Valley: 286
   • Boulder: 230
   • Huntsville, AL: 188
   • Durham, NC: 156
   • Washington: 132

   It's a strange list, especially since San Jose/Silicon Valley isn't actually a city!  Just more proof that you can come up with a list for pretty much any measurement you want.  I wonder if this counts all the folks on laptops hanging out all day at Trident.

   

   
   (06/24/08 09:00 AM)

7. Learn Word of Mouth Marketing -- WOMM-U, May 8-9. This year the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is doing something completely different (disclosure: I'm on the board). It will be WOMM-U (Word of Mouth Marketing University), the first training-based conference full of case studies, operational cookbooks, and practical advice to make Word of Mouth Marketing work in your organization. The tracks will include topics on Managing a blog program Activating WOM in Social Networks Building a Sustained WOM Program Measurement: The ROI of Fans Selling into the CEO ...and much more. Keynote presenters includes my friend Joseph Jaffe (author of "Join the Conversation") and Jeffrey Graham, who leads research for NYTimes. Join me at this unique conference, May 8, 9 in Miami. Register here. (02/28/08 09:01 PM)

8. Prioritizing Marketers Top Priorities. This morning I got a research brief from Mediapost summarizing the findings from the Marketing Effectiveness Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Aanlytics study. This study surveyed marketing executives to identify key trends and strategies of effective marketing. The subject line of the email said: "Marketing Execs Say Basics Are Most Important in 2008". By "basics" I thought they meant strategies such as becoming measurement-oriented, shifting ad portfolio, investing in email infrastructure, build operational data warehouse, and improve web site. However the 'basics' by definition from this study were more customer-centric and more concepts and objectives rather than strategies. And unfortunately for most companies, they're not all that 'basic' in achieving success. 60% of marketing executives said the following 'marketing basics' were important: Customer satisfaction Customer retention Segmentation Brand loyalty ROI I have a copy of the study. To be clear, the study asked marketing executives to choose from over 60 concepts or buzzwords (such as the 5 above) which were then categorized. Other categories, in order of votes, included: SEO (by itself) Personalization: concepts include Data mining, CRM, Lead Generation, Personalization, Ecommerce, Competitive Intelligence Green Marketing: Multicultural / Ethic issues. Breakdown of old media Innovative Branding Viral / WOM: concepts include viral, WOM, blogging New Media: concepts include Web 2.0, Mobile, CGM, Long Tail, Social Networking Macro Economics Tech Strategy Outsourcing Social Issues Other Now, as a marketer, if I participated in this study I may have answered the same way. After all, the 'marketing basics' are overarching objectives. What... (01/02/08 09:00 AM)

9. Imeem is Rocking. Dalton Caldwell is finally finding his groove. His Sequoia-backed social network, Imeem, started out a couple years ago as a standalone, instant-messaging application. He soon scrapped that in favor of a Web-based social music site. But then, a victim of his own success, Imeem was banned from MySpace and threatened with a lawsuit from the Warner Music Group. Caldwell, though, has turned all of that around, and made Imeem into a legitimate, ad-supported music streaming site. He won over Warner Music, which dropped its lawsuit and licensed its entire catalog of songs to Imeem in return for a share of the advertising revenues associated with its music. In fact, Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. found the relationship with Imeem important enough to highlight in Warner Music's most recent earnings conference call. Now, not only can you listen to songs from indie groups like The Essex Green (and embed them on your blog): But you can also also listen to Warner Music acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and embed (30-second samples of) those as well: Imeem claims 16 million unique visitors in July, 10 million registered users and more than one million unique logins a day. Third-party measurement site Compete.com puts the number of unique visitors at 4.6 million, but shows that U.S. traffic is growing and beating both Last.fm and Bebo (see graph above). Comscore shows Bebo slightly ahead of Imeem in the U.S., with 4.4 million visitors in July versus 3.9 million for Imeem (and 1.8... (08/20/07 09:00 AM)

10. Facebook Widget Makers See Traffic Rise on Home Sites. Does it pay to make a custom app for Facebook? Some of the top widgets on Facebook from companies like Slide, RockYou, and HotorNot appear to be driving significant traffic back to the home sites, reports VentureBeat. It makes sense. Widgets tend to have limited feature sets and act as teasers to go to a bigger site. The question is whether traffic measurement sites like Quantcast incorporate widget traffic in their overall stats or just look at teh main sites. (Anyone know the answer to that, please tell us in comments). Compete shows a similar trend, but Alexa doesn't show quite as dramatic a jump (and actually shows HotorNot declining slightly). Still, if 10 million people added Slide's Top Friends widget onto their Facebook page, chances are a fraction of them will go and check out what else Slide has to offer. At the very minimum, widgets can be a powerful form of marketing. Once companies figure out how to make money inside the widgets themselves, then we might finally see the beginning of a true Facebook economy.... (07/24/07 09:01 AM)

11. 50-Strand Template for Building a Word-of-Mouth-Worthy Business. It’s been a month in a half since my last post. Yikes. I’m hoping you (haven't) noticed. :-)I’m back.One of the reasons for the absence has been a lot of traveling, including a trip to London. See my picture here in downtown York. U.S. history is nothing compared to a place like this! I also spent one day in the UK with David Rance, CEO of Round. I worked with David to bring a customer centricity framework into Dell several years ago. There are two powerful parts of the Round system. First is the simplicity of a baseball metaphor and measurement system. As you analyze the customer centricity of your company, you move along the bases, closer to a home run. The bases even bring a language that your people can use to explain why things don’t line up. Second is the sophisticated part of the system: the “Strands”. The Strands represent key areas in your organization, each of which can be measured towards customer centricity based on feedback within the organization…like looking in a mirror. Strands are things such as leadership style, employee engagement, customer data, marketing metrics, etc. On a jet-lagged bank holiday at David's 400-year-old house in northern England, I shared my opinions of what it took for a company to have word of mouth. David opened up his laptop, opened his software, and over the next hour we identified the key strands that are critical for a company to earn word of mouth. Brand Values Collection... (06/18/07 09:03 AM)

12. On B2B Demand Generation tools and Lead Generation Dashboards. CEOs continue to demand better ROI measurement and accountability from marketers. As a result there’s been a surge of interest in software and tools to manage the process of lead management, lead nurturing and lead generation with a greater emphasis... (04/18/07 09:00 PM)

13. How Measurement Can Impede Long Term Growth. Measurement and accountability crystallizes movement towards a goal, individual performance, and helps identify employees worthy of merit. Measurement is the language of any organization. The more measures we can hold employees accountable for the better, right? Hold on. There’s a cautionary tale to running a company with an extreme and unbalanced reliance on internal measures. Most corporate measures and employee goals are internally focused, financially-oriented, and functionally silohed. There’s an unfortunate consequence for companies that ONLY focus on these measures. While it’s healthy to manage business with a pragmatic view of financial health, over the long term, a primary focus on these internal lagging measures is not what builds a great company. Can you agree that a great company is one which builds products based on customer needs, strives to delight customers, and generates positive word of mouth as a result? Great companies reinvent and innovate. Now, how many internal measures and key performance indicators directly tie to accomplishing these objectives? Can you identify the internal measures that measure the required cross-functional cooperation to ensure the entire customer delights customers? Sustained-growth companies create great experiences and benefit from positive word of mouth. The Ultimate Question / Net Promoter questions supports this, where Fred Reicheld studied companies with sustained growth and found when customers were willing to tell friends about that company. What companies are you willing to tell friends about? Here are some ideas: Toyota / Lexus, USAA, Costco, Southwest Airlines, Craigslist, Apple, JetBlue, and Amazon. What do these companies... (02/19/07 08:59 AM)

14. Career Tiip #14: Show and Know Metrics. Once I was in a meeting at Dell, and someone said the company could stop on a dime. A colleague retorted, We’d stop because of a dime!” As funny as that is, this kind of agility is only possible in a metrics-oriented culture. Friends who have left Dell for new companies are amazed at how metrics-deficient their culture is. They are shocked how employees don’t understand the basics of a PL, and so they work to add KPIs into the business that feed the PL. As a result, these new employees are MVPs to executives because they speak their language. A little over a year ago I visited my undergrad college, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and met with the Dean of Business Marketing. I told him marketing graduates need to be more analytically-capable and trained than they were when I went to school. He agreed, and in fact they were in the midst of planning restructuring of the curriculum to focus on analytics. Demonstrating focus and proficiency in measurement will help your career. By showing a command of measuring your activities, you will appear in much better control of your area…and thus be given more responsibility. Executives will have more confidence in employees who can manage and measure, and are comforted by employees who can speak and present in their language. However, don’t make the mistake of getting stuck on the guard-rail of internal measurement. Balance your perspective with customer feedback, customer measures, and creative thinking. Make some principle-based... (01/23/07 09:01 PM)

15. The Merits of Cheap Ass Marketing. My esteemed colleagues at Bazaarvoice found a fun little site that allows you to make up your own Google search interpretation. It's called GooogIe search, and here's what they came up with as a search phrase for me and their corrected interpretation of that search: Isn't that nice? :-) Actually, internally I am known as the world's cheapest marketer, and I don't reject that title. Read my Marketing Bullseye series on the right -- the whole idea of bullseye markeitng is how to spend the least amount of money for the highest impact combining creativity with measurement rigor. Typically marketing as a practice is thought of with big budgets towards advertising, direct mail, TV, etc. When I think of great marketing I first think of great products, great service, positive culture, good press, and amplifying the resulting word of mouth. If you have all that, then you can think about downstream marketing because it will be 4X more effective! To date, Bazaarvoice has done no advertising, except for tradeshow exhibiting and sponsorships (and we didn't start exhibiting until word of mouth and press required us to have a place people can find us). I'm usually the first to cut my marketing budget (but I've got to stop that at some point!). Alternatively, I'll invest in consultants and contractors to help make our products better. Being a markeitng cheap ass (in the most positive sense) is good if it forces you to make your company and products better because you can't... (01/06/07 09:00 PM)

16. What is a click worth?. You probably have already figured it out (if you're buying clicks, I hope so!). If not, here is a handy spreadsheet: Click value measurement.... (12/14/06 09:01 AM)

17. Marketing Bullseye 11: Write in Customers' Language. The bulls eye concept because it not only helps describe middle-brain marketing of blending creativity with measurement, but it also conceptualizes the idea of choosing the most effective way to do things. So what’s the bulls eye in copywriting? Many marketers look at their competitors’ web sites and copy. In the end, every site looks like the other and clever white-paper-speak terms emerge. Terms that are not the language of the customer I don’t think that’s what copywriting means!. Hit the bulls eye by writing in the language of the customer. To use the same terms, phrases, and straight-forward speak that a customer might use when asking someone else about your solution (and of course, they probably didn’t use the word ‘solution’)! Holly Buchanan of FutureNow describes it this way: These aren't the words your customers are using to describe what they need, what their problems are or what they're looking for. They're not looking for human capital management solutions - they're looking for a staffing company. They're not typing human capital management solutions into search engines. They're typing staffing company or staffing services. Andrea Learned describes how Intuit hired an editor from People Magazine to reinvent their terms for QuickBooks. Accounts receivable became 'Money In' and accounts payable, 'Money Out.' Her advice: Follow your customers home. What is in their magazine rack? What words do they use when they email or IM friends, and so on? This sort of anthropological look should give you some in-depth insight as to... (09/30/06 09:01 PM)

18. Marketing Bullseye 8: Unexpected Touch. Hitting the marketing bullseye balancing measurement rigor with creative relevance. For example, Southwest Airlines maintains efficiency without losing creativity or soul. You can get a $150 flight (efficiency through operational rigor) while the flight attendant recites FAA rules impersonating Robert Deniro (creativity and ‘soul’). Up until now I’ve posted blog entries in the longitude dimension of the marketing bullseye --metrics, optimization, and finance. Now, for a principle in the “latitude” dimension. These will be posts about purposeful creativity, first brain marketing, salience, and principles that drive word of mouth. This post covers a strategy that creates word of mouth and loyalty but may lack empirical justification: The Unexpected Touch. When is the last time you were surprised and delighted by a small unexpected gesture from a company? The reason the unexpected touch works is because neither you nor I can think of an answer! The key to this principle is found in the meaning of the words Unexpected and Touch. I use these on purpose… UnexpectedTo be unexpected, you should choose to do something that goes outside the range of what the most demanding customer may expect from the product or service you provide. It is different than adding a great feature or executing perfectly on service. Here’s an example:I love my iPod, yet it has many features I don’t use. If Apple put a dollar more of software features (conceptually), it wouldn’t make as much impact as a dollar they put into the premium packaging (which I haven’t thrown... (08/30/06 09:02 PM)

19. More on the Marketing Bullseye: What does it look like?. Have you ever been asked to launch a strategy, project or campaign that you knew wouldn't make a big impact to the business? I have, many times over. Why does this happen? Do these scenarios sound familiar? The CEO saw an idea work in a previous company and wants you to do the same thing. The sales leader insists a certain strategy is required to close sales A meeting created momentum for an idea, which came out of nowhere. Consultants have come in and presented their strategy (enough said) There’s pressure to copy what competitors do If you’ve been pulled off course from prioritizing the most impactful activities to drive business, you’ve shot an arrow and missed the bullseye. Hopefully your actions impacted something relevant to the PL…otherwise you missed the target all together. I’m not suggesting ideas and initiatives from these origins are doomed to failure, but in a world of limited resources, you have to separate truly impactful ideas from the rest. And usually the sources of many ideas don’t have the measurement, wisdom or rigor to determine if it’s a “bullseye” idea. And by “bullseye” I mean impact to the income statement – revenue and margin dollars. Not advertising awards, not making the CEO happy, not looking like the competition, or checking a marketing tactic box. The bullseye is reserved for marketing strategies and tactics that make the biggest impact to the business, before all overs. And if also proven as such, you will make the CEO... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

20. DirectIndustry, or Direct Access?. On the last page of July's Test & Measurement World, there is an interview with Corentin Thiercelin, CEO of DirectIndustry.com. I haven't talked much about DirectIndustry here, but it is a directory targeting world-wide B2B supply.
    
    The interview is typical of what you would expect, with bits like this:
    
    

    "Google is so exhaustive that it can sometimes lack the order and logic necessary for professionals to compare products and brands effectively. As a search engine specialized for industry, DirectIndustry returns this order to the search, saving professionals time and headaches."

    
    Info-commerce geeks and directory clients who read this blog should find the article somewhat interesting, which is part of the reason why I've posted it. This article leaves me with three questions, however:
    1. Is this good content?
    I've praised T&MW's content here before, but why this piece? Are engineers interested in the business of directories? The page subject is "Viewpoint, An exclusive interview with a technical leader". The most interesting part may be that Corentin was once a test engineer, which is why his website is lopsided towards test.
    
    2. Is this a play to an advertiser?
    DirectIndustry has been running a series of ads in T&MW celebrating their growth and longevity--is this why this interview is here? It's lack of typical editorial relevance smacks of direct access for advertisers. And the interview is all about his company, not really the 'role of the Web in purchasing decisions', as the intro promises.
    
    3. What about loyalty to KellySearch?
    T&MW is a Reed publication, which also owns KellySearch.com, a DirectIndustry competitor. T&MW has KellySearch as a tool on its website. Are the editors passive-aggressive towards their forced association with Kelly? Or trying to look unbiased?
    
    What do you think? (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

21. How to get Word of Mouth (internally) for Word of Mouth. Today I presented at WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), which is growing like a weed. Tivo recently joined which was the 300th member of this toddler association. A couple interesting notes from the conference (I may share more later)... Andy Sernovitz kicked off the conference with a passionate plea to maintain the ethics in the word of mouth industry. I'm very happy WOMMA is pushing this so hard. Although it's not a sexy topic, it is critical to maintain the authenticity of true customer evangelism. Schills will ruin the authenticity and credibility of word of mouth. He also warned that we (those who drive and practice word of mouth marketing) can be seen as Marketing Innovators or Wackos. I think this rang true for me because I always went through a phase of being a wacko before I convinced people that a new program was 'innovative' and impactful. As part of my presentation, I addressed the need to get buy-in from the organization to embrace new forms of marketing. You can assume others won't 'get it', because they are coming from a different perspective. They are buried in their own day to day operational processes and measurements, and they don't see the connection to a word of mouth program. Part of the solution is to connect any new marketing program, including word of mouth, to their objectives. Outline the 'what's in it for me' question -- as relevant for customers as it is for colleagues and employees. It's all... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

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