Tewks Blog

While doing some research for another project I stumbled upon an article by Rick Webb of the Barbarian Group that triggered an insight for me that has helped me frame a portion of my thoughts regarding analytics. Let me summarize his Metrics and Analytics piece as a condemnation of quantitative measurement of campaign performance as nearly complete bullocks. He theorizes statistics fall short because they can be shaped to tell a desired story. Therefore, in the end you must just instinctively know either an idea is good, or it isn’t.

Bold. Brash. You bet, and I agree. At least in part. You look at the campaign metrics Rick is discussing, and they resonate with Seth Godin’s 1964 in his Meatball Sundae. “Get retail shelf space; Use every penny you’ve got left to buy TV time. Sell as must as you can. Repeat.” Unfortunately, this tried and trusted approach is no longer strategically sound. The channels and consumers have radically changed and in so doing have dramatically drained the insights garnered from the old ways of measuring.

This is not, however, in my opinion to say that the value of metrics has been obliterated entirely out of the equation. Rather that we are using the wrong metrics. If done right they can play a vital role in building and sustaining customer relationships. As opposed to focusing on campaign impressions or conversions, however, what needs to be done is targeting the quality of a customer’s interaction.

Today we are still telling stories about ourselves or our products and volleying messages from the fat toward the skinny end of a funnel. We need to flip this funnel. Instead of focusing on what we want, we need to focus on the wants of our customers. As iconoclast Carnegie tells us (paraphrasing here) people want to discuss themselves, or their own interests.

The question then becomes how do you operationalize this and build the funnel into a two way street? In future posts, POV’s, and even ebooks I will explore this in much greater detail, but to start you need to clearly map out where and how you are interacting with your consumers. The map is key because in turn it will be used as a blueprint for not only where, but how you build your listening posts.

By listening post, I mean a place of interaction (regardless of channel) with the customer where you have the opportunity to listen to the expression of their interests. Of the numerous possibilities, a couple specific examples of ways to listen are: Surveying (without straying too far into Net Promoter land); or rewriting and tagging content with action words or phrases that are correlated into behavior patterns of key segments.

This latter point gets at the crux of the new role metrics and measurement can play in the customer centric marketing organization (CCMO). Again, to Mr. Webb’s point there is definitely a squishy aspect to modeling motivations and behavior patterns. There is no doubt intuition, and a nose for a good idea is essential. What can turn good to great, though, is the series of micro improvements you can make to your relationship value props by finding ways to measure and gauge interactions.