Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

The difference between an online poll and a statistically valid survey

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Earlier this week, SciFi Wire (part of SciFi.com) launched an online poll asking fans what they though writer-director Joss Whedon’s next project should be: another Serenity movie, a movie featuring Buffy/Angel character Spike, or WonderWoman. Much as I love the Serenity/Firefly ‘verse, I voted for Spike. Not because I had any illusions that the poll was scientific, or prescriptive for Whedon. Just for fun, and because I know he does listen to fans. Why not let him know that fans still love Spike?

Occasionally during the week I checked the poll. At some point the various Whedon fandoms mobilized to get out the vote, and to my knowledge at least one group of fans figured out how to "beat" the poll. And of course if one group knew (and posted it), they all knew. Instantly.

Apparently it was not that hard to figure out how to vote more than once – just delete the cookie. And with pretty motivated Whedon fans, not hard to imagine that more than one fan voted more than once.

Well, SciFi.com didn’t like it and replaced the poll with a new question. They had a brief explanation (no longer on the site) that the Whedon poll was pulled down because fans manipulated the vote.

Really…. isn’t that taking everything just a bit too seriously? Personally, I think voting more than once is silly, but these sorts of online polls are just for fun, aren’t they? So who cares? They aren’t statistically valid at all. And if you really wanted to make sure that people could only vote once, wouldn’t you make it a bit harder to "vote early and often." For more on this specific incident, check out this post on Whedonesque.

Okay, I hear you saying – we know you’re a Whedon fan. What does this have to do with marketing?

Statistically valid surveys and polls have methodology and technology behind them to ensure accurate, valid results. Objective questions. Random samples that represent the target population. Answers that mean something. If they are conducted online, the technology prevents multiple voting. Sure, the person conducting the survey has an objective, even an agenda, but the scientific methodology prevents total bias from coloring the result.

But quickie polls on Web sites, whether about Whedon or wikis or Windows, are entertainment. Giving them any other interpretation or taking them seriously is just silly.

The marketing lesson: Don’t confuse the two. If you want to do a quick poll on your Web site or blog to entertain the audience, by all means do it. But don’t use it to prove anything. If you want quantifiable "proof," spend the money to do the survey right.

And the relative importance of Joss Whedon’s next project and whether Patrick Stewart is too old for the next Star Trek movie (the current poll question)? Not going to end world hunger or bring world peace. Who cares if the fans fooled with the poll. As one of the commenters on Whedonesque pointed out, the traffic on SciFi Wire and the number of ad impressions probably increased exponentially by getting the Whedon fandoms riled up.

Which in my opinion is what they wanted in the first place, so they shouldn’t have gotten their knickers in a twist when they succeeded.

The inevitability of the A-list?

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The blogger A-list is inevitable. The good news: it’s also irrelevant.

Inevitable for so many of the reasons I mentioned in my June post , Who’s on top. We strive for success. When we reach it, we want the recognition. And we want to defend the territory, so we build barriers to entry. It is human nature, not-so-pure and simple.

The latest entrant in the ego-fest: EgoSurf. Here you can type your name and associated Web sites and blogs, and get an ego rating. Saw this a few places, lastly in David Parmet’s blog, where he laments:

"This is exactly the sort of A-lister bullshit elitist wannabe crap we all hoped blogging and social media would destroy."

I agree wholeheartedly. I’m certainly glad my score didn’t crawl up into the red "egomaniac" zone and wasn’t zero either, but I just don’t understand why anyone cares about this sort of thing, other than as a joke.

Sure, I ego-surf. Who doesn’t. But it doesn’t mean anything. I get lots of Google hits because of the online persistence of things that I’ve done in my career combined with length of time on the net. For 10 years, I was the spokesperson for internet filtering software companies, first Cyber Patrol and then SurfControl, during a time when the topic was hot. Supreme Court cases. Laws. White House Summits. Congressional Hearings. FTC Hearings. NSF Meetings. The list goes on. Since many of the online docs that include my name are government docs, they persist. An interesting look into my professional history, but not that relevant today. Unless you want to retain me to be your spokesperson for a controversial product 🙂

Of course, you can also find a recipe for German Chocolate Cake that I posted to Usenet in 93 or 94. If you’ve been online for any length of time, you will leave a trail. And it is cool to look at it every so often. But it doesn’t make you any more qualified or talented or smart etc. etc. than anyone else. I imagine you could get a high score from all sorts on online activities that are not at all professional (unless you are in the oldest profession.) Provided of course that you use a consistent identity.

So, why am I wittering away about EgoSurf and what does it have to do with an A-list of bloggers anyway?

Here’s why: people take this stuff seriously, and we shouldn’t. So what if there is an A-list of bloggers. Good for them, I hope they don’t implode under the pressure of their own egos and the demands of staying on "top" now that they’ve gotten there. Never mind that the whole concept of there BEING a top seems very clue-less.

All these lists are irrelevant.

The good news about the blogosphere is that you don’t need to be on some top 10 (or 100) list for your thoughts, opinions, hopes and fears to reach, and touch, an audience. For you to be able to meet other bloggers, IRL and virtually, whose work you respect.

Sure you might not get invited to speak at all those conferences (except maybe blogher, where one of the requirements is to check your ego at the door) but so what. Just eats into billable time, and it is usually the same old same old anyway 🙂 

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE to speak at conferences, but it’s just not top priority. I need to pay the bills, and that means client work. Sometimes it is a sexy project that people want to hear about. But most of the time, it is the day in, day out work of supporting the marketing efforts of my clients. And that takes up pretty much all of my time.

All you need in the blogosphere is a blog, and the courage to have an opinion. Readers will find you. Maybe not thousands, but it will be the right group for you. And that’s enough for me.

For a humourous perspective on the A-list thing, check out the top ten blogger lies at gapingvoid.

PR Measurement

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Up until last year when I started my marketing consultancy, I was always on the client side of the PR-agency equation, either as internal corp comm or marketing. I have always had measurement at the top of my list. Still do.

Sure, the measurements change, as it is important to choose a relevant measure for the task at hand. But we always understood the importance of being able to justify our PR results quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Didn’t always LIKE having to do it, but that’s life.

You have to measure, and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. But whether your campaign is for a product or for an idea, you do need to know if the audience "bought it." Gut feel just isn’t enough, and it definitely doesn’t give you the ammunition to defend your work in the boardroom or a competitive situation. More on that in a minute.

For some campaigns — let’s call them awareness campaigns, even though my readers know I really don’t believe in awareness-only objectives 🙂 —  it is still perfectly fine to count clips, look at reach and do a little evaluation of website traffic around the campaign. If your budget permits, do some baseline and post campaign surveying.

BUT the best measurements are tied to sales results — that is after all why most companies are in business 🙂 Yes I know it is hard, and yes I know it isn’t going to be perfect, but to the extent possible you should tie PR campaigns to sales objectives. Now, it doesn’t have to be revenue. After all, there are a lot of steps between a PR hit and a sale. But for B2B in particular, looking for PR to deliver some number of sales leads is not unreasonable. After all, in may cases (tech in particular), the PR budget comes from the old ad budget because we believed in a correspondingly higher value of the PR hit versus an ad.

Now that I am a marketing consultant who handles PR for some of her clients, I still want measurement. Why? Because I know the qualitative is vulnerable to attack. Another agency can easily come in, tell a good story, foster doubt in the client’s mind and lead to agency review.

A steady diet of good quantitative results is a bit harder to beat.

The key is to understand what is important to your client. Then measure your effort in that context, show how PR contributed to the results. The measurements may change over time, as objectives change over time. But there’s always a desired outcome, and if you look hard enough, you CAN find a way to demonstrate quantitatively (as well as qualitatively) the PR impact on results. It may take a while to convince your client to give you access to the information you need, and that is a whole other story. Willingness to measure without the means can be frustrating, but if you work at it long enough, even the most recalcitrant can be won over.

So, in the current PR measurement conversation (see Shel Holtz’s most recent post for the summary) you can put me squarely in the "FOR MEASUREMENT" column.

UPDATE: John Wagner has some more in his blog about his opinion. There’s more than the one post, I’m just linking to the latest as of this writing, the response to the Shel Holtz post linked above. 

Here’s the thing — I don’t think any of us disagree that PR needs to find ways to demonstrably prove its value in order to defend its place in the budget. So does advertising, so does direct mail.  Some believe that metrics is the way to go, others prefer more instinctive approaches (measurements?).

Both are right — the key is to find and understand the measurement that is of value to the client, and I assure you (as someone who has spent a large part of her professional life on the client side), clients care about impact on sales. Show that your efforts generated new prospects. Look at average downloads of your software before and after a major PR campaign. That’s a measurement that is just as valid as any system.

And the systems have their place too. I expect particularly in the B2C realm where companies generally don’t track leads the way we obsessively do in B2B.

It doesn’t matter what measure you pick — just make sure you have one.

Filed Under: PR

Happy New Year

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Best wishes to all for safe, happy and healthy New Year.

I’ll leave you with this picture of my son Douglas who lost his first baby tooth late Thursday night:

Dach_missing__tooth_2_for_web

Grab bag: Good Marketing Stuff

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And for the final grab bag entry this week, a few posts that caught my eye:

Toby Bloomberg on 5 ways to combat negative blog comments. I particularly liked this reminder:

"One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry y’all, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. […] One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter.  And that’s not a negative comment."

She’s absolutely right (that’s why she’s the diva) — there are places for both sorts of things, blogs and blog-like newsletters without comments.

The way I see it, companies just have to decide which thing they want to have and make sure it fits their culture and yes,their marketing plan. If you REALLY can’t handle the comments, don’t put up a blog with comments and then selectively delete the ones you don’t like. You WILL get caught out, and you would have been better off doing a monologue.

I have commented in the past that I (like Toby) do not recommend turning off comments. Rather, use the comments on a blog to have a conversation with the reader. Even negative comments. As we all well know, your BEST customer often is the formerly unhappy customer who you turned around. Of course… you DO have to be willing to do what it takes to turn the customer around….

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If you use TypePad, archive this post from Neville Hobson on how to republish and back-up your blog.

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Two thought provoking posts from John Wagner: Open your eyes to the next wave of PR bloggers and Can the big agencies be thought leaders in a changing marketplace?  John has links to commentary by Shel Israel and Trevor Cook among others. Start from his post and follow the trail. I think John is on to something. It is very hard for the big guns, in any industry, to open the country club doors and let the "rest of us" in. The minute they do, they have lost the cachet of their leadership position. They aren’t "special" any more. However, more disturbing to me than the old school leaders having this "club" attitude is when I see similar behavior cropping up in the blogosphere…. Isn’t it a bit soon (and contrary to the spirit of the blogosphere) for there to be authoritative voices on anything?  To identify anyone as "So and So, the voice of X in the blogosphere" strikes me as odd.

Just my .02.

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A great post by Jill Konrath on the Selling to Big Companies Blog: Why this voicemail failed. Follow her advice and I’ll bet you’ll have more of your calls returned.

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And finally, from Elisa Camahort at Worker Bees (one of my must-read blogs by the way), some additional commentary on conferences. We’ve both noted a trend where conferences are becoming less about the content and more about the contacts. Which may be okay for dot-com millionaires and folks who don’t pay their own way to these things, but as a small business owner who funds myself (whether I am a speaker or an attendee), I need to find value in the program as well as the people. I can’t afford to attend a conference where I already know most of the content and my only takeaway is to have a few meals with people I already know. And much as I’d love to submit my name as a speaker for some of these things, well,  I’m not as well known as others in my field, and can’t afford to pay my own way (or take the time out from billable work) to the extent that others can, so I guess I’ll remain not as well known.  So it goes.

And, yeah, I guess I’ll be staying home a lot too!

That’s it for the grab bag. Next up for the marketing plan series of posts are some words about channel marketing.