It’s a lot like having a bunch of puzzle pieces without the box top picture that gives the pieces context.

The trick is to set all the measurement and analysis aside for a bit and determine your own unique and overriding “macro metric” of success. This is the one thing that you measure above all as a signal of the health of the business. This is the measure of the success of your overriding marketing strategy.

Once you do that you then you can use other data that measures things like awareness, engagement, sharing, loyalty, relationships, referrals and revenue as way to refine your focus on what matters most.

The macro metric is the core measure of “who you are” or “how you want” the brand to be perceived. It’s the one tangible or intangible signal that you’re being true to why you do what you do.

I’ll warn you, finding this one true measure isn’t always the easiest task and there’s no marketing analytics book that can shortcut this idea for you. You discover it when you decide the higher purpose your business serves and when you then listen to how your community describes that higher purpose.

I determined my macro metric years ago and I’ve used it as a guide for a great deal of what we do. For Duct Tape Marketing the metric is usefulness.

We go to great lengths to determine if what we’re doing is useful to our community and to the market as a whole. This thinking influences our content creation, our education, our products, our follow-up, our strategic partnerships, our analysis of revenue per customer, our traffic building, our lead generation, our lead conversion and even our internal processes to a large degree.

We ask our customers to share what they find useful. We track the number of times that people volunteer that something we’ve done is practical and useful. We get nervous when we don’t hear that word from our community during the course of any given day.

Find your macro metric and tie every other key performance indicator you can track and perhaps a few that you can simply feel to this metric and your brand will flourish.

Oh, and I sincerely hope you found this post useful.

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It’s being dubbed as the ‘Brand Activate’ advertising program and will integrate useful brand metrics into the online marketing tools that advertisers use to manage and evaluate their online ad campaigns.

Big brands currently spend over $190 billion per year on television advertisements, so this move by Google could be a very lucrative one by attracting these brands to re-allocate their budget from traditional advertising methods to more modern online advertising methods.

The first Brand Activate solutions to be rolled out for advertisers are:

• Active View:  measures if the ad was seen by the user, the percentage of the ad that was seen, and the duration of ad exposure. Google will only count the ad as “viewed” if the advertisement was “at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second.”
• Active GRP metrics: similar to the Gross Rating Point metric used by the television industry. However, since the metrics are delivered in real-time, Active GRP will allow advertisers to quickly measure the effectiveness of a campaign and adjust accordingly.

Active View is expected to make its first appearance within the Google Display network in a few weeks time and will eventually be available within the Double-Click network. Active View data will be immediately actionable; meaning advertisers will be able to pay only for viewed impressions.

Here’s how Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising, explains the service:

The objective is [to] make it easier for more and more brand dollars to come online.

One of the biggest opportunities to crack the nut as it relates to brand advertising is in the area of measurement.

We think that a new generation of measurement solutions will help brands quantify the benefits of investing online and will help to fund the next generation of great online content and services.

If you want to know more about “Brand Active” advertising, check out the video below or read the official announcement here.

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With social media, a large portion of the cost is time.  Setting up a presence on all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ — requires minimal fees, if any. However, to build a community, several activities must be done on a regular basis:

• Community building. Connecting with customers, prospects, peers, and potential referrers. This is a daily activity.
• Brand monitoring. Scouring the social networks for mentions of your company and products. Also a daily activity.
• Engagement. Listening to your communities, responding, reaching out with interactive messaging. Another daily activity, best done in real time.
• Content sharing. Writing, publishing, and sometimes scheduling content with links to strategic blog posts and web pages. This can be done on a monthly basis.
• Social network maintenance. Keeping your communities free of spammers, updating content, adding applications, etc. Best done on a weekly or monthly basis.

In order to achieve results, a certain “critical mass” of social media presence is going to be required. For instance, if you have five people in your Facebook community, there’s very little you can accomplish regardless of how brilliant your techniques are. On the other hand, having 500 or 5000 people in your community opens up tremendous possibilities.

What the critical mass is for your business depends on many factors. Here are the questions that will help you zero in on program objectives and milestones:

• How big is your social marketing universe?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What value to you place on a new community member?
• What conversion activities are you offering?
• What is the value of a conversion?
• How much time are you willing to invest to achieve a payback?

No matter how you fill in the answers to these six questions, from a budgetary standpoint, the key is to not underestimate the time required to execute the social media plan. Most companies do this: they determine they will be satisfied with 1000 relevant Twitter followers in six months, and grossly underestimate how much time it will take to actually make it happen.

At minimum, you should be prepared to devote these resources to your social media program:

• A leader: someone who is responsible and accountable for results, and for developing all of the creative inputs.
• A dedicated staffer who is available 20-40 hours a week to execute all of the five activities listed above.
• Programming support to help set up accounts, update templates, install applications and set up/process analytics.

The Impact of Conversion Strategy on Budgeting

• Social media objectives can be “soft” – things like extending brand awareness or establishing thought leadership.

• Social media objectives can be “hard” – things like driving people from your social media pages to landing pages where they can buy products or download white papers.

• Social media objectives can also be – and usually are – mixed: a  combination of soft and hard objectives.

With this in mind, I have good budgeting news and bad budgeting news.

First the good budgeting news:

Making hard conversions part of the social strategy simplifies and clarifies the budgeting process. If you know an order or a lead is worth “x,” it’s easy enough to calculate an ROI on your social spend.  If you generate $100,000 in new business on a $40,000 budget, you’re in good shape; if it’s the other way around, your program needs an overhaul.

But now the bad budgeting news:

A social program that’s all about hard conversions will probably fail. Social media is above all … social. The “soft side” of social marketing – talking about the weather, selflessly helping your community, showing off your expertise in valuable and sharable content, etc. – these are the things that ultimately persuade people to convert.

Because of this it’s a mistake to let a desire for budgeting accuracy or simplicity drive the strategy of a social media program. It may be difficult to establish the ROI of a program’s brand awareness component, but brand awareness is, nevertheless, intrinsically valuable and contributes to the success of more measurable program goals.

Big Picture Budgeting Recommendations

I’ll try to wrap this up with a few suggestions to help the entire budgeting process along, whether it’s just you making the decisions or a large internal team. Our agency, by the way, works with small and midsize B2Bs in challenging industrial niches such as truck GPS tracking systems and knife safety gloves, so we are used to participating in budgeting discussions on a small and large scale.

• A healthy start-up budget for B2B social media program starts at something around $2500 a month. That number is not as big as it may sound if you consider all-in costs for per-hour labor.

• Anticipate a long ramp-up, anywhere from 12 to 24 months. Establishing social media credibility takes time because it is relationship-based. It’s the opposite of PPC advertising, where people are in the market and boom, react to your offer.

Budgeting is essential to social success. Although as I said it shouldn’t drive strategy, budgeting forces discipline. It’s important for your organization to determine very carefully what data to track, how to interpret it, and how to make it visible. Without that accountability, social programs will never continuously improve and pay off.

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So, what’s happening here?

Yes, the viewing numbers still seem relatively small, compared to TV, but remember, the price is zero–a lot less than buying TV ad time. But something else is at work here.

Viral videos are the new badge of honor among ad agencies. It’s one thing to pay to have an ad aired and rack up big viewership numbers. It’s another thing to have viewers voluntarily watch your commercial on their own, with no TV show surrounding it that really catches their attention.

So, if even TV advertisers are moving online and watching their ads grow in popularity one happy viewer at a time, perhaps billboards are next…

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The purpose of the challenge is to give students real world experience working with Google AdWords and online advertising. It also gives students the opportunity to see how they can grow real businesses and non-profit organizations by using online advertising.

The challenge is open to any student who has a professor or university affiliate (i.e. researcher) willing to register for them.

Professors must go to Google’s Online Marketing Challenge site and register, The student then registers under the professor’s name. If students wish to participate in groups of ( must be 3-6 people) the process is as follows: 1) Have professor register, 2) Students register under professor’s name, AND 3) Professor verifies the team members and registers accordingly.

The deadline to apply for the challenge is May 1st.

The challenge has several different categories of global and regional winners; there are challenge winners, social impact award winners ( for people who help non-profits), and social media winners( for people or groups who create and maintain Google+ pages).

Prizes include a seven night stay in San Francisco, free tablet devices, free laptops, and $15,000 in donation to a non-profit partner.

Challenge representatives in the YouTube video claim that the experience is a real resume booster.

They also explained that you can advertise for your own personal blog.

Contestants will receive a $250 credit to support their campaign which will run for three weeks and end on June 8th. But the process is not done until participants submit a post campaign report or social impact statement which is due by June 15th. This is where contestants explain what they have done and learned throughout the experience.

The winners is determined by metrics.

Students will work with their professors to put their submission together.

Representatives in the YouTube suggested that they get a head start by reviewing the AdWords for beginners guide and watch short video tutorials on a google learning site devoted to online marketing.

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1. Prezi. This is a interesting take on the slide presentation as it allows you to create one giant and more easily connected idea and then use the tool to zoom, pan and fly all around the presentation to create a really dynamic feel. It’s not the easiest tool to master, but check out some of the incredible examples on the site to get inspiration.

2. YouTube Editor. I like this tool because it’s free, and because you’re using YouTube to host and stream your videos anyway, it gives you some nice editing capability right in YouTube. You can also add annotations and transcripts to your videos making them more SEO friendly.

3. Camtasia. This PC and Mac desktop software is the market leader in the screencapture video world. Screencast videos are a great way to demonstrate how something online works. Camtasia has some nice features that allow you to add focus to areas on your screen as well as annotations and URLs.

4. Animoto. This automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. It takes a little trial and error to get right, but adds surprisingly professional touch when you do.

5. Stoome. This is a really unique tool as it adds a crowdsourced element. You upload video clips and borrow from other users. You can then work on your project alone or with others. This is an awesome tool for creating videos when you attend a big event or conference.

6. GoAnimate. This tool allows you to make full-featured animated movies using characters and sets of your choosing. Animation can be a really powerful way to tell your story in a unique manner.

7. Magistro. This tool takes your raw footage and goes through and picks out what it thinks is the best of the best to create a short video. The tool then lets you add music and titles. Again, this is one that is awesome when it gets it right, but a little clunky with it doesn’t.

8. Sellamations. This service will create doodle videos where a hand draws out your story with a marker in high-speed capture. It’s not the cheapest route, but it’s certainly one of the best ways to create a one of a kind video that’s simply hard not to watch.

9. Common Craft. This is another really unique way to tell your story using video. Common Craft uses paper cutouts moved around or white boards to tell your story. This is probably one of the best ways to take a complex idea and really make it easy to understand. Again, hard not keep glued to this format.

10. ReelSEO. This one actually isn’t a tool, it’s just the best place to learn about tools like this as well as how to more effectively use video to build your business in general.

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Go out and grab five or six of your best customers and pose this question to them: What’s one word you would use to describe how you think about our organization?

The ability to capture and hold one word in the mind of your intended market is perhaps the most telling measure of marketing success.

Organizations that pass this test do so because they have a single-minded purpose that permeates everything they stand for and everything they do. The word most people associate with them represents that purpose and it’s often their most potent brand asset.

So, what did your customers say, what would they say, if you really did this?

Do you have any idea? Do you know what you would hope they would respond?

Let’s look at this idea another way. Think of a business you truly love doing business with and consider one word you would use to describe how you think about that organization.
Did you come up with your one word one single-minded sense of purpose that evoked that organization’s story for you?

A single-minded strategy

In the movie City Slickers Jack Palance’s character tells Billy Crystal that the secret to life is one thing. Crystal, of course, is left to discover what that one thing is, but I believe the same is true for business. I believe the most effective marketing strategies hold together by focusing relentlessly on one simple thing.

That one simple thing can be an idea, like providing shoes to kids in need around the world as shoe retailer Tom’s One for One Movement does. Focusing on simple, yet stunning design, as many people feel Apple does, or building a business by intentionally keeping things simple, in both products and processes, as I believe software developer 37Signals does.

In all cases though, these companies accomplish many, many things, but do so first and foremost through the realization of one single-minded purpose as strategy. This single minded purpose is the filter for every business decision, hiring decision, product decision, and marketing campaign – and it often starts by simply realizing and capturing who the company is being at some point in time – the here’s what we really stand for moment.

Of course, finding and committing to a real-life marketing strategy – the one thing – isn’t enough. You’ve also got to find a way to make it part of the DNA of the organization. You’ve got find symbols and stories and metaphors that invite and allow every part of your business ecosystem to embrace the strategy.

Find your word

This process starts with understanding why you do what you do and how that sense of purpose impacts those that you do it for. It doesn’t really have to be as deep as it sounds, it just has to be something that’s simple and meaningful to those that come into contact with your organization and you must own the word.

For my organization that word is “practical.” I’ve worked very hard at owning that word and in large part my market gets it. Owning that word has taken consistency, patience and discipline.

But, it’s become our trust mark, our filter and our very useful decision making tool. I’ve made many a decision about a tool, a service, a point of view, by simply asking if they way I was viewing it or characterizing it was practical.

Capture your metric

Once you land on the word you need to own, you must also find your solitary metric – the way in which you’ll determine your progress. This can be a simple a monitoring mentions, it can be through informal surveys it can be through the increase of some act such as testimonials and referrals.

We monitor mentions of our brand online using a tool called Trackur and one of the things we obsess over is the word practical in relation to our brand. This is a scorecard idea for us and one that keep front and center.

So, let me ask you this – what’s your word – what does it need to be – how are you going to make it so?

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