James Cameron and Nicholas Christakis just authored a new book titled “Connected,” discussing the intricacies of social networks. While not having had a chance to read through the whole of their findings, I was drawn to one observation about our behaviors having a ripple effect on our network of friends.

Not just our friends, actually, but our friend’s friends as well.

Apparently, with up to three degrees of separation, we have the ability to affect others moods, decisions, buying habits and voting patterns, among other things. This goes double for members of the same sex in a social group. We all have an understanding that we humans love to follow the herd, but I certainly like to think that my moods and my decisions are my own, and no one else’s.  Apparently not.

And while in some ways that saddens me that we are SO susceptible to what others say and feel, it can also be very comforting. We create these social networks, whether online, or in the traditional sense, on purpose. There is a sense of contentment and community that we find in turning to others on our good days and bad days, and it’s great that we can rely on the opinions of those we find useful. Our social networks are our safety net, and if that means that when a friend is having a bad day, that saddens us, and we feel empathetic, I think that makes us all the more “Connected,” as it were.

In terms of how this relates to the marketing sphere, I think the most obvious connection is that we are influencers over our network in a very real and measurable way. As consumers, we now live in a world with online ratings for every product in our lives. Every choice we make as consumers becomes a very deliberate one, and I know I feel a responsibility to let the greater internet community know if a product has either over/underwhelmed me. In so doing, we take care of this network we’ve created. It all seems like a win-win to me.

Successful online marketing starts with a strategic process backed with data insights. Have you wondered who owns web analytics data in your organization? Does more than one team member use the data? Are they talking to each other to understand different perspectives and opportunities? Most often they are not. This is where web analytics governance comes into play. It provides a process to ensure success. However, there are some challenges.

What are the challenges?
A study by Jupiter Research showed the top challenges cited by decision makers in companies with $50 million or more in revenue. The top three challenges include the following.
51%: Improving usability of site
44%: Demonstrating ROI
44%: Understanding/influencing customer satisfaction

How can I overcome the top online marketing challenges?
By being ruthless in your pursuit of excellence. To start, you will need to structure a web analytics governance committee. This should include your search engine marketing strategist, social media marketing strategists, digital strategist, technology, creative and other groups. The executive leading this committee will help to define the strategic process.

How does the Web Analytics Governance process work?

Step 1: Establish the team structure and assign ownership and accountability.
Step 2: Gathering and presentation of facts.
Step 3: Data analysis and reporting.
Step 4: Predictive modeling and recommendations for improvement.
Step 5: Plan and prioritize initiatives.
Step 6: Optimization. Return to step 2.

Why is Web Analytics Governance important?
Web analytics governance helps to avoid hunches that can cost time, money and competitive advantage. The process improves an organization’s productivity and knowledge base thus delivering greater customer value and profitability. It will also help to inform business intelligence and will show you how you can engage customers to deepen relationships and improve satisfaction.

How do I ensure success?
Teamwork. The dynamic interaction of your web analytics committee will mirror the social market space and empower your team to capitalize on real-time communication. With the introduction of real-time search, explosion of social media and mobile applications, marketers will need to develop a marketing mix that can evolve and adapt to changing technologies. This is achieved with a web analytics committee and a strategic digital marketing mix. And again, this happens with teamwork!

How does my marketing plan keep up with changing technologies?
What happens when real-time search interferes with the users’ experience? Where will they go to search for information? At Wayfinder we have our finger on the pulse of market trends and monitor them to ensure that your marketing performance doesn’t skip a beat.

For more information regarding web analytics governance and developing a digital marketing strategy, please call Luca Angeli at Wayfinder at 415-277-6968.

With the start of the New Year, Wayfinder is proud to be helping Expedition Balance get up and running. Expedition Balance is a non-profit organization started by combat veterans to help returning veterans find balance in their lives.

The company supports the healing process and rehabilitation of returning combat veterans through outdoor recreational activities, expeditions, and adventures. It offers a variety of one-day and multi-day excursions to state parks, national parks, and other destinations, providing an environment to share experiences with peers, learn new skills, participate in introspective activities, consider plans for their future, and have fun.

With Americans fighting in two wars and more and more vets returning with psychological problems, we thought it was a worthy and timely cause. We’re proud to unveil the first draft of the company’s new logo design by senior art director Elke Barter and will follow it soon with a website and fund raising materials. We hope you’ll check back to see the company come to life and maybe even lend them a hand (or a few dollars).

Evidently, the experience of dealing with the negative social response to their product in the last year has made Domino’s Pizza a true believer in social media.  They recently went public with a new “Pizza Turnaround” campaign.  It starts with a 4 minute online video in which real employees publicly face customer criticism, like  “Crust tastes like cardboard” and “Sauce tastes like ketchup”.  They discuss the pride they take in making their pizza, and express their genuine hurt at the negative feedback. However, they used the criticism constructively, and reworked their recipes. Now, their responsiveness and new pizza recipes are paying off by building traffic on their website, Facebook and Twitter.

I’m a big fan of honesty.  And while feeling refreshing and honest, this is actually a pretty safe bet.  American consumers are a forgiving lot and have let people off for a lot worse than lousy pizza - as long they fess up and we see change.  In reality, with the intense competition circling around the $5 meal these days, a provocative story like this is an economical way to generate measurable results, in visits, tweets, facebook mentions and–most importantly–sales.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Dominos brand is going to change, or just the pizza.

Tom Abrams summed up two days of FDA hearings in one word: “Wow.”

Abrams, director of the FDA’s Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications, was reacting to the conclusion of roughly 16 hours of presentations by 69 speakers over two days. As reported in my last blog, the FDA called the hearings Nov. 12-13 to find out more about how healthcare and pharma companies are using online promotion and education methods to inform patients, and to hear ideas on whether social media use by such companies should be addressed in FDA guidance or regulations.

After the hearings concluded, there were two words healthcare marketers and agency executives used to sum up their sentiments: “What now?”

That’s the big question for everyone, which even Abrams acknowledged will be challenging for the agency to address. He didn’t provide a timetable for FDA’s expected next steps, other than to note the docket for the hearing will remain open until Feb. 28, 2010. “We will do this carefully so we get this right,” Abrams said in his wrap-up discussing how FDA will proceed in reviewing the data and presentations. “It’s too important of an area not to do it right, as we want the best information about medical products [to be available] for consumers and healthcare professionals.”

The takeaways from the hearing were fairly clear: the Internet and social media are quite different than traditional print and broadcast advertising. Also, it is evident that the few critics of healthcare promotion who presented at the hearings want the FDA to raise the bar on fair balance presentation using new media and agency executives, while many DTC advocates are full of ideas for making the Internet more user-friendly for health-seeking searchers.

A few highlights from the hearings:

• Pfizer chief medical officer, Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall, noted in her second-day testimony, “We’ve clearly seen from our experience that social media is a different animal. It does not operate in the same way as other traditional communication channels. Based on our research with physicians….. We now know that doctors expect transparency, speed, convenience and custom-tailored approaches in answering even the most complex medical questions. They don’t want to be TALKED AT…they want to engage in a dialogue, but they want to initiate that dialogue and keep control over it.”

• Google representatives suggested a new, custom ad format for FDA-approved products which would include an extra line of text to clearly state risks and also link to more information for consumers. “We think this new format will help set a clear standard for advertisers and give users important information,” Google managing policy counsel, Pablo Chavez, wrote on the search company’s blog last week.

• Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence offered a solution. It is based on the concept of the “3 C’s Rule” of accountability for brands and online content. The gist of the Ogilvy proposal is that brands should be held accountable for content if they created it or if they collaborated with or compensated the creator in some way. “The real significance of our presentation, however, and several others throughout the day was that they are clear signs from people within the industry raising their hands and saying, ‘We want regulation to help us define right and wrong,’” Ogilvy’s Rohit Bhargava wrote on his blog. “The tone is not one of resistance, but of participation. Guidelines help all of us, and we want to see them as soon as we can.”

While the presentations tilted in favor of finding a way to put the full power of the Internet in the hands of both healthcare companies and patients, the questions asked by FDA staff did not provide a real sense of the agency’s thinking on the issue. It would be hard for anyone, however, to argue with the statement that technology has changed the playing field for anyone in the healthcare system, be it patients, doctors or marketers and agency executives.

Only time will tell how the FDA responds, but in the interim the wheel that is social media keeps turning - - creating new opportunities for healthcare companies and patients to collaborate.  Regardless of FDA direction, like other industries, social media has forever changed healthcare and pharma marketing.

It all started with a Monkey and a Plumber, or did it?

As I was scrambling to get my last-minute shopping done, I was thinking about one of the most popular brands in the game world: Nintendo, and thinking back to my favorite arcade game of all time, Donkey Kong.

Yes, Donkey Kong.

I thought that Nintendo started its current run of success in the early 80s when DK was released. Boy was I wrong. By about 120 years.

Nintendo Koppai was founded in 1889

You see, Nintendo opened for business in 1889. It started as a “Hanafuda” playing card company and didn’t really get into the toy market until 1970s -10 years before the mega-hot Donkey Kong was released.

So other than the Hanafuda playing cards pictured above, here are just a couple of little inventions/innovative products that you may remember fondly.

These products have kept the Nintendo brand in the forefront of gaming since 1981. Even when the entire electronic/arcade/console game industry imploded in the 80s, Nintendo kept on going. Kept innovating. And stayed a household brand.

Now for a brief list of my favorite Nintendo product highlights.

Donkey Kong
The cursed monkey changed the face of computer gaming forever. And I, like so many others, dropped many a quarter into that game.

Handheld Donkey Kong game
A very innovative system at the time (early 1980s). Just check out the similarities to the current Nintendo DS:

Game & Watch

Nintendo DS

GameBoy
The handheld Donkey Kong system set the stage for the must-have handheld, GameBoy - a pocket gaming console with interchangeable game cartridges.

Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) and Super NES
An insanely popular console that continued where the monkey left off.

Fast forward to today’s Nintendo

The Nintendo game products like the DS and the gamecube seem to blend together for me. But maybe I am blinded by the brilliance of the Wii.

Nintendo, a brand success story from 1889 to today and still counting.

During this holiday season, I’d like to acknowledge the people of Wayfinder, my big-hearted colleagues, who offered themselves in the spirit of giving throughout 2009. Here’s a glimpse of what a few Wayfinders have been up to:

• CMO/Partner Louis Briones is a founding board member of “Expedition Balance,” a non-profit foundation that supports the recovery of U.S. combat veterans. Expedition Balance offers a balanced approach to wellness through: group recreation; spiritual awareness and contemplation; creative expression; physical fitness; and healthy lifestyle education. While Louis is on the Board of Directors for several worthy non-profits, he has a special place in his heart for “Expedition Balance”—so much so that he has recruited many of us at Wayfinder to help launch this wonderful cause.

• VP of Account Service Nellie Newman parlays her business savvy, heart of gold, and passion for fashion to benefit many of San Francisco’s disadvantaged women. Nellie makes a big difference as a San Francisco Board of Director for the national non-profit, “Dress for Success.” Nellie’s mission in San Francisco is to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support, and the career development tools necessary to help women thrive in work and in life.

• Production Manager Jim Chazer has been a committed volunteer coach of youth sports programs for the South San Francisco Boys and Girls Club for several years. In California, school sports programs have experienced drastic cutbacks. With this ongoing declining trend, Jim has become an enthusiastic athletic booster for his son’s public high school’s basketball team, the “El Camino Colts.”

• As a new resident to the San Francisco Bay Area (and a proud Wayfinder), Art Director Elke Barter did not waste any time getting involved in local community volunteerism. In the past year, Elke volunteered to organize a major fundraising dinner and auction to benefit her Synagogue; she prepared meals for those in need in the inner city, where many residents appreciate her talents as a chef and baker; she is a caretaker of animals for the local SPCA; she also lent her design skills to Expedition Balance by designing their logo.

Just a short one today.

“A lie travels half-way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

- Winston Churchill

And that was before the Internet. So if you care to protect your brand’s reputation, you had better be monitoring what’s being said about it and have a strategy in place to squelch rumors and lies.

It’s getting awfully noisy out there.  Deafening is a better word for the Social Media (SM) world and all the “just in time” SM experts, gurus, consultants, strategists, and agencies are woofing or tweeting like crazy.

Facebook opened up this social mosh pit, and Twitter has lit a flame to it.  As I talk to more companies about their SM strategy, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that very few of them really grasp the opportunity that’s sitting right in front of them.

They see Facebook and Twitter and instantly gravitate to the obvious, visual metric on the page.  For Facebook, it’s fans.  For Twitter, it’s followers.  SM “experts” are creating fan pages for their clients and managing their Twitter accounts and banging away on them in attempt to increase these silly metrics.

Mouthwash Brand X has 3,425 followers, and Pesticide Brand Y has 125 “fans”
(don’t think that would really happen).

Who cares?  And, what does it mean?  It could be that all it means is you found 3,425 other people who wanted to be followed.  I bet at least 10% of them are SM experts.  I’m sure there are very clever strategies to get more followers or fans, but they are either very time-intensive or use an automated service.  Either way, is this so-called achievement doing something good for your company or brand?  Will it help you sell more product?  Does it improve your brand equity or sentiment (so you can sell more product)?  Does it help you deliver real value to your customers?  Social media has the potential to do incredibly important things like improving your product strategy or giving you insights into servicing your customers.

So, more followers/fans mostly matters if you listen to what they tell you.

In my opinion, the number of fans or followers should really only be an unintentional outcome of your bigger social media efforts.  The big opportunity sitting right in front of most brands is to build a meaningful community or experience inside their own site.  A place where their customers come, share thoughts and opinions, talk to other customers, gain valuable information, have fun, and want to return again and again.  It’s the online equivalent of the comfortable chairs at Starbucks.  Communities have meaning, facilitate deeper conversations, and ultimately becomes a priceless asset to your company. The obvious reason is that customers who spend more time on your site and visit your site more frequently, purchase more product.  But, the other reason may be even more important.  If you’re listening, your customers tell you how to improve your marketing, your product, your policies, just about everything.  All in the intimacy of your own website, not in that noisy, cluttered world outside your site.

Building a meaningful experience is not something most advertising or PR agencies know how to do.  Some don’t even want to - they want to push funny or invasive messages at you.  This is why marketers have such a bad reputation. They are trained to yell messages at you that you don’t really care to hear. So, it’s disappointing to me to see so many Social Media experts and agencies adding to the noise on Facebook and Twitter (maybe not as loudly, but certainly more frequently).  I think Facebook and Twitter are valuable tools and have their place in your marketing mix, but to truly understand the value of SM, look beyond the “amplication” effect of the medium, and look at the very nature of the dialogue that it is enabling.  If you focus on building deeper or valuable experiences in your very own website, chances are you’ll gain true fans and followers naturally without filling the internet airwaves with mindless noise.

Written by Ken Chen, Republished with Permission from EM Marketing

The Harvard Business Review’s article on “Competing on Analytics” affirms my own personal religion for data. The article highlights a few challenges that must be met in order to be competitive in today’s business climate. These challenges include the lack of leadership, the lack of intelligence on rising competition and the lack of meaningful data in general. With these three major riddles solved an organization can transform fragmented sources of data into a powerful strategic weapon. Let’s delve deeper into the challenges and why they are important.

Organizations require leadership to be able to act on usable intelligence. Roadblocks to look out for include: lack of a clear and well-defined focus from top-level leadership, a culture unable to embrace change, or simply not having the right people or technology to process data. If your organization exhibits any of these characteristics you’ll want to get them in order, and quickly. If any one department is not contributing to your source of strength it will be weakened, and all business and marketing efforts will be as well.

Organizations often lack the ability to exploit competitive data and turn it into intelligence. Rising global competition has intensified the need for proficiency in data analysis. Western companies are having a difficult time beating their Chinese and Indian competitors on product cost, but there’s hope. Analytics can provide the insights on which business processes should be optimized to squeeze greater performance where there’s slack. Furthermore, research can provide insights into your competitors’ pricing strategies and levels of inventory. Segmentation analysis can also provide the details to emphasize in your value-communication strategies. These insights and others can get your organization back on even playing ground with the competition.

Organizations may lack historical data sets. This basically sets them up for failure since decisions are not based on data insights. To paraphrase the old adage: history will repeat itself if it is not recorded for us to learn from. Mental modeling simply can’t compete with computer-aided modeling to inform business decisions. So take the guesswork out of decision-making and invest the time in developing a model that provides performance metrics that your organization can act on.

There’s a long road ahead. Analytics insights will only blossom after the following requirements have been satisfied: data strategy and sourcing, technology and time. Hang in there because it will take time to have enough data to be able to use it with confidence. “Presto e bene non vanno insieme.” Translation: Fast and good don’t go together. So be patient as the right type of data takes time to amass to support future forecasting.

But the time it takes is well worth the benefits. As Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah’s frequently puts it, “Do we think this is true? Or do we know?” The correct answer is very comforting. And from there, the rest is all details in my book.

Here comes the soft sell. It always shocks me when a client says, “This is the first time that we’ve developed a completely integrated campaign that provides quantitative data.” This is obviously an accomplishment for them and we’re always glad to be a part of it. But at the same time, it is only the beginning; there’s always more to be done. And we’re always glad to be part of that too. The right process will allow you to take action, and measure your performance. Ready to discover the gaps? Looking to embrace data to inform business and marketing decisions? Let’s talk.