The Quest for Simplicity in Social Media Measurement (#smm) is one that will dominate the year. Trying to produce something simple out of something complex is…complex. There are seven axioms that are guiding a lot of my thought in dealing with that complexity: 1. The purpose of analytics is to derive competitive advantage for the organization / firm / entity. It follows that the purpose of Social Media Measurement is to drive competitive advantage. If the end result isn’t competitive advantage – then it has no value. That unto itself is a value statement. Simplicity drives competitive advantage because simple is more actionable than complex. I’m often asked questions that have very complex comprehensive answers. I have to sort out[…]

Communities played an important part in the online gaming experience during the early 2000’s, and I think there are lessons in there for today. Time for a story. It’ll be fun and egregiously self-deprecating. My first Real Time Simulation (RTS) game was Age of Empires I, back in 1998 or so. And I loved playing it online. Problem was – the online experience really sucked because most of the players were jerks. The experience sucked and the game lagged like hell. By 2000 I had joined my first gaming community. They were referred to as gaming clans, and you could identify its members by having a telltale tag at the front of a name. MNPE_username, JCV_username…and so on. There was[…]

Jim Novo wrote in response to the last post: This is an interesting line of thought Christopher, perhaps I can help with a bit of a framework. And you’re right, product is the root of Marketing decision making. I hope my attmept at a chart below makes it through the CMS without breaking… Brand for any product is a continuum between Product-centric and Image-centric, example: ……….Product Centric………..Image Centric Beer…….Sam Adams………………Budweiser Image-Centric Brands tend to have commodity status, which begs the need to differentiate by creating some kind of unique Image. Product-Centric Brands differentiate on hard Features and Benefits. If you think about the Marketing for Sam Adams, it’s all about ingredients and customization. If you think about the Marketing for[…]

I’ve been fairly obsessed as of late with quantifying Social Media Return on Investment, or sROI for short. At the root of the issue is a clash of belief systems. Marketing thought is dominated by two rather large models of thinking. You have the Direct Paradigm and you have the Brand Paradigm. By Paradigm, I mean simply a way of looking at the world. Let me take one step back, and then one step forward. People, in general, can only hold so many variables in their heads at the same time. So, we abstract. We’re supposed to derive some forms of causality that are important, throw that into some overarching architecture, and then use that framework to make decisions in[…]