Recently, I conducted a web search for online digital marketing strategy communities.  I had a vision for what I was looking for, a free-form online outpost where marketing professionals could converge to discuss topics of their choosing.  Things like marketing ROI, digital strategy, performance measurement, search optimization, hiring and firing agencies, lead generation, you name it.  Disappointed in my initial search, I fired off a LinkedIN question and got a number of recommendations.  Next, I checked out the recommendations.  Here, I include a brief summary of each of the communities to help you decide which ones might be appropriate to you:

iMedia Connection:  a number of people recommended this site as a source of information on various aspects of digital marketing.  Industry experts write and submit articles that community members can then comment on.  I’ve written a couple of pieces for the community, which got me an automatic free pass.  Authors are automatically members once they publish, so after some scrambling around I found that I was already a member of this community.  Members can also invite other people (just let me know in comments below and I’ll send you an invite).  Members can also create a public profile page.

LinkedIN Groups: there are thousands of groups on LinkedIN on a wide range of topics, a reflection of the millions of users.  Joining many of them is a simple matter of sending a request to join to the moderator who decides whether to include you.  One of the challenges with the LinkedIN groups is that there are almost too many to choose from.  Searching across all group types with the term Marketing, for instance, yields 3,665 groups (at last count).  Once you are approved, you can view discussion topics in reverse chronological order.  The quality of the topics and the activity on the comments depends entirely on the group and its participants.  The hottest groups have over 10,000 members.  A few of them have a membership requirement that is external to LinkedIN, but the vast majorities are open to any LinkedIN member and are easy to join.

Facebook Groups: like LinkedIN, Facebook boasts hundreds and thousands of professional groups (and even more millions of users).  Groups that are open to the public can be joined in one click.  Also like LinkedIN, the topics aren’t really topics per se; they’re posts that people can comment on.  The result is a flat, rolling stream of reverse-chronological posts that drift from one subject to the next.  If you’re willing to spend some time parsing through random noise you can find some gems, including people with similar professional interests to connect with.  Unfortunately, many of the more popular groups can become victims of their own success and get overrun by spammers – a bigger problem on Facebook than on LinkedIN.  There seems to be less spam in LinkedIN groups than on Facebook groups, perhaps a reflection of the desire for LinkedIN users to manage their professional reputation.

MarketingProfs: this marketing knowledge service has good reach (they claim 324,000 members).  While some of their premium content requires a subscription, their Marketing Know-How Exchange is available to “freemium” registrants.  The exchange is organized into high-level marketing topics, the questions are well-moderated, and the people asking the questions can elect to accept or reject responses.  An interesting points system helps to automatically control and moderate the discussions.  You earn 5 points per day starting from the first day you post a question or an answer, and you are awarded points for answering questions.  You attract respondents by awarding points for answers to your question.  So the redemption value is tied to the speed, rigor and volume of answers you desire.  The system helps bond participants and participation to ensure that they are serious and committed, something totally lacking from Facebook groups.

Forrester Research Discussion Board:  Forrester has jumped into the community space with its own community for Interactive Marketing professionals.  The community is in its alpha version with only a few participants at the time of this post.  It’s open to anyone with a Forrester user ID and password.  If you are not a client, you can still register for free.  It’s just starting out so activity is limited.  It will be interesting to see how it grows.  Right now, it still shows the global navigation for the main Forrester site – which is a little confusing and a constant reminder that the community is, after all, a Forrester property.  Also, it is not yet included in the site global navigation.  Right now there is only one main discussion board, but hopefully it will grow and there will be separate discussion boards on different subjects organized by the moderator.  Forrester’s industry reach is promising for the community, should the company elect to back it in a significant way.

ThinkBalm: Transitioning from Forrester, the final community I’ll mention is the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which by the way, was started by a former Forrester analyst.  The community is implemented on Spigit [insert link http://www.spigit.com/index.html].  ThinkBalm provides project workspaces that various people can contribute to.  It also has a type of community currency or fiat that is similar to the points system used in MarketingProfs and other communities that acknowledge “power members,” but it is far more elaborate.  Thinkbalm includes a points system where people can earn points by getting positive feedback on their ideas (thumbs-ups or “spigs”), or conversely, lose points when people “scrap” them.  The points are more than fiat.  You can actually redeem them for goodies (an interesting real-world virtual world tie-in).  Speaking of virtual worlds, that’s the focus of ThinkBalm. Although it’s not a pure interactive marketing community per se, I include it here because there are marketing aspects of virtual worlds and also, to point out a more robust community solution for creating new work collaboratively across organization boundaries.  Something I believe the interactive marketing community should do more of.

The community choices you make depend on your objectives: quick answers to thorny questions, showcasing your knowledge and expertise, networking, or just keeping up with trends.  My dream community would combine the participation of a Facebook group, participant bonding like MarketingProfs, a workspace innovation area like ThinkBalm and professional moderation like Forrester, oh, and having profiles like in LinkedIN and the ability to interconnect would be great too.  Mash-up anyone?

A big thank you to all those who answered my LinkedIN question and got me off to the races.  What a great use of a community!  Feel free to chime in below with your thoughts, comments, or favorite communities.

Measuring Digital ROI with Website Data; The Link Between Strategy and Design
Measuring the business benefit of a non-eCommerce website can be quite challenging. Basic “out of the box” metrics like unique visitors, visited pages, site visit duration and number of leads provide useful top-line data, but they don’t generate insights into how well a website is performing against strategic objectives.  For several years, the interactive marketing industry has been hitching its collective hopes on “engagement” as the ROI savior of Internet marketing measurement.  The concept elicits reactions ranging from evangelism to skepticism.  A recent whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified called Measuring the Immeasurable: Visitor Engagement goes to great lengths to provide an in-depth explanation of how to create general top-line measures of engagement, so I won’t belabor the concept further.  Instead, let’s shift the focus to key performance indicators for strategy execution.

A solid digital strategy identifies the ways the digital channel can be used to achieve broader strategic business objectives and outlines the criteria for measuring success.  In recent years, the interactive industry has placed much of its design focus on user centric design.  However, end user experience is not the only consideration that needs to be taken into account.  Detailed design decisions have a big impact on what metrics can be collected.  You need to design the site to produce the right metrics, a point that is lost on many interactive designers and design agencies.  A good design team will not proceed without a detailed understanding of business objectives.  An effective design team will design ROI measurement into a site.  Here are some typical business objectives, their design implications and some measurement recommendations for tracking and optimizing strategy execution.

While the nuances of each firm’s digital strategy will vary according to its industry, business model, competitive posture and customers, what follows is a framework for typical strategic objectives and their implications on site design:

1. Targeting Key Market Segments.  Best practices in effective website design call for personas as a design tool to represent targeted segments.  A good design team uses the personas to build scenarios for how the personas will interact with the site, then designs accordingly.  But what happens to personas after a website is built?  Often, the personas lie fallow and the question of how the new site is performing in reaching the targeted segments goes unanswered.  A better idea is to use personas as an ongoing performance management tool by documenting key persona scenarios then conducting visitor path analysis to analyze persona traffic.  One caveat is that real world visitors may not follow the exact paths the design team anticipated.  A second caveat is that detail path traffic trends can be very fragmented.  Instead of getting bogged down in complexity, keep it simple.  Create content with specific segments in mind then analyze visitors based on the type of content they access during their visits, not the sequence in which they access it.  The design implication is that content should be highly differentiated between personas.

2. Driving Purchase Consideration.  Most websites share the common goal of driving revenue, but what does this mean from a design perspective?  How can sites be optimized to drive more revenue?  The measurement starting point is identifying key user actions and events (i.e. outcomes) that can serve as proxy metrics for purchase consideration include accessing:
* a store locator (provides geographic insight as well)
* product or service comparison charts
* data sheets and detailed product or service information.
Visitor path analysis that backtracks from these successful outcomes will provide insight into the behaviors leading up to the purchase consideration event.  The insights can be used to create a predictive model that identifies key site paths to streamline and highlight so you can design to encourage purchase consideration.

3. Creating Customer Loyalty.  The immediate and obvious site loyalty metric is the distribution of the number of visits by visitor for a set timeframe.  If a high percentage of visitors access the site multiple times then that indicates site loyalty.  This should be a familiar table for users of Google Analytics, but it is a site focused metric not a product-centric metric.  A good way to foster customer loyalty is to provide content that helps people easily access your service on a recurring basis or to provide information that helps them increase the benefits they receive from something they already own.  Similarly, excessive activity related to troubleshooting and problem-solving can be an indicator that people are having difficulty with a product.  Visits to information about accessories or add-ons can also be interpreted as relevant to share of wallet.  Measuring and tracking these will help create a loyalty index.  Most sites skew toward customer acquisition, not product success or service use.  Consider the needs and interests of current customers in your design and think through how the designs will support measuring their activity.

4. Fostering Advocacy.  Social media tagging tools provide a way for website owners to facilitate advocacy in cyberspace.  Some bloggers have done an excellent job of making their sites readily accessible to sites like del.icio.us and digg by including the relevant widgets.  Interestingly, most branded websites totally omit these simple additions.  Adding them enables you to track activity.  You can also track the number of tags for your website at these sites using functions they provide like the delicious url lookup and tools like the Greasemonkey digg counter.

5. Reducing Cost to Serve.  Self-help is a good thing if self-help sessions are successful.  Success is in the eye of the user, so include a “did this solve your problem?” question at the end of every support listing.  Track and report on the responses to identify the types of content that help and where you need to overhaul.  Also track search activity to identify new support listings that need to be added.  Some companies are going so far as to make capacity decisions for their call centers by using their online help activity as an indicator of self-service adoption.  They are decreasing headcount as online volume increases – a direct contributor to the bottom line and ROI.

6. Accelerating Revenue.  New product introductions create a golden opportunity to track how quickly and effectively your company is creating awareness.  Measure traction and uptake by collecting metrics on new product or service views in a launch date + format (i.e. Day 1, 2, 3, etc.).   Building and tracking separate landing pages for new products and key marketing campaigns also create an opportunity to measure contribution from both digital and non-digital PR and marketing efforts.  Finally, integrating PR tracking (i.e. “earned media” or mentions) with site activity can provide a view of the contribution that PR and digital promotion is making.

Strategy creation, strategy execution, and measurement and analysis are all disciplines, they don’t happen by accident.  Having all three disciplines aligned and pointed in the same direction will go a long way toward answering the question: “Where’s my ROI?”

An interesting announcement hit the press yesterday.  Yahoo and Intel are partnering to combine web offers with broadcast TV content.  Here’s the story, straight from the horse’s mouth: Intel to build Yahoo widgets into new TV chips. The delivery vehicle is widgets built on top of the Yahoo Widget Engine, and the enabling hardware is the Intel CE3100 chip.  So this further elevates the importance of widgets as a vehicle for disseminating content and functionality across the Internet.  A number of important players, like Twitter, are lining up to deliver their services and information through this technology.  Here are some questions Does anyone else see this as an important milestone in convergence?  Will it breath new life into broadcast TV advertising?  There are 1.3 billion households with TV.  The number that receive the chip will determine adoption.  What are some ways that Intel can drive adoption?  Business models?  Incentives?  What do people think?

Communities are hot right now.  Membership is growing fast and valuations are skyrocketing.  Today’s announcement that LinkedIN received a $53 million capital infusion continues a trend of rich valuations (last year Facebook received funding at a valuation of $15 billion).  What are the implications for B2B marketers?  And importantly, what, if anything, should you do about it?  Here’s my take on answers to these questions.

Let’s take a closer look at LinkedIN which has 23 million members and 1.2 million new members signing up each month.  Although LinkedIN is now accepting display ads as part of its effort to “monetize” its user base, in my estimation, the real opportunity, power, and risks for marketers is in the interaction between members – how they interact with each other – not whether, they see or interact with an ad unit.  I’ll use a comment that an interview subject made during a recent Internet strategy project to illustrate my point.

The project was for a provider of complex business services and the area we were probing was how they selected service providers to work with.  The person responded that current performance - the experience of clients working with the provider at the time of selection - was a key determining factor.  This surprised me.  The comment pointed to a closer, higher velocity industry network than I ever imagined.   How does this relate to online communities?  LinkedIN enables dynamic connections between industry professionals, effectively hitting the overdrive switch on word of mouth referrals.  This is both an opportunity and a risk.  Evangelists can tilt the balance in your favor, or even get you on the consideration list.  Detractors can cause your next deal to cave in at the 11^th hour, or turn prospects that you’ll never see away from you. 

Here are three recommendations for how to make the most of your presence on LinkedIN for your B2B marketing objectives:

1. Analyze the chatter about your products or services in the questions and answers section.  People may ask about your company, its products, or express needs that your product or service solves.  Search on your company or product names and see what comes up.  Are people bashing your product or recommending it?  Try to connect with bashers to build a personal connection, understand their issues, and where possible, take corrective action.  Contact your evangelizers to engage them in a dialog about how to elevate their profile in the industry, and even to get referrals.  No chatter?  Start some by asking a question about your products or service offerings.  People love to weigh in on new product ideas or service enhancements. 
2. Activate your customers online by connecting with them.  Scan their networks.  Who are they connected to?  Are some of their connections prospects?  Will they make an introduction for you? 
3. Start a user group.  There are many types of groups on LinkedIN.  Why not start a group of people that use your product or service, or are experts in the area that you work in.  Acting as a network hub is a great way to generate value from the network.  You can generate a dialog on your product and open up a new stream of referrals and the like.  Many companies have spent tidy sums and lots of time creating user groups.  Now you can create user groups in a “guerilla” fashion using LinkedIN’s infrastructure. 

Over time, you may decide to create a dedicated community of your own.  If and when you do, who better to invite to join than the people that you are already connected with via a professional networking community like LinkedIN?  So get started and build your network today.  Send me a LinkedIN request and I’ll be happy to connect ;-). 

The starting point for achieving payback on any investment in web technology, or on any application for that matter, is to have people utilize what you’ve built. But “use” is a relative term. In the case of Business-to-Business Portals, it can be difficult or impossible to answer the basic question “how many clients are using our portal?” There is a certain irony when this occurs, especially when you consider the tidy sums often invested building and delivering functionality through a secure browser interface. This is a situation that occurs more than it should.

Here are some practical suggestions for how to build measurability into customer portals. As you will see in a moment, the recommendations all pivot around one simple concept: client codes. As with most B2B endeavors, the complexity lies not in the concepts, but in the difficulty with which they are dispatched. Before diving in, a few definitions:

Customer – an individual working at a client company

Project or Account – a unit of work for services or for managing and tracking the purchase of products

Client – the business line, business area or subsidiary a customer works within

Corporation – the ultimate parent company that houses all the clients, customers, accounts and projects we have currently, or could have in the future

Here’s some advice for how to capture the data you need to build flexible composite views of portal usage, as well as few examples of how the data can be used:

1. Create a set of unique codes for each of the items defined above and integrate them into the portal security system as well as key supporting applications. This is the starting point for tracking and monitoring all the people at a particular client and performing aggregate analysis to determine how often a corporation is using the portal, the number of customers using it, and so forth. Effectively, what I am suggesting is that the codes be captured in activity log files, along with information about portal use.

2. Create client code tables that capture key relationships between entities, for instance: one customer : one client, (hopefully) one customer : many accounts, (again, hopefully) many clients : one corporation; and so on. Work through these relationships in advance and accommodate them in your client code schema.

3. Use your application logging framework to create separate logs devoted to portal analytics. Log-ins, report views, uploads, downloads, requests, fulfillments, etc. are all potentially meaningful transactions. Just as WebTrends captures page views by visitors, so too should your portal capture key application interactions in a log output. Using a generic, data-centric log output format (such as XML or tab-delimited text) will give you flexibility in interpreting the output later in an analytic tool of your preference.

4. Roll out the client codes as standard identifiers across all systems that handle client data; in this case, including customer portals. You should be able to track activity longitudinally to relate the pieces together across the client lifecycle, starting with a client code for a new opportunity in your sales force automation system, all the way through to a satisfaction survey from an individual customer, and invoices for services and products.

If you follow these basic guidelines, you can begin to answer questions like:

• How many clients are using our portal and what’s the overall penetration of the portal for each of our business lines?
• What is the level of utilization of our portal by each of our customers and is there a relationship between high utilization and customer satisfaction (as indicated by the online survey that we just sent out, for instance)?
• What is our best estimate for the amount of internal labor cost savings of the portal, at the unit of work level, for the transactions that our clients perform?
• Do customers that use our portal buy more from us than those that don’t?
• Did the promotion we recently placed on the entry page of our customer portal drive any sales?
• How successful was our campaign to activate portal usage? Is our new client on-boarding process leading to portal activations?

With a little up front planning and some careful measurement design, you can begin to harness a lot of valuable information useful for measuring portal ROI. Your analytical capabilities become more strategic and powerful when combined with information from other systems. As you do so, you can begin to support strategic account development, customer satisfaction programs and the like.

There’s a lot to be said for moving from “fire and forget” development to strategic asset management. Once you do, you open the door to getting the management attention that online service and product delivery deserves. Programs to manage and deliver results can also get you a seat at the budgeting table, and a voice that speaks the ROI language. Client codes are the metrics foundation for building your customer portal house.