Nate Elliott

I’ve had the opportunity over the past year to work with a lot of banks and credit unions, insurance providers, and investment management firms. Marketers at financial services companies face a number of challenges other marketers don’t — most importantly, confusing and often ill-defined government regulations — but yet I’ve been impressed with the social media efforts I’ve seen from many companies in this category.

I’ve decided to research and write a Forrester report on how financial services marketers can most effectively use social media. We’ll be including lots of our data on how different types of financial customers engage with social media, of course — but I’d also like to collect more insight from the marketers’ perspective.

If you’re a financial services marketer, and you’re willing to walk us through examples of how you’ve used social media, talk to us about how you manage risk and work with your legal and compliance departments, and share with us some of the lessons you’ve learned in social media marketing, then we’d love to talk to you. You can contact me directly at: nelliott at forrester dot com. Thanks!

Yesterday I published a Forrester case study that I’m really excited about, covering how the NHL used tweet-ups to create excitement for the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs. The league worked with fans to organize a series of events that took place simultaneously around the world on the opening night of the playoffs. I had a chance to attend the tweet-up in Vancouver, and thought they were a great example of the power of both online and offline influence.

In the weeks leading up to the playoffs, fans started talking online about organizing a series of playoff tweet-ups — and the league’s Director of Social Media Mike DiLorenzo jumped at the chance to make it happen. Mike planned a big tweet-up in New York on the opening night of the playoffs, complete with food and beer sponsors and hockey merchandise giveaways — and started promoting the event on Twitter.

To make sure there were lots of tweet-ups happening around the league, Mike reached out to a handful of influential hockey fans in key NHL markets to recruit their participation. Lots of fans also stepped up and volunteered to host events in their cities too. Before long, there were tweet-ups organized in almost two dozen cities around the world. The league supported every one of those tweet-ups by sending gift bags, coupons for discounts at shop.NHL.com, and signed hockey merchandise for event organizers to raffle.

The NHL spent only a few weeks and a few thousand dollars planning and supporting the tweet-ups, but the results were fantastic:

• Big in-person attendance. More than 1200 people attended tweet-ups in 23 cities (including events in New Zealand and Northern Ireland) for the opening night of the playoffs. Many fans organized further tweet-ups as their teams progressed through the playoffs as well
• Bigger online chatter. Those attendees talked a lot about the events on Twitter: On the opening night of the playoffs, the term “NHL” was mentioned on Twitter more than twice as often as on a normal day. And #NHLtweetup became a trending topic for the day.
• Enormous total reach. According to the league’s research, as many as 240,000 people could have heard about the event on Twitter. And the tweet-ups also generated press coverage that reached millions, including a story in USA Today.

So, what can other marketers learn from the NHL’s success? We think there are a number of important lessons here:

1. Get your brand advocates involved. The NHL’s tweet-ups wouldn’t have worked without its fans. The fans helped develop the idea, and they did all the legwork for these events — including finding venues and promoting the events. If the NHL had tried to organize these events itself, it would’ve cost a lot more money, and probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
2. Give yourself enough lead time. The NHL and its tweet-up hosts had only three weeks to organize these events — and it was a pretty hectic three weeks. The league plans to organize a lot more tweet-ups this season, and will start planning each six to eight weeks in advance.
3. Make sure PR is part of your strategy. The fans who attended the tweet-ups generated a lot of excitement about the playoffs — both at the events, and on Twitter. But the mainstream press coverage provided a ton of reach. The media is still in love with Twitter, so inviting them to the events can really pay off.

There’s some other great coverage of the event online — including that at Goaliegirl.com — and Forrester clients should read the entire case study for even more details and best practices. Congratulations to the NHL, and to all its tweet-up organizers, on a great event.

Marketers don’t think they’re very good at measuring social media.  When my Forrester Research colleague Emily Riley asked marketers to rate their ability to measure the impact of their social media initiatives, the average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10. Not a great score — especially given that accountability is one of the key selling points of interactive marketing. So I’ve spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why marketers aren’t good at measuring social media — and how they can do better.

The fact is, social media marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight into which metrics are important, it’s not surprising that marketers feel overwhelmed.

Most marketers fixate on easily-available measures like followers or fans — regardless of whether those metrics are important. Many others fail to measure obviously useful numbers just because they’re not on the first page of a report. A marketer focused on talking [video] should have a radically different definition of success than one focused on embracing [video]. But marketers are much more likely to tailor their social media measurement to the tools they’re using than to the objectives they’re trying to achieve. Have a look — most marketers measure pretty much the same metrics, no matter what their objective:

Most marketers measure the same social media metrics, regardless of their objective

It’s obvious that marketers need more clarity into which social media metrics they should be tracking. So we’ve developed a three-step process to help marketers better tailor their measurement strategies to the objectives they’re pursuing. Walking through these three steps will help you cut through the clutter on your marketing reports and measure your social media initiatives more effectively:

• Step 1: Think back to your marketing objective. Go back and find your notes from when you were first planning your social marketing effort — and remind yourself of the objective you were pursuing. If you don’t know what your goal was, you’ll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded.
• Step 2: Consider what types of metrics signal success. Don’t think about specific lines on a report yet — instead, think about what types of consumer behaviors and sentiments match your objectives, and focus your measurement on those categories of metrics. If your goal was energizing, success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand; if your goal was supporting, you want to know if users were providing good advice to each other — and whether it kept users from having to ask you for support directly.  Again, this isn’t about specific metrics, it’s about how you hoped your social initiative would change your relationship with consumers.
• Step 3: Look for that category of metric in the social technology you’re using. Once you’ve identified the type of metric that will signal success, then you can look for ways to track those metrics within the social platform you’re using. This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report Facebook or Jive gives you are most important — and which other vendors you need to use to find the exact numbers you’re looking for.

In my new Forrester Research report, ‘Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing,’ I offer a framework that helps marketers place social media metrics into one of six categories, shows them which categories of metrics should be used to measure which objectives, and gives examples of how to obtain those metrics from each social platform. I hope clients use my framework; I think it will make their lives easier and their measurement more successful.

But the key message of that report (and this blog post) isn’t the framework, it’s this call to action: We as an industry must do better at measuring social media marketing. Social media budgets keep rising, but that trend won’t continue forever if we can’t prove that social initiatives are effective. Perhaps more important, if we don’t know which social applications succeeded and which didn’t, we can’t learn from our experiences and improve on future efforts. And it’s surprisingly easy to measure social media effectively: we just need to focus on measuring objectives rather than technologies.

Whether you use the detailed framework in my report, or simply keep these three steps in mind as you design your own measurement strategy, I hope these ideas help you sift through all the social media metrics that are available, and find the right ones to measure your efforts.

It’s like Christmas eve for me: right now, we’re finalizing the data from Forrester’s latest Canadian consumer survey. When that data’s all cleaned and ready, I’ll be writing a report on how Canadians use social media — including the Canadian version of our social technographics ladder. (And yes, that data will also be added to our social technographics consumer profile tool.)

But I don’t want my report to be just about data — I also want to call out some of the best examples of social media marketing in Canada, and show how savvy marketers have put social media to work for them. In the year I’ve been working in Canada, I’ve been lucky enough to see some great social marketing initiatives from marketers like RBC, Teligence, Sunshine Village, Servus Credit Union, and others. But I’ve already written about those — so I need some fresh examples for this new report!

If you’ve worked on, or know of, some great examples of social marketing in Canada, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an e-mail: nelliott at forrester dot com.  Or leave a note in the comments below.

According to all the data I’ve collected in the past few years — no matter what age group or country you study, and no matter how actively people use social media — the huge majority of users influence each other face to face rather than through social online channels like blogs and social networks. And a huge body of research — most recently including Razorfish’s Fluent study — has proven that recommendations from offline friends are more influential than recommendations from online friends. So I decided to have a closer look at how interactive marketers can create offline influence in my new report The Analog Groundswell: Using Social Media To Create And Amplify Offline Influence.

I found marketers using a range of strategies to create offline influence, but there are two in particular that are most promising:

1. Events. If you want to create a big splash for a new product or service, tweet-ups and house parties are a great strategy for reaching a lot of people quickly. For instance, the NHL worked with fans to run a series of 23 simulatenous tweet-ups to celebrate the opening of the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs — and attracted more than a thousand attendees, generated a potential Twitter reach of more than 200,000, and garnered press coverage that reached millions. And right now, Microsoft is working with a company called House Party to plan in-home launch parties for its new Windows 7 operating system.
2. Ambassador programs. If you want to build long-term relationships and ongoing influence, ambassador programs might be the right strategy for you. For instance, scissor maker Fiskars found a great way to turn members of its legendary Fisk-a-teers online community into offline ambassadors: they gave each member a special pair of scissors engraved with their member number. When the Fisk-a-teers go to crafting parties and pull out their special scissors, it invariably creates a conversation about the brand. Vendors like BzzAgent can drive offline sampling and evangelism for marketers. And even Facebook has used ambassador programs in some markets where it’s been slow to grow.

Forrester clients can learn more — including lots more examples, and our best practices for offline influence programs — by reading the full research report. And I’ll also be speaking on this topic at both Forrester’s 2009 Consumer Forum (in Chicago, October 27 and 28) and our 2009 EMEA Marketing Forum (in London, November 17 and 18).  I just finished writing a case study on the NHL’s tweet-ups as well.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: what are you favorite examples of brands driving offline word of mouth? Have you ever run an offline influence program – and if so, what vendors did you use and how did it work? Let me know in the comments below.

My employer, Forrester, is searching for a senior analyst to cover social media — including online communities, social networks, and organizational structures that support social technology efforts. We’re looking for an individual who is active in the social media community and has good ideas on how social tools complement other analyst activities and research methodologies. You can read the full job description here — and if you’re interested in applying, email me: nelliott at forrester dot com.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years researching how people influence each other (see, for instance, my Future of Influence report or my presentation on the topic from the Web 2.0 Expo.) One of the most interesting findings for me was on how consumers prefer to pass along influential messages. You hear these days about consumers posting reviews on their blogs, rating products on commerce sites, and talking about companies in message boards and forums — and there is, in fact, a lot of influence passed through these online channels every day. But the reality is most people prefer to pass along influential messages offline, either face to face or over the phone. And while a face-to-face interactions are a slow way to get a message out — after all, blog posts can reach thousands of people at a time, while conversations usually only include a few people at most — we know that personal conversations carry the very highest level of trust and influence.

So I’m starting a report around how marketers can drive these types of offline influential behavior. If you’ve seen me speak on the topic, you’ve probably heard my favorite example: when Nintendo launched its Wii video game console in Germany, it reached out to early adopters and asked them to host “Wii parties” where their friends could sample the device. My colleague Josh Bernoff often uses another great example: how Hershey’s works with a company called House Party to introduce new types of chocolate. I’m particularly interested in learning more about how marketers use the internet to organize offline events or drive offline influence — and then use social media to help magnify the impact of such events after they’ve taken place.

If you’ve used social media to drive offline influence — or have seen another marketer do it well — I’d love to hear about it. Please leave me a comment in the field below, or email me: nelliott at forrester dot com.