Contributed By Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked Insights

There has been a lot of recent talk about “Engagement”. Engagement is the new metric for social media, the measure of success for social media marketing. Although clearly defining engagement has been a challenge and people have disagreed on setting standards, it is certainly a concept worth exploring.

As soon as social media started to change the way people communicate and share interests, values or concerns, it became a gold mine of customer intelligence and insight. The key to unlocking this intelligence is to understand engagement.

What is engagement? Engagement is a combination of how people interact with each other and content (viewing, posting, inviting, rating, etc.) and what causes people to change or define their behavior (how influential people or content are).

Engagement not only shows where people are spending their time, and what topics they are discussing and with whom, but also shows the degree and depth of customer-to-customer interactions. If ad placement is based on engagement, advertisers know that the advertising is more relevant to the people that see it because it is based on the topics and people that they engage with.

For advertisers and marketers, knowing facts about their audience before spending money on social media is a huge benefit. For example, if Nike notices that a large number of users on MySpace are engaging around a particular shoe model and that very few people are doing so on Facebook, it would make a lot more sense to spend more heavily on MySpace and know exactly where to place and direct that spend. This tactic uses engagement to ensure results, not just to measure them.

Marketers all acknowledge the importance of engagement. While the subjective aspects of the metric have yet to be defined, the factual elements taken from customer engagement provide the real value. Using engagement as a way to guide and predict your ad buy or marketing spend is a clear and simple method that leverages the customer intelligence that can be gained from engagement metrics. This intelligence can also help accurately inform the content and message of the resulting marketing collateral to ensure it resonates with the target audience.

Engagement is here to stay. Just like any new metric, it will take some time to take-hold and become fully standardized, but it is undeniably a multifaceted and powerful metric that can provide value to marketers throughout the marketing process – especially before it even starts.

About the Author:

Daniel Neely
Dan is the founder and CEO of Networked Insights, the leader in customer intelligence across social media. His 10 plus years of entrepreneurial, management and operational experience with technology companies, has given him the expertise in customer intelligence and experience with the challenges companies face in gathering relevant, real-time insights about their customers.
Before starting Networked Insights, Dan co-founded Market Performance Partners, which guided companies in market ownership through customer intelligence. Prior to that, he was the director of strategy at Scient, one of the fastest growing services company in history. Before Scient, Dan was part of the team that launched eSurance, the leading online insurance company.

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar

I had the chance to interview Dominick Martinetti, CEO of Slappa Distribution, a small but rapidly growing company that is making a great name for itself among DJs and music junkies as an innovative product company. Dominick is an inspiring young man, and I have shared in this article, excerpts from our conversation that reveal his thinking and journey into market leadership.

Slappa has been in business for four years now, and it started with an initial product range consisting of CD cases. It was not a particularly “sexy” business to get into. CD cases had been around for 15 years, and the CD business was not growing aggressively any more. DVDs, computer software and video games still used CD cases, but the margins had been declining for most companies in this space. Also, brands before Slappa had commoditized the product — there was no real choice available to the consumers. Most of the people using these disc cases were forced to not have choices… outside of cosmetic colors, no one was building quality and variety into the cases. Therein lay a problem with CD cases from the consumer’s perspective, which Dominick was able to spot.

To conduct his market research and with an Open Innovation mindset, Dominick went to online bulletin boards and chat rooms for audio professionals like Audiophile, Audio Asylum and Audioreview.com. He sought advice on what these target consumers needed from the ultimate CD case.

He heard back two major things from them:
1. More Protection: A majority of CD cases available in the market were not providing any real level of protection for a person’s disc collection. People wanted to protect discs even while moving formats towards MP3. They wanted to protect their investment. An individual’s music collection alone can amount to anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000 over 15 years depending on whether one is a general consumer or a DJ.

2. People wanted to keep their discs and covers together: People did not like jewel cases because they cracked and then one could not keep their CD artwork (cover) together with the disc.

Dominick created a series of prototypes and sent them to influential journalists who write product reviews for well read magazines and blogs and asked for their feedback and advice on the design. He kept iterating and improving the design based on feedback from these reviewers. After 2 years of prototype iteration, Dominick finally heard “Its perfect!” from several reviewers and he knew he had a winning product in his hand. Dominick had designed the D2 patented pocket system which has a rear pocket for the disc and a front pocket for the cover along with a 5-7 mm opening. The shell for the D2 was made out of X-EVA, a fire resistant, water resistant material.

Launching the product now became much easier for Dominick. He put up a website at slappa.com and told all his friends and the product reviewers he was in contact with that his product was now available for purchase. The reviewers wrote rave reviews of his $49.95 CD-case next to reviews of top of the line $2,000 music systems. Slappa’s products achieved very quick acceptance among the “Pro Audio” market, and Dominick has expanded into distribution via retail, mail order, catalogs and other media where people can pay attention to details of the product.

Dominick’s inspiration is the Fossil Watch Company that made people think they were getting a better deal with a $79 designer watch from Fossil in a tin can than with a $20 watch from Walmart. He already has plans to expand his product line into backpacks, high end bags, and other products, while also expanding distribution globally.

When asked about why Slappa’s customers become huge fans of the company, Dominick says, “We’ve made ourselves a customer focused company. Each customer is our most important customer. You CAN please everyone, in a million ways. You just have to find a different way for every person.”

1 Comment | Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Facebook is an incredible social phenomenon that I am sure most of you have heard about. If you have not yet experienced Facebook, consider joining it at http://www.facebook.com

BrainReactions has recently launched an application within Facebook called the “Most Creative People“. It allows you to view and connect with the most creative people on Facebook and vote for your friends who are very creative. You can join the application and nominate any of your friends from Facebook to provide them further global recognition for their creativity.

The application is available at
http://apps.facebook.com/fbcreative/

Our network now consists of over 35,000 highly creative people from 142 countries. If you’d like to leverage our network for brainstorming with your target market, product testing with a particular demographic, online focus groups, product launch marketing, or any consumer-focused needs, please contact us here.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

I’ve got to hand it to the Onion, once again, they’ve written a hilarious article that sums up the crazy, hype-driven, marketing world we live in. Check it out “Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product”

This article is not only entertaining, but also a valid critique of a consumer response to marketing. The proper marketing, it seems, can sell just about anything by generating enough buzz. And while that is great for most companies, we the consumers are sometimes left holding the proverbial bag when the product doesn’t meet expectations.

Reading this Onion article just re-enforced for me the importance of a comprehensive, online, peer review system for new products. Without some grounding, its too easy for consumers to get carried away by tornado that is an effective marketing campaign and end up far, far from home.

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What our peers buy influences our own decisions on purchases. What I’m suggesting here is a new way for companies to take advantage of the influence and respect the consumer has for the opinion of his peers.

The idea is, you sign up through a company or web search site (like google) to take part in this program and create a comprehensive profile. Upon purchasing an item, you write a review of it. Now, if a peer (based on analysis of your profile) searches for a similar product, they would receive not only relevant ads, but also their peers’ reviews of the product.

Companies would pay a slight premium to be part of this innovative marketing approach, and the consumer would get points for each review written. Those points could converted to $ and disbursed via pay-pal or some other incentive.

I would certainly pay more attention to a review or rating of a peer than I do to the search based ads one normally gets. Alternatively, a summary of your peers’ ratings could appear for each product. Another option could be weekly updates about what your peers are buying. And, to guard against unscrupulous bumping up of positive reviews, one could require a cell phone number to be eligible as a peer reviewer.

Using this approach, products could be marketed in a very specific and targeted way to different groups of consumers with little added cost to the company hawking the goods.

No Comments | Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Opening the latest Vogue or GQ, readers are flooded with images of Uma Thurman, Matthew McConaughey, and Lindsey Lohan telling you that their product makes you a star or is what the new hip thing. But in all reality, is this an effective way to advertise anymore?

As a college student, most of these types of items are out of reach and otherwise, the celeb is not someone I would like to associate myself with. What happened to the plain Jane model, why does every product need to be paired with a certain Hollywood star? If anything, the fact that stars like Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt get paid millions of dollars to be in a 30 second ad and endorse a product turns me off and makes me think that the company has run out of creativity choosing the overused celeb endorsement. Campaigns that are clever (e.g. the Truth campaign, iPod dancing people) are few and far between. It’s a fine line between projecting an image of cool by using a celeb and reflecting that it is simply something that a normal person would never look good in.

With all the computer technology that now allows a billboard or ad to literally change a person’s appearance to be more ‘appealing’, how can a person trust an ad in general? (Check out the transformation of a model from before makeup to billboard at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v3YvvFbsj94) Do advertising campaigns ever think of the societal impact they can create in the minds of their target market? Is Mischa Barton really the best example of a normal young adult for a clothing line?

Basically, celebrity endorsements show laziness or create unreal views of how the ‘normal’ person should look like. Most people don’t find them realistic; yes, I wish I had lips like Angelina Jolie and a butt like Jennifer Lopez, but that isn’t real. What happened to the creativity seen in the Levi’s commercials in the mid 90s or cool Propel fitness water ads of people appearing from drops of water? Companies need to bring the ad campaigns back to reality and give people some fresh ideas to inspire new product consumption rather than the surrealism of a celebrity image.

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It seems that its about time for me to weigh in again about the sorry state of marketing geared to Gen Y individuals. Granted, I can be a very judgmental individual, but there are so few really quality marketing campaigns out there that I often find myself telling my friends that there needs to be a group that has to approve all marketing campaigns and ads to save us from having to watch some of the truly awful ones.

On that note, I’d like to propose an option for companies looking to market to Gen Y and college students. Marketing firms should be making use of the internet to put together focus groups who watch the ad campaigns via streaming video or evaluate print ads on some website. By mining the data on social websites like Facebook and MySpace, companies could identify individuals that they want to be part of the focus group and invites could be sent to those individuals with a promise of compensation for participating.

I’m sure there must be online focus groups already in operation, but aside from using the social websites to identify individuals to take part in the group, my other innovation for this undertaking would incorporate a device to monitor physiological responses from the individual watching the ad. I remember a West Wing episode in which a focus group watching Bartlett giving a state of the union address were monitored using a simple dial that they adjusted in response to what Bartlett was saying. A simple extension of this approach would be a device that is shipped to the individual in the focus group. The group members would hook this device up to a USB port on their computer and before watching the ad, they would place their hand on the device, which would measure electrical and physiological responses to the ad. A baseline could be taken by also showing the group members ad campaigns that the company thinks are ones they either want to emulate or not emulate.

This approach would allow marketing firms to reach the ever so important Gen Y demographic in a very controlled manner and would also provide more information than they would get from a simple form that group members would also fill out after watching the ad campaign.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Managing Generation Y | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

View Made to Stick on FORA.tv

In this video, co-author Chip Heath explains the concept of generating ideas that are ‘made to stick’. There is an interesing question and answer session in the end, do check it out.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Innovation Techniques, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

After viewing the Super Bowl ads, Nationwide’s commercial featuring K-Fed was certainly my favorite. It was hilarious and also made you acknowledge that “life comes at you fast” because of the tangible pop culture example they gave. I think this was an excellent ad targeting Gen Y and may get them to actually think about the need for financial services. I would have liked more information about the company though and the service they provide because it did not get communicated to me prominently. I must say that I investigated it a bit after the ad aired though. I also think the self deprecating humor was a good career move for Kevin Federline. I actually liked the music, found my head bobbing to the beats and his flow, and checked the commercial and K-Fed’s website later during the super bowl! That says something about the ad as well…that I would leave the super bowl to watch a commercial again and visit K-Feds website! I think this ad was the best example of a great commercial and one that could become viral. I’ll be interested in seeing statistics of video views on YouTube. There also was a “stickiness” factor with this ad. The “Federline Fries!” shout by the manager at the end was a show stopper and memorable. I already hear buzz that this will be a memorable pop culture slogan. I quickly thought that this slogan would make a great domain name to have for this blog! This creative advertising idea concept seems like something that we would have generated at our brainstorm sessions with really creative Gen Y idea generators. At our brainstorm this past week we had fun with creating a whole variety of marketing messages such as these. It was excellent because the ad will live on virally through YouTube and in conversations. Authored by Darin Eich.

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We’ve all experienced it, the sudden change in production quality from a national ad campaign to the comparatively low production quality of an ad from a local company. Being someone who is already inclined to be dismissive of most national ads, the sheer (I don’t want to say it, but can’t think of a better word) ineptitude illustrated in so many market-specific ad campaigns is very frustrating.

With digital technology offering low cost production values and so many media-savvy consumers out there, the opportunity for hip, inexpensive local ad production is out there. My main point here is that there are resources in the form of Gen-Y folks who know how to produce videos and have ideas about appealing to consumers out there. Especially in local ads, too many companies rely on the tried and true method of having a semi-famous local celeb telling you about the great deals to be had. Local marketing campaigns should ideally serve as a testing ground for larger national ads, as states provide testing grounds for social programs.

To be competitive and to draw in new customers, locally based companies should employ the technological-know-how of Gen Y individuals and make use of their understanding of effective marketing techniques.

1 Comment | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this