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I’ve spent the last 3 days at the Merkle CRM Executive Summit. This was a great event attended by more than 250 senior marketing executives from very large brands like Dell, Disney Resorts, AARP and many others. David Williams, the CEO of Merkle kicked off the event with a keynote Monday morning discussing the evolution that has taken place, and is continuing to take place, in marketing. One of David’s themes, also common among many other presenters, was the shift marketers must make as consumers become more empowered and in control. There were many discussions at the conference around terms like engagement and relevance, and many presenters talked about the need for measurement and metrics in this new era of marketing.
David Williams offered an excellent definition of engagement during his keynote. Engagement, according to David, is any non-financial interaction a consumer has with your brand. The words in this very simple definition imply a number of things. First, it states the interaction is not financial in nature, but it does indicate value to both the brand and the consumer. This could be building positive value via great interaction or negative value via poor interaction. We recognize that non-financial interactions impact our brands. Second, this definition does not mention any specific channel. Engagement is channel agnostic; it happens in stores, over social media, online at websites, via advertising and a whole host of other places. Marketing strategies must impact channels, but engagement cuts across channels.
On the final day of the summit, Mike Talbot, President and Founder of Alterian, gave an energizing presentation about relevant and persuasive communication in marketing. Mike discussed the three pillars of communication: content, audience and execution. A brand must have the proper analytics in place to know all of the different audience sectors. It must also be able to develop appropriate content and messaging that cuts across channel but remains relevant regardless of the channel of interaction. Finally, the execution pieces must be in place to deliver that content at the right time to the right consumer through the appropriate medium.
To reinforce Alterian’s point of view on relevance, we conducted research on the brands attending the Summit to measure how relevant consumers view these brands to be. To do this, we collected nearly 1.5 million conversations from social media channels during the 2010 holiday season. We then combined this data with internet ranking data from Alexa.com to measure brands on two dimensions – relevance and popularity in the eyes of consumers on social media. This relevant communication index created a lot of buzz at the event. More than 20 brands stopped by to talk with us about what it was and how we created it. The relevance metrics and methodology are available below and for download at the Alterian SlideShare site. We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
