Passion - can you measure it?

Today I spoke on a panel at the Sports Marketing 2.0 VIP Summit that took place at AT&T Park in San Francisco.  Before I write anything here - wow, what a venue! The ball park is right on the bay and the crystal clear sky produced an amazing view!  This one day conference brought together sports marketers from all of the country to discuss how to perform and measure Web 2.0 strategies as they apply to the world of sports marketing. We were the first panel of the day and our topic was online measurement.  My co-panelists included:

• Young-Bean Song from Microsoft (Atlas division)
• John Broady from Omniture
• Laurie Koehler from Intel

The panel was moderated by Daniel Aronson from IBM and specifically focused on the online measurement tools that are available to the market today - and how they can specifically be applied to build a monetizable audience for sports sites and teams.

First question of the day - are sports sites more valuable than regular media sites?  The general consensus is “yes” sports sites and sports content in general (whether it be widgets, blogs or tweets) are more valuable than content on a general media site.  But the follow up questions as to why were pretty interesting.  The thing about sports sites (or shall we say sports fans) is that the visitors are extraordinarily loyal.  They have a strong affinity towards their brand are more likely to affiliate themselves with the brands of their sponsors.

So that lead to the next question - how can you measure passion?  That’s a good one!  Can you measure passion? My answer to that one is that yes, you can pull from your engagement metrics toolbox (there’s that word again) to build a profile of your fan that describes their passion in quantitative terms.  I would start with:

1. How much time do your fans spend on your site? Metrics: Average session duration
2. How often do your fans return to your site over a given time period? Metric: Session per visitor
3. Do your fans post, comment or register on your site?  How often? Metric: You will probably have to work with your web analytics vendor to instrument the data collection on this piece, but it is completely possible to gather all three of these data points.
4. Are the fans visiting your site new or repeat visitors? Metric: New Visitor %, Repeat Visitor %

So if we just start there, you could easily start to build a “passion” metric that resembles how your fans interact with your web site.  But for the Digital Marketing Manager of a major sports team or content site, the exercise goes so much farther than that.  Fans spend time on blog sites affiliated with your sport or team.  They spend time on social network profiles and groups that may reside off of any domain that you manage.

Next question - can you measure all aspects of Sports Marketing?  The answer really is “no”. There is more happening than any one marketer can get their hands around.  Sites can be measured, widgets can be measured, emails can be measured - a lot of mediums can be measured.  However, there is still a lot of aspects of the Web 2.0 space that cannot be measured.

The ending thought of the day that had a broad consensus across the panel was that you have to build your strategy to measure what you can.  Draw a stake in the ground and start measuring the baseline.  You need to play in the new mediums to learn about them - even if you can’t measure them. Keep scanning the market for how you can reach your customers.  Experiment to learn the space and then jump in with more resources when you can measure it and determine your ROI.

In God we trust, all others bring data!

Tom Davenport kicked off the E-Metrics summit this morning here in San Francisco with a presentation on how to compete on analytics. He is a great speaker, very dynamic and a die-hard Red Sox fan (yeah!).

Keynotes are always meant to rally the crowd and get everyone inspired to run off to the respective sessions of the conference and seek “enlightenment” in the practice of analytics. However, Tom delivered on his keynote by providing some really great takeaways. When building out the analytics team within your organization, he outlined how you have to be focused on ensuring that you build the correct processes and infrastructure to support success - it isn’t just about the human capital doing the analysis. Two core pieces of the infrastructure - data and ensuring that you have an Enterprise-wide view of the customer.

Data

• Enterprise - Competing on “Spreadsheets” is a bad idea.
• You may need beefier hardware and infrastructure.
• The organization will need some level of centralized expertise.

Enterprise-wide customer view

• In this segment he displayed an interesting grid that shows the data sources across the organization and how to marry that up with the groups and processes that are going to utilize it to make decisions. You need to be sure that the data sources that are available are actually reaching the current and potential end users of that data. Such a simple concept, but so many organizations do not take the time to map where the data is being used. Just taking this simple step can help you identify gaps in communication between orgs to truly “Compete on Analytics”.

Two great mantras that Tom through up on the screen that I just loved:

• “Do we think, or do we know?”
• “In God we trust, all others bring data”

This resonated with me as I have had the opportunity to work in an organization that did not embrace this (they shall go un-named) and a few who do. Getting your executives on board to build a data-driven brand is a critical underpinning to making this happen. Tom coined this as “The Great Divide”. You have to have your senior management team committed. They must be committed in order to compete on analytics.

One of the most interesting slides showed how organizations need to build their analytical teams. You need to have a solid mix of the professionals and the amateurs. A recommended mix (think food pyramid when you look at his slide graphic) broke down as follows:

• 5-10% of the staff should be analytical professionals. These are the guys who can write the algorithms (our algos as we call them at Clearspring).
• 15-20% of the staff should be semi-professionals who manage, analyze and persuade the business on the analytics.
• 70-80% of the staff should be amateurs that can use spreadsheets and reports. These are your next semi-professionals, so put them on the path to analysis and learning the business.

Tom was a really dynamic speaker - great choice for the kickoff keynote! Competing on analytics is so critical - especially when trying out new Web 2.0 mediums like widgets. You can’t and you shouldn’t launch it if you can’t measure what you are doing.

Key takeaways from Tom - what you can do for your organization:

• Help develop a test and learn culture for every tactical initiative.
• Help the organization think about multi-channel analytics.
• Come up with unique metrics for mweb and multi-channel offerings.
• Get out of the commodity web reporting buesinss.
• Spread the analytical gospel around the organization.it.

And the last random takeaway - did you know that the Red Sox and Patriots are highly analytical driven organizations? Every home game has 25 key indicators that are measured - not just baseball stats, but how the visitors in the park are enjoying their experience. Go Sox! Just think of what that dashboard would look like on the Jumbotron!

Off to the next session. Cheers!

E-Metrics San Francisco

This Sunday in San Francisco marks the kickoff of the E-Metrics Marketing Summit 2008. I will be speaking on two panels at this conference, so please come find me and introduce yourself. This is a great conference and “the” one to attend if you have to pick just one conference each calendar/budget year.

The WAA meeting on Sunday afternoon is open for anyone to attend, while the panel on Tuesday is only for conference attendees. I plan to be blogging each day to cover highlights from the conference. Check back frequently as I’ll be posting more than my usual once per week.

Hope to see you there!

Web Analytics Association (WAA) Community Meeting and Panel Discussion

Sunday May 4, 4:30 - 6:00

Are you confused about the number of customer visiting your website? Are the metrics reported by your web analytics tool different from the metrics reported by your online media or by audience measurement organizations? The WAA invites eMetrics Summit attendees and the local business community of web marketers, publishers and agencies to attend this community meeting.

A panel of experts will discuss the value of the metrics, methods and tools used by web analytics practitioners, online advertising media and audience measurement organizations. Find out how-to-use these metrics and tools to better understand your customers, your website’s competitive standing and overall website value.

Tracking Widgets and Feeds: Measuring Distributed Content

Tuesday May 6, 5:00 - 6:00

What’s a feed and what’s a widget and how do you measure them? As the world moves away from centralized media distribution, social networks and blogs have created millions of new publishers that have access to massive volumes of engaging digital content. Feeds - instant content syndication and Widgets - tiny, portable applications - are all the rage in social networks and are becoming part of the Internet’s infrastructure. They are small, they are fast, they are viral. They are HTML cut-and-paste on steroids. They can also carry your brand. In this session Jodi, John and Ori look at the new metrics needed for feeds and widgets such as virality (placement), the hub nature of the online social scene and the amount of brand impact they might have. And that’s just the beginning.