Type A Mom Conference

September 24 -26, 2009

Ashville, NC

A unique mom blogging conference designed to help moms who blog take it to the next level. The conference will feature influential and insightful mom bloggers talking about topics like the power social networking, branding, blogging, finding your voice, and turning your passion for blogging into a real paycheck.

Sponsors include: Little Debbie Snacks, HP, Boiron & iRobot

Blogalicious

October 9 – 11, 2009

Atlanta, GA

For three days, black, Latina, Caribbean, Asian-Pacific, and Native-American bloggers, among other nationalities, will enjoy a weekend of discussions and events. It’s an opportunity for women to come together to celebrate their diversity and their love for blogging.

Sponsors include: Quaker Oats, Burger King, Success Rice & Boiron

Blissdom

February, 4-6 2010

Nashville, TN

A conference for women bloggers who not only want to network in a laid back atmosphere but also walk away with improved skills. Learn from other women about building your blog, your brand, and your business.

Mom 2.0 Summit

February 18 – 21, 2010

Houston, TX

A place for marketers, mompreneurs and social media enthusiasts to get to know one another. A place to connect, converse, and build relationships. This year’s Summit discussions will focus on social media, marketing, networks, and brand building.

Recently, San Francisco played host to BlogHer ’08, where over one-thousand female bloggers and a handful (literally) of guys, including myself, collected for all things “blogging.” It was, frankly, a bit intimidating. Was I invading female-only territory? Would anyone speak with me? Would there be a hazing ritual?

It was my first BlogHer conference and uncharacteristically I approached it with loose objectives. “Take an open mind and learn” was my game plan, and I am glad it was. I must admit that I found myself to be a bit nervous. I’m not even a blogger by any strict definition. What the hell was I doing here?

Turns out, my self-produced anxiety and fears were unfounded. All, and I mean all, of the the women were very welcoming of my presence at their event. In fact, they seemed encouraged by my presence and genuine interest and reasons for attending. Other men I spoke with echoed similar sentiments.

First impression when I walked into the main event room was that there was a lot of power brought together here, the “bottom-up grassroots power-to-the-people” kind. I am not the first to recognize that women blogers are an influential group, but to see so many assembled together, interacting, writing, hugging, laughing, snapping pictures, and twittering leaves you with a strong impression that these women are tuned in, vibrant and expressive.

Another significant impression is how diverse the group is in every way — racially, sexuality, style, parents or not, appearance — except their gender. They are not a segment of society, they represent all of our society. And as a part of it, they have created a very tight-knit community with a common interest. Many know each other very well from reading their respective blog posts and comments. They are supportive and very comfortable challenging one another. And if you think about it, these are very healthy characteristics for a community.

Part of the community’s strength is that there are many leaders, some formal and many more informal. This conference’s organizers Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins deserve a lot of credit for putting together a successful event. They are smart enough to know that there’s enough talent and interesting people attending that they don’t need to be in the spotlight. They kicked things off, kept them going, and stayed out of the way.

Unique and brilliant and it worked. It was a great experience, I learned a lot and will go again.

Here’s the NY Times’ take on the event, Blogging’s Glass Ceiling

Next month I will share my impressions and evaluation as business marketer.

I thought I would re-focus a bit on measuring marketing effectiveness, perhaps in terms of ROI, a hot topic in 2007. Is it still as important today?

Recently, the CMO Council surveyed 800 + senior marketers to find that it is.

What are the Key Challenges in 2008?

· Quantifying & measuring the value of marketing programs & investments

· Growing customer knowledge, insight and conversations

· Upgrading the efficiency & effectiveness of marketing groups

So, ROI remains important but has it left the hospital’s ICU and learned to stand on its own legs? I suspect that the search is still on for a consistent and believable means by which to measure marketing program performance. I dare say that it is even more troubled by the continued market and channel fragmentation being experienced today. Try to add real comparatives for integrated programs into a single set of results and you begin to understand the colloquial “…like comparing apples and oranges…”

So what is a marketer to do? How do you introduce several disparate channels, programs and media, some of which are just plain hard to get accurate measurements for, and produce believable ROI results? What if the programs have multiple objectives in terms of brand awareness and response? Whew…

Don’t believe me? These same folks stated that important organizational and operational changes they have planned for 2008 include:

· Improving accountability of the marketing organization

· Implementing marketing ROI and/or resource allocation capabilities

Apparently the problem remains unsolved.

But, there’s no need to fear …Lucid is here…

How do you determine if one program reached its desired results AND if it compared better or worse than other investments. It’s really pretty simple. Even without direct sales data.

We have worked with clients to develop a simple model that assigns different values to levels of engagement. In simple terms, someone reading an article (a “suspect”) about your product or service (product) is more engaged than an impression that is served. Similarly, a “prospect” that takes action (clicks through to your site) is more valuable than the reader that chooses not to. This person is now a “qualified prospect,” and likely a good candidate for your next selling message. This model continues in parallel with a standard sales process model with minor variations and may look something like this:

Stage in Sales Process Actions Taken

1. Target Market Impressions Served

2. Suspects Opens / Reads / Views

3. Prospects Trackable Actions (Clicks, Prints, etc.)

4. Qualified Referrals / Wishlist

5. Influencer WOM Blogs, Trials, Reviews.

6. Customer Registration / Purchase

The assignment of values for each is a good exercise, and can be somewhat arbitrary. The important part is to be consistent. Working through this model in post mortem for a program establishes a useful value describing performance. It links input metrics with outputs. Employing a consistent model in the evaluation of the next program defines its performance and so on for each subsequent investment. Comparing the measurements reveals when one investment delivered perceivable incremental value over another, in terms that are particularly relevant to the marketing objectives.

Following is a working example:

In the absence of hard sales data to tie back to your programs, this can be a valid means to compare your marketing spend. Think about it.

The digital media opportunities were well presented, and as expected, attendees would then ask for further information on how to measure the affects of advertising within digital media. Some of the presenters broached the question of what they feel is a reasonable CPM or CPC, as well as different ways to look at the results. And some referenced tools that evaluate brand awareness and how one or multiple ads impact a consumer, yet no one revealed their specific formula for measuring ROI.

Throughout the conference, there was a strong emphasis on building brand equity through digital media, as opposed to direct response, thus taking the focus off ROI. And while I can agree that building brand equity is a natural part of advertising through digital media, there’s a need to measure each stage of this process and provide clients with an agreeable formula for measuring ROI — a justification for the spend.

In conclusion, with so many digital media advertising opportunities available today, and as more become available tomorrow, there’s a need to do more. We need to have a consistent way to evaluate ROI. If there’s a second conference next year, they should do more to live up to the conference description.

In case you weren’t there in the audience with me that day, here are some highlights from the event:

Keynote Address
The first speaker of the day was Cathy Davis of Diageo. Her message was loud and clear: know who your consumers are, capture their information, and bond with them at all touch points to build long-term relationships. The end result is brand loyalty if you give them something to experience and talk about to others. She shared several examples of creative ways her company is reaching out to consumers. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the “Tea Partay.” It’s hilarious…pass it on. Click here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0

Driving Response Through Online Video
Industry statistics show that online spending by advertisers will reach 19.5 billion in 2007. By 2011, that figure is expected to nearly double. There’s been a lot of hype about online video as a mechanism to drive response (just look at the example above). Do it right, and you capture an audience who will work for you by passing it along. Consumers are hungry for this medium, as evidenced by the likes of YouTube, vodcasts, etc. While it all starts with the message you want to convey, you also should recognize the power of consumers. Think about the experience they will ultimately have—are you providing value? Is it entertaining? Will they want to tell their friends? If you can get all the pieces to fit right, yours may be the next viral video to be passed around, and around, and around. What marketer wouldn’t want that?

Maximizing Search: Understanding Daypart Conversion Rates
This presentation helped explain how daypart conversion rates impact a search campaign. Esco Strong of the Atlas Institute looked at several different advertising genres: Finance, Travel, Dating, and Retail. In general, most activity online takes place between 9-5 EST. Not surprisingly, conversion clicks are higher around 12-1pm when consumers are likely going online during lunch breaks at their desks, and again from 8-10pm, when consumers are winding down and going online before going to sleep. Surprisingly, a comparison between weekdays and weekends yielded a similar result—consumers are likely going online during the early afternoon or evening. To optimize your search results, think about these timeframes for your next campaign. Tools like Google Analytics will let you choose daypart features, making it easier to reach your customer in the right place, at the right time.

Leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC)
UGC is not new, it’s been around for a long time – think about Zagats restaurant guide and other types of reviews. Or the countless number of times consumers voice their opinions. It’s all user-generated, and it’s content that other people can use. UGC is a buzzword lately, but not all marketers have been able to harness its power. Many of them are asking consumers to create ads for them. If you watched the Super Bowl, or at least the commercials like me, you probably saw the Doritos “Live The Flavor” spot, which was the winning UGC video in the snack food company’s Crash The Super Bowl contest. It received a lot of hype before the game, and a dedicated site keeps the conversation alive. In that way, it was a positive move. I’m not sure how many additional bags of Doritos sold can be attributed to the spot, but it got people talking.

One quote I heard in this session was “equate brand value with consumer value”. That seemed to be the theme of the day: give consumers what they want, and if it’s valuable, they’ll keep coming back to you for more.

Soon, we’ll all be lucky enough to get what we want.

Happy Spring,
Kim Boknoski