Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Occasional Series I - Objectives

The story so far: our company, WSG bank, is looking for a social media proposal around a segment we've identified as "Builders". We've built some personas. Now we're starting to look at objectives as the second step in the POST methodology.
Jeremiah Owyang maps objectives to functional units in the business. I find this useful, because it immediately highlights the right sort of aspirations and metrics that we should be thinking about.
Regardless of industry or maturity, there are 4 things that all companies should be focused on: customer acquisition, customer activation (generating an initial purchase action from a customer who has registered), customer productivity (better thought of as a component of LTV), and customer retention. Anything else can be described as a function of one of these. In our example, let's start with the first one - customer acquisition. Perhaps we'll return to the others down the road, but this is a good place to begin.
So our goal is straightfoward - attract x new customers to our bank from the Builder segment, which we'll measure by a simple count of new accounts via the social media execution. We can model the data we get from our clickstream to get a proxy for total new accounts over all channels (HINT: our demographics and technographics will help us build this algorithm). Which of the Groundswell objectives is going to be useful?
Most people lunge immediately for the "talking" objective - or marketing in the functional lexicon. Trouble is, our Builders are pretty cynical about banks - so in my book, it's odds-on that they're not going to click over to a blatant marketing site. In my view, this is an occasion to reach for "listening". After all, it's the first step in the relationship build phase.
Because this is an fictional case, I'm going to propose we build a "scratching post" for people to tell us what they think about banks. Let's call it allbanksarebastards.com - at least the headline is going to resonate with our target segment. Our goal is to generate a robust discussion around what we're doing that gets under peoples' skin. We're going to ask a simple question - what could we do better? Longer-term, we're going to leverage this by acting on some of the comments and suggestions.
In the next post, I'll get more granular around this idea and start to lay out some of our "strategies" in the POST methodology.

1 comment:

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