TruEffect Blog

It was only a matter of time: LinkedIn debuts B2B marketing network

If you've been in a position over the past few years of looking for, and failing to find, good B2B market research or lists, then this is good news. If you think that social, er, professional networking sites should be free from profit making ventures that utilize you and your personal data, then the news is not so good. At least online display advertising is transparent, right?

LinkedIn just announced its plan to utilize it's 30 million worldwide professional network for B2B market research. It will offer users incentives like cash, merchandise, and, for the more philanthropic of us, donations to charity, for participating in research opportunities.

It's not clear from the articles to date, whether LinkedIn will generate it's own B2B marketing list from the new opt-in surveys, or whether they are simply selling B2B survey opportunities. But in the database marketing arena, we've rarely seen one without the other. At any rate, the current iteration of their research network requires the person utilizing the service to harvest their own data by searching LinkedIn for qualified professionals, and then emailing them through LinkedIn's "InMails" to ask research questions.

 A lot of people (OK, maybe only Gen Y-ers) still like to believe that everything on the internet should be "free." But the truth is, the buck stops at your eyeballs - and they're in high demand. All those Youtube videos you've been watching fetched $1.65 billion Googlebucks for its founders. Rupert Murdoch paid $770 million for your MySpace page.

A Linked-In company release estimated that the online survey market is worth about $900 million. I don't know about you, but my LinkedIn profile will be signing up for the cash rewards.

– Layne Salter

Where in the world is customer engagement?

Thirty three years ago the home VCR was invented. This fall, Nielsen finally provided broadcast advertisers measurement on delayed viewing. Well.... duh. Media and technology providers traditionally tend to undervalue the power of consumer preferences in how, when and where they like to be engaged. Likewise, most online advertising overlooks the critical component of whether the viewer of the ad is someone with whom the advertiser already has a relationship. Could it be that in the quest for the illusive Holy Grail of advertising, the writing's been on the wall all along – "It's the user"?

It's no surprise this year's favorite buzzword is "engagement." While we owe the latest incarnation of the term to Atlas for its "Engagement Mapping" product, the term is not new. In 2006, some of the best marketing minds around put their collective gray matter to the grindstone to ferret out the truth. Mollie Spilman, then CMO at Advertising.com, defined engagement as "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." Jim Nail, CMO of Cymfony, said, "Consumer engagement may be to the marketing mix what gravity is to the physical world: the unseen force that keeps it all together!" Now, two years later, there's still little consensus on definition, let alone how it can be measured.

What we do know for sure is that broadcast models fail at personal engagement. And direct marketing techniques haven't worked well in the context of new media which has, with the exception of email, been a broadcast model until now. To truly engage with a customer online requires some knowledge about that consumer, and then the ability to utilize that knowledge across your buys. Who is she? What's she interested in? Is she a prospect or a loyal customer? And, more importantly, how do you provide a truly personalized and relevant experience and still be sensitive to her privacy?

Whether you're an advertiser, a media buyer, a data analyst, or a marketing director, the fact remains that in today's complex media world, simply being "where" your customers are is not enough to create meaningful engagement. You must meet him on his terms, understand his needs, and be ready to personalize your message. There's still a substantial gap to be filled by online and multi-channel technologies to provide what advertisers need to turn "engagement" into more than just a nifty buzzword.

– Layne Salter

How the Internet is saving democracy

This is NOT your father's Presidential campaign. Not even close. If the internet has anything to say about it, the days of bumper sticker mentality and less than factual (OK,mud-slinging) political TV commercials may be over. And it’s not just the fact that presidential hopefuls are spending more advertising dollars online. Yes, McCain and Obama might be neck and neck in the fight for Search supremacy, with McCain reportedly pulling ahead in paid Search by driving 22% of traffic from this source, compared to Obama’s 14%, even though Obama’s spending $5.5 Million on the effort. (How’d you like to be optimizing THOSE search campaigns?)

The real story lies in the power of the sheer number of people engaged in the online political story, coupled with the voluminous and instantaneous mass of information being disseminated via blogs, videos and online news. According to a Business Week article, which cites a Pew Research Center study, 27% of Americans go online at least once a week to do something related to the campaign. This represents approximately half of the number of people who turned out to vote in 2004. Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan group that tracks political influence and technology, said, "This is the unseen force that didn’t exist. My 81-year-old dad e-mailing Barack Obama's speeches or Jon Stewart's videos to his 50 friends—he's part of this force that's turning citizens into pamphleteers, whether they know it or not." 

The Pew study found that 40% of Americans have gone online to get political news, up from 16% in 2000. 35% of Americans have watched political videos, compared with 13% in 2004. And the real differentiator is that they’re actively doing their own fact-checking – searching out the direct sources of information, rather than simply swallowing pundits' take on events. About 39% have gone online to watch debates and speeches, and read position papers.

So while CNN estimates that $3 billion will be spent on political TV ads in the 2008 election (almost double the amount spent in 2004), I'd say the odds favor a growing number of informed, intelligent voters. Perhaps even a majority of the public coming out to vote? Sounds like democracy to me. Thanks Internet.

– Layne Salter