Calculating combinatorial explosion: a tool for word of mouth marketing

I am not a big fan of the term 'viral marketing':  the swine flu pandemic (or H1N1 for those who think pigs are being unfairly singled out) has certainly reminded us that 'viral' things haven't historically been perceived positively...especially by those who are infected.  And yet, some in marketing and PR circles continue to let the term fly when discussing why social media should matter.

Word of mouth, on the other hand, seems to focus more explicitly on all that is wunderbar with social media. Influencers tell influencers who tell influencers...and so on and so on...and when it's digital, it's free!

Of course, when everyone is an influencer at some level, marketers might wonder just how many influencers it takes to get a critical mass of pass-alongers. One tool to help in the planning stages uses simple factorial math to calculate the reach that a viral word of mouth approach might achieve.

I've posted a simple spreadsheet version of the tool you can download on the Dialogue Marketing website, here. (MS Excel file)

The idea is relatively straightforward: capture a few assumptions and see how many people you might actually reach.

The assumptions in the tool include:

1. Number of initial influencers (or seeds) the campaign will contact
2. Expected pass along (i.e., retweet, email, linkback) percentage
3. Number of  people these influencers will reach
4. The number of pass along cycles (the 'and so on' part)

By structuring the capture of assumptions, enabling easy development of goal scenarios, and keeping the math in the background, the tool provides campaign planners with an easy to use expectation setter.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Google Analytics: Benchmarking beta

Benchmarking a business' performance is a time-tested approach for understanding where one's business stands in relation to peers, partners and clients.

Google launched a set of benchmarking tools (free and in perpetual beta, of course!) for its web analytics offering in Mid March. By agreeing to share your site data (anonymously), you can compare your website performance against the industry category of your choice.

Here's a screen shot from our site for one month:




We've been testing out the becnhmarking feature on the R+K site for a couple of weeks and the results look very promising. We're able to compare our site metrics in several commonly used analytics areas including:

1. Visits
2. Pageviews
3. TIme on site
4. Pages per visit
5. New visits
6. Bounce rate

Users can drill down in each of these areas for more detail including conversion rates, traffic sources and visitor loyalty. We can see how our site stacks up against PR, Marketing and even client industry vertical category sites.

All of the usual Google Analytics dashboard features (such as easy to read graphs, flexible report configuration and point and click interaction) are available in the benchmarking toolset.

One downside appears to be in the way that Google categorizes peer sites in each category...it does so by site size, using the uber-technical categories of small, medium and large. Unfortunately, you cannot benchmark your site against industry vertical sites that are smaller or larger than yours. I understand the value of the categorization by size, but I don;t understand the restrictions on viewing your site data against sites from different size categories.

So if you aspire to create small, efficient sites, you may find that your peers who have bloated inefficient (but large) sites are not part of the benchmark group to which you belong.

For the complete FAQs on Google Benchmarking, see this