… and how do I measure it?
It’s time for some Marketing Metrics 101, kids. I offer this quick tutorial, inspired by Jeneane Sessum’s call for a likeability measure, and Robert Scoble’s call for an engagement measure.
Way back in the bad old days of marketing boxes of bits on shelves at retail, the good folks at Microsoft used to measure a secured customer metric. The objective was to come up with a numerical value that could be used to determine how likely a customer would be to switch from Microsoft to someone else. It was a pretty good metric, too. We used it to determine which of WordPerfect’s verticals would be vulnerable to a switching campaign, for instance.
A customer was said to be secured if they rated the product highly, would repeat the purchase if given a chance, and would recommend that product to others. You would measure each rating on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 highest, and then take the subset of customers who scored 4 or 5 in every category as your secured customer base. Compare that percentage to the overall customer base, and you would have a measure of the percentage of your customer base that was secured — ie. not likely to switch from Microsoft.
That’s an awful lot like what Jeneane and Robert are proposing, isn’t it? For Ze vs Rocketbom, you want to know how many people think it’s great, how many people would return again, and how many would recommend it to their friends. I put it to you that the top scorers in all three are engaged readers.
Here’s the rub — we used to gather this information using random digit dial surveys; telemarketing. You need to measure either a statistically significant random sample, or the whole survey set. I’m not sure you could automate this process and still get a meaningful result.Â
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