Mobile Marketing

Given the presence of smart phones and tablets everywhere and marketers’ ability to personalize messages based on demographics and other characteristics, the appeal of mobile marketing as a communication tool is obvious.

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Tracking Online Buzz

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Marketers have to decide what they are going to track online as well as how they are going to track it. DuPont employs measures of online word of mouth such as scale (how far the campaign reached), speed (how fast it spread), share of voice in that space, share of voice in that speed, whether it achieved positive lift in sentiment, whether the message was understood, whether it was relevant, whether it had sustainability (and was not a one- shot deal), and how far it moved from its source. Other researchers focus on characterizing the source of word of mouth according to relevance, sentiment, and authority.

More firms are directing their online tracking efforts from a specific location. To monitor the Gatorade brand on social networks around the clock, PepsiCo created a “Mission Control Center” in its Chicago headquarters. Four full-time people handle the operations, with six big monitors providing data visualizations and dashboards. The Gatorade team reviews blog conversations, tracks sentiment, and, based on feedback, makes appropriate changes to the company’s marketing. The team also decides when to intervene in an online conversation. Any post that includes a query directly about the brand or that reflects a misunderstanding is usually an opportunity for the team to weigh in, but as one team member notes, “If they want to talk about working out, we let them have that conversation.”

Sources: Wendy W. Moe and David A. Schweidel, Social Media Intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ryan Holmes, "NASA-Style Mission Control Centers for Social Media Are Taking Off,” www.tech.fortune.cnn.com, October 25, 2012; Lionel Menchaca, Donna L. Hoffman and Marek Fodor, "Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2010, pp. 41-49; "Valerie Bauerlin, "Gatorade’s ‘Mission’: Sell More Drinks,” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2010; Adam Ostrow, "Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center,” www.mashable. com, June 15, 2010; Rick Lawrence, Prem Melville, Claudia Perlich, Vikas Sindhwani, Steve Meliksetian, Pei-Yun Hsueh, and Yan Liu, "Social Media Analytics,” OR/MS Today, February 2010, pp. 26-30; "Is There a Reliable Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing?” Marketing NPV 3 (2006), www.marketingnpv.com, pp. 3-9.