Dennis Troyanos: Today I’m joined by Ian Baer, Chief Strategy officer of Rauxa. Welcome to Game Changers Live

Ian Baer: Thanks, Dennis, I appreciate it.

DT: I’m also joined by my partner Norman Sherman.

Norman Sherman: Good morning.

DT: We’re going to start with a couple of basic questions, Ian, and we’ll have a broad discussion about Rauxa and the future of advertising. What does the Rauxa brand stand for and how does it differentiate itself from the many competitors…integrated marketing agencies that are literally in this Tribeca neighborhood?

IB: Well, I think Rauxa has always stood for a very creative approach to accountable marketing. If you go back to the roots of Rauxa as a direct marketing agency, starting twelve years ago, the mission has never changed. We are here to make our clients successful by helping them acquire, engage, retain, and grow their customer base. I think we differentiate, more than anything, by an independent spirit that puts the client’s success ahead of everything else, and that comes from our founder and permeates all the way through the agency.

NS: Dennis, you used the term integrated marketing agencies. Ian, is that a term that you still use today? If it’s not, what do you use?

IB: We use it. For a while I was referring to integration as the i-word, because everyone seemed to have a different angle on it. In some cases it’s even used to refer to the process of integrating multiple touch-points. When we say integrated marketing we really mean by any means necessary. One of the things that we strive to make happen here at Rauxa is the ability to go truly channel agnostic to help our clients reach accountable marketing goals. Integrated means that if we can do anything it takes to touch a customer and motivate them to buy them or stay or buy more or tell their friends or socialize a brand, we’re going to do it.

NS: The holy grail for most marketing communications firms is to be able to tell a story that works hand-in-hand with each piece, regardless of what channel you’re using. What is it that you do here that enables you to be successful at that?

IB: Integration has to happen systemically for an agency to do it right. I’ve been with a lot of agencies over the years; the approach to integration is all too often: “We want to get into digital, so let’s start a digital division.” “We want to get into direct, we’ll start a direct division.” Now everyone has a social media division. When it’s a separate division, a couple of things happen that almost destroy your chances of success. The first is that because it’s operating as a separate practice from the core of the organization, it doesn’t permeate what’s happening in the other areas of the company. Change doesn’t occur; you simply have a bunch of freaky kids in the basement who’re doing something different. Because you have the bunch of freaky kids in the basement, you don’t get the best talent. Nobody wants to be in a two- or three- or four-person start-up division of an integrated agency that’s decided this is the flavor of the month. You wind up attracting – hate to say this – second-rate talent. The top talent wants to work with the agencies that are innovating in that space. The only way you can keep innovating in all spaces is to fully integrate the practice, which means integrated practices, integrated creative, integrated account people, otherwise it doesn’t work.

DT: You’re the CSO for Rauxa. How would you describe your charter in this role? What do you do every day that makes your job not just unique and special, but exciting?

IB: I was fortunate enough to be able to create that charter because I originated the role at Rauxa. My vision was very much along the lines of what I was explaining: the ability to integrate all of it. That means we get to be the leaders of the ideation process. In a lot of ways, it’s detective work. We are the owners of the insight-generation process, whether that’s primary research, secondary research, the use of online listening and monitoring tools… most importantly, the ability to sort through that, synthesize it, and understand which insights are valuable. I can’t stand when I see marketing presentations – whether it’s a case study at a conference or work that an agency does – where you’re just flooding the recipient with “Here’s everything I know!” It’s like a show-off contest, and this isn’t Trivial Pursuit. About 5-10% of the information that we dig up in an average client assignment is actually useful and pertinent. What makes our strategy practice here solid is our ability to push aside the insights that aren’t useful and focus on the ones that are going to make our clients money.

NS: That’s really interesting. I understand the point that you’re making about flooding people – particularly creative people – with a litany of things, and they can’t deal with it. The challenge is to distill it down into that one nugget, that one piece of magic that can be the catalytic converter for the creative people.

IB: Absolutely. We try to bring everything down to what we call a manifesto.

NS: Is there anything that you can talk about which is not proprietary that might give us a good example of this in action?

IB: I don’t know if you know Wellcare. They’re a managed care organization that does business in thirteen US states. Their core mission has always been at the lowest end of the socio-economic ladder in the Medicare and Medicaid space for people who really cannot afford healthcare. They’re provided a certain level of benefits by the government but they tend to be our most overlooked citizens. They’re greatly in need of healthcare and they tend to be under-serviced. We got into it a bit with Wellcare. They were looking to reinvent the brand in addition to making all of their direct marketing work a lot harder. In this category, everyone’s saying the same thing. Everyone’s using the same imagery.

Wherever you’re listening to this, if you’re near a computer, Google Medicare. Look at some websites of companies that offer Medicare advantage plans, and let me know when you find one that does not include a picture of old people smiling with trees in the background. There’s something about trees in the background that is supposed to indicate life and renewal. Everyone is using the same words and even the same visual language. Wellcare was following that route because that was considered the path to success, and we had to boil it down to “What’s the one thing that makes you different?” For them, the one thing that makes them different is that whatever anybody else is offering in that marketplace, they’re offering more. More tends to be a difficult sustainable advantage: anyone can always one-up you. They’ve got a twenty year dedication to looking at whatever anyone else is doing and saying “We’re going to give them dentistry,” when nobody else in the market is offering dentistry. They were the first Medicare plan to approve Viagra; they take into account the whole person. We made everything about the notion of being well cared for. Instead of it being their name, we made that a brand promise. When you are well cared for, here’s what it means: it means we care for the whole person, et cetera.

DT: What kinds of clients does Rauxa work with, and how would you describe the ideal client profile: a client that ought to be working with Rauxa?

IB: We work with a really diverse set of clients, but it’s clients who put accountable results at the top of their list that are going to find their way to us. They’re the ones that we look for, because we’re proud of our dedication to delivering results. We’ll do it in very creative ways and we know that’s where we’ll be successful. If our mission is to make our clients heroes to their organizations, their shareholders, and even to their consumers, we want to find clients who value that approach to accountability and results. I think the ideal client is the one who lets us in as a business partner, not a marketing services firm. I was once asked [about that] very directly in a final pitch meeting. My response was that the way I’ll know you value me as a business partner and not just as a marketing agency is the first time you invite me to a meeting that has nothing to do with marketing. I think that’s the ideal client.

DT: Talk to us about the Rauxa culture, and what makes this organization unique and special for you and for the people that work here, naturally?

IB: Rauxa is a special place. The fact that we are an independent woman-owned agency is a big driver of culture here. We’re not beholden to shareholders and hitting monthly numbers and the sorts of things that, unfortunately, do plague a lot of big agencies. It’s a dirty little secret of the agency business that plenty of agencies have to recommend things to clients based on their own business objectives ahead of the client’s. We’re never asked to do that here. We work for a founder & CEO who instills in us this belief she has that “My clients are my heroes.” Everyone here is expected to follow that through. The spirit of the place really is Jill Gwaltney’s image as that sort of leader who always puts client success first. That’s what gets rewarded here. If you’re used to that big agency culture where things move a little more slowly and everything has to happen in due process, that’s not Rauxa. Rauxa is more run and gun than that and you have to be a little entrepreneurial to succeed.

DT: So your DNA is very client-focused DNA, which is something that agencies talk a lot about. When we talk to their clients, we don’t hear the same thing. If we were talking to one of your clients over lunch today and asked what the one greatest strength that Rauxa has, what would we hear?

IB: In a recent client meeting where we were awarded a significant piece of additional business from a client that we already had, their CMO said that Rauxa was chosen because they believed that of all their agency partners we were the ones who always put their business needs ahead of ours. That’s right out of the client’s mouth. If I can just give you a short anecdote, when I first started consulting with Rauxa last year, I was on the verge of accepting a position someplace else. I figured I’d pick up a few days of consulting work. They reached out to me because they needed some help with additional strategy for a client. They brought me to the client to present the strategy, which I told Rauxa would be a huge mistake because their clients would fall in love with me and want to hire me – which was a total joke – and look how things turned out. So I got down to this client – a major East Coast financial institution – and after the meeting I got to meet a few of the clients that I had just presented a social media strategy to. I was really taken aback by the care and the passion that they showed to create more opportunities for Rauxa within their organization. I was fascinated by that. I continued the consulting assignment over the next week and I got to meet another client – Rauxa’s biggest client – Verizon. It was the same thing all over again: talking to these people who actually seemed to care about the agency’s future and the agency’s success. It had been so long since I’d seen that level of client love that I said “There’s something really different about this place.”

On creative employees

IB: A lot of agencies are figuratively or literally the guys down the hall. They do their own thing, they keep their own hours, they march to their own drummer, and that’s fine. Creative folks are wired differently. They’re much more an integrated part of the culture here. They get involved in strategy up front. You see them talking to a database strategist now and then because they actually want to know what sorts of insights are coming out of the data that might make their work smarter. Creative is a better integrated part of the work we do here, and we only hire creatives who care as much about the results as they do about the quality of the work. We are infused with creativity throughout because they sit in on more meetings and are more a part of the process.

DT: Many companies that we come across are very focused on analytics, segmentation, and data. Where does Rauxa fall in the spectrum of companies who focus on that?

IB: It’s certainly a core competency of ours. We are in our twelfth year, and about eight years ago we were asked by our largest client to help them get smarter about database management. We brought on board a very senior guy who is still with us and leads our data strategy practice, Peter Powell. Peter has a brilliant gift for being at the top of the game technologically but also being able to translate it to marketers in a way that they can easily understand. He doesn’t get lost in regression analysis and those sorts of things; those are the means and he tends to focus on the reason why and the end. It’s a huge part of what we do. It’s about a twenty person department here at Rauxa, so that’s 15% of our staff. It’s everything from modeling and segmentation, predictive tools, all the way through to very sophisticated analysis. One of the great things about having a client like Verizon is that they really keep us on our toes. Every single thing that we do at Rauxa has to attach at some point to the sale of a specific device, or the opening of a specific account, or the generation of a sales force lead. Because we are held to that level of accountability, we are constantly improving the sophistication of our analytics and tracking so that we can say: “The person who watched this video on YouTube bought that tablet a week later.”

DT: I’m going to change the direction of the conversation a bit here, and talk about the agency business and the communications business in general. I’m sitting in front of two agency veterans. When I met you guys twenty years ago, you weren’t veterans, but now you’re veterans all of a sudden. Tell us about the changing nature of the client-agency relationship, and I’m also going to ask my partner to pipe in on this as well, because he’s got a unique perspective that I’ve heard in a variety of meetings.

IB: Well, I think on both the client side and the agency side, the level of pressure is much greater than it’s ever been. Pressure comes from a few places. The state of the economy: Just look at the average tenure of senior marketing people. It’s a lot shorter than it used to be. They are really under the gun. If you sell cars, every weekend your job is in danger if you don’t hit your numbers. The pressure on our clients is much greater than ever, and that in turn puts a lot more pressure on the agency. The state of the economy is one factor.

I think technology creates a whole different level of expectation and pressure as well. When I started in this business – and it pains me to remember this – there was this thing behind the reception desk that was under a dust cover. Someone said it was called a facsimile machine, but nobody really knew how to use it. If you had an out-of-town client, you would Fed-ex the copy to the client and at some point the next day the client would receive it and you might talk over the phone. Now, the expectation of 24-7 ability to take direction or turn on a dime is much greater. I know that pressure is on the clients as much as it is on our teams here. As a result, it’s more tenuous and more easily fractured.

DT: Norm, how would you respond?

NS: I’m going to postulate something and see how you respond to it. Back in the day, agencies were really marketing partners for their clients. As time has gone on, for a variety of reasons – some of which you’ve hit on – agencies have tended to become much more vendors of execution and to commoditize what it is that they do. Here at Rauxa, everything you do is accountable; you can really tie into what it is that the clients are being held responsible for. Do you find that taking an approach like that helps you build client relationships, build tenure and stickiness with your business, and gets you out of a vendor role?

IB: We had a recent conversation with someone at an existing client that we don’t work with. This individual has his own agency relationship, which I can appreciate that he’s very protective of. While all the other people in his organization have given us lots of work, he’s never given us any. He sat down with us recently and he said: “I was looking over at the reports you’re doing for this division, and as much as I would like to debunk what you guys are doing, the data is so undeniable. I feel like I have to start working with you.” I think that approach to accountability and objectivity, in the end, makes us a more valuable partner. It results in superior client retention. I’ve been in a lot of places that have a tough time holding on to clients. I think our commitment to accountability is a huge reason that clients stick around with Rauxa.

NS: Do you have an opportunity to leverage that accountability into compensation structures?

IB: Sometimes. We do have performance-based agreements with a handful of clients. More and more, it’s something that clients like to talk about but, in the end, they’d rather just get the lowest hourly rate that they can from us. We try to be very flexible. If a lower commitment and more betting on the come is necessary, we’re open to that and we engage in it, but very often, especially with procurement departments, they just want to know that they’re getting a fair value.

DT: We all have children. Ian, I know that you have more children than both Norm and I put together.

IB: I have five children.

DT: Right. If your kids are anything like our kids, I’ve noticed that they distrust marketing and advertising. Tell us what your view is of this generation and the challenges of this generation: Messaging to them, communicating to them, and how that code is going to be cracked in this upcoming era.

IB: I have a philosophical opposition to lying, but beyond moralizing, it’s a pain to lie. You always have to remember what you told this one and that one. The same rules apply in marketing: It’s much easier to tell the truth. There’s much more pressure than ever to tell the truth because 80% of the time if somebody gets interested in what we have to say on behalf of the client, they’re going to go check it out with a jury of their peers online anyway. If they dig up something about us through a consumer experience that belies the promise we just made, the whole case unravels. We talk to our clients about what we call the “Four Be’s” of having a successful campaign. The last “Be” is to “Be True.” Always tell the truth and when we say the truth we mean a defensible truth: if I go to other consumers, it’s not going to get undone. Only 9% of consumers believe what brands post to Facebook. 6% of consumers believe what brands post to Twitter. 31% of consumers believe total strangers. That’s where brands rank in terms of trust. Think about the last ten total strangers you’ve met: they’re five or six times more trustworthy! We would much rather deal in truth and authenticity and collaborate with consumers to move our client’s messages, rather than just shout them. We don’t believe in that.

DT: Earlier this morning Norm and I were at a series of meetings where the chief element of the discussion was the unique assets of agencies. It all came down to one word, and that was talent. I’d like to talk about the key traits that you look for in a Rauxa team member, employee, or colleague.

IB: Talent’s the one thing that can never be commoditized. You can match a process, you can match a product, but the individual that we put in front of you – who’s responsible for managing your account, or creative messaging – is not replicable. From a Rauxa standpoint, not everyone’s right for this place and this place isn’t right for everyone. We do expect more from people in terms of doing whatever it takes. There’s relentlessness to the personality of a Rauxan that is very different. If there is a trait that makes you a real Rauxan – and it’s been proven out, we use a tool called a predictive index to figure out the best way to work with a person – and that consistently predicts whether you will succeed at Rauxa or not. Rauxans have to be over-the-top proficient communicators. I think it’s because of the openness of our culture, and that can-do attitude. Some of it is what we project not only to our clients but to each other. This is the most positive, optimistic work environment I’ve ever been in. That comes from the top of the organization and filters all the way down.

NS: You’ve had management positions in the past at a variety of agencies. You’ve hired people. Some have been successful and some haven’t. You’ve liked working with some of them. Would you say that all of the people that you’ve worked with successfully in the past could come here and work with you successfully again? Is it a reflection of you and what goes on between you and somebody that you work with, or is it the environment that really drives the success?

IB: The vast majority of people that I’ve partnered with successfully could do it here, but not all. Some people in this business can get a little jaded. This constant optimistic “you can do it,” attitude makes some people nauseous. I appreciate that; those people shouldn’t work here. By and large, the values that I’ve always cherished: People who tell the truth, people who go out of their way to make sure that they know what they’re doing, and people who passionately care… that’s what it takes.

DT: What are the top three skill sets that you believe are essential for leadership in the agency business in general today that clients absolutely must have working on their business?

IB: If I have to pick three, the first would be: pay attention. The world is constantly changing under our feet. You’ve got to know what the media landscape looks like for almost any consumer that you have to go to market for. Second would be: keep your tool set broad and deep. The number of necessary touch-points has increased tenfold in the last few years. The third one is: don’t box yourself in. Be a big thinker. Come up with a hundred more ideas than you need. Push yourself to unrealistic points in order to generate breakthrough solutions for clients. Clients always ask for things that have never been done before, and if you give them one of those, they’ll say “Show us a case where you’ve done this before.” I do think that constant focus on making yourself smarter so that you can ideate bigger is important.

DT: What will be the greatest area of focus for Rauxa going into 2012 and beyond? Give us a peek into the future.

IB: My greatest – or at least favorite – business quote comes from Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time. When they asked Gretzky what made him so much better than anyone who has ever played that sport – and he was arguably the most dominant professional athlete within his sport ever – he said “Everyone else is skating to where the puck is. I’m skating to where the puck is going to be.”

DT: Ian thanks, this has been a great discussion.

Companies have access to more information about their customers than ever before. Yet many marketers struggle to capitalize on this wealth of knowledge in meaningful ways that allow them to cost-effectively enhance the customer experience, deepen customer loyalty, and secure future revenues. To do this, Predictive Modeling, an approach focused on helping companies glean actionable intelligence based on historical data, remains direct marketing’s strongest tool. Here are five ways to use predictive analytics to identify opportunities:

1. Identify and organize what you have to work with.
Begin by assessing your available resources. What kinds of data and analytic tools do you have to work with? Try breaking everything down into three goals: short-term, leveraging what is readily available, medium-term, solving for gaps and other areas of improvement, and, long-term, which has three components. Improving the value of your data quality in terms of record deliverability and desirability, improving your data quantity, in terms of deepening your market penetration to reach as many new prospects as possible, and, improving your data warehouse infrastructure, for robust campaign targeting, greater relevance and cost-efficiency.

2. Be careful not to get lost amid success metrics by ensuring your models ask the right questions.
It’s true to say that a response model improves DM performance –but what about those responders’ conversion propensity and potential value? Perhaps “product-specific net conversion models” would be better approaches? Asking your data the wrong question is probably the most common mistake in dataset selection for the model build.

3. Are your prospect and customer databases sizable enough to warrant the investment of custom segmentation?

While modeling predicts certain Key Performance Indicators (KPI)–say, Response %–it does not necessarily explain why. The majority of such predictive tools examine how data elements combined “move together” and to what mathematical extent, but without significant description. A model’s variables may prove out some intuitive insight regarding your target population’s wants/needs, but they are not intended to do so – they should not be considered a profile.

Segmentation allows you to group prospects by their demography, psychographic, or attitudinal natures, as well as their purchasing patterns (for example: their migration among equipment, products, and services). Consumers vary significantly in their purchasing patterns by cause, value and timeframe. Typically, 6–8 relatively “unique” customer personalities reside within larger prospect/customer universes.

Each is unique in its performance levels and demographic/psychographic composition. Understanding such differentiations can be critical in building relevance within creative, copy, and messaging, in addition to testing offers, calls to action, and response channels. Comparative profiling is always recommended across all segments.

4. Leverage multiple analytic tools simultaneously.
Predictive Modeling helps to identify targeting, and Segmentation allows for greater relevance between the recipient and your outreach. When using both analytic tools, be sure to assess performance by both model decile/segment. When combined, you’ll find variances in performance by decile per segment. This informs model depth selection on any KPI basis, such as response, cost per response, conversion, cost per acquisition, and cumulative values.

5. Reporting
Understand your campaigns’ lifecycles and identify appropriate tracking periods. It’s always a good idea to validate your analytic tools used and compare this against prior campaigns’ performance to assess potential toolkit degradation. In addition, you should be sure to measure incremental performance levels. Maintain a “no touch” perpetual holdout group to assess organic market behavior, and compare that versus the “treat” population to assess each KPI’s incremental difference–this is the true gain of your marketing dollars.

Marketing used to be so tidy. Buy some media, print some brochures, maybe follow up with an email, and then make the sale. Advertisers just had to follow the principles of the purchase funnel, and they herded consumers through it for decades. For years, we’ve known that things were changing, and marketing consultants like Forrester and McKinsey have been developing next-gen funnels in an attempt to make sense of it all.

Three of the 1,350,000 image results when you Google “Purchase Funnel”

Your basic purchase funnel is the first shown below. The next is Forrester’s. I’m not smart enough to understand this one. Last is the McKinsey funnel. This one makes the most sense to me, as my thoughts here are primarily focused on the gathering and shopping portion of the process.

Marketing used to be a great business for control freaks, but no longer. Consumers just run free, in search of information, confirmation or damnation of a company’s products and services. As marketers, we’ve always known consumers were in charge, but now they know it.

It’s changing the way we think about marketing in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Recently, we were given the assignment to figure out how sports bloggers in the Midwest could interact with Verizon products in a way that was relevant to the bloggers’ followers. Coming up with a list of suggestions was a new kind of marketing challenge. What would a sports blogger want to do with the product? Would the bloggers’ followers be interested and engaged in the content? We landed on a list of suggestions we’ll be sharing with the bloggers, so we’ll see what happens next.

This is just one example of how to wrangle the free-range consumer. They go wherever they want whenever they want. They talk to their friends on Facebook, search Twitter, read blogs, and basically search out as much information about products and services that is NOT generated by the marketer as they can find. If marketers are smart, consumers will eventually opt in to their messages, but only if they’re delivered where they want it. What else would you expect from our free-range friends?

It all ladders up to a new way to market, and I don’t think it’s a fad. It’s a dimension of social media that forever changes where and how consumers make purchase decisions. Trying to corral them just won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, the execution fell short of the idea. Having pinball, video games and magazines was a nice touch, but it basically looks like an area of the Ikea showroom where the TVs actually work. One detail I do love is the buzzer given to the spouse/girlfriend. In 30 minutes, it goes off and you have to come and collect your man. Treating men like children is funny. Never gets old.

I know this idea could look amazing. Imagine pop-up man caves in malls during the holiday season. They’d be dark, with wood paneling. Flat screens would show sports, “Raging Bull”, “Happy Gilmore” and “Goodfellas”. You could get a beer, eat beef jerky, and belch with impunity. And that 30-minute time limit has to go. If such a magical place existed, I’d be asking my family to hit the mall for a marathon holiday shopping session. I know my girls would love it, and I’m guessing the retailers at the Galleria would, too.

Develop a deep understanding of the business context. What are the program goals and what is the typical customer behavior(s)? This is as basic as it gets but often marketers just pick a measure without really thinking about the business context. What does the first-time purchase process look like? How long does it take? What does the repeat-purchase process look like? Ask a lot of questions, especially:

• Am I asking the right questions?
• Will this measurement answer my question?
• What other questions will this measure answer?

Take, for example, an email campaign intended to drive new sales. We might measure several things—opens, click-throughs, and sales conversions. Let’s say we choose sales conversions for our measure and the result is a measly 0.5%. Was this campaign successful? Doesn’t seem like it. What if I told you that customers were extremely sensitive to how easy the checkout process is… does measuring sales conversions still measure campaign success?

Consider using more than one measure. Sometimes success can’t be measured by just one number. It’s perfectly acceptable to use several different measures and evaluate success based on more than one criterion. In fact, it will help you to understand the bigger picture. But keep the total number small and only include a particular measure if you need it.

Going back to our email campaign example, let’s say we added click-throughs in addition to sales conversions. The click-through rate for this campaign ended up being 10%. Again, was the campaign successful? Ten percent seems pretty good, right?

Establish the baseline. Always make it a point to ask, “Compared to what?” Understand what the baseline for success is. A number by itself is just a number, but when you can put it in context, you can understand success.

Returning to our example email campaign once again: If I told you that the typical click-through rate for historical email campaigns was 15%, does this change your answer as to whether or not the campaign was successful? What if the typical sales conversion rate is 0.15%? Does your answer change yet again?

So as you’re strategizing for your next great marketing campaign, remember the importance of quantifying results—this crucial step could well ensure success beyond measure.

However, as direct marketers, we know that when the premise upon which a consumer initially engages does not square with the actual customer experience, we’re going to have trouble retaining those customers. The number one reason people “Like” a brand on Facebook is to get a promotional offer. And the number one reason people “Unlike” a brand is because after the initial offer, they get bombarded with more. And more. So, as we now enter an age in which anti-spam policies will change social media much the same way they changed email nearly a decade ago, here are a few smart tips:

1. The best way to get people to engage with—and stick with—your brand in social networks is to provide timely, relevant and useful content. Sure, giving away a trip around the world to get a bunch of Likes seems like a good idea at first, but those Likes are meaningless unless that consumer experiences day-in, day-out value from that social relationship with your brand.

2. While people do like to exchange information on deals via their networks, it’s the social aspect that keeps them coming back rather than the deals themselves. If you’re going to push promotional offers, it’s best to think about how these deals can be socialized, and perhaps how the power of the network itself and multiple people rallying around the deal can work to your advantage. Just repeatedly pushing out discount codes via Facebook—especially if it’s an offer that the consumer can find elsewhere—is likely to get your brand the boot.

3. Ultimately, you want someone who has engaged with your brand to feel as if they’ve been let into your inner sanctum. It’s a more personal relationship, and it’s a two-way street. Giving them access to content and information they can’t get elsewhere will engender engagement, advocacy and loyalty to your brand.

One brand doing this really well, not surprisingly, is Jones Soda, a 25-year-old company that has always understood the value of letting the consumer inside its “brand walls.” Over the years, it has let consumers give input to flavor development, used consumer-submitted photos (did someone say user-generated content?) on its labels, and now, on Facebook, it does as good a job as anyone of making its brand fans feel like they’re a part of something. Spend some time with Jones on Facebook and you can vote for what the Seattle-based firm’s profile picture should be, talk up retailers that sell Jones products (or call out those who don’t), discuss flavors, see videos of the Jones Soda movement in action or check out a never-ending display of consumer-created photos and videos that play like a love sonnet to the brand. Jones TV gives the brand a platform to connect with its fans’ love for extreme sports in a totally authentic way. You can also order customized bottles of your favorite flavor(s) and more. But if you’re “jonesing” for coupons, you’re in the wrong place… there’s not a coupon code to be found.

Think about something you’re truly passionate about. It could be anything: music, volunteering, sports or cooking. When you discuss this favored topic with a friend, you’re more likely to be effusive, enthusiastic and have a specific point of view. And when you’re on your own, you’re probably more likely to seek online content related to that subject.

Now think about a brand to which you’re loyal, one you may even say you “love.” How likely are you to engage in an extensive conversation about it? You may give it a mention here and there, but that’s about it.

The listening process is an essential first step in social strategy development. A simple brand-centric keyword search using Radian6 or NetBase or Crimson Hexagon (whatever your monitoring tool of choice) will immediately turn out countless examples of consumer opinion—good, bad and ugly. It reveals the disparity between what you think people think and what people actually think. And that alone is valuable in assessing a brand’s position in the social sphere.

The big mistake is stopping the search there and letting sentiment alone inform your strategy. In other words, there is danger in listening too closely to the brand. This approach is not likely to inspire the next social movement. To do that, you have to tap into something more visceral. A social listening tool is helpful, but you have to pair it with third-party data to get at what people really care about. A simple Google search can be just as informative as a Radian6 report when it comes to identifying an impassioned audience.

So make it a point to discover what gets people excited and create content that shows how your brand can help amplify that passion. These are the high-volume conversations that drive consumer engagement, and are most likely to spark the next social movement.

Through effective online listening, your brand can create a complete picture of its online presence, favorability and reputation.

It seems as if listening is quite an actively used word in social media and marketing these days. Yet most social media monitoring and listening done by brands seem to focus on the following questions:

• What are people saying about your brand?
• What are people saying about competitors’ brands?
• What is your brand’s share of the conversation?

While all this is useful, for the Strategy Team at Rauxa there are more important questions to your bottom line:

• What high-volume conversations are taking place today among your customers and target prospects that your brand could enter in a relevant way?
• What types of useful content can you create—or often simply repurpose—to drive millions of brand engagements and, ultimately, inbound leads to your brand?

Our approach to listening, which we call Audience Identification and Archetype Planning, provides these answers and more.

We help brands create collaborative, social and accountable relationships in the social spaces by first listening for the conversations taking place just outside today’s brand and category dialogue. These are often 100 times higher in volume than the in-category dialogue, and they often provide ideal opportunities to position your brand and redirect that conversational traffic to your site and/or company.

We use these findings as the basis for creating consumer (or business) archetypes, based on their behavioral patterns both online and offline, and the types of content they find most relevant and useful. Then, we help our clients develop programs that deliver the content these people crave, right back into those same conversations. By creating content for an existing, quantified conversation, we are able to bring a whole new level of predictability and accountability to social marketing. Even more, these types of digital assets—both useful and brand integrated—can continue delivering inbound leads like an annuity, often for months or even years after your investment in that content has ended.

Your customers are discussing your brand, and your competition, right now in social media—with you or without you. It’s time to listen, identify the buzz and participate in the conversation.

That’s a lot of pressure. Many creative talents find success in established routines that provide consistent results. Others try new perspectives depending on the task at hand. Just about everyone runs into creative blocks from time to time. Here are a few places I’ve personally found to be effective in eliciting creative insights:

1. Browse at the local bookstore

For me, there is no better place to find ideas and inspiration. Forget looking online. You need to stumble upon new and interesting thoughts you can touch and feel. Perusing books is the greatest research to solving any creative problem. Walk among the books, and see what surprises you. I bring along a notebook, and often take photos of covers, titles and quotes with my cell phone camera.

2. See a movie

Good movies inspire you to think about issues beyond those uncovered in the film itself. The last movie I saw led to a long discussion about remakes, and how they are resold in a different time (the movie featured trailers for Straw Dogs and Footloose; I get the massive marketing potential of the new Footloose, but what possible reason could there be for a new Straw Dogs? Perhaps Hollywood should produce new versions of Jaws and Deliverance while they’re at it). The point is that movies open your mind and imagination on so many levels. And sitting in a theater is the best way to augment the experience.

3. Walk… especially somewhere you’ve never been

There is not much inspiration found in repetition. Getting up and stepping away from the creative problem often works miracles. Besides, life is happening away from your desk. Sometimes you need to be part of it.

4. Listen to people around the workplace

The departments at a lot of agencies are too segregated. I talk to everyone—accounting, creative, reception. Ideas come to light in discussion, and often require a different perspective. The people with whom you work make life interesting. Collaborate with them. The best ideas start with conversation.

5. Watch what’s happening in popular culture, and investigate

As creative talent, our job is to talk to our audiences on an emotional level with an idea based on a human truth that everyone knows. Using material that is out there in popular culture is a great way to make this happen. Writer Carl Hiaasen said, “I wait for the headlines to inspire me.” He professes the oddness of everyday South Florida events provides him with all the material he needs to write his novels. Make the world your medium.

Where do you gather inspiration and look for ideas?

So whether negative or positive, for sheer entertainment or big budget advertising, the power of social media is undisputable. And in the advertising world, we’re all just a little, or a lot, enraptured. I’ll admit to being as excited about the power of social as the next marketer. But I’m a database marketer at heart, and still “enraptured” by proven DM basics: digging the lead-generation trenches, and crawling the miles to get to them; launching CRM plans to ferry those leads into best possible customer experiences (always readying measures should anything fail along the way); developing Retention efforts to ensure ongoing customer loyalty and engagement, and Winback campaigns to ensure we recoup the right lost clients.

The sophisticated analytic toolbox we use to do these things includes predictive modeling, the strongest record selection tool—a statistical rank-ordering of a prospect or customer universe, of their likelihood to behave in a certain way: Who’s most likely to respond to a direct mail campaign (in which case we’d build a Responder model)? Who’s most likely to convert? To own a cat? Love automobiles, or Betty White? Got milk?

When built and used correctly—with the appropriate guidance and thought leadership—predictive models can be the most impactful component of your marketing arsenal. Don’t underestimate the potential. And don’t underestimate the negative effects of these six common modeling pitfalls:

• Asking the wrong question. One client wanted to build a DM Responder model, with the intention of suppressing the “worst records.” We asked the client to reconsider developing a Suppression model instead. After all, the variables that correlate to being a responder may be very different from the variables that correlate to non-response.
• Building a model on too small of a population. As a rule of thumb, you need at least 2,500 to 5,000 records to ensure a quality model. Developing a model upon a smaller base weakens the model, as a smaller population may not adequately represent the overall universe. It’s always best to check for statistical significance first.
• Building a model on the wrong population. The data that goes into the modeling process must be reliable. If not, it can skew or bias the model’s true performance. For example, developing a model to identify at-risk churn candidates is quite a different thing than developing a model to identify loyal, high-ROI candidates.
• Shortcutting the process. A good model takes 4–6 weeks to build. If extremely intricate, it may take even longer, 6–8 weeks. Be sure to allow sufficient time for the model to be developed, tested and deployed effectively. A number of vendors promise turnkey software solutions. While a good option for a client with too small a base population, it’s typically not a good choice.
• Leveraging the appropriate diagnostics to ensure a model is not just explaining the past, but is predictive of the future. All models are built upon past behavior, but remember that prior marketing and promotional efforts can skew your results. For example, if prior campaigns only targeted females ages 45–65, chances are that will pop as a predictive variable in the model algorithm. Modeling is often hampered by self-fulfilling prophecy bias. To avoid this, modelers may choose to incorporate bias reduction measures to normalize the modeling population. Alternatively, if time allows for it, mailing a random sampling first can yield a better base population for model development.
• Diving too deep. Most models “break even” around the fifth or sixth decile. This is usually when a regression to the mean kicks in and undesirable records begin to enter the marketable universe. Each decile is weaker in its predictability than its predecessor, with broader ranges of error. Diving too deep can rapidly yield an unproductive campaign. The results from the model build should provide insight regarding depth selection, and several key performance indicators can be leveraged to identify appropriate cutoff points.

When used correctly, predictive analytics provide a great opportunity for a brand to gain a complete view of customer attitudes and preferences about its products.