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While some, myself included, have been skeptical about Facebook management’s apparent fixation on becoming more like Twitter, the numbers don’t lie: Facebook is gaining traction as a content sharing and discovery tool. Which is, of course, what Twitter really is.

While the growth in the amount of content being shared and number of status updates being posted on Facebook is partly due to Facebook’s perpetual growth machine, I think Facebook’s focus on encouraging these activities is likely playing a role. Obviously, Facebook and Twitter are not playing a zero sum game. There are still significant differences between the two services. But Twitter should be worried about Facebook’s potential as a content sharing and discovery powerhouse.

That’s because while Twitter has established itself as a mainstream phenomenon, it hasn’t been able to sustain its growth as well as Facebook has. And a relatively small number of users are responsible for much of the activity. What Twitter offers that Facebook doesn’t is pure simplicity. That’s certainly part of its appeal, but it’s also a vulnerability. For casual users who are interesting in sharing content and posting status updates more occasionally, Facebook may be a more logical tool. That poses a threat to Twitter’s future prospects.

But Twitter isn’t the only company that should be worried about Facebook’s meteoric rise. Web giants like Google and Yahoo have reason to be concerned too. After all, Facebook is looking like the new portal. It has redefined the internet experience for the millions of people who go to Facebook first when they fire up their web browsers. That’s because Facebook has become many things to many people. Interested in keeping up with friends? You can do that. Want to play games? You can do that too. Looking to find out what’s going on in the world? Numbers wise, Facebook is now even a rival to Google News.

The big question is how big Facebook can get, and how much it can offer, before it collapses under its own weight. Focus is important, and “you can’t be all things to all people” is as good a rule as any when building web products. Facebook’s success defies this logic, but perhaps it’s simply too big to fail.

Photo credit: 7son75 via Flickr.

That is a horribly glib statement, something that a Californian ‘guru’ might pen, so let’s preface these comments with two facts:

1. You cannot sell to someone who isn’t listening, or, to put it another way, if a customer is not opening and reading your email, you cannot influence them into purchasing.
2. A customer engaged with your email is six times more valuable than a dis-engaged customer.

So, a focus on engagement is critical to the development of the email channel, and I would suggest the following ten-point plan for building a successful engagement strategy:

Culture

Firstly, if you have not already then you must start by changing your mindset on one important point: there is no point in emailing customers who have disengaged from your programme.

Their behaviour is a clue, they really don’t want to know and as their data gets older they start to attract the attention of ISPs and trap addresses.

Define

Decide what engagement means to your organisation. For a retailer optimum engagement may be clicking through and browsing once per week, but for an insurance company this may stretch out as far as 11 months and may only be truly relevant during the renewal cycle.

This will define the rules around which you will track engagement.

Segment

Next, segment your base on engagement. Which of your customers has engaged with your email programme in the last week and which have not opened an email in two months, six months, 12 months? Who has never opened? Who are still in the welcome programme?

Contact Strategy

This step is fairly obvious. Devise a contact strategy based on the level of engagement. For ‘the super engaged’, those customers who open every email, you can step up the mailing programme and mail them more often.

For the disengaged, as I have stated, trying to re-engage with these mostly former customers is valuable but at a far less frequent basis.

Segment again

Now it is time to segment again and introduce more relevant content. Most organisations can now fully integrate email and analytics data which provides the email marketer with customer value and browsing data at a customer level.

At this point, it’s time to review the process, and to take on board mindset change number two. True engagement email marketing is based on engaging with the customer on their terms.

Whilst a customer agrees to receive emails from you when they sign up, they will not be in the buying window when you choose to email them. Engagement email marketing responds and interacts with the customer on their terms, with offers relevant to them based on products and services they are interested in at the moment.

It’s not going to replace the ‘email newsletter’, but it will ensure that when you have got a client engaged your email marketing is relevant and in step with them. This way you maximise your chances of making a sale. What gives you this information? The browsing behaviour available in your integrated email and analytics database.

Back to the plan…

Automation

Take your segmentation and automate it to increase return on investment and do more with the same resource. Establish automated programmes and siphon engaged customers away from standard newsletters and into programmes more likely to convert them.

Reassess your newsletter goal

As more and more customers are being managed in more relevant segments away from the main newsletter, use the newsletter to focus solely on improving engagement by changing the tone, offer and strategies based on customer value segments.

The disengaged

As a rule, a customer engaged with your email programme is six times more valuable than one who isn’t. So, set in place alternative strategies, such as ‘we miss you’ campaigns and surveys to reinvigorate them.

Lapsing

Identify lapsing behaviour. Analyse your customer behaviour and try to identify typical behavioural patterns of a customer about to lapse. Your ESP will have segmentation tools that can drop customers into alternative programmes based purely on re-establishing former engagement patterns.

Finally

Crucially, we cannot discuss with every customer exactly what they believe is the perfect email. But we have two key pointers. Firstly, behaviour, of which engagement is the number one factor… Do they read and click your emails? If open rates and click rates are going up then you are making improvements.

But, if I can be more vulgar, engaged customers convert more often. And that is the rub, because improving engagement increases income.  

Why? In Calacanis’ eyes, comScore has always been guilty of underreporting traffic. But its new service, which enables publishers to set up tracking beacons is a “pure shake down” he argues.

The new service offers publishers the ability to give comScore some server-side data through these tracking beacons. The data they generate is then
combined with comScore’s panel data to paint a more accurate picture of
actual audience size. There’s a catch though, and this is where the
controversy begins: to take advantage of this “hybrid” model,
publishers who aren’t already comScore clients have to pay. comScore charges a $5,000 setup fee, which comScore’s CMO Linda Abraham
says is necessary to audit the beacon implementations. Access to
comScore data adds an additional cost, but this isn’t required.

Publishers love server logs, and the most unsophisticated often complain that their comScore numbers vastly underestimate the amount of traffic they receive. The problem, of course, is that server logs count machines, not people. Advertisers aren’t interested in machines, so comScore has built a business around trying to accurately tracking real people. The primary tool for doing this: the comScore panel. Panels, however, aren’t perfect and comScore knows this, hence comScore’s new service.

The extortion logic goes like this: publishers who pay comScore $5,000 to set up comScore’s tracking beacons are more than likely to see their comScore numbers go up, so those who opt not to pay comScore $5,000 are being hurt because their figures are more likely to be underestimated.

There are some valid points to be made on both sides of this issue, but the reality is that, for better or worse, big advertisers and agencies rely heavily on the comScores of the world. They
may not be perfect, but the market has spoken. Larger publishers can either deal with the
fact that major advertisers and agencies rely on comScore or they can spend their time trying to create a tempest in a teapot.

From my perspective, if you’re a publisher and comScore is saying you have 5m uniques per month, but you think that number is closer to 10m, paying a one-off $5,000 setup fee for comScore’s tracking beacon is a no-brainer. $5,000 is a small amount for large publishers who are competing for media buys at the agency level and if the comScore beacon results in a decent increase in your reported traffic, the $5,000 investment will probably pay for itself many times over rather quickly. This isn’t blackmail; comScore is taking the time to set up a system through which it will have access to additional data that it currently doesn’t have, which it can in turn use to refine its panel-based estimates of your website’s actual audience size.

If you’re a smaller publisher or startup that can’t afford the $5,000, it may be frustrating to learn that panel-based services like comScore underestimate your traffic, but you probably don’t need comScore because chances are you’re still too small to be on the radar of major advertisers and agencies in the first place. In my opinion, smaller publishers who aren’t satisfied with ad networks will probably have more success selling the quality of their audience and ad offering to endemic advertisers than they will selling their traffic numbers to agencies.

In conclusion, I think calls to boycott comScore are silly. comScore isn’t the only game in town. Upstarts like Quantcast and Compete have their own take on measurement, and there’s always Google Analytics. comScore doesn’t have a monopoly and depending on your needs and goals as a publisher, competing products, some of them free, might be a better way to go. Who you go with should be based on these needs and goals, not some emotional response to comScore running a business.

Photo credit: Joi via Flickr.

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