Nirmal Deshpande
How are we doing and how can we do it better? Nirmal attempts to answer these questions as he manages planning and research for Ad Council PSA campaigns.
Posts by Nirmal
Marketing Good Health
The CDC hosted its annual Conference on Health Communications, Marketing, and Media in Atlanta last week, and I had the opportunity to spend three days listening to talks by public health experts and social marketers and chatting up folks from around the country who are passionate about using mass communications to help solve public health objectives.
This year’s summit focused on “Listening for Change,” the idea that the most effective campaigns and interventions are those that acknowledge that marketing is increasingly about dialogue rather than one-way broadcast. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion focused on the role of social media in social marketing and why these platforms represent a fundamental shift in the media landscape.
I was heartened to see that the public health community is embracing social media platforms as part of their interventions, but all the same, I found the level of discussion to be slightly disappointing. Absent from the conversation was discussion about HOW to use social media in the context of health and health-related behavior change. Furthermore very few presenters spent much time discussing the impact of their efforts. While calculating ROI in social media is admittedly tricky, it seemed odd that in this gathering of mostly government public health officials, little attention was paid to results. This seemed to be a theme even in non-social media presentations – many presentations were light on impact evaluation and calculating the ROI of interventions.
Filed under: Communications
Tags: CDC conference, health marketing, ROI, Social Media
All views are not created equal: How to make sure your digital content hits its target
An eyeball is an eyeball is an eyeball. Falser words were never spoken. Every time I hear someone brag about the success of their digital creative by pointing simply to the number of fans they have on Facebook as proof, I want to poke mine out. Sure, determining the impact (and value) of “engagement” with digital content in social media is still tricky, but when it comes to measuring exposure to content through social media campaigns, old rules still apply – the quality of eyeballs can’t be overlooked.
A recent post column in AdAge (Sorry, but Counting Facebook ‘Fans’ or Video Views Won’t Help Your Brand), correctly identifies a troublesome practice that too many marketers follow – using topline metrics like the quantity of Facebook fans or video views as the only measures of success rather than also considering the quality of these impressions and engagements. It’s this question of quantity versus quality on which the effective analysis of social media impact hinges.
A look at our analysis of traditional media metrics is instructive. We needn’t necessarily change how we look at data when it comes to examining quality of impressions. Neilson and other auditing systems allow us to look at demographic information to see how efficient our ads have been in reaching the desired target audience in traditional media. In much the same way, many of the major social media platforms now offer a tremendous amount of data about users who engage with our content. Facebook and YouTube insights offer demographic information on fans as well as viewers of ads. Twitter has been the slowest to offer robust analytics, but recently announced intentions to do so in the near future. (more…)
Filed under: Communications, Research and Evaluation, Social Media
Tags: evaluation, facebook, Research, Social Media
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