By Matt Shaw, Interactive Marketing Manager, Flimp Media Inc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you read the collected works of some of the world's greatest marketing minds, you'll likely come away with a single conclusion: that the world is moving away from the kind of marketing they teach in business school.

People like David Meerman Scott would have us believe that marketing is becoming something more organic than measurable. Indeed, people who share Scott's way of thinking want us to stop thinking about marketing in terms of ROI altogether. Instead, these so-called “New Marketers” suggest we think about marketing in terms of motivating large groups of "ordinary" people to become de facto brand evangelists, and trust in them to provide a return eventually.

And they’re right -- that's all great advice. The problem is that despite what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith might tell us, certain individuals within a company will not be swayed by marketing budget proposals including the words "community building." I'm thinking primarily here of investors concerned mostly with profits, and not necessarily with how people interact with the company.

These kinds of people -- and they're not bad people, mind you -- are interested on what they're getting for their investment. For the past several decades, this has been a calculable figure. In fact, for some of these kinds of businesspeople, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which this figure cannot be easily (never mind realistically) calculated.

So it seems as though there's a dichotomy here. On the one hand we have community-building marketing tactics that are great for spreading your message between peers, but which are largely impossible to quantify. On the other hand, you have traditional marketing tactics for which you can calculate return in actual dollar-figure amounts with relative ease. You can't have both, say the new marketers, because the old methods effectively ruin any community-building tactics you might choose to employ, and vice-versa. You must choose.

Or must you?

It seems new marketers often forget about the full power of video. And I don't just mean the power to engage an audience.

Every time a video is played, data is generated. Somewhere there are bits and bytes streaming from a remote server to your computer screen, and they move in particular ways depending on what buttons you push. Often times that data is never collected. And even when it is, very rarely do you get to see all of it. But it's all there for the taking, if you have the right tools.

So what if you could use video to spread your message between peers -- a very new-school idea -- and collect specific data on the back-end so you could figure out how many members of a certain community are moving through the funnel? What if you could, as Scott says, "create a world-wide rave" and be able to calculate its ROI at the same time? And all without interfering with that video's ability to be shared?

If you could do both, wouldn't you?

You can.

Video analytics have progressed to a point where a marketer can track viewer behavior down to the movement of his cursor. But this data is useless if it’s not actionable. Fortunately, there are video analytics solutions out there, such as Flimp, that can track viewer interaction by email address. This makes your video data actionable, turning your community-building video content into a measurable marketing tool.

Flimp, which stands for Flash Interactive Marketing Platform, enables non-technical users to quickly create, edit, distribute, track and report video landing pages and video communications without any programming or IT resources. Since its first release in early 2008, over 120 companies and organizations have used Flimp -- including Allstate, Sirius XM, Citrix, Harvard Medical School and the United Way to increase customer engagement and response rates

Yes, you can have it both ways. Which leaves just one question: what’s the ROI on your New Marketing initiatives?

Author Bio:

Matt Shaw is an Interactive Marketing Manager at Flimp Media. To schedule a demo of Flimp, visit www.flimp.net.

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