Startup Blog

I'm hearing more and more questions over time from founders, execs and marketers at startups about NPS (net promoter score).  If you are not familiar with NPS, check out this overview and my interview with the creator of NPS.  We used NPS extensively at HubSpot starting when Jonah Lopin implemented it around 2009 (he's now founder of Crayon, check it out if you do any marketing or design work - I'm an advisor and investor).  NPS can be a very valuable tool in measuring customer happiness and the underlying growth potential of your startup, if it is used properly.  Unfortunately, from the questions I have been getting, I worry startups are misusing NPS, so here are some of my thoughts.

Earlier this week at Woot Con, in addition to the keynote presentation, I gave a presentation about Lead generation, Lead Conversion and ROI.

I love data.  Netflix makes available rental data by zip code.  Mash that up with a map and you can get some cool stuff.  This article on NYTimes.com has a cool graphic that allows you to see rental popularity by different titles and zip codes.

I am speaking today at the O'Reilly Twitter Bootcamp in New York City.  Here are my slides that talk about the ROI of Twitter.

Download in PowerPoint (PPT) format or click through the slides below.

And of course... follow me on Twitter.

Another blog article from my email outbox.  Here is most of my response to a question about how to measure social media marketing ROI at a B2B company.

1. Reach. (overall reach/database size)
• In the old days, you had a mail/email database. Now you have a number of channels where you can still send messages to people, but they might not be in your "database" but it is almost the same thing. We track monthly a total "reach" adding up a number of metrics, like:
• # blog subscribers
• # fans on Facebook
• # followers on Twitter
• # group members on LinkedIn
• # iTunes subscribers
• Others/etc.
• This is pretty easy to do manually once a month in a spreadsheet.
  
2. Buzz.
• This is sort of an advanced version of the "number of mentions" chart that PR people often use, except this one includes all blogs and online discussions. You want to track the number of times you are mentioned and same for your competition. If people are talking about you more and more, and especially in relationship to your competition, that is good.
• You can do this manually by tracking
• # pages in Google search results for a search on your company brand
• # people that find your website each month on your branded company/product terms
3. Sentiment.
• You try to figure out the number of people who are saying good and bad things about you and trend that over time. For a startup, you just follow conversations and guestimate it since the volume is so low.  For bigger companies, there are some software solutions that are OK, but still being perfected for this (Radian6, Techrigy, Andiamo Systems, Trackur, Crimson Hexagon). The market is immature in my opinion, but the concept is good to think about.

[I am not a political person.  I am not an Obama groupie (it feels like 90% of Bostonians and 90% of Internet users are blind Obama groupies).  I look forward to seeing real results, not talk, from our new president.]

But I am fascinated by marketing, language and messaging.  So, after getting an idea from an article by David Meerman Scott, I took the text from the Bush and Obama inauguration speeches and made word clouds.

What is noticeable to me is the lack of significant difference.  What do you see?  Leave a comment.

 

Marketing has been making a slow progression from art to science over the years. It started when "direct mail" or "database marketing" people began doing direct mail and catalogs and measuring the results. With the advent of the Internet, it became more attractive to be an analytical marketer, as email marketing grew in popularity.  That was probably the birth of "scientific marketing". Now with some technological advances and new understanding of how to leverage the Internet in marketing, there is a growing feeling that pretty much all of marketing should be analytical. But, most marketing people still have questions like:

• Why does sales think all the leads are so crappy?
• How come it is so hard to measure all my different marketing programs?
• How can I use a Blog to better market my company?
• How valuable is my web traffic?
• What do all these web stats actually mean for my business?
• How can I measure social media marketing?

If you have ever felt like this, check out this article about marketing challenges on the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog.  You can also check out this video about closed loop marketing, to learn what you can do to try to be more scientific about your marketing.