MM: In my conversations with folks in Europe who really seem to be ahead of us, in terms of really understanding the “R” in CRM, really understand that first of all, you need to have a lifecycle model for what it means to be in a relationship with a brand. But also, do we have an explicit data collection model for collecting what I call “brand interaction data,” very early on in the awareness and consideration process?

Something else that I’ve seen in this area that’s really been a startling breakout success for some of the digital agencies is the use of viral videos that are part of a guerilla-marketing program. Viral videos explicitly designed for presentation and consumption at YouTube, FaceBook and some of these other video-sharing sites.

Then, tracking who actually downloads or posts or syndicates in those videos of their Blogs and writes about it. Then making an outreach to the people that posted favorable things about these humorous product placements. Almost like a paid feeding of viral videos.

BK: I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that Coca-Cola spends a lot of time and energy monitoring that very thing. Feeding that very engine. You didn’t mention it, but I’m sure you’re aware of Second Life. Burger King in particular spends a great deal of time and money on Second Life, which doesn’t immediately correlate back to store sales, but certainly does speak to that lifetime brand.

How do we find our customers in their place of preference and continually reinforce the brand? There are certainly some forward-thinking companies that don’t necessarily interact and sell stuff on the web, but they’re certainly using those mediums to solidify that brand loyalty.

MM: Yes. Early in our corporate history we did a lot of surveys. There were several almost axiomatic truths that have distilled from having surveyed over 50,000 people. I personally have interviewed probably 3,500 or 4,000 people.

Surveys are highly structured, scientific collections of bullshit. They give you top-of-mind associations and more specifically speak to the expectations of the person asking the question.

Most of the survey data rarely comes back to anything meaningful or insightful in terms of buyer behaviors. This really relates to the superficial, although necessary, task of understanding what your customers are thinking about. Understanding that what customers think very rarely correlates to what they actually feel and do.

BK: So in this on-line context you not only ask the question and get the response but you correlate this Q&A to what they were doing during the session and what they did after the question was asked and answered. Perhaps this will provide valuable insight for Customer Experience Management.

MM: The thing that I’ve tracked now for going on a year and a half is that companies have begun to do extended, open-ended interviews with customers at various stages of what I’ll call the “customer journey to success.”

In some cases, they’re not yet customers. In some cases, they’ve just bought something but they haven’t really yet made an emotional commitment to buy it again or to use it. All the way through arm-waving evangelists.

These interviews then get transcribed. Often, verbatim—with all the broken grammar and syntax that it often entails. These transcripts then move into a specialized content database, using a text-mining engine. We start doing semantic tagging, so as to identify topics and trends and topics. And some more advanced text analysis. We start to understand and to quantify things like sentiment. Keywords and phrases that are positive, negative and neutral, as they relate to a particular policy, program, product, technology, market, demographic segment.

So these text-mining and special voice-of-the-customer databases have really started to document and crystallize the taxonomy of awareness, consideration, trial, purchase and advocacy.

I say the taxonomy of that meaning that there are specific keywords and phrases. Some of them are related directly. Some of them are only indirectly related. This taxonomy of satisfaction then becomes the basis for social media monitoring, by which to start tracking the conversation about your product market customer segments, relative to those keywords that you’ve identified—and then starting to really build more meaningful dynamic day-to-day dashboards.

The idea is then to identify who in your market really has emerged as an advocate for a particular type of application or for product usage.

BK: This sounds much like the interaction you would want in a BLOG or social media interview. To get the best perspective you should engage with Jerry Tarasofsky (iPerceptions), Larry Freed (ForeSee Results) and even Rand Nickerson (OpinionLab).

MM: Great. I’m going to use this opportunity, Bob, to circle back on a topic that you introduced earlier. The term that you used was, “Voice of the customer.”

BK: Yes.

MM: I’m familiar with the term from my exposure into Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. More of a formal quantification of customer satisfaction and utilization rates and things like that. What do you mean, when you’re using “Voice of the Customer,” as it relates to customer experience management? What does that entail? Where’s it been and where’s it going?

BK: “Voice of the Customer” speaks to technologies that allow for direct customer dialog in an online environment. Primarily this takes the form of surveys and direct customer feedback. In particular there are two companies leading in this solution space: iPerceptions and ForeSee Results. Both have compelling solutions and back it up with consulting from business analysts helping clients to take action on the data collected.

Another emerging opportunity for customer feedback is mining content in social media environments including Blogs, Chat rooms, Facebook and MySpace, etc. Gaining access to this data and being able to aggregate remarks into categories could provide online marketers with tremendous insight about brand perception and loyalty, competitive and complimentary products or services, and many other associations.

The bottom line is companies need to get direct customer responses to add with statistics gathered in other interactions so they have a complete 360-view of their online visitors.

MM: That parallels the evolving role of a media-planning agency—specifically, a group that understands the syndicated research, compiled data, and other types of primary research, slicing and dicing the data to achieve an optimum media mix—that includes SEO, SEM, and other forms of engagement services. Does it follow that the SEO-SEM trend will continue moving towards even more specialized agencies?

BK: I do think the trend is for companies to hand-off or out-source SEM to agencies with a specialization in Internet marketing. There’s a lot of money in play. Companies spending these dollars need to have a high degree of trust they’re getting proper positioning for the dollars invested and that this positioning is driving the desired visitors to their site.

I believe agencies must build or license technology to improve their ability to manage these processes. I also believe agencies or some form of service provider needs to “mentor” on-line marketing best practices to their clients for a couple of reasons.

If on-line marketing is viewed as a black art then it will be difficult to view it as a strategic initiative of the company. If the agency holds all the skill or knowledge about these practices then in-house champions can’t articulate value nor influence KPI’s that are span on-line and off-line initiatives.

Google and others are actively taking on this consulting role in competition with agencies and in support of company in-house plans so again the agencies need to transform from exclusive outsourcing to more of a mentoring partnership.

MM: Yes. This goes to a conversation I’ve been having with other innovation leaders now for several years. In one sense, Google really owns that whole keyword/adword space. And the organic search that makes it relevant.

The second thing it has as an ad network. Both adwords, as well as banner ads and rich media things, in terms of animation and things like that.

The challenge that Google has in terms of growing its business is that online only represents one portion. Granted, a significant and rapidly-growing portion, but a portion nonetheless of the total spend.

So there’s a still tremendous—many hundreds of billions of dollars—spent in print, broadcast, out-of-home as well as direct mail and catalogue and so on. They’ve made moves to say, “Let us create a marketplace kind of network for that.” Be they spot display ads in print magazines with a barcode reader in it, so that consumers can scan the barcode with their mobile phones and get a coupon or whatever.

This comes back to what Google just recently announced. I don’t know if it’s a formal announcement or a beta announcement, but essentially a dashboard by which to integrate the Google analytics or Google scene in terms of “What’s going on,” in my website, as well as in the marketplace as it relates to concepts and products listed on my website. With the ability then to buy things.

Now we’re talking about a market planning desktop.

Can you validate pushback? Refine that narrative? And then perhaps explain how you see it working in the realities of the clients with whom you work?

BK: I can’t really comment on those statements since this is outside my area of knowledge. In my opinion this plan makes a big assumption that the creative capabilities and the experience of an agency are of less value than the automation of those processes and the buying power of a market maker like Google.

MM: I think that heightens a narrower, deeper, slice of creativity. That would highlight the price premium that someone who really understands a very specific part of an overall engagement theatre.

I’m really talking more about disintermediating the traditional media planner who—for the most part—was the only one able to translate the analytic insights into concrete action items.

BK: Agreed.

MM: Can you summarize some of the vendors that are leading the way in terms of SEM? You mentioned Covario. Any others in that space?

BK: Covario’s the only software solution I know of that provides an automation and auditing solution for SEM versus the placement solutions offered by companies like Omniture and WebTrends.

MM: What’s history of search engine marketing—in terms of current practice and vendors as well as what you anticipate in the future?

BK: Search marketing evolved in the mid-to-late-90’s as the number of search engines increased and marketers saw an opportunity to influence the search results on these engines. Today search marketing is defined by a couple of categories.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also referred to as natural search, is an effort by site creators to ensure the structure and content of their pages will properly “feed” the search engine spiders—so their company’s pages get top ranking. On most search engines, these results comprise the lower, left body of the results content.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also referred to as paid search, is an environment where keywords are bid on for ranking. These results typically display at the top, left and down the right hand side of the search results content and most often have a shaded background and even a “sponsor” designation title.

In my experience SEO is handled by a combination of in-house personnel and outside consulting or agency expertise depending on the importance of search rankings and the volume of keywords an organization is managing. SEM, by contrast, is almost always handled by an outside agency and sometimes by several agencies, especially when the client markets to unique industries, product lines, and / or geographies.

However, Covario represents a firm that provides a suite of software to help companies audit the effectiveness of their SEO and SEM processes, bridging SEO and SEM to create a new category—or so they intend! As the volume of keywords under management increases, the need for automation becomes increasingly important and eventually mandatory.

My impression of future state is one where technical solutions, consulting and services will be imperative to successful attraction of site visitors. More and more social network services such as Facebook, will play a role in site attraction success so look for an ever-changing landscape.

MM: But you and I both invest with Schwab, for example. So when we go onto Schwab, they’ve got a lot of the most sensitive data about us already. So if there are offers they could make that speak to my role as an economic actor, I’d say, “Yes. Hey—good! Bring it on!”

BK: So that’s more about internal personalization rather than industry persona development. Right?

As a matter of fact we’ve discussed this very topic several times in my web analytics group in Atlanta. Companies are constantly trying to define a manageable set of personas that represent the majority of their site visitors so they can fine tune content creation, marketing campaigns, product or service offerings, etc.

MM: In that context, a persona would represent a facet of my social identity.

BK: It might. Or, it might speak to your behavioral trends specific to one company or organization.

MM: So what kind of trends have you seen in terms of developing these personas? For example, I just read that MySpace has now spent a tremendous amount of time and money developing what they call “micro-niches” — about 1,000 or so very specific interests that they’ve mined from the profiles on MySpace pages. They’re then able to offer very specific activity-based or identity-based groups to advertisers seeking to get into that group.

BK: This isn’t at all an area of expertise for me but organizations like MySpace will certainly have interest and resources to develop such micro-niches beyond what a typical business would have. In the web analytic SIG discussions mentioned previously, corporations seem to be struggling to keep these personas in a manageable – 6 to 12 – range rather than building out hundreds or thousands of micro-niches. To me the question is “what’s the value of sub-divided users to that level unless you have products or services that are so unique?”

In your example, MySpace is looking for more and more exclusive groups of subscribers that will appeal to a large and diverse audience of advertisers. This makes sense for them to have thousands of personas.

MM: Just from what you know directly or indirectly from what you’ve read, have you seen much activity in terms of taking web analytic data and correlating it into more traditional analytic database of customer records needing transaction histories and so on?

BK: There’s often a conversation about integration of web analytic data into business intelligence systems for improved holistic reporting but very few organizations that I’ve dealt with are actually doing this. The question becomes “what is the value of this data to ERP, CRM, BI and other existing data structures?”

MM: We’ve seen tremendous progress in that area from the direct marketing side of the marketing ecosystem. Those are the big database compilers—Epsilon, Experian, Targetbase, Axiom, Merkle and so on—who have compiled huge, very rich databases on households, car ownership, as well as credit card history and transaction reports.

They’re now putting them into special analytic databases. Then integrating these really rich customer masters to a lot of this more transient web behavior stuff, and starting to develop more meaningful multi-channel marketing analytics. They really start to describe who this customer is. Not as a transaction point, but as more of a multi-dimensional relationship over time.

BK: So that’s different that the response I just provided. ‘Yes’ there is a desire to capture specific customer interaction data for use by the organizations you’ve mentioned and others including ComScore and Nielsen. Since most companies will see their visitor data as proprietary they’re more than likely not sharing it with an outside information provider. DoubleClick is an example of one company that captures some of this data via their ad services and I’m sure there are many others that aren’t coming quickly to mind.