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BtoB: What are you experimenting with? 

Popper: We're experimenting a lot with social media. Almost every marketing program has some element of social media, whether it be participation in the communities we already have or whether it's piloting a site on Facebook—and engaging thought leaders to come and engage on the site—and trying to grow a community from Facebook or Twitter. We are working on extensions of our conferences, using Twitter to create enthusiasm and post some of the content and drive users back to the community where the content is. 

BtoB: What are some of the ways in which you are realizing marketing efficiencies in the down economy? 

Popper: One of the things we are quite excited about is a virtual event platform. That's been a way for us to extend the reach of live events that we're having, so we have the efficiencies from making the content available to far more people and for longer after the event. It also has allowed buying groups from a single company to take advantage, whether they were at the conference or not. Because of the complexity in some companies about how they evaluate a software purchase, there may be many people involved; and this way, the people who were actually at the event and the people who weren't at the event can share the same content, so they stay on the same page as they are looking to evaluate a purchase. 

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year. 

When discussing tactics with clients in situations like these, whose mileage matters? By that, I mean that the approach should begin by asking the question, "Which measurement matters to the brand?" quickly followed by, "What can we actually measure?" Too often, marketers accept a set of measurements as the only ones that matter either because those are what have traditionally been used or because the medium most easily produces them. Relatively few marketers take the additional step of wading through the data to find the right measurements.

For the manufacturer above, the key measurement may not be how many people clicked through to the website, but how many of them then clicked a link on the website to find a retailer and what those clicks were worth in terms of typical purchase amounts. The retailer above may wish to correlate the increase in sales of the items featured in the search campaign to search activity.

The cost-per-acquisition model (CPA) provides advertisers with a guaranteed way to ensure ad efficiency, while also opening the door for social networks to monetize more of their traffic.

The benefit of CPA for advertisers
The CPA model is ideal for social networking sites because it eliminates virtually all the risk for advertisers of buying on a CPM basis. As a performance-based model, advertisers pay a fee only for the results their CPA campaign generates. That result can be any transaction specified by the advertiser. For example, an advertiser places a CPA campaign on ESPN.com. Rather than paying for all the people who see that ad, the advertiser only pays the publisher for each user that not only clicks on the ad but also follows through and completes the desired action as defined by the advertiser -- anything from an email submit or qualified lead to a sale or paid membership.