CEO talk!

Today morning, all of us at Tribal DDB got this mail from Tribal DDB Worldwide's CEO Paul Gunning. A must read...

This week I’m sending you a slightly different version of my weekly letter. I won’t focus on office openings or creative awards…I will return to that next week.

This week I want us to ask ourselves questions. How much do we really know about our clients’ customers? And what are we doing to learn more? Technorati just issued their “State of the Blogosphere 2008” report and cited the existence of 133 million blogs. They also noted that 90% of them write at least once a month about a Brand, Book, Music or Product. That is over 100 million postings, many of them about our clients. Are we listening? More importantly, are we listening and bringing that knowledge into our messages and experiences?

Google released their earnings last week and again, we saw explosive growth in search. Consumers, for the most part, are screaming their interest when they type in search queries. They are often indicating serious intent to buy. Do we know the top search terms that drive our clients’ businesses? Should we use those terms as copy points in our advertising? What can that search behavior tell us about the consumer and their relationship with our brands? What does it tell us about our clients’ competitors?

Often clients hand us their target profiles. Sometimes it comes with deep rooted research and segmentation data, but have we matched that up with who visits their web sites? Is it the same person, or someone a little different? Have we developed Personas that reflect the face(s) of the site visitors? Have we examined site behavior to see which piece of what our consumers tell us is the most valuable content (by visits and time spent) and which is not important at all (exit pages)? Have we looked at site side search queries to see if we are missing something substantial? Is there a consumer site path analysis that would challenge the current wisdom of which products are supported the most and which are left to fend for themselves? Do we impart that knowledge to our clients? I am optimistic with the changes that Google Analytics has made to their tool set. It may not be perfect but their attention to the product indicates they too believe site side analysis can reveal many hidden insights.

Finally, do we know where most of the linked and unlinked traffic comes from? Is there a particular social network that is becoming a rising driver to our site? And do we know why it is that way? Hitwise, Compete and other intelligence gathering tools can show us these facts. And from them, we can garner more knowledge about the consumer, what they care about and what they are thinking about as they interact with our clients’ brands.

There are hundreds of tools and resources we use to be the experts on the digital behavior. Ask yourselves if you are using the right ones. But most importantly, ask yourselves if you are using them to better our product in service to our clients. I guess the shortest question is; Are we listening?

Have a safe week. More office and awards celebrations next week…and a few surprises in store!

PG