Digital Marketing Commentary (Now With 15% More Snark!)

Out of curiosity, I checked to see how big the JetBlue Carpocalypse PR stunt really was. Here’s the details, courtesy of Radian6:

Here’s the buzz levels for “Carmageddon” over the last week. You can see it escalating daily as more news channels pick up the stories, and more people re-post those links. However, it REALLY spikes on 7/13, when JetBlue’s $4 BUR -> LGB fares hit the social web:

Jetblue’s “bump” to an existing major news story was so extreme that I had to see how much of the “Carmageddon” volume over those two days was actually due to the airline promo, and not due to other factors. Turns out that because the JetBlue story ran so quickly, it was only 25% of the buzz on Wednesday and Thursday:

Granted, that is still A LOT OF TRAFFIC when you have the City of L.A. asking celebrities to tweet about the closure. 25% is a pretty big chunk of the pie when you have EVERY NEWS OUTLET IN THE COUNTRY covering this story. (Even the Economist wrote about it – and they are pretty selective in their “real news” coverage)

The question is: what does the conversion funnel actually look like? How much of that buzz resulted in traffic to Jetblue’s website, and how many of those links resulted in clicks beyond the $4 novelty fare page? I would love to see how many new visitors spent more than 10 seconds on their site…or what their branded search term volume looked like yesterday. Will people think of JetBlue when they’re traveling in future? They certainly got the message out that they fly in and out of Burbank, and Long Beach, which are WAY easier to fly in and out of than LAX…even on days when the 405 is open.

I wish it was. You can automate bells and whistles; you can’t automate the kind of loving, hand-tagged work that I do on a social media report.

I spent hours today slaving over a hot Radian6 report, reviewing the past six weeks of social media posts for a pharma client. I’m trying to find patterns in the social media evidence for the FDASM movement, as opposed to the scattershot anecdotal evidence that many agencies have relied on to date. So I went through over four hundred posts, eliminating all the spam, foreign language, and unrelated posts. Then I tagged each post as a post type by category, assigned keywords based on the actual content, and analyzed the sentiment. This required actual reading of the vast majority of the posts, and an intuitive adult to tag and report on it. That meant, well, me.

At the end of the day though, I have a series of neat pie charts and bar graphs that illustrate and analyze the chatter surrounding my client’s brand over the last forty-five days. Now we can go to the FDA in February and say, hey, did you know that the most frequent posts we see regarding our client’s product are questions that the pharma company themselves are best suited to answer? Now, I have numbers. I just needed a full workday to really review the evidence.

Bonus for the media buyers: Combine frequency of posts with TV and search volume, and we may see some dovetailing worth mentioning. It will tell us whether the TV media drives social media chatter when it comes to pharma, or if its the docs and the referrals/recommendations who drive the demand. If its the latter, social media is more important than we thought, and we should let the FDA know that too.