Right or wrong, I tend to rely on my gut for market research as well (coincidentally, I’m reading an excellent book on this topic, Gut Feelings). Although it’s worth mentioning I do perform traditional market research in conjunction.

I don’t know if we do, necessarily, a lot of deep analysis or market research, per se. We certainly do a certain level of research. But again, it is so nuanced and comes back to having your ear to the ground, and having a sense of kind of the ebb and flow of what’s going on out there, at least in terms of retail or restaurants or coffee, or whatever the particular area is. So it’s kind of a combination of, like I said, having your ear to the ground, instinct, and a certain level of research.

So it’s not like we went to a traditional retail-marketing firm and said like, “This is our demographic, and please come up with a list of [laughs] candidates that fit that.” It’s really so much more of a psychographic. It’s more nuanced than that.

Mike Arauz knows digital strategy. Here’s an old excerpt I’ve had bookmarked for a while that I finally got around to re-reading. I’m posting the parts I want myself (and my clients) to remember.

Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client’s primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton’s two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. …each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case….The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

As a small elite group they believe there is a need to provide creative branding solutions across every platform. They can do it quicker and more efficiently then the traditional agency model. They can also do it cheaper without sacrificing the quality of the work. Arguably the work may be better.

I believe this to be true.

Perfect definition/application of what branded utility is.

Creating something that people need, not aping existing applications because you can, is key, says Palmer. “For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer’s life. This is ‘interactive,’ which is not synonymous with ‘online,’ by the way.”

In order to quantify all the responses, I had to essentially transcribe each entry into tags that I could sort and filter. For each question, I would run through the responses and extract the pertinent information… the things I ate or drank, where we went, the topics we discussed. Everything was reduced to a tag with as much specificity as provided.

Personal metric maven Nicholas Felton had that to say about the data he collected for his 2009 Annual Review. He’s really on to something, as I’m sure you can gather. But it’s something that I don’t think he specifically addressed. Measurable data is widely available for us, as marketers, to tally, measure, analyze and use. Surveys aren’t a necessity any more; they’re a nice to have.

I’ve always had issues with (filling out) surveys. For one, I’m constantly trying to figure out what the survey is really getting at. Second, they are typically too long and when they are offer me choices, like a multiple choice question, the answer I want to put is never there (it’s easier to measure though is what we’re told). And lastly, what’s the incentive for filling out the survey truthfully?

My belief is that we can use the internet for our surveys. Take for example, Turkey Twitter. We started out with the specific hashtag we wanted to measure (#turkeytwitter), however as we saw what was happening we realized there were 3 or 4 different hashtags that would gather better information.

Now, how can we pull data bits that are valuable out of a tweet that says, “I’m #thankful for friends, my dog beau, this cranberry sauce and world peace”. It’s easy. By analyzing what is in the data set we can break down that this person was thankful for “friends”, “dog”, “cranberry sauce/food” and “world peace”. It sounds simple, but I’m not sure how well it’s being used. Maybe someone could point me to some examples out there (companies using this data, tools out there, etc)?

So, I guess my point is that the web has allowed us this infinite pool of data to use for our research. I propose we, as marketers, do our jobs and use this data more routinely in our work.

PS. Having said all that, I do want to use a similar survey mechanism that Felton used for his survey. I think that’s powerful data and the quantified self is something I’m very interested in. In his case, he had to initiate the data through a survey as there are likely no tweets that will specifically address a meeting with him to the level of data he was interested in tracking. Sounds like a pretty good excuse to get some letterpressed business cards!

Among the tips of effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) found in Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists is this proven technique.

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

I also like the bit about trying to game Google – don’t do it. Do what you should with keywords, URL structure and links and spend time on quality content.

Congratulations, you have a million friends. But what’s it getting you? Marketers have worked hard to make friends online, but the benefits have been elusive at best. The real juice is word-of-mouth referrals from trusted sources, but you can’t tap into that with a sledgehammer.

AdAge touches on what Red Robin is doing, which is closer, but still not where (I believe) things need to be to get that word-of-mouth referrals. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what the best way to get there is, but I think there is a way to do it (quickly, I can’t figure out the reasoning behind spending all the time and money to get all these Facebook Fans), and I’m constantly trying to figure that out. Stay tuned.

Calling all Wall Street quants. I just found the perfect job description for the open position of partner at CurrentBlend. I’d add to this that there needs to be a real understanding of “sweat equity”.

I’ve talked to at least four startups in the past two weeks that needed someone to run their web marketing—but not write site copy or do branding work.  They needed some hardcore quants to test strategies for loyalty and affiliate programs, measure ROI on paid search, etc.  Frankly, fine tuning the web marketing strategy and lead conversion of an e-commerce company is not unlike managing a portfolio, trading or doing financial analysis.  It’s putting a person in front of a set of quantitative tools, analyzing large pools of data, goal seeking, and optimizing.  It’s the kind of thing that, if you were awesome at it, you could walk into any startup that sells anything, pitch your ability to add directly to the bottom line and pretty easily get hired to do it.