The last few days have seen us talking to a number of different companies about whether it is possible to measure the success of marketing campaigns using our tools. It is.

The traditional way of measuring marketing success is:

1. Sales of the product. This is the point of the exercise after all. But sales numbers are a crude tool. How and why did these folk reach you? What were they responding to? The original campaign, or word of mouth generated by it? If they are buying it, are the also recommending it?

2. Consumers seeing the campaign. In offline this would include estimates of people seeing the campaign in papers and on TV, in online you could measure how many people reached any of your pages, downloaded your collateral.

3. Numbers of links to your campaign. This is the primary traditional buzz measurement. A campaign needs links from those who are qualified to endorse it.

4. Numbers of citations (how many people mention your campaign). The secondary traditional buzz measurement. If they are talking about you more after the campaign then you know the campaign is working at least on some level.

All these metrics deliver some value, but they don’t really tell you enough about the campaign itself. If you are a mobile operator the retail returns on handset sales tells you what is hot and what is not, but it does so retrospectively. You can’t predict the success of a product on the first day it is sold by a competitor.

The numbers of customers seeing the campaign is a weak indicator of whether a campaign will be successful. The bubble era was strewn with campaigns which were seen by millions but acted on by very few. (Remember the ISP “Breathe”, whose beautiful, but baffling advertisements were hard to avoid?)

The number of links to a campaign and the number of citation of it form the beginning of an important measure. But both these metrics are incomplete in themselves. Firstly not all links have the same value: some links are more equal than others. If a link is from someone who is authoritative in the area of the product, it is worth far more to the campaign, brings more Google influence and hence more prominence in natural search and therefore more sales.

Natural search is the key target for this kind of buzz measurement. Why? When customers go to Google, their eyes disproportionately linger on natural search. Consumers consider natural search authoritative. The image below is courtesy of Eyetools and demonstrates this in practice.

This is authority is inherent to a brand and it is something that Market Sentinel can measure. What can be measured, as the saying goes, can be managed.

Secondly these measures leave out the quality of the citation – is the reaction positive or negative? A citation is not necessarily an endorsement.

We have recently been looking at a clever viral campaign for Sony Bravia on behalf of the agency Tonic.

The campaign’s origin was a commercial shot in San Francisco on 26th July 2005. Thousand of brightly coloured plastic balls were dropped on a street in Telegraph Hill. This spectacle was so astounding that passers by stopped to photograph it. They posted their pictures on Flickr. This photo has been viewed 245974 times. The agency spotted the opportunity for a viral marketing campaign, and created a site using high quality assets from the photoshoot, as well as making the commercial itself available online.

We were not able to give Tonic all the help we would have liked to, because they only came to us in the last couple of weeks, and benchmarking this in retrospect would be time-consuming. However: this is what you would do to measure the impact of a digital campaign like this.

1. Benchmark the “approval rating” of the product. Compare it with two or three direct competitors. How many people recommend and how many disparage the product? Measure this before the campaign, during the campaign and three months later. If you have changed sentiment about the product relative to the competitors, the campaign has had an impact.

2. Measure the influence of the Sony Bravia brand in relation to the sector as a whole (LCD TVs). That is: how many authoritative commentators in the area of LCD TVs give authority to Sony Bravia. To do this you need to use our proprietary software. Again benchmark this against competitors in the sector. Repeat during the campaign and six months after (these effects take longer to worth, and are themselves longer lasting). This is the key area. If the campaign is successful Sony Bravia will rise up the Google natural search returns for “LCD TV”.

3. Undertake a stakeholder analysis of Sony Bravia itself, before and after the campaign. Look at who were the key influencers before and afterwards. Examine the actual words which are used by those influencers. Examine the context of the conversation – what other websites were cited in that context? These subtle and sensitive measurements help you measur how the climate of opinion around a brand has been transformed.

4. Measure search volume for crucial terms. How many people are looking for the campaign, or for the brand in the context of the campaign.

The preliminary work we did looking at this Sony Bravia campaign identified some interesting methods by which the campaign achieved traction as well as throwing up some interesting lessons about what the brand should try to achieve next time. Tonic will be publishing more detail in the next few weeks and when they do we will return to this subject.