This is TMTYL’s first guest blog post by Adam Needles. You’ll see us doing this more frequently as we find more and more people that we think bring some very interesting opinions to the table. Enjoy!

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The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

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Part 1 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: list of tools to be used in techniques described on Part 2 / 2 – Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques — interactive marketing blog special.

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ‘social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

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Part 2 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: techniques to be used with tools on this page or any tool on Part 1 / 2 – Free Social Media Monitoring Tools — interactive marketing blog special.

We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

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Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.

This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.

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The Super Bowl, the highest-profile TV event in the U.S. and one where the ads are as much a spectacle as the game itself, creates an immediate splash, letting loose an enormous amount of chatter online and off. But now that a little time has gone by, let’s look at how social media can be used to extend the life of, or create a ripple effect around, a Super Bowl ad — or any advertising campaign, actually.

There are many approaches to marketing in the digital-media space, but I subscribe to the belief that consumers live at the intersection between owned media, such as your brand’s web properties; bought media, such as display and pay-per-click campaigns; and earned media, which includes all the user-generated content in the social-media space, from blog posts to comments on YouTube. Although I don’t believe all three approaches must be represented in every campaign, I do believe that in today’s world you do always need to include the earned-media perspective, because consumers will start the dialogue and build value or destroy value for your brand, whether you want it or not. Ultimately it comes down to how you want to engage in these conversations as you evaluate how they add value.

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