2nd
Online Marketing and Options trading
Since “social media strategist” only takes one so far in the halls of a large corporation, most of us are also tasked with numerous other “real jobs” to justify the paycheck (ugh!). Sometimes, these can be equally fullfilling as strategizing on and executing against a new viral campaign. But, not always.
However, one of my current “additional duties” is to clean up our Account Executives processes for placing, monitoring, and measuring online campaigns. I know, I know, how 1999, right?
Still it must be done, and despite all the interest in and trials of Social Media marketing, we still get our bread buttered with the old-fashioned placements. So, I’ve set about to automate as much as possible and am reminded of something an old B-School professor of mine taught me. “Read, Remember and Relate”…straight from the mouth of the master Guil Babcock on how to prosper as an investor by continuosly learning and inter-relating from various disciplines. Borrowing from this, and trying to cross polinate between these two fields, I have begun proposing to our firm to treat our online marketing individuals as portfolio (or more precisely) “options” traders.
We have set out to build an algorythmic model to estimate expected revenue for each placement in real-time (or near real-time) based on a multiltude of inputs, similar to what the ad networks do, but focused exclusively for our budget/purposes. Hopefully, the notion will extend deep into our upsell/cross sale business as well. It is a large undertaking, no doubt. Transitioning a firm from a “manual” people business to one regulated (if not directed) by algorythms is a daunting challenge. Still, it must be done.
Day trading online placements? You bet. Interesting in a different fashion. And, about as polar opposite to the humanistic side of social media marketing as you can get. Though, I believe professor Wesch said it best, at the end of the day we are all “teaching the machine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE , no?
ACEdge
