“We need to be passionate about innovation and the desire to be better than we were yesterday,” said Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist, as he kicked off the 10^th Annual MIMA Summit in Minneapolis yesterday.  That he is, as proved in his keynote where he shared a plethora of digital marketing and interactive practice successes and failures, all examples being Minnesota brands such as Target, Best Buy, Star Tribune, General Mills (Betty Crocker and Wheat Thins), U of M, and 3M. The fact that he did so much research and pruning of our market’s digital assets for his presentation was a beautiful illustration of user-centrism, the central theme of his talk. In addition to this fabulousness, he shed light on metrics we can evaluate in order to scale and create a better [digital] experience for our respective audiences. Most of the sites and brands featured, with the exception of  University of Minnesota (website), Wheat Thins (Twitter) and Red Bull (Twitter), were scrutinized for lack of thought about the end-user in design and content on the web (UX and information architecture), mobile (optimization, mobile enabled websites, use of QR and barcodes, etc.) and social (using as a push, rather than a conversational medium) – so basically everywhere:-). So, how do we even begin to move in the right direction since none of us have a perfect digital strategy? He offered three different  anecdotes.

Accountability
He went after the impression metric right away and classified it as HITS (how idiots track success). “Pure unadulterated crap!” he exclaimed when referring to the person who says, “We’ve touched 500,000 customers this year.” It’s important to actually measure. The bounce rate is the best accountability metric… It means, “I came, I puked, I left.” To drive this one home he called out the Star Tribune, who has 407 links on their home page, to which he said, “Here you go, here’s all this info. Go find everything for yourself.” U of  M, on the other hand, focuses on the person, not page views. A little visit to University of Minnesota‘s website is an experience geared toward the user and focuses on assisting them through its vast house of content available. Definitely worth checking out and taking some notes from. So, we were left with…

Extract insights from everything you do! Deliver delight across digital activities. Be authentic! Don’t guess.

Visitor Loyalty
He used this opportunity to talk about brand destruction. He challenged agencies (and even inferred a bit of doom) to asses data on the micro and macro level, which means helping them to innovate and leave certain metrics (that don’t really tell a story) behind. Give clients data they actually need and can use; that helps dictate new direction or revisit one that’s worked previous. Help clients to see where their audience is and what they need and want.

Influence People in the world
Simple. We’re losing our ability to control the conversation. We are in a human and conversational economy. If you do not understand this, you’re going to have some serious problmes moving forward in digital – and probably life.

FANTASTIC one-liners that sum it all up!

• Don’t pimp yourself! Give your customer what they want.
• If you don’t think about multiplicity in everything you do, than you won’t do great things.
• Think differently and increase innovation in your company.

Four Different Ways You Should Be Measuring
Avinash closed his presentation by sharing four different ways to measure the performance of our digital content in order to truly understand our audience(s), and with that knowledge (hopefully), create a better experience for them through content and conversations.

• Conversation Rate – Number of audience comments or replies per post
• Amplification Rate – Facebook/G+ = # of shares per post | Twitter = # of retweets per tweet | Blog/YouTube = shares per post  and clicks per post
• Applause Rate – Facebook/G+ = # of likes per post, +1 | Twitter = # of favorite clicks per post | Blog = # of +1 and likes per post, video, etc.
• Economic Value – Sum of short and long term revenue and cost savings (per visit goal value). This is a custom metric that needs to be assigned. Much like how we give value (as PR people) to impressions. You set this up in Google Analytics.

In addition to being one of Google’s masters of awesome, Avinash blogs about analytics and digital marketing at Occam’s Razor. Visit Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value for his kick ass blog post that lends far greater detail and explanation of these four metrics.

This keynote did indeed delight this digital gal, and gave me inspiration to continue on my little path of seeking business success by way of building an experience (holistically) for people instead of thoughtless and ridiculous things that people will never care about. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I hope to share a few more MIMA Summit session highlights in the coming days. God, it feels good to write. I don’t do it enough. Hoping someone enjoys it. Also – a HUGE THANK YOU to the organizers and volunteers of MIMA Summit. Talk about a professional organization who’s crushing it. Way to be an example of the awesome.

Happy Thursday:-)