Procter & Gamble remains far from out of the woods in its closely watched effort to goose sales in traditional western markets, bolster its biggest brands, rebuild its innovation mojo—and do all of that at a less expensive level. The company's newest such effort is to overhaul how it measures the impact of its $5 billion-plus annual marketing outlay, especially its digital aspects, in a major new review.

America's largest advertising spender just adopted a new system two years ago for measuring ROI on marketing spending because investors—led by activist shareholder Bill Ackman—had begun pressuring new P&G CEO Bob McDonald to get more efficient in that area. Of course, Ackman and like thinkers began putting pressure on McDonald all over the map in an effort to get him to move more aggressively on a strategy to put P&G's financial returns back to historical peaks and more in line with those of competitors such as Colgate and Reckitt Benckiser.Continue reading...

Pinterest is finally getting into the data game. The photo-heavy (and ridiculously popular) social site has launched Pinterest Web Analytics to help brands and advertisers better understand what users are doing with their content in a move towards monetizing its huge amount of traffic.

The 3-year-old company—which is the fastest website to reach 10 million unique visitors a month—has taken a cautious approach in defining its business model, in part to avoid the mistakes of other social networks that moved too fast.Continue reading...

Three years after its Fiesta Movement campaign wrote a new playbook for social-media marketing, Ford is launching a "Social Remix" for the 2014 Ford Fiesta that it hopes will represent a similar advance—and sell more cars—through an industry-first paid-media campaign that is completely crowdsourced.

Scott Monty, global head of social media for Ford, is unveiling the Fiesta Movement remix at a Social Media Week panel in New York this morning. Monty told brandchannel before the session that "we're taking the core idea of Fiesta Movement, which is still a very solid concept, and taking it to the next level."

The automaker is introducing the new Feista through a multichannel campaign that will be entirely crowdsourced by consumers. Also, in an echo of the original Fiesta Movement year-long campaign that gave new Fiestas to bloggers and other online influencers ahead of the car's 2011 debut, Ford is once again seeking 100 "social influencers" to convey the "unique personality and attributes" of the attributes of the new car — but "in an entirely different way," as the automaker stated in a press release.Continue reading...

A storm is gathering in the clouds, not just with #Sandy moving towards the northeast US, but with rumbling within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This week, it emerged that Salesforce.com's biggest acquisition, social media campaign manager Buddy Media, is losing more than $40 million a year, while Salesforce's social media markeing firm, Radian6, is reorganizing and shedding jobs.

Salesforce spokesperson Jane Hynes’ statement in part: “With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rebalancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing, and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people globally have been impacted.”

Salesforce acquired Buddy Media in August for $745 million, a time it was churning through more than $42 million a year, while Radian6, Salesforce’s previous marquee acquisition was cash-flow positive at the time of its $325 million acquisition in March of 2010.Continue reading...

Social media monitoring has never been more necessary, or complicated. In the wake of acquiring Seesmic last month, HootSuite is getting more sophisticated — just as Twitter is clamping down on limiting third-party clients. HootSuite's just-launched Command Center, lets users monitor their social media mentions, publish and engage other users, all while analyzing and measuring results in one dashboard.

The goal, CEO Ryan Holmes tells VentureBeat, is “a hub where every social interaction can be seen, studied and spread.” That's the holy grail for marketers looking to wrap their bosses' heads around ROI (or some other kind of object) every time social media enters the conversation. 

A virtual ‘situation room,’ or ‘master control,’ HootSuite enables large enterprise companies to control all social activities real-time with dashboard views that include blocks such as, "Twitter Daily Retweets," "Twitter Follower Growth," and website visits.Continue reading...

The biggest misconception about Twitter? “That you have to tweet to use Twitter,” said CEO Dick Costolo in a "fireside chat" with Federated Media's John Battelle this week. Indeed, new research from Beevolve finds that 25 percent of Twitter users have never tweeted.

Costolo’s newfound celebrity on magazine covers, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, as well as a recent New York Times profile, is impressive for a brand that didn’t exist seven years ago. Now, it's up to an estimated revenue of $350 million this year and 140 million users, even as Wall Street and Silicon Valley mull over engagement and the "dark social" arts of social marketing. Twitter, meanwhile, is trying to get smarter about providing support and analytics to brand marketers grappling with the age-old question of demonstrating ROI.Continue reading...

While more than 70% of marketers are using new media platforms, 62% are increasingly concerned with the inability to prove ROI across these channels according to the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) 2012 Digital and Social Media Survey, conducted in April and May 2012 with 224 client-side marketers.

Use of online video (e.g., YouTube) increased from 64% last year to 80% in 2012, and since 2007, overall usage of social media and mobile marketing has grown significantly, with 90% and 74% of marketers using them, respectively.

Respondents' preferred social/digital channels for consumer outreach:Continue reading...

Two months after pulling its paid ads from Facebook, General Motors is "in talks" to return to the site as a paid advertiser in return for access to "better data," according to the Wall Street Journal (which broke the original story of the pull-out on May 15th). GM CEO Dan Akerson and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have spoken about the issues — GM's desire for better measurement and analytics to gauge the effectiveness of any paid Facebook advertising — that led to the falling out, WSJ reports.

GM's chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick and Facebook's global ad sales head Carolyn Everson reportedly met for the first time at the recent Cannes advertising festival to discuss what would bring the automaker back to the table, the Journal heard from a source. At that meeting, "Everson said Facebook is willing to provide GM with better data on how their ads can turn into dollars, as it has agreed to do with other advertisers, this person said. Facebook won't provide any special treatment for GM, however."

Whether or not GM can take credit for getting Facebook to improve its metrics and reporting (or receives any "special treatment," cheaper ad rates or additional data), it's certainly good news for other marketers feeling a similar need for more granular data in the never-ending quest to "prove" the ROI of paid Facebook advertising.Continue reading...