Not long ago I sent the following email to our entire agency:

I’m writing a blog entry on how we keep score. I’d like your help in making a list of all the ways we measure success.

Ready? Go.

Here are some the of the answers I received, in no particular order:

• Increased public awareness of client/product
• Increased sales/inquiries for client
• Client goals/expectations met or exceeded
• When the client tells other people good things about us
• When the client hangs the creative on the walls at their corporate office
• When the cash register rings
• When the client brand becomes a part of pop culture
• The number of stories we place and the resulting sales increases
• Success is when you make the competition nervous
• PR lineage
• Incoming calls/leads
• Awards
• Web analytics
• Improvement in perception
• When we truly help craft a client’s brand culture
• Isn’t the prime measure of success client happiness?

These are very broad definitions of success, and each can be further broken into subsets of more precise metrics. Web analytics, for example, can get extremely detailed. Personally, I prefer quantitative metrics like sales (not that there’s anything wrong with qualitative success).

The most interesting facet of this little email experiment is the widely varying replies. All are correct, which I think leads to the takeaway: you must define what success is before implementation of any marketing initiative. And it must be measurable.

Last night I read a post by eConsultancy about JetBlue’s latest promotion. Brilliant stuff. September is their slowest month, so they’ve decided to offer an all-you-can-jet price of $599 for the entire month. Their ultimate goal was to “fill seats,” but the success far eclipses sales:

Between September 8 and October 8, travelers can take to JetBlue’s planes as often as they’d like. For only $599. The airline, which is known for its social media savvy, sent out a press release about their offer and tweeted about the deal yesterday. Since then, they’ve sold out 1/3 of their inventory.

According to JetBlue spokesperson Jenny Dervin: “September is a slower month for us. Peak seasons are the holidays and summer. So we thought: ‘Let’s find a way to fill seats.’”

And it appears to be working. To announce their offer, JetBlue sent one tweet to their over 1 million Twitter followers, a general press release and a newsletter to their frequent flyers yesterday.

Since making the announcement, JetBlue has found over 10 million mentions of its brand on blogs and news sites. They’ve seen hits to their trip planning route map grow 861%. Meanwhile, other sites are piggybacking on the deal. For instance, travel mapping site Evelater is encouraging people to post their All-You-Can-Jet plans. They were a trending topic on Twitter yesterday and the positive word of mouth continues to grow.

As we say in the Red Square house rules, always keep score.

Read More