Can you use the web effectively for branding?   I touched on this question in my thesis, but a couple of recent events got me thinking about it again.

Having dinner with some Computer Science PhD students at the Cambridge Brewing Company the other night, our conversation about business models for social media turned to the value of online advertising, specifically, how it is different than TV and why online display advertising still doesn’t bring in big money.

And, a couple of days before that, AdWeek reported results of a Forbes.com study that found that most marketers are still using direct response metrics for online advertising, based on clickthrough and conversion rates.  The article points out that search and email marketing are considered the best performers held up to that yardstick, while display and video ads are at the bottom.

On one hand, this makes complete sense, but in a medium where you can target precisely and leverage social networks and word of mouth, not using the internet for branding seems like a missed opportunity.   How could we use the web effectively as a branding vehicle, in a way that makes sense from a measurement perspective?

Direct marketing is about facilitating transactions, but branding is about facilitating relationships.  Here are some thoughts on how to build a brand relationship – and measure it – on the web.

Deltas in expression & interaction

Interacting with a brand should lead to a purchase somewhere down the line, but the it’s not a 1 to 1 exchange.   A person could interact many times with a brand online but never buy the product, or never interact with the brand online and buy the product anyway.  Or they could interact with a brand online and that could not have any bearing on their purchase behavior.

If we start on the premise that branding is about building a relationship, then a snapshot or a total (like the number of people who became fans on Facebook during a campaign) isn’t that meaningful as a metric.  Instead, looking at shifts over time is a much more material number to measure both the impact of the campaign and the position that it holds in consumer’s minds.  So, for example:

• How are the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers changing over time?  What is the net change from the beginning to the end of the campaign?
• How does the rate of new comments, fans, or followers change over time?  What’s the attrition rate?
• How does average time spent and unique visitor volume on the site change over time?  How far does it drop off after the first visit or the initial campaign launch?

Reach + amplification

At the Cambridge Brewing Company the other night, we talked a lot about reach as one of the big reasons that TV advertising is still appealing.  In all fairness, there are some sites with big reach, but how do you reconcile volume with targeting on the web when it comes to branding?

But reach online doesn’t have to be the same as on TV. Actually, it shouldn’t be.  To me, a much more relevant metric, especially for a social media campaign or a microsite is amplification – how much the original site visitors (which we’d used to measure “reach” at a given point in time) spread the word.  Some ways to establish amplification would be to ask:

• What is ratio of new to repeat visitors over time?
• What percentage of site visitors embed or forward a video, post, or object?
• What percentage of people who visit the site share or retweet web site links, press releases or tweets using social media sites?
• How much site traffic is coming through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogs (WordPress, Blogger)?
• At what rate are all of the above increasing over time?

That said, marketers should be concerned about reach within your target demographic or (even better) behavioral type, but in branding, it’s important that those people keep engaging and endorse the brand by promoting it to their networks.

Make it useful, make it multi-platform

But, how do you ensure that people come back and interact with the brand, as well as feel the need to pass things along to their networks?  Although I don’t have anything against banner ads for branding, I think branded utilities will play a big role in the future of brand advertising online because they keep coming back for a reason other than just liking the product.

Useful is a loose term, too – I think the best branded utilities are a platform for interaction with other people in a context that makes sense.  Nike is one of my favorite examples – they created a running community/progress tracking site, but there are other potential variations.  What a way for coffee shop customers to compare caffeine consumption with other conaisseurs?  Or a online travel agent application that lets people benchmark their own globetrotting against groups of people from the same region or with similar interests?

If this sounds familiar, it should – applications on Facebook, LinkedIn and, increasingly, wireless phones, have all aimed to serve this purpose.  But, as people expect to be able to jump from platform to platform, it will be the applications that enable anywhere, anytime access as seamlessly as possible that will return the biggest dividends for brands.