Social Media Metrics and Measurement
How Gatorade Monitors Social Media with “Mission Control Center”
Jun 30 2010
I recently read an article about Gatorade and their social media monitoring process called the “Mission Control Center”. Looking at picture of the Gatorade Mission Control Center, one would think you are observing sky measurements at a mini version of NASA. Equipped with six big monitors and five marketing specialists, Gatorade has reinvented their tactics to social media marketing. But I ask myself, is this all really necessary?
On one screen, you see a visualization of tweets relevant to the Gatorade brand including mentions, competitors and other related topics. The marketing team is able to discern the sentiment, content, importance, frequency and category of the tweets that, in turn, helps them determine their next marketing step.
Another screen provides visualizations from mentions in blogs in a 24-hour trending topic screen. The different colored lines indicate the number and sentiment of the tags and mentions. The fact that Gatorade can monitor these conversations shows how much hype Gatorade really is in the world of social mediums.
Through this advanced control center, Gatorade marketers are able to see the reactions to a new campaign release or television advertisements and see if they are getting their intended reaction from its consumers. Amazingly, through this new marketing strategy, Gatorade has been able to increase engagement with its product education by 250% and reduce its exit rate from 25% to 9%.
With Gatorade’s worldwide popularity, it makes sense for them to go to such lengths to create the optimal social media campaign. The future of Gatorade, at this point, seems boundless. Gatorade’s expert marketing team is hoping to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.”
Social media monitoring can influence other aspects of marketing – including traditional marketing. Gatorade is able to see how people react to their ads immediately online, whereas waiting for traditional ad metrics would have taken many months. They can immediately adjust their ad campaigns based on consumer responses through social media. For example, Gatorade launched an ad featuring a song by rap artist David Banner. Through monitoring social media, Mission Control saw that the ad generated a lot of discussions and buzz and within 24 hours Gatorade recorded a full-length version of the song and gave it away to social media followers on Facebook and Twitter. Listening to social media provides real-time feedback for Gatorade to see what works and what doesn’t.
With the help of big time athletes being the center of the majority of Gatorade’s commercial campaign as well as tactical marketing strategies, Gatorade has become the largest sports brand in the world. They must be doing something right! With their installment of the Mission Control Center, Gatorade marketers are able to track a number of mediums in the world of social media.
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Funny how business issues frequently refer back to the basic ideas put forth in the last century. Peter Drucker, management guru during the last half of the decade has been quoted many times saying “What gets measured, gets managed!” Gatorade certainly applies these simple “blocking and tackling” rules to the new world of social media to achieve great results. Pay attention to the basics — even in new technologies, communications media and customers interactions!