Monthly Archives: February 2012

In our previous post, Don’t Sweat the Social Hierarchy, we enlarged on our theme from Social Media is the Megaphone and talked about social media as a conversation among equals. In this post, we begin to explore the topic of social media metrics.

Measure Results

“The social medium creates many artifacts, or digital breadcrumbs,
that are directly measurable as people participate.
It isn’t just a medium with a message,
but it is also a medium which contains and records actions.”

Marcel LeBrun, CEO, Radian6

As part of your engagement plan, you determined what success looks like, and how to measure it. Without this key exercise, you can easily waste lots of time and money on ineffective use of social computing.

It’s often said, if you can measure it you can manage it, and it’s true. You’ll meet many people who insist that you can’t measure the value that social media brings. These people are only right in a sense — you can’t use many of the old measurements designed for traditional media, and you may need to modify some (cost per thousand impressions or CPM, for example) to make them work with social media.

However, the idea that the online environment — the first man-made environment in history that can totally close the loop between causation and result — is somehow not measurable is dead wrong.

We’ve discussed previously  the idea that half of advertising is wasted. And it’s a crying shame that a fraction of a percent of direct mail has the intended result. Why do others pre­fer these media? Because they’ve managed to achieve predictable results due to a mature measure­ment system. A marketer we know said, essentially, “I know if I drop $75,000 on a direct mail campaign I’ll get a sales bump of X percent. I don’t know what my investment in social media buys me.”

It’s true. The field of social media measurement is in its infancy compared to the giant, mature adver­tising industry. But there are still very good ways to measure your success.

Measure Social Media Results is the 37th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Why Should You Track Social Mentions?

In our previous post, Enable Social Tagging, we looked at using social tagging sites to raise your site’s profile. In this post, we enlarge on our theme from Social Media is the Megaphone and talk about social media as a conversation among equals.

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Don’t Sweat the Hierarchy

We’ve been quoting social media pundit Seth Godin in the last couple of posts and continue here, on the topic of modes of social media communication. Godin stresses that, since the nature of social media is distributed, non-hierarchical, and definitely not top-down, command-and-control, this have can implications for how your business is organized. He states that the huge non-profit United Way has underperformed in the last decade, and looks to the way they are organized as one of the keys.

The United Way is a classic top-down approach. By creating arrangements with the Fortune 500, they were able to do payroll deduction on millions of paychecks. That, all by itself, was key to their scale. But what happens when those relationships aren’t as important? Because people rarely talk about the United way and its work, the word of their great efforts doesn’t spread as far and as fast as it might. As a result, it’s hard for them to catch up when the payroll-deduction approach loses juice.

Compare this to the brilliant peer-to-peer gimmick embraced by Nike and Lance Armstrong. […] [T]he Armstrong LiveStrong idea spread so far, so fast precisely because of their side-to-side, not top down approach. In our ever faster, ever more selfish world, the chances of growing a non-profit with a top down approach are tiny. It’s just too hard, we’re to busy and you don’t have enough time or money.

Consider Godin’s recommendations along with ours as you prepare to engage with your community.

Give the Megaphone

Ask your supporters to commit. This goes beyond the kind of commitment represented by merely buying your product. Make it easy for your supporters to pick up the megaphone and tag your site, blog about it, “Like It” on Facebook,[1] +1 it via Google, tweet it on Twitter, and so on.

You’d be surprised how effective committed supporters can be:

• Dell estimates[2] that a Dell detractor costs the company $57, and a promoter generates $328
• A study across 20 brands by analyst firm Syncapse[3]found:
  • The average annualized value of an individual fan on Facebook is $136.38; the range is from $270.77 in the best case to $0 in the worst
  • On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
    • McDonald’s saw the largest variability, with Fans reporting spending $159.79 more per year than non-fans
    • Oreo saw the lowest value with a difference of $28.52
• Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand
• Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends
• An average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But, an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations.
• On the other hand, social media management firm Vitrue found that a Facebook Fan is worth $3.60 of media value
  • Vitrue determined[4] that on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year at a $5 CPM (meaning, that a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month)

Of course, there are lots of ways to give your supporters the megaphone, and we cover many more techniques in the chapters that follow.

The key is to give the megaphone, not hog it.

Next up: Measure Social Media Results

Don’t Sweat the Social Hierarchy is the 36th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

[4] Real Time Marketer’s A Facebook Fan is Worth $3.60. Really? bit.ly/pNPe9K A dissenting view from The Future Buzz’s More Absurd Social Media Analysis – The Value Of A Fan bit.ly/oi6QD7

In our previous post, Social Media is the Megaphone, we took a look at enabling your community to speak. In this post, we examine using social tagging sites such as Digg and delicious to enable your community to find you.

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Enable Social Tagging

A good way to enable your community involves social tagging.

There are lots of social tagging sites, but three of the most popular are Digg[1], del.icio.us[2] and Reddit.[3] Social taggers who find an interesting Webpage can easily tag it — mark it as interesting for other site members to see. Only a minority of people actually tag pages, while a much larger number cruise the tagging aggregator sites looking for interesting topics and pages. This gives the taggers an enormous influence for their size.

Encouraging your community to tag your information and media can dramatically improve your visibility, even if your site does not perform well in Google searches. Seth Godin did a search on “diabetes” on Delicious. The search led him to a site filled with white papers on diabetes.

While this site would likely not show up on the first page of Google results, because eight people had tagged that page, Godin was able to easily find it through social bookmarking. Therefore, instead of spending vast amounts of time and resources on SEO techniques to influence Google search results, if an organization can manage to get even a handful of their advocates and supporters to tag their pages, their visibility on the net would increase dramatically.

Godin puts it like this:

The Acumen Fund [a non-profit global venture fund working to solve the problems of global poverty] has hundreds of pages on its site — yet most of them are essentially invisible. If the organization made it easy for donors and supporters to start tagging pages, the most important messages would rise to the top. The same thing is true for art museums, religious groups and the ACLU. In every case, there are pages, buried and doomed to decay into obscurity. But if a few surfers tagged the pages appropriately, though, other surfers would find it. And the word would spread. The big secret of del.icio.us is that the percentage of users who do the tagging is tiny. Most of the traffic to the site is looking for the tagging done by a tiny minority. This is the essence of online leverage.

Think about how you can leverage your supporters by encouraging social tagging. It’s a great way to drastically improve the impact of a small group of supporters.

Next up: Don’t Sweat the Social Hierarchy

Enable Social Tagging is the 35th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

In our previous post, Social Media Relationship Stages, we took a look at the process of drawing your audience into a closer relationship. In this post, we talk about enabling your community to speak.

Social Media is the Megaphone

And your supporters are the speakers. Encourage them to:

• Tag you on delicious.com, digg.com
• Upload relevant photos to flickr.com
• Blog about you
• Tweet about you

Seth Godin describes the power of the Internet, and of giving your supporters the megaphone:

The Internet changes everything. Now, one person armed with a keyboard can reach millions. One person with a video camera can tell a story that travels around the world. And one person with a blog can sell a lot of computers.

The trick is this: you need to give your fan club some leverage, an amplifier — a megaphone.

Your former patrons, the aggrieved ones, the critics — they’ve already found the web. They’re the ones who have managed to post play-by-play accounts of your misdeeds and missteps. They’re motivated and they’re already embracing the medium.

A diligent marketer, however, can make it easy for your fan club to get the word out as well. And to do it in an authentic, uncontrolled, honesty way.

This is why you don’t censor comments about you online: There are supporters as well as detractors out there. If you get all paranoid about nasty things the haters (or trolls) say, and feel tempted to remove them, it helps to remember that your supporters see these posts as well. And if you’ve enabled them — handed them the megaphone — you may find they’ll rush to your defense.

This won’t work, however, if you insist on approving all posts on sites you control.

Doing so stifles the ability for your supporters to quickly respond to negativity. It also breaches the trust you hope to establish with your community. If community members feel they must think twice before posting — taking into account whether Big Brother will approve their posts — you lose the ability to find out what they really think, and violate the implicit contract you established with your community when you decided to engage with them.

Next up: Enable Social Tagging

Social Media is the Megaphone is the 34th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

In our previous post, Ask for the Commitment on Social Media, we discussed asking your community for a commitment. In this post, we examine the process of drawing your audience into an ever-closer relationship.

Social Media Relationship Stages

To encourage a relationship with your customers and prospects through social media, it will take more than placing a simple “Buy” or even a “Like” button on your home page or social media site. As we’ve discussed, one of your online goals should be to draw existing and potential customers into a relationship that will be productive for both parties. The basic steps, to paraphrase online marketer Seth Godin, are to:

• Turn strangers into friends
• Turn friends into customers
• And then… do the most important job: Turn your customers into evangelists

The trick is to do this without resorting to traditional marketing tactics that may turn off your online community.

Traditional marketers refer to the gradual process of enticing the public to become buyers as the marketing funnel. Lots of folks go in the top; only a few fall out the bottom as customers. Godin thinks this metaphor is all wrong for online marketing. In his free e-book targeted at non-profits Flipping the Funnel — Give Your Fans the Power to Speak Up,[1] Godin gives advice that enterprises can benefit from as well:

The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not your donors [customers]. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested in supporting your organization, many of them might—if they only knew you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is worth investing time and energy and passion and money into.

But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you?

We’re living in the most cluttered marketplace in history. Whether you are curing cancer, encouraging faith or educating people in need, people are better at ignoring you than ever before. You don’t have enough time to get your message out.

Godin goes on to say that most organizations have underused assets: your friends and your supporters.

Godin’s idea is to flip the marketing funnel and turn it into a megaphone. You give the megaphone to your fan club: the people who like and respect you, and who have a vested interest in your success.

Next up: Social Media is the Megaphone

Social Media Relationship Stages is the 33rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

In our previous post, Your First Social Media Contributions, we discussed how to make your first contributions on social. In this post, we get into a serious subject: asking your community for a commitment.

Ask for the Commitment

“Social Networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals.
Do it reliably and repeatedly — so that over time people
have an interest in helping you achieve your goals”

Seth Godin

You’re using social media for a reason. You want something. It may be attention; it may be sales; it may be brand awareness. The best-designed social media sites feature calls to action — click to get our newsletter; click to find out more; click to buy.

Your site should ensure that your audience knows what it can do to help, and can take a positive action online. “Click to email a salesperson” isn’t going to cut it. “Click to chat with a live person” is much better. “Click to buy” is even better. “Click to recommend this site to your friends,” however, may be the best outcome.

Based on the goals you identified in your engagement plan, design interactions that explain the participation options, and entice people to get involved, right now.

The old saw that salespeople must practice ABC — Always Be Closing — is applicable to online as well. But what it means to close may be different. If you’re that obnoxious sales guy always asking, “Are you ready to buy now? How about now? Now?” you’re not going to be successful online.

While it doesn’t pay to be obnoxious, you also don’t want to be shy. It’s best online to give before asking, and it’s also best to gradually draw your audience in to a more intimate relationship.

Perhaps you start off by offering information on your business, and then ask for a small commitment, like entering an email address to receive a white paper, or a newsletter, or a bumper sticker. Then perhaps you ask them to email their friends about your social site. Later you may ask them to sign up for a newsletter, or come to an event, or take action in some other small way. It’s a conversation. It’s relationship building, and you don’t want to go too fast, yet at the same time you want to enable those who are really excited to proceed at a faster pace.

How you ask and what you ask for at what time is more art than science. You can take your learning from offline efforts and try to apply it online. Just be sure you keep your ears open. Ask those you’re involving how they’d like the relationship to progress, and don’t fall into the offline ways of constantly pushing messages as a passive audience.

Regardless of your other online goals, most businesses share a common goal: Increase sales. Buying online now has a long history, and is rather sophisticated and well-developed. Social media definitely offers new ways to reach and inform prospective customers while drawing them into an ever-more-intimate relationship with your business. We take a look at this topic in the following post.

Next up: Social Media Relationship Stages

Ask for the Commitment on Social Media is the 32nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1