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Social Media ROI, Necessary … Not Evil

Eric Boggs and Adam Covati of ArgyleSocial.com discuss methods of measuring the impact and ROI of Social media.

Argyle Social is building a social media Analytics platform that is geared at helping people measure the ROI of Social Media Marketing.

Measuring Social Media ROI seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days. It is not an easy concept to grasp and the metrics are still in their infancy.

Eric and Adam give an interesting perspective on the topic.

Social Media ROI, Necessary… Not Evil from Socialize Your Cause on Vimeo.

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What the Open Graph means for Facebook

With Facebook’s recent announcement of the evolving Social graph, now dubbed the “Open graph”, it changes a few things for the web and the way in which we are all connected.

What changed?

Facebook’s open graph model now allows for any webpage to be liked by any Facebook user. This means that instead of everything having to be housed within the Facebook walls for users to like and spread the content, those barriers are broken down and the web is an open playground.

The ability to house everyones likes and common interests within Facebook is somewhat limiting and not realistic.  Thus, the ability to pull in outside content and like/share with your social graph is that next step. (Think of it like an evolution of the FB share functionality, that lets you see who else of your friends also liked what you did)

The idea stems from the concept of social objects. A social object is a a topic or area of interest that brings two people together. All human connections revolve around a social object. For more information on social objects check out Hugh Macleod’s Social Objects for beginners post.

Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.

Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.

Example C. You’ve popped into your local bar for a drink after work. At the bar there’s some random dude, sending a text on this neat-looking cellphone you’ve never seen before. So you go up to him and ask him about the phone. The random dude just LOVES his new phone, so has no trouble with telling a stranger about his new phone for hours on end. Next thing you know, you two are hitting it off and you offer to buy him a beer. You spend the rest of the next hour geeking out about the new phone, till it’s time for you to leave and go dine with your wife. The cellphone was the social object.

Open Graph

So now, any website that implements the facebook like button, has the potential to be spread through Facebook, without having to make a group or fan page. The like plugin shows the user on your page which ( if any ) of their Facebook friends also liked the page.

The open graph is Facebook’s next step into the domination of the internet and an interesting step towards a more semantic web. I’m interested to see how this develops and what other social networking sites will try to do in a similar vein.

How to implement the like button on your site

Head over to the Facebook Developers page and generate your own button. Place the code on your site and like the open graph do the rest.

To implement a dynamic like button on each page out your site. Check out Christopher S. Penn’s post on How to implement two Facebook social plugins in less than five minutes

I am curious to hear others thoughts on the use of the like buttons on their websites and the cannibalization it might have on existing Facebook fan pages.

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The Future of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking has been around for a while now but it seems to have gotten a little stale. Unless you are a massive power user of a site like Digg or Reddit it is extremely hard to gain any traction on the sites.

The “social” aspect of these sites is also lost to me. Do people really friend and follow people on stumbleupon or digg? I would have to guesstimate that the majority of traffic to each of these sites is to glance at the main page to see what is “hot” (with the exception of stumbleupon, where you are blindly wandering the internet based off your set preferences). Maybe call it “democratic media” but not social.

Social bookmarking sites have been useful in the past for driving traffic and building backlinks to your site. While they still can drive a considerable amount of traffic to your site (provided that your content is Remarkable) they are losing the SEO power they once had. This is, in part, due to most popular bookmarking sites changing their links to “nofollow”, plus the massive amount of spam content that they receive on a daily basis.

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Getting More Done Online in Less Time

Corey Creed, of Hippo internet marketing, recently spoke at the The Official Charlotte SEO & Search Engine Marketing Meetup, touching on the subject of being more productive online. He goes over some pretty interesting methodologies and practices that he has implemented in his day to day life that has dramatically improved his workflow. Later in the presentation, he covers a variety of tools he uses to maximize productivity (my favorite was the action machine) . Runtime is about 35 minutes and it’s jam packed with great info.

How to Get a LOT More Done Online – in less time from David Wells on Vimeo.

What are your favorite productivity tools? Mine would have to be Launchy, an awesome app and web launcher.

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Digital Marketing Zen #17 – The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media

Maggie Fox, Founder and CEO of Social Media group, talks about earned media vs paid media vs owned media in the context of Social Media. The presentation entitled ” The art and science of scaling social media”.

Click through to the post to see the player. My shortcode here is still messed up =/

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How Hootsuite stole my juice

I have been preaching about the benefits of using hootsuite as the ultimate social media dashboard for a while now. A week or two ago I realized a HUGE flaw. They are stealing my juice.

The ow.ly link shortener that hootsuite provides is stealing all my Google Juice. The links I have been sending out via that link shortener have been useless due to the fact that the links open up in hootsuite’s ow.ly iframe. I have heard numerous complaints that the bar across the top of peoples browsers is super annoying and I shrugged that off and told them to get over it. Now, I feel their pain, because its canalizing the SEO power of my links.

I found a quick work around to this by installing the bit.ly link shortener exstension for chrome , But it still requires me to manually make a new link when I click the hootlet button to update my social media properties. BOO! (manual work = bad)

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Digital Marketing Zen #16 – Inbound Marketing with Rick Burnes

I recently ventured to my home town of St.Pete (Tampa Area) for the Social Fresh Conference. It was a fantastic line up of speakers and filled with great minds, who, think alike. I managed to snag some video and audio from the conference and this piece in particular I though was simply incredible. This show is from the presentation from Rick Burnes of Hubspot, entitled mapping the inbound marketing ecosystem. A lot of the presentation comes directed from the hubspot book inbound marketing. Its a great read and a must have for any marketer serious about owning the digital space.

He stresses the importance of taking a holistic approach when it comes to your overall online marketing efforts. He explains how Social media, seo, and content all fit together and play a key roll in the inbound marketing process. By leveraging these 3 aspects of digital marketing and piecing them together in the right way, it can have a huge impact on your business.

Hubspot definitely eats their own dog food (weird saying) and has an awesome blog over at blog.hubspot.com.  The runtime is around 50minutes or so but is a must for any digital marketer to listen to and digest.

 

 Digital Marketing Zen #16 Mapping the inbound marketing ecosystem [50:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (393)

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Digital Marketing Zen #15 – On Page SEO Optimization

In this episode of The Digital Marketing Zen Podcast, David Wells discusses various on page factors that you can easily change to influence your sites search engine rankings. It runs about 17 minutes long and has some neat little bits of information, that I hope you will enjoy. Please feel free to add your 2 cents in the comments below or call in and leave a message at the Digital Marketing Zen line (617) 299 -1232.

(click through to see the player. [ ] short code is messed up on my main page for some reason…. any ideas on that? =P)

 

 Digital Marketing Zen #15 [17:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (508)

Shownotes

- See show #12 for SEO 101 with Robert Enriquez

- On page Optimization is very important and should be your second step after keyword research

- Its Niche, NOT “NITCH”

- Title Tags, H1, Alt tags, Image Title Tags, Bolding Links (<strong>)

- Content – If you are serious about SEO keep your content fresh. I recommend a post per week at LEAST. Make sure you use interal linking within your content.

- Google Analytics

- Google Webmaster tools

- XML Sitemap Maker

- Google may or may not shoot a missile at you.

- Different Sitemaps you can upload for blogs.