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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 =/

 

 Digital Marketing Zen #17 The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media [35:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (89)

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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 (174)

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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 (225)

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.

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The ROI of Social Media

The ROI of Social Media seems to be a hot issue on the minds of most business owners and for good reason. If I were planning to allocate my scarce resources (money.. or even scarcer time) I sure would like some reassurance as to how much money I will receive in return. This is a fundamental human reaction that ties in with fear. Fear of the unknown, Going into uncharted waters, which can be scary and stop many from venturing far from the shore. On the flip side the biggest “risks” or being the pioneer of something new, often then to lead to the biggest rewards.

Okay, inspirational words aside, what is the ROI of Social media? Well, lets first examine the ROI of that billboard your company has put up, or the print ads you are running, how about those TV spots? The truth of the matter is that the ROI for all marketing activities have been wish-washy at best. It is simply impossible to measure and take into account all the complexities of how customers interact, view, interpret, and make their buying decisions. Not to mention trying to put an arbitrary dollar sign on it. (Anyone who claims they can, keep them close, as 2012 is fast approaching)

When it comes to Digital Marketing and Social Media, there has never been a more measurable marketing discipline. Click throughs, impressions, traffic, bounce rates, specific customer journeys through a site, and other analytical data paint a pretty vivid picture. Not only that, they can give you some great actionable insights into what to tweak and areas to improve upon.

Two Ways to Measuring Social Media ROI

The C.R.E.A.M. Approach.

Tracking back the specific click throughs in your purchasing funnel through your analytics. Then using this to determine which converting customer came from which social media platform. This works well for E-commerce and lead generation focused businesses because their determined goal equates directly to $$. On the other hand, brick and mortar businesses do not always have this luxury. Without some type of specific end goal to assign a dollar sign to this type of analysis is impossible. (This is why email newsletters or some measurable call to action is a must on any businesses site)

What about brand centric websites that do not generate direct sales through their website? Good Question. There are numerous “media metrics” that can be assigned to social media efforts. Metrics such as impressions, sentiment, share of voice, engagement, followers, friends, and the like. None equate to hard number though. It’s almost like a faith based initiative.

While you may not be able to see a direct increase in sales, you may be able to deduce some cost savings or other spill over effects.

The Spill Over / Cost Savings Approach

These metrics fail to translate directly into money signs, so the importance may escape the number crunchers in your next meeting. But don’t give up, the potential savings can be huge for companies transitioning archiac forms of business services to new agile social media platforms. One example (as played out as it is) is how Comcast took on a new approach to customer service by using twitter to engage with customer complaints and thus reducing the load on their call centers.

6 cost saving concepts to factor into your social media ROI

• The branding potential – saves money needed on potential advertising
• Increased customer service - cut costs of call centers and other bleeding departments
• Increased customer engagement – brand evangelists spread W.O.M. with more credibility that the company could ever muster on its own.
• Strengthening of existing customer relationship – Whats the lifetime value of your customer? How have your efforts made retention easier / more cost effective?
• Being viewed as an industry leader – lower time and money spend on chasing leads. If you are the obvious expert people will be banging at your door.
• The long term SEO benefits – Cut costs on Pay per click models.

You can slice and dice social media metrics in a variety of ways. So it is important to decide which factors you are going to measure against when the time comes to figure out your ROI throughout the course of your social media efforts.