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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.

 

 Social Media ROI [47:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (372)

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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 =/

 

 Digital Marketing Zen #17 The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media [35:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (345)