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.

Grab the Audio and Listen Later via Itunes

Other Social Media ROI Resources

For other Social Media ROI takes I would suggest checking out CSPenns take on Social Media ROI and Olivier Blanchard’s (@thebrandbuilder) blog . These guys are on the cutting edge of Social Media Analytics and I am following their input very closely.

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 =/

The Art and Science of Scaling Social from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

ShowNotes

Earned is the PR and is the most credible

Paid is your mass advertising very expensive

Owned Media is the brands media outlets- the blogs-videos-photos .

Digg Social ads

Re-purposing Content for different platforms. It’s best to take the earned credible content to use

Content goes stale very quickly in social media channels. Refreshing content frequently is a must.

Testing your content against itself by using different headlines and different types of multimedia.

Sometimes traditional earned media does better than user generated content. So testing what works and what doesn’t is important!

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)

I still love and use hootsuite and it is still the best free tool to use to manage your social media life in one easy to use dashboard. They just need to fix their love with the iframe and bar that goes across the top of the browser. (This goes for stumbleupon/digg too)

As more people come to realize the increasing value of SEO to their marketing activities they will want to use a platform that has this functionality built in. I would almost guarantee a huge boost in the adoption rate of Hootsuite over Tweetdeck, if they were to take out the Iframe and integrate bit.ly or a more robust url tracking service. The sheer fact that it is web based will make Tweetdeck a distant memory (or memory-hogging memory)

So please Hootsuite, stop stealing my juice and keep up the A+ work. Your App Rocks.

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.

Mapping the inbound marketing ecosystem with Rick Burnes of Hubspot from David Wells on Vimeo.

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)

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.

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.

At the end of the day perhaps the altruistic effects of your social media efforts provide value beyond that of a mere green piece of paper. The entire premise of Social Media is having a give to get mentality. Anything else will run the risk of your company being viewed as the cash hungry monster that it very well may be.

Put out good quality content that interests your audience and be authentic in your efforts and you should be seeing the positive effects of your social media campaigns. If you have to resort to calculating these numbers to convince your boss that what you are doing is working, you might be doing something wrong.

Social Media ROI from the Pros

If you enjoyed this post and would like to dig even further I highly recommend watching Christopher S. Penn’s Presentation on Social Media ROI.

You may also want to check out “Social Media ROI”  with Olivier Blanchard Part 1 Part 2

What is your take on calculating Social Media ROI?

In this episode I talk about a couple of my favorite tools that I use on a daily basis to streamline many tedious, repetitive social media tasks. I also get into the business benefits of using foursquare as a free customer loyalty system for any brick and mortar business. Also a rant on how it spams my twitter streams.

Runtime about 16minutes

Shownotes:

Hootsuite – All in one social media dashboard. Watch my tutorial on Hootsuite

Twitterfeed – feed RSS content to different social media outlets

Ping.fm – Aggregate updates for close to 60 social media networks at one time

Pixelpipe - I reference this as pixel bytes but its pipes… silly me. With this you can blast out audio/video/picture content to over 100 sites simultaneously.

FourSquare – Location based social network that has been gaining traction lately.

If you enjoyed the show make sure to subscribe over in itunes

Call in and leave you thoughts on the Digital Marketing Zen Hotline at (617) 299-1232 and I’ll put you in the show!

In efforts to become one of the go to places on the web for all things digital marketing and social media, The Digital Marketing Zen Videos section is now open for business! I have been collecting the best of the best in Digital Marketing talks from across the web.

Sharing Videos on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and the like is all well and good, but those messages seem to get lost in the ether quickly.

So, I have decided to house the videos that I have seen that have inspired, taught, or amazing me in my travels across the internet should have a permanent home. This is that home.

The Categories for the Videos Section include :

• Augmented Reality
• Design
• Digital Marketing
• Pay Per Click
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media
• Web Analytics
• Original Digital Marketing Zen Videos

So go ahead and check it out. Let me know what you think, and most importantly suggest other videos that have inspired you in your social media or digital marketing efforts.

In this episode of Digital Marketing Zen, I interview Robert Enriquez, Founder of Search Exchange (an internet marketing conference here in Charlotte). Robert is a master link builder and online reputation management expert and knows his SEO. You can Follow him @NC_SEO & @SearchExchange

We talk about where to get started if you are new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), What tools to use for keyword research, advanced keyword research techniques using Google Adwords, and we take a look at the implications of real time search for SEO. Runtime 16min.

Shownotes

3:20 First thing to do when starting SEO. Keyword Research!

3:48 Tools for Keyword research. Wordtracker.  Google Adwords Keyword tool.

4:20 Advanced Keyword research by running a google adwords campiagn to get accurate impressions.

5:15 Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and you receive a 100 dollar Google Adwords gift certificate.(So many Googles in that sentence!)

7:15 What is the biggest mistakes that most people make with SEO?

9:10 Implications of real time search on search engine optimization.

11:00 Link building tips from Robert : Merchant Circle, PRlog.org, Ezine Articles.

15:20 Search Exchange 3 day conference with Chris Brogan and Lee Oden Keynoting. May 17th 2010.

In this Episode of Digital Marketing Zen, I cover the importance of staking your claim in usernames on various social media websites. Having a consistent username across the board is not only a must for branding purposes but also for the inherent SEO benefits that many web 2.0 sites. Give it a Listen!

P.S. I say its episode 13 in the show but its really episode 12… Someday I will learn how to count… someday….

Runtime 10 minutes

Show notes

Usernamechecker – Check to see if your desired usernames are available.

Knowem – Name checking and sign up service. Great resource here.

Twitterfeed – Feed RSS into your twitter accounts

SEObook SEO toolbar – Seo tool for Firefox with robust features

Quirk search status plugin for FF

Please feel free to leave your comment below or call in to the Digital Marketing Zen hotline to leave audio comments. Audio comments are featured on the show! Use the Google Voice Widget to call in.

For More on Social Media Real Estate check out my post on Alter Imaging’s Blog