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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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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)

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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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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.

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How to Socialize your Browser, Streamline your life

There are many different ways to update your social networks, but some are much easier than others. This post is designed to be a guide on how to share content with various social networks with just a few clicks.

One of the main reasons people use as an excuse not to get involved with social media is that “I simply don’t have the time”.

Well, after you read this post there will be NO excuse as to why you are not sharing the content that you consume on a daily basis with the various social media networks you may or may not be a part of.

It is time to streamline

Copying links, venturing to the site, logging in, pasting your link, and clicking update are a thing of the past. There are tools out there that will facilitate the ability your ability to share content without having to venture to them.

Enter Browser plugins, They have been around a long time but are rarely adopted by people because they simply don’t know that they exist. So if you have ever been doing something online and thought “There has GOT to be a better way“, there probably is. Do a quick search for what your problem is and add the word plugin to it. You will be amazed at how many free plugins exist out there to suite many needs.

Don’t work harder, Work SMARTER, stupid.

Plugins that facilitate Social Sharing

Shareaholic – A browser plugin that is

Hootsuite – A bookmarklet from Hootsuite. This is my personal favorite sharing tool.

Sharethis – Another Bookmarklet that allows sharing across multiple sites.

There are likely many more plugins out there. These are the best that I have found on my journeys through the interwebs.

How to socialize your browser

1. Download FireFox or Google chrome
2. Go to sharethis.com and/or shareaholic.com.
3. For sharethis you will need to drag the bookmarklet to your Favoites bar in your browser.
4. For shareaholic you are going to download the firefox or chrome extension.
5. Now that you have either installed, Navigate to a page/post that you want to share, click the button, and boom its done. As easy as that.
6. *Note that ShareThis, Sharaholic, and hootsuite require that you sing up an account with them to use. Don’t worry its FREE! They will ask for your login credentials once and Keep them, as long as your cookies are enabled.
7. Now Share content with the world with no hassle.

Now you are set up to Share content with the rest of the Web. Sharing relevant content wth followers and groups is a powerful social media strategy that facilitates user engagement.

A Couple things to remember when sharing content

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Using Hootsuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard

I have been consulting with clients about the virtues of Hootsuite for some time now and have decided to create a walk through on how to set up hootsuite and how to use it to aggregate your social media updates and to monitor the twitter fire hose of information.

Hootsuite is a powerful twitter client that allows you to customize the twitter streams you see to get the data FAST. Think of it like the ultimate web based Twitter Dashboard.

In the video I run through the initial set up. I then dive deep into how to use the tabs, columns, different search strings, how to autopost rss feeds and why you should be doing so.

Using HootSuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard from David Wells on Vimeo.

Benefits to using Hootsuite

• The ability to aggregate your social media networks
• Use it as a url shortening service
• Tracking clickthrough stats on shortened urls
• Scheduling out Tweeting/status updates for campaigns
• Auto feeding rss content into your twitter, facebook or Linkedin profile
• Ping.FM intergration allowing for syndication across 50+ social media sites…
• Easily sharing with the bookmarklet/browser plugins
• Easy access across multiple computers due to it being web based
• Derr…. It’s FREE (for the time being)
• AND now Wordpress blog integration announced today Jan 6th 2010

What about other twitter clients?

What makes Hootsuite better than tweetdeck and its counterparts is the ability to lay out the information in a tab like format. The tabs give the ability to set up multiple custom twitter search queries that makes for an amazing twitter listening platform.

One of the tabs I use in my hootsuite (as explained in the video) is a Q&A tab. This allows me to search anyone talking about social media, marketing, seo, or ppc in twitter. The search queries look like this:

• “marketing ? -http” (the -http takes out people linking to things and leaves only questions)
• “social media ? -http”
• “Your brand” ? -http
• “Your competitors brand”
• etc. (there are so many ways you can do this. I explain in the video at the 3:28 mark)

Remember a core principle of social media is GIVING before you get anything

I would highly recommend setting up certain tabs with phrases and questions that relate to your industry. Believe me people are shouting into twitter with questions ALL the time. If you can send them a quick answer they will thank you for it and most likely follow you, maybe even refer a friend to you for help. (WHAT? A business lead on twitter? perposterious!)

While there is an iphone application for hootsuite currently available, I can imagine that an android counterpart is soon to come.

Using Hootsuite as a social media dashboard

So what are you waiting for?

Go use it and stop complaining that you don’t understand twitter. It’s 2010 for Gods sake!

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How to aggregate Social Media Photo Sharing with MobyPicture

MobyPicture is a photo sharing site that allows users to send out one photo via email, mms, or uploading directly online and having it distributed over a vast number of photo sharing and blogging platforms.

A lot of people use Twitpic, Yfrog, Twitgoo, TweetPhoto, Img.ly, but they are all lacking syndication with other social media sites. Mobypicture fills that gap by aggregating Flickr, Facebook,  Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, LiveJournal, Youtube, Tumblr, Brightkite, Vimeo, Forusquare.

It’s easy to set up (in video below) and an excellent way to share photos and videos with people in one simple message.

To use MobyPicture all you have to do is send the picture via email or mms to your custom mobypicture email address (usernamer.password@mobypicture.com) with the subject as the message you want associated with that picture. Mobypicture handles the rest and blasts it out to the services of your choosing.

My Video Tutorial on MobyPicture.com

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Social Media Charlotte Google Wave

So everyone is talking about Google Wave and how awesome it isn’t. I’m not so sure I see the practical application of “Waves” right now. I do think that like every google product, Google wave will become better and easier to use over time.

As for right now I think that Google Wave is very much like the fax machine. What did the first person who had a fax machine do with it? They couldn’t fax anyone else b/c they are the only person with the technology! That must have been a hard sale to make.

For the elite group of people that are in google wave, I’d like to hear your thoughts on it in the comments below!

You can join it by searching in Google Wave “with:public social media charlotte”.

I created it with the intention of having an open forum to discuss anything and everything social media related, kind of like a forum on steroids.  Feel free to post questions, comments, or links to any social media related topics you wish.

You too can add waves to your blog with the wordpress plugin wavr .

It looks as though the plugin is still somewhat buggy. But if you log into your google wave account here you will be able to see the wave on this post. (Awesome functionality… ) Plugin is broken or buggy

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Best Practices for Business Blogging

Here is the panel from the Social Media Business Forum with Jeff Cohen, DJ Waldow, and Alison Bolen on “Business Blogging Best Practices.” It was a great panel and some very good tips, tricks, and how-to on how to get your blog working for your business.

 

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For the timestamps of the Video Please head on over to Alter Imaging’s Blog!

Runtime 51min.

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The Future of Business on the Social Web

Here is a little video I took from the 2009 Social Media Business Forum.

Laura Fitton (author of Twitter for dummies), Jason Falls (Principal over at Social Media Explorer), John Andrews (Founder and Managing Partner at Collective Bias), and Lucretia Pruitt (Director of Social Media at Collective Bias.) Speaking about how the Social media landscape is changing.g

 

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View the video with timestamps over at Alter imaging’s Blog

The future of business on the social web – Social Media Business Forum from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.