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.

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.

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.

Most people use social bookmarking sites as a way to store their browser bookmarks in the cloud for easy access on the go. Sites like delicious are good for that.

Browser plugins however, are more useful. Xmarks, previously named Foxmarks, is a browser plugin for firefox & chrome (if you have internet explorer running please smash your computer now for me).

Xmarks allows for cross browser/machine bookmark syncing and the ability to access them from the cloud when you are on the go. These are your private bookmarks accessible from anywhere. If you aren’t using this tool, please get with the program.

Now towards onwards to the future

Enter ZooTool.

Zootool is a new social bookmarking tool that is dusting off the oldschool “social bookmarking” site and giving it a new, awesome twist.

I predict ZooTool (or something of the same concept) to become de facto social bookmarking site of tomorrow. Why you may ask? Because it is bringing in the functionality and social aspect that other services are lacking.

ZooTool is enabling people to save and share content like never before. It allows to to grab any type of multimedia you come across while surfing the web.

By simply clicking the bookmarklet   You can grab any piece of multimedia content from the webpage.

As you are collecting the pictures, images, pages, and documents from any web page you can easily sort them into folders and have the option of sending the bookmark to your existing social networks

Not only will this help you sort and tag images and other pieces of content that you might want to add into your own blog, it will also keep the attribution information of where you found the original artwork. Something that I have found to be extremely handy.

All the collected bookmarks from across the web can be easily accessed in your “Zoo”

What tools are you using to collect multimedia from the web?

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.

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?

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

• Make sure it is relevant to your audience. Or they can and will tune you out.
• Share more of other peoples content than your own

Chris Brogan recommends almost 10 times as much  of other peoples content than your own. This is a tip from Trust Agents a book by Chris Brogan and Julian Smith. This shows that you are one of the community and not all about “Me, me, me” and “buy my crap”

• Don’t overdo it. You may think sharing 30 links with your twitter followers per day is helpful, but it may be construed as spam. So, share the Best of the BEST.
• Have fun and share things you are passionate about. It’s just easier that way =)

Video Tutorial for those who can’t read

Socializing Your Browser – Make Sharing Content Easier from David Wells on Vimeo.

So, How are you sharing content with your community?

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!

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

How to update multiple photo sharing sites at once with MobyPicture.com from David Wells on Vimeo.

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