Blog ROI | Professional Blog Service

Who has time to do the work today?

Monday, March 1st, 2010

There has been a lot of news lately on how companies are really not hiring right now. A recent report talks about how a companies are hiring temp workers, but they are not hiring them to stay. In the past, a common practice was to test drive a worker then offer them a position. Hiring them as full-time employees is not happening right now.

So, who is getting the work done?

When I joined ATA Airlines back in 1997, George Michelsons brought in Bain and Company to basically prepare the company for sale. The process was to get rid of a lot of people and put more jobs onto fewer people. While this strategy worked around the country for Bain, it usually preceded an upgrade in office automation to ensure the work could still get done.

The office automation phase did not occur at ATA Airlines.

The result was a lot of stressed out people carrying around their imaginary trays trying to figure out how they were going to fit one more item onto an already heavy load. No longer were people interested in teamwork, they were more interested in self-preservation. It created a lot of ill-tempered people in the process.

As some of my clients reveal their corporate cultures, I am finding similarities to what I experienced at ATA Airlines. No one has time to commit to anything above and beyond what their core responsibilities are. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is not projected to get much better – CEO’s are reluctant to hire.

What are the solutions?

The easiest is what is being done by some today. Hire temp workers to get things done. They may cost a little more in the short-term, but allow you to avoid the headaches of hiring employees and their costs over the long-term. There are a lot of companies providing these services.

Sometimes, just hiring a grunt worker is not enough. Sometimes you need a professional person to do the work, you don’t have time to do. There are companies being set up that can act as your Marketing Department, your Accounting Department, or your HR Department. They can do it at a cost that is far cheaper than hiring full-time employees, but are focused solely on getting work done for you.

So, look around and ask yourself, are you and your colleagues a bunch of stressed out grumpy people not really accomplishing much because there is too much to do? There is help out there that can help your company meet its strategic goals for the year.

We actually put together a white paper on the ROI of outsourcing blogging and social media. You can download it here, if you want to take a look.

About the Author: Paul Lorinczi
Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.

Tags: best practices, blog writing, business blogging, Business Blogging Content, strategy
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Ghost Writing, News, Research Desk, Tools, Writing | No Comments »

A Year in Review

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Professional Blog Service started a year ago out of Indy Associates to assist companies in generating content they need for most of their Internet marketing activity.

While at Indy Associates, we always recommended blogging as a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. With the popularity of social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter, the strategy has become even more important. The challenge for most of our customers was the blog content generation. Most companies do not have trained content writers that are able to develop conversational blog content, while writing for the search engines. Most important, many of clients have great ideas with no time to share them.

So, what have we learned in 2009?

Most companies still do not have the resources, or the time to write their own content.

2009 saw the unemployment rate hit 10% in November. It was reported that many companies laid off many in their workforce leaving those left behind with more work to do and little time to get it done. The last thing on anyone’s mind is getting blog content written, even though everyone agrees that marketing is still important in a down economy.

Blogging and Social Media continue to evolve from AOL of the 90s to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter heading into a new decade.

“Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time, according to a Nielsen report published in March of this year, “Global Faces and Networked Places.” These numbers keep rising as the year progresses. By 2012, IBM predicts that globally, a quarter of the global population will be using social media in some form.

Results still matter to most companies.

Learning how to play in social media is one thing. Getting people to interact with you is another. Your clients may or may not interact with you through social media. The challenge for all companies is finding out which ones they should engage. You may be able to sell like Dell, or respond to customer complaints like Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue Airlines have done. (Note to my former colleagues at American Airlines – take note!). Either way, Social Media and Blogging is measurable in some way depending on the strategic approach you take with it.

There are great tools like Yahoo Analytics (shameless plug as we are a Yahoo Analytics consultant). Radian6 and Scoutlabs can track who’s talking about you, and help you decide whether to act on the positive or negative media being generated.

We predict that 2010 will be the year of results with blogging and social media. In a nutshell, you are doing it to build your marketing list, or to generate interest in your products or services. To succeed, you will need:

An understanding of how your market uses blogging and social media, if at all
A plan to participate
Execution and commitment to the plan
Measurement of the results over the course of the year, not a month

If you can learn how to do it before your competition, you win. It will take them 12 months just to figure out what you have done.

Happy New Year from Professional Blog Service

Tags: blogging, business blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social networking, social networks
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | No Comments »

Marketing Plan for 2010? Try the 70-20-10 Marketing Mix

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Patrick Spenner at the Marketing Leadership Council presented a great variation on the Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule) when it comes to trying new marketing tactics: (Beat the Social Media Investment Catch-22, November 9, 2009)

Spenner suggests any marketing plan should be follow the 70-20-10 spending rule: Roughly 70% of your marketing budget should be on the “tried and true” marketing channels — areas that you know absolutely have succeeded in the past.

The other 10% should be on experimental or new channels “for which there is no in-year expectation of ROI.” In other words, don’t expect to see an ROI within the fiscal year. Look for growth and results, but don’t expect things to pay for themselves.

The middle 20%, says Spenner, is for the most successful of last year’s 10%. “These touchpoints are incubating — we should manage them to develop benchmarks for success,” wrote Spenner. “These touchpoints eventually move over into the 70% as the organization accepts them.

Where could you find some new traffic? It may not always be on social media (said the social media company). It may be something new like trade shows and non-industry conferences. It may be a new website. Or email newsletters. Or a strategy of participating in discussion forums. Or telemarketing. And it just may very well be Twitter and blogging. The point is that you look at at least one new strategy and give it a year to see what happens.

Take some of the money you’ve been spending on newspaper and radio advertising, and try a new social media campaign. Pepsi Cola just did it, forgoing the multi-million Super Bowl ad buy, and putting $20 million into a social media campaign instead. Toys ‘R’ Us saw some explosive growth on their Facebook fan page. And even the Cincinnati Bengals have joined the Twitterverse and have over 15,000 followers.

Finding new marketing channels is important. Media consumption by your customers is always changing, and they’re going to places you didn’t have in your 70% bucket a few years ago, or even last year. Two years ago, I thought Twitter was the stupidest thing ever. Today, as much as one-third of my personal blog’s traffic comes from Twitter, but the largest portion comes from StumbleUpon.

So what’s your new 10%? What are some new channels you could explore for 2010?

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.

Tags: Cincinnati Bengals, marketing, Pepsi Cola, Social Media, Super Bowl, twitter
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Communication, Lead Generation, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Twitter | No Comments »

How Can Travel Destinations Use Social Media and Blogging?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

For one thing, update your website. Get a new site that makes lets you easily make your own changes, rather than relying on a code warrior to make $100/hour changes for you.

Second, add a blog and write new content at least twice a week. Talk about what’s going on at your place, announce special events, review those events after they happen, do special “Meet the Staff” profiles, talk about the history of your place, and anything else you can think of.

The reason you want to do this is because of search. Ninety percent of all web interactions begin with search, which means they’re searching for you. If they can’t find you, they won’t visit you. So blogging helps you win searches when travelers are looking for you.

Third, join Facebook. Create your own profile, but then create a page for your destination. Upload your email list of all your past visitors (you have been collecting emails, haven’t you?), and invite all of them to become fans of your page. Then you can update them about special events, new blog posts, and other news. Build a fan base of people who love your place.

Fourth, join Twitter. Upload your email list again and start following those visitors. They’ll follow you back, and you can use Twitter to broadcast new blog posts, chat with followers (like a chatroom), and keep in touch with your regulars and fan base.

By jumping in on social media and blogging, you can create a base of rabid fans who love your destination. They’ll not only come back year after year, but tell their friends about it too.

Tags: blogging, Social Media, travel destinations
Posted in All Posts, Blog ROI, Business Blogging Content, Lead Generation, Social Media, Social Networks, Writing | 1 Comment »

Content is STILL King

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Jeff Bullas has written a post on a study he found called the “Internet Activity Index” released by the Online Publishers Association. The study shows how content sites are still King of the Internet for both eyeballs and time.

Here are the highlights of the study:

The 5 Categories and the the types of sites that were measured were:

Content (Sites like NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and Edmunds.com (Content sites)
Communications (websites offering email, and Instant messaging)
Community (Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn)
Commerce (such as Ebay, Amazon)
Search (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc)

Here is Jeff’s interpretation:

The study on online activity titled the “Internet Activity Index” released by the Online Publishers Association shows the trends of the types of activity that have occurred on the Internet over the past 6 years. The study’s findings has important implications for online marketers and how they should be focusing their time, resources and strategies in 2009 and beyond.

Five key findings of the study?

Internet users continue to spend a majority of their “time” with Content sites, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009.
Emergence of Community (it wasn’t measured in 2003 as it wasn’t statistically significant enough and not on the radar)
Content is still king; the content rich sites continue to be a place where consumers spend the majority of their online time and provide an environment for brand marketers to reach and engage with consumers despite the emergence of community sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.
Community sites are reducing the share of online time by communications sites due to community sites ability to offer the same activities such as email and instant messaging more efficiently.
Time spent with Search doubled.

Here is the report as it is reported on the Online-Publishers Site:

Share of Time Spent Online (%)
	Jul08	Aug08	Sep08	Oct08	Nov08	Dec08	Jan09	Feb09	Mar09	Apr09	May09	Jun09	Jul09
Commerce	14.1	13.5	13.1	12.8	14.3	16.0	14.1	13.4	13.2	13.3	12.8	11.0	10.9
Communications	28.2	29.0	28.7	28.0	26.5	25.9	26.5	27.4	27.0	26.4	26.3	25.2	24.4
Community	9.0	8.9	8.3	8.7	9.7	9.7	11.3	12.6	12.8	13.7	14.5	18.5	20.6
Content	43.4	43.2	44.6	45.3	44.5	43.2	42.8	41.1	41.5	41.3	41.1	40.6	39.6
Search	5.3	5.3	5.3	5.2	5.0	5.3	5.3	5.4	5.5	5.3	5.3	4.7	4.5

% Change in Share of Time, Month-Over-Month
	Jul08	Aug08	Sep08	Oct08	Nov08	Dec08	Jan09	Feb09	Mar09	Apr09	May09	Jun09	Jul09
Commerce	3.4	4.3	3.0	2.3	11.7	11.9	11.9	5.0	1.5	0.8	3.8	-	0.9
Communications	2.4	2.8	1.0	2.4	5.4	2.3	2.3	3.4	1.5	2.2	0.4	-	3.2
Community	2.3	1.1	6.7	4.8	11.5	0.0	16.5	11.5	1.6	7.0	5.8	-	11.4
Content	2.6	0.5	3.2	1.6	1.8	2.9	0.9	4.0	1.0	0.5	0.5	-	2.5
Search	1.9	0.0	0.0	1.9	3.8	6.0	0.0	1.9	1.9	3.6	0.0	-	4.3

*Notes: Excludes .gov and .edu Web sites, as well as pornographic domains. Percentage change indicates the percentage increase or decrease from the previous month’s value (June 2009 % change not shown due to introduction of Nielsen’s NetView RDD//Online data). Share of Time data based on Total Time values.

Source: OPA and Nielsen Online

For years now, the principals here have been preaching that content is king. Not only for search engine optimization (SEO), but also for it being the hub of a social media campaign. A colleague of mine, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of a large travel company has validated these findings with their strategy. Quote: “Blogging is the hub of a social media campaign. Social Media alone is not a strategy for corporations wishing to participate.”

The numbers Jeff shared this morning kind of validates this approach. From a hub, there are spokes to other platforms through sharing. The valuable asset is the content generated.

Tags: Blog ROI, blogging, business blogging, Business Blogging Content
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Research Desk, Social Media, Writing | 2 Comments »

You Can’t Measure Web 2.0 with Old School Expectations

Friday, June 12th, 2009

A few months ago on another blog, I talked about the problem with measuring social media through Marketing 1.0. Most old school marketers — Marketing 1.0 pros — are used to reaching hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions. So they tend to get frustrated when their whiz-bang social media campaign is only getting hundreds or just a few thousand visits. They’re spoiled by the big numbers, and think social media should be just as robust.

The problem is, they weren’t really reaching millions in the first place. They were being lied to by ad salespeople, and it colored their perception of who they were reaching.

Here’s an example.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

According to the Golf Channel’s website, they have a “global reach of almost 110 million homes,” which makes the Marketing 1.0 pro think they’re going to reach 110 million people.

Not even close. Let’s run through the math:

According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country. But do 29.5 million people watch the Golf Channel? No.
The Golf Channel won’t even say how many people they get. But Sports Business Daily did.
According to Sports Business Daily, Golf Channel’s average daily viewership is 77,000. Primetime viewership runs around 131,000.
77,000 viewers divided by 110 million homes is. . . .07%. Not even one-tenth of one percent the Golf Channel likes to brag about. But you can bet every Golf Channel ad salesperson is telling their customers, “We have a reach of 110 million homes.”

But it doesn’t end with the Golf Channel. Newspapers and magazines boast about print runs, but don’t talk about readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of listeners and viewers.

So how do you know who’s telling the truth? Can they even accurately measure reach, or tell how many people watched a particular program? Not really. They can come close based on statistics. But they don’t know who saw your ad, if they were flipping around during the commercials, or if your commercial caused someone to go to the store and buy your product.

The same is true for PR. If a newspaper has a print run of 500,000 copies but a real readership of 300,000, the PR person will say, “we reached as many as 500,000 readers,” but they’re only counting the print run, not the actual number of people who read that article. They don’t know if anyone saw the article about your latest book buried on page E13, if anyone sent it to others, talked about it over coffee, or even bought the book as a direct result of the article.

Social media is able to measure itself, although not completely accurately. Still 90% accuracy is better than “we have a global reach of 110 million homes.”

How can I measure my site traffic?

Thanks to products like Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and StatCounter, you can measure website and blog traffic. You can see what keywords brought people into your site, what pages they landed on, and if they purchased one of your products. This way, you can see which keywords led to the most purchases, and focus more of your attention to promoting those keywords.

With programs like Radian6, you can see if people are talking about you or your product, and which Tweets, blogs, and websites you’re on. From there, you can follow those links back to your analytics package and measure visitors’ buying behavior.

So what do hundreds of visitors do for me?

More than the millions of people the ad salespeople were telling you about.

For one thing, you can find out which of those hundreds of people truly love your product. Which ones are the raving fans. Which ones tell their friends about your product.

Jason Falls of SocialMediaExplorer tells a story about how Maker’s Mark Bourbon has an Ambassadors Club, a group of raving fans of the high-end Kentucky bourbon. They get cards saying they’re Ambassadors, they have a special website, and get special inside information to help them become evangelists of the product.

When one of the Maker’s Mark Ambassadors is in a bar, and a person next to them orders another kind of bourbon, the Ambassador says, “No, you don’t want that,” and they order their new friend a Maker’s Mark. They tell the story about the bourbon, give them a card, and encourage the person to become a new fan of Maker’s Mark. The program is such a success, because they’re constantly having to send out new cards. (They have other ways of measuring their success too, but Jason didn’t tell me that part of the story.)

Imagine you’ve got a high-end consumer product that will only be enjoyed by a small, but affluent group of people. Where are you going to put your money? How are you going to track the results? How will you determine the reach of your message and which ones are the most effective? What kind of strategy could you build with social media as compared to broadcast or print media?

Do you have any thoughts? What would you do? Leave us a comment.

Tags: permission marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social networking
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks | 1 Comment »

What Absinthe Can Teach You About Business Blogging

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

I was recently asked by our friends at Compendium Blogware to help judge an internal blogging contest they were holding among the employees. I was chosen to be the impartial outside observer (thanks, Doug) to judge the entries.

The rules were simple. Come up with a creative and relevant way to use keywords, use photos or videos to support content. They had their wealth of knowledge about corporate blogging software to draw on.

The idea was a simple one: show business owners why and how to start a business blog.

That’s easy to explain. Blogging is all about search. People search for answers to their problems. Your goal in blogging is to have people find you at the top of the search engine rankings, and recognize you as having the answer to what they need.

Chris Baggott, Compendium’s CEO and co-founder, tells a great story about one of their clients, a small liquor store in Greenfield. The owner will write about different exotic liqueurs and products she gets in from time to time, and talk about different recipes and drinks her readers can make. When she talks about root beer schnapps, sales for the product goes up. When she writes about a particular wine, sales for that wine jump.

One week, she wrote about absinthe, the liquor often consumed by Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, and Pablo Picasso. She only had a few bottles in the store, so she thought she would see what would happen if she wrote about it.

A few weeks later — if I have my details straight — a new customer showed up and bought up all the bottles of absinthe she had in the store (one bottle went for nearly $100). How did you find us? she asked.

The customer explained that he was going to the Indianapolis 500 that weekend, and wanted some absinthe to share with his friends. He did a quick Google search for local liquor stores carrying the stuff, and found the Greenfield liquor store — the only one in the area carrying it. Or at least the only one that showed up in the search engines.

The guy flew into town, landed at the Indianapolis airport, drove east 1 hour to buy the bottles, and then raced to the track. Talk about a blogging success story!

This is just one example of a business who patiently plugged along with their blogging efforts, not doing anything out of the ordinary. She just wrote something new, week after week, focused on what her customers needed. She made sure to employ best blogging practices, and stuck with the fundamentals. As a result, she sold her entire stock of absinthe to one customer.

And sometimes, that’s what blogging is all about. It’s a great tool for search engine optimization (SEO) that leads to some great Long Tail opportunities. That one-in-a-million or even one-in-a-thousand opportunity that comes along only to those people who were prepared for it.

Not everyone is going to be scrambling for absinthe in the Indianapolis area. In fact, if I were a betting man, I would have bet that no one would ever search for absinthe in Indianapolis. But one guy did, and the liquor store won that Long Tail search.

As a business blogger, you need to focus on winning as many Long Tail searches as you can. Write frequently about topics that are related to your company’s mission. If you’re in the blogging business, write about the different ways people can use blogging and social media. If you’re in the liquor business, write about great liquor recipes. But write a lot, and then measure it.

The key is to write about these topics frequently and regularly. If you just poke around at it, throwing up a post every few weeks, you’ll still be relegated to the dregs of the search results, never to see the light of day.

If you want some ideas for blog posts, want to know how to create great content several times a week, or just want to find out more about how you can get those regular, frequent posts without ever having to lift a finger, get in touch with us and we’ll tell you everything we know.

Photo: Qole Tech

Tags: absinthe, business blogging, Business Blogging Content
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools, Writing | 1 Comment »

Are Your Customers Talking About You? Five Ways to Find Out

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

In our last post, we talked about how Twitter helped start a revolution in Moldova, and how the ruling Communist party was caught unaware that any protest was going to begin until it actually began.

People are talking about your organization, whether you know it or not. The Communists were not following any discussion on Twitter or social media, and were completely caught off-guard by the protests. The best way to find out if someone is talking about your company on social media? Use social media.

So how can you find out whether people are talking about your company or not? Can you even measure it? There are a few basic ways that any social media practitioner uses:

Plain ol’ Google – We’ll start with the most obvious one. Just type in your company name, product name, or even your name, and see what comes up. If you’ve done nothing else online, hopefully your website and a Google map came up. If it didn’t, learn search engine optimization and start blogging super quick and fix this.

Google News Alert – If you like what you see in your Google search (i.e. not “nothing”), you can set up a Google Alert to let you know whenever your name, your company, your product or industry have appeared in a news article, website, and even blog. We use Google Alerts to monitor issues in our industry, see what our clients are up to, and to even see where our own names are appearing (we’re very needy that way).

Twitter searches – We use Twitterment.com, TwitterFall.com, and of course, Twitter’s own search feature. Twitterment does a keyword search, especially in a Twitter bio, so you can find people based on their background or interests. TwitterFall lets you search for keywords and then drops them on a website page for you to see (TweetDeck’s search feature will do the same thing, but without the clunky web interface.), and Twitter search will look at every tweet for your search term.

Radian6 – A social media measurement service that actually seeks out and tabulates social media conversations people are having on Twitter, blogs, and other social networking sites. It’s a subscription-based service. We use it for some of our clients here, and have been able to not only find conversations about their topic, but find out who started it, how much of a social reach they had, and determine what the potential impact a positive or negative message could have on them.

Bloglines – Search blogs and get the results emailed to you. It works a lot like Google Alerts, but delivers the results to your home page and RSS feeds, rather than your email (Google Alerts can only send results to your email).

So what did you find? Are people talking about you? Are they saying mean and nasty things about your horrid lack of customer service, or are they singing your praises because you deliver more than you promise, you’re on time, and provide a great value?

Or did you find nothing? If you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, that’s great, because no one is saying anything bad about you.

On the other hand, if you’re a marketer, this is awful news, because no one is talking about you! You are NOT the subject of anyone’s conversations. You have barely made a dent in the mindshare of your market. And you’re probably destined for more of the same until your company shuts down, which may be any time now.

If you want to jumpstart a conversation about your company, now is the time to start blogging and participating in social media. Read this blog, read Kyle Lacy’s blog, read Doug Karr’s blog. Or you can even give us a call.

Just start doing something right away.

Tags: google analytics, Social Media Analytics
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Tools, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Blogs are the Center of the Universe

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I love social media experts. There’s one born exactly every 0.017 seconds, and they all have great opinions that prove Dirty Harry’s second most famous quote right. One piece of advice they like to give is:

“You should not blog, at least not right away.”

Take it from a social media practitioner (I’m not a “social media expert” that is a title for an “interactive user” who has hung out a shingle), blogs are important. In fact, blogs are the center of the social media universe. Why?

Blogs are the root source of content for nearly everything.

If you plan on doing anything meaningful in social media, you have to have a landing point. Preferably one you can measure and is engaging. Often times you need a place to break a story. Other times you need somewhere you can bring together ideas. Blogs are perfect for this.

About the Author: Mike Seidle
Mike Seidle is a leading internet and social media marketing consultant who specializes in developing campaigns that are measurable and get long term results. Mike has been helping companies get internet results since 1996.

Tags: blogs, Social Media, social media experts, twitter
Posted in All Posts, Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter | No Comments »

The Importance of Measuring Social Media’s Impact on Sales & Marketing

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

I’ve been beating the “measuring social media” drum for the last several weeks, talking to whomever I can about the importance of measuring the nebulous world of social media.

(In some cases, I’ve actually had to argue that it can be measured at all, but that’s a different story. My suggestion is, if you don’t do social media, don’t say what it can or can’t do. Ask if it can, but don’t declare it can’t.)

A few months ago, social media guru Jeremiah Owyang wrote how online community managers need to prove the worth of social media if they’re going to survive cutbacks during a recession.

His three areas to measure

Improvement in marketing efficiency – Measure how quickly a new product launch goes from awareness to the close of a sale, or spreading word of mouth. Measure your clicks on Twitter and your blog, and see how many of them place an order. How long did it take to go from date of launch to profitability? Back when I was in the poultry business, we measured that in months and sometimes years. Now it takes — and can be measured in — days and weeks. And sometimes months and years.

Reduction in support costs – Owyang says to measure any decreases in whether a customer goes to physical stores, emails an account rep, or calls the tech support line. You want to see an increased reliance on the community itself, and measure the dollars saved through your community. Apple takes advantage of their raving fans and expert users who provide free tech support to their customers with simple and not-so-simple problems. The net result to Apple? Fewer phone calls to tech support, which means lower tech support costs.

Actual improvement to sales – I said it before, and I’ll say it again. You CAN measure sales from social media and your community. It’s a simple matter of having an analytics package — like StatCounter or Google Analytics — installed on your site. Count the number of people who enter the site, count the number of people who buy your product, divide the number of visitors by the number of buyers, and you have your conversion rate. Dell Computers was actually able to show they sold $1 million worth of products just through Twitter alone. If you can show this, shout it from the mountaintop, or at least from the desk in your cubicle.”

But what about the long sales cycle?” the naysayers grumble. “What about realtors and insurance agents who don’t sell anything online?”

Easy. Here’s how:
1) Keep track of how long they spend on customers, and how long a sale takes. (Many of them already do.)
2) Keep track of each channel that gets customers, whether it’s the Yellow Pages, email, WOM referral, networking, or social media. (There are software solutions that do nothing but measure social media.)
3) Add up the time AND money spent on each channel.
4) Total up sales gotten from each channel.
5) Divide a channel’s sales by time spent on the channel. That’s your value per hour.

Sales ÷ Time = VPH

6) Subtract the channel’s cost from the channel’s sales. That’s your ROI.

Sales – Cost = ROI

See? Easy as pie. But if you’re still stuck, give us a call. We’ll help you out.

Tags: blogging ROI, business blogging, sales, Social Media, Social Media Analytics
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Tools | 4 Comments »

Category: Blog ROI

Professional Blog Service started a year ago out of Indy Associates to assist companies in generating content they need for most of their Internet marketing activity.

So, what have we learned in 2009?

Most companies still do not have the resources, or the time to write their own content.

Blogging and Social Media continue to evolve from AOL of the 90s to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter heading into a new decade.

Results still matter to most companies.

Happy New Year from Professional Blog Service

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