Social Media Analytics | Professional Blog Service

Learn 7 New Secrets to Promote Your Blog at BlogIndiana

Friday, August 6th, 2010

I’ll be speaking for the third year in a row at BlogIndiana on 7 NEW Secrets to Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media. My session is at 10:15, on Saturday, August 16, in Room 252 of the ITCC Building on IUPUI’s campus.

I’m also speaking at the Social Media 101 event on Thursday, August 14 about — what else? — Social Media. This is for you new bloggers who are still learning about social media and blogging.

If you want to attend, I can give you a 10% discount off the tickets (because I’m kind of a big deal. Wait, what? They’re giving all the speakers that deal? Suck!). You can register for BlogIndiana 2010 (affiliate link) on the website. Enter the code “SPEAKTOME10” and you’ll get 10% off your registration fee.

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.

Tags: blog promotion, blogging, BlogIndiana, Presentations, Social Media, speaking
Posted in Blog Writing, Blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | View Comments

5 Questions to Ask Your Social Media “Expert”

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The term “social media expert” is thrown around and debated so much, it has nearly become a punchline.

Someone told me once that when the economy recovers and the bartenders and waiters get their old jobs back, the number of social media experts will be cut in half. And I keep reading lately that a lot of advertising agencies are starting to embrace digital media as one of their new offerings.

Meanwhile, there are real social media firms who have been using the product for more than a few weeks, don’t limit their Facebook time to playing Farmville and Pirate Clan, and don’t think that ROI is the name of that Canadian goalie playing for the Colorado Avalanche.

So when you go to hire your next social media consultant, ask them these questions, and pay careful attention to their answers.

1. How long have you been blogging? How often do you publish? The correct answer is anything longer than a year. People who write about a particular topic have to know something about it. And your social media expert can and should be blogging about some aspect of social media. Basically, if they’re not blogging, they’re probably not doing their job correctly.

They should also be publishing at least once a week. More is better, say, 2 – 3 times per week. But if they go for a few months without publishing anything, they’d better have a good reason why. “We’ve been executing some national campaigns for our clients, and I barely have enough time to sleep” is a pretty good excuse. A blank stare and a mumbled “I dunno” is not.

2. What blog platform do you use? The correct answer is “WordPress dot org. If they say WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, or anything else, ask them why. Anyone who has the technical knowledge to use WordPress.org will have the technical know-how to use the other tools you may need for your campaign.

I say this as someone who has different blogs on different platforms. I really like Blogspot.com for my personal blog, my favorite short blog platform is Posterous, and I will acknowledge the existence of Joomla. However, I embrace my elitism and snobbery when it comes to WordPress.org for client blogs.

3. What are some automation tools that you use? You don’t really care what they say, you just need to hear that they have an automation process. They should talk about things like Twaitter.com, Twitterfeed.com, Ping.fm, TweetDeck, and HootSuite.

If they carefully craft each blog promotion (i.e. including yours) by hand, they either don’t have enough work — which means they’re new, and they’re going to learn how to do this on your dime — or they’re inefficient — which means your work may fall through the cracks.

4. What analytics package do you use? For measuring blog or website traffic, if they say “Google Analytics,” that’s acceptable. We use Google Analytics quite a bit on our client blogs. However, better yet is “Yahoo Analytics” or “Going Up,” or one of the many other professional-level packages. For social media tracking, if they say “you can’t measure social media effectively,” thank them for their time, and ask them to leave. If they say “Google News Alerts,” give them a B– for trying.

The real social media experts will either cobble together their own system (B+/A–) or use a paid service like ScoutLabs or Radian6 (A+). Just keep in mind that those services are pricey, so if you want top-notch analytics results, that will be added to your budget.

5. What kind of ROI should I expect? Trick question: they shouldn’t be able to answer right away. Anyone who promises you a specific increase is just guessing. We’d love to tell you that you’ll see a 25% increase in sales, but we can’t. We’d love to say that you will see amazing growth in just a few months, but we can’t. The truth is there are too many variables to make an accurate prediction, just like with any marketing. We can’t predict the future, but we can measure it when it happens.

Follow up question: What kind of ROI have you gotten for other clients? While you would like to see significant numbers, what you’re more interested in is whether there are any numbers. A good social media practitioner will be able to track what business came from their campaigns.

Most of the social media poseurs will not be able to give you a good answer to most of these questions. Your true social media expert will have more than just a deep understanding of the tools, but will understand how to find your target audience and be able to create the right messages to reach them. But they should also be able to answer these five questions satisfactorily.

Photo credit: Pro Blog Service generated by Wordle.net
Yewenyi (Flickr)

Tags: consulting, google analytics, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social media expert, WordPress
Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | View Comments

Accuracy in Web Metrics is a Myth. Go for Real Time Analytics

Monday, June 14th, 2010

It’s online marketers’ dirty little secret: Web metrics are not very accurate. None of them.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

Users can block script and pixel based systems and proxy servers (servers that cache content to reduce bandwidth use on networks, like say, your ISP’s or corporate network) prevent your server’s weblog from recording every page view (I blogged in a little more detail on accuracy issues here). On top of network issues, there are some basic software limitations in browsers and metric packages that prevent every click and visit from being counted.

How bad is it? Somewhere between 4% and 12%. And it’s almost, almost always missing clicks, visits and page views.

So, do web analytics have value? Yes. But despite what you may think, their value isn’t counting every single click you get on your site. It’s for identifying trends. Knowing what is happening and what has happened in aggregate has great value. Even with a 6-12% margin of error.

The problem is, many web metrics solutions are on a time delay (like Google Analytics) that prevents you from seeing what is happening now. On the internet “NOW” means everything. And if you want to see what is happening minute to minute, your options are rather limited.

Here’s a situation that happened with one of my clients:

We had a client who had just started a $90,000, 48 hour advertising campaign for a major affiliate network. We didn’t realize it, but some bad code was preventing people coming to a landing page for step 3 in the registration process. A real-time analytics package allowed us to see the problem and fix it in about 15 minutes, but a once-a-day analytics package would have only pointed out the problem halfway through our 48 hour schedule.

Should we have tested the landing page better? Yes. Reality is that marketing sites are often done on much tighter deadlines than traditional software development and sometimes testing isn’t that great. That means real time metrics are critical.

If we had waited 12 hours for metrics to become available, my client would have lost 25% of sales and 25% of the money they had spent on the campaign.

Real time matters more than you think. If you’re not investing in it, you need to consider it.

About the Author: Mike Seidle
Mike Seidle is a leading Internet marketing strategist and has been helping companies with search engine optimization and developing cost effective Internet marketing strategies since 1998. Mike is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service and currently serves on Professional Blog Service's board of directors.

Tags: accuracy, google analytics, real time analytics, Social Media Analytics, web metrics
Posted in Blog ROI, Blogging, Social Media Analytics, Tools | View Comments

New Social Media Revolution 2 Video from Erik Qualman

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business (affiliate link) launched a new Social Media Revolution video a couple weeks ago, matching the same look, sound, and interesting ideas as his original Social Media Revolution video.

It’s a great video. It has a lot of interesting statistics, and you can really dance to it.

If you work with some social media non-believers, make sure they watch this new video, as well as the last one. I can tell you that Erik’s last video played a large part in helping us land a church as a client. They saw the video, said, “oh man, is it really growing this fast? We have to tap into this,” and called us. (So thanks, Erik, I owe you a beer. A really nice one too, not one of those beers whose names appear on the side of a race car.)

Tags: Erik Qualman, socialnomics
Posted in Communication, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks | View Comments

Don’t Measure Web 2.0 with Old School Expectations

Monday, February 15th, 2010

This post was originally published on April 11, 2009, at my DeckersMarketing.com blog, now defunct.

My friend and fellow social media guy Kyle Lacy asked a question on Smaller Indiana about whether we should measure Web 2.0 with Web 1.0 tools.

The problem, Kyle says, is that Marketing 1.0 folks are expecting old school results with 2.0 tools. They still expect to measure thousands and thousands of views, like they used to see with TV and radio commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads.

Even as recently as five years ago here in Central Indiana, TV and billboards reached hundreds of thousands, radio and newspapers reached tens of thousands. Across the country, Web 2.0 is only reaching hundreds and thousands – tens of thousands if you’re lucky, hundreds of thousands if you’re Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

These “low numbers” are having a chilling effect on some marketers, especially the Marketing 1.0 folks, because they’re used to seeing the BI-I-I-I-G numbers. They have these too-high expectations because they have been lied to by traditional advertising and PR.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

On the Golf Channel’s website, they tell us “the Golf Channel has a global reach of almost 110 million homes.”

Ooh, squeals the marketer in capitalistic delight, if I advertise on the Golf Channel, my ad will be beamed into 110 million homes.

Not so. Who typically watches the Golf Channel? Golfers. And how many of them are there? According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country.

In other words, the Golf Channel wants us to think they’re reaching 110 million homes. That may be, but that’s not how many people might watch it — 29.5 million. And of those, how many are actually watching it? It sure ain’t 29.5 million.

The Golf Channel won’t even say. In a press release from this past February, they said:

Preliminary projections of Wednesday’s coverage – which also marked the highly anticipated return of Tiger Woods – show Golf Channel will garner the highest first-round rating on the network, and likely will surpass the network’s highest rating ever (2.0, Friday of 2008 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship).

Highest ratings? Compared to what? They never said what those high ratings looked like, or even their daily viewership.

But Sports Business Daily did. They said — probably to the chagrin of The Golf Channel — the average daily viewership is 77,000, while their primetime viewership runs around 131,000.

Let’s see, 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 the Golf Channel isn’t alone in these misleading figures. Newspapers and magazines like to boast about print runs, but don’t mention actual readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of viewers. (And don’t get me started on cable companies that lump in dozens of stations no one watches and then count them to pad their advertising rate cards. Like I really want 12 different home shopping channels or an HD version of the International Military History Channel.)

Therein lies the problem. There isn’t a completely accurate way to measure the number of viewers on a TV channel, but marketers have been conditioned to think they’re reaching 110 million.

The same is true for PR. Let’s say 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 can’t tell how many people read an article, clipped it out, sent it to others, or stuck it at the bottom of the bird cage.

Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media

PR, traditional marketing, and media people like to say they can measure their efforts by measuring sales, web views, numbers called, etc. They run a few commercials, or get some airtime and column inches, and look for a spike in sales.

“Look, sales went up right after we ran our commercial,” they say. “We made it all better.”

But that’s not completely accurate. They can’t prove the cause-and-effect of their efforts. Was it their latest ads? Or the previous set of ads? An unknown newspaper article? Coupons? A full moon?

I agree, the PR/ advertising most likely led to the increased sales. But which commercials at what time? Which story on what TV news program? And how many of those particular commercials led to a particular percentage of sales?

There is no piece of software on earth that will tell me that 10% of Friday’s sales increase happened because of Thursday’s 6:00 TV news segment, and not the article in the newspaper. And I’ve got nothing but surveys and estimates to tell me that I need to focus more attention on the NBC news, not ABC.

We Can Measure Social Media Though

Now that we’ve got some great tools to measure social media, people aren’t seeing numbers of millions or even hundreds of thousands, they’re seeing thousands, and sometimes even hundreds. (And sadly, these are the numbers they were probably getting all along.)

And marketing people, used to that 110 million figure, are writing off Web 2.0, because it doesn’t have the same numbers as big media. Of course, they write it off, not knowing important figures like commercial viewership, or how many people are fast-forwarding through their commercials on the DVR.

Sports marketer Pat Coyle often writes about the problems he’s facing with marketers who are very interested in in-stadium sponsorships and reaching 60,000 people per week for 8 – 10 home games, but balk at sponsoring a social network with 20,000 raving fans because they don’t have “high click-rates.”

What these marketers are missing is the passion of the raving fan that social media harnesses. A raving fan who finds the latest song, article, or video online will tell their friends about it through Twitter, post it on their blog, or even post it on a discussion forum. Their friends pick it up, and forward it on through the same channels. This ultimately drives traffic to the website, thanks to the exponential growth of they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. This leads to increased sales or viewership, which leads to more raving fans, which leads to increased sales, and so on, and so on.

The benefit of social media is that we can measure the passion of Web 2.0 users, and how much they love the company or brand. We can use services like Radian6 to measure the real reach of our marketing and PR 2.0 efforts.

Programs like Radian6 tell us who the raving fans of our brands are. One raving fan is worth more to a company than 200 people who glanced at the TV ad or raced past a billboard at 70 miles per hour. The raving fan tells their friends, who in turn become fans and tell their friends. The cool thing is, social media measuring tools can follow that train. It shows where the raving fans are talking, and how often they’re doing it. It will show us who that first raving fan was, and how much of the actual number of sales they created.

Social media is still new enough that there isn’t a standard method of measurement, but that’s because there are too many methods. We’re spoiled for choices, and because this is such a new way of doing things, the people who find out the best way and can standardize it will own social media measurement.

Meanwhile, marketers need to learn that if they want to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their online campaign, they need to begin understanding the emotion and passion of many of their customers. If you can harness that, then you’ll finally begin creating the traffic –– and sales –– you’ve been looking for.

Tags: social marketing, traditional marketing, web 2.0
Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Traditional Media | View 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

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: blogging, business blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social networking, social networks
Posted in Blog ROI, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | View 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?

Tags: Cincinnati Bengals, Marketing, Pepsi Cola, Social Media, Super Bowl, twitter
Posted in Blog ROI, Blogging, Communication, Lead Generation, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

Canadian Council of Public Relation Firms Shouldn’t Ask for Media Monitoring RFPs

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

I’m a little angered and disappointed by the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms.

According to Joseph Thornley’s blog, they’re calling for a Media Monitoring RFP to ask media monitoring companies, especially those who provide social media services, to fill out an RFP so they can “propose the most comprehensive set of offerings they are capable of.”

From there, they want to identify who has the best offerings, and then use that to compare costs to find the provider who offers them “the best value.”

We find ourselves dealing with a monitoring industry that has adjusted to the new environment in different ways and at different speeds. Following what’s going on has become a complex process that can involve setting up dashboards with several different suppliers. And each provides us with a unique view of different things.

Multiple offerings. Multiple methodologies. Increased complexity. Increased cost.

Thornley is the CEO of Thornley Falls, a Canadian PR firm, that combines PR with social media and word of mouth advertising. He’s also the president of the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms (CCPRF). So, I’m sure he’s a smart guy. (And he’s Canadian. I love Canada.)

Which is why I’m disappointed in the CCPRF.

I’m not a big fan of RFPs. I think they’re mostly a waste of time, and an incorrect way to evaluate whether a company is good enough to do a project. In most RFPs, the vendor is not allowed to speak with the client, which means they may miss out on an important point that makes or breaks a proposal. (I’ve been on RFP committees. They were awful.)

RFPs force the vendor to start selling on price, not on value. I don’t know of a single large PR firm that will try to match the pricing of a small boutique firm. But if they offer the same services on paper, then the temptation of the client is to assume the quality and scope of work is exactly the same. Yet, this is what RFPs do to vendors who can’t demonstrate value over price, because they can’t speak with the client.

Finally, the companies submitting RFPs have no way of knowing if the client even knows what they truly want. I’ve known companies that actually spoke to the client, and found they not only put the wrong specs in the RFP, the client didn’t know enough about the problem to know what to ask for. Again, a simple meeting would allow a vendor to educate the client, and could make the whole process much easier.

So it sounds like the CCPRF wants to be educated, since they don’t know what the different media monitoring services can do. But it also sounds like they’re not sure what’s most important, since they’re dealing with different offerings, methodologies, and complexities.

I’m morally opposed to RFPs on general principles, but this almost seems a bad practice.

(Having said all that, the really smart media monitoring agencies will do whatever they can to educate the different PR firms about what “good” media monitoring looks like. And if they haven’t, they’re a big part of the reason this is happening at all.)

It sounds like the CCPRF is just information gathering. There’s no chance of winning a project. There’s no definite work that’s going to come out of it. It’s just hours of work that doesn’t really educate, answer questions, or teach people about what that particular company does. The agencies will put in several hours of work for which they will not be paid, only have an outside possibility of getting deals out of it, and the CCPRF is getting the benefits of the work for free.

If the CCPRF wants to learn more about media monitoring, they need to do it on their own time, or invite the media monitoring agencies to an educational session, webinar, conference, or white paper on what their particular agency does. And the CCPRF needs to pay for it.

CCPRF, you know how frustrating it is to spend time and money on projects and RFPs only to have them not make the final cut. You’re asking people to put time and money that will essentially be an RFP to another RFP, which you may or may not submit in the future.

Joseph Thornley says this RFP is an industry first. I hope it’s the last too.

Tags: Canada, media monitoring, Public Relations, RFPs, Social Media
Posted in Social Media, Social Media Analytics | View Comments

Ad Agencies Slow to Use Social Media Themselves

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Ad agencies, while quick to recommend social media to their clients, are slow to use it themselves. A study by RSW/US and Second Wind shows that while nearly 75% of the agencies they polled have a social media presence, but most a majority of them don’t use it more than once a month.

According to an article on Adweek.com:

Nearly three-quarters of the 212 agency leaders polled in the online survey are connected to LinkedIn, 66 percent to Facebook and 56 percent to Twitter. But when asked how frequently they use each, the majority said no more than once a month. For example, 47 percent conceded that they never tweet, 7 percent said they tweet less than once a month and 4 percent tweet just once monthly.

The findings were similar for blogs, with 56 percent of the respondents saying that their agencies have blogs, but only 6 percent use them daily. A whopping 66 percent indicated that they blog no more than once a month.

I’m not sure if I should be surprised by all of this. (I’m not.) Many agencies suffer from the shoemaker’s children syndrome. They have the knowledge and experience doing the things they recommend, but they don’t have the time or energy to implement the strategy themselves.

How many web designers don’t have an updated website? How many social media strategists don’t monitor their own ROI and stats? We’ve certainly seen our share of agencies that aren’t eating their own dog food, but is it because they don’t have the time or because they don’t actually believe in it themselves?

We like to think it’s because they’re just too busy doing client work. But there are more than a few large agencies that just don’t get social media, and the only reason they’re on Twitter or Facebook is because they told an intern to set up the accounts.

Six months ago.

If agencies want to be in the position to tell clients why they need to use social media, they need to use it themselves. They need to eat their own dogfood. How else will you keep up with the developments in the field — developments that your clients will need to know about — if you’re not using the tools on a regular, frequent basis.

Appoint someone in a senior position to use social media, and give them permission to speak for the agency in their own voice. Make sure they’re given some time each day to use it Chris Brogan recommends 2 hours per day. (Hey, some of us work for a living, Chris.) We usually recommend 30 minutes a day, especially if it’s not part of your regular job description.

If you’re going to tell others to use social media, you need to do it yourself. This is not a “do as I say, not as I do” business. You’re doing your clients a disservice if you’re not tweeting using Linked In, or using other social media tools on a nearly daily basis yourself.

Tags: ad agencies, marketing agencies, Social Media, social media tools
Posted in Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Networks | View Comments

How to Measure Your Twitter ROI

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing posted an excellent article on How to Make Your Tweets More Useful.

Jantsch says that one of the big problems businesses have with Twitter is whether Twitter has an effective ROI. While most businesses love the push/interruption marketing approach, they’re just not going to get that many followers doing it, and thus the ROI is going to be low, and the executives who gave a wary, half-hearted approval are going to say, “See? Told you it wouldn’t work.”

The problem is that social media doesn’t work that way. We don’t like to be pushed or interrupted. Or when you do it, it has to be so slick and smooth, we don’t even realize you did it. You can’t just beat us over the head with commercial after commercial of “Daily special: Mention this tweet and receive 10% off your next order!” You’ll be dropped faster than a napkin with someone else’s snot on it.

Jantsch says we should think about our tweeting activities and payoffs in an “expanded way.” (That’s “adopt a revolutionary paradigm” for you marketing-speak addicts.

We can use Twitter to test messages and headlines, best time of day for tweeting, soliciting comments and feedback, and find out what interests people.

Jantsch offers a few ideas we can use to improve our Twitter ROI and actually get some use out of the tool. Here are a few of his ideas, paraphrased and adapted:

Forward an article to your followers, using the bit.ly URL shortener in TweetDeck or at www.bit.ly. Measure the Return On Influence at Twitalyzer.com or at www.bit.ly. If you get a lot of traffic in the form of clicks, you may be able to do your own blog post on the subject (sort of like this post!).
Tweet a question to your followers for their opinion on a decision you need to make. Link a shortened URL to the page/post in question, check the stats, and read the comments. Throw in a survey if it will help.
See what kinds of tweets people respond to the best. If they respond to certain ones more, say personal or non-commercial posts, you may be on to something. Give people more of what they respond to. Don’t flood them with the other stuff, because they weren’t responding the first time.

Twitter is quickly becoming a tool for businesses to marketing and promote their brand or product. And for those of you who have to show your boss how to find the ROI, these are a few ways to do it. There are plenty of Twitter tracking and measuring tools out there. I just happen to favor Bitly and Twitalyzer. You can use what you want.

So what do you use to measure your Twitter ROI?

Are you measuring your Twitter results? How are you doing it? Any ideas or suggestions or things to avoid?

Tags: Social Media Analytics, twitter, Twitter ROI
Posted in Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Tools, Twitter | View Comments

Category: Social Media Analytics

The term “social media expert” is thrown around and debated so much, it has nearly become a punchline.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media

We Can Measure Social Media Though

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

So what do you use to measure your Twitter ROI?

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