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You Don’t Get Social Media ROI Yet? C’mon, Man!

December 26, 2011 By Erik Deckers Leave a Comment

Social media ROI is not that hard to understand. There's a simple formula, a simple process, and some simple tools to do it all.

I was feeling good about social media ROI, and how/whether people understand it. I figured, at least my people — marketers — get it. They understand how to measure social media, or at least the principles behind it.

Apparently not.

eMarketer dashed those hopes to the ground with their December 20, 2011 article When Will Social Media Measurement Mature?.

Marketers know that counting fans, “likes” and followers is not the best way to measure success in social media marketing. Yet these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. It’s not surprising, then, that marketers consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media, and that a majority of them believe they cannot measure social media campaigns effectively.

How to Calculate Social Media ROI

Calculating the ROI of anything is easy. Subtract how much you spent from how much you made, and that’s your answer. If you spent $10,000 on a social media marketing campaign, and you made $50,000, your social media ROI is $40,000.

Simple, right?

$50,000 – $10,000 = $40,000.

So how do you know whether sales are coming from your social media efforts?

I’m not going to delve into the step-by-step process, but I’ll give you the tools and concepts you’re going to need to get started.

Set up Google Analytics, and install the code on every page on your website. If you have a blog, it only needs to be part of the code. If it’s on a website with pre-built pages, it needs to be on every page.
Set up a Bitly account. Bitly is a URL shortener that also lets you do some basic analytics on the number of people that have clicked your link.
Create a Google Analytics tracking campaign for any and all major links you’re sending out. This is how you’re going to measure a particular blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, etc. If it’s just a basic link to the website, a campaign code is optional. But if it’s a blog post about a particular marketing campaign, set up the Google Analytics campaign.
Put a hyperlinked call to action in your blog posts that take people directly to a sales page or order page. Make sure that the hyperlink is given a unique campaign code.

Here’s what will happen:

You’ll send out a link to a blog post via Twitter, Facebook, etc. Let’s say that 10,000 people see that link on your various accounts.
1,000 people visit your page and read that blog post, all within a 6-hour span.
Of that 1,000 people, 100 people actually make a purchase with a total of $10,000 in sales.
Those 100 people also fill out their contact information, which gets placed into your CRM.

By looking at these numbers, you can determine a number of things.

1,000 visitors out of 10,000 social media followers, fans, and friends means you have a 10% click-through rate.
100 sales out of 1,000 visitors is a 10% close rate; out of a 10,000-person network, that’s a 1% close rate.
By looking at the entrance and exit paths of that particular 6-hour period, or particular day, you can see that a majority of people were moved enough by the blog post to go directly to the order page. Compare that to another blog post that only lead to 30 sales out of 1,000 visitors, and you know it wasn’t as effective in moving people to act.
You can then subtract the cost of that particular campaign from the amount of money you made to calculate the total ROI for the day/week/month.

Calculating social media ROI is not that difficult. It’s just a matter of having the right tools and knowing basic analytics and campaign creation. There are literally hundreds of articles and several books on each step I first described. It’s just a matter of reading, and then trying out what you’ve learned. With some trial and error, and constant measuring, you’ll soon learn what works and what you can stop doing.

Or you could just hire a social media professional to do it all for you.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : You Don't Get Social Media ROI Yet? C'mon, Man! • Keywords : social media ROI, social networking, social media marketing, marketing, ROI •

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: Marketing, ROI, social media marketing, social media ROI, social networking

50 Things That You’re Not Measuring for ROI, But Should

December 23, 2011 By Erik Deckers 5 Comments

I’m so sick of the “what’s the ROI of social media” question. It’s asked by people who a) think it makes them sound clever, and they’re hoping to show that social media “doesn’t work,” or b) think they’re supposed to ask it, because they read an article that said they should ask it.

The problem is, we can’t answer the ROI question during out first meeting. We can answer it after your social media plan has been up and running for six months. We set goals and then measure to see whether you made them. We count how much money the social media campaign made — because we can do that — and we subtract how much money it cost.

But we can’t predict it accurately beforehand, and anyone who tells you they can is lying.

What about you and your business? What’s the ROI on the stuff and the staff at the office? Have you measured them? All of the things you buy and the people you hire have a direct impact on your bottom line. Some contribute to revenue, some take up space, and some are a drag on your bottom line. Number 50 painted on a wall And yet, the people who are so quick to pull the “what’s the ROI of social media?” trigger haven’t asked that question about anything else in their own business.

So I’d like to see companies start measuring ROI on these things.

Your college interns.
Your brochures. You pay professionals to design these things. What have they gotten you?
Your weekly staff meetings.
Every other meeting you have to attend. They’re a big time suck and productivity killer. Yet we go to them without question. So what’s their ROI?
The person who answers your phones. Don’t you think the voice of your company contributes to customer satisfaction?
Your accounts receivable department. What does it do to your cash flow if they’re on time versus late with sending out invoices?
The paintings and furniture in the front lobby.
Your telephone hold music. People actually study this kind of thing, so it should be possible to figure out.
That lunch meeting you had.
Your mobile phone.
The company mission statement that took eight people three months to write over six hour-long meetings.
Your membership in three different trade associations. You should get valuable sales and clients from these. Are you?
Your Chamber of Commerce membership.
The company car. Lease costs, gas costs, maintenance. Are you making your money back on that?
Your HR department.
Your legal department. They’re great for keeping you out of trouble and for helping with intellectual property. How much did they make you this year?
Your sponsorship of a Little League baseball team.
Your fax machine. Seriously, do people still use fax machines? They have online services you can buy to send and receive faxes, instead of paying $40 a month for a separate phone line.
Your voice mail system.
The PR agency you hired for your latest campaign. And none of this “this is what your media coverage is worth” stuff — how much money did you actually make?
Your office coffee machine.
Your annual industry conference in Las Vegas.
The business class flight you took to get to the conference. Execs need more leg room than regular staffers, apparently. So did you make more money by taking the more expensive flight?
Your trade show display. These things are expensive. But did you make the money back?
Your marketing department. These are the ROI experts. How much money did they make you?
The cleaning service.
The office Christmas party.
Your office location. Retail stores can demonstrate how one location outperforms another. But what do you get for where you’re located? Do you really need an office downtown in the big city, when a location in the suburbs will cost less?
The water cooler.
The TV commercials you ran on cable TV for six months in 25 major markets.
The IT department.
Your CIO. Should your CIO really have the same decision-making abilities over the CMO? Should they be able to tell the CMO, “no, you cannot use social media tools to help market the company”? Hopefully they generated revenue to make up for all the lost sales they just caused.
Staying at the conference hotel instead of a cheaper hotel a mile away.
Your sponsorship of the local chamber event.
The 90-minute morning networking meeting you attended. You go to this once a month. Have you gotten sales directly from going?
The giant flat screen monitor in the conference room.
The big table in the conference room.
The conference room.
Your administrative assistant.
The company website. If you don’t sell anything on it, is it still making you money? Why did you spend $10,000 to get it designed?
Subscriptions to all the business magazines that decorate your lobby. Did you even read them?
Your newspaper ads.
Your business cards.
Casual Fridays. And while we’re at it . . .
Appropriate business attire. There must be a reason we have to dress up for work. So how much money did you make from it?
Your customer service department. You know how much they cost you, but do you measure how much they made you?
The accounting department.
The 12 books on new management ideas you bought and never had time to read.
Your industry trade magazines.
You.

I am not opposed to the social media ROI question. I just think it’s an easy fallback question that people use as an excuse, whether it’s out of fear or disdain. And I encourage businesspeople to ask that question. After all, you’re going to spend money on it, so you’d damn well better know how much money you’re making from it.

But you should do the same thing for some of these other things you have in your business as well.

Photo credit: duncan (Flickr)

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : 50 Things That You're Not Measuring for ROI, But Should • Keywords : social media, ROI, social media measurement, marketing, business •

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: business, Marketing, ROI, Social Media, social media measurement

Who Should Rule, Content or Marketing?

December 15, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

The argument about whether content or marketing is king is missing the big picture.

Over on his blog, Nashville writer Jeff Goins questions whether content is really king.

Well, actually, no he doesn’t. he said content is not king anymore. It’s a “fat, dethroned monarch, dis-empowered of his royal ability to influence.”

Janus, the two-faced Roman god, should represent content marketing.

Marketing — or as Jeff calls it, “relationships” — are the true king. Without relationships, without marketing, it doesn’t matter how awesome your writing is.

I used to be terrible at this. I thought all I had to do was be a good writer. But I was wrong.

I was scared. And lazy. I didn’t want to have to actually meet people. I just wanted to write.

But that’s not how the world works. So why would I think for one minute the Web would work that way? Yes, even in real life, it’s not just what you know that matters, but also who you know.

And even in business, the best way to promote an idea, product, or service is relationship. We all know this, because in this day of media saturation, we don’t buy what the ads tell us to buy. We buy what our friends recommend.

If I have to give an edge to either of them, I still side with content. Because hidden content can accidentally be discovered one day. I might write a post that gets picked up by search engines, and I could start being found for that topic.

But I could optimize and promote the bejeezus out of something really awful, and a lot of people could see it, but what do you think would happen if everyone showed up and saw — and said — how awful it was?

Still, it’s not a question of whether content or marketing is king.

Content Marketing Rules

This does not have to be an either/or proposition. You shouldn’t have to choose one over the other. And no, this is not one of those “why can’t everyone just get along” cop-outs that I detest. This is like arguing about whether peanut butter or jelly is more important on a PBJ.

Content and marketing have a symbiotic relationship. One cannot exist without the other. You can have great content, but if your marketing sucks, no one will see your stuff. And you can have great marketing, but if your writing sucks, no one will care.

There has to be a happy medium here. Or at the very least, we have to recognize that Content/Marketing is a two-faced king, like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings. You can’t have good marketing and lousy content, and you can’t have lousy marketing and good content. Without one, the other will die.

Content without good marketing is a private diary. Marketing without good content is spam.

I think once writers realize they need to market, we’ll see a bigger explosion in books and ebooks. And once marketers realize that content is not some throwaway afterthought, they’ll start seeing an explosion in sales and profits.

And if you want to learn how to do both, you can buy Branding Yourself or No Bullshit Social Media to see how.

(See what I did there?)

Photo credit: mscolly (Flickr)

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Headline : Who Should Rule, Content or Marketing? • Keywords : content marketing, writing, marketing, relationships, Jeff Goins, social networking •

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Writing Tagged With: content marketing, Jeff Goins, Marketing, relationships, social networking, writing

Four Online Predictions for 2012

December 7, 2011 By Erik Deckers Leave a Comment

Okay, I’m going to jump on the trends bandwagon and offer yet another online predictions blog post where I polish my crystal ball and predict the future of social media. I think I have a decent track record going for me. In 2010, I predicted that Android sales were going to outpace iPhones, and I was only six months late on that (it finally happened earlier this year). Of course, I also said SMS would become obsolete, and that ain’t happening any time soon, so I’m batting .500.

Emboldened by my previous success — and with a promise to Allison Carter (@allisonlcarter) that this list will not mention mobile or geo-location networks — here are my four predictions for 2012. Crystal ball

1. An even bigger focus on quality of written content.

Thanks to Google Panda, the traditional SEO techniques of on-site optimization and backlinking is not as effective or important as it once was. Now, Panda measures things like bounce rate and time on site. In other words, if your site sucks, your rankings will drop. If your site is good, your rankings will rise.

Want to improve your rankings? Improve the quality of your content, especially your writing. The better your writing is, the longer people will stick around.

We’ll see a bigger push for web designers and bloggers to have better writing, not just a bunch of schlocky writing. So for anyone who has been in the quantity-over-quality camp of blog writing, you’re going to have a tough time of it in 2012.

2. Disruption will be the watchword, and the way to make money.

We’re already seeing how social media, broadband, and mobile phones are disrupting some middle men businesses. People are canceling their cable and satellite TV, and instead watching videos on Netflix and Hulu. We’re getting local news from local bloggers, or national news from each other, instead of TV news and newspapers. I even quit listening to local commercial radio, choosing instead to listen to an awesome public radio station out of Louisville, KY. Traditional media has been disrupted, but that’s not all.

We’ll continue to see more middle men being disrupted by fast phones and social media — look for advertising and PR agencies, publishers, banks, and credit card companies to take a big hit as people figure out how to circumvent these gatekeepers. Look for other people who figure it out to make a buttload of money being the disruptions, or taking advantage of the new disruptions.

(Case in point, Dwolla, which only charges $.25 per transaction for anything over $10 (under $10 is free), and is currently on course to move about $350 million per year.)

3. Citizen journalism will continue to grow and become more important.

Newspapers have taken a big hit in the last 10 years, thanks to online media — a disruption that’s been years in the making — but people still want local news. The newspapers that will survive and thrive will be the dailies in smaller cities, and the weeklies in small towns. In the big cities, we’ll see more citizen journalism as people report on their local stories. More Twitpics, more cell phone videos, more stories that are pieced together through people acting like their own journalists.

I would love to see some news-minded entrepreneur figure out a way to gather all of this content and monetize it. While that may not happen in 2012, look for online-only newspapers like The American Reporter to pick up the slack of the big city papers, and local news outlets like Patch to become more widespread and easier to use.

We’re going to see more news, commentary, sports, etc. covered up by real people, not professional journalists. I also think we’ll see smaller print newspapers get smarter about their online efforts, and even TV stations to continue to embrace the web. Could we also see someone start an Internet-only TV news style of website?

4. Teenagers will begin to leave Facebook in droves.

Their moms and dads are on Facebook. Their grandparents are on Facebook. The whole point behind Facebook was it was a place to go where you could be cool. And as everyone knows, it’s impossible to be cool when your parents are around. They’re moving to other networks where their parents are not. Even Ben Bajarin (@benbajarin) of Time Magazine is questioning whether it’s the beginning of the end for Facebook. (Hint: No, not yet. But don’t be surprised if it happens one day far off into the future.)

Where they’re all going is still unknown. MySpace is still popular among teenagers. YouTube is actually the second biggest network among teenagers (Facebook is still first). And the gaming console networks are seeing a big uptick. But when all the stats are showing that 1 in 5 teenagers are leaving Facebook, it’s time for marketers to stop with this “social media is for young people” nonsense and recognize that the parents and grandparents are embracing it more easily now.

Photo credit: JasonLangheine (Flickr)

About : Online predictions • Accountable Person : Erik Deckers • Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Content Rating : G • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Creator : Erik Deckers • Editor : Erik Deckers • Genre : Non-fiction • Headline : Four Online Predictions for 2012 • Keywords : predictions, social media, citizen journalism, Facebook, disruption, marketing • Mentions : Facebook, blogging, social media, citizen journalism • Publisher : Professional Blog Service • Source Organization : Professional Blog Service • Version : 1.0 •

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Citizen Journalism, Corporate Blogging, Facebook, Marketing, Newspapers, Radio, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks, Television, Traditional Media, Writing Tagged With: citizen journalism, disruption, facebook, Marketing, predictions, Social Media

How Writers Can Use QR Codes

November 28, 2011 By Erik Deckers 6 Comments

What can writers do with QR codes? Do we even need them? When most writers still have that “I’m a writer, not a marketer” attitude, embracing something as 21st century as a smartphone, let alone a QR code, is going to be difficult.

But, if you’re trying to reach a particular kind of audience — let’s say a tech-savvy audience — or people who might not otherwise discover your work, a QR code could be a great way to market your work in some surprising and creative ways.

QR Code to my About.me page

The whole point of a QR code is to reach a mobile audience. People who use their mobile phones to read articles and watch videos. People who use their tablets to read ebooks. Basically anyone not using a laptop or desktop computer, or reading paper-based articles and stories.

By tapping into the growing mobile market — and it’s growing fast — writers can get their words in front of a brand new audience, or at least an audience who can access your old work in new ways.

You can reach that mobile market in a few different ways, including emails, or making people tap long URLs into their web browser. But a QR code — that funny looking pixelated square — is something people can scan with their mobile phones to perform a certain action, like open a website or a video.

For writers, you can point a QR code at some of your work, and allow people to read it on their mobile phones. Here are a few places you can point them:

At one of your best articles or short stories: This should be the first place your QR codes should go. Point them at some of your best work, and then put the QR code on a business card or writer’s resume. Or if you’re at a conference, put it on a t-shirt. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Best way to do this? Install WP-Touch on your WordPress.org blog, or use Blogger, Posterous, or WordPress.com for a mobile-ready blog. Warning: Do not just point a QR code at your main website. For one thing, it’s boring and unimaginative. Hopefully you’ve already got a short, and clever, domain name, so a QR code is wasted. But if you don’t have anywhere else to point it, at least make sure your site is mobile friendly. A site designed for a desktop is awful to negotiate with a mobile phone.
Your book page on Amazon.com: Have a book flyer or sales card? Put a QR code on it and let people scan it. They can make their purchase right on their mobile phone and have it shipped to their house or office.
A mobile-only video: If you have a book trailer, consider making one especially for mobile use, and maybe even specifically for QR users. Speak directly to the user — “Hi, thanks for scanning the QR code and checking out the video.” — and tell them what is so special about this particular video. (“I’m sharing three additional personal branding secrets you won’t find in the Branding Yourself book.”) Make sure the video works on your mobile phone too. Some videos can’t play on mobile phones, so make sure you choose the right format and size.
At your ebook: If you’ve got an ebook for sale, whether it’s on Amazon.com or another ecommerce page, write up a small card about the book, and put a QR code on it. People can read the ebook on their phone or tablet, especially if they’re using the Amazon Kindle app.
At a secret page on your website: One of the best uses I saw of a QR code was a friend who put it on a t-shirt that he wore to conferences. People who scanned the code were immediately taken to a hidden page on his website where they could find how to connect with him via Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., as well as some special information that wasn’t available on his regular website.

The nice thing about QR codes is that you can point them anywhere you want. When you want to change pages, just edit the QR code. No need to create a new one or get rid of anything with the old code on it. Just go to the place where you created it, change the destination URL and you’re set.

You can put your code just about anywhere it can effectively be scanned, and point it anywhere that makes sense. On your business cards pointing to your book pages. T-shirts to your About.me page. Book covers to mobile videos. Anywhere you can think of, you can point it. Just don’t point it at your regular website, or put it on a highway billboard.

Watch Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) talk about QR codes and how they should and should not be used.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : How Writers Can Use QR Codes • Keywords : qr codes, writers, marketing, social media, smartphones •

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Marketing, Personal Branding, QR Codes, Social Media, Video, Writing Tagged With: Marketing, qr codes, smartphones, Social Media, writers

Can Your Company Survive Without a Corporate Blog?

April 15, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

Does your company need a corporate blog if it’s going to survive the next 10 years?

Maybe not.

Will your company thrive and grow if you don’t have one?

Maybe not.

A corporate blog is a great way for companies to share information with their customers and vendors. It’s a great way to promote their products, answer customer questions, make special announcements, and even sell to new customers.

A corporate blog will help your company appear at the top of the search engine rankings — there are roughly 88 billion Google searches per month. How many of those are you missing out on? — and will give you a place to send your customers when you interact with them through social media marketing. (Uh, you are using social media to talk to your customers, aren’t you?)

People are reading blogs whether they realize it or not. In fact, Technorati estimates that 76% of active Internet users are reading a blog of some sort or another. I think that number may even be higher, because so many websites, online newspapers, and landing pages are actually blog posts, and not regular html pages. People visit the blog thinking they’re finding a page or article, but in actuality are reading a regular old blog post.

The great thing about blogging is that anyone can do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 company with a marketing budget measured in the hundreds of thousands, or a one person operation whose total sales are measured in the tens of thousands. At its very core, its very essence, a corporate blog is just a company talking to its customers about the things that matter to the customers.

The blog is the great marketing equalizer. It levels the playing field between big and small companies. I’ve seen small companies with more passion than money turn out great blogs that are well-written and well-received. I’ve seen huge companies with lots of money and personnel that create crappy blogs that are poorly written piles of jargon-filled manure.

A corporate blog can cost thousands of dollars in design, content creation, and web hosting, or it can be one of the many free options hosted on someone else’s server. The expensive blogs don’t always do better, and the free blogs are not always lacking in quality.

What matters is the content and whether you’re creating enough of it.

So will your company survive without a corporate blog? Maybe it will.

But it will certainly be outclassed and outpaced by the companies that do have one.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Coda (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Marketing Tagged With: corporate blog, corporate blogging, Marketing

Four Ways a Corporate Blog Can Help Your Company Increase Profits

April 14, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

A corporate blog is more than just a company diary where someone from marketing talks about the latest trade show. A corporate blog is a support tool that can lighten the load of several different departments within your company. Here are four ways a corporate blog can help your company.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs and Improve Reach

In the past, Marketing put a lot of time and money into developing, creating, and printing new sales literature and brochures. But once the specs changed on a particular product you got a new area code (it happened to my company in 2002), or you made an egregious error (guilty), the remaining 8,500 copies of the brochures were rendered obsolete, or you had to hand correct every single one of them with a black marker.

A blog can replace a lot of sales brochures and literature, introducing customers to the new product, letting them read the new specs, and finding out the latest features and prices. A blog will also let you show new photos and video demonstrations, tell people about the upcoming trade show or the show you just finished, or even post a video of the CEO talk about the product and what it means for the industry.

By turning to electronic publishing, you can reduce printing costs, reduce costs per lead, and ultimately, costs per sales.

2. Serve as a Newsroom

The PR department spends a lot of time chasing down the industry media or traditional media, trying to get them to talk about your latest product or service. The problem is, the media isn’t always willing to listen, or they can only publish on their own schedule, not yours. But by posting news articles to your website, you become the news source, not the traditional or industry media.

A blog will let you disseminate the latest news to your customers, helping your most loyal customers not only read what you’re up to, they can share it with their readers, which promotes your news as well. The media can use your blog as an information-gathering source as well. This lets them see what you’re doing, rather than waiting for a press release. They can find your press releases, product photos, and HD video clips, and get everything they need with ease. They can also get further information and details without calling your PR person while she’s on vacation and unavailable.

3. Sell to New Customers

Corporate blogging can greatly benefit the sales department, because salespeople can talk about the benefits of the new product, use blog posts to answer frequently asked sales questions, and preemptively overcome any objections potential customers may have.

While this won’t answer every question and objection for every customer, you’ll find that it cuts down on the time per sale. When I started selling on the Internet in the late-90s, I found I had cut my time per sales call down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes just because of the information I was putting on my website.

Again, this is where video demonstrations can be invaluable to potential customers. This also helps improve search engine rankings, so your site is more easily found during web searches, which means more customers could find you, which in turn means means more sales.

4. Provide 24/7 Customer Service

If you have a product or service that has frequent questions, don’t just rely on an FAQ section. Turn your blog into a knowledge center, and ask your customer service reps to write posts that answer those frequent questions. Make them as easy to find as possible (proper keyword tagging, links from the FAQ page, or even listing them in your “popular posts.”

Ask other customers to leave comments on individual posts about different fixes and solutions they’ve found as well. Incorporate their answers into the official blog posts to continue the discussion, and to make your customers feel like they’re contributing.

Finally, customers can search your website and find in-depth answers to questions they have. This saves phone calls about basic constantly-asked questions, which means you can help reduce customer service costs.

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Corporate Blogging Tagged With: corporate blogging, customer service, Marketing, Public Relations, sales

New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

February 4, 2011 By Erik Deckers 1 Comment

Last Friday I tweeted: “I’m easily impressed. I’m not easily flabbergasted. @kabaim just flabbergasted me. Follow him and ask how he did it.”

Screenshot of my Twylah page. Click to see a bigger version.

@kabaim is Eric Kim, founder and CEO of Twylah, the new Twitter tool that Eric says is going to change the way we use Twitter. Twylah (@Twylah)does all these amazing things. So many of them, in fact, that I’ve probably forgotten a few them here.

Imagine going to a website that’s laid out like a magazine theme for a blog. On that page are your tweets, categorized by the topics you tweet about most. There, a visitor can see those categories, and read more tweets within each of them. The layout page will pull out any photos you’ve included with your tweets, and then organize the rest in reverse chronological order.

This does a number of things for you, for the reader, even for search engine optimization.

It lets visitors experience your tweets visually, rather than seeing an entire timeline. Don’t like one particular category, like your 90 minute ongoing discussion with your project team about where to have lunch? Replace it with one you prefer. Want to highlight a Twitter topic from two months ago? Drop a less interesting one and replace it with the old topic.

It can pull in tweets from weeks, or even months ago. This gives life to your tweets, beyond the typical 1-hour life expectancy that our tweets usually have.
Each Twylah page is a real web page. The links on them are shortened using bit.ly, which means they’re not only trackable, but they even count as backlinks to your real site. This will be a big help for anyone who needs an SEO boost.
You can direct people to your Twylah page instead of your Twitter profile page, giving people an expanded view of your bio. Now people can see if you’re a real person, and if you talk about what you claim to talk about.
People can even follow you directly from Twylah, rather than jumping back to your Twitter page to follow you.

These are all pretty cool features, and based on my scribbled notes, there’s a lot of amazing stuff that Twylah is going to do.

But, there are three things that social media marketers and practitioners need to take note of, because these things are going to be H-U-G-E for social media professionals. Of course, these will not be included in the initial rollout of Twylah, but Eric expects them to be available around 6 weeks later. (I hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

Further down my Twylah page.

Users will be able to subscribe to a person’s categories of tweets. For example, if you’re following Douglas Karr, but only want to read his tweets about the Marketing Technology Blog radio show, you can subscribe to that category. Here’s the even cooler part: Those tweets will be emailed to you as a newsletter. Subscribe to several people and their categories for a bigger newsletter, and read their interesting tweets at your leisure.
Twylah will have an analytics package. Not only can you see how many times your stuff was retweeted, or how often you tweeted about certain topics/categories, but you can see how many people engaged with your tweets — retweeting, clicking links, etc. For example, if you tweet about the Android phone, you can also see the engagement with those tweets has gone up. If you also tweet about the latest Twitter meme, you may see that your engagement went down for that topic. Translation: You can adjust the topics, and even time, of your tweets accordingly, based on the engagement of your tweets by your followers.
Twylah’s analytics will also tell you what you need to tweet about and when, to help your engagement improve. Twylah will actually help you figure out when most of your network is actually using Twitter, and what sort of tweets interest them the most. What’s cool: This is especially useful for people who are very particular about following people with certain backgrounds, such as book marketers trying to build a following of independent bookstores.
Twylah will eventually aggregate the total engagement of different topics. Imagine being able to know which of Twitter’s trending topics are actually engaging the readers. Maybe the new iPhone 5 is one of the trending topics in July, and 20% of the people are engaging with those tweets. As an iPhone marketer, you would then know that you need to tweet more about the iPhone with links to important information, like nearest retail location.

A lot of these way cool Twylah features are still in the Alpha stage, while Eric and his wife, Kelly, are working feverishly to roll the beta out in the middle of February. If you want to be a part of the beta, go to Twylah.com and register. Also, ask Eric for a personal demonstration of Twylah.

You’ll be flabbergasted. I know I was.

Filed Under: Marketing, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Twitter Tagged With: Eric Kim, Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, twitter, Twylah

Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

February 2, 2011 By Erik Deckers 3 Comments

I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.

And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools Tagged With: blogging, Marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo

Random Thoughts on Writing a Book

January 14, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

I’ve finished my second book, Branding Yourself, with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, and am working on a third book on networking with Jeremy Dearringer, CEO of Slingshot SEO, an SEO company here in Indianapolis. I also have a couple other writing projects in the works, although those are still under wraps. I hope to have some news about those by Springtime.

But I’ve learned a few things about becoming a book author, things that I thought were easy, and things that I learned are hard.

Writing a book isn’t really that hard, if you write on a regular basis. I used to think the advice “write every day” was stupid. “Who has time for that?” I thought. “I have work to do.” Turns out the work I was doing was writing anyway, and when I decided to write intentionally — to focus on new aspects of writing and become better at them — my writing improved.
Have a good editor. I learned a long time ago that while I’m a stickler about grammar and punctuation, I make a crapload of mistakes. Even though I catch them on second and third edits, I still usually find one or two that has to be fixed. Pearson just sent Kyle and me the “gathers” of the book. Individual chapters that we need to read over and mark any errors before the second printing. Believe it or not, with two writers and four editors, I found a couple errors. (What’s worse, they were mine!)
The hard part isn’t writing the book, it’s marketing it. In order to support the book, and sell copies, I’m starting to travel more to promote it during talks. Next week, I’ll be in Northern Indiana one night and Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’m trying to do some paid speaking gigs, but am thinking about adopting Scott Stratten’s idea when he was promoting UnMarketing (affiliate link). Scott made an offer to any group: buy 100 of my books, and I’ll travel out to you. I’m thinking about doing that for anyone who buys 50 of my books, as long as you’re within driving distance. But compare that to writing. I could write at home, spend three hours, and knock out about 6,000 words, or almost an entire chapter. It’ll take me that long to drive to most of my speaking gigs.
Know your subject matter. Writing teachers love to say “write what you know” (which presents a problem for science fiction or fantasy writers). But this makes life so much easier when you’re writing a book. I remember struggling with a couple of chapters on Twitter Marketing for Dummies because I didn’t use some of the tools we were writing about. I had to spend a lot of time using them before I could write about them, which threw a huge monkey wrench into my writing schedule.
Have a writing schedule, and stick with it. John Grisham’s writing schedule, when he first started out, was to write from 7 am to 8 am, before he opened his law office. Christopher Moore’s schedule involves a lot of screwing around all day before he settles down after lunch and writes for 4 or 5 hours. Mine is to write at night, after the kids are in bed, and go for about 4 hours. Ignore the people who tell you to wake up early because mornings are more productive, or the people who tell you to stay up late because no one is awake then. Do what’s best for your body and your schedule. If you’re a night owl, stay up late. If you’re an early bird, get up and get that worm. But create a schedule and stick to it.
Shut off distractions. I love my Twitter network, and love chatting. But they are also the biggest interruption of my day, because they’re always more interesting than whatever I’m doing (even as I’ve written this post, I’ve sent 4 tweets). So when I’m writing, and have the willpower to do so, I shut off TweetDeck, close my Gmail, turn off the notifiers, and get to work. I can save myself 30 minutes of writing when I do that. My wife once asked me why I didn’t do that more, and I told her to “rephrase your question in the form of a tweet.”

Writing styles and processes are different for everyone. What are yours? Do you do anything special to get your writing done, to be more efficient and effective, or even to avoid distractions? Leave a comment and let me know.

Filed Under: Marketing, Speaking, Writing Tagged With: book writing, Branding Yourself, Marketing, public speaking, speaking, writing, writing process, writing style

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