You thought they were dead, but they were just in a coma. Or it was the evil twin. Or maybe it was a dream sequence, but the two once-dead soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live will find a new life online.

According to a Gizmodo article, the two ABC soaps, which were killed by the network this past spring, are going to be made available online instead. ABC has licensed both shows to Prospect Park, a production company that “promises all the shows will be just as long and just as ‘high quality’ online as they were on TV.”

While Casey Chan, the Gizmodo author, doesn’t “imagine soap opera watchers to be particularly good at using the Internet,” I think it’s a gutsy move, as opposed to moving to a cable network, like USA Network or WGN. I wonder if this could be the beginning of the end of broadcast television as we know it. Will more TV shows start migrating online? Will the “critically acclaimed” (that’s TV talk for “awesome show, sucky ratings”) shows find new life online, while regular TV is left with the same tired old clichéd dreck we’ve watched since 1983?

While I don’t know whether most soapies (soapers?) will have the ability to watch their favorite soaps online, I think this could be a great reason for them to start. And if they were smart, advertisers like Best Buy or Dell and cable companies would take advantage of this opportunity.

For example, Best Buy or Dell should run commercials during these soaps that say “you don’t have to miss your favorite soap. We have a laptop just for you.” Call it the One Life to Live or All My Children package — build it with enough RAM and a big enough processor, easy-to-use wifi, and a browser that comes preloaded with shortcuts to the OLL and AMC streaming sites.

After I heard the news, I was talking with our new intern, Cody (@CAustinMiller), about the possibilities, and we thought of all the possibilities this venture held for Prospect Park.

Production costs are greatly reduced

A typical TV show is shot on giant TV cameras, which are easily $100,000 dollars a pop. But this year’s season finale of House was shot entirely on a Canon 5DmkII digital camera.

One of those cameras (body only) is $2,500. Lenses are several hundred to a few thousand dollars apiece. Similarly, the web series Odd Jobs is shot entirely with a Canon 7d ($1600 + lenses).

Imagine shooting an entire show for a fraction of the cost of a single TV camera. Since very few people are watching an Internet-only TV show on HD plasma TVs, the need for the giant cameras is reduced.

Better video equipment means better story settings and language

If you’ve got these small handheld cameras, imagine shooting some scenes outside, without worrying about a sound stage and all those cables and production crew. A boom mike, digital audio recorder, and a digital camera, and you’re all set.

And you’re no longer bound by studio Standards and Practices people who say you can’t use certain words on television. Want to drop the F-bomb? Fire away. Want the s-word? Let ‘er fly. Online means you can say whatever you want without S&P dropping the hammer on you. (Of course, you have to make sure you don’t offend your audience.)

Advertisers can reach targeted audiences

This is worth a blog post in itself. Imagine these scenarios:

• To watch the shows, users have an account where they provide some basic demographic information: age, sex, race, location, income, family status, etc. Show producers can go beyond providing basic demographic info to their advertisers — “we think it’s mostly white women between the ages of 25 – 45″ — and provide actual counts and percentages.
• Thanks to today’s web technology, advertisers can deliver specific ads to specific people watching on specific browsers. Send diaper ads to new mothers, life insurance ads to women in their 40s, luxury car ads to people who make a certain amount of money. Go read up on Facebook advertising for more ideas on how this works.
• Advertisers can offer special coupons and codes during the show. These ads and coupons can even appear in a sidebar in the browser window. These can all be based on the viewer’s demographic information.
• Marketers can then track click-throughs and follow the visitor’s path all the way through to the contact page or purchase page. They can determine that X number of people ordered our product while they were watching All My Children at 2:37.
• I just had a EUREKA! idea: Put a shopping cart right in the browser sidebar window. When a small product is advertised on the show — say, the latest Danielle Steel novel — viewers can fill out the shopping cart without ever leaving the viewing window, order the book, and have it shipped, all during the show. It’s the ultimate in impulse purchasing.
• Product placement is much easier and less expensive for marketers. Since the production company can call the shots without having to involve the network executives, they can sell product placements for a fraction of the cost of TV spots, but make a bigger piece of the pie.

Sell subscriptions to the shows

This is a chance to test the loyalty of the shows’ viewers: sell monthly subscriptions — say $2.99 per month — to viewers for ad-free episodes. Otherwise treat each episode like a regular TV episode: splits in the shows where they usually happen, with 2 – 3 minutes of advertisements. But monthly subscriptions can also offset production costs and help pay for the episode. If enough people opted for the monthly subscription, it may also show advertisers that viewers don’t want ads, which means they have to be more clever in how they reach those viewers: more product placement, sidebar ads, etc. This could also help the production company find new revenue sources as advertisers scramble for a way to reach this now-clearly defined audience demographic.

Crowdsource the writing

Many years ago — and I can’t remember when or what show — viewers got to vote whether a certain character lived or died. They called in, cast their votes, and the story unfolded to the majority’s wishes. Now, imagine having an online poll that allows viewers to vote on a particular story line. Does Trent live or die? Is Ashlyn’s evil twin really Ashlyn? Does Trent marry Ashlyn?

It’s one more method of interaction, and one more way to keep viewers involved and coming back. Maybe they could even shoot two endings to a storyline or episode, and let the viewers vote for which ending that gets shown. As a bonus, let people watch the ending that didn’t get aired after the episode is over. Again, more interactivity, more content for viewers to consume, which keeps them coming back.

I’m really excited to see what sorts of developments will come out of this new deal (not enough to watch soaps, mind you, but still, fairly excited). Prospect Park has said they will begin airing All My Children online starting September 26, after it makes its final TV appearance on Friday, September 23. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of ideas they come up with, and whether the Internet may be a great new frontier for TV shows that can’t survive the picky whims of studio executives who worry more about ratings than actually showing good television.

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• 

The one advantage social media marketing has over traditional marketing is accurate measurement.

With tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, SEOMoz, and even bit.ly, you can see how well your corporate social media campaigns are working. (Doug Karr has a great post, Your Analytics is Missing the Mark, on the different social media tools you can use.) I can use these tools to measure my social media performance, down to the visitor, the second, and the penny.

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Why Can’t You Predict the ROI of Social Media?

Last week, I talked about why it’s important that — at least in early discussions — you ignore the question of “what’s the ROI of social media?”. That’s because, as Scott Stratten said, you can substitute words like “Twitter” with “talking.” Then you’re asking questions like “what’s the ROI of ‘talking?’” “why should we be ‘talking’ with our customers?”

Part of the reason is that social media is so new, it’s difficult to say what your ROI is going to be. For example, we have one client that has $20 million in sales each year, and we helped him grow his sales by 6% through social media. We have another client whose business is big enough to employ four people, and she tripled her sales — that’s 300% growth — through social media.

So, our range of success is 6% to 300%. That’s a pretty big range. We could split the two and say “on average, you can expect 153% growth,” but that wouldn’t be accurate or honest. And we could say “you can expect anywhere from 6% – 300% growth,” but that would also be misleading.

However, what we can tell you is that we can accurately measure every step of your social media efforts, from the number of people who visit your blog, how they got there, which stories they read, how long they read it, whether they read another story, and did they follow your sales funnel?

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing can’t do that

The reason the ROI question for social media is rather silly is because traditional marketing can’t measure those same numbers with the same amount of accuracy. To be fair, traditional marketing has a long history of measurement, and they can give you basic numbers, like “the industry ROI on direct mail is 2%,” or “100,000 people usually watch this station locally on Sunday nights.” But they’re still missing a big piece of the pie.

• Cable TV stations like to tell you how many homes get their channel, not how many people watch it. The Golf Channel boasts their channel is received by 110 million homes, but they don’t tell people that their daily viewership averages around 77,000.
• Magazines and newspapers will tout their readership, but they can’t tell you how many people read a particular story on a particular day, or how many people saw your ad.
• Billboard companies can give you an approximation of how many people drive by, but they can’t tell you whether they actually looked at the billboard, or how many times people have seen it.

And bottom line, none of these marketing channels can tell you which of your ads compelled people to buy, or which one contributed to increased sales.

The closest you can come to measuring these channels is by putting channel-specific phone numbers and websites on the ads. If someone calls that number or visits that website, you can assume they responded to your ad. But you still don’t know how many people saw it or how many times they saw it, and you can’t monitor overall traffic.

Profit is the most important measurement

Of course, the only thing that really ultimately matters is your profit. It’s not just increased sales (although that’s important), it’s also reduced costs in customer service, travel, and even printing. If social media can help you answer customer questions while reducing phone hours, improve networking to help grow relationships without traveling, and disseminate marketing information without printing out brochures.

The analytics tools that exist can show you all of these things. And by tying those figures in with your customer service, sales, and marketing departments, you can easily figure out how social media is making or saving you money.

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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• 

I was at a client meeting with Paul yesterday, and he made an interesting point:

“Blogging is a lot like dieting. You won’t see any results in the first three months. It’s that 3 – 6 month period of faithful dedication that you start to see the results.”

We see this a lot in our business: companies dive into their social media and blogging efforts, go gung-ho for the first month, slip a few times during the second, and give up after the third after nothing happens. The same is true with dieting (excuse me, lifestyle changes). But most dieting experts have the same advice that we offer our clients. So whether you’re trying to lose weight or grow your blog, here are a few tips that both sets of experts will tell you.

Set Specific Goals

“Lose weight” is not a specific goal. “Get more readers” is not a specific goal. What’s “more?” What’s “lost weight?” By this nebulous definition, if I get one more reader or lose one pound, I’ve met my goal. Instead, set up a specific, measurable goal. “I want to lose 20 pounds in six months,” and “I want to grow my readership by 30% in three months” are both specific and measurable.

Don’t Weigh Yourself Every Day

As you’re losing weight, you’ll occasionally plateau or even gain weight. You may have worked out, drunk plenty of water, and avoided carbs but you still put on a pound or two. You may have promoted your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but your readership stats still dropped. Dieting experts will tell you not to step on the scale every day, and we’ll tell you not to check your Google Analytics every day. That’s because you’ll freak yourself out with every off day, and stress about how to keep your victories going. You’re in this for the long haul, not the quick loss (or gain), so just check your overall efforts once a week to make sure you’re on the right track.

Stick With It

Like we said earlier, you can’t give up after the third month, because you start seeing results between the third and sixth month. And you really start to see a dramatic improvement after six months. That’s when everything is becoming a habit, when you’re firing on all cylinders, and when people start to notice what you’ve been doing.

But more importantly, once you hit your initial goal, you can’t quit. You can’t give up your dieting efforts, because the weight will pile back on. And you can’t give up your blogging efforts because you’ll start to slip in the search engine rankings again. Once you reach your initial goal, set a new goal, find new techniques, and focus on those.

Get An Accountability Partner

Tell someone else what you’re trying to do, someone else who will hold you accountable for your efforts. It could be a workout partner or food buddy to make sure you stick with your diet and exercise plan. Or it could be someone in your company or department to make sure you’re blogging on schedule. They’ll incessantly nag remind you when you missed your workout session or blog posts.

What’s your blogging strategy (or diet tip)? What have you done to make sure you’re doing what you originally set out to do? Share your secrets in the comments section, and let us know where you’ve found success or the pitfalls others should avoid.

Photo credit: RoadsidePictures (Flickr)

——
My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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• 

Anyone can write a basic blog. It’s not that hard. And I’ve talked for hours, whether at seminars or at a one-on-one “brain picking” session about basic blog writing. But I rarely get the chance to talk about advanced blogging, the secrets that I use to improve my blog, and make it stand out from the hundreds of thousands of basic blogs.

This is a good book to use for advanced blogging. At least until I write my own.

Here are 10 advanced blog writing techniques we use for our clients and ourselves.

1. Use WordPress.org: I don’t have anything against platforms like Blogspot.com, WordPress.com, or Posterous.com (I have blogs on all three). But WordPress.org is what a lot of the pros use, because it’s extremely customizable and you can improve its functionality with a few plug-ins.
2. Use a search engine optimization plug-in: We use All in One SEO Pack and Zemanta. Both of these let us do some additional optimization on our articles, which is something the other blog platforms don’t do as well.
3. Choose 1 – 2 keywords or phrases per post: Stick with the mantra, “one idea, one keyword, one post, one day.” This post is about the keyword phrase “blog writing techniques,” and nothing else. Not about choosing topics, not about winning readers, not about whether video or photos help with readership, it’s just about how you actually write posts. By doing this, I not only boost my SEO efforts, but I don’t overload people with information.
4. Write catchy, dramatic headlines: Your headline needs to be catchy, interesting, and compelling. Include phrases like “10 Secrets” or “5 Tips” to fire peoples’ interest. Also, be sure to use your exact keyword phrase in the title for better SEO.
5. Use keywords in your anchor text: If I’m writing about blog writing techniques, I need to link that phrase to another article about that phrase (which I just did. Sneaky, huh?).
6. Watch your keyword density: Density means the percentage ratio of keywords to copy. This particular article has about a 1% keyword density (1 keyword every 100 words). If the number is below 1%, search engines might not realize what your post is about. Anything over 2 %- 3% could be seen as keyword stuffing, and the search engines could drop you. Shoot for 1.5% – 1.99%. Divide the number of keywords by the total number of words to figure density.
7. Automate your cross-posting: Use services like Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to promote your posts to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, and 40 other social networks. It will save you several minutes every time you publish a post.
8. Use analytics to determine how your effectiveness: This lets you see where your traffic is coming from, what brought them there, and how long they stayed. You may learn that a particular keyword is getting a lot of traffic, so you write about that topic again. Or that a particular website is sending a lot of traffic, so you work to get published on that site again. I like Google Analytics for solid analytics.
9. Publish your blog 2 – 3 times a week: Everyone who starts blogging has great intentions, but life intrudes and this resolution gets broken like it’s January 3rd. If you want to excel at blogging, you must write more than once a week. Schedule an hour a day to write, or schedule a three hour block, and write all your posts in advance.
10. Become a fast writer: Writing fast means being able to find the best words and assemble 400 of them in 20 minutes. If you can’t do this, focus on those things that are holding you back, and work to overcome them. Being able to write fast will also help you publish more frequently.

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• 

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)

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• 

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.

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• 

Sponsoring a sports team or event is not just about signing a check. It’s more than just getting your name on the side of a car or a sign in the stadium.

Basically, if you want your sponsorship dollars to be an effective marketing tool, you need to double your total sponsorship budget just to promote the fact that you have a sponsorship deal. If your sponsorship is for $100,000, spend another $100,000 to promote it.

If you’re sponsoring a racing team, you need to tell your customers about it, and get them to cheer for “your” team. If you’re sponsoring a football team, you need to get your best customers into the luxury suite to see and hear the game. Even if you’re sponsoring a Little League baseball team, you need to find a way to bring the parents into your store or restaurant after a game.

Tomas Scheckter

I’ve been thinking about how sports marketing professionals can use social media to their benefit over the last several months. Last year, we brought a some Indy Lights team owners and sponsorship brokers — Gary Sallee, Roger Brummett, and Tyce Carlson — to talk about sports marketing at a Confluence networking event.

That month, I also had a chance to talk to Mike Micheli, PR director of Dale Coyne Racing, who was also a great guide and mentor when I became one of the first ever race bloggers at last year’s Indianapolis 500. (He also hooked me up with Tomas Scheckter for a quick interview.)

The Problem: You Just Can’t Effectively Measure Traditional Marketing

One thing both the team owners and Mike Micheli explained is that sports marketing is no longer just about soliciting checks from big companies. Now, team owners have to be able to demonstrate the ROI of a sponsorship.

I can’t imagine anything harder in the measurement and analytics world. It’s just as hard as measuring regular marketing outlets. You don’t know which TV commercials increased sales, and which ones lost money. You don’t know which billboards brought visitors to your website.

And good luck trying to figure out which logo placement or interview plug was responsible for the bump in sales. You’re trying to figure out which made money and which lost you money, whether it was the car sponsorship, or the special event tent. Or the t-shirts. Or the ad in the race program. Or the — you get the picture.

But social media can do all of that, and then some. Here are three things social media can do for sports marketers.

1. Social Media Can Prove ROI in Sports Marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s easy to demonstrate the ROI. Thanks to simple tools like Google Analytics and bit.ly, it’s possible to come up with a basic system to see how many people found your website, requested additional information, or bought something. With a paid solution like Yahoo Analytics, you can actually get more specific information, as well as deeper stats and real-time results.

You can measure a campaign’s success and figure out which variables, messages, and even time of day brought the best results. See if you get spikes in traffic before, during, or after an event. And whether the spikes are taking place in the event’s city, or if they’re spread out. You can even set up different URLs and landing pages, and do A/B testing to see which variables brought the best results.

Take it a step further and use products like Radian6, ScoutLabs, or even Vocus to monitor the social media discussion about your brand and your team. Now you can pay attention to who’s talking about your brand, and interact with the ones who are the most vocal, whether positive or negative. You just can’t do that with a billboard or a TV spot.

2. Social Media Can Grow a Sports Marketing Audience

There are more social media tools than you can shake a stick at. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of ways to connect with your customers online. For a good start, get Twitter Marketing for Dummies (affiliate link). (Full disclosure: I helped Kyle Lacy write this book. Shameless plug: We’re working on another one.)

Use tools like Twitterment, NearbyTweets, and even Twitter’s own search function to find people who are interested in your team. Use Twitterfall or TweetDeck’s search feature to watch for dicsussions about your team or the event.

Connect with those people, and discuss the team, the players/drivers/crew, and the event itself. Don’t sell them anything or talk about your company. if you have to, hold a special contest or make a special offer. “If our team finishes in a certain place or higher, the first 500 people to tweet us gets a coupon for a free widget.” But other than that, talk about the thing that interests the fans (hint: it’s not you).

3. Social Media Can Deepen Relationships With Fans and Customers

Enhance your customers’ experience on race day by live blogging, tweeting, and video streaming from the stands, the sponsor’s tent, or even Victory Lane.

• Get some behind-the-scenes looks (assuming you get permission from the team) at what it looks like in a garage or locker room.
• Hold a special Twitter chat with a driver or crew member.
• Have a player give a special video greeting or tour for fans.
• Ask different team members to blog about their experiences over the season, complete with photos and videos.

Social media lets fans see the things they might be missing, but help them feel like they’re part of the experience. By doing this, you help them feel more like a part of the team. They’re insiders, with special knowledge about the team, the athletes, and the event. By feeling like they’re connected, they’ll become more of a fan, not only of the team, but of the organization or brand that helped them get there.

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• 

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?

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.

“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.

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:

1. An understanding of how your market uses blogging and social media, if at all
2. A plan to participate
3. Execution and commitment to the plan
4. 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

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• 

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?

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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:

1. 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.
2. The Golf Channel won’t even say how many people they get. But Sports Business Daily did.
3. According to Sports Business Daily, Golf Channel’s average daily viewership is 77,000. Primetime viewership runs around 131,000.
4. 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.

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