One of the issues I see a lot of business people still trying to wrap their heads around is how to measure the effectiveness and value of their social media investment.  In a lot of ways, it’s the question because no online effort is free. Even if all the tools are free, every campaign still takes time and effort, which you pay for by the hour in most cases. In almost every case where you commit to an online project the analytics will be squishy and gray at best, and you’ll have to come to terms with the immutable fear that your people could be spending their time and energy elsewhere. The fear is a given, and if you don’t have it’s because you’re not really weighing your options correctly.

Here’s the thing, you’re not alone. We’re ALL trying to figure out how much time and energy to pump into this new medium and what the right approach and mix is. No one has it right. Every situation requires a unique approach. Consumers are fickle. Attention is fleeting. The ecosystem is mercurial at best. For better or worse, this is the state of affairs and the credibility of anyone who tries to sell you on a proven formula should be questioned ruthlessly.

So if no one has a formula, what the hell do you do? Simple, you take everything you know about your customers, what they like and what drives sales, you make an educated guess about how to engage them in a way that drives sales and you go for it. This is where measuring your progress in the right context is key.

Always Put Your Engagement Metrics In To Business Context

If you only take one thing away from this post it should be that your starting point for designing any social media campaign should be one question “how is this going to drive business”. I wish I had a dime for every post that has “how to measure social media” in the title but never talked about revenue. You can track the ever-lovin’ out of YouTube views, blog comments, followers on Twitter and watch those stats increase over time till you’re blue in the face, but if you have no idea how it’s affecting your bottom line, you’re just spinning your wheels and burning cash.

Make no mistake, it’s easy to think you’re doing well when you’re not. That’s where a lot of companies fall down and over commit to projects that are actually hurting them. For example, your company creates a funny YouTube video. It’s got clever product placement and is meant to and act as marketing for your product. You’re tracking the online stats and you see is that tons of people are sharing it and that views are way beyond anything you could have imagined. You get psyched. Your boss is ecstatic. Everyone’s celebrating 80’s style and throwing you high-fives.

Here’s the rub. If you’re only tracking engagement, your marketing department is going to think the YouTube video that cost you 2 weeks of your peoples time and “just $5000″ in equipment was a great investment. But then you look at the metrics in the context of your sales and the data tells a different story. Sales are still static. Congratulations, you’ve just learned that you’ve wasted $5000 and two weeks worth of a team’s pay that could be spent elsewhere. $5000 in fliers handed out on the street at a Starbucks line might have gotten you closer to your goals and taken a day. Without the context of the sales/revenue data, you just don’t get an accurate picture of what’s going on and how effective your efforts are. This is a totally plausible scenario and it happens every day.

The good news is that if you start by asking the right questions and put every campaign in context of metrics that are meaningful to your business, you’ll significantly reduce your risk, and you’ll set yourself up to learn quickly from your mistakes if you do fail and you can pull the plug quickly if you’re not tracking the way you thought you would be.

This is the reality of social media. It’s the smart approach. Take an educated guess and go for it, measuring your progress in a way that is meaningful to your bottom line. Know that you’ll guess wrong sometimes, miss the mark and take a financial hit. Nothing is free and everyone fails a few times. It’s part of the game. The trick is to be able to spot the times that seem like you’re doing well, but you’re actually failing, and to fail fast, pull the plug and learn from the experience.

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

Measuring Social Media Engagement In The Context Of Conversions and Sales

It’s important to realize that right now, we’re still figuring out how to handle platforms like YouTube and how to deal with copyright because it’s all so new. These nascent values (like fair use etc) are still up for debate, so we’ve got to work hard to understand what they mean for the ecosystem and how choices one way or the other might affect behaviors and outcomes in the future.

Now, I do realize that I’m asking you to spend 30 minutes here, which in the world of the web is an eternity, but here’s the thing….in my opinion, if you want to wrap your noodle around these issues, these two videos do a great job of getting you informed quickly. In the context of all the content that’s out there on this stuff and the density of a lot of the text you’re likely to come across, 30 minutes of video is pretty quick. Agreed? Ok, here we go…

This first video is quick (just 5 minutes). Margaret Gould Stewart, YouTube’s head of user experience, talks about how YouTube’s technology works and polices the massive number of videos uploaded to its site every day, as well as how they work with copyright holders and creators to foster creativity and mutual benefit in the ecosystem. It gives you a glimpse into how YouTube is thinking about remix culture and how to facilitate a system that seeks to reconcile creative freedom with marketplace competition. The scale of the technology is staggering. This gives you a nice macro view of the volume of content that YouTube’s trying to deal with.

In this second video Harvard professor Larry Lessig, an authority on copyright issues, takes a look at remix culture from the point of creators,  society and community values. If you watched the first video, there are some great points where Larry cleverly paints a very different picture of what it’s like to be on the other end of YouTube’s system. Because you havent watched the video yet, I wont spoil it but (because it’s my blog) I’ll still say that I think Larry is really freakin smart and ask that you pay attention to the minutes around this quote:

“Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works, and the opportunity to build this different type of culture. And for that to happen you need ideas like fair use to be protected and central to enable this kind of innovation…between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture.”

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

How YouTube Handles Copyright, and Some Thoughts On Remix Culture

It just goes to show you, when one person finds a smart work-around for a common problem and uses it in public, that idea will propagate across the network as it is adopted by more and more people…until it becomes part of the culture.

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

New Behaviors To Maintain Old Habits

The barriers to entry that I’m talking about aren’t just a little bit lower, they’re A LOT lower. The technology that companies like Canon and Nikon are making available to the masses is, in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than what professional videographers have used historically to get the same result. What’s interesting is that the latest DSLRs weren’t even made to shoot films, but spend a few days surfing around Vimeo and you’ll realize quickly that there are hundreds of classically-trained photographers that are doing just that – and they’re excited about it. A few extra buttons and menus added to the tools they’ve been using for years suddenly expands their skill sets by orders of magnitude that are making them re-think their entire approach to doing what they do (and to what services they can offer clients).

What’s great to see is the level of enthusiasm, grass-roots innovation and information sharing online around what’s happening with DSLR video. The best example I can think of is Canon, which itself has done a tremendous job leveraging Vimeo to bring its customers together to collaborate – not only do they run their own Vimeo group contests like “Beyond The Still” to encourage fans to embrace DSLR videography and collaborate, but there are user-created groups resembling some of the most popular Flickr groups around each of their HD-ready cameras (7D, 5DMKII, Rebel T2i etc) with thousands of subscribers where people are sharing their footage, as well as teaching and helping one another.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. I think it all comes down to the fact that video just gives audiences so much more of what they’re looking for when it’s done right, and it’s the medium that people are going to start looking for by default. YouTube has trained the next generation and set the expectation – if you can find what you’re looking for in text – you can probably find the same thing on video too if you know where to look. And THAT  is the basis for the shift in behavior that we’re seeing on the web towards video. When people expect to find content in the form they want it it (i.e. video over text), they’ll look for it in that form. So why not give them what they want? You can afford to now. :)

Below are 3 great video shorts recorded on DSLRs to complement the one at the top of the page, which was shot on an intermediate-level DSLR by Philip Bloom on a Canon Rebel T2i which you can get on Amazon for well under $1000.  I hope you enjoy these as much as I did…

Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II and edited by Jason Arthurs on Vimeo.

A Canon 7D Short: Thursday Night from gnarly bay productions, Inc. on Vimeo.

Shot on a Canon 7D

Canon 7D – Short Wedding Film from Ray Roman on Vimeo.

Shot on a Canon 7D

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

The Rise of DSLR Filmmakers & The Next Wave Of Web Content

Want a Facebook “Like” button for your WordPress blog like the one you see on this blog? It’s super simple. Todd Williams, Executive Developer at Media 1 Designs, got inspired by yesterday’s announcement at F8 about the Open Graph, and coded up a nifty lightweight “Facebook Like” WordPress plugin that you can use for your WordPress site! It was officially released today on the GunnJerkens blog.

Here’s what the options panel looks like:

Installation:

1. Head Over To the GunnJerkens blog (to make sure you’ve got the most up-to-date version)

2. Download the plugin (this link to the zip file will only work for the current version)

3. Unzip the file and place the Facebook Like plugin folder in your WP-Content –> Plugins Folder

4. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.

5. Go to Plugins –> Installed

6. Activate the plugin

7. Go to The Facebook-Like options panel, configure the settings

8. Click save.

And you’re done! Simple. Lightweight. Awesome (and every time someone clicks “like” that activity will show up in their Facebook stream and bring traffic back to your blog.

Also, if you blog about this plugin, please link back to the original GunnJerkens post.

Enjoy!

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

How To Get A Facebook Like Button For Your WordPress Blog (Plugin)