Two weeks ago, Gunn/Jerkens, a Marketing Communications company I do social media consulting for, hosted it’s first-ever Social Media Mingle event. Clients and associates joined us for a day-long seminar that started out with a 4 hour presentation, co-delivered by myself and Katie Wynne (I am the one excitedly waving my arms around in the beginning of the video below). At the event, we covered the trends, benefits and best practices of some of the most widely used social platforms. It was a fun, engaging experience and I was delighted at how much the attendees participated and how vibrant and deep the conversations in the seminar were. Here’s a little taste of the event…
If you would like to view the presentation, a trimmed-down SlideShare version has been posted below for your convenience. If you have any questions about any of the content, please feel free to discuss in the comments here, or on the Gunn/Jerkens post.
A special thank you goes to Linda Gunn for asking me to join the team to help lead the discussion for the event.
This slide deck by Oliver Blanchard on Social Media ROI is a hoot. It provides a witty introduction to measuring social media campaign ROI. Importantly, it highlights the fact that social media is an investment that requires people, time and resources, and if you’re not measuring impact in terms of things that matter to your business, you’re going to crash land. If you’re confused about how to measure ROI in your social media campaigns check out his presentation. It’s a good primer.
Five years ago, if someone from your marketing department said “Let’s market to our existing customers!” they would have risked losing their job. Why would any organization spend time or effort on customers who’ve already bought the product? Backwards you say? Not anymore. This is a winning strategy on the social web.
Social media changes the game by giving brands and organizations an unprecedented ability to target and energize their existing fans. 5 to 10 years ago, brands didn’t know who their biggest fans were or where to find and engage them. Now individuals come to you and they bring their entire social graph of trusted relationships with them. When the stars align and they start to come in droves, it’s word of mouth on fire – that’s the real power of the social web. Recognizing that, smart organizations that have a connected fan base shift their spending away from recruiting and start focusing on their existing community’s happiness and let the fans do the marketing for them.
BMW has had amazing success with it’s strategy of targeting existing Mini Cooper Owners because they understand how critical their passionate customers are for spreading ideas that promote the brand. Mini Ownership for many isn’t just about the car – it’s about being part of a subculture that has it’s own fashion, events and lifestyle. BMW made a smart move by focusing on treating their best customers as special insiders who love to be in the know and talk about the product. There’s a key lesson here for any brand with an existing community. People haven’t fundamentally changed, but the technology does change their ability to market for you so significantly that it changes where the dollars should be spent.
One of the hardest questions to answer definitively when it comes to social media is “How do we measure ROI when it comes to conversation?” Starting a blog and getting on Twitter and Facebook is a good start, but, even if you’re producing great content at a good clip, it’s hard to measure the value of the conversations that you generating. This is especially true in the beginning when you’re building a new community from scratch. Common questions I’ve heard are…
- What’s relevant and what kinds of interaction should I be focusing on?
- Which kinds of people should I be focusing my attention on?
- What types of people are important to recruit to sustain interaction and keep my community vibrant?
- How do we focus on the signals and block out the noise?
- What are the most useful social metrics?
Measuring conversation is tough, but it’s not impossible and there are a few people out there who are thinking about it deeply and coming up with useful solutions. This 45 minute talk I recorded on my Flip at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo given by Katie Niederhoffer and Marc Smith is, to date, the best resource I’ve found for getting a deeper understanding of interaction patterns that matter and what types of people make communities tick. To my knowledge, it’s the only video taken of the event, so please forgive the ahem…less than HD quality of the recording. Katie and Marc share rich data on what the interaction patterns look like for the types of people that you want to recruit for your community. Hint: It’s always a very special few that produce the majority of the interactions that sustain communities – being able to recognize them when you see them so that you can focus on building relationships with them and keep them around is a key success factor.
Thanks again to Katie and Marc for allowing me to record their talk. I hope that those of you who love this stuff as much as I do get a lot out of this. These guys did a great job in such a short period of time. The talk is a great primer for understanding the social science and dynamics behind what makes communities tick.
Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation (Web 2.0 Expo 2009 – Katie Niederhoffer & Marc Smith) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.
What is the most meaningful way to understand and measure a dialogue? As marketing transforms from a broadcast model to a conversational one, which constructs should be captured and how do you measure them? Is it necessary to make a distinction between the metrics used to tap into the value of a conversation per se and the ROI of a social media marketing campaign?
This presentation offers new strategies to think about and tap into the depth of interactions and emotional connections people have online. Beyond buzz levels, sentiment, and other core metrics typically provided by brand monitoring solutions, the presentation will offer methods to understand a conversation: how emotional is it, how in sync are the constituents, how intimately do they relate to the brand or product? How much trust do the constituents reveal?
Marketing efforts that take advantage of technology to enable community and collaboration render traditional metrics limiting, at best. Traditional metrics have been optimized for more passive exposure to a specific message, frequency of exposure is considered a proxy for relevance; and, the premium is on reach over quality.
Primarily due to its more participative dynamic, a conversation engages constituents unlike static messaging. As many in the industry have noted, a natural development is to measure engagement. However, there is little consensus on what engagement means and how it can be measured. Often it is calculated by merely adding traditional metrics, assuming more is better.
The presentation will introduce new constructs and present case studies with empirical research demonstrating more valuable, still measurable constructs than the core metrics currently in use.
*** Note: This was recorded by Steffan Antonas (@steffanantonas on Twitter) at the Web 2.0 Expo On 04/01/2009. Special Thanks to Katie and Marc who allowed me to record this session. The slide deck for this presentation can be found here: http://bit.ly/gNwC1
Katie Wynner and I have been putting together a presentation we’re giving in Long Beach, CA this week on Social Media Marketing and she came across this video on Social Media ROI. The video showcases several of the best known Social Media ROI examples along with other effective Social Media Strategies and data that I’ve seen from recent reports released on all the tech hubs. Two thumbs up. Hat tip to Katie for the find.
I’m having a lot of fun playing two social games right now – Glue and Foursquare. Foursquare connects you and your friends around the places you visit offline (restaurants, shops, movie theaters etc) and Glue connects you and your friends around the popular sites you visit online (like Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yelp and Wikipedia). Both services allow you to share your experiences about your favorite places and stuff you love in real time with your friends, as well as earn rewards, unlock achievements and compete for bragging rights.
Some fresh Hitwise data posted by Bill Tancer just a few weeks ago indicates that Twitter might have hit a wall and is now on the decline. Just as Twitter secured an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company’s valuation in the $1 billion range, Bill dug into the data to take a quick look at Twitter’s market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic. I’ve included 2 of the key graphs here – Marketshare of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com and search volume for “Twitter”. In both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009, which validates the feeling expressed by many heavy users that engagement seems to be falling off of late.
It should be noted that the chart immediately below indicates visits to Twitter’s website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption. If this interests you, please head over to Bill’s post and start a discussion – perhaps he’ll be nice enough to run the reports again as of this week so that we can get a better idea of whether this is just a temporary setback Twitter is experiencing, or not. My guess is that with the addition of Twitter lists, you’ll see a spike this week back to Twitter.com, but that it’ll be a spike, not necessarily the start of an upward trend.
Marketshare Of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com
Search Volume (U.S.) for “Twitter”
