I’m starting to think about starting a coworking space in Abbotsford, BC.
I’ve been working out of my home office for about 4 months right now, and while the commute is great, the community is absent. There’s a buzz and a beat to working with others – especially cool, innovative, smart, and creative people – that you just can’t match when solo.
OK. So you’ve launched your new social-viral-mashable-linked-web2.0-connected web place, and you’re tracking a million metrics. Which ones should you actually be paying attention to? Those are your Key Performance Indicators.
As Rhian James at FreshNetworks mentioned in a comment on my recent post about measuring social media marketing efforts, that’s really the key. Burying yourself in a mound of data is unproductive; knowing which data tracks progress to your critical initiatives is pure gold.
FreshNetworks posted on this topic on their blog, and created a valuable SlideShare presentation illuminating the difference:
Measuring the results of social media marketing efforts has been challenging to say the least.
Five or six years ago, when I was helping start-ups put blogging campaigns together to kindle the development of user communities, I didn’t really have a clear idea how to measure ROI. About the only things we measured were visits and sales … which wasn’t too bad, but was only a very small part of the story. And based on our unsophisticated set-up (plus lack of Google Analytics) we really had no clue what the connection between visits and sales exactly was.
Today there are plenty of other ways to measure social media marketing results. Here are just a few, starting with quantitative measures:
YouTube views & subscribers
If you’re doing anything on YouTube, the obvious measures are:
How many times your videos have been viewed
How many people have subscribed to your channel (you did create a channel, right?)
A less obvious measure is the number of comments on your videos. While you’re checking that, be sure to get a sense of the overall tenor of the comments: are they positive, negative, or lukewarm?
Del.icio.us bookmarks of your page
If you’re creating valuable content – and you’re sharing it properly with the world, and have sprinkled some magic pixie dust on it – you’re going to get some attention. A good measure of how valuable the content is is whether people care enough about it to bookmark it and share it on Delicious or other social bookmarking sites. If the answer is zero … reconsider your content, approach, or both.
Number of references on Digg
Along the same lines as Delicious … if people care about your content, they’ll save it and promote it on Digg, StumbleUpon, and other similar sites.
Search engine rank
This is probably the most obvious ranking measure, period, and it correlates strongly with your ability to do something interesting enough and remarkable enough for people to actually want to link to it. But it’s not just the obvious search on your name … while you’re checking your search engine rank, you want to look at …
Name – how you rank for your company name and brand names
Good keywords – how you rank for keywords that you think people will use to find services like yours … for example … hawaii flights for Hawaiian Airlines
Bad keywords – how you rank for bad keywords, ones you don’t want to be associated with your company … such as worst airline ever, or lemon, if you’re a car manufacturer
Website metrics
Is traffic to your website going up? And/or, are you getting higher quality traffic that stays longer, looks at more, and converts better? You can use Google Analytics for free, or other stats packages. Some of the metrics you want to be tracking are:
Unique visits
Return visits
Frequency of visits per user
Time spent on site
Number of pages visited per visitor
Leads generated (total, and per visitor)
Sales (total, and per visitor)
Note: if you’re not actually selling something, substitute whatever it is you want users to do … your conversion goals … for “sales.”
RSS subscribers
How many people think your material is good enough to want more, on a regular basis. These people will subscribe to your RSS feed, or your email list to be updated when a new post comes out. Note: Feedburner is a good service for this.
Engagement
When you post on your blog, or on whatever service you use, how many comments are you getting?
Followers on Twitter
You are on Twitter, right? Does anybody care? Find out by starting to track:
Number of RTs – how many are re-tweeting your posts?
Number of DMs – how many are interested enough to direct message you?
Followers – as mentioned above, how many followers you have
Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc.
How many people have friended you on social networks? If you’ve started groups, how many people have joined? Of the people that have friended you or joined your group, how many are actively engaged – listening and talking?
More qualitative ….
That’s a fairly quantitative list, but there are some qualitative questions to ask as well.
Are we seen as experts in our industry?
Do we get mentioned/cited when people are talking about our industry?
What is the quality of interaction we’re seeing in all the above places?
In the final analysis …
… there is no final analysis. Social media marketing, is, after all, marketing. As such, there is very rarely a one-to-one correlation between input and output.
The reality, however, is that your ability to connect with clients depends on your online footprint, and the quality of your online presence. Are you findable online? Are you where your clients are, online? And if they search for you, do you have both a big enough and targeted enough Google footprint that they can easily find you?
Your online success, and increasingly your business success, relies on the answers to those questions.
I signed up for a Windows Live Messenger account this morning and was struck by the infrequently asked questions:
The title says frequently asked questions, but they’re obviously not. They’re actually questions Microsoft wishes people would ask …
What ordinary person – Joe in the warehouse, Betty in accounting – has ever asked: How do I create a strong password? Betty is much more concerned about creating one that she can actually remember.
And Joe has never wondered: How can I create my mobile credentials?. Seriously now … what on earth are those? I’m not sure I know, and I’m a COO and architect for a software company!
These are FAQs that have never been asked. Someone, somewhere, has been told: write some FAQs so we have some help on the website. Go figure out what people might want to know.
It might be easier to … just ask people what they want to know. Or check your logs and figure out what seems hard. Or watch a couple of users interacting with the system.
Early in 2008 Robert Hruzek invented Blogapalooza – a way to celebrate bloggers’ best posts of the year.
This January he did it again. I don’t have a clue how he managed, but Robert Hruzek was able to get 128 posts from 128 different bloggers live over a couple of weeks in early January.
Here’s a much-belated post on all of those posts, and all of those bloggers …
Whether you’re an individual, brand, or company, it’s good to know when people are talking about you. It’s even better to know what they’re saying.
The last thing you want is to find out that there’s a firestorm of negativity about your latest post, product, or brand when a forest of media microphones are thrust in your face and the media trucks are camping out just off your property. Instead, you want to be in tune with what people are thinking and saying, and you want to be able to enter the conversation with your perspective.
Here are 8 quick, simple, free tools for listening online:
Best and easiest:Google Alerts
Set up an alert. Set it to be emailed to you at the frequency of your choice. Wait for the messages to hit your inbox. Could it possibly be simpler?
Most immediate and fun:Twitter search via RSS
Enter your search items. Grab the RSS feed. Save it in your RSS Reader (Google Reader, or any offline reader). Watch the items get pushed to you every 15 minutes – or however often your reader updates.
Web 2.0 old-skool:Technorati
The fact is, Technorati is not what it once was. But it can still be a useful tool to electronically eavesdrop on what millions of bloggers are blathering about. Go, search, subscribe to the RSS feed. Simple.
Comment search:backtype
Pretty much the same as above, except this search engine focuses on what opinionated people – the 5-10% who comment on blog posts – are saying. Visit, enter your search terms, and get email alerts.
Reviews, etc.:Omgili
This can be particularly helpful if you’re in packaged goods or electronics and you want to check out how you’re being reviewed (example: Panasonic TV). But you can just visit the home page for generic search and cast a wider net.
Really old school:Google, Yahoo!, perhaps Live
Maybe, if you want to know what people are saying about you, you should just search the web. What a thought! Alas, you actually have to do it yourself, although you can set up some automated searches too … but it’s a good idea to do it weekly or so.
Social media ear to the ground:Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc.
More and more people are joining social networks, meaning a lot of the web’s conversation happens behind closed doors. But you can get in … perhaps with your own profile, perhaps just with judicious searching, perhaps by joining conversations … and hear what’s going on that’s important to you.
Yes, discussion boards still exist:BoardTracker
Online discussion boards still exist, despite their low profile in the web2.0 era. Even though they’re one of the oldest forms of online community, they are in some cases still growing. BoardTracker is a good way to search these often thinly sliced vertical niche sites. And yes, you can set up alerts to come to you,
So … that’s 8 ways of listening to your clients and your community that won’t cost you a dime, and in most cases not even much time.
But when just about anything anyone wants to know is a simple search away, what, specifically, constitutes education in the age of Google? And, is it enough to know about, without knowing how, or why?
This paper is inspired by Nicholas Carr’s widely read Is Google Making Us Stupid? That being the case, of course, I have absolutely no expectation that any of you will actually read the entire thing.
As anyone who follows tech news knows, Microsoftisplanningitsownretailstores. Presumably, having seen the success of Apple’s stores, Ballmer thinks there’s a model to follow here.
Key to almost every new business venture is a question: how is this differentiated from the competition. But based on what I’m seeing in Microsoft’s Retail Experience Center … please help me understand: how is this any different than Best Buy?
OK, so I get that there are digital displays for product shelves. I get that everything is Microsoft, Microsoft, and more Microsoft. I even see the mini-computers on the shopping cars (and wonder how long they’ll last).
But those are details. On the big picture … the whole metaphor of the store … nothing has changed. It’s a nice, plastic, pastels & neutrals, soulless big box store. How Microsoft!
And how appropriate that their recently-hired VP of Retail, David Porter, is a 25-year Wall-Mart veteran. His latest gig was much sexier, at DreamWorks Animation … but the role was head of worldwide distribution.
Just like launching your website or start-up too early, being too eager to be a big swinging you-know-what on Twitter can be a fatal flaw.
Check out this Twitter account that I was invited to follow yesterday:
In brief:
Following: 584
Updates: 2
There’s an obvious discrepancy here. When you follow someone on Twitter, they are likely going to take a look at your past tweets to see if you might be someone they want to follow. If you have no history, people have no data. And what happens in the absence of data? You guessed it – not much at all.
So in other words, by “launching” too early … drawing attention to yourself by following people … you’ve done yourself a disservice.
Do yourself a favor instead. Learn Twitter (or any other social application you’re testing), develop some history, put out some data … and then start following people.
The unfortunate part is that this looks like a legit person or organization (unlike the vast proliferation of spam get-rich-quick accounts on Twitter lately) but they will not get the consideration they might deserve, simply because of a bit of over-eagerness.
There’s a great quote about life choices by Smoke Robinson, the wonderful author, mountain man, hiker, mountain climber, and all-round adventurer:
Most choices at the crossroads of life are made under weak starlight with a feeble lantern that illuminates poorly the farther stretches of trail.
I was going through some old posts today, and saw this one which I wrote after reading his book, Walking Up and Down in the World. I’d already posted it, but it’s so good I just had to repost it.
Smoke was up, Smoke was down. He was dirt-poor, he was fairly well-off. But he always seized his chances for adventure with both hands.
We needed some music for a software product that we’re delivering to a client in a couple of weeks, so I decided to have some fun with GarageBand.
Here’s the result … I call it Natural Vibes:
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Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
