6)  Making The Wrong Type Of Facebook Page

*RcFishingWorld would be much better off on Facebook with a business page instead of a personal profile.

Personal profiles are the only pages most Facebook users will ever be familiar with, however, they lack many essential resources which business profiles otherwise would include. For example business pages give page administrators access to insights about your pages’ audience through statistical insights such as; page views, demographic views, traffic sources, and other key statistics otherwise absent in a personal profile. Even though business pages do not allow you to actually “friend request” your target market, they still give you access to your audiences news feed via the “like” button. Bottom line: make sure you make the right type of profile!

5) Not Posting Frequently Enough On The Wall

*Mortgage Advice is not engaging their 2,000 fans.

Take this business page as an example, “Mortgage Advice.” This page has over 2,000 fans, but they are not reaching out to any of their fan’s news feeds, because Mortgage Advice is not posting anything. By simply posting, “Check out Mortgage Advice… For such and such reason,” they would easily generate a couple hundred impressions and draw a small piece of internet traffic to their business, but they are not utilizing this potential. If Mortgage Advice added a few nice graphics and than reinforced their more professional look with some interesting wall posts, which were than updated and maintained, than even this business could generate some revenue on Facebook! Instead their simply letting their fans waste away.

4) Not Engaging Your Audience, or Worse Yet; Acquiring Fake Fans!

By neglecting fans, business pages are essentially shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. Edgerank and Post Quality Score are metrics of Facebook’s content management filters. Unlike the past, everything users post does NOT appear in your audience’s news feeds; information which users do not engage, is subsequently filtered out to save users time, relieving content which may be perceived as spam or unimportant to the user.

This also means fake fans will do more harm than good to your page because they bring down your engagement rates. Companies which entice clicks and engage people through interesting posts, will maintain contact, pages which do not engage their audience will be filtered out of their audiences’ news feeds all together!

Some tips for increasing your engagement;

• Make sure to respond to comments, and don’t worry about commenting on your own material.
• Never leave a fan hanging and always respond to whatever questions fans may post, positively enforcing fan engagement.
• Also feel free to “like” your own material, as this does not harm your Edgerank or P.Q.S. scores.
• There are many techniques to raise your engagement for example try to ask your audience questions,  instigating engagement. Using these simple guidelines, can quickly garner huge results and massively improve your pages marketing on Facebook

*See how each post only makes impressions on 10% of CiviliansNews.com‘s audience?

3) Not Running Sponsored Stories

Sponsored story advertisements are displayed for current fans and friends of current fans, in order to spur re-engagement. Re-engagement is for fans who at one time “liked” your page, yet lost interest over time. After a fan becomes un-engaged, ignoring your page for some time, their news feeds will start filtering out your pages posts, losing contact to your audience member’s news feed. In order to regain contact with these fans you SHOULD run a sponsored story Facebook advertisement, if un-engaged fans click the advertisement than just like that, your page will start making impressions again on that user’s news feed.

A tip for sponsored story advertisements: try to focus on third party articles which positively endorse your organization. This makes the sponsored story appear as if it may have been run by a 3rd party, so you don’t look like you’re tooting your own horn.

2) Not Keeping An Eye On Your Competition

Later this year Blitzmetrics.com is going to be bringing FREE social media analytic dashboards to all businesses who sign up on their website. These dashboards will be full of information about your competitors’ social networks as well as your own fans’ engagement. However, this free product is still not scheduled for release until later this year. Until then let’s talk about keeping an eye on your competition manually.

It’s really as simple as “liking” your competitors’ pages, than following their activity in your business page’s news feed. When logged in as a business page, the business will maintain a news feed consisting of things the business page “liked.” This is useful because, by liking your competitors, you can personally monitor their actions on Facebook everyday. Commenting on your competitors’ pages is also allowed as well. Spamming a competitor’s page is an easy way to violate Facebook rules and policies, however, it is still not completely disallowed. Often times, large companies will even disregard this type of engagement because even if you’re shouting out your own page on your competitors’ walls, it raises your competitors’ engagement rates, making this tactic a double edged sword.

Ignoring your competition is a massive mistake: make sure to keep a close eye on what your biggest competitors are doing everyday. Check out how they are utilizing social networking and employ techniques that they have used successfully for yourself!

1) Being Overly “Business-ey”

Have fun! When utilizing the social networks for business, it is always important to remember what you’re doing and where you’re doing it. The social networks are still a taboo, unknown realm of marketing. Most users are young people, and most of their time on the sites are spent concerned with high school friends and ex-girlfriends, which will often take precedence over corporate marketing campaigns.

As far as posting content, remember that users are unlikely to engage with the same monotonous business messages. Try adding a bit of provocation to your posts. A sense of professionalism is always inherently mandatory, however, don’t be afraid to dive into a funny joke, funny topic, or peculiar interest. Stirring up, or aggravating fans increases engagement and inevitably will increase the volume for which your material is shared.

Hopefully these basic guidelines help you run a successful business or fan page on Facebook. Good luck!

-William Larsen, BlitzLocal Analyst

This is an article from one of our analysts, who we encourage to share opinions. It may or may not reflect the views of BlitzLocal.

Original at The 6 Biggest Business Mistakes On Facebook! BlitzLocal

Ranking well for the proper keywords will generate targeted, high quality leads for any business. Customers who shop or price check online are constantly using Google search, and the businesses that rank well on Google meet potential clients who found them because of their search engine rankings. Dennis’ friend recently started a racquet stringing business out of his home in Boulder, Colorado. Knowing his customers often found racquet stringing services online, he asked Dennis if he would help him climb up the Google search results for keywords like “Tennis”, “Boulder”, and ”Racquet“, knowing his customers would likely use these search terms if they were looking to get a tennis racquet strung in Boulder. Often times competition for search results is fierce, making it a very competitive field. Take the term “Remote Control Car” for example. Searching even this three word term, causes Google to display 15 million results. Obviously, the results listed first will receive the most views from prospective customers; but how do you get your business to the top of the ladder?

Dennis started by explaining that clickable links online, termed “back links”, are essentially connecting web traffic together from one site to the next. For example, any link in this article, which takes you to another page, is a back link. Receiving high quality, “back links,” from reputable sites, is one of the major components Google uses when ordering search results, particularly when a search query returns millions of results. Essentially, the amount of back links and how well they fit the target search (among other things) determines who gets to be at the top of the search. This creates multiple dimensions to the importance of back links to your site. It is important to have back links because, not only do they account for a great source of direct traffic to your website, they piggyback off other sites’ traffic and funnel it through a direct link to yours, and play a vital role in how Google ranks sites in keyword searches.

The impact of a back link is determined by the rank of the page your site is linking with. This clout, or credibility of a website, is kept in a system of scoring called “Google Page Rank.” You can easily download a page rank application, which tells you the page rank of any page you are surfing, or linking to,  displayed in the bottom right hand corner of your browser, after downloading this free tool from quirk.biz.com. The page rank scale goes from 1 to 10, but it is important to note that the page rank scale is also aggregate. An aggregate in this context, means that sites which rank even 1 level higher than others are ten times stronger than sites ranked even one level lower; exponentially rising and falling in the Google pecking order. In order to zoom past all the other search results on Google, it is important to score well on Google for back links, because Google takes into account the quality and amount of back links to your pages, ranking pages with more, higher quality back links, ahead of sites which are not as well-linked to the rest of the internet.

Although ranking a small business page requires more than simply 1 or 2 back links, even from a page rank 5 site or above, a single “PR5″ back link is usually enough to rank well on certain Google keywords. Particularly if your intended Google keyword queries return less than 2 or 3 million results, and the keyword results your seeking are not in heated competition with other websites. In more sought-after search fields, one must acquire more back links that are ranked higher; ideally with matching keywords and topics, to impact competitive search results the most. A good way to obtain back links on reputable sites is to guest-post material on other sites, for example a friend’s blog, but that is just one suggestion for anyone getting started tackling any major keyword searches.

To rank his friend’s tennis racquet business, Dennis started by quickly writing a short article on his PR5 blog, laced with keywords for Next Day Racquets, that he later hoped to rank for in Google search. He identified ”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” as the keywords that would work best, because the company is a start-up business in Boulder, Colorado that sells tennis racquets, and Dennis realized that it was feasible to rank even higher than his friend’s business rivals for these keywords. He again determined, “Boulder, Tennis ,Racquets,” was the ideal search term for his friend’s business by discovering that the term received an acceptable amount of highly targeted web traffic, while additionally targeted prospective local customers. Keyword research played a vital role in this process, whereby any search query with less than 2 million search results would be relatively “low hanging fruit,” that with a few steps could be overtaken on search results.

The material that ranks number 1 on Google, on average, receives 4 times the amount of organic traffic that the content ranking number 2 receives. So the importance of being ranked high, for any business, is tremendous. After determining the desired keywords, Dennis wrote a highly targeted article about,”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” on his PR5 blog. Dennis also went ahead and created a social media outlet, (his specialty), via a Facebook.com fan page, for his friend’s business (which it would use as a sales page for the time being). He then went on to link his blog to a new article post about Next Day Racquets, while intermingling another link into Next Day Racquet’s Facebook fan page.  After linking the PR5 blog with Next Day Racquets Facebook fan page, he went ahead with a simple little trick that quickly allows Google to index the newly posted material. WordPress blogs are already great at pinging the search ladders, informing Google instantly about the emergence of new content, but a great way to get indexed even faster is to use the Google plus 1 system. By pushing plus “+1″on the newly formed content on his blog, Dennis actually got Google to instantly crawl the post and in turn got the post instantaneously indexed on the search ladder, with no wait or time-delay!

The result? Next Day Racquets ranked number 1 for the keywords, “Boulder, Tennis, Racquets,” in 15 minutes! By simply writing a high quality, keyword articulated article, on a reputable site (his own blog), then linking it to his friends business fan page and then “+1″-ing the results, Dennis instantaneously brought the Google indexing spiders running to the site and had it ranked number 1 on the search engine keywords just as fast. Dennis achieved what most business owners never do; he ranked Next Day Racquets in the top 5 of Google search for important keywords and search terms. Not only that, he did it quicker than I could have ordered a Domino’s pizza. After a few weeks the listing did fall from ranking very 1st on the ladder, down to number 4 on the search results. Even so, Dennis Yu was able to get his friend more Google recognition in 15 minutes than home businesses ever get at all! Not only that, he didn’t use any unethical business or black hat S.E.O. and instead properly mounted Next Day Racquets on the search ladder, for the long run. Dennis Yu is truly a professional. Check out more on his blog www.Dennis-Yu.com.  I hope this article helps people maximize their search engine opportunities; it sure helped me!

-William Larsen, BlitzLocal Analyst

Original at Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal Ranks Small Business #1 on Google in 15 Minutes! BlitzLocal

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession.  Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila!  Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth.  You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do.  Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On 

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right?  In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2.  Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth.  We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates.  CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way.  We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call.  Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months.  Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training?  I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

 About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

Original at Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making BlitzLocal

The graveyard of failed startups is littered with the bodies of companies that have gone after the Microsofts, Cokes, and Proctor and Gambles of the world.  Why not? The reasoning is that just one Coke as a client can be worth 1,000 little clients, and is perhaps even enough to sustain your venture all by itself. Unfortunately, when you have one big customer that accounts for most of your earnings, they can also jerk you around; more on the “Wal-Mart” problem later.

Some people call this the problem of the elephants, deer, and rabbits.  It’s sexy to go elephant hunting, but the trouble is that it takes a team to kill the elephant. That team may have to wait for months on-end before getting anything; often starving in the process. It takes sophisticated tools and plenty of unpaid labor to get an initial meeting, much less deal with all the various levels of decision makers needed to get your first dollar.

Rabbits are small, plentiful, and easy to catch.  These are the small businesses that have $10 a month for your software, but can be such a pain to service that you get a case of “rabbit starvation”. Yes, it’s true; if you live in the woods and subside only on rabbit meat you will starve, since wild rabbit meat is so lean that it takes more energy to process than it’s worth.

So in true Goldilocks fashion, the rabbits are too small and the elephants are too big. And thus, startup advisors say, you should chase deer—medium sized, not too hard to catch, and enough meat to make it worthwhile.  Trying to serve the middle, however, is like trying to be everything to everyone. With no focus in the marketplace, you are unable to differentiate and unable to dominate a niche.

Back to “Paul” again; he has had minor success selling to elephants.  He is personally well networked, and one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. But he is just one guy and there is only so many of him that can perform magic. It’s not scalable.  Further, the $10,000 proof-of-concept deals don’t seem to materialize into $100,000 deals, despite what the Excel spreadsheets to the board might represent.

He may have spent (gambled) $50,000 in energy to get the $10,000 deal. And the big brands that he’s dealing with know this full-well, and are happy to take advantage of the discounts their name can leverage. It’s like the prom queen that can be mean to the adolescent boys; teasing each of them into an endless stream of favors. And it is here that startups die.

In engineering projects, we know that you have to multiply the estimates by a factor of 3. If they say it will take 5 weeks, then you can assume 15 weeks is a more realistic estimate.   Same is true of sales. That deal that is 60% likely to close is actually 20% likely to close.  And instead of 2 weeks, it will be 2 months. You might be ready to go, but the main client contact may be slow to respond to email, the accounting people have some arduous PO process, or some new person wants to evaluate your software—starting the clock over.

Meanwhile, you’re burning cash.  It’s not like you can put payroll or your rent on hold. What you’ve expended so far is a sunken cost, so you just keep going like the gambler who bets double or nothing.  Even if you get the deal, you might not be paid until you complete the work, plus net 60.  So if the project takes 90 days to complete and you’re paid 60 days after completion, you have to float 150 days of cash.  If the pre-sales process took 90 days, you’re now looking at 240 days; not an uncommon cycle to close a big deal.

In those 240 days, anything can happen.  Facebook or Google comes out with a product or feature set that eliminates the need for your product. The company you’re dealing with has a re-organization, so your internal champion isn’t the decision maker anymore. Maybe you lost a key engineer—hey; lots of places are notorious for folks who are disloyal, jumping to whatever the sexy thing of the moment is. Your board or investor begins to pressure you, forcing you to spend more time on convincing them that you’re “so close” to hitting it big, while actually taking your focus away from execution.

Napoleon had his Waterloo because he overextended his supply chain. In other words; the clock ran out on him. If you’re going after the big boys, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to win.  Mind you, self-service software is a different matter—we’re talking about selling deals to household brands that are used to dealing with big agencies who will roll out the red carpet with not a penny of cost on their side for months.

So here are some key insights to help you avoid a prolonged death—to have a decent shot at success versus running out of gas.

•       Law #1: Enterprise software is not bought, it is sold. Companies don’t just walk up to you and say they want to order the #2 meal, supersized.  Expressing interest after reading about you on TechCrunch is a long way from getting your first penny.  Enterprise software is sold via a network of experienced sales reps that have inside connections at the client company. That rep may have been an agency player with a big black book or someone who was internal until recently. If you don’t have teams of folks who can navigate these landmines, you’ll be constantly scratching your head as to why you got so close, but some inferior vendor won the day. You’re column fodder, buddy—the client was happy to waste your time to get you to fly in and pitch, just so they can say they talked to 3 other people before selecting the vendor they had in mind all along.  Moral of the story– don’t enter a battle that you haven’t already determined you’ve won via inside connections. In other words: never go into an RFP situation blind.        

•  Law #2: Ask for a token payment. Sure, you might be dealing with someone from General Motors. But does that person have power to sign a check? We no longer do custom work for free or do a ton of free consulting. If they want a proof of concept, we charge a nominal fee.  Even if it’s only asking for $1,000, the prospect’s reaction to this will be quite telling if they are serious. Case in point—one of the largest newspapers in the world wanted our help with Facebook marketing. They wanted every PowerPoint presentation we have ever done, some one-on-one meetings on-site, and some technical help to troubleshoot. We were flattered. But when we popped the question, they balked. I knew this person’s boss, who told me that this person was preparing a strategy to present as their own. This person was just swapping our name for his name and taking credit with no intention of engaging with us. It happens all the time. Watch for it now and you’ll see it often. A payment of a few thousand dollars is a gesture of good faith between both parties. And if you are looking at doing a partnership with a larger, more established company, be wary of “partners” that want you to take all the risk.
•       Law #3: Decide if you are positioning yourself as cheaper or better. You can’t be both. Even if you are, the marketplace won’t believe you. Plus, you’d be leaving money on the table if you can justify yourself as being of higher quality. Would you trust a heart surgeon that is offering surgeries this week at 50% off?
•       Law #4: Triple your prices. You’ll lose some customers, as you should. But the ones you lose are likely the ones that are causing you the most headaches which, in turn, prevent you from focusing on the guys that are happy to pay you more. Spend time on the customers who love you. Don’t abide by the squeaky wheel management philosophy. If you have 30 clients paying you $5k a month each on average, wouldn’t it be so much easier to have just 10 clients paying you $15k a month?
•       Law #5: Ignore the armchair quarterbacks. Often the most well-meaning of family and friends will insist on giving you advice.  While you trust their friendship, it doesn’t mean they can weigh-in on complex business decisions.  How much of your precious time are you selling to folks who aren’t going to buy your software or can’t help you refine your offering?  You’re talking to the wrong people, though many enjoy the entertainment of verbal jousting at your expense.
•       Law #6: Sell through a partner. If you can’t afford a sales force, leverage the client base on someone who already has a Fortune 500 client base.  That’s what BlitzLocal does with Webtrends, who opens doors for us that we would never get on our own.  In fact, we get to work with existing clients who have Webtrends as their analytics provider, which makes deals so much easier. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So that’s what it takes to go after the big boys.  If you’re not extremely lucky, you need the cash, connections, and focus to weather lengthy sales cycles. So think twice if you want to get Nike as a client.  They won’t even let you publicly mention them as a client if you do, so the referral value may be less than you anticipate.  But when you can find those particular clients who are partners that care about your success, too—then you’ve found a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. If you want to argue, feel free to voice your opinion, too.  I can’t promise I’ll respond, but I will certainly try to respond to folks who ask for help. You can also reach me at facebook.com/dennisyu.

About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising.   BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

Original at Why Startups Fail to Win Big Deals BlitzLocal

1. Locate the conversations
2. Gauge the overall sentiment of those conversations
3. Participate in the conversations
4. Work towards increasing positive sentiment

Tools to help businesses locate the conversations that are taking place around their brands, products, and services have proliferated over the years, so achieving #1 is generally a piece of cake.

Participating in the conversations simply requires good old-fashioned customer service, as does increasing positive sentiment, although a fair amount of training may be required to teach employees how to navigate different social networks, and help them understand just how public their interactions really are. Despite the extra training, numbers 3 and 4 are still hands-on, human-touch activities that that businesses already understand how to handle, and they generally don’t handle being automated very well. Customers would rather have no interaction with a company, than to have nothing more than automated robots attempting to solve their problems.

So if number 1 is easy to solve with automated tools, and numbers 3 and 4 are handled primarily with human-touch activities, what about the second need – gauging the overall sentiment? This is an area that into that fuzzy, not-quite-sure-how-to-handle area. People and businesses are trying to automate this process because applying a sentiment grade to huge datasets is beyond the capacity of manual human power. At the same time, trusting a machine to correctly analyze sentiment is fraught with problems.

Let’s first consider the ways that a machine might analyze sentiment.

Methodology 1: analyze human-scored data, in which humans first analyze and rate sentiment of each piece of data, and the machine then analyzes those ratings to produce reports and aggregated summaries.

Methodology 2: the machine applies a human-scored dictionary of phrases to incoming data, then analyze the data to produce reports and aggregated summaries.

Both methodologies require manual human action first, and neither is a perfect solution. Either humans must score data, as in methodology 1, which is not scalable, or humans must score dictionary phrases, as in methodology 2, which is much less accurate because the phrases cannot take things like mixed messages or sarcasm into consideration. “I love my ugly shoes”, has both positive and negative dictionary words (love and ugly). How should a machine evaluate that? Or “Wow, that’s the most awesome mullet I’ve ever seen!” might sound positive to a machine, based on words such as “wow” and “awesome”, but that algorithm will miss the fact that the user was being sarcastic.

For now, the best solution seems to be the human/machine/human process. Humans must first create phrase dictionaries (or use ones created by others), possibly run actual data through a group of humans who score the data as the basis for which machine learning can rely on, then let the machine classify new, incoming data using the human-scoring process as a way to improve the machine algorithm. The entire process should be repeated as often as deemed necessary. Eventually, the classifier should improve, but humans will always be needed to oversee the results.

Clearly, this process is not merely a matter of humans vs. machines. Both are required to properly handle sentiment analysis.

“It’s hard enough to determine sentiment via email– think of when you may have misinterpreted tone in your own personal communications. Now try to determine sentiment when you have only 140 characters or when a third of these interactions come through a mobile device. Irony, sarcasm, and humor are hard to convey via a 4 inch touch screen. Thus, automated sentiment analysis is problematic, at best, but can at least give you a general sense of how your customers feel. Then manual checking of sentiment can sit on top of your automated monitoring.”

– Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal

So how should companies gauge sentiment if automated tools aren’t sophisticated enough to pick up on sarcasm, for instance, but humans aren’t scalable to meet the growing flow of data?

There may not be a “correct answer” to this question, but I believe a smart strategy is to choose the best tool to meet your particular needs, and then use intelligent, business and marketing savvy humans to “analyze the analysis”. This human-based analysis of the analysis will ensure that the data reports are not only correct, but are also actionable. After all, knowing that 93 customers are unhappy is a meaningless metric. Understanding which customers are unhappy, and why they are unhappy, leads to being able to take the necessary action to accomplish goals 3 and 4 – participating in conversations and improving sentiment.

Let’s take a look at a few ways that sentiment analysis an be turned into direct action:

Customer service: find specific complaints and negative sentiment, so those users feelings and issues can be addressed, before they cause widespread brand damage.

Promos and offers: determine how a new promotion is doing, enabling quick decisions on what to promote further, and what to discard. Sometimes, a promotion backfires, and should be pulled (and perhaps explained) before negative sentiment explodes.

Understand conversion problems: make note of potential blocks within the conversion funnel that is creating negative sentiment, thereby causing potential sales to fall off the cliff.

As I mentioned early on, there are many tools to help locate and monitor the conversations taking place about your business. These tools range from the simple Google Alerts tool to the more robust and complex Radian6, with most small businesses choosing a tools that fall somewhere in the middle, such as socialmention or Trackur.

Some tools that are either entirely focused upon sentiment analysis, or include sentiment analysis as one feature of a broader social monitoring tool, include:

• OpenAmplify
• Social Mention
• Amplified Analytics
• Lithium
• SAS Sentiment Analysis
• Trackur
• Radian6
• Collective Intellect
• Heartbeat
• Webtrends Social Measurement

Which tool is chosen will depend heavily upon company needs and budget. Regardless of the tool used, however, the question businesses need to ask is, “Do we have the manpower needed to properly assess the results, and then take action to enhance or improve sentiment?”

A smart marketing team, in conjunction with a customer service team, should do “an analysis of the analysis” to determine the next steps to take. Understanding the causes of sentiment and making smart marketing and customer service decisions based upon that understanding requires people who are trained and highly skilled in these areas. These people may be in-house, or may be a part of an outsourced social media marketing agency such as BlitzLocal provides, but what is clear is that while machines may be necessary to process large datasets to calculate sentiment, humans are a crucial factor in not only refining the analysis, but in taking necessary actions based upon that analysis.

Original at Understanding Sentiment – It’s Not Just A Humans vs. Machines Approach BlitzLocal

Hopefully, at this point, he stops throwing money at the world, and learns a better way to advertise that stands a far better chance of resulting in positive ROI for every dollar he spends. If so, then at this point, he learns that his ads should be shown only to the group of people who are not only most interested in his products or services, but who are also most likely to respond to whatever offer he is presenting.

On this journey of discovery, he adds two new words to his marketing vocabulary — “targeted” and “qualified”.

What is targeted traffic? Users who are specifically interested in the products or services he provides are the users he wants to target. The chances of converting those users are much higher than the chances of converting a user who landed on his site accidentally and has no interest in what he has to offer. It suddenly becomes obvious to the entrepreneur that if he only spends money advertising to people who already have a strong interest in what he has to offer, then his conversion rate will likely be high, and the return on his investment will likewise be high.

What is qualified traffic? Qualified users are those who are not only interested in his products or services, but are able and ready to actually to to buy. It’s the difference between “looky-loos” and those who have a real need for the product, the budget to acquire the product, and the authority to approve the purchase of the product.

Now our entrepreneur can begin to shed his “newb” status and start launching marketing campaigns that are aimed at targeted, qualified individuals.

Let’s take a look at an example how our businessman can effectively accomplish this new goal.

Our fictional company owner has created a specialized dating service aimed at matching wealthy singles who are both into adventure and extreme sports, and wants to advertise his service on Facebook.

Before he understood the merits of showing ads only to targeted, qualified individuals, he probably would have designed an that sounded exciting or intriguing, but aimed it at everyone. What kind of traffic would he have shown that ad to?

Now that he is a little more savvy, he can begin to narrow that number down.

First, he chooses to only show ads to people interested in sports.

After thinking about it, he realizes that’s still way too general, so he narrows that down to people who enjoy extreme sports.

More thought, and he realizes that he forgot to only target singles, so he adds that to mix.

Finally, he knows his service is pricey, so he wants to pre-qualify his targeted audience as much as possible. Facebook doesn’t have an “I’m rich” category, but our now-savvy businessman can make some educated guesses on finding those people who are more likely to be qualified to pay his steep prices. So he’ll also target various interests, such as yachts, for example.

Now he’s narrowed his ad campaign down to a very targeted group of people who are more likely to be qualified as well. He can choose many different interests besides yachts, of course, honing his campaign until he finds the sweet spot of targeted, qualified users that are most likely to sign up for his specialized dating service.

Suddenly, our online entrepreneur has become a businessman who no longer empties his pockets while chasing everyone in the world. He now understands why the terms “targeted” and “qualified” matter, and is currently enjoying his own extreme adventure.

Related articles:

How To Use Facebook’s New Power Editor For Ads

How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5

Original at Why The Terms Targeted and Qualified Matter BlitzLocal

When I googled “social media vs. seo” (in quotes) this morning, 12,400 results were returned. Restricting the same search to only the past year, over 800 results are returned. Obviously, many people are pitting the two against one another, and have been for some time.

There’s little sense, in my mind, in postulating whether social media is better than SEO or SEO is better than social media. Making these two marketing channels adversaries is akin to pitting shirts against pants/shorts. For those people who don’t wear dresses or jumpsuits, they’ll likely be wearing a shirt and a pair of pants. Asking them which is better will probably only result in having them give you a look that implies they think you’ve lost your mind.

Cross-Channel Marketing Rules

When promoting anything, whether it’s a business, a website, a product, or a brand, promotion works best when it covers a broad spectrum of marketing channels. Television ad campaigns work best when they are reinforced by radio campaigns, magazine campaigns, newspaper campaigns, email campaigns, etc. Cross-channel marketing succeeds because the layers of reinforcing messages work together to create a connection with the target audience.

Waves of Data Engulf Users

People today are absorbing external stimuli in huge waves of data, much like a whale ingests enormous swarms of krill. It is unlikely that a whale would be able to pick out the one particular krill that tasted peculiar amongst the millions he ingested. Likewise, the data we absorb each day is so large and diverse, that recognizing and remembering one marketing message amongst the continuous data flow is rather low. It’s much easier for a lone marketing message to be lost in the flow than it would be if it were repeatedly reinforced by entering the data stream in various ways, from various places, and at various times.

Be Where They Are

The goal should always be to interact with users where they are. If they are searching via a search engine, then an SEO campaign can help reach them during that process. Of course, a PPC campaign also works hand-in-hand with SEO to cover both the organic and paid listings that are returned in the search results for the queries relevant to your brand, service, or product.

Users are spending a considerable amount of time on social networks, so a social media campaign is needed to reach them there. Like the concept of using both SEO and PPC campaigns to cover organic and paid search listings, social media campaigns will include organic interactions such as tweets, Facebook Likes and wall posts, etc., in addition to paid interactions such as promoted tweets and Facebook ad campaigns.

Value In Each Piece Reinforces Overall Value

Each channel will reach users at a different point in the marketing funnel, so the value should be calculated and compared in relation to other marketing efforts aimed at that same audience. In most cases, a search user is likely to be in one part of the marketing funnel, and a Facebook user is in another (or may even be outside of the funnel altogether). Pitting the value of an SEO campaign aimed at the search user against the value of a social media campaign aimed at the Facebook user will only result in a confusing matchup. There is value in both, with each being one important part of an entire cross-channel promotion.

Give each marketing channel its own level of respect, evaluating the effectiveness of each using data that is relevant to that particular channel. Analyze how well the campaign is working within its channel, adjust, re-analyze, adjust again, until you are satisfied that it is accomplishing the goals you set for that particular channel.

Make sure each channel’s message is consistent with the messages from other channels, so that every channel reinforces the others. As the daily influx of data streams through each person, those reinforcing messages will build upon one another and help the entire package of marketing messages stand out in the user’s mind.

The key isn’t to compare seo vs. social media, but to use the right messages in the right formats to ensure the best chance of reaching users at the right time and in the right place. The more often you can accomplish that, with consistent messaging, the more successful each campaign will be, no matter which channel it was focused upon.

Let us know if you’ve found a particular combination of cross-channel marketing especially successful, or if you’ve had problems connecting various channels to create a tight overall campaign.

Original at Social Media vs. SEO – No Contest! BlitzLocal

This webinar was presented by:
Brendan King, CEO, Vendasta
Mike Hartrich, Director of Digital Products, LocalEdge
Greg Sterling, Opus Research

Intro:

Small business are increasingly interested in social media and “conversational commerce”. However what does that actually mean? After the Twitter account or Facebook page is established, what next? SMBs and the sales channels and publishers that serve them are struggling with how to divide the labor and bring social marketing to SMBs but in ways that are efficient and still preserve the “authentic voice” of the local businesses.

Greg begins with a few words about himself and Opus Research and then presents a series of surveys that were done which helps us see the current state of the rise of social media and its impact upon small businesses.

The Rise Of Social Media For SMBs Occurred Because Of Several Factors:

• SMBs claim that most of their business comes from WoM (word of mouth)
• Reviews/social media are an extension of WoM, and they can be very powerful.
• Social tools and sites are free or cheap
• Social media is more intuitive, giving SMBs the confidence that they “can do it all by myself”
• SMBs are following the consumer, going where they are (e.g. 600 million facebook users)

Survey: Are You Marketing Savvy?

In one survey, 65% of the respondents chose either “neutral” or “not savvy”.

Survey: How Do Customers Find You?

• 82% word of mouth
• 66% search/internet
• 37% “advertising”
• 23% yellow pages, etc.

Survey: Current and Future Media

Most Used Media Right Now: Created a social profile, IYP/newspaper site, email marketing, print yellow pages, blog, direct mail, print newspaper
Plan To Use Soon: email, video, blog, direct mail, print newspaper
Won’t Use: TV, local radio, groupon/deals

Survey: Current Marketing Methods

Company website, social media, email marketing, seo, ppc, online display, video, blog

Survey: Top Sites Used By SMBs To Promote Business

1. Google/Google Places
2. Facebook
3. Yahoo
4. Linkedin
5. Twitter
6. Citysearch
7. Yellowbook
8. Bing
9. Superpages
10. Yelp

Survey: Why Do You Have A Facebook Page?

• 41% had a Facebook page vs. 27% a year ago
• It’s an easy / affordable way to create extended awareness of the business
• Best way to communicate with customers
• We have to to stay competitive
• Important way to generate sales

Survey: Social Media Benefits

• 41% better relationship with customers
• 37% increase visitors to site
• 29% increased phone calls
• 28% increased sales

New: Facebook Deals

The Groupon / daily deals phenomenon is now coming together with the Facebook pages platform.

Social Media Challenges: Time, ROI

• 66% of SMBs said they updated Facebook at least weekly
• 63% feel social media has helped make customers more loyal
• 56% feel social media has taken up more time than they expected
• 25% estimate that they made a profit on their social media spend while 15% estimate they have lost money. The remaining respondents said they broke even
• Many SMBs often think that social media has fallen short of their expectations

Mike presents next:

Social Media – A Small Business Perspective

What Are Business Owners – HEARING?

Customers are saying to SMBs:

• Where can Ii find you online?
• Is your site up to date?
• What about this review I read about you?
• Can I find you on Facebook?
• Do you have Foursquare coupons?

Other business owners & analysts are saying to SMBs:

• You need to be on Facebook
• You need a mobile strategy
• You need to be on deals site
• You need to engage more

What Are Business Owners – SEEING?

• New technology
• New articles
• New studies
• New growth stats
• New sites
• New channels
• OVERWHELMED

What Are Business Owners – FACING?

• Advertising/customer
• Engagement segmentation

In the past, small business owners split their focus between main business activities. Now owners must:

• Assure their website is updated
• Monitor their SEM PPC campaigns
• Review their organic SEO listings
• Update social media
• Monitor business reputation

SMBs are finding it tough to stay authentic and still push sales.

What Are Business Owners – SAYING?

• They need help.
• They cant keep up with their website, blog, SEO, PPC, Facebook updates, online reviews, daily deals
• Confused, distracting, cluttered
• How are my competitors doing?
• How can I track online?
• Is there a service that manages all this?

What Are Business Owners – MISSING?

Many SMBs dont have:

• Websites
• Basic CRM
• Social presence

Many SMB owners are:

• Too busy
• Lacking experience
• Behind the curve
• Too sales-focused
• Missing the point
• Not able to track

What Are Business Owners – CHANGING?

• Focused on online
• Engaging their users
• Building knowledge
• Sharing their experiences
• Seeking partners
• Gaining confidence
• Running out of TIME

What Are Business Owners – DOING?

Finding Success:

• Testing self-service
• Finding online agencies
• Expanding traditional relationships
• Hiring talent in-house

Building/Buying:

• Websites
• Social presence
• Reputation management
• Online CRM
• Analytics

Content creation is a challenge – or rather, doing enough of it. For example, posting on Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis is hard. They are looking to partners to help them build that content.

Brendan begins his presentation now.

The explosion of reviews and UGC content is everywhere.

What is Reputation Management?

• Presence/visibility
• Reviews
• Mentions
• Social engagement
• Competition/industry benchmarking

The medium is two-way, not just push – consumers can participate so it has implications on reputation, which makes it scary for the business owner. The brand becomes what your customers say it is, not what you say it is.

Their company released some stats and wants to qualify the data they used. They chose 2000 random accounts from all users who use their services. These random accounts came from secondary and tertiary markets rather than the large markets such as New York or Los Angeles, so that the numbers would be more representative of the typical SMB. Here is what they found.

Presence/Visibility

They look at what kind of presence the SMBs have across 25 social networks, to see what the business’ current visibility is. They found that 32% have 10-14 social media listings, 27% have 5-9 listings, and 15% have more than 15 listings, with the rest having fewer than 5 listings. Even in small markets, 49.8% of SMBs that use their services already have a Facebook page, while only 5% have a Twitter account. In addition a large number of them have a page on Foursquare that they don’t know about, so they have not claimed those pages. Many of those unclaimed Foursquare pages have check-ins, which the business owners are unaware of.

Reviews

22.3% of all those SMBs have reviews, which is up from 8% last year.

• Yelp: 51.1% of those SMBs have Yelp reviews
• Google: 17.4% of them have Google reviews

Reviewed Businesses By Category:

• 40.4% – local services
• 13.4% – restaurants
• 12.6% – local shopping
• The remaining business are across many smaller categories

Mentions

99.7% of the SMBs had “some” mention of them online

SMB Usage Of Their Reputation Management Tool

Within one month of receiving alerts, 13.6% of SMBS logged in to interact with the tool. At some point, over time as they use the tool, they have a lightbulb moment, and they come back more frequently. The average time per visit is just over 7 minutes, and 20.1% spend over 10 minutes per visit.

This was the end of the presentation. What follows is the Q&A:

Q: Someone wanted to know if they believed the SMBs when they stated that most of their business came from WoM?

A: Everyone agreed that if the business owners were to dig deeper, they would likely realize that they lumped together a few different channels into WoM, mainly because they dont really know where the leads are coming from.

Q: How should SMBs manage the task of dividing up labor between themselves and the partner(s) helping them keep up their content creation (both on site and on Facebook, etc)?

A: They’ve found that partners are helping SMBs craft the message that goes out, including idea generation, and that is effective. It is challenging, however, to get a small business owner to get focused on building out those relationships, rather than just concentrating on making sales.

Q: PPC vs. social media? Are SMBs becoming less focused on paid search as they move towards social? Or are they embracing both?

A: They are seeing more SMBs branching out – not replacing – just adding social to the marketing mix. SMBs are looking for a balanced approach. They want to work with trusted partners that direct them into channels which are good fits for their business – showing them what works best for their vertical.

Q: SMBs are screaming, “Help me, Help me!” How do you scale that?

A: Instead of just selling, selling, selling, SMBs need to build relationships. They need tools and guidance to help them do that easily.

Q: Look into the future. Predict major trends in a year or a year and a half.

Mike: As SMBs get more engaged and spend more time and priority on content creation and doins more CRM, they will be seeing the effects of what they’ve done.

Brendan: The future holds more social media. The nature of advertising has changed, and SMBs need to catch up. Reviews won’t go away. SMBs need more transparency, direct contact, and more openness. They’ll see more complexity and confusion, which is why guidance and tools is so important.

Original at The Rise of the Social SMB – Liveblogged BlitzLocal

Retargeting is a new buzzword that is quickly spreading through the marketing community. Many online business owners have heard the term recently but aren’t quite sure what it means. I spent some time researching this fast-growing marketing technique and wanted to share my findings with you.

Let’s start with a common definition of retargeting. Retargeting, also commonly known as “behavioral retargeting” or “behavioral remarketing”, essentially means targeting ads and marketing efforts at consumers and prospects who have previously visited your website, but did not convert.

The key here is that you target your ads only at users who have visited your site, have had some kind of experience with your brand, and who are now considered “lost” users. Retargeting aims to bring those lost users back to you, using ads that can skip the “introduction to your brand” phase.

Anyone who sells anything on the web understands that converting is the number one goal. Retargeting allows you to go after those lost conversions, and some studies show that retargeting can increase conversion rates by up to 125%.

Keys To Successful Retargeting Campaigns

1. Granular targeting: Being able to segment your visitors into small, tightly focused groups enables precise retargeting. For example, by knowing exactly which specific products and services your visitors engaged with on your site, you can later deliver those same product ad to that group of users.
2. Working with ad networks who have the technology to track and use the information obtained to present retargeted ads across a large network of sites is essential to making this work. When a user visits your site, a cookie is dropped to track that user’s interests on your site. You share that cookie with your ad network, who in turn, serves relevant ads to that same user as he or she lands on any other site that uses that ad network to serve ads.
3. Personalization of the ad is critical. You’ll set business rules to determine which ads get displayed (using dynamic content insertion) based on various factors, such as whether the user is a registered user of your site and has supplied you with an email address in the past, what phase of the buying cycle she is likely to be in, how many times she has visited and left without converting, etc.
4. Careful and continuous analysis of web analytics is a must to create successful retargeting campaigns. Knowing which ads work, and which ads the user has seen too many times are equally vital. A good campaign will provide a variety of ads aimed at promoting the same thing to measure success and frequency caps to avoid ad burnout.
5. Dynamic, customized landing pages work well. If a retargeted ad is successful in bring a user back to your site, acknowledging her return can welcome her and personalize the experience for her.
6. Once a retargeted user converts, the cookie is removed, and the user falls out of the retargeting group.
7. You can also use the same concept of retargeting in the social realm, though with admittedly less control, since you won’t be able to drop a cookie. You’ll also be limited to a narrow online world, but one which your users are likely spending most of their time. One of the big advantages of utilizing Facebook ads, for example, is that the ads can be targeted to highly specific groups. You can set up ads to target only Facebook users who have a relevant interest (or is a fan of a competitor), and who aren’t fans of you yet. Send them to a specific landing page. If they don’t convert (they don’t click the Like button), you can continue to show them a variety of different ads to remind them of your offer. You’ll also need to be careful to avoid ad burnout here, and may need to create shorter-term campaigns when retargeting within a social network. If your retargeting efforts succeed and a user converts, she’ll drop out of the user pool that you’re targeting with this group of ads.

Add Retargeting To The Marketing Mix

Marketers always want to supply the right ad to the right user at the right time. Sometimes, that means showing a generic display ad that introduces your brand to users who have never heard of you. Other times, you may show ads to search engine users with relevant PPC ads. Now, with retargeting, you can also show personalized ads to users who have already visited your site and failed to convert. Your brand is one they are already familiar with, so you can skip the introductions and move right to the phase of reminding them that they had considered one of your products in the recent past. Reminding “lost” users of your brand – and specific products – enables you to reach an audience that the other types of ads aren’t designed to reach.

Original at What’s Up With Retargeting? BlitzLocal

This post was live-blogged from a webinar I attended today. It was presented by:

Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group

Justin Huskamp, Product Marketing Manager, Coremetrics, an IBM company

The webinar begins with Justin discussing their Coremetrics Social analytics tool:

Social media marketing spend is the fastest growing investment, and will pass email marketing in 2013.

Facebook and Twitter command huge and growing audiences, and are a proven way for brands to reach their customers.

40% of Facebook users “like” companies

51% of twitter users follow companies, brands and products

Social likes and tweets are really just another form of a review.

Do social channels provide any incremental value?

• Social sites are second only to display for generating new visitors.
• Facebook engenders more session loyalty than email, twitter or referring sites.
• Facebook referrals are more efficient at conversions

Why build a social following?

People spend 90% of their Facebook time in their news feed. You NEED to be in the feed. Engagement makes the message viral. Once engaged, that customer is now an evangelist to an average of 137 like-minded friends. So, create a fun and engaging social content and contests. Don’t just throw offers at them.

Tracking Earned Media:

What’s Hot? Tools are needed to show where to focus on good content and good audiences. What’s converting? Once you track it, you need to appropriately attribute earned media alongside all channels. So, track the social channel, then compare it to other channels.

Susan is up now with her portion of the presentation:

Challenges of Social Data Measurement

1. Multiple, shifting sources (which leads to)
2. Inconsistent dataset
3. New behaviors = new data types (what does it mean when someone likes…)
4. Inconsistent quality
5. No measurement standards (biggest issue)
6. Privacy considerations

Social Measurement Sand Traps (3 Challenges)

Data Challenges

1. Engagement – no agreement on what it means. Decide what it means for you and be transparent with your organization on that.
2. Reach – Partial datasets, inconsistent measures
3. Sentiment – Alogrithmic sentiment ~ 75% accurate at best
4. Influence – Not all influence is created equal. Someone may have be an influencer to you for web tools, but not for cars or makeup.

Tool Challenges

Have to include new tools that specialize in social space, and old tools that specialize in enterprise crm, analytics, market research, so need tools that are a blend of both.

Organizational Challenges

Each corporate department looking at data in very different ways.

All this adds up to…
data challenges + tool challenges + organizational challenges =
Frankenmetrics

Before you do anything else, have a goal for measurement!

Use approriate metrics at each level:

• Social strategist: engagement metrics: fans, followers, clicks
• Line Of Business/Geo Stakeholders: social media analytics, insights, share of voice, word-of-mouth, resonance
• Corporate Level – Business metrics: revenue, reputation

The Elephant in the Room: ROI of social media (which may be the wrong question)

ROI = [Gain from investment - cost of investment] / Cost of investment

A better question might be: What is the BUSINESS VALUE of social media?

Case Study: Let’s imagine a Comcast customer tweets a complaint about not getting a particular TV channel in his area.

Think KPI, not [just] ROI when looking at this tweet.

How do each of the departments look at this tweet?

• Brand Marketing – Brand impact? Do we deal with it, ignore it, or what?
• Product Marketing – Isolated incident or trend? Should we offer it?
• Competitive Intel – Vulnerability or opportunity to outshine competition?
• Operations – How much did it cost to resolve?
• Customer Service – Did we make the customer happy?

Six Use Cases for Social Media Value

1. Brand Health – Understand how people talk about your brand on social web.
2. Marketing Optimization – Decision support for social marketing investment
3. Revenue Generation – Generating leads, conversions, and revenue via social media
4. Operational Productivity – Reducing operational costs via social media (saving money in call centers, for example)
5. Customer Experience – Helping customers and improving their experience with your company and across channels
6. Product Innovation – Consumer-led ideation

Social Insights and KPIs

1. Brand Health

Insights:

• What topics spark conversation?
• What topics spark emotion?
• Sentiment by social media channel
• Stated intent to purchase
• Whether brand gets credit for promotions

KPIs:

• Volume of social media mentions
• Sentiment
• Share of voice vs. competitors
• Number of fans/followers
• Highest-performing topics
• Number of brand mentions per campaign

2. Marketing Optimization

Insights:

• Which channels generate highest visit loyalty
• Which platforms generate highest logyalty/conversion/revenue
• Where conversations about your brand occur online
• Likeliness to buy based on specified behaviors
• If social channels cannibalize other online channels
• Most effective times to post social content/engage
• Where to find brand advocates

KPIs:

• Conversions/sales by channel
• Impressions by channel
• View-through/click-through by channel
• Visitor loyalty
• Advertising equivalent of earned social media
• Most followed account/people who talk about your brand

3. Revenue Generation

Insights:

• Effectiveness of social channels for conversion and revenue generation
• Likeliness to buy
• Impact of social media on search results
• Whether social channels are cannibalizing other channels

KPIs:

• Conversions by channel
• Sales by channel
• Visit loyalty
• Improved search engine placement

4. Operations Productivity

Insights:

• Potential cost savings from deflected calls
• Most active adovocates
• Which services issues best answered online
• Knowledge base gaps

KPIs:

• Number of calls deflected
• Call deflection savings
• Number of advocates
• Value of advocates
• Reduction/deferred hiring of FTE

5. Customer Experience

Insights:

• Most common service and product issues
• Triangulation of above with service channels
• Acceleration of issues
• Sentiment and emotion drivers

KPIs:

• Number of customer service issues addressed via social channels
• Percentage escalated and resolved
• Percentage of positive ratings and reviews
• Sentiment ratios

6. Innovation

Insights:

• Most common service and product issues
• Customer requests
• Competitive opportunities and threats

KPIs:

• Speed to market
• Product development efficiency

The Future of social Analytics:

1. Enterprise-class capabilities such as data quality, integration, governance and scalability will be checkbox items
2. A basic ability to understand social data will be come a critical skillset
3. Machine learning will continue to improve, but probably not as fast as everyone wants it to.
4. In the next 1-2 years, we’ll see social benchmarks
5. Ultimately, the terms “social media”, “social business” and “social analytics” will go away.

Recommendations

Focus on which is incidental and which is vital.

1. Have an objective
2. Know your data
3. Think globally, not locally (across the company departments)
4. Think directionally (look at data patterns over time)
5. Don’t underestimate the soft stuff (processes and people)

That concluded the webinar. I found some useful nuggets of information in this presentation.

Original at Effectively Measuring Social Media – Liveblogged BlitzLocal