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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Real-Time Analytics Solutions

Published December 18th, 2009 Analytics, Email Marketing, Social Media No Comments

Real-time web analytics reporting is more critical than ever for many organizations. It’s not realistic to wait 4 hours, or even 1 hour, to see how visitors are consuming fresh content, navigating new product sections, or generally browsing, on many sites. With the recent changes to Google’s search results, integrating real-time social media content, the transition from launch (or post, or release, or whatever) to tracking and refining, has been shortened even more. But even before the social media revolution, marketers have wanted to get real-time data when an email campaign is sent, a microsite is launched, their product is featured on Oprah, etc.

So how do you monitor your website in real-time? Omniture will provide you with some real-time data, likewise with WebTrends, but it isn’t complete. Google Analytics provides you with none (though I see this changing in 2010). So you need to employ a different analytics solution for this need. For enterprises, this might not be for your entire corporate site but maybe just your blogs. For smaller organizations, this may be something you want on your whole site. Regardless, here is a quick breakdown of three popular real-time web analytics offerings, and what I like about each of them.

Clicky

I’ve written about Clicky before as a low-cost analytics solution, and it is pretty cheap. You can get a base level package for just $9.99. We use Clicky on this site and we love it for its ability to breakdown the pathing that specific visitors took through our site. This can be done in real-time or historically. I literally can look at the Visitor report, see what organizations are on my site, and then see what paths they’ve taken, and what source brought them to the site. So, if your reading this shortly after I’ve posted it, I’m probably looking at your network (your ISP or organization name) of the corner of my eye on my extra monitor. If your with a Fortune 500 company, chances are I’m watching the path your taking through my site. Can you see the sales benefits we get from Clicky now? Deployment of Clicky is straightforward and it has some cool “event tracking” type capabilities that can be leveraged.

chartbeat

Admittedly, I’ve only been using chartbeat for about a week, but I really like it. The interface is a simple yet effective dashboard. Instead of looking at standard analytics metrics and reporting in real-time; it defines its own reports and metrics, ones that are more relevant to real-time needs. For example, page density and whether visitors are idle, reading, or writing (dependent on your CMS). It also integrates Twitter conversations and incoming links into the dashboard. Chartbeat also runs about $10 a month (for up to 5 sites) and has a 30 day trial for you to check the product out.

Woopra

I was a big fan of Woopra at first, but I don’t really use it as much as I used to. My biggest problem with the product was that it isn’t web-based, but required an installed application. That aside, it also has a great dashboard, and more comprehensive reporting. It also features the ability to chat with any visitor currently on your site. I haven’t employed that in a real business situation yet, but I have played around with it a bit. Most folks tend to think that Woopra is great for monitoring, and covers the same bases that chartbeat does, so if you’re looking for that type of solution it is worth checking out. Woopra has pricing plans from $5 a month up to $180, based on number of pageviews, so it seems more focused on pursuing larger customers. So if you’re enterprise level, it definitely is worth checking out.

Managing Social Media Backlash

Published September 23rd, 2009 Paid Search, Social Media No Comments

A few weeks ago, John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s health care reform initiatives. The comments made by the chief executive have been stirring controversy on the web and social media, spreading a Whole Foods boycott off and online through protests, a website, blog, Flickr page, Facebook page and group with over 30,000 fans, and a Twitter account with close to 630 followers.

There is an old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, though ignoring Internet press, good or bad, can hurt a company and their online reputation. Here are a few ways you can respond and manage a spiraling viral incident in a strategic manor.

Corporate Social Media Guidelines

First and foremost, make sure you company has corporate social media guidelines in place. Policies regarding social media are becoming a standard for today’s organizations and by outlining rules or best practices within your company, you can express the importance of your brand.

React, Don’t Retract

Be aware of the comments and confront them with positive feedback. Use the credibility and knowledge of your brand to interact with these users, answer questions, offer insight on marketing decisions and clear up any rumors or misconceptions.

Mackey posted a blog thread to set the record straight on his comments and also invited consumers to participate and share their thoughts through a forum devoted to that topic. Social networks may not capture your complete key demographic, but as seen by this Whole Foods incident, the Honda Accord Facebook fiasco, and last year’s Motrin Mom advertisement, consumers can have a strong and effective voice. If your marketing resources allow it, consider involving your audience on marketing decisions in the future.

Utilize Another Online Medium

When news spreads like wildfire people are searching online for what is being said. Use this targeted traffic to your advantage and customize a pay per click campaign. Using paid and organic search strategies together will result in a higher brand awareness as well as greater authority and sincerity from consumers. Since paid search advertisements are displayed along with search results, run a campaign with keywords based around your brand’s press-worthy events. This brings searchers into your domain, where you can develop a controlled and customized landing page to promote your company on your turf.

Consider a Niche Network in your Social Media Marketing

Published August 20th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

I often find myself twittering, writing or discussing one constant topic: food. I follow @PDXfoodcarts on twitter, am a fan of bacon on Facebook and my latest tweet was about a new recipe I tried this week. I am not a gourmet cook or would even call myself a foodie, but with the vast amount of online resources devoted to this topic, I have a smorgasbord of social activity to make me feel like a world-class chef.

Niche social media networks seem to be popping up everywhere, and with the rate of social media users in general, it is not a surprise. With online platforms like Ning, anyone can create or join an online community, though as a user or a company, how do you know when you should participate in or start a personalized network around your potential clients?

Niche communities allow visitors of the same industry, demographic, area or hobby to interact in an environment based only around those specifics. Of course these users are probably already on Facebook or have their own blog, though instead of sorting through the groups, finding similar followers or Digging a link or post within a pile of pages, users with the same interests are located and communicating in a single, focused place. Due to this undivided attention visitors are more loyal, concentrated, and more likely to convert into a subscriber of your website or better yet, a customer.

While an industry specific site may seem like the golden ticket to an advertiser or marketer, it is important to focus on the niche social sites that are right for you, your business and where your potential customers will be visiting. Here are a few hints to help you venture into a niche network.

Do your research.

There are hundreds of niche sites out there as well as platforms to make your own. Review the ones available as well as where your competitors are socializing. Develop a strategy to help you get started with social media marketing.

Quality is better than quantity.

Be cautious about marketing on networks that are outside your industry or you will lose your trust with users and eventually be considered as spam. If you knit, trade pattern ideas at Ravelry rather than Footbo, a social network all about soccer.

Know your audience, know your content and interact with users.

What can you offer that can’t be found on other sites? If you are promoting a new snack or food, post recipes using your product on Food based sites like Allrecipes.

Try it out!

Choose a site, which is relevant to your interest or business objectives. Register as a member; tour the site and its features. Watch interactions, content and existing users. Submit posts, search for friends and you are on your way!

Popular Corporate Social Media Guidelines & Policies

Published August 11th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

Social media guidelines are becoming a standard for today’s organizations and a way to explicitly set the rules of engagement while trying to mitigate corporate risk. Effective policies outline best practices of engagement and importance of brand rather than restrictions on access or conversation.

However, rather than put social media guidelines in place, some organizations have attempted to attain more control over the conversation by limiting access and pushing mute – most notably, ESPN and the NFL. So why such the Web 2.0 hate from organizations? Most organizations are wrestling with social media because they fear the disclosure of proprietary or sensitive information and their employees are the organizations, thus their comments represent the organization as a whole.

Organizations that “get it” are able to empower their employees to be representatives of the brand and furthermore, foster relationships with customers and diffuse potentially disastrous issues before they explode. Here is a list of savvy organizations that have developed social media policies:

Intel - http://www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/en_US/social-media.htm

IBM - http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Opera - http://my.opera.com/community/blogs/corp-policy/

Cisco - http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/ciscos_internet_postings_policy/

GM - http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/about.html

BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/blogging.shtml

Sun - http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp

Dell - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=corp&~section=019

United States Airforce – http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090406-036.pdf

Hewlett Packard – http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/blogs/codeofconduct.html

So what are SwellPath’s social media guidelines you may be asking? Simple – Tweet long and prosper.*

*But don’t tweet on the weekends, but do tweet about how great we are, but don’t tweet about our secret sauce, but do tweet about how good the secret sauce is, but don’t tweet about Adam’s mom, but do tweet about corporate tweeting…”

My point is, you don’t nor will you ever own the conversation. Corporate social media guidelines can be useful for employees unfamiliar with this medium and possibly unclear about the importance of brand. Rather than focus on the control over a medium where you have no control, focus instead on your culture, product offering, customer service, ect. – things your organization can control.

Alternative Value in Paid Search Traffic

Published August 5th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When analyzing paid search traffic the central focus is obviously on conversions, the sale, lead gen form completion, or whatever the primary conversion event is. But this shouldn’t be the only focus, and you shouldn’t calculate the value of your paid search activity entirely by conversion rate or ROI. Here’s some other ways you may find value in paid search, and some ideas for calculating that value.

Usability & Conversion Improvement

What does paid search traffic have to do with usability? Look at it like this: paid search traffic is a random sampling of visitors that have strong purchase intent, or strong intent to learn about your offering. Those that don’t convert, as a group, provide insight into what is “not working” with your site. You should be able to ask and answer questions like these:

Are these visitors bouncing at high rates? If so, you need to start testing out some different landing pages, or take a good look at your offering.
If they aren’t bouncing, are you tracking specific events on your landing pages? Implement event tracking on any key potential actions on your page and see if visitors are engaging at all.
Beyond the landing page, are they navigating to other pages or areas of your site? Why are they not finding what they came for on the landing page? What are the common paths their taking, and where are they exiting?
Are they using your site search field, and if so, what keywords they searching for? Are they getting results? How do these terms and results relate to the original paid search keyword and landing page offering?

Answering these questions will initiate a process focused improving conversion. Use unconverted paid search visitors as a “focus group”, and look into your analytics data for their “responses” and “feedback”. You’ve paid for them to visit your site, get value out of their behavior and actions.

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Let’s suppose I’m shopping for vitamins. I’ve decided I need to start taking ginko biloba supplements again to combat the lack of sleep that seems to come with running an interactive marketing agency. Disclaimer: I have no idea if ginko would help with this, or of the actual health benefits of this product, it is just a good example. So, I normally buy my vitamins and supplements at VitaminShoppe.com or Trader Joe’s or some other grocery store. But I decide to price it out and buy it on the internet, so I search for “ginko biloba” on Google. I see a paid search ad for Vitamin World and I click through. After researching their products a bit, I decide I’m a little skittish about buying this new addition to my diet on the internet, so I’m just going to buy it at Trader Joe’s the next time I’m there. Failed PPC conversion for Vitamin World right? Maybe not, before I exit, I notice the two links highlighted in the image to the left: Email Specials and Request a FREE Catalog.

You know how the story ends: I sign up for a catalog, end up visiting a Vitamin World store in my local mall the next time I’m there, and become a lifetime customer worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the company. So, that’s best case scenario. But the gist of it is, Vitamin World is making an effort to keep the “conversation” going with me. While I’m not a big fan of the Email Specials link, I love the big call to action on the catalog request link. Beyond catalogs and email, you might also track if visitors are clicking through to your social media profiles. Track these actions specifically for y0ur paid search visitors and develop a value for them. This may be a more complicated equation if you have advanced analytics and direct marketing programs in place, where you can track multiple touch-points and segment customer types based on product categories; or something as simple as calculating the estimated value of an email recipient, then applying that to number of signup conversions you have in your PPC account. Now, obviously you can track these as conversions in your PPC account, but that can muddy up your PPC data. Using analytics to track the goal, and segmenting your PPC traffic out for analysis is usually a better option.

Keyword Testing & Strategy

I’ll tiptoe around this, because I’m definitely not the SEO specialist (or PPC for that matter) around here but the gist of thsi is that you can use your PPC account to test and refine your SEO strategy. If certain PPC keywords are limited in their conversions, but result in high-levels of engagement or some other key performance metric, you may decide to integrate them into your SEO strategy and target some pages for them. This is somewhat of an extension of the usability and conversion improvement section, but with an obvious focus on SEO and the value of certain keywords.

In conclusion, don’t write off your failed PPC conversions. You paid for those clicks – get some value out of them any way you can. This might mean putting in some sweat in the form of analysis, testing, or development, but those costs will likely be recouped over time, because you will never convert 100% of your search traffic.

Specialized Digital Analytics Tools

Published June 14th, 2009 Analytics, Social Media No Comments

Web analytics is no longer as cut-and-dry as having a solution installed that can measure all of your digital marketing , or give you a complete view of your customers interaction with your brand online. Sure, you have your Google Analytics, Omniture, or whatever covering you for most of your site traffic. But what about what’s happening beyond your site, or what about your need to analyze visitors in “different ways”? here’s a brief rundown on three specialized applications that aren’t terribly expensive, and can give you some great additional insight into your digital marketing efforts.

Percent Mobile

The technology behind Percent Mobile is nothing special, and the reporting interface is a bunch of fancy Flex or Ajax or anything like that. But, the concept, the simplicity of the reporting interface, and the organization of the necessary metrics, makes Percent Mobile an awesome application. Here’s how it works in a nutshell: you tag your pages with a standard JavaScript tag, and Percent Mobile gathers, analyzes and reports on all the traffic from mobile phones to your site. Simple. There are some really obvious uses for Percent Mobile, one of them just being the ability to give stakeholders a quick look at the profile of mobile visitors to your site.

Kontangent

Kontangent is analytics for your Facebook applications. If you’re building a Facebook app, or you have one already, you should be seriously looking at Kontangent. The Kontangent founders were building applications themselves, and realized the robust analytics reporting they’d developed was probably more valuable then their apps. They worked closely with Facebook to get even more data from the platform, and eventually became a fbFund recipient. Kontangent lets you track metrics you’d want to have for your applications, but integrates it with available demographic data from users. You can filter on this data in the reporting interface, and get a really clear picture of who is using your apps.
Kontangent’s close relationship with Facebook makes them a solid front-runner to dominate this space, so any concerns about the application not getting the attention it deserves, are probably unwarranted. Definitely check it out if you are building Facebook apps.

userfly

If you have never used an application that captures your visitors use of your site as a “video”, you have to try userfly. The downside is that it can slow your site down a bit, as it is essentially videoing your visitors mouse movement and clicks. If you have a high-traffic site, you have to run something like userfly on a small sampling of visitors. The upside of running userfly, is that being able to see sessions in “replay” is way more enlightening than trying to mentally visualize sessions by looking at analytics data. Fancy analytics talk aside, userfly is highly addictive. If you geek out on your analytics reporting for your own sites, you will definitely geek out on userfly. Did I mention it is really cheap? For only $25 you can capture 1,000 visits per month.

I hope you can find some use out of one of these applications. There are dozens of more specialized applications out there that fit unique analytics needs; look beyond your analytics install for other ways to analyze your traffic, profile your visitors, or capture interactions happening beyond your domain.

Successful Facebook Applications: The Key Integration Points

Published May 20th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

With over 50,000 Facebook applications currently in existence and more being developed daily, it’s becoming more difficult for your app to stand out in the crowd. The functionality of an app largely determines it’s success, yet the integrations points help ensure it’s visibility and viral nature.

The Facebook Application Platform includes integration points into Facebook Profiles, which, when understood and used correctly provide a seamless user experience between a Facebook application and a Facebook user. The more integration points used, the more engaged an application and thus the more the app is immersed and spread on Facebook.

While it’s important to understand all of the integration points for Facebook applications, content and action integration points are generally the most important as they help lead to widespread adoption.

Application Content & Actions

Feeds

The once controversial feeds have become a beloved and integral feature on Facebook. Feeds are arguably the most important integration point on Facebook as they allow applications to increase distribution through friend circles.

An application’s feed stories are distributed throughout Facebook via:

The user’s profile. The wall, which contains the content users have created and shared with their friends and what friends have shared with the users themselves.

The user’s home page. Similar to the profile page, new feeds syndicate on users’ home pages.

Canvas page. The application feed displays a feed of all the activities of the viewer’s friends on an application’s canvas page.

Apps can publish to either a user’s or a user’s friends’ feed, enabling apps to leverage a user’s influence within their circle. A good feed story should captivate a user’s friends and should be written in the voice of the user, reflecting their current actions.

There are 2 types of feed stories for an application: one line and short sizes. One line feed stories exist as a single line and appear only on the wall on the user’s profile.

Example:

Short feed stories on the other hand are formatted with templates and allow for a small amount of text and media. The media can consist of an image, MP3, video, or a SWF file.

Example:

It’s generally best to use a combination of the 2 feed story types based on the importance of a story.

Notifications

Notifications are items sent by an application to a user’s notifications page in response to some sort of user activity within an application. Due to abuse of this feature, apps can send no more than 40 notifications in a given day. Facebook is hoping this limit encourages more quality notifications and encourage users to send notifications to interested friends. Therefore, it’s important that notifications are relevant and include call to actions.

User Generated Content & Actions

Profile Box

The profile box provides a space for apps to represent itself on a user’s profile – of course this is only if the user’s opts to. Therefore approach the profile box as a way for a user to represent themselves via an app rather than a place for users to digest app content. Profile boxes are most engaging when they showcase recent actions of a user with their friends or an application.

Example:

Publisher

The Publisher feature is way for an application’s users to create content for their feed or their friend’s feeds. The main advantage is that the Publisher enables users to create/upload rich content directly from their profile. The ability to publish content from the homepage versus an application page, removes barriers to use and increases engagement.

Bookmarks

Similar to social bookmarking, Facebook bookmarks are a great way for users to maintain engagement with an application. If a user has bookmarked an application, it will appear in the Applications Menu on the bottom left side of the user’s Facebook profile, which gives the user an easy way to access an application.

Example:

A bookmark URL should be provided so users can easily save the application and have it appear on their menu. Bookmarks can be configured in the Canvas page settings.

Understanding the key integration points will help ensure that your Facebook application isn’t lost amongst the 50,000 other applications all vying for user’s attention. These of course are tactics that need to be tied to a larger application strategy or social media strategy for that matter.

Social Media Measurement & Metrics

Published February 22nd, 2009 Social Media No Comments

The reach of social media continuously grows as more sites incorporate social media characteristics into their content and information architecture, not to mention the ever-growing number of social sites. Consequently, it has never been more important to engage in social media with a strategic, well-planned approach. However, prior to social media engagement, it’s important to understand how to effectively measure your efforts and impact.

Social media metrics can be broken into on-site and off-site metrics. On-site metrics refer to referral traffic and actions on your site while off-site metrics refer to actions on a particular social media site. On-site metrics would include:

Goal/conversion visits
Time on site
Bounce rate
Page per visit

These metrics help qualify a particular site’s users, by developing insight into what can be expected in comparison with the current site traffic. However, the caveat here is that a click-through to your site is required to gather this data and additionally, any social media strategy that only measures referrals needs to be reevaluated.

On-site or traditional online tracking metrics can prove successful for measuring social media efforts, however these metrics alone don’t always provide a clear picture of engagement, interaction and attention. The off-site approach addresses more qualitative metrics than on-site metrics and gives insight into the true value of social media.

It’s difficult to put over-arching metrics on all social media sites since each site is completely unique. Each site should have it’s own defined set of metrics. Some of the most common off-site metrics include:

Number of friends/contacts/fans
Number of members
Wall posts
Comments
Messages
Views

Trending these metrics over time begins to show the impact of your efforts, as seen in the graph below. This approach is still quantitative in nature, yet begins to measure interaction and engagement. The graph below shows an example of a client’s Facebook Page metrics over time.

The off-site metrics are important as they not only help to justify social media efforts but help funnel efforts with the most engaged user base. Additionally, mapping these metrics with on-site metrics builds a more complete picture as to the value of a particular site and it’s users.

Obviously the trends alone are a sign of a valuable interaction with users but the true value of social media can’t be graphed. It’d be much like trying to graph the amount of offline WOM mentions with that of the power of the influencer. Yet the metrics in this scenario suggest a high level of user engagement that should be leveraged to help push WOM. Utilizing both on-site and off-site metrics helps to develop baseline social media measurement, creating a clear picture of value to an organization.

Social media is often viewed as simply another web medium, thus people’s obsession with measuring it against traditional online metrics. While metrics can help show a level of engagement and growth, don’t become obsessed with one or two of these metrics. Social media is powerful when communities are created, content is shared and conversation happens – and that is hard to measure.

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

Published January 12th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

Have you asked yourself if your organization needs a social media marketing strategy or if you need a presence on the various social networks? The answer is yes, but what does that mean, and how to you get started? Are you going to hire an agency to help you (if so, I know of a great one)? Are you going to have someone in your marketing department handle it? Are you going to hire an intern? Exactly what kind of effort is this going to take?

Before you sweat these questions, start really simple. First, find someone in your organization to get the ball rolling. If you’re asking these questions, and reading this post, there is a really good chance that someone should be you. If you’re concerned that your not experienced enough with social media and social networks, don’t worry, this stuff isn’t rocket science. Read up on the subject a bit; you’re interested on some level, so getting into a few articles or blog posts shouldn’t be too tough. Read John’s post on Twitter strategies, find some info on Facebook pages through Google, and spend sometime lurking on these networks and observing participants and other organizations’ efforts. Create personal accounts and spend a week watching how these communities operate, seeing how people communicate, and seeing how other companies distribute information.

Then what? Then decide how you want to first approach this. Do you operate a small boutique and maybe have list of email subscribers? Then maybe you just want to setup a Twitter account, announce it to your subscribers and walk-in customers, and then use it as a way to communicate with them a bit more frequently than your emails. Tweet when you have a new product or line in the boutique, or when an important visitor comes by, or for special offers. Maybe you run a large restaurant. Setup a Facebook page and a Twitter account and let followers and fans know about your daily specials, or maybe make follower-only and fan-only promotions. Maybe you just started a multi-million dollar apparel company and you need to figure out how to align your social media marketing your brand image and your other marketing efforts. If that is the case, then you should signup on Twitter and quickly snag the username that matches your brand name, if it is available, and then you should call SwellPath.

The point of all of this is that it’s time to get involved! If you’ve been in business for awhile, think back to what your organization’s first website looked like. Probably a lot more rudimentary than it does now. But you had to start somewhere, so you had someone put up some pages, and you created something for your customer to see. Of course there is a lot to be said for doing something right from the get-go, and getting solid, professional consultation. If your organization is big enough that you can afford this, and you have a reputation that needs to be carefully handled, than by all means you should pursue a qualified agency like SwellPath to help you carefully develop and execute your strategy. But if you’re a mom-n-pop, or simply a small organization that hasn’t been tremendously dependent on your online efforts in the past, than just jump in and start somewhere. Getting your feet wet will help you figure out what the landscape looks like, and help give you some ideas for how you can have a bigger space in it.

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Clicky

chartbeat

Woopra

Corporate Social Media Guidelines

React, Don’t Retract

Utilize Another Online Medium

Usability & Conversion Improvement

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Keyword Testing & Strategy

Percent Mobile

Kontangent

userfly

Application Content & Actions

Feeds

Notifications

User Generated Content & Actions

Profile Box

Publisher

Bookmarks

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