First a Little About the “Ethics” of Ghost Tweeting….

While at Search Engine Strategies Chicago I was interviewed by Web Pro News about the panel that I spoke on about Social Media and the ethics of “ghost tweeting”.  A lot of people had a lot to say about Guy Kawasaki and his use of Twitter back in March when he was the keynote speaker at SES NYC, most of it was not good in the eyes of the search marketing experts speaking about his keynote.  Granted, some of his tactics could definitely be classified as spammy, but at the end of the day, Guy Kawasaki is a marketer.

That being said, was his “Ghost Tweeting” ethical?  I’m more of the opinion it’s not a question of ethics, its more of a question of disclosure and expectations.  Knowing how busy Guy Kawasaki really is, most people likely wouldn’t have expected him to not be running his Twitter account by himself.  He’s got staff, he’s got help.  The problem with the situation was that he wasn’t disclosing it until Dave Fleet called him out on that fact.  Was his audience in an uproar about it?  Yes, some were, some stopped following, but since the disclosure, he’s gained more followers.

At the end of the day, its about the relationship you want to make with your audience.  Are you forming personal relationships with your audience, do they expect that from you?  Or are you just disseminating information like Guy does with his account?  There’s no real interaction going on, so the expectations are much lower. So what’s ethical, what’s not?  You’re audience is actually the one that will decide.  If you are trying to “trick” them by employing other people to tweet for you in a personal way, it will show through eventually.

And Then About Measuring Your Social Media….

Abby then went on to ask me about Measuring Your Social Media Strategy because Serengeti Communications put on a session about doing just that at SES Chicago.  Measuring has to be a key fundamental part of any Social Media Strategy you implement.  Without measuring how do you know what’s successful and what isn’t working?  What are you wasting your time on or what should you dedicate more resources too?  Along with that is your agency – SEO, PPC, PR or Advertising – selling you a laundry list of social media tactics because they know how to set up those types of things or is it because there’s been significant research done and you are going to be actively engaging with people in those social media channels?

It’s certainly not easy, and there’s no cookie cutter approach!

What is success?  What is failure?

When it comes to social media marketing, unless you have a plan to measure what your are doing how will you know?  There’s a lot to be said about planning your social media strategy, knowing where your audience is, understanding how they talk about you, getting something to go “viral”, accepting the negative with the positive, throwing up social media tactics like darts to a bulls-eye.  It’s subjects we’ve talked about here on Social Conversations, but unless you have a plan to measure what you are doing, you’ll never know if what you are doing is worth the investment you are putting into it.

While there’s a lot of numbers counting, and those numbers can be very subjective, you still need to have a social media measurement plan.  For example, counting the number of Twitter followers you have, isn’t really a great measure if you want to measure the quality of your reach. However if you are just starting up a Twitter account, monitoring and counting how many followers you are attaining on a daily or weekly basis can be decent way of gauging how you are progressing in the beginning.  Once you reach a certain threshold, counting the number of followers can be and overwhelming task to keep up with and weed out the spammers.  It’s the same for counting the number of fans you have, or friends on other social networking sites.  It can be a good “check” but it can’t be the be all end all to your measurement plan.

A social media marketing measurement plan needs to include a lot of checks and balances.  For example, how do you know if the content you are creating is really valuable to your audience?  Do you count the number of retweets you get?  Or is it the number of retweets from those “quality” followers that you’ve predefined on a list.  Maybe it’s the number of times your content has been embedded?  Perhaps the amount of traffic that is being driven to your page, or maybe even adding in how much time on site do the visitors coming into the content are averaging.

Then there’s the whole integration with “offline”, if you have those types of measurement.  Even if you are an online business, you likely still need to track something offline.  How are people hearing about you?  Did someone tell them to come to your Facebook page while they talked on a flight to San Diego?  Maybe they sat next to someone at a Coyotes hockey game and it was suggested they check out your video.  How do you account for and measure those aspects of your social media marketing efforts?

When it comes down to it, if you can’t measure it, you need to ask yourself if you should be really implementing that particular social media tactic?

Putting together a social media measurement plan should be an integral part of your social media strategy.  It makes sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what and how things are going to be measured.  It also gives your team the ammunition they need to prove or disprove that something is working to help or harm your brand or company.  How you are measuring is just as important as what you are measuring as well.  This is why it’s important that everyone from the C-Suite executives to your data analytics teams understand what the end goals are and what & how you are measuring to see if your efforts are helping you meet those goals.

At the end of the day do you want to really be answering the question from your CMO “Well why are we still doing this?” with “Well because Oprah’s on Twitter now!” ?

Child With Measuring Book Photo Credit:  Flickr User Goldberg

Archeology Team Measuring Photo Credit:  Flickr User Wessex Archeology

Who doesn’t love “free”?

Social media is free, isn’t it? Well in the very basic sense, yes social media is free.  Participating in social media if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

• Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere
  Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?
• Invest in Finding Your Audience
  Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?
• Invest in the Approach
  How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”
• Goals & Measurement Need Investment
  Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?
• Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right
  You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

Rupert Murdoch the CEO of News Corporation is really creating a bit of buzz in the Search Engine world.  Why?  Well it seems that Murdoch believes that his collection of news sites which include U.S.  media outlets such as FoxNews.com, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and international news outlets such as the Daily Telegraph in Australia, The Sun and The Times in the UK as well as channels such as National Geographic, would not suffer greatly if he blocked Google from accessing them and allowing Google to have them in their index and offering them up as relevant search results for searches done on the site.

So is he crazy?  Does he really realize the effect that taking such a drastic measure will have on his search traffic?  I would suppose they have some inkling since Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer was quoted by the Telegraph.co.uk as saying

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

I cannot claim to be an expert of News Corp’s properties or their properties’ demographics, but most people consume their news these days via hearing about it on a site, primarily social media sites, and then going to a search engine to find out more.  It’s happening more and more these days – look at how much Twitter and its trending topics affect how people search.

When people see things trending on Twitter, say for example like Kayne or Taylor Swift when Kayne so rudely interrupted Taylor’s acceptance speech for an award.  On Twitter you saw that both Kayne and Taylor Swift were trending terms shortly after the incident happend.  Without going to a search engine to figure out why they were trending, you’d have to guess through the tweets that were happening.  By going to the Google, at that time, searching for either one of their names produced a news one box with links to news articles that contained a lot more relevant information.

While Miller says the traffic received from Google is the least valuable, I wonder where they are looking to get more valuable traffic?  Other than relying on their return visitors through bookmarks or direct type ins, there’s not much more valuable traffic.

Social Media although it looks like it could be the answer to all their prayers, if you take a look closer, it’s likely even less valuable than Google’s traffic.  News media sites primarily focus on social news sites like Digg, Fark, Reddit or Ballhype.  If they are expecting better traffic they should really look at how members of these communities function.  Community members in these sites click on the story to see if they want to vote for it and immediately leave to go vote on more stories back on the social news sites.  This type of “hit and run” traffic is a lot less valuable if you are trying to get the visitor to stay on the site longer or view other  pages.

At least with search traffic coming from Google visitors stay on the site longer, especially if there’s photos or videos to interact with on the content, because they want to become educated on the topic they searched for.

All of this hull-a-baloo that Murdoch is making sounds more like someone who’s just pissed off with the popular kid they were playing with and wants to take his toys home so no one else can play unless they come with him and that hopes the rest of his “gang” will follow him back to his house.

If other news sites actually start analyzing their web analytics for their sites and really break down the search traffic, I have a feeling they are going to continue to “play” with Google because they will find the traffic from Google is actually quite valuable.  They also might find that while Social Media News Sites will drive traffic, if they segment that out and analyze that as well, they can see a difference in the quality via time on site and pages viewed.

So what say you?  Is Murdoch crazy for pulling his sites from Google or is he’s one of the smartest guys to try and start a “Google Revolt”?

While attending the eMetrics conference in the Washtington, DC area, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik announced a whole slew of new features being applied to Google Analytics.  From my take on it from a social media perspective, this can help companies start to track some of their measurements they were doing manually for measurement in social media.

So what all did Avinash announce?

• Experimental API for Google Website Optimizer
• Unlimited unique user analysis (which also shows as trending)
  • Avinash emphasized it’s “True” unique user data
  • You also can do this by picking unique time frames, you don’t have to “add” all your data together like with other analytics packages
• Advanced Table Filtering – Avinash calls this “In Line Analysis
  • You can choose your segmentation values
• 2 New Behavior Types of Goal Tracking
  • Number of Pages View
  • Time
• Custom Variables
  • Setting up variables such as
    • Comments left on blog
    • Traffic coming in from specific types of sites (such as blogs)
  • You can track things at a visitor, session, page  (visit) level
• Free Mobile Application (Apps) Tracking
• Custom Alerts
  • You want to know about those people coming from blogs – you can be alerted now!
• Intelligence  – New Dashboard Additions
  • Automatic Alerts – these will appear automatically now when you log into GA and see your dashboard.  GA’s algorithm will look for anomalies in your data and alert you to them automatically

Avinash also went on to say that this new intelligence which is giving you a peek into the “unknowns” is only phase one of what Google’s planning to roll out.

So how does this help your social media strategy and measurement?  Well for starters as Avinash pointed out, you can now track comments in Google Analytics by setting up custom variables.  This is something currently you have to manually put into a spreadsheet to keep track of, now it can be easily integrated into your Google Analytics tracking.

The same could be said for monitoring how much traffic you are getting from blogs, or specific types of sites.  The custom alerts allow you to be notified and this could even help you discover unknown sites that are helping to disseminate your content.  There’s a lot between the custom alerts and custom variables that you can put into place to help you measure some of the things you are doing manually now, all within Google Analytics.

Then there’s the mobile app tracking.  To me, this is huge!  Before you’d have to guess someone was using a mobile app by the browser they come in on “iPhone” or “blackberry” being listed.  With this new announcement from Google Analytics, this can  help any company wanting to know how mobile applications are affecting the traffic to their sites.

If you’d like to read more about the specifics of each of these announcements, the Google Analytics blog has detailed information about how each of these new features work.  I highly suggest taking the time to read up on them and implement them into your own measurement strategy for social media.

While this isn’t the be-all end-all way of measuring for social media, these new features that Google is adding to Google Analytics can help take some of that manual counting and heavy lifting off of your plate, if implemented in the correct fashion.  One of the nice things about these new features is that as Avinash put it, you don’t need a “God” to code this stuff for you to have it work, its very easy to implement.

On an off note, wishing a speedy recovery to Avinash!  Hope that arm heals up fast!

Yesterday we launched the first tweet chat aimed at discussion and conversation about social media metrics, both measuring and monitoring.  The focus of the conversation was around “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Your Social Media Efforts”.

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what to mesaure and how to measure it.  People are finding that a mix of free tools, paid tools, home grown tools and spreadsheets can all work together to accomplish their tasks.

We’ve taken the transcript of the #SMMetrics Tweetchat from yesterday and made it into a PDF that you can download and print, or just view.

• #SMMetrics Tweet Chat Transcript 09/09/09

Next week @nathan_linnell (Nathan Linnell) will be heading up the TweetChat and topic will be “What Metrics Are You Using to Track/Monitor Your Social Media Efforts“. To follow or join in the conversations around social media metrics just follow the hashtag #smmetric and include it in your tweets so we’ll see your questions and contributions.

#SMMetrics Tweet Chat is Every Wednesday at 1 p.m. EST.

Nate Linnell (@nathan_linnell) and I (@storyspinner) noticed that there wasn’t a lot of discussion going on about metrics, monitoring and measuring in social media, so we decided to lead up that charge! Starting on Wednesday September 9th at 1 PM Easter time, we’ll engage the Twitter community in a talk about Social Media Metrics. You can follow the hashtag #smmetrics to join in the conversation. Our first week’s topic for #smmetrics chat will be focused on: “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Social Media“. So come on in and join the conversation!

Serengeti Communications Interview at Search Engines Strategies

While in San Jose, CA for Search Engine Strategies in August, I was interviewed by the Search Engine Strategies team about building relationships in social media communities.  It is a bit longer of an interview, but I discuss a few points that we really didn’t get into on the panel that discussed managing social conversations.  John asked some great questions which the audience didn’t and in social media, really needs to be addressed.

We discuss tying social media to your bottom line, and what that bottom line really means.  Unfortunately some companies are deeming that social media doesn’t work because it isn’t selling more of their products.  Click to purchase rarely happens in social media, instead companies must look at other measurement methods to understand exactly how successful or unsuccessful their efforts are.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of presenting on three panels and at the last minute, the honor of getting to introduce Thursday’s keynote speaker, Charlene Li.  As an avid fan of the book Groundswell which Charlene co-authored this was a real honor to do no matter how last minute it was.

Charlene had a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in her presentation which focused on the How to Prepare for the Future of Search and how social media is affecting it each and every day.  The biggest piece of advice was probably the hardest for any SEO or PPC professional to comprehend; Focus on the Relationship with People, Not the Keywords People Use.

Conversations in Social Media

That was the point of my presentation at Search Engine Strategies as well.  The session “Managing Social Conversations” included myself, Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo, Mike Volpe of Hubspot and Brian Kalma from Zappos.  The whole panel had that focus too, in social media its about the relationships and conversations you are having with your audience that ultimately win the day, not the keywords that drive those conversations.

There were two primary focuses to my presentation, the first was that social media needs a strategy.  That requires a bit of work to create something successful.  Research, defining and measuring all go into strategy – it’s not just tactics like putting up a Facebook page, or starting a Twitter account.  If you don’t have a sound strategy behind doing those tactics, your efforts will most likely fail.

The second focus on my presentation was on measuring and monitoring.  Without measuring and monitoring how does a company know that what they are implementing with their social media strategy is really working?  Unfortunately most companies have been conditioned to relate success to a “click to purchase” ratio.  In social media this type of action rarely happens.  So what’s a company to do?

In Social Media – Measure Something Different!

So what do you measure?  How about interaction, involvement, influence and intimacy?  These are all factors that can be measured and proven to affect the bottom line of a company.  These can be measured and monitored through buzz monitoring tools and web analytics, its just a matter of understanding the data and turning it into actionable data. This is what our new social media white paper: “Social Media Impact: Unicorn or Elephant” is all about, so sign up for it if you are interested in learning more about doing Social Media the right way.

You can take a look at our Social Conversations presentations including the ones from SES SanJose and connect with us on Slide Share.