I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Help Your Online Marketing Strategies

Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing endeavors are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.  However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 (formerly known as Techrigy) can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• They Tell You What
  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• They Tell You When
  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• They Tell You Where
  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• They Tell You Who
  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who, What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

In our next series piece on the Research Pillar of the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, Kevin Olson, Serengeti Communications’ research guru, will be explaining how Human Analysis affects the research process for social media marketing.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

If you’re aiming to tackle social media monitoring, then finding a suitable tool is simple. A stable of popular products such as Alterian SM2, Radian 6, and Sentiment Metrics offer users the ability to conduct complex searches through millions of historical records. The process generally entails inputting a list of important keywords–some of which are bound together by Boolean operators–and examining the output of records in order to answer questions such as, “which web communities are the most popular for a given keyword?”, and “who are the key influencers in these communities?”.

In theory, the social media monitoring tools provide these answers along with a variety of pretty charts and graphs that further illustrate the point. In practice, however, those of us that are tasked with reporting on this output are occasionally encountered by a sea of unintelligible records in which the charts and graphs are at best, misleading, and at worst, completely erroneous. Every client is different, and the variance between each keyword set can make one project a breeze while another project a burden. If you aren’t experienced in finding coherence within a large data set, you’re likely to be left with a disproportionate number of burden projects. But have no fear, adhering to these five key principles can drastically improve your efficiency and help you fully navigate through a sea of records.

1. Start with the most recent data – Your end goal may be to provide six months of historical data about a product, brand, or a specific subject area, but there may not be a need to immediately query all six months at once. If you’re critical, you’re operating under the assumption that the first set of search terms will need to be tweaked several times before returning acceptable results. By starting with the most recent results, your social media monitoring tool spends less time searching and returns fewer total records. This allows you more time to find negative terms, and more time to find recent relevant records that may warrant new keywords. It has the added bonus of ensuring that the top domains returned are likely to still be active and the sentiment will reflect the most current market perceptions.

2. Branded terms may be your bread and butter – When prioritizing which questions you want to answer through social media monitoring, you should consider that the most specific keywords will often return the most relevant results. Branded terms often offer the kind of keyword specificity that can perform the heavy lifting required to filter irrelevant results. For example, imagine how much more targeted and relevant search results for “Sausage McMuffin” would be instead of results for “Sausage Biscuit”. By leveraging specific branded terms, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend manually filtering spam.

3. Be aware of ambiguous terms – Sometimes, branded terms are not the silver bullet for relevancy.  For example, for every specific car brand such as “Volvo”, “Mercedes-Benz”, or “Lamborghini”, there may be a “Dodge”, “Saturn”, or “Smart”. The latter terms also offer little in the way of negatives that could refine these searches; attempting to create a comprehensive list of negatives can potentially open a can of worms that sucks time away from other valuable areas of investigation. Therefore, if you are trying to gauge the relative volumes of conversation about Volvo versus Dodge, you’re better off comparing specific models such as the “Volvo S40” versus the “Dodge Avenger”.

4. Do not always equate high volume with high influence – When reporting on key influencers, it may be tempting to choose the domain in which a keyword appears the most often. Make sure you consider factors such as multi-channel reach, unique monthly visitors, PageRank, and other factors that may enhance the authority of one domain over another.

5. Show no mercy for Twitter – When searching for short-tail keywords, spammy Twitter feeds can often overcrowd the result pool. The solution to reducing the volume of these results can be to use more complex search terms that reduce the likelihood a result will be returned given then 140 character limit. You may miss some important domains, but you can be confident that the ones returned are more likely to be targeted and relevant. A better way to find important twitter feeds may be to find high value domains that also use twitter to release content and engage their audience.

Social media monitoring is a work in progress, but hopefully these five key principles will help you decide on how to proceed. Surely, semantic analytics will advance by both process and technology, but in the meantime, there is a large enough space for ingenuity in social media monitoring to drive a truck through.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

If there is one thing that is certain in this every changing world, it’s just that – change is certain.  As the tides of the internet and the whims of social media community members ebb and flow, so does the popularity, web site traffic, interest and buzz around tools, applications and sites in social media.  Even with all your research, six months down the line, the social media marketing tactic that you identified as part of your strategy could be in serious decline and not performing.  On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined.  The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble?

Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media.  There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly.  This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

The key for these bigger corporations to be able to be flexible is to plan in flexibility if they can and to also educate senior management about the entire social media environment.  If they understand that you are monitoring and measuring closely and need to be able to stop or invest more into something within a short time frame and have the data to back that up, they may be more willing to allow for more flexibility and less rigid processes for your strategy.

Don’t Be Afraid to Stop

When something isn’t working, why would you want to keep doing it?  It’s a lot like beating your head against a brick wall, you’re not going to move the wall, you’re only going to get a bruised forehead & a headache.  If you have the data to tell you that the tactic you are implementing isn’t meeting the success measurements or helping you to attain the goals you set in place, you need to be nimble enough to either change the approach slightly or stop it all together and even replace it with putting more investments and resources into other tactics that are hitting their success metrics.

Continuing to deploy and invest in social media marketing tactics that aren’t working just because they are cool or you like them a lot and feel comfortable in that community, is likely only prolonging the failure and wasting your valuable resources.  You’ll get more out of being nimble and flexible enough to adapt and invest in places that are garnering your more engagement and success than in places that you merely feel comfortable with but aren’t producing for you.  This is why its important to diversify your strategy with a few marketing tactics and not to fall in love with one or two particular sites, tools or tactics.

Be Ready to Invest in What’s Working

Sometimes a particular marketing tactic can work a lot better than what you had even expected.  Those are the nice kind of surprises that marketers like to experience.  If something does take off and works like gangbusters in your strategy are you prepared to invest more time, resources and money to further enhance the success of what’s working so well?  Do you also readjust your goals, the amounts invested and time you are allowing the program to run?

Being able to plan into your strategy the ability to change rather quickly is important for the success of your plan.  It’s especially important to be able to take advantage of things that are working better than expected, or if there’s a new opportunity with a feature or a tool.  Sometimes implementing new tools can make your team even more efficient and free up some time and resources, so can you then dedicate that newly freed up time and resources into current tactics or implement new ones?  These are things that your team should be looking at when you are first planning your strategy.

At the end of the day if you can plan in some “padding” into your strategy that will allow you to be flexible you’ll be better able to adapt to the every changing social media marketing world.  If you educate your C-Suite about the way social media can change but show them you have the data to back up the reason for changes, you’ll end up being more nimble and better able to adapt and find a lot more success in your future.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

Marketing in Social Media is fast becoming an important piece in most companies’ marketing plans for this year and moving forward.  More companies are adding Social Media Marketing as a line item in their budgets this year.  They are either maintaining what they invested in it last year or adding more money to it, which is pretty impressive seeing the state the economy is in and how budgets are being slashed left an right.

What Are Your Company’s Goals for Social Media?

With that increase in money towards Social Media Marketing though must come accountability.  At the end of the day, how what is your Return on Conversation or Investment for entering into the Social Media space?  Do you have goals set in place to help understand whether or not the marketing tactics you’ve researched and laid out very carefully in your strategy are really helping or harming your company?  Without a clear set of goals, how do you know what to even measure and what do the success metrics look like?

A study from Business.com surveyed its audience about their plans for 2010.  In it one of the figures showed that over 25% of the companies who were intended to participate in Social Media Marketing were planning to implement 10 or more marketing tactics in social media.  Wow!  10 or more!  How does any marketing team keep track of all of that, and whether each tactic its successful or not?  It’s a tall order.  Even taller is how do they know how each of these tactics help reach the goal set in place – if there are any?

Goals are Different than Metrics

Measuring, counting, accumulating anything is looking at metrics for a particular tactic you are implementing.   Measuring tactics alone doesn’t really mean you are hitting your goals.  Goals are more encompassing of the bigger picture of where a company wants to be.  It isn’t to gain 100 more fans on a Facebook page – that’s measuring a tactic.  A goal is something like “Increase Customer Retention by 10%” and figuring out what metrics you measure in your social media tactics that can help prove social media helped to meet or contribute to meeting that.

Counting tweets, retweets, fans, friends, website traffic, referrals, and everything else is all about the metrics.  Individually they can mean absolutely nothing.  For your goals to be successful you need to look as how all of these metrics work together.  Which are the strong pieces and which are the weak.  You do need to measure, and look at these individually  – how else will you know if the particular tactic is helping you?  But when you look at your goals, it has to be from a higher view, and remember that’s what the C-Suite and Senior level management is looking at too.

When you are putting together your strategy, make sure you lay out your goals first – then figure out what metrics help you understand how what marketing tactics you are implementing are helping you reach those goals.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

According to the Business.com Social Media Benchmarking Study in businesses who are implementing social media marketing strategies, in over 66% of these businesses it the marketing department driving the initiatives.  Most likely there’s been some word handed down from on high to the marketing department saying “we need this social media stuff” or “we need to be talking about ourselves out in social media, now!“  If it were only that simple right?

Of course companies want to talk about themselves, their brands, their services.  They want to push their very carefully crafted messages out to the social media communities because they think that’s what’s going to win them kudos in these communities that are talking about them that they’ve found through buzz monitoring tools.  Here’s the thing that marketers most of the time completely miss the mark on:

It’s Not About You.

Really, honestly, I’m not lying here – it’s not about you, your brand, your company’s product or services.  It’s about them.  It’s about the community member’s experience.  It’s about what the community member is sharing.  At the time they could be experiencing something with you or sharing something about you, but at the end of the day, it is purely about the experience the community member has had.  That’s why marketers need to check their egos at the proverbial door when they enter into the world of social media marketing.

That’s a pretty tall order to do, as marketers we want to promote our company, brand, product or service.  We want people to listen to us, we want people to “want us”.  That’s why we’re in social media marketing, that’s why we’re here, right?

Wrong.

Social media is about sharing and engaging.  Sharing experiences, engaging in conversations, giving knowledge, tips, information and items of value.  Value isn’t determined by the company or the marketer putting the information out there.  It’s determined by the person in the community who’s consume that content.  As much as you think there’s value in some piece of content that’s put out there on your blog or in your video channel, if the audience doesn’t find value in it, it really doesn’t matter what you (as the marketer) think.  That can bruise even the more sturdy egos out there.

Determining what a community is going to find of value requires engagement.  It also requires companies to let go of preconceived notions of what they think people view their products or services as.  Having an open mind and letting go of that death grip of control over your brand can help you immensely when you are engaging in social media.  By opening the doors to your customers to define value, you can open the doors to a much more successful social media marketing strategy.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

One of the major advantages of social media is that it can allow free and instant access to pre-built audiences in a wide variety of channels.  The real question is: how do you convert these audiences into brand loyal enthusiasts that will consume your products and services for years to come?

The answer is a 1-2 punch of active participation and opportunity for landing.

Reaching Out Through Participation

The concept of “joining the conversation” is one that’s well-worn in the social media landscape.  In order to become an industry thought leader, it’s important to engage in relevant forums, tweet ups, LinkedIn conversations, and influential blogs.

The Gift of Content

If the conversation is the honey, consider online content the flypaper.  Authoritative content is the gateway to your site.  Don’t feel shy about pointing the link to your content so long as:

1. It is extremely relevant to the conversation and
2. It will be of great service to the audience.

Otherwise, you run the risk of looking too self-serving which will severely hamper your ability to create a following.

Here just a few ways you can build a social media following through valuable content:

• Guest Contributions
  Reach out to well-respected bloggers and key influencers.  Tell them how much you admire their content and offer up your services to write a post or two—even feel free to pitch a couple ideas.  Not only will this allow you the opportunity to receive visibility from your target audience, but also the chance to drive the occasional incoming link or two (remember, rich anchor text and deep within the site).
• Multimedia
  Remember, content is so much more than just articles.  Don’t forget to post optimized video and image content on websites such as YouTube and Flickr.  It’s a great way to introduce your brand in a helpful and informative way.
• Press Releases
  Writing a press release is one of the most powerful ways to utilize offsite content.  A creative and headline grabbing press release is one of the quickest and most effective ways to stir social media interest around your brand.

Don’t Forget: Convert the Traffic!

You’re so close to actually converting social media visits into sales!  The final phase is the conversion—the call-to-action in which you allow the user to take the plunge from casual fan into paying customer.  Make sure your content has attractive offers that don’t impede the quality of the content. Also, be sure to offer at least two conversion points per page.  Additionally, experiment with both soft and hard conversions.  An example of a soft conversion might be “sign up for our free report” whereas a hard conversion is typically more along the lines of a sale.  Varying your conversion points will allow you to accommodate consumers along varying stages of the buy cycle.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the fourth & final pillar, Measurement.

Finding where relevant conversations around your brand or company are taking place can be an arduous task.  In order to succeed at finding the conversations when they are still fresh, a mixture of free and paid tools are typically utilized.  While many of these tools are still in their infancy, they generally do a fairly good job at finding conversations that are specific to keywords that you believe are relevant to your brand or company.

There is an additional tool, however, that you already have in place that you’re likely not using to help find relevant conversations.  That tool is your web analytics package.

What Advantages can a Web Analytics Package Provide?

Your web analytics package will obviously function differently than your free or paid social media monitoring tools yet it will still provide valuable information that will allow you to quickly engage in relevant conversations.

One key advantage deals with the type of data your web analytics package reports on.  Rather than looking for keywords that are used on social media sites, your web analytics package will be reporting on visitors being referred from social media sites to your site.

Another advantage of your web analytics package is that it likely is reporting the data in near real time.  That means you can immediately know when a conversation is taking place that’s referring visitors to you site.  With social media monitoring tools, you can look more broadly with the use of keywords, but the freshness of the data that’s returned is reliant on how quickly or slowly the tool finds the conversations.  In some cases it could be hours and in others in could be days or weeks, so augmenting the data from social media monitoring tools with your web analytics data can potentially decrease your response time to relevant conversations.

How can You Find the Relevant Data in Your Web Analytics Package?

In your web analytics package there is an enormous amount of data relating to your sites visitors.  Knowing how to sift through that data to key in on what’s relevant to your needs is a vital step to finding additional relevant conversations in the social media space.

For this post I’ll use Google Analytics as an example, but you could get similar data from any of the leading web analytics providers.

It’s essentially a two step process to get setup correctly.  The first will be creating a custom report and the second will be creating an advanced segment.

Creating the Custom Report

Basically, with a custom report you want to setup a way to find social media sources that are driving visitors to your site and then determine the actual referring path from each of the sources.  This is done by creating a custom report in Google Analytics.

As the dimension you’ll want to use Source and then Referral Path as a sub dimension.  In the metrics area you’ll want to at least add Visits, but you can also add additional metrics that can give you more insights into the visitors being referred.

Once you’ve saved the custom report, it will allow you to spot social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  You can then click on any of the sources and see URL(s) within the social media site that’s referring the visitors.

As the report currently stands, all sources will be present when looking at the report.  To help you sift through all the sources you’ll complete the second step in the set up process.

Creating the Advanced Segment

Creating the required advanced segment can be done in two ways.  You can create an advanced segment that keys in solely on a defined group of social media sites or you can create an advanced segment that excludes your top non social media referring sites.  I prefer the later since it doesn’t limit the number of social media sites that are included in your advanced segment.

To create the advance segment, simply generate a list of your top referring sources.  Create a new advanced segment and add “Source” as the dimension.  For the condition you want to select “Does not match exactly” and then simply add in the first non social media source as the value.

Continue adding additional sources until you feel enough sources have been excluded to allow you to easily go through what remains and pick out the social media sources.  The result should look similar to below, but likely with additional sources added.

This can also be done using regular expressions in the value field, but for visual sake I’ve broken each source out in a separate OR statement.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to combine them.  To do that, drill in to the custom report you created and then select only the new advanced segment.  You’ll now be able to spot the top social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  Click on any of the sources and you’ll be able to see the actual page they were referred from.

You can then go directly to the page and determine if it’s appropriate to engage in the conversation that’s taking place.

Remember that this is in no way a replacement for a social media monitoring tool, but it can be used to augment what you get from such tools as well as potentially decrease your response time in certain cases.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the fourth & final pillar, Measurement.

Today’s post wraps up our series on the Four Pillars of Social Media here on Social Conversations.  In this series we covered how to research, plan a strategy, engage your audience and use measuring techniques in your social media marketing efforts for your company.  Whether it’s a small business, a B2C or a B2B business, these fundamental concepts are what will support your social media marketing strategy, make it strong and successful.

I wanted to round out the series with a piece that reminds marketers, directors, senior management and the c-suite that social media marketing is unlike any other online marketing strategy you may implement.  Since the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) have become such a prominent force in the online marketing world because they can be measured through analytics by seeing the Click to Conversion ratios, companies have become very focused on this to decide whether a program is successful or it failed.

Unfortunately these types of measures don’t work the same way for your efforts in Social Media Marketing.  It’s a lot more complex because engagement in social media communities very rarely leads to a person clicking on your link and then purchasing your product or service.  You also have to factor into the whole scheme of measuring your actions online whether its SEO, PPC or media buying, was that “Click” affected by something you did in Social Media.

Take for example engagement in forums.  Say you have a team from your engineering department out in a Ruby on Rails forum discussing the latest things they’ve implemented using RoR.  Someone who’s been lurking and watching your team share it’s knowledge posts a reply in the thread saying “hey thanks, you guys really seem to know your stuff, this helped me a lot”.  The next thing that person does is looks at one of your team’s bios.  They then look at their profile on LinkedIn, then look at your company’s profile on LinkedIn.  From their they click over to your blog and read a few of your thought leadership posts.  After they read those posts, they forward one on to their managing direct with a note that says “these guys seem to really know their stuff, can we utilize them to help us XYZ project?”.

The managing director was looking at other companies to help and had never heard of your company until his engineer suggested your blog post.  Now he’s looking at your company’s profile on LinkedIn, not only that he’s checking out who recommended you and those companies to see if they are like his company.  He then clicks on a link to your latest presentation on Slideshare, he passes that on to the CTO, saying “this company is really impressive, I think we should use them with XYZ project”.

Now the CTO is checking your company out, he’s reading your blog too, but he’s checking out the comments from other companies on your blog and your interaction.  He clicks on a link to your tweet stream and sees you’re interacting and sharing your knowledge with the community about relevant topics, not what you sang in the shower.  Now, he too is impressed, he emals back to the managing director “please contact them and set up a meeting, you’re right they really seem to understand our industry very well”.

The managing director now types into Google your company name, first he clicks on a PPC ad you have (by mistake), then backs up and clicks on the first result, which leads him to your homepage.  He finds the link to fill out the contact form, and now you have a lead.

So who gets the credit?  If you were just looking at analytics, some may say PPC, some may say SEO – never did any of the people click into your site first.  Their first encounter was in a forum about Ruby on Rails, their next was LinkedIn, then your blog, then SlideShare, then Twitter.  The last steps were search and then the click into your site to fill out the contact form.

Sometimes it is pretty easy, you can see a click to a product from a link on Facebook, Twitter or a blog post and can see the results.  However, more often than not, the above scenario that I just outlined for you happens hundreds, if not thousands of times a day online.  Marketers just aren’t aware of all the steps customers are taking to get to the “conversion”.  So how are you measuring that?  Are you accounting for this type of scenario in your ROI or bottom line of your entire marketing plan?

Just because social media marketing doesn’t lead to that instant “Click Conversion” doesn’t mean it isn’t working, it means you have to work a little harder to measure its success.