The Best ROI Explanation for Social Media and Some Additions

As an owner of a social media marketing and design company, it can be hard to explain the return on investment in accordance with social media use. I think many of us (marketers) try to find a return on investment because:

A. It can be easier to sell the marketing because of an ROI explanation.

B. We believe so much in social media. We want to use it… every chance we get.

Jason Falls has one of the best explanation (and personal views) of ROI in Social Media in his post: What is the ROI for Social Media?

In the post he starts out by stating a quote I have posted in my office on the wall:

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

He goes on to say that it is hard to convince business owners that the point of social media is the conversation and relationships. If they are mainly in it for money “they will fail.”

Your ROI is what you got out of the conversation, not what you got out of their checkbook.

I have always been a believer in social media to help grow your business. You can use it as a delivery tool to send a message to many users in a short time span and build relationships. The problem with the business environment and social media is the mindset many business owners are under… the “i need my return now” mindset. “I’m investing $2000 a month in marketing.” I need to see return every month.

Social Media takes time to develop. Amy Nowacoski has a comment on Jason’s blog post has a great comparison for Social Media and ROI:

ROI on human interactions is always very tricky. I’ve worked in fundraising and development for years, and have always held that fundraising events cannot always be about the bottom line. It can’t be about just the dollar figure you amassed that night. Events are also about cultivation and engagement. I would spend time making sure everyone, not just the big donors, feel like VIPs because that guy who only bought a $20 ticket today, could be the guy who gives you $20K in 10 years.

There are always methods of combining social media marketing with traditional marketing. This will give you something of substance (ie direct mail) with something intangible (social media).

Social Media is growing in popularity and growing in validity as a powerful marketing tool. Start getting involved. Set some goals and achieve trusted relationships in your community!

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Part 4: Social Media Marketing for Small Business: Mentors

It is time for a roundup and the last two parts of the Social Media Marketing for Small Business posts.

Here is a look back at Parts 1-3.

Part 1: Prioritize, Plan, and Execute
Part 2: The Circle of Life
Part 3: Attention to Action

We have touched on many strategy elements when it comes to small businesses using social media for marketing and promotion. I wanted to talk quickly about the importance of having “social media mentors.”

Some of us are entrepreneurs with small business start-ups and having mentors to help with everyday occurences should be a strong part of our business routine. Andrew Hyde of StartupWeekend said it best on Chris Brogan’s blog:

Find Great Mentors. I think I have said this before, but it is slammed into my head by TechStars. It is the best thing you can have as a startup. Find them early, and listen as much as you can.

We should all have mentors. The same applies to social media use. Find a couple of industry leaders, as well as, local leaders to follow and ask questions. This should be applied beyond hiring a social media marketing company or a consultant to guide you in your social media use.

Social Media Mentors can give you great tips and benefits of using social media on a daily basis. This will help you hone your craft on top of your daily routine.

There is so much information shared on a daily basis that it is hard to seperate the good and the bad. Personally, I rely on some of my mentors to do this for me.

I wanted to list the couple of people that I am blessed to call my social media mentors (whether they know it or not).

Douglas Karr

Pat Coyle

Social Media mentors do not have to be different than your business mentor (mine happen to be).They can be anyone you trust to lead you in the right direction through your new media use.

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Part 3: Social Media Marketing for Small Business: Attention to Action

We spend a lot of time talking about increased exposure for your company or personal brand in social media. We spend countless hours reading on how to gain attention to our content or service offerings. Personally. I spend quite a bit on Google Reader trying to stay ahead of the curve and consume the next big idea.

Many small business owners concentrate on one aspect of social media: the attention of the users. It is mainly the increased exposure to potential clients that starts the interest wheel turning in many owner’s heads. This is the old marketing strategy of the more you do the more eyes you will hit. We need to take it a bit further than just building brand recognition. It is hard to measure brand recognition in terms of return on investment.

Initially when entering into a social media marketing strategy companies need to think about the attention gaining concepts for the plan. Whether you are doing a contest, spending time in the networks, or launching a new platform it is important to initially focus on the attention aspect of social media.

What is truly important (in a business sense) is the action the user takes to buy and/or become interested in your product. You have all the attention you can muster! How do you turn the user’s attention into action.

4 Ways to Change Attention to Action

1. Free eBook:

Write a short book about your expertise. Are you an accountant? A business coach? Maybe you are a plumber who is just getting involved online? Write a quick page turner on some topics that will be beneficial to your readers. Offer it for a free download and capture their email address. This will allow you to build your database while already zeroing in on interested prospects. Chris Brogan has done an excellent job at this.

2. Blog or Email Subscription

In everything you do in social media it is extremely important to always have a subscription box for users to subscribe to your thoughts and offerings.

A great email tool for wordpress is Subscribe2 or the FeedBurner Email Subscription.

3. Promotional Banners or Links for your Profile

Always have a link present (image or text) that offers a discount on your services. You can also have a link directed to your company website that allows users to invest more time in learning about your services. This is a huge example of way to drive your attention users to your website and sell them on your services.

4. Gain Their Trust

You need to become involved in the communities that potentially may be a revenue source for your company. Take the time to respond to questions, ask questions, invest in writing great content, and helping people out. This is a huge aspect of changeing attention to action. The steps towards the buying pattern of a user has a lot to do with trust in the social media environment. Gain their trust and offer them something to hard to put down.

Gaining the trust of a user is the more important of the four steps listed above. User’s attention is not a bad thing but in order to measure your  ROI  you must take some of them to the action steps.

Always measure and document what you are doing. Time management is key.

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Part 1: Social Media Marketing For Small Business: Prioritize, Plan and Execute

We are constantly selling.

Whether a sole proprietor or a multi-employee company, small business owners are constantly selling themselves and their service/product. Most of the time the two go hand in hand.

From traditional marketing to email marketing, there are a multitude of ways to go about marketing your products and services. Social Media has just recently come to the limelight in the small business circle. There has been a recent push to utilize the world of social media to

Image via Wikipedia

take advantage of the multitude of eyes and ears in this space.

At Brandswag we talk a lot about using social media for your small business marketing strategy. The biggest hurdle in explaining social media is the issue of weighing the benefits against the time spent on social media platforms. If you are thinking of social media in terms of a sales cycle you should stop. Let me say that again…. Just stop!

By looking at social media as a sales cycle it keeps you from seeing the absolute value and benefits of using platforms like Facebook, Myspace,  Twitter, and LinkedIN (to name a few). If you view your use of social media as an instant ROTI (return on time investment) you are going to become frustrated and give up before the magic happens.

Social media takes time. There needs to be sense of importance and goal setting when using social media for your small business. You need to be able to set aside the time every day to check your social media sites and update your blog.

If you have goals set and a plan laid in place to utilize social media you will succeed with creating brand awareness, organic search engine optimization, and becoming a trusted adviser in your local industry.

It is extremely important for you to prioritize, plan, and execute. Execute. Execute. Execute.

Prioritize

Take some time to travel in and out of the different social media platforms. Figure out which sites make sense for you to spend some time. Check out a previous post of mine (in collaboration with Brogan, Rowse, and Sanders) on how to be productive and choose the right social networks.

Find four to five social media platforms that cater to what you are wanting to accomplish.

Plan

Figure out how much time you can committ to using social media. If you want to set aside 30 mins a day to take care of your sites.. DO IT! By all means, the time involvement is important but frequency is just as important. Community users want to know you care and are active in the site.

Execute

Follow Nike when they scream JUST DO IT through all of their advertising. Execute your plan with perfection, create meaningful content, and communicate with your friends online. You can prioritize, dream, and plan all you want but if you do not execute…. well, I wont have anything to say to you.

By executing and joining in the conversation you are developing your brand every single day you spend on social media.

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on how to help small business owners understand, utilize and become successful using social media.

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Independent Blogging Compared to Corporate Blogging

I follow the writing of many of the staff at Compendium Blogware, a local company here in Indianapolis offering an extremely trackable and orangic seo based blog software. I was reading through a post by Megan Glover called Is Blogging In Your 2009 Marketing Budget?, and happened across a powerpoint presentation about measuring, tracking, and adjusting your corporate blog. You can view the ppt by clicking here: measure-track-and-adjust-webinar.

In the webinar they had a graphic from Google Analytics that show where the traffic to their blog was originating from  (image below). Of course being a search and keyword driven blogging platform you would

imagine that the majority of the sites traffic would be from search engines. I decided to check out my analytics to see if I was completely opposite, in the middle, or the same.

Below you will see my traffic sources from Google Analytics. Not surprisingly most of my traffic is driven through referring sites. It got me to thinking about the value of blogging and the underlying reason of why I am writing this blog. Without hesitation I can say that the main reason for blogging is my love for social media both here and in Indianapolis. I love the concept of building community on the web. I have met some wonderful people through my dealings   in Friendfeed, Twitter, and Smaller Indiana.

The other reasons can be contributed to my social media marketing and design company and becoming a trusted adviser in the city of Indianapolis. A blog is a great way to build credibility among your peers and collaborate with many individuals on a global scale.

Of course, another big reason for blogging is the organic search engine optimization I gain through posting and linking. I don’t know if I should be worried that my lowest referring center is search engines. I have been contemplating a way to switch that tables and even out my traffic sources. Any ideas on how to do that?

It is interesting to see the sources of traffic of certain blogs both on a personal and professional level. I would gather that the majority of corporate blogs have a higher search engine traffic rate than most independent blogs out there.

Do you find referring sites more valuable or search engine traffic?  Maybe you find direct traffic the most valuable of them all? I guess it is all based on  the goals and aspirations of the blog strategy itself. Any tips on blog strategy can more than likely be found at Chris Brogan, Chris Baggot,  Hutch Carpenter or Louis Gray’s blogs.

Example of How NOT To Run A Web Service: Bloglines

In my blog reader infancy I used the Bloglines RSS reader service. I was pretty happy with the overall service until I discovered Google Reader , which is hands down better than BlogLines.

I had installed Bloglines as an add-on to my browsers and it had been pretty easy to subscribe to certain blogs I found valuable: you just hit the RSS button and it would direct you to the BlogLines website. This small producitivity tool soon became an annoying tool when I couldn’t figure out how to delete it from my browser. Of course, we could blame my ADD on the fact that I could not delete the service but my browser still redirects to BlogLines whenever I click the RSS button.

I wanted to delete my account so I tried to sign on and unfortunately (since I haven’t used the service in a year) my account needed a new password. The Bloglines service needed to verify my account and so they sent a verification email to my inbox. I have verified the account three times and have still not recieved any email from BlogLines.

I thought to myself, “Self. This is a web service company. Their customer support must be decent. You should try that.” I proceeded to email the customer support department and waited for the email.

and waited…

and waited..

and waited..

I have since asked for support three times through email to no avail. They have not contacted me and I have STILL not received a verification email for the account.

Does anyone see a problem here? Shouldn’t an RSS Reader Service be conscious of the ability bloggers and readers have in spreading a bad vibe/message?

I am extremely dissapointed in how Bloglines has completely ignored my requests for help in deleting their service. If I was in their shoes I would have (at least) responded with some courteousy in order to win back the account or keep the user.

This should be a prime example of how NOT to run a web service. The last thing I want to hear is that they have been busy with updates and a re-design. The last thing I want to hear is that I cannot delete my account and they would rather not help me uninstall the service.

So this is my rant about Bloglines. Screw it. If you want me to keep my account send me a stupid verification email! They are making it pretty easy for me to hate them right now.

Don’t Whore Yourself When Linking. That’s Dirty.

I am an avid reader and fan of Alexander Van Elsa’s blog on new media. He wrote a post yesterday about the failing “linking economy” on the web. The post entitled: The Linking Economy Fails because Social Currency Became Financial Currency is a great look into the concept of internal linking. There have been quite a few blog posts pertaining to the over-the-top linking strategy of some major blogs. In his post Alexander makes reference to some major blogs by saying:

It is also a system that breaks down easily, especially if you in some way or another monetize your site. That is why all of the big blogs seldomly link to external sites. TechChrunch, CNET, they all love to link to themselves. The motive is pure financial, and has nothing to do with content, trust, or any other factor.

I will be completely honest when I say, it is hard for me to care that much about TechCrunch and CNet. They have already positioned themselves as quasi-industry content leaders. Does it really matter that they are internally linking?

I think this is a lesson for all the smaller blog contingencies out there. When you are posting content about a specific topic try to link to sources that you find valuable. It is extremely apparent to everyone when the only links in a blog post are internal links. Get over yourself.

I am not going to sit her and say I have NEVER internally linked to a post that a reader may find valuable. There is a fine line to draw when internally linking and outwardly linking. If you have five links in your blog post and they ALL travel back to you…you are an internal link addict.

Go to an ILAA (internally linking addict anonymous) because you are ruining your credibility on the the open market. And if the only thing you care about is a greater google page or search ranking….pack up your crap skippy.

Take the train home because I firmly believe genuine content will always win.

3 Reasons Why Search and Authenticity Should Be Important to Corporate America

I was skimming through Chris Brogan’s posts and happened across a post called: A Counterpoint to the Branding Craze. This caught my attention because I am a huge advocate for branding, both personal and professional.

I have tried to use my blog to create a brand identity for myself and my company and it has been successful in more ways than one. In his post Chris talks about the concept of search being involved in the corporate strategy of most companies:

One of the reasons that I advocate content marketing, such as writing a compelling group blog, is that it’s an opportunity to build search equity. Writing about things that people might search for is a great way to find some new people at your door who might want a look at your product.

Content marketing should be in the corporate strategy plans of every business in America. There are a couple of reasons why I am strongly urge clients and businesses to dive into the realm of content marketing:

1. The Search

By blogging and writing about things that “people may search for,” you are creating a website (blog) that will hit the search engines with enthusiasm. When you have a site where content is changing regularly and you are writing about issues/services that people find important, you will find an increase in visitors to your site.

2. Authenticity and Personality

Consumers today want social media authenticity and personality behind a company. If you are a stoned face corporation sitting in a corporate park somewhere and are NOT listening to your customers needs and wants: YOU WILL FAIL. By blogging and creating an area for dialouge you are telling your customers: I trust you. I want to hear what you have to say. This goes for both big business and small business.

3. Brand Identity and Value

People want to connect with brands on a level that has become as personal as a relationships between two people. A blog/content marketing allows you to start the romantic courtship of a consumer. This courtship can turn into a seasoned consumer that will spread your good message across the valleys and streams. Maybe even through their email.

There are a multitude of reasons to start a blog and create a space where content marketing is king. Read more of Chris Brogan’s posts if you get the chance. He is a genius at laying out what it takes to create great, authentic content.

Also, if you are interested in starting a corporate blog I would suggest checking in with Compendium Blogware. They have a blogging tool that allows for AWESOME search results.

Yes. I Have Started a VideoBlog

I have started a VideoBlog! I will be updating the “vlog” every other day, hopefully.

Feel free to check it out. Kyle’s Socially Creative Video Blog.

SMS + WordPress = Connective Mobile Plugin

I always love it when a group of Indianapolis tech nerds create a innovative widget/application/plugin.

Introducing: Connective Mobile WordPress Plugin

The Breakdown: from Douglas Karr’s post: WordPress: SMS Integration Plugin

One of the projects I’ve been working on this week has been a WordPress Plugin that allows direct SMS integration with Connective Mobile. The plugin is quite robust, with both an administrative interface and an author interface. The admin interface allows you to manage the integration’s features. The author interface allows you to add subscribers and send out messages to your text club subscribers.

The Beautiful Thing: Sending a broadcast text message to your subscribers!

I love the idea of connecting the blogging platform with SMS integration. I would find it very valuable to be able to send out a mass text messaging to all of my SMS subscribers. My hope is that users don’t abuse the priveledge of sending out SMS messages to their subscribers.

I am not a tech minded person so if you want to know more about the administrative details check out Douglas Karr’s post.