In this chapter, Evans talks about writing down what it is you are trying to do so that you will know what you are measuring in order to achieve your social media goals. For instance, Evans starts by asking you to think about who your audience is. Knowing the wants and needs of your audience will help you to have a starting point to focus your efforts on. Pay attention to patterns that customers are setting and learn what their dislikes and likes are. Remember, on the Social Web, it’s all about getting involved in conversations with others. What better way to reach out to your consumers than to talk to them?
It’s All About the Metrics
Regarding your key metrics, Evans points out:
In selecting your key metrics, it is equally important to think through the kinds of social activities that your audience–or various components of it–may be engaging in. Your audience may be actively reading blogs, bu not at all interested in actually blogging themselves. These types of differences in behavior will certainly impact your choice in the activities you offer them and hence the types of metrics that are available for analysis.
By measuring different aspects of social media and paying attention to what other people are doing, it will allow you to better understand what is going on at the various purchase points on the Social Web, thereby creating a more effective social media campaign for success.
Other Tips That Evans Offers in This Chapter
- Your promise minus your delivery equals what you do at the point-of-sale.
- It is essential when considering the use of managed applications (ie. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that you get involved and stay involved. By being involved and thinking clearly about how a managed program will evolve and play out, you not only benefit from the program itself, but you set in place the basis for a true community built around your brand and the larger experiences you provide as your overall social media program continues to expand.
- Social media measurement is based as much on heuristics–using what is available to make the best of what you have–as it is more traditional quantitative and statistical analysis. Don’t be afraid to go with your gut: your experience is worth a lot when it comes to making sense of these new channels.
- If you measure conversations that include strong indicators of active recommendations and your bounce rate is still high, look at the landing page and check that the experience it provides is consistent with the likely interests or motivations of those arriving.
- While “posts to comments” is more popular, “comments to posts” is the measure that actually rises in value as the thing you are generally after- audience participation- improves.
The Main Points According to Dave Evans
- It is essential that you identify and clearly state your business objectives before deciding on specific elements of a social media program.
- The behaviors of your target audience are key in setting both the strategy and in identifying the metrics that will support your campaign.
- Conversational content can be measured, with the metrics leading to an understanding of who is talking about you and what they are saying.
- Metrics collected near and within your purchase process link the conversation to the actual impact on conversions. This is the data that can help you establish an ROI for your social media programs.
July 27 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media | No Comments »
In this chapter, Evans talks about the importance of connecting the dots between managing social information on the web as well as keeping up with social interactions. Managing social information can be eased with tools such as RSS and blog aggrigators in an effort to help you stay organized and up-to-date with the latest information. Evans states:
Social Interactions–the third big collection of channels making up social media– consist of the messages, feeds, and emails that flow as social content is created, discovered, consumed, repurposed, and shared. The updates, feeds, and emails–the connective threads–tell you to go look, that something new is waiting for you.
What matters as much or more than the post itself, Evans points out, is how that post comes to the attention of someone who needs or wants to know about it. If you haven’t already experienced it or were never very good at it, you will find that with the Internet and social media, etc. multitasking becomes an essential skill. Participants of the Social Web are constantly dividing their attention between two or more computer screens at a time just to keep up with an incessant flow of information. We have alerts and emails and RSS and blog aggregates and all sorts of other things that make noise, just to tell us when there is something new that might interest us. This is why it is so important to have a system in place.
Evans also reminds us that we shouldn’t neglect the content of what we are trying to get across to people. On the Social Web, content is still king. After all, you might receive a notification that there is somethibng that might interest you. However, when you go to read what someone has written, you quickly realize that it is of no use to you. This is where content comes in. You have to make what you are saying interesting. How do you do this? You do it by making what you have to say useful, informative and catchy.
The Main Points According to Dave Evans
- By combining social knowledge with real-time presence, mobile social applications are changing the way people interact in real-world settings.
- Feeds make it possible for you to manage large amounts of information. You can use feeds to keep up with customers, competitors, partners, and suppliers.
- Feeds make it possible for your customers to keep up with you. As you create social content, consider adding a feed to make it easy to track and discover.
- Social media forces a rethinking of branded content: what does it mean when recipients have a hand in the creative and when the content itself is reduced to its purely informational state?
July 20 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media | No Comments »
Twitter has all the complexity of walking into a room full of people at a party. You start by listening, and then introduce yourself and get involved. Microblogs boil social networking down to its most essential elements: a post, a comment, and an indication of relationships. -Dave Evans
There is much to be said about the use of various microblogging sites such as Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku as well as the various status update features on Facebook and Myspace. All of them allow you to post quick, short bursts of text to the entire world (or just your friends and family). At its core, it is a great way to get information across quickly and efficiently. And in the business world, microblogging can be extremely effective for marketing purposes because it allows you to interact with your consumers.
A Note About Podcasting
According to Wikipedia, a podcast is a “series of digital computer files that are released periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication”. In plain English, it’s an audio file that you can download on iTunes daily, weekly or monthly by subscribing to it. It’s an extension of blogging. Regarding podcasting, Evans is quick to point out that the real importance of podcasting isn’t the clip itself but rather how it is delivered. As he stated:
It’s about giving your audience the absolute choice of where, when and how to consume your content.
When done correctly, podcasting is highly effective. Check out the following statistics that Evans notes:
- Advertising in podcasts and online shows has a three-fold ad effectiveness increase over traditional online video and a seven-fold effectiveness increase over television.
- Embedded ad placements are more effective than pre-roll across a range of audio and video formats.
- Advertising in podcasts and online shows is effective in moving users from awareness to consideration to purchases. There is a 73 percent average increase in likelihood to use/buy versus a control group.
- Podcast advertising leads to a more favorable opinion of an advertiser after hearing or seeing an ad. Sixty-nine percent of those podcast listeners surveyed had a more favorable view of the advertisers following ad exposure. [Source: Podtrac-TNS Advertising Effectiveness Studies, 2006-2008]
The Main Points According to Dave Evans:
- Blogs are an effective, easy way to build a credible social presence: Be prepared to deal with direct, public customer feedback.
- Microblogs are casual forums that can be used to quickly create a following.
- Audio and video content can be used to extend text-based information. When created by your customers, video can convey to them a real sense of participation in the brand.
- Podcasting gives those interested in what you have to say the ability to choose where, when, and on what device they will listen.
- Social media is one of the many tools that you have available when developing and extending your business prescence. Like your entire toolbox, the more that your social components interlock with each other and with your traditional efforts, the better.
July 06 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media and Social Networking | No Comments »
When advertisers run an ad campaign on television, they may get 30 seconds or so to get a viewer’s attention. It’s a form of one-way interaction (since a person cannot interact with a television) and it’s an interruption that most people choose to ignore. When you turn it around and start comparing advertising on the Web, it’s slightly different.
A Few Notes About Interruptive Advertising:
When you’re watching television, you are typically watching it to relax and be entertained. When you are using the computer, you are typically using it to relax, be entertained, communicate with others and quite possibly gain knowledge. Therefore, when you throw advertising in in the form of commercials, pop-up ads, or banners, it’s an interruption- an annoyance. However, most people accept television commercials the same way that Internet users accept banner ads and pop ups: they are a tradeoff and something that can be ignored.
Evans cites Myspace as an example stating that most people know and understand that the reason Myspace is a free service is due to the presence of advertising….EVERYWHERE. The reason that the majority of social networks online (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are free is due to the presence of ads, so I guess the ad people must be doing pretty well. However, if you’re anything like me, you never click on the PPC ads on the sidebar which begs the question that Evans brings up: If you knew that no one was watching, would you still pay for the ad?
On the Internet, the only real way that your advertising message receives any attention is if people are interested to begin with. If you depend on iterruptive advertising to earn revenue, then you might as well pack up your bags now. This is why so many ad campaigns have turned towards social networks and microblogging services such as Twitter. The thinking is that if you generate enough of a buzz about your product/service to a targeted audience, then eventually you will succeed in having people purchase that product/service.
Participation is Everything
On the Internet, the social media element demands your full attention and presence. According to Evans:
On the Social Web, if your profile isn’t up-to-date, if you’re not commenting, if you’re not making connections, you don’t exist.
The Main Points According to Dave Evans
- Social networks lend themselves to direct participation.
- Participation and transparency are central to success on the Social Web.
- You can tap existing social marketing applications that operate within leading networks.
- You can use white-label platforms to implement your own community and support services.
June 29 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media and Social Networking | 4 Comments »
From a marketing standpoint, advertising is as natural as putting your pants on in the morning; you don’t even think twice about it. However, to other people (the consumers), advertising is one of the most annoying things. It’s an intrusion on our privacy and an unwelcome interruption. That being said, Evans poses the question: If you couldn’t interrupt people, how would you reach them?
Marketing is tricky. On the one hand, as a marketer, you want to create a buzz about your product or service with the hopes that it will lead to an increased revenue. At the same time though, you don’t want to turn possible consumers off by aggravating them. This is where online marketing comes into play. Many more businesses are turning to online marketing and advertising because let’s face it; this is where most people spend the majority of their time. Additionally, studies have proven online marketing to be more cost effective overall than other traditional means of advertising (i.e. television, radio, newsprint).
Building Your Online Reputation
Even if you were at the top of your game and widely recognized as a leader in traditional forms of marketing, switching over to online marketing means having to start from scratch; it means that you have to work on building your reputation all over again because ultimately, it’s your online (not your offline) reputation that drives your desired results on the Social Web. So how do you go about building your reputation online? You begin with a quantitative break down how popular you are in some of the following categories:
- ratio of blog comments to your blog post
- unique visitors
- dwell times (how long any one person stayed on your site)
- assessing social commentary about the content on your site (do people like it or hate it?)
- assessing the social commentary related to your product or service (is your website helping or hindering this?)
Other questions that you’ll also want to be thinking about:
- What are you doing to generate awareness about your product, brand or service?
- What channel is your top performer in terms of return on investment (ROI)? How was it measured?
- Are your strongest touchpoint experiences driven by marketing (the expectation you set) or operations (the product or service you deliver)?
By continuously reviewing and tuning your content based on its use, you are continuously enhancing your relevance to specific audiences and thereby building your social reputation. -Dave Evans
The Main Points According to Dave Evans:
- Social media is most different from traditional media in that it lacks the option to force an interruption: Your message has to be invited in.
- Social media is fundamentally measurable.
- Social media can be organized as follows:
- Platforms: This includes social networks along with white-label community and forum applications.
- Content: This includes ratings, reviews, photos, videos, podcasts, and similar content that is created and shared on the Social Web.
- Interactions: This includes the little bits of information that flow around through feeds, email, and SMS that tell participants what is going on across the Social Web.
June 23 2009 | Marketing | 1 Comment »
As most of us recognize by now, the Social Web can be extremely beneficial to business owners who have a loyal customer base. In this chapter, Dave Evans talks about the importance of being able to measure how influential your brand is to your customers. By understanding how willing your customers are to evangelize or spread the good word about your brand, you can begin to evaluate how successful your business will be in the future.
Additionally, Evans notes that any profits that a business earns through any form of coercion, trickery, or misleading advice are at best short term and will-if left unchecked- ultimately destroy the business. At the heart of everything is the customer. The role of the customer recommendation is central to the rise or fall of your brand. Evans goes on to point out the following:
On the Social Web- made up of social media applications such as blogs, photo and video sharing, collaborative event planning tools, ratings and reviews, and more- the conversations that stem from actual, delightful experiences with products and services are the key to driving and sustaining evangelism and hence long-term growth.
One of the main things to remember about influence and measurement regarding your business and the Social Web is that you want to increase the number of people who are willing to promote your brand while decreasing the number of people who detract from your business model. Provide a great experience, and the conversation will take care of itself.
The Main Points According to Dave
- The measurement of influence is critical to successfully implementing social media. The Net Promoter score works very well for capturing and tracking this.
- Influence- rather than control- is the central element you have at your disposal on the Social Web.
- Taking the time to gather and distill quantitative metrics is essential: Speak with IT, your webmaster, media group, and your CFO to develop a comprehensive dashboard and report card that includes potential social measures.
- Integrate blog indexing services and any relevant online data that you have access to into your measurement platform.
May 27 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) | 2 Comments »
Touchpoint analysis, as defined by Evans is:
-the rigorous discipline of carefully evaluating each point of contact between a firm and its customers has been used in traditional marketing to catch the divergence between what you want to convey and what you are actually conveying.
When talking about the Web, touchpoint analysis is extremely important because of the speed in which messages are transmitted from one party to another. For instance, if your site promises a certain result or guarantee with whatever product or service you are selling, and you don’t deliver on that promise, you can almost be guaranteed to hear about it in social networks and/or from dissatisfied customers who have written about it in some other forum. As Evans stated:
When you look at the difference between what you are saying about your brand versus what you hear coming back off the Social Web, any differences can often be traced to the difference between what you actually delivered and the expectation you set.
A Better Understanding
By understanding how touchpoint analysis works, you will be able to act more decisively, building on what works for you and your company while addressing any pitfalls. At its core, touchpoint analysis is about understanding your product based on the degree to which your present customers feel that you’ve delivered what you said you would. That being said, it is important to pay attention to what your customers are saying on the Social Web. Their reflections about what you are doing will give you a more quantifiable approach to understanding whether or not you are keeping your promise to deliver either goods or services.
Gathering Data
Touchpoint analysis takes a more quantitative approach, meaning that you can measure your success based on customer feedback as well as what your competition is doing. In order to begin gathering data to conduct a touchpoint analysis, you first need to decide what it is you are going to measure. In order to figure this out, you must first begin by observing actual customer experiences. So, for example, if you sell and/or deliver your product in physical stores, go and take pictures or notes. If your business is telephone based, use recordings of conversations. If you are an online marketing guru, use screen grabs (print screen function). You are trying to determine what it feels like to be an actual customer using your goods/services.
By analyzing collected data based on your observations of customer interaction and reactions to your services, you should be able to put together a quantifiable list of information to help your business improve in areas where improvement is needed while scaling back in other areas that don’t need quite as much attention.
The Main Points According to Dave Evans
- Touchpoint analysis leads to an understanding of the core elements of the experiences that will be talked about on the Social Web in conversations relating to your brand, product, or service.
- The touchpoint map is a systematic representation that quantifies the contribution and performance of individual touchpoints.
May 18 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media | No Comments »
The following are some tips that we can take away from yesterday’s lesson with Dave Evans:
- Your Absence is Felt- On the Social Web, your absence is conspicuous. Failing to participate retards the advancement of trust. In fact, it can increase the likelihood of mistrust.
- Consideration-Phase Marketing- The addition of consideration-phase marketing bridges a critical gap for marketers between awareness and purchase while opening the channel for effective word-of-mouth.
- Don’t Downplay the Small Stuff- What you see on the social web may seem pointless, trivial, or otherwise lacking in conventional measures of editorial value. Avoid this mindset: Instead, think about the fact that someone actually took the time to create this content. To that person, what is being expressed through this content certainly matters.
- Work it Out- If you don’t already own a copy of Dave Evans’ book, Social Media Marketing, an Hour a Day, you can go to it’s website where you’ll be able to download worksheets to help you with your marketing adventure.
- Your Promise- Your promise minus your delivery drives what you do at the point-of-sale.
- Use Google- Use Google Alerts to monitor your competitors.
- Video Presentations- If you’re interested in presenting multimedia content to a client whose Internet Connection is slow or nonexistent, install RealMedia‘s latest media player. This will allow you to save many forms of online video to your desktop with just one click, this way you can show it as a part of a presentation.
- Brand Detractors- A brand detractor isn’t the same as someone who simply doesn’t like you. A brand detractor is someone who has made it his personal cause to impact you negatively, generally out of a strong belief that what you are doing is wrong. By comparison, an upset customer is someone who is open to a change in viewpoint: Generally speaking, a brand detractor is not.
Hopefully, these tips from Evans will help you out. Don’t forget that you can buy a copy of Dave Evans book, Social Media Marketing, an Hour a Day on Amazon.com!
May 12 2009 | Marketing | 1 Comment »
Social media is all about being an active participant in a conversation on the web. By increasing the amount in which you participate in an online discussion whether it be in Twitter or some other forum, you are actually helping to create your very own social reputation. To take it a step further, when the context involves marketing, your social reputation becomes an expression of the brand you’re trying to sell. For example, if several people on Twitter become involved in a conversation about how the iced mochas at Starbucks have tasted really bad over the past few weeks and suddenly Starbucks responds with an explanation, then they become a part of that conversation with the consumer.
Because they are measurable, online communities foster participation. According to Evans, these communities maintain the collective reputation of a brand, based on which an individual may develop or attest personal loyalty. Increasing numbers of marketers (and rightly so) are getting involved with the Social Web, with particular interest centering on the collective. You see, by influencing the collective, you can then reach the individual!
Evans points out that traditional forms of media take a “push and tell” approach to marketing whereby the marketer is in control of the message and dictates that message to the consumer (who is in a subservient role). Social media throws this balance off, making the consumer and the marketer equal partners- both with the opportunity to voice their opinions.
Consumer Generated Media
Over time, the Internet has grown to have a significant impact on how people view their own ability to hunt and gather information on a wide range of products and services. Consumer generated media is all over the Internet in the form of photos, blogs, videos, comments, ratings and reviews, and guess what? It is CONTROLLED BY THE CONSUMER. You may have wanted to buy that brand name blender, but after having spoken to a few other people online prior to your purchase, you realized that it was a piece of junk with a label. One of the biggest things that marketers can take away from all of this online chatter is that consumers talk about the things that interest them the most. As Evans stated,
Consumer-generated media is a reflection of the generational norms: as Millenials move into the center of the marketing power brand, their online behaviors become increasingly significant.
So, what does this mean for modern day marketing gurus? Marketers need to identify what it is they want to look at when it comes to studying consumer behavior. After that, create a list of the things that you’re doing (or have already done) to generate some sort of awareness about your product and/or service. Join social networking groups such as Twitter, and find out what people are talking about, and then start talking back. And don’t downplay the little things such as blog commenting because every little bit counts when it comes to solidifying your online reputation as someone your consumers can trust!
The Main Points According to Dave:
- Social media plays a significant role in marketing: The conversations that take place on the Social Web determine how easy-or difficult- your task in driving conversion will be.
- The social feedback cycle is built on the post-purchase feedback and conversational loop that augments your traditional purchase funnel activities.
- Consumer-generated media, and in particular photos, audio, and video that supplement text (blogs), are in mainstream use now, even if concentrated in the Millenial and Gen X segments.
- The determined detractor is an individual who plays an important role in the evolution of markets but nonetheless will not (normally) be “won over” and therefore is generally best viewed as a participant with whom you will “respectfully agree to disagree.” Your best response is to simply ensure that your story is also being told.
- Your social feedback cycle, developed and maintained over time, is a key planning tool as you develop your social media plan.
May 11 2009 | Business Building and Internet Marketing and Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media | 1 Comment »
Social Networks: The Power of the Collective
According to Evans, understanding how network organization affects the flow of information is central to your successfully making the case for social media within your organization. That being said, Evans lists three laws which govern the use and value of social networks as well as the Social Web. They are as follows:
- Sarnoff’s Law- Named after the founder of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), David Sarnoff, this law holds that the value of the network increases in direct proportion to the number of listeners. So, for example, in a typical broadcast, a single voice is sent out to millions of listeners. Therefore, a network with 100 people is 10 times as valuable.
- Metcalfe’s Law- Named for Robert Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet and founder of the networking firm 3Com, this law states that the network value grows as the square of the number of users. For example, people can talk in both directions and with more than one conversation occurring simultaneously.
- Reed’s Law- Named for David P. Reed, this law is also known as the “Law of the Pack” and holds that the value of the network grows more powerfully than either Sarnoff or Metcalfe would suggest with the formation of groups and the interconnections between them. This law is most applicable to how we view social networks today.
Social Media Begins Here
Social media is about ordinary people trying to reach out to one another via groups and communities that are formed on the Web. This is why social networking is so effective. People are constantly sharing information with one another- more often than traditional forms of media (i.e. television and radio, etc.). Marketers are also beginning to recognize the value of social networking because as Evans stated:
These highly interconnected social networks are equally perceived as effective in vetting that information, and it is the combined impact that makes social networks along with user-generated content and social meedia so powerful from a consumer’s perspective. They are using these networks to evaluate everything you say.
Evans Wraps it Up With the Following
- Social media derives its value simultaneously from the collective and the individual, not the mass. This is a reversal of traditional marketing and creative models where a single message is crafted and pushed out to a mass audience.
- Network Value-that is, how efficiently it supports sharing and collaboration-is determined by the way in which members are connected. Networks that follow Reed’s Law- where members are free to form groups and connections between themselves and these groups- are the types of networks of most interest to social media marketers.
- The touchpoint map and social feedback cycle are central to the successful application of social media.
- RSS allows content to be scheduled for delivery. This is much better than having to go and check on it. RSS powers much of the Social Web.
- Social networks are part of, but not the same as, social media and the Social Web.
May 04 2009 | Reviews (non-paid) and Social Media | No Comments »
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