Empowering Small Business

How to Measure Social Media for Small Business

"Tracking the Influence of Conversations: A Roundtable Discussion on Social Media Metrics and Measurement" authored by Jeremiah Owyang, formerly with Podtech.net and soon to be with Forrester, and Matt Toll, with Dow Jones, begins the dialog about how an organization can effectively measure the value and marketing effectiveness of social media.

As collaborative Web 2.0 technologies continue to be introduced and proliferate the consumer and business environment, we are seeing increased interest and discussion about the value of social media tools - blogs, podcasts, videoblogs and social networking sites. But how important are these conversational vehicles, really, to overall buying decisions? How can organizations join in these conversations, and influence product-service evaluations and purchasing behavior?

The key to remember is that social media is about having two-way conversations, and that previously powerful obstacles between a seller and target customers are being removed with tools are simple as blogs. All of a sudden, information can be disseminated (locally to globally) in a heartbeat via some combination of social media.

For the findings below, about 30 marketers, bloggers and social media experts gathered together and came up with these measurement attributes:

• Analytics and Activity: Focused on traditional measurement elements like page views, unique site visitors, etc.
• Community Activation/Call to Action: Are recipients reacting to some call to action message?
• Conversation Index: The ratio between blog posts and comments-plus-trackbacks.
• Demographic/Who: Understanding who is responding to the message - who is reading, watching, talking, and for how long?
• Influential Ideas (Memes): The intensity or velocity of the spread of an idea or message over time - answering the question, who is creating a real dialog? (Bloggers and marketing consultants placed the most value on this metric)
• Participation and Engagement: Responding, and acting, on the message. (Corporate marketers placed the most value on this metric)
• Reach: Has less to do with sheer numbers and more with who you are influencing.
• Relationships and Connections: The concept of influence in a specific target community is growing in importance as small communities form and niche conversations start in every industry.
• Relevance: How relevant is a specific blog post to a given company.
• Sentiment/Tone: Tone-flavor of any given response.
• Content: Intrinsically linked to the focus of a given social media platform.

One interesting finding was that traditional Web analytics placed very low as a metric - suggesting that social media is relevant in ways different  from traditional online marketing. "Reach" also was ranked very low, suggesting that forming closer relationships was more highly valued.

Although the group did not determine or endorse any particular standard method of measurement, they all acknowledge the pressure they experience to validate their investments in social media marketing. Clearly, this particular dialog has just begun.

Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO

Relationship Marketing via Social Media

In today's social media world, marketing is changing dramatically in that everyone is increasingly able to communicate directly with actual people and not just target market segments or "audiences." As a result of this social media trend, marketers need to think more about how to establish direct, authentic relationships with people - and why they are doing so.

The irony of this movement is that "market relations" - the process of establishing direct relationships with an infrastructure of market segments that have some influence on a buying decision - is the very basic marketing principle taught by my first professional mentor, Regis McKenna. Back 25, even 15 years ago, real market power came from having sustained relationships with a wide variety of people of influence.

Once the PR industry caught on, this trend became an bandwagon that truly overplayed its welcome - everyone talked about communicating to influencers for a company (within the context of its market and technology segment). Unsurprisingly, those influencers (market analysts, all media, associations, noteworthy VCs, high-profile CIOs) all became numb to the constant barrage of communications. Everyone's effectiveness suffered.

But, with the proliferation of social media and its requirement of sustained personal integrity, it's possible once again (although via different mediums) to establish the type of one-to-one connections that are so intrinsically important and so highly leveragable. Authentic dialogue can be reestablished between those who are seeking to honestly communicate and respond. Tools and technologies will enable and accelerate these conversations (blogging, Facebook, Podcasts, etc.) and those most facile in them will have the competitive advantage of "speed to market" but even more importantly, "transparency of voice."

Understanding the sociology of networks that are then created is a concept that Ev Rogers so eloquently wrote about in his ground-breaking book "Communication of Innovations" (now in its 5th printing as "Diffusion of Innovations.") His statistical, communications-based research proved that the rate of a market adopting an "innovation" is specifically driven and effected by the activity of one adopter category of people choosing to influence another. Bottom line, there is always a set (or sets) of people in a social system that play(s) a catalytic role in how an idea, concept, product, etc. takes fire and gets adopted.

So, in today's social media reality, we're back to relationships then between groups of people, and understanding how the process of authentic and transparent communications impacts eventual market success.

Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO

Web Community Forum: The Launch of a New Social Media Resource

The folks that brought you the Blog Business Summit (the blog and related events/conferences ), which helped educate all of us bloggers on how to maximize and leverage business blog behavior, have just announced their new foray into the social media environment - The Web Community Forum. As their new blog reports:

"The Web Community forum is a site and event series dedicated to supporting and fostering online community building best practices. This blog is intended to track, facilitate and continue the conversation surrounding this incredibly rich topic, and the next conference will take place December 5-6, 2007 in Seattle, WA.

The goal of Web Community Forum Seattle 2007 is to discuss and propose some emerging best practices for community building for business, political campaigns, marketing, and other professional efforts using Facebook and the Facebook platform."

The event has signed up Jeremiah Owyang as its keynote speaker, who just announced on his blog that he has joined Forrester as their senior analyst for social computing and interactive marketing. Most recently he was at Podtech.net as their director of corporate media strategy. His blog notes that his keynote will cover:

Facebook Strategy: Opportunities of a Ready-Made Platform

Facebook is a media, community and application platform that offers an existing thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. The ability to understand users, their preferences, and networks, helps web applications to quickly segment and rapidly grow. Of course, no system is perfect, so attendees will come to understand the challenges with data, privacy and the growing conflict as work and personal lives collide online.

By analyzing users, their profiles, networks and affiliations there’s a tremendous amount of rich data that not seen displayed so readily. The ability to create a targeted web strategy to meet specific needs of the ‘long tail’ is more accessible than ever before.

Facebook provides targeted advertising unlike before, the ability to provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preference gives the ability to accurately market effectively

The recently launched Application Platform gives a small agile web team the ability to quickly deploy a widget, scale and monetize.  Explore what’s worked as these mini-applications are launched on top of an existing community.

Attendees will learn:

-Demographics and Trend Data of Facebook
-Word of mouth and viral growth using the Newsfeed and Widgets
-Groups, Sponsored groups and other community features
-Harness Personal and Network information
-Contextual and targeted Advertising opportunities
-Monetizing your efforts
-Case studies of success and failure
-Understanding costs, and strategies to measure ROI

BTW, Podtech.net is a great social media resource and if you haven't checked out Jennifer Jones' social media show "Marketing Voices", this is a "must-listen-to" regular podcast. I worked with Jennifer at Regis McKenna, and she has a great background in marketing, social media and broadcasting - journalism.

And be sure to check out the new Web Community Forum blog, and stay tuned for what should turn out to be a fabulous line-up of speakers!

Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO

Online Marketing Traffic Tactics

Attracting consumers via online marketing strategies is a cost-effective approach to driving revenue for small businesses. To illustrate the importance of these online marketing methodologies, the Wall Street Journal just published a research report summary* on how small businesses increase online traffic.

In the area of online marketing, small businesses said they use the following marketing tools along the lines of these percentage responses:

• 55% submit company websites to search engines
• 47% utilize search engine optimization
• 37% buy online yellow pages
• 35% buy Google ad words
• 34% buy Yahoo ad words
• 30% utilize website analytics

In terms of current and emerging problems, small businesses identified the following issues as either being a serious problem currently (C) or becoming a problem (B):

• Increasing competition for natural or organic search engine rankings: C - 32%; B - 49%
• Increasing competition for top paid for search positions: C - 29%; B - 51%
• Tracking total return on investment of search marketing: C - 23%; B- 31%
• Keyword price inflation: C -19%; B - 44%
• Click fraud: C - 18%; B - 28%

In the area of pay-per-click advertising where companies only pay when a person clicks on an online ad, the average reported increase in the median cost per click is 16%.

As we can see, online marketing is now a key business driver for small businesses and at Innuity we are focused on helping businesses connect with customers most likely to buy their particular products and services. To learn more about Innuity's small business promotional services including local search engine marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, website services YP Guides and more call 866.814.4080.

*Sources: 2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business Mobility and Business Applications Survey, Yankee Group Research

Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO