What’s the real value of a user clicking your tweets? Is that user a prospective client for you? Is that user adding value?

Oh wait… stop! I forgot one important thing: should we be talking about ROI when dealing with Social Media? A CEO will definitely say yes! A Social Media expert will probably say… we are not pursuing ROI goals here, we want to engage with our clients in another way…

Well, Social media is not rocket science. It’s not black or white.

Social Media is like any other type of campaign. First thing you do is to set up objectives.

What are you trying to achieve with your social campaigns?
What do you need in order to achieve those goals?
How are you going to measure those campaigns?

When it comes to Social, answering the last 2 questions can be difficult… Is it enough with creating a Facebook Page? Should I have Twitter? What about FourSquare? +1? A blog?
How do I integrate them all?

And the second part… what are the KPIs?
It’s funny because if you search for content about social media measurement, you find a wide variety of metrics you can look at but who is going to tell me if I’m doing right or If I’m missing an opportunity?

Social is not about brand awareness is about brand engagement. What is a good level of engagement? Is having 3 retweets an amazing performance or is it poor? Where are the benchmarks for social media? Well… there aren’t, my friend. The only benchmark is your common sense.

But I have a few tips for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual looking for some Social buzz, a SMB or a big corporation. Just read.

1. Categorize your social efforts by the ultimate goal of each campaign, post, tweet or status update. What do you want?
- Provide with information or updates to your followers?
- Promote a new product/service?
- Get people to buy something?
- To complement a brand awareness campaign?
- Provide with a better customer service?
- Personalize your brand?
etc.

2. How does success look like for you? What would you consider a successful campaign and why?

3. I spy with my little eye: find a similar brand that has been “socially” active for a while. How many replies, i likes, retweets, comments is it getting? Could you use those numbers to build a benchmark and use it as a reference to evaluate your own performance?

4. What’s the level of integration between Social, your other online campaigns and your traditional media? Are they complementing and helping each other?

How are you analysing your social media results?

Article first published as Is Common Sense The Only Real Way to Analyze Social Media? on Technorati.

                          

If you could really fall in love with a decive, you would definitely fall in love with this one.

Some of the amazing features:

- The home screen includes re-sizable widgets for apps and a simple swipe action to clear notifications
- To let users monitor data usage, ICS includes a reporting feature with data breakdowns and controls.
- Touch to beam: there’s a new feature called “beam” that lets you share things with friends using NFC technology. You just need to put 2 Galaxy nexus together in order to share whatever it is on your phone. From a YouTube video to a contact.
- Speech-to-text functionality to dictate. Words will magically appear on the device’s screen. I love this feature because I hate the keyboard on the screen. I’m much slower so this will solve that issue!
- In the security realm, there is a device unlock feature via facial recognition.
- Lots of new improvements have also been made on the camera app.
- One of my favs: when you receive a call you can pick it up, hang up or… you can inmediately text that person with a message like: I’ll call you later. I’ve named this feature the apologetic hang up.

If the words are not enough and you want to see it…

                          

Lately, I’ve been reading many articles about companies that offer daily discounts like Groupon or Living Social. I have to say that I have purchased a few coupons myself and I love my discounts!

However, a great opportunity for a small business to leverage the online world can become a nightmare.
Recently, I purchased a coupon to get a massage (I need to relax from time to time) and when I call to booked my appointment, I got an anxious assistant on the phone confirming that they were fully booked until January!
When I check the deal page I realized that they had sold more than 300 coupons. 300 for an hour massage. That means 300 hours of work plus the appointments they already had in their agenda.
Let’s do the maths: they open 8 hours a day, 6 days a week = 48 hours a week = 192 hours a month + extra appointments – holidays = I’m fully booked for almost 3 months!

What are the consequences? A frustrated potential customer that will probably forget about the coupon after a couple of months. If you lose that customer once, you may lose him/her forever plus the retail selling opportunity (all the extra things you can sell to the customers when they visit).
And I haven’t finished… what about those 3 months of intense, unexpected and unorganized activity?
And what about your social reputation?? What’s is going to happen when all these discount seekers visit you, obtain a bad service and they post a terrible review in Yelp, Urbanspoon or any other site?

I could read this words in The Globe & Mail a few days ago:
“Researchers found offering a Groupon correlated with a bump in business for most companies and also an increase in Yelp reviews. But they also found a company’s star rating declined after it offered a Groupon. In general, those companies with reviews that mentioned the words “Groupon” or “coupon” had star ratings 10 per cent lower, on average, than those that did not.”

So what’s the conclusion?

If you’re a business owner, go ahead and use the discount sites to promote your business. But please, be reasonable. You can participate almost as often as you want so the first time you try don’t go crazy and offer only what you can really handle! Remember that you need to continue to offer an amazing customer service. Don’t ever forget about that.

If you’re a discount seeker, enjoy the discount!

                          

I can’t wait to see the numbers after Christmas. Many people will get a new device(specially tablets) and due to the holiday season most people will connect from their portable devices instead of connecting from their computers.

These findings are part of recent comScore report, Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. If you are interested, send me an email and I’ll be happy to send you the pdf.

Source: Very interesting article published by Comscore

                          

Google Alerts will monitor the Web for interesting new content. The content that you consider interest based on your choice of query or topic. Google Alert will send you any news, blog, tweet or anything on the Internet containing the query that you specify.

Why is Google Alers your ally in terms of social?
Don’t you want to know where your name, service or product appears? Don’t you want to know the latest news of your market? What about what your competitors are doing?

You just need to set up a few alerts containing at least 4 main points:
- Your name or company’s name.
- Your main competitors’ names (company or individuals)
- Keywords that describe your product or service and your market.
- Search for negative reviews like: Hanoi Morillo sucks or “Hanoi Morillo” and “negative”

Google Alerts

                          

According to New York-based Dynamic Logic’s recent study, mobile wins hands down, claiming that brands will gain more awareness and even purchase intent if they opt for mobile display advertising over online.

Presented at last week’s Advertising Week Mobile Media Summit, the study outlines why brands should be focusing their efforts on mobile display advertising, as well as stating that advertisers who repurpose online creative for mobile will fail at putting its message across to consumers.

The study looked at results the of 2,437 campaigns over the past three years and reports that because ads take up a good proportion of space on mobile screens, there is more brand awareness and positive impact on brand metrics. Mobile had a 19.9% increase in ad awareness as opposed to online, which had an average of 4.2% increase over the past three years.

The most successful mobile campaigns were found in low-involvement categories such as CPG, where the ads are geared at creating brand favorability and purchase intent. There was an average of 4.7% increase in purchase intent when it comes to mobile advertising whereas online sits at an average of 1.2%. With mobile, there was also a 12.1% increase in message association as opposed to online, which saw an increase of 2.2%.

In a press release, Alina Rana, senior vice president and head of Dynamic Logic’s Emerging Lab, warned advertisers of the fading novelty associated with mobile ads.

“Similar to other new advertising mediums, consumers were overwhelmingly receptive to mobile display advertising in its nascency but now that its novelty is wearing out, creative quality matters more than ever,” she said, adding that poor creative can have a negative impact on a brand, when three years ago the quality did not matter as much as it does today.

Mistakes made by mobile advertisers, such as cluttering the ad with text and logos, as well as showing the brand logo only through a product shot, were also pointed out in the study. It advised advertisers to place the brand name and logo on the left-side of the ad and to always have a strong call-to-action that encourages consumers to interact and engage.

Source: Tech Journal South.

                          

When you come across something on the web you want to check out later, share it to there. You’ll have a search-able, chronological list of cool stuff waiting for you.

Cool uh?