How exactly you engage with WordPress site owners depends on your business. A graphic designer could do something as simple as creating some exceptional themes with which to get the attention of websites – a theme for photographers would put your services in front of more photographers than you could probably otherwise manage in short order. An accounting application could develop a plugin that integrates with any of the eCommerce platforms on WordPress to automatically record transactions. A local, mobile app like Forecast or Highlight could develop a sidebar widget that the author or business can use to show off where they like to hang out. Moodfish could help restaurant websites feature events that suit the atmosphere of the restaurant. An analytics platform or someone working in social media could put on business WordPress dashboard stats about the performance of their marketing, website, or social networks. The point is, a little creativity and you can conceive of some way to leverage this network of nearly 100 MILLION websites on your behalf.

Making a WordPress Plugin that Works

I’ve had the privilege of spending the last few months helping FoxTranslate develop an incredible simple and powerful plugin that translates the pages of your site in to different languages. FoxTranslate’s foundation is in document translation and while they increasingly provide inexpensive transcription and related services, they are not in the business of translation software. But web site translation is not that far removed from document translation, indeed, FoxTranslate has translated far more than documents, from apps to sites, so a plugin to automate the process for businesses and site owners wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Why invest in software, a plugin, when you’re business isn’t remotely related? Consider the nature of websites likely to need translated content? Certainly global corporations who work in dozens of languages every day. More than that though, consider the language professionals, travel services, immigration sites, and lawyers who deal in such services – every one of them not only benefits from a site in the various languages in which they work, they need documents translated and transcriptions inexpensively fulfilled.

Keep it Simple

The focus of SEO Translate (get the plugin here), as the plugin is called, was on simplicity for the site owners. I’d personally simplify the WordPress user market in two camps: 1. there are the designers, developers, and hardcore WordPress users who work with the platform 2. there are the small business owners, marketers, and bloggers who do not. A simple plugin, in fact any successful product or web service, appreciates the value of being accessible to everyone. In designing your plugi consider that the great majority of webmasters don’t know CSS and PHP; they don’t understand shortcodes, and they don’t want to spend time trying to figure out how to BE a developer in order to use a plugin that enriches their site. Keep your plugin simple and invest in the settings and features that make it as simple to use as possible. If you ever hire a developer to build you a WordPress plugin and they say that you should prioritize the development of functionality that makes it easy to change, redesign, or extend the plugin, shy away – while an extensible plugin is nice, you may be doing that at the expense of a plugin that the majority would use.

Be Available

As a hardcore WordPress site developer, nothing is worse that trying a new plugin and not being able to easily provide feedback, ask questions, or show your support. Think more creatively than a basic contact link or forum for support as the tools and technology available today make is simple to manage bugs, feature requests, and interaction with customers. From ZenDesk to a Facebook Page, your users and customers should be able to connect with you in near real time. Now, it’s important to understand that that doesn’t mean you have to be available all the time. SEO Translate features uservoice, a free, or inexpensive, platform that enables an audience to review FAQs, ask questions, and vote on features and enhancements. The Facebook Page for the plugin is accessible right within the settings.

Think Outside the Box

Obviously, the plugin translates your website so it can be read in other languages. There are many ways to do this and the most popular, but least valuable, way is to dynamically recreate the pages in the language on the fly – if you’ve ever translated a page with your browser using the Google Translate option that pops up, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Yes, that translates the page for the reader but it doesn’t actually create a translated page. There is a BIG difference in that, as far as search engines are concerned, the dynamically created translation doesn’t actually exist; Google doesn’t consider your site to be available in Spanish and therefore there is nothing for a Spanish speaking audience to find through Google. Indeed, SEO Translate creates translated pages for your site; thinking beyond the box, we’re not just translating a site, we’re creating content in the respective language and helping you reach the audience in that language. Making those translated pages truly accessible requires some thinking about SEO and the developers spent time ensuring it functions with other SEO related plugins, optimizes content, and appears in your sitemap to direct crawlers to the various languages in which your site now exists.

Every good business owner, every successful entrepreneur, rock star sales professionals, and effective marketers all know that the key to their success is in delivering value. That’s all the more true of partnerships and the use of another web site to promote your business or service is partnership – you can only leverage turn to the likes of TED, NBC Sports, CNN, and tens of millions of others, by creating value for them through the publishing platform they prefer, and making it easy to benefit from the services you provide. An investment in a WordPress Theme or Plugin is not significant but the return in reaching 71,863,541 web sites is.

Related posts:

1. It isn’t SEO, it’s Performance Architecture

If not yet on the bandwagon, you should be.

I’m still figuring out Business Intelligence, what is Social Business Intelligence???

Brito recently informed me that Buddymedia, with Booz & Co., just wrapped up a fantastic study reviewing the ambitions organizations have for social media.

According to the study of Fortune 100 companies, 63% have plans to integrate social media as part of their overall marketing activities with 59% increasing their spend in social media monitoring to support that integration. Social media monitoring is the increasingly common practice of leveraging technology (a web service) to track what’s going with your brand in Facebook, twitter, and other social channels. This listening is a critical step in creating intelligence but in and of itself isn’t Social Business Intelligence (SBI).

46% of those involved in the study or are investing in the technology and data to enable actionable intelligence, best practices, with 56% citing their intent to use social media not just for advertising or customer support but consumer insights and innovation. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Social Business Intelligence is the aggregate of channels and metrics that when leveraged, provide real-time, actionable insight about and to your organization. More simply put, Social Business Intelligence can tell you what’s driving adoption, the channels that matter, a tremendous depth of profile information about customers and prospects, and the no-longer elusive ROI on time spent with social media.

Referred to as The Knowledge Management Connection and the CEO of SEO, according to Forrester’s James Kobielus, SBI is unique in it’s ability to finally provide the discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis of content and communication. In a very real way, the data revealed through SBI is the holy grail of a search engine – an accurate representation of the popularity of and trends related to a business, product, service, or organization; the CEO of SEO.

How does Social Business Intelligence Work?

As suggested above, listening to chatter on social networks is only the tip of the SBI iceberg and if your organization is only trying to figure out how to listen (or only listening), you’re missing the boat.

Today organizations spend thousands on agencies and consultants to help profile and segment their leads, prospects, and consumers. They spend thousands more on services that help identify others that match those profiles in an attempt by marketers to find people more likely to convert. An element of Social Business Intelligence depends on the fact that these profiles are readily available; and, in fact, they are. No longer do organizations need to run surveys, demographic reports, and studies to profile their customers, SBI technologies do it for you in minutes at a fraction of the cost. For without that profile data, insight to social media is limited to only listening and reporting. Social marketing becomes social intelligence because we’ve moved beyond listening to an understanding of WHO engages your brand.

But it doesn’t end with who, where, and what. There is something to the business end of SBI and it is the most valuable and critical.  Having learned who supports your business, ultimately you want to know how they do so.  Are they resulting in revenue and if so how much?  Are they referring other customers and if so how?  Are they making disparaging comments that actually impact your business?  Social Business Intelligence closes thesocial marketing to conversion loop to provide insight to the ROI of everything in which your organization might be involved.

Let’s paint that picture more clearly…

Social Media & Marketing

• What: Content – tweet, post, share
• Where: Channel – twitter, email, facebook

Social Intelligence

• What
• Where
• Who: John Smith from Austin, TX who has a Klout (influence) score of 65, income of $200k, 3 kids, and works for Dell

Social Business Intelligence

• What
• Where
• Who
• How or Why: Resulting in a conversion, RSVP, donation, referral, criticism, etc.

Notice I mentioned email up there?  It’s a bit of a misnomer to think of SBI as only applying to Twitter and Facebook.  Social Business Intelligence listens to everything, helps you identify who, and provides insight to the impact those people have on your bottom line.  And yes, it’s about more than tracking the performance of your marketing through a channel, it can be leveraged to provide insight to customer service, recruiting, supply chain management, operations, and more.  Dion Hinchcliffe has pulled together an amazing list of considerations with regard to the impact and strategic use of SBI.

The point is, the fact that ONLY 56% of Fortune 100 companies intend to use social media for consumer insights and innovation is disturbing and if you aren’t in that segment, applying Social Business Intelligence across your entire organization, well, call me so I don’t invest in your future.

Most important is that the technology being developed today puts all of that information in one place. Social Business Intelligence isn’t this conceptual analytics idea but real innovations that exist right now to make it ridiculously easy to know what’s going on.  IBM has invested millions in SBI and Jeff Schick, IBM’s VP of Social Computing Software explains best why this needs your attention:

“The idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative [at IBM]… Social analytics is playing a huge role in not just making recommendations of content, people and communities, but in recommending what an organization needs do to better its financial results.”

Influencing Me

My take on the whole space is that it’s still too complicated, costly, and confusing. It took me the length of a significant post just to introduce to you the fundamentals. Call me crazy but the technology, enabled by web services in the past few years, makes it such that this intelligence should be readily available at the click of a button. For the past few months, I’ve been building just that in GroupCharger.

To first simplify the entire concept of Social Business Intelligence, we’ve developed for your organization a single stat, a GroupScore that accounts for all this data we’ve reviewed to give you a sense for how you’re doing. From one period to the next, your GroupScore will expose, simply, the impact of your time spent in email and social media while working on marketing, customer service, support, and the product experience. In a very practical fashion, GroupScore is the automation of the Net Promoter Score for your organization, distilling the impact of promoters and detractors on your bottom line. In a very tactical sense, your GroupScore makes it easy to understand if you should focus on LinkedIn or Facebook.

More than that, we’ve focused on making this intelligence inexpensive and readily available. It takes minutes to run the report and includes those customer profiles many pay so heavily today to acquire.

We’re still in the early development of this science so I welcome you to try it out and share with me your critical feedback. If praiseworthy, I don’t mind hearing that too.

No related posts.

The goal? “To create an environment that encourages startups, developers, marketers, UI/UXers, college students, recent graduates, investors and tech enthusiasts to come check out Austin.”

If you don’t live in Austin and have considered visiting, this is the time. Austin companies are rolling out the red carpet to show off the Austin startup scene (one of the greatest reasons so many are fleeing Silicon Valley for the Texas hill country). Just a few of the supporters and participants include Infochimps, Austinpreneur Joshua Baer, Twilio, from the city, Austin’s economic developer of emerging technology, Eve Richter, the Dachis Group’s Bryan Menell, Damon Clinkscales, and the true incubators of Austin’s startup community Cospace and Conjunctured.

Marketing Clique’s David Vogelpohl and myself will be hosting an event to force an end to the famous startup struggle between developers and marketers with shotguns at dawn. All of this made possible by Jacqueline Hughes.

Major events throughout the week include Capital Factory’s invite only Demo Day (request an invite here), The Next Fest, WeStart, Startup Crawl which is just one of the ways to catch a beer throughout the week with Austin Tech Happy Hour and Big Data Love a taste of your other options.

If considering the week, check out the schedule on Plancast and RSVP to the events you intend to join.

No related posts.

I’m not sure I can add more than what ThinkBrilliant has so effectively done there.

Also referred to as Info Art or Data Visualization, the means of communication is becoming increasingly popular as we look simplify the growing amount of data at our disposal.

Marketing with Infographics

More than a form of engaging content, infographics are incredibly viral; easily resulting in hundreds of tweets, likes, shares, and links. Your work with infographics needs to recognize that broad impact the graphics will have on your brand, SEO, social media channels, and customers. Valuing them for only one purpose will disappoint you.

As a result, planning an ROI in an infographic is difficult, perhaps more so than a blog post, given the richer nature of the content. I’d suggest setting a benchmark against which to plan the effectiveness of infographics on your behalf. Most important in measuring the return on an investment in graphics is valuing the social and link equity built on behalf of your business; arguably, more than the traffic and leads from the effort.

• Links - If you don’t benefit from 20-30 quality links (PR of 4 or more) then go back to the drawing board. Evaluate your topic, the quality of the design, and your outreach on behalf of your infographic.
• Social – Assuming your site effectively leverages Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and other social networks to enable your audience to share content, shoot for 400-500 social instances on your behalf.
• Traffic - Measure this over a long term. In the first few days, you’ll experience triple digit growth in traffic to your site. Let the elation at your success die down! That traffic is of far less value to you than that which you’ll continue to receive over time once the viral excitement for your shiny new object wanes and more qualified search volume sends contextually relevant users to your site. I’ve seen long term, sustained increases in new visits as high as 25% (though, keep in mind, I work with startups that are often working with very little base traffic). Set a number reasonable to your business; 1-2% points isn’t unreasonable for a large site.
• Leads – Certainly, dependent on your average daily volume and expectations for traffic, leads are the most variable of this benchmark. I’d set it around 50-100 and see how your first few infographics deliver.

I made a very important point there. You MUST promote your infographic as though it were a press release if you expect to truly benefit from the creative work done. There’s the catch. Infographics come at a much greater cost than blog posts or even press releases supported by an agency (or at least, they should have a greater cost). Involved in your infographic are researchers, designers, social marketing experts, and, frankly, the relationships you’ve developed with your industry and the online community at large that determine the effectiveness of your infographic. You are developing an infographic to connect with your audience, constituents, and partners in so many different ways such that you might benefit in so many ways. That isn’t as simple as whipping up a graphic.

Developing an Infographic (and how much will it cost?)

Don’t let me scare you off, if you want to dip your toe in the water and sample what an infographic can mean for your business, you can find designers (overseas) who can create exceptional designs for a few hundred dollars.

I just heard a great sigh of frustration out of every U.S. based designer, agency, and social marketing service provider

Yes, you CAN get an infographic done for a few hundred dollars. But let me put my designer friends at ease by pointing out that I’m not at all encouraging that approach. In the interest of full disclosure as you figure out how to get your done, the truth is, you can do it on the cheap.

In reality, a quality infographic, well researched, and supported socially, virally, and with influencers, will run a couple thousand dollars. What you need to be sure you are getting though, when evaluating designers and agencies who all quote a few thousand bucks, is that ongoing promotion of the work they’ve done on your behalf through major sites that love infographics (Mashable comes to mind). What you are paying for is great design at about $100 an hour, research, AND social marketing and PR to attain those numbers we benchmarked above.

Compared to the cost of a great quality blog post ($75), rest assured, you are going to be challenged convincing the purse strings at your organization to open up. Keep in mind the results to expect, contrast them to what you’ve been doing through your blog, and share with stakeholders the fact that many great startups have been built on the shoulders of amazing infographics (see Mint.com or Flowtown).

Once you’ve found a designer with which you are excited, expect the work to take a couple weeks and heavy dependence on you to help them understand your marketing strategy, tone, objectives, and industry.

Where do I find a great infographics designer?

Take a look at Jess3, Column Five Media, Hyperakt.com, or Dachis Group’s XPLANE. You can find fantastic designers in your own town or through design communities easily found online but keep in mind the indirect benefits you are looking for in a great infographic designer: will their work reach influencers?

I’ve been pleased with the work done through teams at an agency but with the right brand, internal marketing resources, and influence, you can probably accomplish as much yourself simply sourcing the design.

Long a fan of crowdsourcing, there is an interesting trend in the data visualization community that will be fun to watch. Just as logo design was impacted by the reach of the internet through Crowdspring and 99designs, you are going to be tempted to chase the cheap, almost crowdsourced services. Be careful, infographics design should be an intimate part of your marketing plan and the research, design, and social support of the work done with infographics demands more than a few hundred dollars thrown at a spot buy or contest. Of course, the same argument should be made of your brand and logo but then…

Introducing Visual.ly

Where working with infographics efficiently becomes more intriguing is in that, technically, you are working with data; and data, can be easily presented through charts, graphs, and icons. Charts, graphs, and icons can be whipped up in Powerpoint can’t they?

You’re going to love Visual.ly
And I’m hanging my head in shame at how poorly my transition just painted this very cool service.

Visual.ly is building three main segments to their business. Today, for the most part, it’s a search engine for existing infographics. Its scoring and ranking features create an engaging and effective experience for those trying to find infographics that reflect a dataset or design they have in mind. More, the search engine is a great resource for finding great designers. It aspires to be a source data from research and data oriented organizations, the government, and non-profits. Ultimately, where you might turn for the bulk of the research to be done on behalf of your own.

Therein lies the promise of some efficiency in developing infographics. The legwork you need to do today is best accomplished through Google, endlessly searching for reports, case studies, and stats to share. Visual.ly hopes to make that easier. But more than that, Visual.ly is doing some amazing work developing a web-based platform that actually creates the infographics for you; no graphic design experience or designer necessary.

You heard me right, they are exploring the possibilities in dynamically, automatically creating infographics. In minutes.

Sounds amazing no? And it will be. But not without it’s limitations (I suspect). Expect that the infographics to be available through their web based tools are either generic or of a structured format – there is no designer involved (other than initially as they set up the format) so if you are looking for something unique, you’ll have to stick with the professionals.

Don’t get me wrong, the promise is still terribly exciting. Exceptionally designed infographics for straightforward datasets and ideas (And there is no reason Visual.ly can’t accomplish these beautiful designs), at a much lower cost, enables us (you) to allocate dollars that would have otherwise been spent there to designers and agencies for more creative and unique designs. We have a few months to wait before the real power of Visual.ly is available to us but know that the founding team is comprised of the team behind the amazing work done with Mint’s blog.

We’re not without a taste. Using their Twitter Visualizer, a web based infographic developer they’ve already made available, I whipped up this, in about 5 minutes.

Pretty cool! Apparently I am a geek obsessed with work while Shawn Collins plays video games when he should be working on the next Affiliate Summit. And Shashi B is a strong connection between us.
Thanks to @AffiliateTip for being my guinea pig.

No related posts.

Years ago I built my first store on the Yahoo Store platform. I was so frustrated with learning a completely different language and framework, there, that when I had my first run in with fraud and dealt with the FBI before closing that venture, I promised never to work with anything complex again. Since, I’ve set up a handful of e-Commerce sites via WordPress; you know I’m a passionate evangelist of WordPress as a CMS for any site and reasoned that the extensibility, for eCommerce, would be a great thing. While I’m still a big fan of plugins like WP-Commerce, the complexity of a store really begs for simplicity in administration where ever else possible.

It’s with that experience in mind, and a new opportunity before me, that I dove headfirst in to an exploration of Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, eBay ProStores, Amazon, and Volusion. Determined to find an easier platform, and a huge fan of web services and cloud computing, my new direction emboldened me to persevere with an in depth investigation.

Let me jump ahead to the conclusion and share here that that emboldened perseverance didn’t last long

e-Commerce Provider Requirements

I’m not going to point any fingers at the unreasonableness present in e-Commerce provider feature lists. I understand what providers are trying to accomplish for folks with those lists; if you want to know what we do, here’s the list of the few thousand bells and whistles associated with our platform. At the end of the day, we merchants (or rather, me potential merchant), have a brief list of requirements and only want to map that list to your capabilities. Here’s my list:

1. Easily customizable, templated designs
2. White label experience – my domain, no cobranding
3. Search optimized architecture and flexibility to change everything related to SEO
4. Mobile accessible (mobile app is a huge plus)
5. Integrated with Facebook: Connect, Like, Store page
6. Catalog distributed through shopping engines & eBay
7. Credit card, PayPal, and G. Checkout (is that necessary to point out?)
8. Discounts, coupons, gift certificates, shipping deals, etc.
9. Product options
10. Reviews and comments
11. Inventory and return management
12. Site search
13. Tax management
14. Reporting and Google Analytics integration
15. Email marketing integration and CRM
16. Recommendation intelligence
17. Affiliate tracking (or better: white label affiliate platform)
18. Accounting integration

You may have your own unique needs and admittedly, I’ve probably overlooked something, but that’s what I have in mind and I don’t think there is anything there unreasonable.

Now, take a moment and try to figure out exactly who offers that and at what cost; which of those features are built in vs. add-ons; which are truly available and not just listed because, of course you can add a Facebook Like script to your product pages. What is really a part of their platform? I’ll give you a day. It’s taken me longer than that and I’ve just about given up.

No, I’m not going to be critical of the e-Commerce provider’s sales experiences, but in the era of dynamic web sites where decision tree analysis is easy and friendly, I should be able to indicate what I want and wait moments while you spit out whether or not you can cut it, exactly what I need from you, and how much it will cost.

Without that, here is my first attempt, an attempt upon which I will build, to highlight the feature variations between e-Commerce providers.

e-Commerce Vendor Comparison

Could also be called, the differences between Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion because that’s where I got frustrated and called it quits

Before you read my matrix let me be clear that this is NOT accurate. I couldn’t figure out whether or not these providers offer all of these features. What I’ve done is map what I could find from each and tried to understand whether or not the same was available elsewhere.  I FULLY expect that this is complete and ask the providers to help me clean this up.  Beyond Volusion, Shopify, and BigCommerce, I do want to plot what’s available from Magento, eBay ProStores, Amazon, and others.  I’m just exhausted.

By the way, *stars* refer to updates I’ve received from the provider; those features are available but were not discovered through my original review.

Providers, contact me here for corrections, I will be diligent about ensuring this is accurate. I realize you may not appreciate what I’m trying to do here but small business owners trying to figure out how to sell online have an unreasonable experience before them. Let’s make it easier.

Everyone else, if you want to add a feature or entirely new provider, let me know

My Conclusion OR Why Providers Should Care

Even though it sucked trying to go through the BigCommerce feature list with a fine toothed comb, that chart (as of June 24, 2011) speaks for itself. Though I can’t tell if BigCommerce has blog infrastructure integrated with its platform, it seems to do everything else I need. Shopify is a close second because it does what I want and I think it’s safe to presume most of those missing features are part of the platform (they are pretty standard features); besides, their App Store (integrating 3rd party tools and features) is brilliant. Their shortcoming? The apparent lack of any significant marketing capabilities. Volusion’s built in affiliate platform, if I’m right in reading what that is, is a HUGE advantage but they seem to lack in many other cases.

Again, I fully suspect my investigation is incomplete, but that’s what their websites tell me; I shouldn’t have to jump on the phone with a sales person to figure that out and I’m certainly not motivated by a free trial just to find out that provider doesn’t do what I want – that’s the information with which I’m making a decision. Please, share with me what’s missing and let’s help everyone make the right decision.

Update: I received a great note from Shopify (three cheers for them) and revised the matrix accordingly. The original post remains otherwise unchanged as I’d offer (and encourage of Shopify) that my original review is still a reflection of the challenge store owners have in evaluating each provider.

Update: Just heard from Volusion so we have a full report of features available from the three.  As I’d done with Shopify, the features updated by Volusion are flagged differently so as to distinguish the provider features obviously available from those according to their update.

No related posts.

As an industry, we’ve invented the Net Promoter Score, brand monitoring services, The Relational Ethnography Approach (ask people), technologies to scour blog comments, agents to track buzz, and an endless list of methodologies to try to get at the answer; but, each are flawed in various ways and, frankly, none provide raw numbers with which to explore the retention, engagement, and conversion rates of this coveted audience. That’s where Google Analytics comes in, and while it has flaws of it’s own (which I’ll cover), setting up this report is incredibly simple and relatively reliable as a benchmark for the impact your organization is having on the word of mouth marketing of your business.

Setting Up Google Analytics To Track WOM

Step 1: Get your hands dirty with Google Analytics’ Segments

Segments are the little secret in Google Analytics. So easily overlooked in the upper right hand corner of your reports, I’m not surprised by how few marketers realize they exist. Get to know them, Segments turn the hum-drum platform into an incredibly powerful reporting tool.

How?
Where the reports with which you’re familiar, from the left hand navigation in Analytics, get you insight to traffic source, content, goal conversion, etc., the entire data set can’t be sliced and diced. If you want to know the conversion rate of new visitors through organic search from Texas, it can’t be done. There.

Click on the drop down that defaults to All Visits next to “Advanced Segments” in the upper right and welcome to a whole new world. By default, you can slice your entire dashboard and all reports by organic search traffic, direct visits, mobile traffic, visits that convert, or a host of other options. Those default options alone give tremendous insight to important online channels and audiences on which you want to focus your attention.

Step 2: Create a new advanced segment

Further buried from view, take a look to the left side of that set of advanced segments that drop down and you’ll see a link to “Create a new advanced segment.” That’s where we’re going. I’ll wait for you….

Here, on the left, you are going to see the two distinct variables to consider. In layman’s terms dimensions are the slices to your reporting that are directly related to the user. Dimensions include things like source, browser, country of origin, content consumed, search performed, or products evaluated. Metrics, on the other hand, are the things they actually do: time spent, whether or not they converted, unique page views, and exists.

Combined with the AND / OR statements that segments use to combine these variable and the possibilities for slicing and dicing your reporting become almost endless. Truly, many other analytics platforms promote the fact that they can very closely track user groups, perhaps even tracking a single user, Google Analytics can too.

Step 3: What are the right Dimensions for measuring Word of Mouth?

Notice I referred to Dimensions and not Metrics; we want to segment, as closely as possible, the audience to our site referred by word of mouth. Those users are distinguished by their source, keyword choice, and type rather than what they do on the site. For that reason, our creation of this segment is simplified in that we can ignore the blue Metrics box.

Before I get to the variables I use, a word on how they work
Simply, you drag the Dimension or Metric you want factored to the grey dotted box that says “dimension or metric.” To the right of that, a couple drop down boxes will appear to help you define the Condition of the Value of your variable. That uses a lot of buzz words but it really is the most concise way I can come up with to explain it; essentially, condition is something like matches exactly or contains while the value is the data associated with that variable (source might be twitter.com; goal starts might be 10 or 1203). You’ll get the hang of it by just playing with it.

Traffic Sources – Keyword

The first Dimension by which we want to slice our Google Analytics reports to get a sense for word of mouth marketing is Keyword. Find Traffic Sources under Dimensions and drag Keyword from beneath there to the right.

Here’s what to evaluate for your business. Search volume to your business consists of types of keywords that we, generally, refer to as brand terms and generic terms. They are exactly what they sound like, brand terms include searches that include your brand name. By the very nature of those searches, that user MUST be familiar with your brand. So our Condition is that the Keyword Contains some concise reference to your brand. That might be “Facebook” if you are Facebook; it might simply be “Ford” if you are Ford Motor Company since Ford is the reference to the brand in that company name that depends on awareness of the brand.

We’re done. With that. Beneath that section, click ‘Add “or” statement’ because we want to identify users that visited your site through a brand term OR…

Traffic Sources – Source

Stick with the same section within Dimensions and drag Source to the right to create our second variable. Set Condition to Matches exactly and our Value to (direct).

We’ve just asked Google to identify only users that visit the site directly. They’ve typed in the domain name or had it bookmarked. Simply, they have to be aware of your brand.

Wait…. ‘they had it bookmarked?‘
Yes, that is what I said and that does mean some of those users AREN’T new. They’ve already visited the site so they can’t possibly, in this case, have been referred by word of mouth. That’s exactly right. We’re going to further segment our data to define that fact.

First, we have another source I like to include. Add another OR statement so we can get…

Traffic Sources – Twitter.com

Again from Dimensions > Traffic Sources, drag Twitter.com to the right to create our third variable. Set Condition to Matches exactly and our Value to twitter.com.

Think about the volume you receive from twitter. While you might be tweeting about your business, updates, and discounts, visits from YOUR followers, for the most part, have already visited your site. Those visits aren’t influenced by word of mouth marketing but Twitter is otherwise an incredibly viral engine. Your followers will retweet your posts while existing users and fans tweet their own updates about your business; that’s word of mouth marketing.

If we can just exclude your existing audience from the traffic referred than any visits to your site via twitter are inherently a reflection of word of mouth.

Ok Twitter makes sense, why not Facebook?
In truth, both Twitter and Facebook should be monitored but Facebook is likely diluted; by advertising you might be doing. While Facebook does result in new visits to your site through Likes, Shares, and comments on News, you probably also advertise on Facebook (or should at least try it) and that advertising is certainly not word of mouth. We CAN set up Google Analytics to account for that but I’m going to leave that for a future post as this is already getting long. Simply, if you don’t run Facebook ads, add it to your segment as we’ve done with Twitter; if you DO run Facebook ads, you should have UTM tracking in place and we’d use that to exclude that traffic.

As you’ve already reasoned, the flaw in our segment so far is that it can include existing users. That’s easily solved with the AND statement. Click the ‘Add “and” statement’ and we’ll grab what we need (be careful! It’s easy to mistakenly grab OR instead of AND).

Traffic Sources – Twitter.com

Above Traffic Sources, still within Dimensions, is a variable for Visitor. Open that up, we want to grab Visitor Type. Our Condition for Visitor Type is that the Value Does not match exactly; Returning Visitor.

Combined with the variables already chosen, we segmented our reports to include ONLY new visitors direct to the site, through a brand search, or via twitter. Essentially, those that were in some way referred to the site.

When you’re done, your screen should look like this:

At the bottom of the Create Segment screen you have to name the segment. You’ll be surprised how often you miss this and get frustrated because you can’t save the report. Before you do that, you may want to click Test Segment on the right to make sure GA is seeing the data you expect.

Step 4: Does it make sense for your business?

I thought about sub-titling this section, “Is that all? Is it really tracking word of mouth?” but decided to go the other way because, as we discussed at the start, there is no panacea for tracking word of mouth marketing. So no, this is NOT exactly what you want but let me be crystal clear; nothing is. There is no report, service, or vendor in existence that can accurately measure word of mouth. What you want, is a barometer and in that regard, this is pretty damn close. I’ve been using this segment for just about as long as it’s been technically possible and it’s more accurate than anything else I’ve explored.

The real question is, is it right for your business?

1. Is your website indexed well by Google? Failure in that regard will pretty significantly dilute what you get out of this
2. Keep in mind that the volume you see through Twitter and Facebook is affected by how much you use them and the size of your audiences there. We have defined the segment that reflects word of mouth volume BUT if you don’t use Twitter at all or you use it disproportionately more than everything else you are doing and it will misrepresent things.

That said, what you want (and really all you can get) is a barometer; a fairly accurate measure of the impact of your business (your sales organization, marketing, user experience, etc.) on word of mouth marketing. In this regard, this will give you that benchmark from which to measure and compare the impact of what you’re doing in spades.

So, where’s the flaw in this?
What we can’t yet measure (or rather plot would be more accurate) is when your traditional marketing campaigns take place. Perhaps you run TV, radio, or print advertising? When that happens, your direct traffic and branded search volume will go up (we hope).

I just revealed both the flaw in these word of mouth analytics and a significant reporting opportunity for another day…. yes, when you run traditional advertising, your direct traffic and branded search volume. Consider the possibilities

Step 5: Impress your boss

Or, get giddy with GA

Having applied the report, either from the creation screen or with that drop down we reviewed at the top, start asking all kinds of questions to help validate the data.

1. When did the redesign of your site launch?
2. Did you drop an email campaign or newsletter?
3. When did that series of blog posts start?
4. What was the impact we made to our customer service department?
5. Was there a new sales training program put in place?
6. When did our print campaign launch or change? Keep in mind that your direct traffic is only going to change when the campaign does so I don’t mind that this report can’t exclude offline advertising; when something changes, you can identify it, if nothing is changing, you are in somewhat of a baseline from which changes in the data must be affected by WOM

All of this, and, more, is easily plotted against your new dataset. Take a look. This is a simple (real) example that highlights two clear changes to the business and the impact those changes had on word of mouth marketing. In the first case, the company came out of beta; certainly cause for everyone to say in passing to a friend, “hey, did you know such-and-such is out of beta? You should check it out.”

Secondly, a popular series of blog posts were started. You can see the initial post and the impact on word of mouth, most likely at that point through twitter. More interesting is the ongoing impact those posts had for the business, as word of the posts spread.

Most marketers, and almost assuredly ALL CEOs, neglect this data. In the case of the blog posts, it might leave many questioning why you should bother creating content. Sure, you convinced the board to give you a budget to create content for SEO and now they are wondering why, with few conversions from that content, the investment is worthwhile; the answer is, word of mouth marketing. In this case, we’ve almost doubled new visits to the site; visits that would have otherwise been ignored or misunderstood as mere direct traffic or more brand searches.

More, compare segments. Grab your Word of Mouth segment and Total Visitors and see how traffic to the site through word of mouth marketing performs relative to total visits. Don’t be the least bit surprised if your conversion rate, time spent, or other metrics are significantly different.

Now ask, what do you do about it?

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From there, the industry was thrilled to learn that MailChimp was adding similar insight, called Social Pro, to their email marketing platform. In the span of a few months, we had gone from very little data about our audience’s social profiles, to a goldmine of insight about who, what, when, how, etc. The marketing world rejoiced.

Then it all came tumbling down.
The company behind the scenes, RapLeaf, caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal (and others). The work being done at RapLeaf was game changing for the marketing world and showered with praise and scrutiny. That scrutiny, and the privacy scandal that rocked Facebook, led to significant changes in the RapLeaf platform (you can read about it here), changes that left marketers and agencies scrambling for alternative data sources as the projects underway at Flowtown and MailChimp were shelved.

From the Ashes Rose A Better Solution

Coming out of beta today is a service that “unlocks” that goldmine of data in both social profiles and email subscriber lists. And what they can tell you about the world of social networking is exceptional.

Provide the email addresses and social network IDs for your customers and Fliptop profiles name, age, gender, company, occupation, location and all the key social networks that person is on. From there they track new signups, clicks, and engagement across all the subscription channels; providing a single dashboard of social engagement with your business. More (yes more), Fliptop tracks every post, tweet and email campaign, measuring for you reach, engagement and conversion like never before possible.

Out of beta and awesome, if you have any interest in your social marketing beyond what you can learn from Google Analytics and Hoot Suite, check it out; you can try it free. Plans are tailored for users of every type, from small business to agency. Let me know what you think.

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