It is common knowledge that everyone considers Chris Brogan  a nice guy. I’ve met him a few times and I think he is a good dude and has a good sense of humor. (But what do I really know?  He could go home and kick puppies for a hobby.) Also it is no secret to how he built his social media footprint. He consistently put out content, he commented a ton of blogs, he interacted with people on Twitter, and he shared himself and his time. He was an early adopter, executing this strategy in a lot of spaces before others were and he has done well for himself with it. (Sure it is more complex than that but this isn’t an an analysis of how he built his footprint.)

This strategy is pretty much the basis for most social media strategies; grab any social media book off Amazon and it will probably have some version of that strategy as a roadmap to success. The problem with this strategy is that it can easily scale for a medium to large business but for individuals or small businesses it isn’t easy to do. Watching Chris work though this has led me to see a few main themes:

Eventually working hard and working smart aren’t enough. Through Chris’s blog we have seen him touch on this as he has had to adjust how people can reach and contact him. Also we have seen him set expectations on if and when he is going to reply to you and the best way for you to ensure that he does.

With personal brands and small businesses you eventually reach a point where no matter how you improve your processes eventually you can’t do everything you want or need to do. For larger businesses it is easy to hire more people to scale this but when it is just you it probably is not that simple. Eventually you have to figure out where you can use other people to power your small business or personal brand. Can they act as a filter for you to maximize your time? How much does help dilute what you are doing and how much will it enhance it? By giving up some control and responsibility it can help you accomplish more but at the same time you have to prevent the help from changing your voice.

When people or customers have an imagined relationship with you it is hard for them to understand why it changed. With Chris being active on commenting and interacting he has established relationships with a lot of people and turned them into advocates of his personal brand. I would assume a large majority of these relationships were created over an exchange on Twitter, interactions on a blog post, or even an e-mail exchange. However over a period of time as Chris probably participated in these interactions less and less due to the sheer amount of relationships that he has created. (It is unreasonable to expect him to do so.)

This ties in a little bit with my previous point about not being able to do everything. Eventually the amount of blogs you can read and comment on, the amount of Twitter interactions, or the amount of email exchanges you can have becomes so time-consuming that you can’t handle it. It isn’t that you are ignoring that relationship you cultivated but you may not be able to interact every time that other person wants you to. In their mind, while they know you have grown and expanded, they still can’t wrap their head around how that impacts your relationship with them. This can turn a prior advocate bitter quickly.

Your success is also your downfall. When you start with people as peers in this process and eventually surpass them this impacts the dynamic between you and them. When you do have problems responding or don’t respond as much these people quickly feel that you think you are better than them when that isn’t the case. It is just an issue with time. As a person, things haven’t changed. You are still just as nice, just as caring, but the circumstances around you have changed dramatically.

When you have social media growth in your personal brand or for your small business it is a rough adjustment for people who you interact with to make and it isn’t the easiest thing for a single person or small business owner to wrap their heads around. At some point you have to make a move where you completely change how you interact and how you approach it, when that time comes it usually isn’t welcomed by the people you have interacted with over the last few years. I think this is a huge grey area that there aren’t clear rules for and watching Chris deal with it might help us determin the right and wrong way to proceed when individuals and small businesses get there.

Do you think there is an easy way to scale?

Related Articles:

• Trust Agents Review
• Inactivity on Twitter
• The Paid Posting Debates Makes Its Return
• On Moving To The Cloud
• My Review of Crush It
• When should you start social media engagement?
• On Google Buzz and the move towards better aggregation
• My Favorite WordCamp Boston Presentations
• My WordCamp Ignite Session
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II

Immediately I turned to the passenger sitting next to me, a middle-aged woman who was traveling with her husband and showed her the text, the couple wanted to know where it was from? I explained to them it was from the service where I booked my flight from and that when you book through them you could elect to receive alerts about your trip. The wife said, “Well how do you know that is right the Captain just said it would be only 30 minutes?”

That got me thinking. I had what was essentially a primary source just tell me information about my flight. (The captain.) And I decided to ignore that source and believe a secondary source that came in via text message. (Orbitz) Why did I do that? Was it the medium that it was delivered? Was it me being cynical? Did one give me the answer I wanted to hear?

The first reason I believed Orbitz over the Captain is based on past performance. I have flown a lot in my lifetime and every time I have been given an estimated delay time it was always off by at least 45 minutes. “We’ll be leaving in 30 minutes” has turned into hours on more than one occasion. This information was always taken directly from the airline. (I know these are “estimates” but on more than one occasion it seemed like the times were given more appeasement than anything.)

Orbitz has never given me wrong information.

I think that the second reason had to do with the medium. Automatically when I get a short burst of information electronically, with no opinion attached to it, I believe it because this is the medium I deal in most often. (I should know better.)  Hearing a voice over a PA system no longer outranks straight data to me and I am not sure if that is good or bad.

Eventually we took off, 35 minutes after the Captain announced we would be on the runway for half an hour and 85 minutes earlier that what Orbitz said. I guess maybe I need to reconsider the value I place on each source of information.

Is your evaluation of information colored by past experience, the medium that delivers it, or other factors?

Related Articles:

• Should We Expect More From Social Media Conferences?

This week I finally sat down and did something about my inefficiencies. I combined, reorganized, and found myself moving a lot of my content to the cloud. (I know, I know, “the cloud” is marketing lingo.) Here is what I did:

E-Mail- I had five e-mail accounts going to three different sources. Two to different web mail accounts and three to my desktop e-mail client. While I had alerts coming into my browser from the online clients I recognized that having these three different sources for email was a complete waste. I decided to move all my e-mail into my Gmail account because I was starting to use Google Buzz a little more, I have a Palm Pre which links with Google products fairly well, and I wanted to get my stored e-mails off of my computer.

Concerns:

Backing my content up- Of course I am afraid that I could run into data loss or have my account arbitrarily deleted. Not having my data on my computer and on my backup drive does scare me a bit. I have been a customer of Backupify since they launched and felt okay with moving all my e-mail to the cloud because of it.

Signatures- One of the features I like about my desktop client is the ability to assign signatures to my various e-mail accounts. Gmail only allows for one signature, but there is a great browser extension in Wisestamp that allows for me to create multiple e-mail signatures for Gmail.

Bookmarks- I have used Xmarks for a long time and have always had a Delicious account. I realized that most of the time when I was bookmarking items they became a mess if I was putting them to Xmarks (I often didn’t organize these into folders). I decided that I should just move everything to Delicious and use that as my main bookmarking source. Besides making me organize my bookmarks better I can share this as content through various social media outlets.

Documents- I haven’t made the transition to Google Docs or anything like that. I am a slave to Microsoft Office products and it will be that way for the foreseeable future. One change I did make though is how I store these items. I have begun to use Dropbox (this is the only referral link I have ever used, when you sign up for free I get more storage for free) more and more as a data backup solution and as a replacement for my flash drive, as well as a way to share large files with my clients. Instead of using three different services: backup, file sharing device, and portable file storage I now have one tool to manage.

What tools are you using to make yourself more efficient?

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• My Favorite WordCamp Boston Presentations
• My WordCamp Ignite Session
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part I

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Gary speak at events before and in general I love his passion and energy. The book was a quick and enjoyable read. After finishing it  I  think “Crush It!” is one of the better books to recommend to people who don’t understand the power of social media and aren’t very technical. It is a great way for people to understand the power of social media and to wrap their heads around some of the general concepts as well briefly learning about some of the tools. For people well versed in social media I wouldn’t call this a must read, most of us are pretty familiar with his story and the general concepts he lays out, but being such a short book it is very easy to digest and you can easily get through it in one sitting.  For me it was more like a motivational book, I wouldn’t call it detail rich when it comes to the technology he uses or specific strategy.

I really enjoy that Gary has such a strong personal narrative and I think how he shares his story builds a lot of credibility with readers learning about this space. After reading the book I understand how he uses the technology and I am eager to read more from Gary. Personally for me I look forward to his future works and hope to glean some details of how he is applying strategy for other businesses. To Gary’s credit he didn’t use the same old social media examples we see in just about every book, there was no mention of Dell, Will It Blend, or the other traditional case studies that have become so played out. (This is a major pet peeve of mine.) Gary actually references a lot of different people that have taken control of their niche, which I found refreshing. I also like that Gary empowers the reader to actually search for how to use tools and other available information about their potential personal branding strategies. He is right that there is so much available content out there we should be taking advantage of it.

This is a small detail that I have a problem with. We know that Gary has some tight ties with Tumblr and that he moved his site to that platform within the last year. But the way he presents Tumblr in his book reads like he has been on it for a few years. He really pushes the platform hard but making it sound like there is a little more history between him and the platform… well… It just feels a little disingenuous to me. I have to wonder how much more there is to that relationship than Gary just using the platform?

Overall I would recommend Crush It to anyone that is interested in Social Media and I would call it a must read to skeptics and beginners.

What did you think of Crush It?

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• On Google Buzz and the move towards better aggregation
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• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part I
• Ten must have Facebook applications for your business?
• Working on Local Search

The reasoning behind waiting until their respective launches was because they didn’t want to tip their hand to competitors (a pretty logical fear) and they wanted to launch “everything at once” (not a strategy I agree with). While each situation had a few additional layers to them there were a few main points I made with each company.

1) If you launch a website and a product to an audience of zero what do you really gain?

With the established company they had a mailing list that they could send out a release to and they planned on a typical PR push but they were missing out with connecting to their audience on social media. Imagine if they had a social media base when they launched this revolutionary product? Brand advocates sharing the news of the release would spread the word tenfold. For the startups they could have already created some sort of thought leadership or relationships within social media that would amplify their launch.

We are all very close to our work and always believe what we do and what we make is important. But without a mechanism to share what we do or make that passion stops at the doorway of your company.

2) You can display knowledge without tipping your hand.

While you are working on the everlasting gobstopper you can build your brand without revealing the details of the gobstopper. Within an industry you can talk about general topics, you can strategically plan your content to work for your launch. This can even work to your advantage by creating an editorial calendar ahead of time and building a case for the problem you are going to solve.

3) Social media isn’t a switch you can flip.

Research and planning before you engage is a must if you want your use of the various available tools to be effective. Also just because you start to use a tool doesn’t mean you are going to have an audience overnight, well unless you are Bill Gates. Just like the products they are developing or the businesses they are preparing to launch, time needs to be reserved for planning and development.

When doing engagement before you feel your company or product is ready you don’t have to use all the tools that you are planning to once you fully launch. I think that is where a lot of companies get lost is that they struggle to see how they can use specific tools before the actual launch of their product as opposed to breaking down the possible content they can produce pre launch and post launch.

Related Articles:

• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part I
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• Getting Rich With the Niche: My Presentation For Blog World Expo

I found a lot of these posts short sighted and not looking at the potential of Google Buzz or what it could mean.

For years I have talking about social media aggregation and saying it was the next big thing. Of course each year I would say this I would proclaim that next year would be the big year for social media aggregation. Basically I have been wrong since 2007 in my proclamations. (Hey I’m human.) I think with Google Buzz we are seeing a few things coming together and also the groundwork being laid for future innovation.

To recap why I think it is so important. We have seen and are going to continue to see more and more communities spring up around the products we buy, our social groups, the organizations we belong to, our professional development, and on a recreational level. Most studies show that the average person can handle being part of three online platforms and anything after that because a tad overwhelming. Now that we are pretty much required to join more than three platforms how we manage and interact with them is going to be important. With Google Buzz, Google has taken a large step of moving our social media communities into an interface that we are already frequently using, e-mail.

The development of Buzz allows us to interact with these different social groups through one platform that we already spend time with. We can monitor the people in our social graph from one point and discover new and important content based off the Google recommendations. Is this revolutionary for most of us already using the various tools available? Not in the least. Is it revolutionary to people not using these tools? Yes. Does Google Buzz have a ton of potential? Yes.

Where the revolution lies in Google Buzz is in their API and the adoption of standard technologies. This is where the innovation is going to happen. This is where the smaller ecosystems are going to tie into the larger tool. This is where we are going to get that two way interaction where we manage a lot of our social media content from one common tool and that will allows us to digest content, create content, find new and exciting content, and interact with our various social contacts.

Is Buzz currently lacking on features to make this a total aggregation point? Yes, you can’t publish to the networks it supports. (For example you can’t post to Twitter through the interface. But this is supposedly coming.) The networks it supports are limited, but with the API development and the usage of common standards these changes should come pretty rapidly.

The even more important point that isn’t being made is this is a huge step for Google to become your data silo of choice. Your contact base, your content aggregation, and where you pay attention to your social graph all in one place that you can access on any network with your Google account sign in. With Facebook being rumored to creating a comprehensive e-mail client (which has been a rumor for years) they see the value of this. (Why do you think Facebook Connect has been pushed so hard?) The battle isn’t what activity stream is more important, the battle is for all of your data and where you consider your “social home”.

Do I think out of the box that Google Buzz is an amazing product? Not at all. What interests me is how this is going to play out. Google has had a record in completely failing with various social technologies. However I think the evolution of Buzz over the next year and how other sites interact with it is going to reveal a lot about social aggregation, data silos, and where this is all heading.

What do you think about Google Buzz?

FYI- Jason Falls has a really excellent video on setting up your Google Buzz.

Related Articles:

• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II
• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part I
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• Thinking about creating a Facebook fan page? Don’t just jump in.
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• Getting A Grasp On My Facebook Account
• Kim Kardashian and her massive growth on FriendFeed: abusing the system or FriendFeed looking the other way?
• Facebook Friday: Looking For Applications in All The Wrong Places

JQuery in WP Presented by Jim Doran

His Blog- His Twitter- His Presentation Slides (.pdf download)

Session description: Using jQuery in your WordPress Theme. jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript framework that’s extremely popular with Web designers and developers. This session presents an overview of jQuery and how to start using it. I’ll walk through a case study that uses jQuery with a new, homemade WP theme and demonstrate layout techniques, animation effects, DOM manipulation and AJAX/JSON. This session will show beginners how to start using jQuery and how to begin making WordPress themes.

What I learned: I have taken and use some jQuery bits and pieces in the past but didn’t have a full understand of what it can do or the community behind it. This presentation broke down some jQuery, explained how it worked, and gave examples of how the presenter has deployed it.

The Future is Now: WP Themes With HTML 5 by Rob Larsen

His Blog- His Twitter- His Presentation Slides (.ppt download)

Session Description: Excited about HTML5? Wish you could start using the new semantic elements right now? You can. In this presentation Rob Larsen will show you how to create cross-browser, HTML5 enhanced WordPress themes using nothing more than a little extra JavaScript, basic WordPress knowledge and some knowledge of the new elements.

What I learned: You can start programming for HTML5 now and some of the major changes to it. Really interesting and a lot of great examples, specifically a recoded default WordPress theme done in HTML5 with the code in the slide show.

Get Thee Behind Me: Making BuddyPress Do Thy Bidding by Boone Gorges

His Blog- His Twitter-

Session Description: With BuddyPress, you can build your own social network on top of WordPress in just a few minutes. But every community is unique (freakish?) in its own ways, and BuddyPress’s default setup won’t work for everyone. Sometimes you want more than the standard BuddyPress, sometimes you want less, and sometimes you want something that doesn’t look social networkish at all. In this session I’ll talk about the structure of BuddyPress and how the parts work together. Then I’ll demonstrate a few examples of how you can use plugins, config files, and child themes to make BuddyPress work for your unique and freakish purposes.

What I learned: First of all Boone was just a fun speaker to watch: good-natured, good-humored, and really knowledgeable. I am really pumped about deploying BuddyPress to a single WordPress install and this made me feel a lot more comfortable with deployment as well as answering some questions I had about theming. I was so inspired I started an install and cloning a site for a friend the day after WordCamp.

Here are my favorite two Ignite Sessions:

Brad Williams – Top WordPress Plugins You’ve Never Heard Of

His Blog- His Twitter-

Session Description: Learn about the most amazing unheard of plugins that exist! Presentation will include 20 of the best plugins you’ve never heard of.

Michael Susz – Short Codes: Pain Free Magic

His Blog- His Twitter-

Session Description: Many people i meet are unaware that they can mix output from php functions into editable content in WordPress; from simple things like displaying the current date, to retrieving & formatting data and flowing it into a page. my talk will introduce people to short codes, explain how powerful they are, and how they can be customized with attributes.

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• SEO For WordPress Step Three: Create Your Strategy
• SEO For WordPress Step Two: Do Your Research
• SEO For WordPress Step One: Determine Your Goals

Essentially I am covering everything from this post with a few more coding references.

You can view my deck below.

Related Articles:

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• Video of My WordCamp Chicago Presentation
• WordCamp Chicago Recap
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• SEO For WordPress Step Four: Implementing Your Strategy
• SEO For WordPress Step Three: Create Your Strategy
• SEO For WordPress Step Two: Do Your Research
• SEO For WordPress Step One: Determine Your Goals

Tracking Goals

Now that we have goals that we think can be measured we have to work out how we are going to do that. This is another step where you need to stop and think before diving in. What type of metrics do you have access to, what type of data does your business generate, and what tools are out there that you can use? In our case we have a simple analytics program that interfaces with our PPC campaigns, our internal sales numbers that we can see the source of how the customer signed up, how much they spent, how often they sign in and if they invited people at our disposable. We added ways to track traffic through individual links by using URL shortening services that offer analytics. If we want to we can determine the value of individual tweets, posts, and links. Also the factor of my time, which I have to track on my own using a separate tool.

For the five incoming streams of traffic from our marketing program I have created a different URL that they enter the site with. Some are landing pages and some are invite codes, it all depends on the source of the traffic. Because each of these sources has different URLs we can break up the incoming traffic into different groups. Beyond the five sources of our traffic we can create invite codes for contests, special events, and numerous other ideas, we are really only limited by our imagination.

For example lets look at Twitter. When people ask to be invited to the site because they found our Twitter page (or we added them as a friend) we send them an invite code with a custom URL. If we tweet an invite code out we use the same URL, we call it the Twitter invite code. (Note: If we wanted to break it down further we could break these into their own URLs, for discussion’s sake we are saying they are the same.) Our analytics program measures the Twitter invite code, this will tell us the traffic that we have received (click thru rate for members) from it and the amount of people who signed up (conversion rate for members). The great thing about this invite code is when we tweet it we see people sharing it or clicking thru and signing up even though they didn’t ask to join.

We have all of our traffic data and general signup data now we need to know our sales data and scratch a bit more underneath the surface of our member’s data. At the end of the month we go into our system and see the amount of people signed into the site after signing up, the total amount they spent (conversion rate for sales), the people that they invited, and how much they spent. We then marry the two groups of data together to analyze them for each of our five marketing planks. (We are starting to use the eCommerce setup in Google Analytics to but haven’t had it running very long, hopefully this makes us more efficient with our measurement.)

Are there flaws to this? Yes. While we can measure what person A did and they people they invited. (Person B) Data gets messy and complex beyond that. If person B invited person C, D, E and then they invite people the data begins to get a bit blurry. Currently we can’t map that effectively. (This will evolve as the company grows… hopefully.) So the numbers we are analyzing stop at a certain level but there is more than enough data here to determine the effectiveness of what we are doing with our marketing campaigns.

What can we track? What is the ROI?

With all of this data there is so much we can measure. We can examine click thru rate and conversion rate of every piece of content we put out there through our marketing program. This can tell us information like what content is the most effective, what platform is the most effective, or even when is the best time for us to post our content. Through these numbers we can determine the effectiveness of our campaigns and assign some value to the engagement we have with our members.

Also we can check our return on investment for specific channels.

A very basic ROI formula reads like this: Net profit / total investment × 100 = Return on Investment (You could always go with the DuPont forumla but we are trying to keep this basic.)

Using the Twitter example again we can learn through our system the net profit of sales based off of people signing up through Twitter and the people they invite. For our total investment I have tracked my time and can divide that into what I was getting paid per month. Multiply that by 100 and we have a very simple ROI for Twitter usage for this client. We can apply this to all our social media outposts, blogger outreach, and our PPC campaign (of course we have to add in the cost of the ads for the PPC campaign).

Now this is a very basic model. Let’s say though we want to break down our Twitter usage further. We can give a different tracking number to link we tweet, we can see how often it is retweeted and shared via the URL service and see what the conversion rate and click thru rate is for that specific URL.

Also we can monitor our brand and see people sharing their own invites via Twitter. We can then take their name and check it against our system to see the click thru rate and conversion rate for their invites and make an adjusted return on investment for Twitter as whole. Expand the idea of monitoring past that, we can see the value of different message boards, blogs, and find new people to establish relationships with. We need to be aware of where we are being mentioned and figure out how to evaluate the data to determine the values of these communities.

When we break down all of our usage on these platforms we can see what has been effective, where we are gaining traction, and what is giving us the most for our investment. A large portion of our social media campaign now has a basic idea of our return on investment. It isn’t perfect but it gives us an idea on what efforts are effective, where we should spend our time, and how we should tweak our strategy. We aren’t even factoring in branding and some of the “immeasurable” impacts of a social media campaign.

I hope this gives you a very basic and elementary look at the thought process of tracking ROI for a campaign. Like I said at the start of this your business, your goals, and what you can track will vary but creatively looking at a situation, the data available, and establishing goals you can track will allow you to create your own procedure for tracking the ROI of your social media campaign.

Related Articles:

• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part I
• Creating a Social Media Command Center Using WordPress
• How to evaluate and rank blogs in a niche
• My Blog World Expo Presentation
• Thinking about creating a Facebook fan page? Don’t just jump in.
• Getting Rich With the Niche: My Presentation For Blog World Expo
• SEO For WordPress Step Four: Implementing Your Strategy
• SEO For WordPress Step Three: Create Your Strategy
• SEO For WordPress Step Two: Do Your Research
• Is ESPN doing the right thing by cracking down on Twitter?

It seems like the ROI debate around social media is continuous. The more and more this industry evolves the more and more answers to that question change. Some people say that you can’t really measure the ROI on any of this and if someone tells you they can it is BS. Others will tell you that some of this can be measured but most of it can’t be. (Some people just don’t know how to measure.) Then there are people who I see eye to eye with and well tell you that if you set goals, think about how you can measure them, and work your strategy around these metrics you can measure the ROI with some effort. (I must say that Amber’s post completely inspired this.)

Before I go into this I want to say that the strategy and measurement that I am doing for this client probably won’t work for 75% of the businesses out there. Their goals, their business model, and how they execute their social media is probably different from the way you do. THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. Each business is different and their goals, execution, and how you track the results are going to be all over the map. There isn’t a cookie cutter approach to this and I think that is where a lot of the frustration lies. My goal with this post is to show you the thought process behind setting goals, breaking those goals down, and how we track them.  Because this company is set up a certain way it makes breaking this down very easy, I have clients where this answer is much more complex but I figure this is about the process. (This is really written for a 101 level.)

Also this isn’t even taking into account other forms of traffic including search engine traffic, Jason Falls has a great post about that.

The Company

I am not going to name the client but they are a bootstrapped startup that is basically using social media as their main marketing until they can afford to use other marketing channels and have more of a complete marketing blend. They sell goods through a private shopping website much like the Gilt Groupe, so all of their business is done online. (Which I know is an advantage over brick and mortar when tracking all this data; again I wanted to make this simple.)

Setting Goals and Breaking Them Down

In our original discussions there were two top-level goals they wanted to achieve.

1) Gain members
2) Sell more stuff

These goals as listed above you can track on some level but they are very general. This is going to be the case with most companies you need to look at these goals and break them down into smaller and much more measurable goals.

Gain more members and sell more stuff…

There are tons of ways that we can gain more members, which ones are we going to focus on? For our first couple months we had to focus on just a few channels and leave other options until this year. We went with Facebook, Twitter, PPC, our blog, and blogger outreach. Through these channels the members we bring into the site we also want to buy product. Through this through process it has adjusted our goal to.

1) Gain members:

a) Through Facebook
b) Through Twitter
c) Through PPC
d) Through Blogger outreach
e) Through our blog

2) Sell more stuff

a) Through Facebook
b) Through Twitter
c) Through PPC
d) Through Blogger outreach
e) Through our blog

If we want to we can break these down even further to a per post analysis for the blog, Twitter, and Facebook. Our blogger outreach can be broken down by campaign, by interests of the blogger, by gender, by location. PPC can get sliced down into looking at keywords.  We can determine what we feel is important to track this and continually break down each of these goals into more data points. Remember that these smaller goals all feed into the large goals you have set. You need to determine what has value to you and create your goals around that.

You are developing your KPI (Key Performance Indicators) in this step; think through this using the SMART criteria model:

This means the measure has a Specific purpose for the business, it is Measurable to really get a value of the KPI, the defined norms have to be Achievable, the KPI has to be Relevant to measure (and thereby to manage) and it must be Time phased, which means the value or outcomes are shown for a predefined and relevant period.

The point is that we took two pretty general goals and broke them down further into goals that can be measured.These smaller goals can be combined after we split and track the data to determine if we have reached these large goals.

Setting goals is the first and most important step. You need to understand your goals and figure out how to break them down into reasonable and measurable chunks.

Part II – Coming tomorrow.

Related Articles:

• What is the ROI of Social Media? Part II
• Creating a Social Media Command Center Using WordPress
• How to evaluate and rank blogs in a niche
• My Blog World Expo Presentation
• Thinking about creating a Facebook fan page? Don’t just jump in.
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