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©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Social media ROI – reality or fantasy?

What was interesting to me was the choice that was made. I will explain a bit later why I think the choice was made, but first let me give you a run down on what happened.

The message went out with ” Please HELP! I am buying a new phone and can’t decide which one to buy. It is between Brand X and Brand Y. They said Brand X has more features and Brand Y has a bit of extra browsing time in the package. Now Brand X and Y are well known brands but Brand Y is a cooler, more status brand with the general public.

So all the advice poured in. Many people were saying they had Brand Y and it is awesome, or I they were really happy with it or it was the best Brand and so on. A few people had another popular brand which I will call Brand Z, but wasn’t one of the two chosen.

I decided to play devils advocate and told them that Brand X had won awards over Brand Y and supplied links and I would go for that one as it is a better phone. The heat turned up for Brand Y. At the end of a few hours there was over 20 recommendations and the family member had also received direct messages. Also think of the number of friends-of-a-friend saw these comments and people it indirectly influenced.

I don’t think I have to tell you what decision they made. They bought Brand Y, the phone with less features, but some browsing time thrown in and in my opinion not the best choice. Why would they do this? It is simple it made them look cooler to the majority of their friends and gave them some status. Now this was interesting to watch, it is not really surprising as people make these types of decisions all the time. Word of Mouth from valued sources is one of the greatest influences around.

Now accurately measuring word-of-mouth is not simple. The majority of techniques I have employed through the years has been by collecting source of business information (often this is not reliable) and through research to get an idea of the percentage of business attributed to word-of-mouth. These depend heavily on honest answers and accurate capturing of information and naturally asking the correct questions.

So what I have been pondering is whether word-of-mouth just a result of good branding and customer experience? Does social media play a role or is it merely a vehicle of expression? Would we employ a different strategy to offline? Would we use examples like this to convince people they should not neglect social media?

This is what I think. If you are not engaging in social media you can’t effectively communicate with those that are. Your advertising and other marketing efforts may reach them, but not in the same way.

It is not possible to jump in on private conversation without violating privacy, but there are many public conversations that can be joined. These must be relevant and worth while. For private conversers you can make the information easily available and create fan pages, groups or a community that they could join. You need to be listening to find these conversations. There is a big basket of tools, some free and some paid for to help find these conversations.

Social media word-of-mouth definitely has a wider (and faster) reach than in person (in most cases). I am not talking about viral marketing here, but pure advising and influencing by trusted sources without incentive. We could get into emotional incentives, but you know what I mean.

What is your take on social media word-of-mouth? Is it a driver for your business? I would love to hear others experiences and views on this.

PS: I have posted a brilliant slideshow I found, by Matt Gran­field, on this topic in my favourite video page.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. So now we have faith in Strangers?
2. Do we really TRUST brands?

I am the first person to champion measuring marketing effectiveness and implementing your marketing strategy in a way that you can measure your marketing activities and their influence. I am also aware that some activities have a long term effect and are only measurable in intangible terms for example goodwill or are a supportive role and do not directly influence profit.

Often I have seen business people say “what is the ROI for social media?” To me this shows a total lack of understanding of social media as well as the potential complexities of ROI.

I will explain why I believe this.

Firstly I will go into ROI and get a little technical, which is needed for me to make my point. The standard formula for ROI is: “Gain from Investment (Income)” less “Cost of Investment (Expenditure)” divided by the “Cost of Investment” and is expressed as a percentage. Some people express ROI in a monetary term by just subtracting “Cost of Investment” from “Gain from Investment” and to me is closer to gross profit, however, at the end of the day they both show how much money you made from your investment and that is what is important.

Now it may seem simple to calculate ROI, but this is not always the case and the results are often different for every organisation. The reason for this is that what is taken into account as income and costs differ for each organisation. For example your efforts may not only produce immediate income but future income e.g. subscription or financial products, how this is taken into account can differ. Whether it expressed in today’s terms (net present value) or not. What about future costs or indirect costs like the cost of processing a sale. So we can see that dependent on the complexity of your product and organisation ROI may not be a straight forward question to answer for any type of medium or tool.

Now I come to social media. There is no single use for social media. It is being used for many different things in business from sales, branding, PR, research, CRM, networking, database building, direct marketing and more. In business how you measure sales would be totally different to how you measure research or CRM. So depending on what you want to achieve with social media your objectives will be different and the measurements you use will be different. Some efforts will not have a direct impact on sales and produce a ROI but rather may be a supportive role that perhaps influences customer retention. You can read about how some businesses are using social media in the series I wrote looking at various SM tools use in business.

So when someone asks “What is the ROI of social media?” The answer really is: it depends.…..

My suggestion on measuring SM and SM ROI is the following:

1. Define your goals (broad and general) and objectives (precise and measurable).

2. Choose relevant social mediums to achieve these goals and objectives.

3. Decide on what measurements are important to you and how they are to be measured in a way that satisfies your organisation.

4. If ROI is one of these important measurements you need to decide on what you will take into account for income and expenses.

5. You need to monitor these and compare it to other mediums/tools you would use to achieve these same objectives.

6. Adjust your objectives if need be.

As far as I know there are no industry standards or benchmarks for SM, however, there are for other mediums/tools and I would use their benchmarks as a guideline. No business person will use a tool to achieve an objective that performs worse than another option. And for that, I mean comparing apples with apples. Remember some new efforts take time to reap rewards and can not be compared to an existing method that is reaping rewards, in the long run the new method may out perform existing methods. Be sensible about how you implement a new tool, just as you would with any other.

I would love to hear from others what their views are.

PS: If any of the steps above are a challenge, which they can be and are not a simple as they sound; there are many experts who can help you work through this process.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Facebook for business has me scratching my head!
2. My first Social Media pit stop was @twitter
3. The Biggest Issues Marketers Face

If you shout loud your competition shouts louder and so we end up with a never ending spiral of noise. We have all become masters at blocking out the noise we don’t want to hear. I believe the answer lies in that statement with the word “want” the prominent word. You need to target your message at people who want to hear it.

There are many reasons that people will want to hear your message. When I consider Facebook I want to hear updates from people I care about, people I have a relationships with. I also want to hear updates from groups I joined because it is about topics I am interested in. On Twitter I like to read updates from people I find interesting, sometimes because I admire them, other times because they provide me with knowledge or entertainment.

In Linkedin some of my groups provide me with information and discussions that help me understand others view points or introduce new concepts, ideas and products. The interesting thing in all of this is that it is driven my me and my interests rather than others pursuing me. I am in control of what I consume rather than the other way around. So I can walk away from the town crier and ignore what he says.

So where does this leave business? This is against how business has always been done. Business always controlled the message and what went out. So does business just ignore this or do they find a way to engage. You hear some people say that social media suits some industries better than others and they may be right. But, they may be wrong too. Maybe some businesses and industries are just doing it better than others and adopt new technologies and ways of doing business earlier, easier and better.

Businesses should be sitting down and thinking about what they want to or could achieve from social media. Is it a PR tool, a sales tool, a branding tool, a relationship building tool or any other tool? Taking social media on face value and believing that it has no place without considering what it could mean to your business could be a critical mistake, especially if your competition figures it out before you.

I also think business needs to evaluate their expectations of social media. Do you expect immediate return and immediate wonders? Would you expect this of another investment? I think if we can set a clear strategy, with realistic objectives and a practical plan we could manage expectations and a lot more people will be less disappointed by what the hype has promised.
What do you think the answer to getting heard is?

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Social media ROI – reality or fantasy?

My dilema is all about opening links in a new tab/window or not. Firstly for user experience and secondly for bounce rates.

According to Wikipedia, Avinash Kaushik states:

My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis based on my experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for.

Now this really depends on the type of site that you are running and what you are trying to achieve. The standard bounce rate for a blog is apparently between 50% to 75%. For example a blogger with a loyal following who stays on the blog for 4 or 5 minutes to read the entire latest post and then leaves without clicking to another page, because they have read it before, is still achieving their goals. And yet they may have a bounce rate higher than the standard range.

I have been trying different methods to reduce my bounce rate, which is comfortably in the standard range and occasionally goes below. There is one method that I really can’t decide on which direction to take.

When you have a link in your post to another website you can add target=“_blank” to make that link open in a new tab and prevent people bouncing off your site. I have researched this quite a bit and fail to find consensus on this. Some SEO people will tell you to do this, as bounce rate affects your Google rankings, and therefore, you need to force it. Others tell you this is antiquated, and that most people know how to right click a link if they want to open in it in another window instead of leaving your page, and you are treating them like idiots by forcing this.

I have tried both methods, but recently have tended to not use the target underscore, feeling perhaps it is a bit antiquated. Though every odd article I do add it just for testing. I am not 100% sure of this decision and wonder if I am making a blunder. My bounce rate has remained healthy, but could it be better?

I would be interested to hear others views on this little method and it’s effect on bounce rate.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

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From what I have seen some people are really concerned about privacy (I am in that camp) and some people don’t seem to worry too much. In my article Facebook for business has me scratching my head, I mentioned that I have used Facebook for years, but purely to keep in touch with family and friends all around the world.

Every time someone sends me a request on Facebook it seems to require some sort of application. On the install application page you have to give that application access to almost everything including your photo’s to install it. I have two children and I hate the idea of “whoever” is behind these applications having access to photo’s of my children and therefore, decline every request that requires an application. However, my family who sometimes have pictures of my children install every other application and I have no control over this. Am I being overly protective – maybe?

My big question is “How much should we reveal about ourselves online?”

Should we be totally open and reveal every aspect of ourselves or reveal as much as is relevant? I think there is a fine balance here. Online people can be less trusting therefore you need to be open and honest and may need to give a lot more about yourself than in person. Could this actually be detrimental for example if you are a job seeker?

Is privacy really a farce and there is no such thing? Is it a word that gives us a false sense of security? Social Networks have really changed the amount of personal information that is online. It seems that many super Internet marketers or online socialites reveal much about their personal life. Is this the price you need to pay for that success? Is it important to be able to form a more personal relationship with people who are connected to you or follow you?

How much do you reveal about yourself? Do you go all the way, do you have a personal policy or do you keep part of yourself private? I would love to know what others are doing and think in this respect.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

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Gordon Macmillan writes “Out of a sample of 4500 CVs received in the last two years it says just 6% reference “Social Media”, 9% mention Twitter, and a meagre 2% talk about blogging, while 13% include Facebook (though in some this was merely highlighted in the ‘interests’ section).”

What I can’t decide is whether the reason for this is based on a stigma in some companies/organisations and industries regarding social media or if there is really a shortage. There are millions of blogs out there, millions use twitter and even more are on Facebook. The title of this article is based on a comment to the mentioned article rather than the article itself.

What I found shocking was the first comment to this article. A business owner calling social media a distraction that takes people away from adding value to a business. He is rather degrading about social media and clearly advises people to keep it off their CV if they want to get employed.

My first thoughts were here is a guy who has no clue about how to use social media for his business to create value from it. Who doesn’t understand that you need a strategy and clear objectives which should be measured. That he sounds old fashioned and not keeping up to date with technology and trends. If he had said he had tested and turned to expert advice to ensure best results and that it clearly added no value for his business, I may have been okay with his answer. But, such a general statement…

The next answer from an avid social media user mildly disagreeing and recommending people add it to their interest section rather than their skills on their CV; led me to think that there must be a stigma attached. For me that thought is also rather shocking. It would suggest that a large portion of businesses have this view of social media. This was certainly not my perspective as I was of the opinion that social media was gaining acceptance and ever increasingly being included in marketing budgets.

To me it would seem that people only include it for positions requiring social media experience and knowledge and leave it off if not mentioned. It seems that social media is perceived as non-productive socialising and in some cases this is probably true. However, having a clear policy about social media along with a strategy would go a long way to change this.

After all if people want to be non-productive, they can do this using their mobile/cell phones to text/sms, browse the internet and use social networks, as well as email both at work and on their phones.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Privacy in Social Media
2. Facebook for business has me scratching my head!
3. YouTube for Business

For me social media is interactive and usually involves conversations, however, there is a lot of push going on where the conversation is started and then comprises mostly of replies. This is not always a bad thing: just an observation. Videos on YouTube are similar in the way that a video is posted and people can leave comments. Therefore, I am going to classify it for my journey, as social media. Though I am sill not 100% convinced it should be.

There are millions of videos on YouTube aimed at all sorts of audiences. YouTube offers a partnership program where you can join their advertising program (A bit like Google Adsense) and if you produce/upload enough videos, which you have rights to, you can create your own channel. I think this is a great opportunity for any business and can be used in a number of ways, for example:

You can still upload these to YouTube without a channel. The important aspect of this is integrating these with your business. For example, you have a customer service section on your website where you have links to embedded informational videos. Your customer service or sales reps can point customers to these helpful videos.

YouTube offers a way to drive traffic/sales through call-to-actions from your video. If you manage to target the right audience this could give you a real boost.

Then you can earn money through the partner advertising model in the same way you do from Google Adsense.

I came across this YouTube success story page. This is more about successful partners. YouTube also offers partners analytical tools to measure their success.

I think it is important to always have a strategy, an identified target audience and objectives you want to achieve and to measure these. Another really important aspect is quality. If you are promoting a professional service or quality product your video should not be poor quality. However, if the intention is to make a homemade, on-the-run, type of video, then you may get away with it, though you can still ensure a certain level of quality. One of my clients has an excellent page explaining the video production process.

Considering the number of people watching videos everyday I think incorporating YouTube into your Social Media or Internet Marketing Strategy is well worth it

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

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1. What is the next BEST thing in marketing?
2. To be, or not to be (part of social media), that is the (big) question:

First let me tell you a bit about each of these social networks. Plaxo was founded in November 2002 and Linkedin founded in December 2002. Plaxo initially positioned itself as a platform to manage your contact list and later added the more social networking features and premium service. The most recent development is that Plaxo has made their most valuable tool (sync to Outlook) into a premium paid service.

Initially Plaxo got a really bad name for spam, however, it seems they have sorted how you invite contacts and have recovered to some degree from this sentiment, though some stigma still seems to be in the air. From what I can establish Linkedin is the more popular choice between the two and I constantly find articles that suggest Plaxo is a distant second. I did come across something that stated that only 1/3 of Plaxo users were on Linkedin, but can’t find that again and it could be quite old and I have no idea how accurate that is. I haven’t registered on Plaxo and from what I have read it is not on my ‘anytime soon agenda’. Nothing has made me feel I just have to register with Plaxo, however they do have their loyal users.

From what I can tell Linkedin has always marketed itself as a business-orientated networking site. As with Plaxo, Linkedin has added additional features and started a premium service

Both Linkedin and Plaxo can be used to grow your contact network for either business or with the aim of finding a job. I now am going to focus more on Linkedin and ways people are using it as a business tool.

I found this cool page on Linkedin listing some of their success stories. Looking at this list you can see that most success stories revolve around increasing sales, finding new clients, improving a business through advice/answers or landing a dream job.

I have observed some other ways that businesses are using Linkedin. One of the big ways is creating a group, which on it’s own is really easy. Running a group is a different animal and requires time, effort and foresight. Some groups are part of the business (even are the business), they have websites, sell products, host events and regularly send out announcements to their member base. I really like the idea of groups and feel so much can be done with a group if you have a strategy. The hardest part initially is growing the member base (isn’t it always). I have two clients seriously looking at this as part of their marketing strategy and am working with them to formalise a Linkedin group strategy.

Recently, I have had a few invitations to webinars. Now I have no idea how successful these are, as the number of people registering via Linkedin seems small. I have also read a while ago that attendance of webinars is low – perhaps that has changed. I have just started researching webinars for a client so will probably write a post once this series is complete.

Linked also is working for recruitment agencies to head hunt or for companies to advertise an opening to the Linkedin masses. I have had a load of franchise type companies approach me with opportunities to partner or open a franchise. The other type of approaches I have had are MLM trying to recruit me into their network. And then what I call spam. Purely arbitrary approaches about some product or service the person thinks will benefit me (with some of them I wonder how they know this considering their product). So in all this Linkedin is essentially being used for direct marketing.

Linkedin has other uses like research (polls, discussions and answers), a vehicle to provide slide show presentations, project collaboration, meet up with connections while travelling, add your event and share what you are reading. There is no doubt that Linkedin can be used as a tool to promote your business, product or cause.

I tried in vain to find the largest group on LinkedIn. Emarketing, a group I belong to, with close to 185k members shows up as the largest to me. Today, however, I received the weekly announcement where they claim to be “#2″. So who is #1? The second closest group I found was Executive Suite with just over 167k.

If you are considering Plaxo in your basket, then I imagine the strategies you employ would be similar to Linkedin. I am going to keep an eye on these business orientated social networks. They are collaborating with each other. I see Plaxo and Facebook collaborating and recently LinkedIn and Twitter. Maybe we will see the emergence of one or two super social networking groups.

For me Linkedin has certainly proved to be king! (That could be because I am more active there, but I think most would agree).

Lastly I found this interesting article on Measuring the Results of Social Media Participation by Scott Klososky.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Choosing between all those other Social Networks
2. The next BEST thing in Marketing!
3. What is all the Xing about?

Realistically, it would be impossible to be personally active on even 10% of those. Now if I had a nifty tool/platform that linked to all the different Social Networks with a single profile/account ID and allowed me to view my messages from them all in one place, filter discussions from them all, keep track of keywords on them all, share on them all, have an events calendar linked to them all and provided me with metrics on them all and do anything else I might want to do on them all — that would be cool.

I am sure that somewhere someone is working towards that right now. If I had oodles of funds I know would probably be looking into that myself. I have read a bit about OpenID and I think the idea there is having a single profile to use on various social networking sites instead of creating a ‘hundred’ profiles everywhere; I just wonder if the various big social networks would be open to that or if they would want to hang onto their proprietary — anyway back to choosing between all the social networks available.

When it comes to social networking in business and you have decided to incorporate social media into your business strategy, whether for internal communications, recruiting, marketing, lead generation, PR, CRM, research, branding to name some, the first thing you need to do, as I have kept saying through my articles, is to define your goals and objectives and your target audience/market for social media. Once you know these things you can find the social networks that reaches your target audience and achieves your goals. It is important to ensure the social network is active with the type of members they claim. With online platforms like Ning anyone can have a social network. I would also research which networks my audience was using to get an indication of where you should be.

I found this review of some of the top social networks but none of these are focused on professionals (more business orientated) like LinkedIn, Plaxo or Xing. I also came across this nifty pie chart based on a list created by Peter Kim’s Wiki of companies using social media. I think the breakdown gives a good idea of the types of social media channels to focus on, obviously within your strategy. You definitely want to focus your energy on the networks and channels that give you the most ‘bang for your buck’. I am not sure social media could be deployed as a quick win unless you are a tech company with a new innovation in this field.

One channel that is rather small on this pie chart is forums and discussion boards. That surprises me some what. I would have thought more people would be targeting industry ’round tables’ and discussion forums to connect to their audience. Perhaps there is a time issue here.

I found another great list on Mashable listing some social mediums various companies are using. The most intriguing for me was seeing Dell had bought an island on Second Life: a virtual world. I had to find out what that was about. Now imagine selling virtual products of your brand and make real money from it. That seems like the idea here as people buy these virtual products with game money bought with real money and it works on a revenue share model. Obviously not at the price of the real thing. I see this as an extension of having your brand show up in a game but done in social virtual world that can generate income — very clever.

In my next post I will cover Linkedin and Plaxo.

©2010 Aqua Pebble. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. So now we have faith in Strangers?
2. Is Linkedin king in the business social networking world?
3. Going after what you want– Part 4