In a nutshell if any or all of the slides happen to give you goosebumps, put a smile on your face, or just simply make you go ‘wow’, it’s pretty obvious that:

• a) If you’re already in the web industry, you’re in the right industry
• b) If you’re not already in the web industry, you sure wouldn’t mind being in it
• c) Technology, innovation and the rampant growth of the web is something to get excited about, no matter how you look at it

Check out the ‘87 cool things’ slideshow, you won’t be disappointed.

As humans we’re inherently 2 things: mobile and social. We like to move and we like to be gregarious.

So my answer was pretty simple – both are the way forward in web. With smartphone sales set to eclipse PC sales by 2011, we’re going mobile as a society whether we like it or not.

As for the social aspect… well, regardless of the surge in social media ‘gurus’ sweeping the web, all that was ever needed to get humans talking on teh interwebs was the technology to facilitate conversations and interaction. As a species we’re born to be wild social, and the professionals plying their trade in the social media space aren’t professional socialites per se, they’re just professionals at understanding the many vehicles and technologies – current and future - out there that enable us to be social. The current arena for social media might be our desktop/laptop and a browser, but ask any social media strategist you know about the importance of the mobile web, and I hope they stress just how important it’s going to be: very.

As mobile technology gets more sophisticated, as GPS improves, and as mobile apps and augmented reality continue to multiply and grow respectively, our mobile media use will become second-nature. Handsets will become more powerful. Our social media use is already becoming ubiquitous. We as an industry will continue to combine the two in new and innovative ways, enabling users as a collective to be more productive, more connected, and more interactive than ever before (disclaimer: one’s rate of adoption and privacy concerns notwithstanding). Web Version 3.0 isn’t about the semantic web anymore, it’s about the socimobi web with semantics and microformats already built-in for good measure.

My advice to my colleague in the end? If nothing else, keep an eye on the mobile horizon, and be social. Take some refresher classes or training in the basics, sure, but no matter what just get into it. Go social, and have fun – try a favourite social network on a data-enabled phone, and get stuck-in. Learn what value an app gives a user, visit favourite sites through a mobile browser, or try out Google Latitude. It’ll be more interesting and engaging than SEO, that’s for sure.

Having just moved flats, I’ve probably done the ‘Argos dance’ more times in the past 3 months than I care to mention. You know – the one where you:

• Enter the store
• Find/wait for a laminated catalogue
• Emphatically flip/slide/skim through the 2000+ page bible
• Find your desired product
• Check if product is in stock using a calculator-style keypad
• Write out the product’s 8-digit code on a (provided) slip of paper
• Walk over to the payment kiosk at the other side of the store
• Re-enter the product code, re-check availability
• Pay with your chip & pin debit card (or reserve item)
• Wait for your number to be announced via tannoy
• Pick up your purchased goods
• Get out

So what’s the problem?

There’s a weak link in the process above – did you notice it? It’s an expensive, cumbersome, and card-carrying member of a dying breed. No, I’m not talking about the tannoy system. Its the printed catalogue that Argos prides itself on. The huge, bulky book that Argos boasts is in more than 18m households throughout the UK.

Argos launch this behemoth twice a year. That’s 36m catalogues up front, not to mention the number of books used in-store, or made available year-round, or the ones left in the rubbish bins after being shoved into the arms of passers-by on the high street on sunny Sundays. The costs associated with the printing of these catalogues must be astronomical (regardless of where the printing’s outsourced to), not to mention the negative impact on the environment. Why bother using a printed catalogue at all? Aren’t we in the digital age?

Googleize it

Currently the physical Argos user experience is pretty easy, but it could (and should) be so much better. At the moment there are way too many components. Just as an ecommerce website is made to be intuitive and as simple as possible to drive revenue, the same principles apply to the real-world version: streamline your user’s experience and you stand to make more revenue. Google, as we know, does this with ease. Although they have access to the entire world’s online information, they never fail to offer a solitary search bar to remove all uncertainties, ambiguities and alternative choices for the user. All the user can do is search, which is what they came to do. The same applies to an Argos customer. The only reason they’re in-store is to browse, locate, buy and pick-up a product. It shouldn’t be so cumbersome.

What’s important to mention here is that Argos already take a quarter of all sales through their online channel. The effort required for that involves making available an entire database of items, able to be cross-referenced with stores across the UK to check for local availability. That’s a mammoth task, considering the sheer size of the Argos catalogue 18m households know so well. So, if there was a hard part to making the Argos in-store experience better, it seems to be done (quite well) already. If every Argos product is alraedy indexed and updated for use on the websites, why doesn’t Argos pull that experience in-store as well?

Upgrade

So, let’s catapult the Argos in-store user experience to the 21st century, Make it simpler, faster, more efficient and infinitely better than it is now by (ironically) applying the existing online experience to the real-world store.

Some first steps:

• Replace each store’s outdated and eco-unfriendly catalogue setup with an up-to-date monitor, laminated keyboard and mouse. 76% of the UK population already has a PC according to Deloitte, and 80% are online, so familiarity won’t be an issue.
• Integrate a chip-and-pin card reader to the setup above to allow for direct debit transactions.
• Index, itemize, categorize and tag every product in the central product database to make ready for search. Fortunately this, the hardest step, is done already – with 26% of sales through online channel, the Argos website already includes this functionality
• Segment the main database by store to allow for ‘local’ product search. Again already done via the ‘branch availability’ tool online.
• Create a single, unmistakable Google-style Argos-branded search interface. Make it the simplest path-to-goal possible so even the most non-web savvy in-store user can use it
• Allow the user to browse pages of products (complete with promotions/sales based on search query, much like pay-per-click ad targeting), add items to a temporary basket, and pay directly using the attached card reader and an SSL-protected payment system
• Add a permanent purchase history and login feature once a debit card is used. Membership/login details are created once, and activated via debit card chip recognition – negating the need to remember yet another password when in-store.
• Integrate membership details with online/website account for seamless offline/online transactions
• Email product purchase receipt to the registered user’s email inbox (optional, if email address provided)
• Include email marketing opt-in option for coupons, savings, advance product notices and recalls
• Send product order number to user’s mobile phone via SMS (optional) or printed receipt (optional)
• User waits and collects purchased goods as before, including the tannoy

The initial benefits

Coming from a marketing angle, the most dramatic benefit to Argos would be a substantial increase to their registrant database with rich transaction-based customer profiles. Taking a page from Amazon’s book, this data would be used to create targeted and relevant, behaviour-based messages to recent customers.

Some other possible benefits:

• Use of increased digital marketing techniques to replace the traditional ‘here, take a catalogue’ promotion marketing techniques
• Increased customer retention through incentive-marketing, cross-selling via emailed receipts
• Fully interchangeable offline and online channels, internal efforts and resources become centralized
• User experience enhanced through simplification and familiarity of one primary interface (search)
• Uplift in sales through targeted on-page promotions based on search query
• Presumed uplift in sales through higher in-store capacity from more efficient browsing process
• Increased user affinity via efficiency of in-store and online experiences
• Reduction in printed materials lessens impact on environment, lessens costs associated with print

I’m not denying the several unaddressed issues with this idea like switching from print to electronic, the massive infrastructure required, system maintenance, server downtime, etc., but in the interest of providing a better, faster user experience to an already successful business model, there’s potential. And if nothing else, it stands to be better for the environment, which I’m sure will be affecting Argos more in the near future as more companies go digital.

Looking at these figures, it’s easy to see why the Premier League is considered the most lucrative in the world. But if there’s this much money involved in the world’s fourth highest gross revenue-generating league (behind American football, baseball and basketball), why haven’t the clubs in the world’s richest football league recognized the value in the fastest-growing and most cost-effective channel available – Online – and invested accordingly?

Setting the pace

The recent launch of Manchester City’s new website prompted me to take a look at the websites of the 19 other clubs in the top flight. City (and the agency they used for the build – www.pokelondon.com) had clearly done their research into what makes a site usable and attractive in today’s market. More importantly, it seems they spent a while looking at what’s *not* being done across the majority of EPL clubs, and I’d imagine Poke happily realized their work was cut out for them after completing their competitive analysis. Simply integrating social media across a well-built site coupled with a modern, attractive and clean interface, I have no doubt the City site will win fans not just of the team’s football, but of a better online experience.

What about the rest?

One might argue that the traffic arriving on a football club’s website is qualified enough to know what they want and where to go – allowing the UX to be disregarded. However general web marketing and design should always be given priority, no matter how familiar the audience. What’s more, considering the EPL’s global reach and revenue, all 20 clubs have potential user bases worldwide, meaning their sites should be optimized for acquisition and retention where and whenever possible. Key web design factors such as usability, interface design & architecture, SEO, grid structure, Flash vs CSS, navigation, page number, page depth, ad space and many more should always be addressed, but in most cases of the sites below, these considerations seem to fall by the wayside.

Below are the websites of the 20 English Premier League teams for the 2009/10 season, in alphabetical order. Some thoughts follow.

Some recommendations

• Update and differentiate. Man City’s rethinking of what their site visitors want and need – and stripping away the rest – is welcome progress to what seems like a stagnating and under-appreciated medium for football clubs. This thought is enforced by the realization that no less than 7 of the 20 clubs are built on identical templates, provisioned by a wholly owned subsidiary of The Football League called FL Interactive (FLi). The implicit trust those 7 clubs have put in FLi – that the templates used are indeed the most effective, usable and optimized designs and layouts possible – seems worryingly naive. Surely each club’s supporter base and season ticket holders are as unique as their club’s history? They deserve to be treated as such – both online and off.

  Instead, these 7 clubs have limited their web channel’s potential by using an agency who uses identical templates as 6 of their competitors. Shockingly, FLi actually use the same template for almost all teams in England’s Championship, League 1, League 2 and Non-League. See the full list here.

• Become more social. Although Man City is not the first club to offer a live Twitter update feed directly from their homepage, they might be the only club to realize the importance of fully integrating social media across their entire site. Worth mentioning that Liverpool and Chelsea have also highlighted their social media presence on their homepages, with Facebook and Twitter the primary networks of choice. Surprisingly, neither Man Utd or Arsenal seem to have any such presence – yet.

  Clubs extending their brand name through 3rd-party social sites allows higher degrees of interaction and helps build loyalty amongst those supporters who haven’t grown with allegiances to any particular club. This is especially true in other countries where the EPL is broadcast, and where support bases translate into huge revenues through merchandising alone.

• Question the value of 3rd-party ads. Interestingly, given the huge revenues generated by EPL clubs over a season, it seems strange that 17 clubs use 3rd-party advertising on their homepages and subpages. Only Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea opt against 3rd-party ads on their homepages, and it’s no coincidence these 3 clubs are currently considered the richest in England. Strangely though, most clubs also tend to run ads for their own content using standardized IAB ad sizes. In my opinion this contradicts a maturing web society’s user behaviour: basic run-of-site banner ads are becoming white noise due to saturation and ineffectiveness. I can’t recall the last time I clicked a banner ad, so why train users of a club website to go against a growing online behaviour? Improve the overall user experience to gain long or short-term revenue, and lessen the reliability on ad-generated revenue.
• Improved use of white space. After a quick scroll of the list above, one main pattern emerges: the clutter. In the world of web design, white space and padding are not-so-secret ingredients to a successful layout. Proper spacing aids in the visual differentiation of a page’s content into digestible chunks for the eye. Unfortunately, the majority of the sites below blatantly dismiss the need for white space, and opt instead for cramming as much content into each page as possible. Again, Man City’s new site leads the pack here, and the choice of sIFR typography accents the white space very effectively.
• Deliver multilingual content to a global audience. As mentioned above, EPL club websites can’t afford to assume their user base are in the British Isles only. The Big Four of the EPL have included multilingual site variants, with Arsenal and Man Utd opting for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, whereas Arsenal and Chelsea have also translated into Russian. Both Man Utd and Man City (no surprise given their new owners) have translated into Arabic. Of the 16 other club sites, only Spurs have elected to provide translated content – into Chinese. It should however be a matter of time until the remainder of the EPL sites start translating into languages their records show are generating overseas sales.

So what do they do successfully?

The above recommendations don’t touch on the various web marketing methods that are implemented by most, if not all, of the 20 EPL sites – and successfully so. Given the growing size of the UK’s mobile industry, SMS marketing seems to be a very popular channel used by all clubs, as well as registration-based marketing and subsequent email marketing for maintaining communications. Streaming video content is also widely used, as are other media forms such as podcasts, TV, blogs and RSS. Various forms of competitions, prize draws and contests are used to retain traffic and build site loyalty. As already mentioned, some sites successfully use social media, although there is definite room for improvement in this area. Ultimately one might consider the point of doing such effective web marketing campaigns when the base website could be so much better.

Have any thoughts on the 20 EPL web sites listed above, or feel I’ve missed something? Feel free to comment below.

Having attended e-consultancy’s event on the ‘Future of Digital Marketing’ in June, if I’m being honest, it was the first time I’ve felt excited about digital marketing for a long time. Way back in February I attended the dire DMA show in Las Vegas, and subsequently wrote up a diatribe on why it and the industry as a whole seemed to be lacking in innovation. Thankfully, e-consultancy’s choice of speakers for their event seems to have gotten me back on the right track. This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the future of digital marketing and a recap of the event.

So what’s the future?

Not surprisingly, not one speaker on the day truly answered that question. All of them did however provide their thoughts and opinions on what they thought was at least coming onto the horizon – or what’s already here and hasn’t been properly utilized yet. While much of me wanted fundamentally new technologies to be unveiled (more on that later), the strongest recurring theme of the day was making the best use of the methods and tactics we digital marketers use today – just ‘better’. So the first take-away: if the basics of a digital marketing strategy at the moment include email marketing, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, referral and affiliate marketing and increasingly social media, then the digital marketing strategies of tomorrow will likely include the same. The innovation that represents the future of digital marketing is primarily in how each channel is represented, managed and utilized – focusing more on value to the end user and striving to maximize their experience beyond anything else.

Below are some choice extracts from the show that to me captured the essence of what the future of digital marketing actually will be, interspersed with my own opinions and thoughts or additions for good measure.

Get the basics right first

• Search is and will continue to act as the launch pad for most online experiences. The difference will be in the application, access and delivery of search results. With access to search increasingly varied by platform (mobile, web, API, socially-aided, etc.), search can become increasingly targeted and (as Google has shown us) will always be monetized.
• Localized search will become ubiquitous with Search. Users will increasingly use search to find local and offline results. In this respect, local search will become a microcosm of the SEM landscape we know today, with results targeted on such a granular basis that the competition between websites for conversions will take to the street.
• The consumer’s voice, since the advent of *shudder* ‘web 2′ technologies like social platforms, blogs and other dialogue enablers has been increasingly heard and will continue to lead the way marketers do business. This isn’t anything new, but recognition that as internet infrastructure grows, the need to listen to what your customers want – and don’t want – is beyond imperative. Barry Smith of SkyScanner summed it up by underlining the need to understand your landscape – get feedback, monitor, and respond accordingly.
• Social media will continue to proliferate and become increasingly synonymous with the web as a whole. Already we’re accustomed to checking our favourite social sites as part of our daily routine, but with innovations on the horizon like Google’s Wave plus socially-driven mobile apps and social search, most of the things done online by consumers and businesses alike will have a strong social component to them.
• The basic channels, and significantly email marketing, will become the foundation to a marketers kit. During a surprisingly open and telling presentation, Mark Kelleher – Head of Marketing Technology and Operations at the BBC – highlighted the BBC’s constant and continued use of email marketing as one of their primary interaction methods. 110 different newsletters totaling 30 million sent/month are delivered as timely, relevant and highly personalized communications thanks to advanced CRM techniques. It seems based on this that as a tactic, email marketing shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
• The web services we use today behind a monitor will tomorrow be integrated into more devices and channels. Integration and convergence as well as multi-platform access are indeed the next logical progression of the web, and marketers need to diversify their messages and technologies to reach the maximum number of users effectively.
• The underlining rule so far? Get the basics right before venturing into the ‘what’s upcoming’ waters. Focus on what you do already, but do it better, and always remember to maximize value to your end user, listen to them, and offer them what they want. Simple things to overlook like website conversion optimization, calls-to-action, A/B testing, platform/browser optimization, feedback user groups, localization and continual evolution need to be addressed before anything else. Build a solid foundation, and you’re setting yourself up for success.

Stay tuned for the next post: Getting to the fun stuff – the next level up in the future of digital marketing.

Once you get an idea for their behaviour, go a step further and give your virtual mannequin a name, a personal style, a back story, and anything else that helps your model become more ‘real’. You’ll be amazed at how differently you look at your future campaigns when you have an actual face and a name to market to, not just an email address or PID (person id).

This past week I attended, albeit briefly, the TFM&A show in London. I normally love trade shows – the glitz, the glamour, the schwag – the buzz always gets me really inspired. This time it was all a bit different though. Maybe I’ve been getting used to the B2C arena in the last 1.5 years and become somewhat removed from the furore that is a B2B marketing tradeshow, but overall there was a strong theme I couldn’t shake – it’s all the same.

Turning down one aisle to another, every vendor’s booth might as well have been touting the same snake oil remedies to your problems. Unfortunately the snake oil was just a permutation or mutation on the basics: email marketing, SEO, CRM, viral marketing or the best/most potent of all – social media. The queue for the social media keynote alone was an unbelievable 4 wide, wrapping around booths and across aisles for at least 300 feet. Of course this is representative of the fact that social media has become an important tool in the marketer’s toolbox, and more importantly that our industry is booming, but is that it? For what it’s worth, I thought the exact same thing at the DMA show in Las Vegas in late 2008, and it seems to be a recurring theme or question of mine –what’s the next big thing in digital marketing and where’s it going? Why are the booths all touting the same old thing, or just a variation of it? Social media is our most recent revelation, but it’s a testament to how much like a fat kid on a smartie our industry has become. Are we so starved for newness that social media is the only thing that gets us out of bed in the morning?

We all know that marketing is all about getting to your target audience, and in the last 5 years it has become paramount to display the relevant messaging to your audience for the best yield. Digital marketing represents a medium that is extremely cost-effective, thanks in no small part to the internet revolution and how ubiquitous it is across all demographics and markets. As the web matures, behaviours mature, and products need to match those behaviours. In that respect, a part of marketing has always been inherently underhanded – we aggressively seek out and exploit new areas that show any sign of being lucrative. First it was the web in general (1.0), then it was communication channels like email, RSS, and now it’s all social (2.0). From a wider perspective, it just seems that marketing will always be moving 5 steps behind the general population, and playing catch-up to ‘fish where the fish are’.

It’s worth mentioning that not for one second am I inferring that I know any better than those many (clearly successful) service providers; nor do I know that the next big thing in digital marketing is X, Y or Z. I’m just saying that at this rate, digital marketing (and I’m not even touching traditional marketing here) is getting, for lack of a better word, predictable. As marketers, we have a basic set of tools, applications, systems and processes that we need to do our jobs effectively – a CRM for contact storage, an email platform for communicating, PPC for quality traffic, a web team for site optimization, and so on. But more and more I see these as assumed infrastructure rather than golden fleeces, and although vendors will always improve their offerings, they’ll always be offering effectively the same thing.

This post is sounding like I’m becoming jaded more than anything else, but I can’t help saying it: I can’t wait for a new paradigm – a fresh new way of approaching marketing (and our audiences) that stops us from being lemmings and instead lets us be part of the creation of products that promote themselves by addressing specific, real needs in a market. Until then, we seem destined to go buy the latest fishing rod by going to these ‘cutting edge, industry-leading’ tradeshows and getting swarmed by a sales crew who tout their ‘unique’ solution as the Holy Grail. Call me (very) sarcastic, but when one interested attendee actually asked a vendor ‘OK, so what are your USP’s’ I almost snorted. In the context of the show as a whole, I think I could have answered for him, although I don’t think my answer would have closed the deal.

This is the year for marketing analytics. We’re in a global recession that is showing no signs of abating, and will get worse before it gets better. It’s been well documented that digital marketing is in a great position to thrive during these economic doldrums, but good marketing still costs money and that money will be harder to come by in ‘09. As finance departments and C-level executives tighten their fists around marketing budgets, the only way you can be sure of acquiring new funds is with hard, definitive proof of what’s working and why.

Of course most marketers reading this are thinking ‘I already analyze my campaigns to death, I don’t need to change anything’, but A) many other marketers aren’t analyzing at all, and B) you can never have too much (worthwhile) analysis. This is the year of diligent, comprehensive analysis of anything and everything you do as a marketer – not only to adapt to your market forces, but to stave off economic ones.

Why is web analysis good for your business?

Not knowing what’s happening to visitors on your site is like owning a store but wearing a blindfold from behind the counter. Customers walk through your store’s aisles, but you have no idea where they’re going, why, and what they’re having trouble finding (but let’s not imagine them stealing stuff). You need to know what your site visitors are experiencing – good or bad – on your site, and act accordingly. This is all assuming they’ve arrived on your site ‘for free’ via an organic search result, but it’s a whole different ballgame (and a big old waste of money) if you’ve paid for visitors to your site but aren’t tracking what happens after that.

If you have proof that campaign ‘A’ generated XX visitors, XX of which hit goals 1,2 (but not 3), and that XX% of those goals resulted in a sale, then you have the hard numbers your bosses want and need in this shaky economy.

By keeping up-to-date with the analysis of your entire website – everything from keywords to ATOS (average time on site) to bounce rates, goal hits, even browser & resolution, you can be sure that the things you’re doing to market your site aren’t wasted. What’s better, if you find they are a waste, you can adapt and change. Alternatively, if you have proof that campaign ‘A’ generated XX visitors, XX of which hit goals 1,2 (but not 3), and that XX% of those goals resulted in a sale, then you have the hard numbers your bosses want and need in this shaky economy. Remember that conversion stats aren’t the end-all-be-all: using web analytics to know without doubt or intuition what countries outperformed others, what time of day visitors hit your goals, what browser type results in more sales, or which campaign worked best…can all mean the difference between economic success and failure.

So web analysis will save my business in 2009?

No, of course not. Web analytics are crucial in a downturn economy, but won’t save a flagging business or work miracles. Analysis is best used at all times – when any change you do on your site – no matter how big or small – can be tracked, measured, quantified and acted on. If it worked, you continue; if it didn’t work, you try again until it does. This same rule applies to all marketing activities you do in 2009, but no matter what, if you don’t analyze, you might be just another statistic by the end of the year.

What are some tools to help me analyze my efforts in 2009?

Without a doubt, Google Analytics is the best free analytics decision you could make for your business, but here are a few more free or low-cost tools that can help you make of the most of your marketing efforts:

• CrazyEgg – amazing heatmaps that visualize what your visitors are doing. Be sure to check out the Confetti reports, you’ll love them. (https://crazyegg.com/)
• StatCounter – real time viewing of visitors to your site is voyeuristic, but highly intriguing. ATOS, footsteps, and exit pages are crucial. (www.statcounter.com)
• Use Facebook pages or social ads? The FB insights analytics are great, with a slick interface. (www.facebook.com)
• 4Q – Numbers aren’t always enough. Sometimes it helps to hear it straight from your customer’s mouth. 4Q is a survey tool that answers the most important questions you need to know about your site. (http://4q.iperceptions.com/)
• ClickTale – Like CrazyEgg, but more. Visualize what your visitors are doing, on what pages, and every interaction they have with your site. (www.clicktale.com)
• Yahoo Web Analytics – Don’t like Google? Yahoo has their own version of Analytics and has some loyal fans and users. (http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/)
• Woopra – Desktop client that lets you manipulate data, connected to a web service for data capture. I’ve tried to use it, couldn’t believe I was expected to download the app but then wait 2 weeks before I could even start using it as they ‘validated’ my site. Your experiences are your own, however. (http://www.woopra.com)

Walked in at 8:30 am to find my desk as one massive present. This is the stuff of legend and lore.

They’re questioning what drives and motivates us to open up our daily lives to anyone and everyone, when it’s possible that no one’s listening.   They can’t imagine opening a Twitter account and talking to an empty room, so why do we bother?

It’s a good point.  Taking a step back for a moment (from whatever social medium you’re reading this in), you might wonder how we – the users who aren’t necessarily using social media for financial gain – measure any type of return out of social media? 

What’s the underlying factor that lets us get a return out social media, and makes us keep using it?

First, just skip the marketing-centric, revenue-generating B2B/B2C user who recognizes the potential in social media, so they tap into like it was the Klondike.  For these users, social interaction is a business decision, and going social is often associated with a brand or product to result in revenue.  Identifying why they’re using social media is easy – it’s money.

For the other type of user – the everyday social media/network user –identifying value and drive gets tricky.  There’s no money involved, so they’re simply doing it because they want to.  These ‘C2C‘ (consumer to consumer) users share information and opinions across their network(s) with like-minded people, gaining knowledge and contacts in the process.   So what drives them to continue using social media?

Interaction = Confidence = Value

Some seasoned social networkers might be reading this and thinking ‘There is no immediate return, stop thinking like a marketer.  The return is the interaction itself.‘ 

So what happens when you get no interaction? Do you stop?

Social media is linked to confidence, and that confidence is linked to value for the user.  In fact it’s a lot closer to tracking a basic marketing campaign than you might think, although perhaps not as easy as looking at a finite percentage or number that represents how many people X/Y/Z’d your product.  There are little value-trackers – different to each network – that we all look for and use to show us how we’re doing.   Any significant lack of these value-trackers often leads to low confidence, which results in a user asking the question ‘Why are you doing it?’  Conversely, get a lot of interaction, and you know you’re doing it right.

There are little value-trackers – different to each network – that we all look for and use to show us how we’re doing.

Take Twitter.  First-timers clearly find it daunting to broadcast what they’re doing, but the minute they get an ‘@’ reply, broadcasting becomes interaction, and they’re hooked.  The same goes for blogging – comments are crucial in knowing that people out there are actually reading your blog.  Lack of comments means lack of confidence, which means lack of value, which leads to no more blogging.  Even having a post bookmarked on Delicious means your hard-worked content has been deemed valuable by someone, somewhere, which spurs you on.

Of course there are ton of these ‘value-trackers‘ out there, each particular to a network, but the most obvious might include:

• New Twitter followers
• @ replies
• retweets
• trackbacks
• comments
• favourites
• friend requests
• diggs
• bookmarks
• ratings
• and many, many more.

Get any of the above in a respective network, and you start getting personal value out of it.  Your confidence goes up, and you keep going.  At this point it’s easy to answer the doubters why you’re doing it – because you want to and you have proof that it’s worth it.

Do we need social media KPI’s?

Does this mean all social networks should have ways to monitor performance so that users know what they’re getting out of them?  Or does it totally defeat the gregarious, organic nature of social media and risks making them yet another way to track popularity?   Does the lack of performance indicators lessen the likelihood of adoption by ‘newbies’, or is it a good thing that you either use social media because you want to, or don’t use it at all?

What do you think? Add your comment below.