Who needs the beach when you can saunter over to our office and kick off the weekend in laid-back, faux-island style. RSVP at the DC Tech Meetup page, and we'll look forward to bidding you Aloha.

When & Where:

Friday, June 1

5:00 - 9:00

CDG Interactive, 1320 19th St, NW, 8th Floor

First you had to figure out how to add time in your daily marketing schedule to devote to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

But just when you felt like you’d gotten the hang of hashtags and retweeting and growing your fan base, along comes the next shiny thing in social media, like Pinterest or Tumblr or Google+, and you hadn’t even figured out your LinkedIn strategy yet.

What’s a small organization to do?

That’s where the idea of social media discernment comes in. Discernment simply means evaluating the options and making specific choices. Just as in other marketing programs, not all channels or platforms are equally appropriate for your organization. It’s OK to pick and choose.

Here’s how:

• Know your goals. We say this every time we talk about social media strategy. Why are you using social media? What is the expected outcome? Each platform has different strengths and weaknesses; match the platform to the goal. (Need help differentiating? Use the Social Media Site Comparison tool at PowerUp Social).
• Know your audience. A second crucial factor to use when determining which social media platforms are best for you is to know what audience you’re trying to reach. Pinterest, for example, heavily skews female. LinkedIn’s audience is predominantly college educated. Choose the platform your audience uses.
• Look at your numbers. Past performance can also predict future success. If you need to make room in your schedule for a new platform, review your site analytics and evaluate the performance of the existing ones. If Twitter drives traffic but those visitors don’t convert, cut back 1 day a week and try Google+ on that day instead (or whichever new platform you’ve identified using steps 1 and 2 above).

Speaking of site analytics, you’ll want to keep a regular eye on them. Platform value can change over time. Are the existing accounts still performing? To what degree are the new ones succeeding or failing?

Based on the data, you can change the mix of your daily social media efforts.

Keep in mind, too, that you don’t have to spend the same amount of time everywhere. Again, based on performance data, you can weight some activities more heavily than others. (For a sample schedule of a social media “diet,” see the PowerUp Social Media Pyramid.)

Your Turn

• How do you decide which platforms to use and how much time to spend on them?
• How do you measure the success of your efforts?

Visit PowerUp Social to learn more about each social media platform and how to build them into your organization’s marketing plan. While you're there, sign up for the free 8-week course on social media marketing and strategy.

More than ever, that strategy needs to include a smart and efficient use of mobile platforms. Shopping in general is becoming more mobile-centric, and even more so during the holidays, when shoppers want to make the most efficient use of their time and dollars. If you (or anyone other decision-makers in your company) need convincing that mobile is a must this holiday season, consider these facts:

• Up to 65% of consumers confirm store hours and location, prices or product availability using their mobile phone before even heading to a store.
• 52% of US consumers use their mobile phones to search for information such as product reviews and competitive pricing while they are in the store.
• Mobile search will generate 27.8 billion more queries than desktop search by 2016. This trend has led Google to launch a new smartphone-specific crawler to return search results targeted for smartphone users.

If you don’t already have a mobile strategy in place, the time to begin planning and executing for mobile is now. Otherwise you’ll discover that it’s too late to be ready when the holiday shoppers should be lining up at your store (virtual or otherwise).

And of course, "mobile strategy" is not just a fancy way of saying "mobile website." Yes, a mobile-optimized website is a good start, but it comprises only part of a comprehensive mobile strategy. An effective mobile strategy will include a variety of tactics, such as:

• Optimizing your listings in review sites, Google Places, location-based social media (such as FourSquare)
• Testing new search strategies for the smartphone crawler as people search differently on their phones than on their desktop computers
• Creating mobile-specific PPC in addition to search optimization efforts
• Using mobile-specific functionality such as click-to-call and geo-targeting
• Incorporating QR Codes or short URLs in off-line channels to help customers find your mobile presence

If you need help getting "mobile-ized" for the holidays, contact CDG. We'll help you assess the behavior of your current mobile visitors, set goals, develop and optimize your mobile strategy and measure your success.

Photo Credit: Joe Buckingham on Flickr

“MySpace? People are still on MySpace?” That was the reaction from one of the participants in CDG’s social media roundtable earlier this week. “That’s the most surprising thing I’ve heard in a while,” she said.

It’s true, MySpace is creaky and aging, and to be honest, its long-term prognosis just might be terminal. But it’s not dead yet. As recently as last November, MySpace attracted nearly 25 million unique visitors; that's more than Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest.

It’s also worth noting that those 25 million people are disproportionately young and diverse and less affluent than the general population. According to a recently released Pew Internet study on teens and social media, MySpace—along with Twitter—is one of the most racially diverse social media networks. It’s most popular among Latino teens: 35% of Latino teens who are active on social media have a MySpace account, compared with 22% of Caucasian teens. Also, MySpace accounts are more prevalent among social-media-using teens whose parents did not attend college.  Thirty-two percent of those teens have a MySpace account, compared with just 18% of teens whose parents have at least some college experience.

These statistics are worth considering not because MySpace’s influence is likely to increase. Truthfully, unless there’s a drastic shift in the social media universe, MySpace will never again touch the dominance of a Facebook or a Twitter. But in 2012, ignoring MySpace altogether can work against you—particularly if you are trying to reach a niche audience that still has a significant presence there; for example, Latino kids between the ages of 13 and 18.

The larger moral of the story? Although things change at lightning speed, be sure to keep your eyes on the entire social media landscape and not just what’s emerging on the horizon.

For more guidance on social media channels and tactics, check out PowerUpSocial.com, CDG’s new resource about social media for business.

There’s no shortcut to getting an accurate picture of your ROI. It takes planning, consistency, and ongoing engagement. But don’t get too worried, here are 4 steps to help you start assessing your social media ROI.

1. Create goals

 The truth is, it’s impossible to measure social media ROI without first understanding your goals. How can you judge you success if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. In some industries, goals are transactional and/or sales-based. But other organizations (including many in the science community) are not trying to complete a traditional sale. For these types of organizations, goals might include:

• Generating discussions on specific articles or topics
• Sharing information with a wider audience
• Attracting more people/entrants to a competition
• Increasing awareness of programs
• Selling tickets to an exhibit or event
• Disseminating educational materials to teachers

Once your goals are explicitly defined, you can see how your social media efforts will support them and how you will measure success.

Note: Your goals will also guide which social media channels you use. For guidance on choosing the right channels, consult PowerUp Social, CDG’s comprehensive resource on social media of business. Generally speaking, Facebook, with its more than 800 million users, is always essential.  

2. Monitoring your Activity

Once you have goals set for your social media activities, you need to monitor your efforts. What you monitor and measure should reflect your goals. If the success of the campaign is being measured by an increase in your social media audience, then you should concentrate your efforts on, for example, increasing your number of Facebook followers (or likes).

Most social media platforms provide some level of statistics, and there are a variety of third party tools (ranging from free to very expensive) that you can use to maintain and monitor your social media accounts. Here are a few to consider:

Facebook:

If you are using Facebook, the Facebook Insights for Pages provides a wealth of information about:

 Demographics of who is visiting your pages

• How many people are talking about your content
• How many people have viewed each tab on your page
• What external sites are referring visitors to your page
• Who is talking about and sharing your content

Twitter

Twitter advanced search allows you to set geographic and even sentiment parameters around specific keywords. So you can create separate searches for positive, negative and neutral tweets about a particular topic and restrict that search to within 100 miles of the DC area in order to better coordinate your response.  You can save these searches, so you only have to set them up once.

Third Party Tools:

There are also a variety of third party tools that allow you to monitor multiple social media accounts, schedule activity in advance, monitor specific terms, assign team members to follow up on specific items, etc.

3. Measure Conversions

Each of your goals should match up with a specific, measurable conversion. Often people conflate “conversion” with “purchase.” That’s a mistake. Think of a conversion as any action you want your user to take. So, are your social media efforts aimed at getting a user to download a document? Watch a video? Provide an email address? Sign a petition? Each one of these actions can be tracked, measured, and counted as a conversion, which will in turn help you determine your true social media ROI.

Since, in many cases, your social media efforts are driving users back to a website, you can analyze your web statistics to determine your conversion rate. If, like most organizations we work with, you are using Google Analytics, you can set goals to track your conversions.

There are three types of goals in Google Analytics:

• A specific URL (like a thank you page) when people submit a form or an email address
• Time on Site
• Pages per visit

If you want to measure video views or document downloads you can use Event Tracking. You can even use Event Tracking to track how long people watch a video, when they stop and start it. Using the goal funnel, you can see how many people started the process, where they went, if they left the site completely, how many continued on to the next step.

4. Report your Success

Any report on social media should take into account a combination of factors, including conversions, engagement and sentiment. We generally use the following measures:

• How much traffic social media drove to the site & conversions – what actions they took when they got to the site
• Fan base – followers, likes, subscribers (YouTube channel, blog RSS readers, etc.)
• Engagement – retweets, conversations (Facebooks # are talking about), shares, blog comments
• Demographics of your audience
• Sentiment

By incorporating all of these factors and applying them back to your business goals, you can determine the effectiveness of your social media campaign, and in turn your ROI.

Need help making your social media campaigns more effective? The CDG Interactive social media team can help. Contact us for a consultation.

“The Taste of Savings” ties into the company’s new television/Internet ad campaign, in which people on-the-street are asked to take a Car Insurance Taste Test.

In the iAd, we expand on the taste test idea by inviting users to create their own Taste of Savings. Once they launch the GEICO iAd, users go through a four-step process to create their delicious blend. These engaging, game-like interfaces allow users to to collect the Value Berries, blend them up in the Sav-o-matic, fill up bottles of GEICO on an assembly line, and finally, create their own personalized label.

The iAd also provides a multitude of ways for users to further interact with GEICO—by watching the Taste Test ads, downloading ringtones and Taste of Savings wallpapers, or getting a quote at geico.com.

“The success of our previous iAds set the bar very high,” says Matthew Snyder, CDG’s creative director, “We worked hard to create an engaging and fun concept that embraces the interactivity available through the iAd platform. We couldn’t be happier with the results.”

The iAd began running earlier this week. You can see The Taste of Savings, and all other GEICO iAds by downloading the iAd Gallery App and searching for GEICO. Have Fun!

If you need a mobile advertising solution for your company, contact CDG.