Argyle Social is building a social media Analytics platform that is geared at helping people measure the ROI of Social Media Marketing.

Measuring Social Media ROI seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days. It is not an easy concept to grasp and the metrics are still in their infancy.

Eric and Adam give an interesting perspective on the topic.

Social Media ROI, Necessary… Not Evil from Socialize Your Cause on Vimeo.

Grab the Audio and Listen Later via Itunes

Other Social Media ROI Resources

For other Social Media ROI takes I would suggest checking out CSPenns take on Social Media ROI and Olivier Blanchard’s (@thebrandbuilder) blog . These guys are on the cutting edge of Social Media Analytics and I am following their input very closely.

What changed?

Facebook’s open graph model now allows for any webpage to be liked by any Facebook user. This means that instead of everything having to be housed within the Facebook walls for users to like and spread the content, those barriers are broken down and the web is an open playground.

The ability to house everyones likes and common interests within Facebook is somewhat limiting and not realistic.  Thus, the ability to pull in outside content and like/share with your social graph is that next step. (Think of it like an evolution of the FB share functionality, that lets you see who else of your friends also liked what you did)

The idea stems from the concept of social objects. A social object is a a topic or area of interest that brings two people together. All human connections revolve around a social object. For more information on social objects check out Hugh Macleod’s Social Objects for beginners post.

Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.

Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.

Example C. You’ve popped into your local bar for a drink after work. At the bar there’s some random dude, sending a text on this neat-looking cellphone you’ve never seen before. So you go up to him and ask him about the phone. The random dude just LOVES his new phone, so has no trouble with telling a stranger about his new phone for hours on end. Next thing you know, you two are hitting it off and you offer to buy him a beer. You spend the rest of the next hour geeking out about the new phone, till it’s time for you to leave and go dine with your wife. The cellphone was the social object.

Open Graph

So now, any website that implements the facebook like button, has the potential to be spread through Facebook, without having to make a group or fan page. The like plugin shows the user on your page which ( if any ) of their Facebook friends also liked the page.

The open graph is Facebook’s next step into the domination of the internet and an interesting step towards a more semantic web. I’m interested to see how this develops and what other social networking sites will try to do in a similar vein.

How to implement the like button on your site

Head over to the Facebook Developers page and generate your own button. Place the code on your site and like the open graph do the rest.

To implement a dynamic like button on each page out your site. Check out Christopher S. Penn’s post on How to implement two Facebook social plugins in less than five minutes

I am curious to hear others thoughts on the use of the like buttons on their websites and the cannibalization it might have on existing Facebook fan pages.

The “social” aspect of these sites is also lost to me. Do people really friend and follow people on stumbleupon or digg? I would have to guesstimate that the majority of traffic to each of these sites is to glance at the main page to see what is “hot” (with the exception of stumbleupon, where you are blindly wandering the internet based off your set preferences). Maybe call it “democratic media” but not social.

Social bookmarking sites have been useful in the past for driving traffic and building backlinks to your site. While they still can drive a considerable amount of traffic to your site (provided that your content is Remarkable) they are losing the SEO power they once had. This is, in part, due to most popular bookmarking sites changing their links to “nofollow”, plus the massive amount of spam content that they receive on a daily basis.

Most people use social bookmarking sites as a way to store their browser bookmarks in the cloud for easy access on the go. Sites like delicious are good for that.

Browser plugins however, are more useful. Xmarks, previously named Foxmarks, is a browser plugin for firefox & chrome (if you have internet explorer running please smash your computer now for me).

Xmarks allows for cross browser/machine bookmark syncing and the ability to access them from the cloud when you are on the go. These are your private bookmarks accessible from anywhere. If you aren’t using this tool, please get with the program.

Now towards onwards to the future

Enter ZooTool.

Zootool is a new social bookmarking tool that is dusting off the oldschool “social bookmarking” site and giving it a new, awesome twist.

I predict ZooTool (or something of the same concept) to become de facto social bookmarking site of tomorrow. Why you may ask? Because it is bringing in the functionality and social aspect that other services are lacking.

ZooTool is enabling people to save and share content like never before. It allows to to grab any type of multimedia you come across while surfing the web.

By simply clicking the bookmarklet   You can grab any piece of multimedia content from the webpage.

As you are collecting the pictures, images, pages, and documents from any web page you can easily sort them into folders and have the option of sending the bookmark to your existing social networks

Not only will this help you sort and tag images and other pieces of content that you might want to add into your own blog, it will also keep the attribution information of where you found the original artwork. Something that I have found to be extremely handy.

All the collected bookmarks from across the web can be easily accessed in your “Zoo”

What tools are you using to collect multimedia from the web?

How to Get a LOT More Done Online – in less time from David Wells on Vimeo.

What are your favorite productivity tools? Mine would have to be Launchy, an awesome app and web launcher.

Click through to the post to see the player. My shortcode here is still messed up =/

The Art and Science of Scaling Social from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

ShowNotes

Earned is the PR and is the most credible

Paid is your mass advertising very expensive

Owned Media is the brands media outlets- the blogs-videos-photos .

Digg Social ads

Re-purposing Content for different platforms. It’s best to take the earned credible content to use

Content goes stale very quickly in social media channels. Refreshing content frequently is a must.

Testing your content against itself by using different headlines and different types of multimedia.

Sometimes traditional earned media does better than user generated content. So testing what works and what doesn’t is important!

The ow.ly link shortener that hootsuite provides is stealing all my Google Juice. The links I have been sending out via that link shortener have been useless due to the fact that the links open up in hootsuite’s ow.ly iframe. I have heard numerous complaints that the bar across the top of peoples browsers is super annoying and I shrugged that off and told them to get over it. Now, I feel their pain, because its canalizing the SEO power of my links.

I found a quick work around to this by installing the bit.ly link shortener exstension for chrome , But it still requires me to manually make a new link when I click the hootlet button to update my social media properties. BOO! (manual work = bad)

I still love and use hootsuite and it is still the best free tool to use to manage your social media life in one easy to use dashboard. They just need to fix their love with the iframe and bar that goes across the top of the browser. (This goes for stumbleupon/digg too)

As more people come to realize the increasing value of SEO to their marketing activities they will want to use a platform that has this functionality built in. I would almost guarantee a huge boost in the adoption rate of Hootsuite over Tweetdeck, if they were to take out the Iframe and integrate bit.ly or a more robust url tracking service. The sheer fact that it is web based will make Tweetdeck a distant memory (or memory-hogging memory)

So please Hootsuite, stop stealing my juice and keep up the A+ work. Your App Rocks.

He stresses the importance of taking a holistic approach when it comes to your overall online marketing efforts. He explains how Social media, seo, and content all fit together and play a key roll in the inbound marketing process. By leveraging these 3 aspects of digital marketing and piecing them together in the right way, it can have a huge impact on your business.

Hubspot definitely eats their own dog food (weird saying) and has an awesome blog over at blog.hubspot.com.  The runtime is around 50minutes or so but is a must for any digital marketer to listen to and digest.

Mapping the inbound marketing ecosystem with Rick Burnes of Hubspot from David Wells on Vimeo.

(click through to see the player. [ ] short code is messed up on my main page for some reason…. any ideas on that? =P)

Shownotes

- See show #12 for SEO 101 with Robert Enriquez

- On page Optimization is very important and should be your second step after keyword research

- Its Niche, NOT “NITCH”

- Title Tags, H1, Alt tags, Image Title Tags, Bolding Links (<strong>)

- Content – If you are serious about SEO keep your content fresh. I recommend a post per week at LEAST. Make sure you use interal linking within your content.

- Google Analytics

- Google Webmaster tools

- XML Sitemap Maker

- Google may or may not shoot a missile at you.

- Different Sitemaps you can upload for blogs.

Okay, inspirational words aside, what is the ROI of Social media? Well, lets first examine the ROI of that billboard your company has put up, or the print ads you are running, how about those TV spots? The truth of the matter is that the ROI for all marketing activities have been wish-washy at best. It is simply impossible to measure and take into account all the complexities of how customers interact, view, interpret, and make their buying decisions. Not to mention trying to put an arbitrary dollar sign on it. (Anyone who claims they can, keep them close, as 2012 is fast approaching)

When it comes to Digital Marketing and Social Media, there has never been a more measurable marketing discipline. Click throughs, impressions, traffic, bounce rates, specific customer journeys through a site, and other analytical data paint a pretty vivid picture. Not only that, they can give you some great actionable insights into what to tweak and areas to improve upon.

Two Ways to Measuring Social Media ROI

The C.R.E.A.M. Approach.

Tracking back the specific click throughs in your purchasing funnel through your analytics. Then using this to determine which converting customer came from which social media platform. This works well for E-commerce and lead generation focused businesses because their determined goal equates directly to $$. On the other hand, brick and mortar businesses do not always have this luxury. Without some type of specific end goal to assign a dollar sign to this type of analysis is impossible. (This is why email newsletters or some measurable call to action is a must on any businesses site)

What about brand centric websites that do not generate direct sales through their website? Good Question. There are numerous “media metrics” that can be assigned to social media efforts. Metrics such as impressions, sentiment, share of voice, engagement, followers, friends, and the like. None equate to hard number though. It’s almost like a faith based initiative.

While you may not be able to see a direct increase in sales, you may be able to deduce some cost savings or other spill over effects.

The Spill Over / Cost Savings Approach

These metrics fail to translate directly into money signs, so the importance may escape the number crunchers in your next meeting. But don’t give up, the potential savings can be huge for companies transitioning archiac forms of business services to new agile social media platforms. One example (as played out as it is) is how Comcast took on a new approach to customer service by using twitter to engage with customer complaints and thus reducing the load on their call centers.

6 cost saving concepts to factor into your social media ROI

• The branding potential – saves money needed on potential advertising
• Increased customer service - cut costs of call centers and other bleeding departments
• Increased customer engagement – brand evangelists spread W.O.M. with more credibility that the company could ever muster on its own.
• Strengthening of existing customer relationship – Whats the lifetime value of your customer? How have your efforts made retention easier / more cost effective?
• Being viewed as an industry leader – lower time and money spend on chasing leads. If you are the obvious expert people will be banging at your door.
• The long term SEO benefits – Cut costs on Pay per click models.

You can slice and dice social media metrics in a variety of ways. So it is important to decide which factors you are going to measure against when the time comes to figure out your ROI throughout the course of your social media efforts.

At the end of the day perhaps the altruistic effects of your social media efforts provide value beyond that of a mere green piece of paper. The entire premise of Social Media is having a give to get mentality. Anything else will run the risk of your company being viewed as the cash hungry monster that it very well may be.

Put out good quality content that interests your audience and be authentic in your efforts and you should be seeing the positive effects of your social media campaigns. If you have to resort to calculating these numbers to convince your boss that what you are doing is working, you might be doing something wrong.

Social Media ROI from the Pros

If you enjoyed this post and would like to dig even further I highly recommend watching Christopher S. Penn’s Presentation on Social Media ROI.

You may also want to check out “Social Media ROI”  with Olivier Blanchard Part 1 Part 2

What is your take on calculating Social Media ROI?

Runtime about 16minutes

Shownotes:

Hootsuite – All in one social media dashboard. Watch my tutorial on Hootsuite

Twitterfeed – feed RSS content to different social media outlets

Ping.fm – Aggregate updates for close to 60 social media networks at one time

Pixelpipe - I reference this as pixel bytes but its pipes… silly me. With this you can blast out audio/video/picture content to over 100 sites simultaneously.

FourSquare – Location based social network that has been gaining traction lately.

If you enjoyed the show make sure to subscribe over in itunes

Call in and leave you thoughts on the Digital Marketing Zen Hotline at (617) 299-1232 and I’ll put you in the show!