I’ve covered the importance to businesses of social sharing earlier this week. In that post I elaborated on why you should be investing in programs that increases social sharing.

In case you’ve missed that post, here’s a quick “why” and “how” recap:

• What people share on social networks is increasingly being a stronger signal to search engines
• What people share on social networks have a higher degree of trust, compared to what brands share
• You basically want to figure out how to get your customers to do the talking, rather than doing the talking yourself

A warning before you keen on reading: this is a product pitch of a tool that I think is a game changer, the only tool that I’ve found that facilitates for e-commerce shops to effectively increase social sharing. So if you don’t like product pitches, stop reading now.

Avalanshare is a new tool that tracks and monetise your customers’ social sharing

Avalanshare is primarily aimed at e-commerce stores that wants a simple and effective tool to increase, track and monetise what customers shares on their social networks.

Today your product pages are probably ready for social sharing, meaning that they are equipped with the standard social sharing buttons for Twitter, facebook and Google+. And that the meta-data is properly setup for generating a good looking thumbnail preview.

How does the Avalanshare tool help you:

• It allows you to setup incentives for you customers to share your product
• You can control the thumbnail preview without playing around with the meta-data
• You’ve a complete campaign tool allowing you to run multiple campaigns
• Everything is being tracked in real-time

With the Avalanshare tool you can now easily setup campaigns such as “Thanks for buying our product! Share this with your friends and you will both get 10% your next purchase”.

Avalanshare starts at €49.95/month and comes with a 14 day free trial period (disclosure: affiliate link).

Do you know of any similar products? Please post the links in the comment field!

Social sharing is growing at a rapid speed. At present the Facebook platform makes up for 52% of all social sharing, with Twitter and Tumblr growing their individual social sharing rate exponentially.

Social sharing is the fundamental mechanic behind what powers social networking platforms. It’s the tool that amplifies your customers’ and prospect’s respective voices. As a brand you’re probably pretty keen on being a part of that context and the content that is being shared (given that it’s somewhat a positive sentiment).

Search engines like Google and Bing are looking at what’s being shared on social networks and are using it as signals to their search algorithms. If authentic users are sharing something it must be relevant content, and search engines wants to deliver exactly that.

What your connections are sharing is trusted, the rest is advertising

If you want visibility on the Facebook platform you’ve a few options;

1. Buy advertising space
2. Create a Page
3. Create an application
4. Entice your customers to share your content (somewhat includes 2 & 3)

Needless to say it’s advertising space that Facebook wants us to buy, that’s their primary sources of revenue and that’s why Facebook can stay a free service for its users.

However, regardless of the platform is called Facebook, Youtube or Mashable, advertising will always be perceived as advertising. If the  platform itself is social or not doesn’t matter, advertising is advertising and typically we’re ignoring this type of content.

Inspiration taken from David Armano’s original social stream graphic.

Above I’ve illustrated a typical newsfeed stream, this could be any social network as the principle is the same. I’m not saying that advertising on these networks are worthless, but don’t get fooled by the sharp marketing teams at these social networks. You’re buying advertising no matter what they call it or how they brand it. You’re probably already good at advertising so that’s not what we need to worry about now.

Equally, if you setup and run a branded Page, the messenger is you. It’s not paid advertising, it’s permission marketing based push content with some functionalities for having a dialogue. The problem remains though that in most cases brands will treat this the same way they treat advertising space.

The real value lays in the trusted content from real connections. The content may be sponsored or paid for, but the messenger is a customer or a prospects. If done right, this heavily increases trustworthy of the content.

60% of consumers say they would share their purchase in return of a free perk

Social sharing is growing at rapid rate – In recent a study conducted by Beyond, 60% of the respondants said they would happily share a purchase on Facebook in return of a free perk.

Getting you customers’ to share their purchase, or the product they are considering, is obviously not for everyone. But as we’re getting more and more born digital natives into our buying demographic, this is going to increasingly cater to more people.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science

Spotify was one of the first services that tapped into the frictionless sharing into the Facebook Timeline. it’s simple, whatever you listen to is being updated on your Timeline and appears in your connections ticker.

Getting your product pages ready for social sharing is essential, having an interesting product is essential. When tapping into letting customers speak on your behalf there’s simply just no possibility that anything but excellent product and services will survive.

The future of empowered customer will simply bring better products and services to the market.

Do you want to avoid a social media fail? Have your aligned your strategies after your customers and prospects needs, or is social media just a tactical toolbox that you patch ontop of everything else you do?

There’s still a big disconnect in how customers and brands interact on social media channels. When the two meet, it’s often awkward and results in a social media fail for brands. As “social” is something you are, not something you do – brands don’t automatically become social just because they talk about their products on a branded Facebook page.

The business objectives for brands are to Increase sales and to reduce costs. Fundamental. The problem though is that when it comes to social media, the norm seems to be to approach it with the same old tactics as worked for paid media; crafting a message and push it out as far as possible.

So will your Social Media fail? Here’s 6 reasons on why it might:

• Your customer is in desperate need of help whilst all your Twitter feed does is sending automated Tweets with products updates. Add to that no one monitors any incoming tweets.
• Your online customers decide when to shop, why is your customer service team offline?
• Your customer is an expert in a field you target and a super-admin on a forum, are you monitoring and engaging here or are you just attentive to your own Facebook page?
• Your customers have a big following and influence on Twitter, even-though they are low transacting customers aren’t they worth looking after?
• Your customers are overwhelmed with notifications and e-mails, if you have something to say make sure it’s excellent, relevant and personalized.

Whilst you’re thinking about what product to post on your Facebook page or tweaking that new welcome tab, your customer is writing in a forum about his bad experience. And whilst you’re discarding your low transacting customer base they are using their twitter followers to gain traction against you.

Social media isn’t tactical and business objectives hasn’t changed, but your strategies on how to successfully achieve your objectives probably needs changing.

Read more about why some companies are better than other at social media in my CMIQ article here.

Enticing your customers to share your product within their social network is a winning tactic in the age of rising advertising costs, lower click-through rates and decreased trust in brands. But how do you get customers to share your product, and more importantly how do you track and monetize it?

Make your product pages share friendly

Making your product pages share friendly doesn’t only mean that you add share-buttons, but you need to make sure that when people share your links on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc, they convey the right message i.e. a proper thumbnail with description text and image included in your page meta-data.

Apple does this with excellence even-though they (for some mysterious reason) haven’t embraced sharing buttons on their product pages.

This is how it looks like when you share the iPad2 main product page on Facebook:

Here’s another example from Marinedepot.com that have added Facebook Like-buttons to all their product pages. Liking the product generates a nice thumbnail in my Facebook timeline:

Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ will render the thumbnails from your pages pretty much the same way. Twitter requires a bit more thinking through though.

In the example below, Marinedepot.com have simply settled with just generating the full URL to the page. My guess (which is not supported by data) is that this doesn’t really work in their favour.

I would rather have looked at automatically shorten the link using any of the popular link shortening services such as bit.ly and ow.ly together with the page title.

Entice your customers to share

Getting your product pages ready for sharing with good meta-data for thumbnails and share friendly buttons is a good start. But how do you entice your customers (or prospective customers) to actually share your product page?

You’ll need to work on some kind of reward to the customer in return of the social share. This could both be financial or non-financial rewards.

Sneakpeaq.com does this very well with non-financial incentives on their product pages. A Facebook share earned me an extra “Peak”, a currency that I can use on their site for various things such as “view” special prices.

Tools that can help you

Avalanshare.com (disclosure: affiliate link) is a tool I’ve checked-out lately trying to solve the problem of effectively monetizing and tracking your product pages social shares.

Regardless if you use a tool like Avalanshare or you develop something in-house, Google Analytics Social Interactions together with campaign tracked outgoing links is your best friend when having to measure and report back on the performance.

It’s now standard that every company should have a Facebook page and Twitter profile. Even though they don’t intend to use this as a tool for customer engagement but rather pushing their marketing message out.

It seems like the will of simply having a presence on these platforms is stronger than any reasonable business justification.

So inevitably most of the times this fails, sometimes worse than other times, but it never ever really ends up very well.

How does it look like when it’s bad, really bad? As I’ve been shopping around for aquarium and related equipments, I’ve seen both the good and the bad, and the really bad. This post is about the worst of them all.

It’s not your job to push a marketing message, it’s your job to help your customers to buy from you

These are two are very different things. Pushing a marketing message is effective when you buy media, it’s totally devastating anywhere else. The closest of definition I can come up with is; SPAM.

If you’re out to have a presence on social media networks then it’s your job to help customers to buy from you.

Your tactics may need to be unconventional and creative, but that’s just for the good because this is how marketing will look like going forward.

Hiding behind the screen is not okay

Put yourself in my shoes, I’m a customer that have placed orders of a couple of items and it’s now been two weeks. I know that certain items that I ordered were not in stock, hence I’m suspecting that my total order will take ages to arrive.

So I have a potential problem and I need to get in touch with them. I find my e-mail order confirmation and try to send a reply back. The problem? Reply address is a “noreply” address. I never understood this with “noreply” addresses, why on earth do they exist? Can anyone give me the slightest hint?

So I try to have a look at their website. Maybe if I login I can send them an e-mail? Not so lucky there either, I can though browse through a few FAQ’s that are as intelligent as a goldfish.

Of course they have a Facebook page

In 2012 you’re not in the game if your not on Facebook, right? But I’m not sure me or the 62 other people on the page are being helped very much by the infrequent status updates about their new mobile website, or their Christmas sales on goldfish tanks.

No one seems to be commenting or liking the posts, so my educated guess is that this is yet another distraction for the company and it’s customers.

And as you probably already figured out it doesn’t look much better on twitter or on Youtube either. Let’s just conclude that they don’t need to worry about things like Google+ just yet. If you’re not customer centric as an organisation, these tools won’t help you.

fb.me..goldfishhttp//rrr….fbme??? You’re saying what? Sorry can’t hear you?!

How do I get in touch with you?

Maybe there’s a way to reach this company. Maybe a contact form or an e-mail is hidden somewhere but at least I cannot find it, I cannot reply to my confirmation order and I cannot write on their wall . So I will just sitback and hope my products arrive someday, and the likeliness of me being a returning customer is as small as the company replying to my tweet.

Update 13th February

It all got even better when I today received a newletter from them regarding their February sales – of course there’s no working Unsubscribe button in their e-mails.

The way we’re taught to measure and report on online paid media is by attributing direct transactional value to conversions as a result of clicks on tracked links. If you buy a lot of banners space this is great and pretty straight forward way of measuring the direct impact.

But is buying media space the only thing you do to attract new customers? Highly unlikely. You probably invest in SEO, E-mail marketing and run a couple of social media profiles as well. Most likely you report and measure these channels the exact same way; a tracked link where you attribute the value to the last click.

The problem with attributing all value to the last click

There’s nothing wrong in measuring and reporting on transactional value from your last touch points. But there’s however a giant problem if this is the ONLY way you look at your analytics data.

Then you won’t get buy-in to do anything that costs money but cannot be tracked and reported on with a tracked link. How does that resonate in social media when investing in your product and your customers are the winning strategies?

The reason we have the, now so common,  Twitter and Facebook profiles full of “Come and check us out, click here”-messages is just beacuse of the way we’ve learnt to measure and track paid media; by tagging and tracking a link.

These Social media profiles then rather become an attmept to satisy your internal customers (your managers) rather than trying to satisfy your real customers (the transacting customers). Because how do you attribute sales to that customer you helped in a forum, or that Youtube videos series with educational videos? Sounds like a good thing to do, but hard to prove how it relates to transactional value right?

Part of the solution is to look at assisted conversions

I’m all for justifying the reason for doing, any business not working that way is a dangerous business. However, you should never become a victim of your own measurement model.

I think it’s unlikely that the last touch point channels are going to change dramatically over the next years, what is changing though are the assisting channels that leads up to these conversions.

Let’s take an example; you’re being sent a Facebook message by a friend of yours with a funny video from Blendtech, you click it and land on Youtube, you laugh a bit and the close that browser tab. One week later your mom calls you and ask what to buy in present for you dad. You perform a branded search on “Blendtec blenders” click and land on Blendtec’s product page. You then copy the link and e-mail you mom who then buys the blender.

I know, not your everyday example but also not very unlikely. Tell me how your CPA report is attributing any value to that Youtube video?

Was the link easy to share? If you knew this behaviour existed, could you have made any features on your site aiding this type of transaction?

If you treat your last attribution report like god, then nothing of the above is likely to ever happen and you’ll stick with your Facebook page where you spam your poor “fans” with message after message with tracked links, and it’s more of a distraction than the asset it could have been.

Simply illustrated, your assisting channels leading up to a conversion could very well look like this:

There can be endless of assisted conversions (the whole offline world!), for the simplicity in this case I just illustrated 1 assisted conversion, and I’ve just made up the path in a random order. Your Google Analytics will tell you the exact path of your assisted conversions.

If you invest in TV-commercials your branded search traffic is probably going to increase as a result, as well as your direct traffic of course. A strong content strategy which resonates well in social channels, where you invest in producing whitepaper and holding webinars – unless you ask for personal details as payment to attend or download, there’s little you have to track and attribute and sales as a result.

This is not a future challenge to solve, this is today’s challenge to solve. We have no shortage of metrics to measure, quite the opposite actually, but we’re struggling with understanding how to correctly attribute economic value to our marketing efforts.

The solution won’t be that you can accurately track every single cent, the solution will be to intelligently look at the sea of metrics you have, and see if you can find relationships between them and your financial transactions.

Is Google Analytics telling you that Social Channels is leading to branded search, then what are your social metrics telling you? Is a lot of comments on your slideshare presentation making it more sticky, hence making it appear in search?

No one said this is going to be easy, and we’re been spoiled for too long with a model that was too easy for it’s own survival.

Baekdal.com recently wrote about the value, or actually the non-value, of traffic coming from the Social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. The problem with StumbleUpon Baekdal argues is the high traffic volume and the low conversion. He then explains very well why StumbleUpon sends loads of traffic and why the conversion will always be low.

Low value traffic from StubleUpon

Whilst the direct referral traffic may be to little value, there is one important part missing in this analysis; ranking signals to Google and other search engines.

StumbleUpon as ranking signal to Google

When looking at the referral data in Google Analytics and the direct attributed economic value the picture is not very nice. A lot of traffic that doesn’t generate any sales is not the kind of referral traffic you really want.

But a lot of traffic coming from StumbleUpon must mean that people on the social bookmarking site are sharing Baekdal.com links, and a lot of it as well.

Whilst I don’t have any data to support my theory, I’d like to argue that just as a link being shared on Twitter and “liked” on Facebook, a shared link on StumbleUpon must be a valuable ranking signal to Google. And I don’t mean that the actual StumbleUpon link with Baekdal’s page will rank, but the actual Baekdal.com domain will be getting the credit.

Thus the result of the link shared on StumbleUpon will make the bakedal.com pages rank potentially higher on Google hence sending more traffic from Google.

Ranking signals to Google from StumbleUpon

Readers and Baekdal, what do you think?

My very talented friend Minter Dial (The Myndset) have together with Yael Rozencwajg (Yopps) have spent a lot of time explaining how to look at the real value of  a facebook fan and our social networks. Just to make it more sticky they’ve branded it as the value of a Facebook fan.

Actually the title should have been “6 steps to understanding the real value of a [insert and social media channel here] fan”, but that doesn’t quite have the same ranking potential in search engines.

So how do we go about to solve this multimillion dollar question?

Haven’t every digital marketing agency in the world (that sells Facebook ads) already answered this question? Reading the publications available on the topic the value of a Facebook fan is anything from a couple of $ cents to a few dollars.

The problem with all of these studies are that they don’t measure the value of a Facebook fan. They measure the Cost of Acquiring a fan, or in best case the Cost of Acquiring a customer (CPA). That’s a very bad metric for measuring the potential value (or non value) of a Facebook fan.

Instead you have to attribute the actions, activities and information taking place on your Facebook page  and attribute this to your bottom line objectives. Easier said than done in today’s digital multichannel environment. Probably the best existing solution today to track and prove any economic value from Social channels is to use Google Analytics Multichannel Funnel and look at the Assisted Conversions (requires that you have properly setup your goal paths).

Minter and Yael have made a great 6 step guide on how you should think about the real value of  a facebook fan.

Real value of a facebook fan

Source: http://themyndset.com/2012/02/what-is-the-value-of-a-facebook-fan/

A brief discussion around the topics of “Mapping Social Media profiles with Customer records and how to Reward Social influencers” with some bright people at the ICE conf 2012 London.

Nick Garner, Global Head of Search Unibet - Pantelis C. Kotopoulos CRM Strategy – Regional Alignment Manager (Established Markets) Unibet – Tim Axon, CRM Director at International Mobile Sportsbook Company.

Successful Social Media programs are seldom accidental. Whilst you as an observer only see the tactics it’s important to try to also understand the underlying objectives these tactics steam from.

Razmus Svenningson, Ex Head of Social Media Strategy at Betsson Group, is a smart guy and one of the leading names within Social media and iGaming.

At the ICE conference 2012 London he confronted the audience with a crystal clear message; Success in social media doesn’t start with the tactical tools and technologies, but rather with what you as a business wants to accomplish.

Starting that now so common Facebook page may not at all be a top priority if you’ve properly made you due diligence and understood your organisation’s specific needs.

If you’d like to hear more from Razmus follow him on twitter here.