The gist of what we had to say was that although human resources departments often seem to fear and loathe social media (and a poll of the room confirmed it!) because so much can go wrong there. But in a well-aligned organization, the message in social media can be a powerful recruitment and retention tool, on both the talent and the customer sides. That’s two dimensions by two dimensions for ROI recovery — four places where you can go digging for dollars back on your investment in getting the message right. That’s a lot of potential reward. We point out that in order to align, you need focus. But once you have that focus, and you create alignment, then the power of amplification is on your side, not against you.

Our slides are below, saved on Slideshare.net. You won’t get the full thrust of the narrative from just the slides, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts in the comments if you do flip through them. In what companies have you seen the most alignment?

If you use Chrome, you have the opportunity to set up Chrome Extensions, which are basically like visual bookmarklets: little snippets of Javascript that take what you’re looking at and transform it with contextual relevance for a particular purpose, like sharing to Twitter or posting to your blog. I use a lot of bookmarklets, but I limit the Chrome Extensions I have visible to those which help me get things done nearly every day, and those are the ones shown here:

These are:

Evernote

If you’re not already using Evernote, you’re either scrambling to keep up with odds and ends of information scattered everywhere, or you’re using another digital organizing system that may not be as good. What’s great about Evernote is how many ways there are to get tidbits into it, and how many ways you can get stuff you need back out. Besides the Clipper extension and the bookmarklet, they have mobile apps, the ability to send notes by email, integration with lots of other apps, and multi-format note capture (audio, photo, and/or text).

The Clipper Chrome extension enables you to enter some tags and comments and specify a notebook other than the default if you want to, but you can also just quickly save the note (as either the whole page, whatever you have selected, or just the URL) so you can get on with whatever you were really doing and deal with sorting it later. The best part is that notes are indexed and readable text in images is recognized, so even if you’re too busy to go back and sort your notes out, you should still be able to find what you need with a good search.

Clearly by Evernote

Clearly is also by Evernote, and it’s a great way to simplify the formatting of a page so you can reduce visual clutter — and lighten the page footprint so that it takes up less space if you want to save it into Evernote. I use it all the time. My notes in Evernote are so much more streamlined since I got into the habit of clicking this button first, then clicking the little Evernote elephant icon within the Clearly-reformatted page.

bit.ly

We have a custom short link domain: optmz.me (you know, like “optimize me”), and bit.ly allows us easy custom shortening of links for sharing and also provides a high-level but helpful snapshot of how those links are performing in the social channels where they’ve been shared.

HootSuite

If you manage multiple social profiles, it just doesn’t make sense not to have a tool that supports multiple profiles per channel and gives you great tools for listening, participating, and measuring the effectiveness of your presence. Our tool of choice is HootSuite, and this Hootlet extension works beautifully as a time-saver and facilitator of social sharing: click it, and it pops up a small window so you can share whatever you’re looking at to whatever social profile you choose, now or at a scheduled later time.

SEO for Chrome

The starting point on understanding SEO is always user experience: the site should have meaningful, relevant, well-architected content that addresses potential user needs. But to diagnose and understand technical considerations of how a page or site is ranking relative to others, it really helps to know some of the site’s quantifiable characteristics: how many pages are indexed, what’s the PageRank, how many backlinks does it have, both to the site overall and to whatever page you’re currently looking at. This extension is a very handy tool for a quick assessment of those numbers.

SEOmoz

If you want to look a little more closely at the SEO-relevant characteristics of a page or site, the SEOmoz extension digs a bit deeper and provides a look at metadata, configuration settings, and other attributes that can affect rankings.

BuiltWith

It happens surprisingly often that I sit in meetings with prospects and ask about what technologies their website is built with, and the answer is “I don’t know.” Fortunately, I can pull up the prospect’s website, click the “bw” button, and have a pretty darned good list of platforms and tools so that we can move into the next level of detail about what it might take to optimize their marketing performance. You gotta love anything that reduces the time from sales inquiry to getting the job going and showing the client their first results.

Yslow

It’s important that your pages load quickly, both from a user experience perspective and to ensure that your perceived quality by search engines isn’t adversely affected by a slow-loading script or badly-sized image. The Yslow extension, based on Yahoo!’s guidelines for site performance, gives you a fairly robust assessment in a few seconds about what factors may be affecting page load times, and grades each area so you know where your site performance sits relative to other websites.

GAdebug

If you work with Google Analytics in any sort of advanced way, you will periodically need to check how it’s configured for a certain page, what variables are being passed, and so on. Especially if you are in an agency or consultancy. This little extension comes in handy on sales calls, too, where I can quickly determine how savvy my prospect’s organization is when it comes to their web tracking.

Buffer

I’ve only recently started using Buffer and I’m still only on the free version, but it’s already been useful nearly every day and I will likely be upgrading to include all my social channels, and to get the ability to schedule updates. But even in the free version, Buffer encourages you to update  your social profiles with greater regularity, posting your queue of updates on a pre-determined schedule and even suggesting quotes and tidbits to share if you can’t think of anything. If you frequently struggle with remembering to update your accounts, this could be a big help for you.

So there you have them: the 10 Chrome Extensions that make me a more productive, connected, and informed digital marketer. What are the must-have browser extensions for you? Let us know in the comments.

If so, you might just be the smart marketer we’re looking for.

We’re [meta]marketer, a team of geeky (but sorta cool, we like to think) armchair digital sociologists and marketing data scientists who’ve figured out a way to turn our overly-analytical mindsets into an asset for our clients: by helping them mine their data to learn about their customers, and using those findings to improve their marketing from top to bottom. And bottom to top.

And we need a few more folks like us.

The people we’re looking for, first and foremost, are super-smart. They already have above-average comfort with the more advanced features of Google Analytics (and if they already know SiteCatalyst, that’s a big help, too). They regularly read digital marketing blogs, so they already know a lot about A/B and multi-variate testing, even if their exposure to testing has been minimal. They probably write blogs of their own – no doubt with cheeky opinions about digital stuff, like why QR codes suck, or how Google+ will become the new online infrastructure, or whatever. They probably register domain names for fun. With friends. At bars. And they definitely know what keywords drive traffic to their websites, and probably tweet about the funniest ones.

As far as specific skills or traits we’d love to see: analysis, analysis, analysis. A capacity for true high-level strategy, not just planning. Insatiable curiosity. Knowledge of SEO and what Google ranking factors are. Agility with AdWords and other PPC models. Understanding of landing page optimization.

Yeah, we know: it’s a lot to ask. But hey, like we said, these people are super-smart – they can do all of this before breakfast. (But not necessarily before coffee.)

And we’re hoping they live in Nashville. If not, we’re hoping they want to relocate here. And if not, we’re open to discussing remote work, but honestly, we think you’d have to be, well, not all that smart to not want to live in Nashville, so maybe they’re not the people we’re after anyway.

(By the way, we’re all about equal opportunities, but we reserve the right to discriminate against people with negative attitudes. That’s about all.)

What to do next: Email us at jobs@metamarketer.com with an explanation of why this sounds like it’s perfect for you, a link to your completed LinkedIn profile (or you can attach your resume, if you’re old school), and any other links you think we should see that help establish what you know about the Web: your Twitter, your blog, whatever.

We know being awesomer than most can be a lonely business. That’s why we’re set on assembling a growing group of awesome people so we can work together and keep each other company while we improve the way the business world does marketing.

If you’re the next member of our Team Awesome here at [meta]marketer HQ in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, you’re not just a project manager, you’re also a process optimizer. (Or as we like to say: “optimizizer.”) You help us track and manage our workload, coordinate with our team to plan work and with clients to track progress, and keep the CEO informed and at ease about everything so she can sleep at night. (It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try.) But the beauty of the role is this: whatever you see that needs improvement, you improve.

Of course we’ve already established that you’re not merely familiar with Gantt charts: you dream in them, complete with dependencies, critical paths, and pretty colors. We like that about you. Ideally you know and love OmniPlan, but if your preference is Microsoft Project or another tool, we can definitely make that work and we’ll listen to you rant about why it’s so much better than other tools and yet why it still sucks. You’re also more than passingly acquainted with resource management, capacity planning, forecasting, risk management, etc.

And what’s most amazing is, you already know how a consulting agency works and in your first few weeks of work, you’ll start noticing right away some ways we can improve how we handle client work, how we capture knowledge internally, how we assign and manage tasks and resources, and how we order lunch. (Hey, we’re open to input about anything.)

It goes without saying that you’re fun to be around, fearless about figuring things out on your own, and organized enough to do something about what you learn. We also admire that you take suggestions for improvement as well as you give them, that you smile often, and that you get our nerdy jokes that combine references to Star Wars, LOLcats, and Jason Fried.

OK, that last bit is admittedly a bit of a pipe dream, we know. But if the rest of this sounds like you, well, we can’t wait to meet you.

(By the way, we’re all about equal opportunities, but we reserve the right to discriminate against people with negative attitudes. That’s about all.)

What to do next: Email us at jobs@metamarketer.com with an explanation of why this sounds like it’s perfect for you, a link to your completed LinkedIn profile (or you can attach your resume, if you’re old school), and any other links you think we should see that help establish what you know about the Web: your Twitter, your blog, whatever.

Come prepared to show us your prettiest Gantt chart.

So here’s the part I most want to tell you. The unconference scene in Nashville — meaning both BarCamp Nashville, which takes place in the fall, and PodCamp Nashville, which is coming up this April 14th — have sort of been my secret superpower. I don’t think it’s in any way a stretch to say that my involvement in attending, organizing, shaping, sponsoring, and speaking at both BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville over the years has been instrumental in providing me with the network and the confidence to launch and grow [meta]marketer.

The unconference idea was interesting to me from the get-go: I attended and live-blogged the first BarCamp Nashville at Exit/In in August 2007, when it was sweltering and miserable outside, and perhaps even more so inside.

Here’s me live-blogging (which was how we all made short, snarky comments online before Twitter was popular) BarCamp Nashville 2007 for the now-defunct “Music City Bloggers” website, with my buddies Newcastle Brown Ale and Treo 680 on my right side and my other buddy Jim Reams on my left.

I remember feeling really strongly that day that this could be the start of a really important momentum in Nashville. (Of course I was also pretty hammered by 3 PM, so y’know, take that with a grain of salt.) And sure enough, some of the folks I met that day remain central to my network, and some of the people who continue to inspire me to get beyond talking about new things; to get off my ass and get stuff done.

So in March 2009 I got off my ass and launched [meta]marketer. And many of this company’s early associates, referrers, and clients were ‘Campers, both Bar and Pod.

The next tipping point occurred when, while I was serving as the marketing chair for BarCamp Nashville 2009, the crew agreed that the website needed some revamping. I ended up working closely with Josh Oakes and Brad Blackman on sketching out the user experience for the website. We spent considerable time and detail on diagramming how each area of the site should function:

and what we came up with is still the underlying design for the BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville websites today:

A few months later, I offered Josh a role with [meta]marketer, and he has since grown into our Director of Optimization. (We also continue to work with Brad on design projects as they arise, and refer work to him as often as we can.)

There’s really so much more to tell. But what I most want to convey is how integral a role the ‘Camps have played in stringing together this company’s history, and how possible it is that they’ll be a catalyst for you too. If you’ve been wanting to meet more people who are bright, forward thinkers, who aren’t constrained by traditional definitions of technology (after all, the term “geek” can apply to almost anyone in any field), and who may share your hope for a more connected future for Nashville, then, well, this is your place.

So be at Tequila Cowboy (formerly called Cadillac Ranch) on April 14, 2012, or you’ll miss out on one of the best secret superpowers around.

Before I dig in too far, there’s something you should know about me, I naturally lean more towards the creative side. Which means graphs look like pictures and a spreadsheet of numbers looks a lot like the code from the Matrix. I’m also a big picture and big idea guy, so the thought of addressing the tiniest of details is little intimidating for me. But I like the idea of stretching myself, and I felt like the best way to get more people to visit my Youtube page is to be able to understand what the metrics tell me.

So I ended up here.

I think that the reason analytics can be challenging for people like me is the illusion that numbers are nothing more than cold facts. This is not always true.

Back in the fall, the entire [meta]marketer staff (as well as a few other “outsiders”) gathered in the little conference room to brainstorm and further construct the vision of [meta]marketer. We talked for a couple hours and at the end the phrase that we all walked away with from that meeting is that “analytics are people”. As much as this seems like common sense, it really brought a new understanding to me of what working with metrics can be like.

The temptation with numbers-driven data is that it is very easy to boil everything down to formulas. Yet people aren’t formulaic. Yes, we repeat are patterns and are fairly predictable, but not formulaic. Motivations change and are different for every person. Thinking about the motivations behind the numbers is what I find fascinating.

When I was in high school I remember the most dreaded question that teachers always ask… “why?”. I hated that question mostly because I felt like I was being cheated out of my right answer. I thought my correct answer alone was enough. My high school economics teacher told me I was the most concise student he’d ever had because I just simply wrote the answer in as few words as possible (usually just 1). But embracing the why behind something opens up so many more possibilities.

Several times I’ve come in to the office when Josh is breaking down potential audiences for a client and I get to sit in and throw in my 2 cents. We brainstorm potential consumers for various products and services and attempt to describe how they might operate on a site. In order to do this, we really have to step into people’s shoes (which can be a bit of a challenge when you’re talking about a sports or cars or other things I know very little about). The degree to which we are able to imagine and understand those motivations we can better predict an outcome and can better meet their needs as consumers.

I’m probably not saying anything new, it’s really just what has helped all of this make sense. I’m still learning, and apparently I’m still concise (since I took a 2 hour conversation and boiled it down into 6 sentences). There are lots of things about metrics that I don’t get yet, but they bought an “intern desk” so I hopefully I’ll have a few more things figured out soon.

Whenever the subject of Klout comes up, some folks get a wee bit snarky, feeling that to measure anything about social media is tantamount to a popularity contest. (And hey, I’ve tweeted my share of Klout jokes. It’s easy material: at one point, the topics about which Klout claimed I had influence were cowboys, babies, and Shark Week.) So as you might imagine, right away, there was backlash. The very first comment on the story called Klout the most meaningless metric in online marketing. Blog posts linking to the story took issue with treating the topic as front-page-worthy news.

For the record, I don’t think either criticism is wrong, per se. But they both fall a little short of a full look at the situation.

It happens to be my business to traffic in meaningful metrics. But the funny thing about what’s “meaningful” is that it’s both subjective and relative to the quality and type of data available. Data about influence in social media is soft and subjective. It’s squishy. You can’t measure a person’s influence directly, but you can develop hypotheses about what types of activities might correlate with people who are highly influential. For example, someone who has a great deal of influence on Twitter probably has a greater chance of having his or her tweets retweeted than does someone without much influence. When you measure those activities, you create a sort of leading indicator of influence. Klout has attempted to do that. Is it a vanity metric? Sure. Any publicly-visible metric can be a vanity metric. Especially if you check it compulsively. But even that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningless.

One of the other vanity metrics we encounter when working with clients on marketing measurement strategy is Alexa ranking. Alexa does a pretty decent job of gauging relative volume of website traffic using a method that could be compared with Nielsen ratings for TV shows. (The Nielsen ratings are vanity metrics too, but they’re a data point that TV industry folks use as directional data.) Should you base your marketing strategy on monitoring your Alexa ranking? Of course not, but if you’re looking for a top-level measure of your website’s traffic relative to others’, you can certainly include the rank’s variance as a gauge on your dashboard, and you can feel good when it’s holding steady or showing gains. If it shows a big drop and you have no idea why, even if your own website’s traffic didn’t really change, it’s possible that something is going on in your competitive landscape that you need to know about.

Klout isn’t really any different. Although it’s still in the benchmarking stage of developing integrity as a metric, it may ultimately be useful as a directional indicator of social media engagement and effectiveness. That doesn’t mean you need to babysit your score or contrive to inflate it artificially, but it does mean that if your score falls, it may be an indicator that you’re not connecting with your audience. And there isn’t a much more meaningful pursuit in marketing than connecting with an audience: it’s what has to happen before you can make money. So if you’re concerned about ROI in social media and you’re not thinking about measuring earlier-stage metrics like engagement and influence? You’re missing the point, my friend.

Klout’s efforts to quantify influence may seem frivolous, but it isn’t unusual for forward-looking work in analysis to seem frivolous. Being ahead of the curve inherently means that most people don’t get what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.

And this is where the newsworthiness comes into play. Whether you think Klout as a company and a concept is ahead of the curve or not, most of the people blogging about social media in 2011 have spent a good amount of time discussing the idea of “influence,” and that concept isn’t going away in 2012. Rather than dismiss it, it might be worth spending a little time as 2011 winds down planning how you will develop your influence and cultivate your online audience for a more profitable 2012. I’ll be right here cheering you on and retweeting you, as long as it doesn’t involve cowboys, babies, or Shark Week. I can’t go screwing up my Klout.

Seconds Of Beauty – 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

Perhaps you think of Montblanc as a pen company first and foremost, but this is a promotion for the chronograph. And it is yet another example of how a company can extend how its brand interacts with customers, and how customers experience the essential value of what the brand represents. Pretty clever, and beautifully effective.

Plus, they engaged Wim Wenders, one of my personal favorite filmmakers, to intro and “present” the concept: see his video intro here.

A taxonomy organizes concepts and presents a representation of categories and concept hierarchy as a thought framework, shared vocabulary, and institutional knowledge.

For example, one of my favorite book titles is by the linguist George Lakoff, called “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” It’s a humorous illustration, but a vivid one: the groupings we agree upon say as much about us as they do about the things we’re grouping.

In attempting to produce a meaningful taxonomy for website content management, it is useful to attack the problem from a few different angles:

• What is the consumer vocabulary? What terminology does the consumer use to describe the concepts, and what groupings make intuitive sense to the consumer?
• What is our aspirational vocabulary? What terminology would we ideally like to train the marketplace to adopt? What groupings would demonstrate our conceptual framework and biases for the sake of influencing consumer perception of our subject matter?
• What are the areas of greatest content density? Topics within our subject area about which we have a great deal to say are going to need finer resolution and sharper distinctions than those about which we have very little to say. For example, if we create a taxonomy of [meta]marketer terminology, it will be insufficient to talk about marketing: we will need greater specificity for what aspect of marketing we’re talking about, such as marketing analytics, online marketing, search marketing, etc. But for something that isn’t our core subject, we will not need to be so specific. We may occasionally create content about Nashville, for example, but we probably won’t need to describe whether the content is about Nashville businesses, Nashville lifestyles, Nashville music, or anything more granular than Nashville… whereas clearly other websites and businesses that do focus on Nashville would find it meaningful to drill into those additional levels of detail.

And so on. Truthfully, it hasn’t saved us time or money yet, but it may someday, and for now it seems like good discipline. But I wonder, how are other companies tackling this? Do you have a “smartzz” notebook or folder somewhere, or a wiki? How do you make sure that good explanations of difficult concepts don’t have to be re-created every time?

This coffee sleeve, which I picked up at Drinkhaus, my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, promotes a fun seasonal event that patrons of independent coffee shops are probably going to want to know about. The event’s organizers printed these and distributed them, I’m told, all around town to locally-owned coffee shops. For the price of design and printing, they have a memorable vehicle for communicating with an audience that’s already, by their presence in an independent coffee shop, demonstrated an interest in supporting local, independent goods.

It’s a good reminder to think about the unconventional ways we can reach our audiences.