1. Make a list of which social media activities you regularly engage in. Do you answer product questions? Support requests? Recommend your product/service? Drop links to viral campaigns that drive visitors to your site? There are endless numbers of things you could be doing. You just need to catalog them.
2. Think about how each of those items on the list impact the business. Do they result in sales? Positive press mentions? Lower churn? Make sure you have a positive business outcome for each action you take. If you can’t come up with a positive business result for some of your actions, consider not engaging in that activity.
3. Take your activities and divide them into two categories- those that create new revenue, and those that create cost savings. For example, answering product questions instead of sending it to the sales team is a cost savings for the company, whereas driving traffic to a signup page via a blog article results in new revenue (hopefully).
4. Figure out how to attach a dollar amount to each activity. When it comes to determining revenue generation, it’s fairly simple. First, use tracking links wherever possible (custom tracking links in conjunction with link shorteners, etc.). Second, keep a detailed timeline of your social media activities, so that you can measure increases in sales against the baseline. Coinciding increases can be connected with your campaigns (albeit somewhat circumstantially). When it comes to cost savings, things are a little bit more difficult. To better explain, I’ll demonstrate through my own experience. One of the activities I spend a lot of time doing is solving support issues via Twitter. To calculate the dollar savings of that activity, I talked to our support people and found out how long the average support call takes. Then I determined the median wage for a support tech. This gave me an approximate cost per call (a lot support managers will already know this number, you just have to ask). With that number, I could now demonstrate a cost savings for every request I took off of supports’ hands.
5. Think outside the box. After examining the obvious ways that your activities generate revenue and cost-savings, look at other side benefits your activities generate. For example, if you’ve created some evangelists along the way and you observe one of them taking on support questions proactively, you could count each incident as additional cost savings (as per the last example). After all, if you hadn’t contacted that evangelist, odds are good that the customer would be talking to your support people instead. The same thing goes for purchase recommendations from evangelists.

So that’s my $.02 on the process that I go through when considering the financial impact of my corporate social media activities. What’s the process you use to determine the ROI for your your social media activities?

“By recording your goals and dreams on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be.”

-Mark Victor Hansen

One of the mantras of goal-setting is that if a goal isn’t written down, it’s just a dream. So, as is popular across the blogosphere, I’m writing my social media goals down here.

First, let me say a little something about the rationale behind these goals. I’ve found that as social media has become my job and career, it has become more difficult to manage. I’m no longer doing it just for the fun of it, and I have a lot more riding on my social media success. Furthermore, I’ve learned a lot about social media in the past year, and I want to make sure I’m living according to my knowledge. So without any further ado, here are my 2010 social media resolutions:

• LinkedIn – In the past, I’ve done some work with LinkedIn, including completing my profile, working to get recommendations, and doing some networking. This year, I’d like to use LinkedIn much more effectively. In order to do so, I will spend an hour every week:
  • Updating my status
  • Finding new groups to join
  • Participating in discussions in groups I’m already a member of
  • Answering some questions in the Q&A section
  • Seeking out new contacts.
• Facebook – I have to admit that I’ve been conspicuously absent on Facebook recently. One of the reasons is that I’ve adopted other methods of communication, and much of what drew me to Facebook has evaporated at this point, but the hypocrisy of being a social media guy who doesn’t use Facebook is somewhat galling, so I’m going to reengineer my Facebook presence and get involved again by making sure that I log in every day to do Facebooky things like
  • Updating my status
  • Writing on my friends’ walls
  • Finding groups to network and exchange information with
  • Checking on some of the pages I’ve started (and maybe even start some new pages).
• Twitter – I’m on Twitter a lot, I just need better consistency. I want to:
  • Tweet at 3 new people
  • Drop at least 3 useful links
  • Retweet at least 3 awesome tweets every day (outside of my normal tweeting)

I have to admit that it feels a bit lame to put a solid number on this, but I think that if I want to improve the quality of my Twitterstream, this is how I’ll do it.

• Blog – This is the area I’m most excited about, because blogging is where I got my start in social media, and it’s still the area that I enjoy the most (although you wouldn’t know it by the number of posts lately). I want to become a much better blogger, and in order to do so, I’m going to
  • Write one post every day, even if I don’t post it. I mostly just want to get into the rhythm of writing every day.
  • Publish at least twice every week, pulling from the body of content I’m creating in my daily post writing.
  • Comment on two blogs every day in order to be a better blogosphere citizen (blogozen?).
  • Finish working on my blog theme by adding Facebook Connect, better sharing and commenting functionality, and an awesome footer.
• Misc. – I’m going to do something groundbreaking this year, I’m just not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. Vague? Yes. Unrealistic? Possibly. But what’s the point of goals if you don’t have something exciting to drive towards? I’ll be taking more time to flesh this goal out, deciding what constitutes “groundbreaking” and how I plan on achieving it.

But more frequently fear is a negative thing. It can kill your mojo and cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities and experiences. After all…

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

-Wayne Gretzky

So how do you overcome fear? I asked that question on Facebook and here are some of the responses I received:

• The only way I have (overcome my fear) is to face it. I had a fear of heights and to over come it I went on the sky coaster at Lagoon, scared the crap out of me but I lived!
• i was gonna say the same thing about doing exactly what you’re scared of … i was scared of heights too, so i went skydiving. now i’m cured! i still get scared when i’m up high and i’m thinking about it, but then i remember, what’s scarier than jumping out of a plane? nothing!
• I think about people who have been there for me, who count on me to just do things. I don’t want to let them down, and think to myself – if I don’t do this – who will? Then I take a breathe and leap. Usually its all good.
• My biggest revelation came by observing that my 3 year old daughter is a chip off the old block. She’s the type to hem & haw 30 minutes before she’ll set foot in a cold swimming pool. Sometime (most of the time), you just have to get in the #@!#$% water, already.

This big takeaway from these is that if you hope to overcome your fears, ultimately you’ll have to face them. But how do you get to that point? From these quotes and my own experience, I’ve compiled a list of several ways to overcome your fears.

1. Peer pressure – Think about how many times in your life you let somebody talk you into doing something you didn’t want to do. It’s a fairly obvious fact that peer pressure absolutely influences our decisions. Most of the time it’s viewed negatively. But what if you could use it as a tool to help you overcome your fears? One possible solution is to share what you’re trying to overcome with friends and colleagues and ask them to help you get past your fear. Most of them will be more than happy to help and encourage you. I think another effective and interesting application of this idea is to identify some people you know and admire who demonstrate a fearlessness in the area you’re working on. Start spending time with those individuals, watch what they do, learn from them, and allow yourself to be infected by their enthusiasm. I can name several instances in my own life where I learned how to overcome my fear merely by associating with people I admired for their fearlessness.
2. Obligation – This is the  “If I don’t do this, who will?” idea. Obligating yourself is a great motivator. Whether it’s a promise (verbal or implied) to a beloved family member or a commitment to a boss, creating an expectation in others is a great way to give yourself some extra incentive to get past the initial “I’m scared” bump. Another variation on this is to make the obligation to yourself. While an internal promise may be enough, I’ve found another motivator – money. I’ve found that when I pony up and pay some cash to do something I’m scared of while I’m removed from the situation and still able to think logically, I’m way more likely to do it, because I don’t want to waste my money.
3. Optimism – Paralyzing fear is often rooted in the spectre of failure. Nobody wants to fail. Next time you’re afraid of failure, sit down with yourself and take inventory of what you would actually lose if you fail. While in some cases, this won’t help (if you fail in skydiving, you have a LOT to lose) in many of the day to day things that we avoid because of fear, our actual potential losses are insignificant at best.
   

   “It is not failure itself that holds you back; it is the fear of failure that paralyzes you.”
   - Brian Tracy

   As an addendum to this, learn to deal with failure positively. In this engrossing article about learning the skill of luck, the author points out that one of the things that makes people lucky is their attitude towards ill fortune (or failure, for that matter). From the article:

   Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

   When you learn to deal with failure in a healthy, optimistic way, all of a sudden, it’s not so scary anymore.

4. Persistence – This is a tactic I use myself, with great success. Here’s how it works: pick one thing every day that scares you. Start little, but make sure that you do it. You’ll find that as you build up a pattern of facing your fears, it will become easier and easier to do, until you don’t think twice about those little butterflies in your stomach.
5. Bravery – They say that fortune favors the bold, and I can prove it. Just talk to Nate Bagley about The Blogworld Miracle. ‘Nuff said.

So that’s my list. There are all sorts of other ideas and hundreds of books about this, but these are just some of the things I came up with. What do you do to overcome your fears?

This experience got me thinking. WPDesigner has an impressively extensive knowledge of WordPress themes. He took that knowledge, broke it down into chunks that are easily digestible for n00bs, and shared it, free of charge. And what has it gained him?

• He’s getting linked to because it’s great content.
• He’s getting better search engine rankings because he’s getting linked to.
• This in turn leads to more links because more people are discovering his tutorial on search engines, finding his tutorial useful, and linking to him.
• At the end of it all, he’s getting more clients because he’s become an authority by virtue of the fact that he’s posted great content that has become democratically acknowledged as authoritative. This authority gives him credibility, and that credibility gets him business. Furthermore,  people may use his tutorial but find that their technical skill isn’t equal to the results they want. What do they do next? Hire the guy who wrote the tutorial! Talk about good karma for sharing a little bit of knowledge!

Want more evidence? I could substitute SEOMoz.org for WPDesigner in the above story for when I was learning SEO and it’d be about the same. Their awesome free SEO content for n00bs (and even old veterans) drives sales to their premium tools and forum, and gives them credibility to land major consulting clientele.

So what does this mean to you? Try this 5-step process:

1. Think about what you do. What are your core competencies? What you you know a lot about, or what are you an expert in?
2. Come up with a body of content. How would you share what you know with someone who didn’t know anything about it, but wanted to learn? What things are helpful, and what things are just too advanced?
3. Decide how to break up the content into easy-to-understand chunks. Write it as an ongoing series on your blog. Publish it in one chunk as a guide or blueprint. Do whatever makes the most sense. But whatever you do, make sure it’s easy to follow.
4. Promote your content to beginners. Go to where people are asking questions online (think niche-oriented forums, Yahoo Answers, or LinkedIn Answers). You’ll have opportunities to share your knowledge and point questioners to the resource you created for them. In the process, you’ll be building authority for yourself and for your content. In addition, you should be getting some tasty linkjuice as a byproduct.
5. Support your content. If something in the industry or discipline, update your content so it remains valuable. That insures that you don’t become irrelevant.

These are my suggestions. What are some other ways to come up with authoritative cornerstone content?

• First, have a product/service/brand that’s remarkable and compelling in and of itself. Seth Godin calls this making a purple cow.
• Second, tell your brand’s and product’s story in such a way that your potential customers are as excited about your product as you are. If you’re not excited about your product, revisit step one.
• Third, tell your story at places where your market is. This means not only building well-targeted SEO, PPC, and traditional offline campaigns, but crafting intelligent social media and viral campaigns to make sure that you’re involved where the conversations are happening in your market.

That said, if I had to distill the key to successful marketing into one word, it’d be passion. At the end of the day, If you don’t care about your product, how can you expect anyone else to?

1. TwitterCounter – Shows you a day-by-day count of your followers and then goes a step further by predicting how many followers you’ll have in the future, based on your current average growth rate. It also shows you graphs for people you follow as well as your tweet volume. They limit stats to 3 months back, however it looks like they’ll be adding some paid functionality that will let you search the lifetime of your account.
2. TweetStats – Divides your Twitter feed into seven delicious graphs. Want to see what day you tweet the most? There’s a graph for that. Want to know which month had the heaviest tweet volume? There’s a graph for that, too. It’ll also tell you who you tweet at most, who you retweet most, and what your favorite flavor of Twitter client is.
3. TweetVolume – Ever wonder exactly how much more you get tweeted about then your competitors? TweetVolume is the better alternative to counting tweets in Tweetdeck. Just put in up to five different keywords and get a snazzy little comparison graph back in a few seconds. It’s slick, fast, and simple. The only problem is that you can’t adjust by date, and the tool is unclear about the time range that it pulls data for.
4. Twitter StreamGraph – StreamGraph is perhaps the coolest tool on this list, IMHO. Basically, it takes a keyword you choose, and then creates a correlation graph for other keywords that appear in association with your keyword by date. That way, you can see not only how frequently your keyword appears on Twitter, but you can also see what keywords appear alongside it. This is nice if you want to see what words people are associating with your brand, or if you’re trying to get a feel for how people are talking about various issues/products/services/etc. Pure, unadulturated awesome. (Caution: Runs a little slow.)
5. Trendistic - Trendistic is another keyword trending tool. It’s nice because it lets you see, very clearly, what the volume has been for whatever keyword you’re searching a day, a week, a month, three months, or six months. It also gives you a list of currently trending keywords on Twitter on the right side of the graph. Simple and straightforward.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. What stats tools do you use and why do you use them?

About the conference (from the conference website):

Digital Marketing World Fall 2009 will sum up the cutting-edge information and skills you need to master the latest, most successful digital marketing techniques out there. You’ll be amazed by how much you can digest in a six hour period! Some of the concepts brought to you by respected thought leaders and experts in the industry include:

• Integrating social media into your marketing mix
• Creating High-Performance Landing Pages for Demand Generation
• Engaging and nurturing sales prospects through email
• Building valuable content for your customer community
• Link building to boost your site traffic
• Building customer loyalty on the social web
• Twitter success stories

1. Use your exisiting site - Create a good, unique content-rich page on your own site geared towards the keywords you’re trying to do damage control on. Make sure that the keywords are also in the URL. Also, if needs be, address the issue that the negative result is talking about and rebut it.
2. Build a site - Buy a domain with the keyword(s) that you’re trying to do reputation management for in it and then seed the site with positive content like how tos and tutorials, or use it to address the concern created by the negative result(s).
3. Use free content as a tool - Farm good content out to content sites with a good link profile. This could be everything from sending articles to major article sites to doing guest posts for bloggers who will accept them. Bloggers are an especially great target for this because many of them like the break that guest posts offer them.
4. Mobilize your foot soldiers - Ask affiliates and other friendlies to post nice things (reviews, endorsements, etc.) geared towards terms you’re trying to do reputation management for. Your best affiliates are especially likely to do so, because it gives them another chance to sell your product.
5. Help others help you - Build links to others with existing positive content who are already ranking on the terms you’re doing reputation management for.

This is by no means exhaustive, it’s just a few of my own favorite strategies. Good luck!

I remarked on this problem to my fiancee, who has some experience as a productivity consultant gained from her days at Franklin Covey. She asked a few questions, and it became apparent that the real reason I was putting these projects off wasn’t because they weren’t important enough. It was because they were too big. My fiancee’s advice: cut the project into smaller tasks, and do them as I have time.

The takeaway is this: How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.