Surveys Do Not Prove Social Media ROI

The reason that surveys provide poor proof is because they go through a subjective (and fallible) human layer: the survey respondent, in this case 3000 marketing managers. What don’t we know from their answers? 1) The methodology they used to determine ROI, 2) whether the ROI was insubstantial or very substantial, 3) whether the marketer had any reason to exaggerate (for example, if their job is tied heavily to digital marketing, saying that social media marketing yielded positive ROI could be a self-preservation measure), and many other things.

This is not to say that social media marketing does not drive sales. I think in many situations that it does. It is a part of my job as well, so I’d love to finally point to studies that proved its effectiveness. However, the grad school research assistant inside of me cannot accept poor metrics as indicators, and a marketer’s reported opinion is a poor metric.

As Mr. Dempsey points out, multi-touch attribution (tracking all the different places that digital marketing “touched” someone, such as the first time they saw it in a Google display ad, then the second time they saw it when a friend Liked it, then visited the website, and then finally when they saw it again a week later in a tweet, clicked the link, and made a purchase) will help us get a better handle on how social media plays into the awareness and decision matrix, but you’d have to conduct very controlled experiments to determine EXACTLY what role social media plays in ROI. And if that’s done, it will be expressed in a quantitative fashion (i.e. 22% on average), not a qualitative fashion (62% of marketers agree that it contributes to ROI).

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

Craig Kanalley blogged at the Huffington Post about how Google+ sign-in will now integrate with apps. If you’re signed into Google+, your activity within apps will now inform Google search of what’s hot. Google will be able to track the most popular audio files on SoundCloud, for instance, or the best reviewed movies on Fandango at any given time.  Google+ Director of Product Management Seth Sternberg reported that Google is “rolling out this feature in desktop Search over the next few weeks, starting with a limited number of music and movie apps.” Additional apps will be supported over time.

Over at Digital Marketing Remix, Natascha Thomson blogs about why Google+ will win the social media platform race. She thinks that as the big social media platforms add features (such as Twitter dropping support for Instagram and getting their own photo (and video) tool; LinkedIn adding endorsements, company pages, and the option to add all kinds of content to profiles; and Facebook offering live streaming and now even free phone calls), people will narrow down the number of social networks they engage with. Google now offers community, email, analytics, document hosting, pictures, video sharing with YouTube and more – and all of it accessible with a single password and login, connected to the most powerful search engine in the world. Add to that the fact that Google+ is already in second place when it comes to the number of most active users on a social network, plus people are cutting back on time spent on Facebook, and the handwriting is on the wall: Google+ will be the dominant social media platform: its just a matter of time.

Not to leave out businesses, we’ll finish this roundup with a YouTube video by Martin Shervington discussing how you can use Google+ to improve your brand’s searchability on Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGNp6349UKA

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

Are you ready for a crisis, should one occur? Having a crisis plan in place before one happens could save you millions in crisis response. However, there’s lots of bad information on digital crisis management out there, so make sure your source has proven results.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

• Do you blast emails through your Outlook? You get an F. Very few people are getting them.
• Do you use software that tracks open rates and clickthroughs? You get a D. That’s an important part of email marketing, but hardly the whole game.
• Are you conducting A/B Split Testing on your subject lines and your body text, so that you can boost those open rates and clickthroughs? You get a C. Getting better, but still have a way to go.
• Are you building landing pages to receive visitors who come in from clickthroughs, with content based on the link they just clicked? Are you using Google link tracking in the URL or other software that will track where the visitor goes on your site? If you’re doing one of these things, you get a B. If you’re doing both, you get an A-.
• Are you using a leased SMTP email server rather than paying so much more to use a web based server? If so, you get an A+.

In the Philippines, even if you’re getting a C, you’re light years ahead of the competition in most industries. If you want help getting to the next level (or the top level), contact Tony Ahn & Co. to see what we can do for you.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

How to Know if This is Happening to You

• Do you get close to zero response from blasting thousands or tens of thousands of emails out? If so, chances are good that nobody is seeing them.
• If you blast from your regular email account, do your email recipients to sometimes report not getting your emails, or finding your messages in their spam folder? This is a major red flag that your IP address is blacklisted.

How to Fix Your Email Marketing

Stop using Outlook and move to an application designed specifically for high-volume (bulk) email campaigns. The downside is that this will involve a monthly fee which will depend on the size of your database and how much email you are sending. The upside is that you won’t be wasting your time writing emails that nobody is reading, and you’ll be able to track how many people received it, opened it, and clicked on a link in it (clickthrough). Moving to the next level of effectiveness, you can try A/B Split Testing, which will help you boost your open rates and clickthroughs.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

Of course, this will depend on those electricians, doctors, accountants, and mechanics 1) having a presence on Facebook, and 2) a number of your friends actually liking their pages. You may be thinking “How many of my friends actually have liked their doctor on Facebook?” and that’s a valid question. Facebook is hoping the promise of what Facebook Graph Search can provide will help encourage people to like more things that they actually do like. “There are now new reasons to make these connections,” says Tom Stocky, director of product management at Facebook. “We’re hoping the existence of [this new search feature] will encourage it.”

The new search feature, called Facebook Graph Search (the “graph” being all the people, places, photos, pages, links, and other objects on Facebook, and the web of connections between them all), allows you to search for:

• Pictures posted by friends living in a particular city.
• Businesses owned by graduates of a particular university.
• Friends who are friends with people that work for a particular company, for example all your friends who are friends with people who work for Microsoft Philippines.
• Friends who are friends with people of a certain occupation (Does anybody know a plumber?)
• Movies, restaurants, books, or brands/products your friends like.
• All the photos you liked in 2007.
• All the TV shows that college students like, or software engineers, or people in their 30’s.

Facebook’s Third View: Now in Beta

Facebook sees Facebook Graph Search as a new, third way that people will view Facebook. We have our timeline view to see what’s happening with us, our newsfeed view to see what’s happening with others, and now a search view, to see what we’re looking for. The new service will be Facebook’s first ever beta product, requiring a waitlist. Over the coming months, it will slowly become more available to those communicating in English and eventually to those communicating in other languages.

Now that Facebook is becoming more Filipino in how it allows people to search for information, it will be interesting to see if the Philippines, commonly known as the social media capital of the world, adopts Facebook Graph Search with the same zeal and fervor as it adopted Facebook itself. We’ll be able to use Facebook Graph Search to tell, as soon as we get into the beta.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

But appointments to see his properties didn’t increase. Neither did sales. Why not? Because he failed to understand the pivotal role searcher psychology plays when optimizing a web page for the search engines. Let’s examine each keyword for a moment:

home remodeling – This keyword was responsible for virtually all his new traffic. However, when deciding to optimize for this keyword, the broker didn’t realize that anyone searching for this term would not be interested in buying a condo from him. He succeeded in sending himself a a couple thousand more pageviews per month, but the traffic was worthless.

manila home valuation – This keyword, on the other hand, sent no traffic to his site, because nobody was searching for it. Having the top spot on Google for a keyword that nobody ever searches for won’t increase sales, much less pageviews.

It is critical that one understands user intent when planning which keywords to rank for. Think like a consumer; this shouldn’t be hard, as you are one yourself. What terms would YOU search for when looking for information? If you were buying a house, would you be more likely to use the term “residence” or the type of home you’re looking for (condo, apartment, house)?

SEO Services: Hire Someone Credible

If you choose to outsource SEO services to another company, make sure you get one that will suggest keywords based on your goals that 1) consider a visitor’s intent; 2) sends you traffic that is interested in what you’re selling (or showing); 3) isn’t so competitive that it will be impossible to rank for; and 4) is something they can rank in the top 2 spots, preferably the first. Research shows that 57% of searchers click the #1 result, 10% click the #2 result, and 4% click the #3 result.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

This infographic, courtesy of brandyourself.com, explains what you need to know about your online reputation, and how to improve it:

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.

A web search on this topic yields plenty of U.S. results, but nothing on the Philippine market.

This discrepancy prompted hybrid traditional PR & digital marketing agency Tony Ahn & Co. to conduct the first-of-its-kind survey on Techno-Social Behavior across all ages and classes in the Philippines, presented in this seminar Understanding the Digital Pinoy. Get the analysis and application of this coveted, never-before-seen study on how gender, age, and SEC affect how Filipinos respond to digital marketing.

Have complete market intelligence so every campaign becomes more effective, and have it  before everyone else does.

Welcome to the unexplored world of the digital Pinoy. Sign up now to be the first to know.

Understanding the Digital Pinoy
Presented by Tony Ahn, M.Ed.
August 30th, 2012
1-4pm
18/F, Philamlife Building
Deadline for tickets: Monday, August 20th, 2012
PHP5,000 

Tony Ahn & Co. Public Relations. Digital Marketing. Reputation Management.