Top 10 Metrics for Email Marketing Success

In this article, I've listed for you all of the metrics I recommend any email marketer be tracking, recording and analyzing as part of their email marketing campaigns. Too often, companies push messaging out to their subscribers or purchased email lists and don't pay attention to the results in an effective way. Almost every email marketing tool out there provides a majority of these metrics if not all of them, so now is the time to start yourself a good old fashioned Excel spreadsheet (at a minimum) and begin tracking each of these items so that you can make more informed decisions about campaigns to come and make the most of your spend (in time and money).

What you can do with each of these metrics is:

1. Try to determine what the industry average is. Look at reports from Forrester or ClickZ or hire individuals to manage your email marketing who have worked in your specific industry.
2. Look at past stats for your company to set a benchmark for a minimum level of success. You can always be improving.
3. Set a desired state for each metric at the industry average, twice your existing stat, or whatever feels most comfortable as an aggressive yet attainable goal.

You should be tracking as many of these metrics as possible by campaign.

Metrics:

• Sales: Quantity of leads, quantity of sales converted off of an email referred website visitor, or actual revenue generated off of those click-throughs.
• ROI: Calculate the costs (in both software, tools and time spent) for each email campaign and subtract that from the total revenue generated. You can get pretty complex with ROI calculations beyond this simple formula, but I won't get into that here.
• Conversion Rates: The % of email referred visitors who convert into a sale or lead.
• Value of an email subscriber: The number of subscriptions divided by the revenue generated from email marketing.
• Total number of email subscribers.
• Unsubscribe Rate: Usually you can get this from the tool you're using to send & manage your email list, provided to you by campaign.
• Customer frequency: Average number of unique visitors driven by email each month.
• Open Rate: This is a good guage of how effective your subject line is in grabbing the attention of recipients. Also mixed into this is a value of your brand's awareness or affinity among subscribers - loyal customers may be more inclined to open regardless of the effectiveness of the subject line, eager to find deals and promotions being announced.
• Click-through Rate: The % of opened emails that generated a click through to your desired URL. Similar to "Open Rate" but this one is a measure of how effective your email's content is in generating enough interest to drive that recipient to become a web-site visitor to get more information.
• Deliverability: In some tools, you can also find a metric called "Bounce Rate" which will tell you the % of emails sent that came back as "Undeliverable" because either the email address is no longer valid or the email could not be delivered for another reason such as that email service provider's server was down.

More on deliverability:
You should learn to cleanse your list based on which emails are reported as undeliverable so that you don't continue sending emails to these over and over. However, more importantly, if the % is high, look at two things:

1. The source you used for obtaining the email. If you purchase emails from a list and this particular list has a high bounce rate, you'll want to talk to the source to make sure you're getting your money's worth. 
2. The lead capture form you are using to capture emails from subscribers yourself: 

 If you are obtaining the emails yourself but the bounce rate on deliverability is high, consider putting in an "email verification" process where you provide two fields for entering email and make sure they match (this prevents what's called "fat-fingering": a mistakenly inputted email address) or an email verification link sent to that address after the form is submitted. In the latter case, you plan not to use the email address in marketing campaigns until the link is clicked to verify the address is correct, however this is likely to bring down the likeliness that each person will fully convert into a subscriber since it requires an additional step.

A 46-point SEO checklist for any website

MonsterCommerce SEO team at the Google campus in 2006

Throughout my career in interactive marketing, I have maintained a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) checklist for my own use. I have updated the best practice guidelines for each item on the list along the way. It's by no means comprehensive, but I still find it extremely helpful as I approach any new project.

I thought I'd share it with you and see what you might add to this list to help make it more useful. As with any check list, it needs to be broad enough to fit most websites, but most high-level SEO guidelines generally are that broad.

The other thing to keep in mind with SEO is that the formulas are not definite. Google does not publish the exact formula for title tag length or keyword frequency/density, but throughout years of SEO expert analysis and commentary, these general best practices have come to light and tend to drive top 10 results for medium to long-tail keywords for any business with a relatively "search engine friendly" site. I will tell you that the last few SEO projects I have contributed to or led in the past 12 months have all started to see brand new top 10 rankings for relatively competitive keyword phrases off of these techniques.

I have also been known to differentiate "search engine friendliness" from "search engine optimized" in the way that I think and talk about SEO. I will elaborate on that further later, but let's summarize it here so that you get the most from this checklist: If your site is "search engine friendly", it means that there is no bulky Flash file or complex JavaScript (or other spider-blocking code) preventing the automated search engine spiders from adequately "crawling" through your site's code to reach the keyword-rich content designed to tell them what your site is all about. If your site is "search engine optimized" then that means that once the spiders do get to the keyword-rich content, the keywords were chosen properly and the content properly optimized (at effective keyword frequency and density levels, in addition to the checklist below) so as to properly differentiate and position the page as an authority on that keyword (topic), thus resulting in higher placement for that keyword query in the search engine.

I look forward to hearing from you, via the comments section below, regarding what criteria you suggest changing or adding to this list. One additional caveat: These are (mostly) on-site SEO factors, so they do not include off-site factors such as link popularity - which are equally as important in obtaining and maintaining top 10 rankings. I hope to post an entirely separate post on link building strategies soon enough. As a checklist, your goal is to achieve a YES or "Requirement met" for each item.

1. Title Tag: Keywords in title tag appear at the beginning of the title tag, before company name.
2. Title Tag: Unique to each page
3. Title Tag: Relevant to each page's content
4. Title Tag: Word count is 6-11 words
5. Meta Description Tag: Unique to each page.
6. Meta Description Tag: Appears in sentence format, not keyword after keyword
7. Meta Description Tag: Word count is 12-24 words, maximum 200 characters
8. Meta Keyword Tag: Unique to each page.
9. Meta Keyword Tag: Word count is between 0 and 48 keywords, maximum of 2,000 characters
10. Meta Keyword Tag: Keywords are not repeated
11. Meta Keyword Tag: Keyword phrases are separated by , and a space
12. Meta Keyword Tag: Keyword phrases are listed longest to shortest
13. Images: File names have keywords in them
14. Images: Images have SEO friendly name and URL
15. Images: Location shows images are stored in a single directory (e.g. brandonsbaseballcards.com/images/)
16. Images: Have alt attribute with relevant keyword
17. Page Content: Section/topic titles appear in H tags and should be in order (H1, H2, H3, etc) in the source code
18. Page Content: Aim for fewer than 100 links on any given page, including navigation and on Sitemaps
19. Page Content: Homepage static content is keyword rich
20. Page Content: Homepage static content will change regularly
21. Page Content: Bread crumb navigation exists for each section
22. Page Content: Use tag instead of for bold formatting
23. Page Content: Text navigation exists for any nav options in an image link
24. Source Code: Javascript and CSS referenced in external files
25. Source Code: Title and metas are formatted properly (see sheet two of this workbook)
26. IP address: Site is on dedicated IP address (recommend Bruce Clay's Server Tool)
27. IP address: Block list check performed and not on any block lists (recommend Bruce Clay's Server Tool)
28. 404 error: 404 error page exists and contains text links to relevant sections of site
29. 404 error: 404 page is consistent with site's design
30. 404 error: Webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent
31. Robots.txt: Is located at the root directory of the site
32. Robots.txt: Is formatted properly (recommend RobotsTXT.org)
33. URL: www is forced (cannot access a page without the www)
34. URL: URL uses hyphen between words in a folder and file name
35. URL: URL should be entirely lower case
36. URL: Any URL redirects are set up as 301 redirects (recommend Bruce Clay's Server Tool)
37. URL: URL contains keyword-rich, relevant categories and filenames
38. URL: URL contains the topic or category
39. URL: root of each folder in URL goes to a landing page
40. URL: URL is unique - no multiple URLs can reach the same page
41. URL: URL is short as possible (75 or fewer characters)
42. Site Map: HTML sitemap: links are categorized and links appear for all sections
43. Site Map: XML Sitemap is generated and submitted (recommend XML-Sitemaps.com)
44. Submission: Site submitted to DMOZ.org
45. Submission: Site submitted to Yahoo! Directory
46. Link Check: Run a broken link check on the site, (recommend LinkSleuth)

Talking Social Media Engagement at Conversion Conference West 2010

Next week, I am presenting at Conversion Conference West: the first conference devoted exclusively to online conversion. It will be held on May 4-5 at the luxurious Fairmont Hotel in San Jose.

Whether you are looking for the psychology of persuasion, graphic design, copywriting, usability, landing page testing & tools, or best practices for your specific situation, its all here. Enjoy world-class expert sessions, hands-on live critiques, and no-holds-barred open mic panels. Use promo code "CCW560" when registering at www.ConversionConference.com to save $250 off of a 2-day full conference pass by May 1st!

I am presenting on Wednesday morning at 11:10 am, and my topic is "Social Media for Engagement & Conversion." Full Agenda

I'm putting the finishing touches on my presentation for next week, and thought I'd share with you some highlights in the messaging I plan to use...

As marketers are forced to look at how to best leverage social media to drive the business, some traditional ways of thinking need to be looked at in a new way. For example, companies that are successfully leveraging social media for B2B marketing are finding that social networking has changed the concept of a "lead" and the ability to connect with and establish relationships with key prospects.

"The nice thing about social media is that on social networking sites, we have access to contact information and the ability to reach a target contact very quickly and easily."

What that means for us is that success is now marked by penetrating the noise and establishing a relationship.

A desired action in social media can involve brand awareness and brand building or a more direct action such as a click through (from Twitter, for example) to a web site where a lead is generated or a purchase is made. On top of all of that, social media can help marketers and sales professionals to continue to foster relationships with existing clients - particularly with high-revenue or high margin services or those with a significant project life-span, leading to repeat business.

My presentation will include a brief overview of the major social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), a list of metrics to focus on for each, best practices for engagement and calls to action, some case studies, and then tips on metrics, reporting and alerts.

Don't forget that you can follow me on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/ErinE.

You can also follow the conference organizer, Tim Ash, at www.Twitter.com/Tim_Ash or follow the hash tag #ConvCon

The Social Media Rolodex: Using Social Media Effectively for B2B Business Development

Yesterday, I was the featured speaker at the esteemed Business Marketing Association's St. Louis chapter monthly luncheon. I was honored to have been offered the opportunity since they've featured recent speakers like Steven Woods (@stevewoods) of Eloqua (also, author of the excellent book, Digital Body Language) and in a few months, their speaker will be Kodak's CMO, Jeff Hayzlett.

That's pretty great company to be included with!

So, I met some excellent marketing professionals and business owners, and my presentation focused on how you can use social media sites to grow your professional network and drive more business in a sales role with a B2B company. I spoke from experiences having worked closely with folks at Perficient who are doing exactly that, and I made recommendations about which sites are ideal to focus your energies on in this capacity. You can view my presentation below, via SlideShare.

I also recently attended a luncheon by the St. Louis BMA in which Scott Davis (@ScottDavisShift) was the featured speaker. He is the author of the best-selling marketing book, The Shift: The Transformation of Today's Marketers into Tomorrow's Growth Leaders - an excellent read!

The St. Louis BMA has become an extremely valuable event for me, but unfortunately, now that I live in California, I won't be able to take advantage of it each month by attending their monthly luncheon series. I recommend anyone working in marketing (especially in a B2B or lead generation capacity) and living in St. Louis to sign for their alerts, start attending the luncheons and get involved. They are clearly embracing the opportunities that exist for marketers in the interactive and integrated marketing space.

Big thanks to Michael Flavin (@michaelflavin) Carin Schulusky and the rest of the BMA STL team for inviting me to speak and coordinating the event!

Some resources:

• BMA St. Louis Event Schedule
• Subscribe for BMA St. Louis Emails
• BMA St. Louis on Twitter

Social Media Marketing for B2B Business Development - Business Marketing Association St. Louis

View more presentations from Erin Eschen.

Leveraging Web Analytics to Increase Conversions

I gave this presentation yesterday at the first ever Market St. Louis conference in downtown St. Louis, MO at Lumiere Hotel.

I was asked to make this a pretty basic introduction to using Google Analytics, and when I asked the attendees how many were already using analytics on their site, only 5 raised their hands. We had mostly small business owners and entrepreneurs in attendance, so I think the presentation fit them. However, even if you have already been using analytics for a while or use it regularly, you may still get some value out of reviewing this. What I did was outline my personal 4 best uses for analytics:

1. Troubleshooting problems
2. Tracking & Increasing Conversions
3. Gaining Business Intelligence about your visitors
4. Monitoring Performance

Big thanks to @MarketSTL (Will Hanke) for inviting me to speak. I enjoyed it!

Leveraging Web Analytics to Increase Conversion - Market STL Presentation

View more presentations from Erin Eschen.

Marketo's B2B Social Media Guide

One of the best take-aways I gained from the Online Marketing Summit 2010 conference in San Diego a few weeks back was a whitepaper called, The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media  by Marketo, who also had a strong sponsorship presence at the conference. It includes sound bytes such as:

"Social validation, or social proofing, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous situations when people do not have enough information to make opinions independently, and instead look for external clues like popularity, trust, etc."

and

"Social networks play an influential role when it comes to mitigating the feeling of risk that overcomes B2B buyers when trying to solve a problem or purchase a solution."

 Some tips from Marketo on social media marketing are listed below - some are techniques I had not considered before. Many of these topics were heavily covered at OMS.

• Mark tweets about your product as a “favorite”on Twitter, and provide a link or feed to these favorites on your website alongside the product information. Essentially, you are including product reveiws without having needed to solicit them!
• Start with goal-setting. You have to know what you want to accomplish before you set out to do it, and if you don't know what you can potentially accomplish with social media marketing, a white paper like this one is a great place to start. Page 14 and 15 of this document list out all possible goals and objectives you could have. "What do you want to accomplish and what are your distinct action items for each goal?"
• I still see bloggers trying to hard to push their products on their blogs or across social media. I personally tune this out, and Marketo agrees that the only way to be effective in social media marketing is to "stick to the topics your prospects and customers will find most compelling and avoid the hard sell."
• Not blogging yet? Why not??! Interesting stat: “Now visited by over 67 percent of the global
  online population…social networks and blogs…have become the fourth most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail.” – Global Faces and Networked Places, The Nielsen Company, March 2009
• I've seen a lot of research and data surrounding what types of content in micro-blogging (Twitter) most often gets "re-Tweeted." Rather than obsessing over types of keywords that get re-Tweeted most or times of day that tend to lead to the most re-Tweets, I like Marketo's advice because I've seen it work in action: "Research has shown that asking for a retweet actually increases its chance to be retweeted. Just don’t do it with every tweet—save it for those that are
  most important or relevant." Twitter and other social networks are largely populated by curteous professionals who desire to help one another out. Take advantage of this properly and respectfully.
• I love this point: A natural advantage to getting engaged on Twitter? It almost happens without you even having to try, as long as you gravitate toward the types of content and people that interest you most:
  You will "associate yourself with a specific group of industry experts and thought leaders, and
  demonstrate your interest in the space."
• Why does Twitter make sense for business? Especially B-to-B?
  "Microblogging gives people real-time insight into your business in a digestible way. You present timely information without making people visit your website or conduct a search. Microblogging automatically supports permission marketing." I love that quote!

Also from this white paper:

Best ways to use LinkedIn for B-to-B:

1. Use LinkedIn Answers to ask thought-provoking questions or become an “expert” by providing valuable answers and demonstrating thought leadership.
2. Promote events on LinkedIn.

and I've seen this stat before but haven't yet delved into creating this medium for my business.

“55 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to consume white papers and analyst reports if they were delivered as podcasts.”
– Research: Podcasts Penetrate B2B Mainstream, MarketingVOX

Do people use podcasts that much? Is it the iPod and iPhone that people are using to subscribe to podcasts from companies about topics they are interested in? I'd like to know more about this before going through the effort of creating podcasts and submitting to Apple (for example.)

How to get Twitter posts to show up on Facebook fan pages, using Notes

A friend recently asked me a question about Facebook fan pages, and in the spirit of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's "Trust Agents," which I am reading right now, I decided to make it into a post on my blog - share the knowledge.

I've managed a Facebook fan page for a while now and have tried out a lot of Twitter, blogging and RSS applications for fan pages.

From my friend:

Hi! So, I am having a ridiculous time trying to figure out how to properly sync up Twitter with a FB Fan page so that the tweets automatically update the status. Can you help me with this? Or point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

My response:

The best solution, from my experience, is to hook up your Twitter RSS feed into the fan page's "Notes" application (which is a native application to Facebook, not a 3rd party app).

I've tried TONS of 3rd party apps and no luck getting Twitter posts to update Facebook status reliably.

So here's an article to show you how to do it. 

You can see what it ends up looking like by visiting Facebook.com/Perficient

If you have another, or better, solution for getting Twitter to update your fan page status, please leave a comment here. I would prefer to have an app handle it for me, but this is the simplest way I was able to achieve it.

Blog and Twitter standards for social media managers

Every day, I run through lists of "standards" and "procedures" I have created for myself as a manager of social media for an organization. I do this without really thinking about it. I have a list of tactics and minimum expectations that my boss and I set and agreed upon months ago, but I find it interesting because when I first learned Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click Advertising, these "guidelines" came from a third party. I learned SEO and PPC about 5-6 years ago, and this was after experts had already emerged. Having tested and tweaked their processes for optimizing code and content or managing bids or editing ad copy, these experts set the stage for a suite of effective techniques that the rest of us could follow. Personally, I don't feel like social media is quite there yet. On one hand, the reason for this is due to the more creative and uniquely personalized nature of "social media" -- varying not only between e-commerce and B-to-B (for example) but also varying greatly between target market demographics such as industry and age, varying by desired action and then also varying by brand experience (how do you want your brand to look? creatively?).

So, given that all of that makes sense to you, I want to outline some of the standards that I feel generally work as a starting point for any company endeavoring to utilize social media to drive business results. From here, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. And by the way, isn't that just the fun of it all as marketers? In what other media do you feel we have been able to uniquely tailor our strategy and approach to best suit the market and organization goals as much as we do in social media?

I'm going to go over my own personal tactical standards for blogging and Twitter use today - in the interest of hammering out a post I can actually publish today without it being too daunting -- and then will revisit things like Facebook and LinkedIn in a later post. 

Blogging:

• The Value: I call our blogs the "home base" of content for our organization. Now, we do not have a lot of pages on the site changing frequently (i.e. product inventory coming and going) nor do we regularly change our capabilities -- all of the things we bring to an organization. This means that our blogs present a unique destination for my company's experts to present our knowledge, experiences and industry insights on a regulary basis. Blogs also have a tremendous impact on Search Engine Optimization because search engines love keyword-rich content, and they love new, fresh, unique content.
  
• Standards for Quantity of Blogs: Have as many blogs as are relevant to a unique target and/or unique product, capability, solution or industry. We have three right now and we're working on launching more. If you run an e-commerce site, you might have a unique blog per category. This would certainly help with SEO efforts as well (siloing), but consider first your internal resources for upkeep, because keeping content fresh and relevant is more important than having a lot of blogs.
  
• Standards for Quantity of Posts: Post at least 3 times per week. Personally, I would push for 5 times per week and would love to see a new post daily, but I think 3 is a floor to keep people subscribing, engaging, tweeting about your posts and coming back. Let your blog go more than 2 weeks without a new post, and your content becomes stale, subscribers may unsubscribe, and you may lose some credibility. Now, we all understand that "people get busy," and ideally, if your organization is operating on all cylinders, they'd never have time to blog for you, right! Well, I certainly write content for our blogs myself, but my job is to mobilize the real experts in the company toward generating content and spilling their unique experiences, insights and opinions onto WordPress, so I do what I can to keep them active without pulling them away from clients, who always come first. ;-)
  For a personal blog, and call me a hypocrite because I am, I suggest once per day. Chris Brogan posts at least once every day. In many instances, I have seen a direct correlation between frequency of blog posts and # of followers or traffic to the blog - as long as, of course, the content is useful, relevant and valuable.
• Additional Blogging Check List: With every post, I ask myself the following questions before publishing or within an hour of posting:
• Is there a relevant photo or graphic we can embed in this post?
• Where would it make sense to add a link into the body copy? (Check your links after you publish a draft also.)
  
• Can I turn anything in this post into a bulleted or numbered list? (People LOVE lists! Trust me.)
• Can I add video (we use YouTube) or a slide show (we use SlideShare.net) to this blog post?
• Can I reference the posts of any industry experts or colleagues whom I respect? (Props!)
• Did I ask people to comment at the end of my post or throughout? Did I ask the reader questions to get them engaged?
• Did I read through this one last time when finished in order to correct obvious grammatical or spelling errors?
• Almost daily, I check all posts to see if any comments have been posted to any blog post. I always make sure our experts know about the comments so that they can reply and engage that user. If someone took the time out to comment on our blog, we owe them the acknowledgement and to answer their questions.
  

Twitter

• The Value: Twitter sits on the perimeter of our blogs to automatically tweet new blog posts and more importantly plays host to a uniquely active and engaged community of technology buyers (my target market) who are looking to discuss solutions, trends, strategies and more.  They use "hashtags" to help categorize their posts (how convenient!) and they want to talk to others. Largely, word of mouth advertising, though it remains strong off-line, is growing online and one of the most significant centers for this activity is on Twitter.com.
  
• Standards for Quantity of Twitter Accounts: Similar to blogs, referenced above, have as many Twitter accounts as you feel are relevant to an active Twitter community. Typically this means creating separate accounts by category (product/offering type), skill set / capability, or industry. We have even created an account based on a business partnership because there are so many people on Twitter looking to engage with this partner, plus, we have the unique content, experiences and insights to engage with them via our partnership. Again, and importantly, don't create a Twitter account if you can't maintain it, and follow something similar to my Standards for Quantity of Tweets as a maintenance rule. If you don't have the expertise or bandwidth internally (or with an agency) to get it done, don't start it.
  
• Standards for Quantity of Tweets: My requirement is 2-3 times per day as a bare minimum but I try to hit somewhere around 7-10 tweets per day for my primary focus accounts. I am a little bit more relaxed with myself on the weekends because Twitter activity as a whole decreases on Saturdays and Sundays. I also try to avoid over-saturation, although this is less of a concern than not tweeting enough. Also, the concept of "can you tweet too many times per day such that you create too much noise and people end up tuning you out" is up for discussion.
  
• Additional Twitter Check List:
• Monitor all references by others made to your brand and your Twitter profiles: Respond appropriately and in a timely manner.
• Talk about your self/brand/product less and others more. Mention what you have to offer when it's relevant and in an informative way. Those who relentlessly "advertise" or use "salesy", marketing messaging in their tweets get ignored quickly by the communities that I am used to engaging with. Trust me, you will not get far with it. Talk about the industry, the trends, and the knowledge - the product or solution will speak for itself through your wisdom.
  
• Is there a relevant hash tag I can use? I ask this every single time I write any tweet.
• Monitor hash tags and lists that are important to your business every single day. Use TweetDeck and/or CoTweet's Search Pad (I use both) to get live feeds of multiple hash tags at a time.
• Reply to a few of the best posts within some of your followed hash tags every day or any time you have some time to spend monitoring your searches.
• Shorten all URLs: I use Bit.ly but there are many that you can find to use.
• Tweet during conferences and webinars using agreed upon hash tags.
• Tweet about any and all events happening involving your company.
• Be polite in everything you do and say. Be gracious, thanking others for their #FollowFridays and RTs, offer up help when questions are asked that you know the answer to, and congratulate others on their accomplishments (awards and recognition received, promotions, new jobs obtained, etc.).
  

That is all for now.

Am I forgetting anything? What are some of your standards and procedures for making sure you're getting the most out of social media for your organization or personal brand?

Keep in mind that what I have outlined in this post is mostly the "standards" (or, in many cases, the bare minimum) of daily activity guidelines that allow me to ensure that I am keeping my company active across blogging and Twitter, but there are additional techniques and strategies when it comes to creative campaigns and unique partnerships which I feel tend to best leverage these technologies toward greatest business benefit and compelling brand building.

Thanks for reading! -Erin

By any other name...Can you label yourself?

Last night, an aunt of mine told me she had been reviewing my "web site" -- did she mean my blog, my Twitter profile, my Facebook profile? I am still at a loss for which online presence to which she was referring. Regardless, she had one problem with my bio. After 30 minutes of discussion about what countries I have been to in 2009 and which ones I plan to fly out to in 2010, she said "Erin, you simply cannot call yourself a 'jet-setter.'" She informed me that it was perfectly acceptable and - in fact - honorable to be called a jet-setter by others, but to label one's self such a thing was a bit - I don't know, pretentious? I don't recall her exact adjective. I think, in fact, she avoided telling me that self-labeling was anything in particular. She simply implied that it was a massive faux-pas.

It immediately reminded me of how we are all falling into the same trap when we call ourselves a "social media guru" or "social media expert." How much can we label ourselves and get away with it? I used to be able to call myself an online marketing specialist or "online marketing consultant" and all was well. Now that I'm getting more specific with things, is there a threshold of, say, speaking appearances or consulting gigs I must land before I can call myself an expert in social media marketing? Is there a certain number of miles I must obtain - a la George Clooney in "Up in the Air" - before I can call myself a "jet setter?" Is being Platinum on American Airlines' Advantage program enough?

Is it really faux pas to label one's self? Where do we draw the lines?

How to deal with negative social media sentiment

At the Integrated Marketing Summit last week in downtown St. Louis, I attended a session called "Twitter Basics and Beyond Workshop" in which Mark Aaron Murnahan spoke about how to use Twitter to monitor brand mentions and engage followers. He did a pretty good job and took questions at the end.

One of my favorite moments of any marketing conference occurred at this point. An attendee raised her hand and asked: "What should we do if we're seeing a lot of negative comments about our product?"

Mark paused. He recommended that she take a customer service approach and reach out to each individual to see how she can help to improve their experience. Great response, except that...well...

"We can't," she responded. "We don't really have any control over the product. We can't make it...better," she said reluctantly. Everyone in the room had a puzzled face and turned to pay more attention to where this was going.

Mark asked her to tell us more about the product.

"Well..." she hesitated, "It's the St. Louis Rams."

While the room of attendees muffled their giggles, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Having attended quite a few home games this year, I know just how bad the "product" really is. She later called the team the "on field product" -- an important distinction actually, given that the brand consists of much more than just the current team's stats, which will be something to keep in mind later in this post.

So, Mark seemed a little stumped. I'm going to be honest. It could've been that he felt a little bit out of place being from the Kansas City area and now needing to address someone about St. Louis sports, but he's much more savvy than that. I think he was preparing his response when I jumped in with a thought. Raising my hand, I offered her a little bit of advice, and I'll elaborate on that point here.

She is right. There is nothing that she can do to make the on-field product better. When we take on roles in social media or marketing, we choose the product we're willing to promote day in and day out on the day we accept the job offer. Sometimes that product changes - getting a lot worse (St. Louis Rams) or a lot better (like MonsterCommerce, the online shopping cart software and its related services did from 2004 - 2007 while I worked there.) We take that risk.

Now, as marketers or public relations professionals (note: I believe social media marketing is turning a lot of "marketers" into PR folks by nature of the beast, but that's another post for another day), we are now responsible for monitoring brand mentions across all social media sites. And we now sleep even less than we did before because complaints, spur of the moment business opportunities, demands and customer needs can come flying across Twitter at any moment of the day. If your organization hasn't split social media roles into "customer service" and "marketing", then you have to be both reactive and proactive, taking care of customers on every whim as well as putting out great content, promotions and personality that compels and engages - building brand loyalty and affinity over time (not to mention leading to sales/leads).

This is our challenge. Working in social media for the Rams simply compounds the difficulty.

Often, reacting to negative sentiment such as what you see in this screen capture of a few tweets after the December 13th loss can risk adding fuel to the fire.

Instead, my primary recommendation is to find and focus on the positive influencers across Twitter for your brand. If your brand or product is popular enough to have a lot of people tweeting about how terrible it is, there have got to be some who like it. In the case of the St. Louis Rams, you have a sports team with an esteemed history of super bowl wins, all-star players like Kurt Warner, and a city that is not made up solely of fair-weather fans. St. Louis sports fans are pretty notorious for their loyalty to their teams. So, it didn't take me long to find someone on Twitter who not only created a St. Louis Rams "UNOFFICIAL" account on Twitter, decked out with a pretty solid-looking background. On top of that, this Twitter user seeks out any sports article with a positive spin about the Rams and polls his followers on their favorite players on the team.

He/she also has almost 3,000 followers, and the account owner engages with their followers regularly with @ mentions! That's a pretty significant and decently engaged voice in social media. Unfortunately, this person has not tweeted anything since November 29th, and yet the Rams have lost something like two games since then. Dear Rams Social Media Manager: It's time to get this person tweeting again by reaching out to them, find others just like this one (Another fan here is tweeting daily and has almost 5,000 followers), and get the positive conversations going. It doesn't mean you're going to keep people from tweeting "Rams suck" after each loss, but I firmly believe that in light of your lack of ability to change the product, empowering your fans to remain active is the only thing you can do. You can continue to tweet positive messages from the official Rams account, but we all know that third party endorsements are more effective.

I also recommend finding other "products" affiliated with the on-field product (the team) that will drive attendance, participation and positive brand sentiment (assuming those are some of the KPIs by which your job performance is measured). Examples would include talking about the awesome suites available at the Edward Jones dome, videos and content about the experience of attending the games - from the nice facility to the food and drink available to the kids entertainment and nearby restaurants. Essentially, you are event marketing - selling the experience (aside from the disappointment that inevitably comes at the end of the games). Also, find places online where people are talking about the charity involvement, past player awards, commemoratives, memorials, special pre-game events - anything at all that the organization is, in fact, investing their time and money in. Give these items a little boost with social media as well.