Let's Talk About Social Media Marketing in Saint Louis

Yesterday, I was invited to speak about social media marketing on 550 KTRS as part of the All About Business radio show. I enjoyed the segment, in which I was asked to comment on what it means to be a social media expert and explain the Social Media Club of Saint Louis. I think it went pretty well, but I will warn you that I have a case of laryngitis. ;) Here's the recording of the 11 minute portion of the show in which I was interviewed.

How I Track Twitter Traffic for My Company

Until recently, it had been very difficult, and near impossible, to accurately report on traffic coming from Twitter posts to your website or blog.

Google Analytics has made changes recently that make it easier. According to a recent post in BtoB Magazine, "Rebooting Twitter Analytics":

The issue has to do with the way Twitter referrals were tracked through popular third-party applications such as TweetDeck and HootSuite. When a user clicked on a link embedded in one of these applications, the referral to your website wasn't recorded as a Twitter referral. Instead, Google recognized it as a “direct referral,” thus hiding some of the Twitter-related traffic under the direct referral column on your analytics report. 

“Now, whenever you click on a tweet, Twitter routes the URL through the t.co shortener,” said Tom Critchlow, VP-operations for Distilled NYC, an SEO and online marketing company. “So it shows up in analytics as a Twitter referral.” 

However, it's not that simple.

Here's what I've discovered. If we follow the advice of this article, then in our Google Analytics, we should be able to simply go to the "Social" reporting category in the left nav and click on "Sources" to see how much traffic we get from Twitter. I did this, and for the time period I am looking at, this report shows me that my company's blogs got 588 visits from Twitter in that time period.

Alternatively, you can try using "Advanced Segments" in Google Analytics to create a segment of your traffic (for reporting) that only shows traffic from Twitter. I set this up using the "Include: Source" filter, and then started typing "twi..." and it auto-suggests three different referring URLs that are part of Twitter: mobile.twitter.com; twitter.com and twitter. See screen shot:

So, that suggests to me that it would be in my best interest to include all three of these as part of this segment I am setting up. So I do just that, and I am sure to include "t.co" as well, per Critchlow's comment in the quote above.

My advanced segment setting ends up looking like this:

Save the segment as "Twitter Referred Visits" or your title of choice. Then, run a standard report on number of visitors in the same time frame as I ran earlier for Google's "Social" report that had returned a figure of 588 visits.

I get a total of 1,651 visits! That's three times what Google's social report told me was coming from Twitter.

I feel more comfortable relying upon my own advanced filter to show me a more accurate view of just how much traffic is coming to my site from Twitter. Why? Because I set it up myself, and I'm including what I personally know to be URLs that Twitter owns and uses to refer traffic.

The BtoB Magazine article ends with a quote that helps us keep a frame of reference around even attempting to track all inbound referrals accurately to begin with:

“It's a misconception that inbound traffic over the Internet is 100% trackable,” he [Chad Pollitt, director of inbound marketing for Kuno Creative] said. “It's not; it's just more trackable than the older print methods.”

How are you reporting on Twitter referrals to your company's web properties? If you're using Google's social reports or any web analytics tool's built-in social reporting, you may be missing the mark and leaving out a large portion of traffic actually coming from tweets. I recommend building reports on your own so that you have more control. Besides, I know our social media strategy involves a heavy Twitter component, so I want to make sure I'm giving that time investment in Twitter the most accurate data I can find to justify that it's working. 

I'd be curious to know if anyone else is seeing this kind of discrepancy and if you've set up your analytics in any different way to report on Twitter traffic.

When Amazing Design is Not Enough

Bet you didn't think it was possible! Being a great designer often isn't enough, and the surge of functional mobile applications and social networks is making this reality all the more apparent.

I've spoken with plenty of marketing and web technology folks who place a high premium on the design of their application, website, or product's user interface. Good design is certainly important and can set your site or app apart. However, as I came across a great article in TechCrunch today, I was reminded once again just how much usability and function can take precedence over aesthetics. It provided several examples of apps killing their competition on usefulness and function even when the styling was inferior.

I wrote about it on Perficient's Spark blog, a blog for all things innovative and experience design related. Check out my post here:

When Amazing Design is Not Enough

Copyright and IP Rules to Follow in Social Media

Some rights reserved. - Horia Varlan

I just finished reading this great article by Stephen Easley, posted today on SmartBlog on Social Media: "Why IP law still matters in a social media age"

Easley outlines three key learnings from South by Southwest Interactive, one of the largest interactive marketing & technology conferences in the U.S. - which ended this past week. These are his three key tips to follow as it pertains to copyright law applied to social media:

1. Photos: "Be careful when using any picture, even one widely circulated through Twitter or Facebook.  If you use a photo, the best practice is to obtain express permission to use it, and at the very least do not use photos without proper attribution and links at a minimum."
2. Copy: "Don’t just scrape content — instead transform content with your own unique creativity, and thereby avoid unfair competition or copyright violation claims."
3. Criticism and Impersonation: "When dealing with criticism or parody of individuals, be careful not to “credibly impersonate” — so using the word “fake” offers a good deal of protection. When dealing with criticism or parody of a corporation, learn their trademarked logos and marks and try to avoid using them or at least transforming them so that you can argue that there is no consumer confusion, an element necessary under trademark law."

...and the full article provides some background on why Easley suggests you follow these tips. Read the Full Post Here. 

Helping Saint Louis Lead in Business Technology

AdSaint - a local Saint Louis ad industry site - recently interviewed my boss, Bill Davis, Director of Marketing at Perficient. This link includes the audio interview. 

I think he does a great job describing what our company does. He also talks about raising Perficient's visibility as a company based in Saint Louis with our airport ads, and social media (which I do) as a key strategy.  

3 Types of Metrics that Demonstrate Social Media Marketing Success

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how we can demonstrate positive business impact from social media or content marketing initiatives. I report on social media marketing metrics weekly to my direct manager, and I often think about them in three major groups:

1. Fans, Followers and Subscribers: People who have said they want to follow our brand. This gives you a sense of  Awareness or Brand Visibility as well as how it is impacting the brand's online reputation in its space.
2. Clicks, Traffic: People who have visited your blog or site as a result of finding you online via social channels. 
3. Leads/Sales: Actual interest in doing business with your company. I value leads coming from general inquiry forms higher than leads coming to us via incentive offers such as a white paper or webinar. 

Technically you could add a fourth category to this and actually quantify sales that started as a social media based lead. That requires adequate tracking in your CRM or analytics system, and is much easier for something like an e-commerce site selling products than it would be for a B-to-B firm. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed a recently published article by Jon Miller of Marketo called "5 CEO-Worthy Metrics for Demonstrating Inbound Marketing Success." In his post, Miller outlines the following metric types and gives detail to them:

1. Month over month growth in organic website traffic, leads, and opportunities. 
2. Social engagement, not just reach. 
3. Lead generation by content, channel, and initiative. 
4. Percent of leads with an inbound original source.
5. Forecasted conversion through the funnel.

Very similar to my line of thinking but he's talking more generally about inbound marketing and not just social media. You can read his full post here. 

IBM Study Unveils Top Inhibitors to Adopting Social

Sandy Carter (@sandy_carter), VP Social Business Evangelism at IBM, recently did a video interview in which she talked about the reasons why companies are hesitant to really get engaged with social media and use either internally within a hosted community or allow their employees to engage online - to post work-related communications via social networks.

IBM conducted a study of over 2,000 companies and asked them about the top inhibitors to adopting social media. Here are the top response areas. I wasn't surprised at any of these, but I'm glad that IBM's study groups the reasons into buckets so that we, as social media marketers, can help tackle the fears that companies face as we approach social media strategies unique to each company's needs.

1. Security - Someone might break into my private community and something bad will happen
2. Adoption - How will people use it? Will they come? Will they like it?
3. Culture - Is our company culture ready to listen to employees or clients? Are we ready to respond and react in this way?
4. Compliance - Regulated industries such as finance are hesitant to let anyone tweet/post about investments.

Sandy's high-level understanding of social media for business is impressive, and she's extremely articulate about it. I had the opportunity to have dinner with her at an IBM conference earlier this year and enjoyed meeting her and connecting with her.

Huge change coming to the Web: New gTLDs and what it means

I have heard about the coming change to website domain names but didn't quite understand it clearly until I read this article. AdAge titled the article "Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?" At first, I thought that sounded a bit over-sensationalized, and perhaps it is, but if your ead through the finer points here (and I've only highlighted the key points) I think you'll see why it will change things quite a bit.

Amplify’d from adage.com

First, the basics. A "generic top-level domain" is the part of the domain name to the right of the dot, e.g. in "http://www.ICANN.org" - the "org" is the top-level domain (TLD). There are 22 generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .COM, .ORG and .NET, and around 250 country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) that are specific to certain countries, like .JP for Japan and .MX for Mexico.

With ICANNs New gTLD Program to commence January 2012, the doors will be thrown wide open and virtually any word can become a gTLD if the company or organization meets certain criteria:

They can pony up the hefty application fee ($185,000) They can prove they can afford to run a gTLD year after year They can justify why they should own a particular word as a gTLD – e.g. a travel company is unlikely to be successful at justifying buying ".Apple" as a gTLD but they can justify buying ".adventure"

If a company can meet these criteria - then congratulations – they've just become a registry. Amazon can buy ".books" and JetBlue can buy ".fly". And if two companies want the same word and can't reach an agreement on their own, an auction commences with the word going to the highest bidder.

From a consumer's perspective: Just when we thought it was kinda safe to go into Internet waters because we had a basic understanding of what a safe URL should look like … now anything's possible. With hundreds of new gTLDs likely to be introduced starting next year, consumer confusion is virtually guaranteed. There's little doubt fraudsters intend to exploit this new window of vulnerability.

Now you can see why there is a lot at stake. Yet, when I spoke to my IT and marketing peers at the largest companies, there was a near universal lack of information on this topic! Read more at adage.com

 

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How to Keep Your Company's Bloggers Motivated

I was recently interviewed by a writer for Microsoft's partner newsletter publication, Redmond Channel Partner. Perficient is a Microsoft partner, and we consult on installing and configuring Microsoft software such as SharePoint for large companies.

Barb Levisay has been publishing a series on social media in her "Marketing Matters" column. This week she covered our blogging strategy. Perficient currently has 5 active blogs and over 50 experts across the company who contribute to them weekly. I thought I'd share the details she covered about how we keep our bloggers motivated to publish valuable new content frequently.

Amplify’d from rcpmag.com

Commitment to Fresh Blog Content If blogging is your social outlet of choice, consistent fresh content is the key to results. It's a challenging commitment, but if managed and rewarded well, a blog can give you a significant boost in organic search results and Web traffic. Erin Eschen, online and social media marketing manager for Perficient, a National System Integrator partner headquartered in Missouri, said, "Blogs are the hub of our social media program. Our goal is to demonstrate thought leadership through our consultants' expertise. Most of our bloggers write their posts because they love it." To keep bloggers motivated, Perficient also offers cash incentive programs based on milestones, like the most traffic to a post. Eschen said, "My bloggers are people who don't report to me so I give them constant feedback to recognize their success. We share the numbers of post visitors with the writers and they compete in a friendly way to write posts that will attract readers. It's important to share those numbers." Read more at rcpmag.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1aipe

Using CRM to track the ROI of Social Media

I frequently find the insights of Radian6 employees to be forward-thinking and optimistic regarding social media. Not only that, but they also tend to be extremely analytical and technical in their approach. I met Amber Naslund (@AmberCadabra) in person this summer, and this recent article by Olivia Landolt (@livslandolt) shows me that the company hires those who truly understand the social media landscape.



Having worked in social media for 2 years now, with specific objectives in driving traffic, leads and ultimately revenue from social media marketing, I can only agree with Olivia that there can be a direct, positive ROI from investing in sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Below I've included snippets from Olivia's article on Radian6's blog. Particularly the aspect of tracking ROI that involves leveraging the source information in most Customer Relationship Management systems.



Ultimately, if you become diligent about tracking the source of the first contact, the first brand impression and/or the first point of engagement with a sales prospect, you can then track the sales lifecycle, average and total revenue, and much more. Getting leads from social media into your sales and lead tracking systems is critical to both driving results and proving that results occur.

Amplify’d from www.radian6.com

In one corner we have those that firmly believe that there is a definite return on investment from social media, and in the opposing corner those that firmly believe that there isn’t.

Tracking sales resulting from social media doesn’t just help to justify the time or investment spent. It can also help identify what networks are the most valuable to a brand.

Going beyond awareness and likes and retweets, companies may also consider traffic resulting in inquiries or purchases that were directly fed through to their site from social networks, which can be determined using web analytics tools, paid for or free.

One of the first questions to ask should be how are leads tracked outside of social media? While some might use Excel, for large organizations this is likely achieved in the form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. These CRM systems or (even spreadsheets) will host contact information, history and sales but also leads and the source for these leads. So when tracking ‘website’ inquiries one can just as easily track ‘social media’ or ‘Twitter’ as another lead source. This will make it easier to track new leads as a result of either a DM Twitter inquiry or a Facebook wall post through the sales cycle, starting at the point of entry. Analyzing this type of data at the end of the month will provide a clear picture of exactly how many leads the various social sources have generated, if they have closed and if so the amount of the sale. Read more at www.radian6.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1af70