Here’s the slides I used in my talk to the next gen of digital marketers (I’m so proud to see the next gen-and I feel sooo old!):

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In my 6 years of corporate and small business social media consulting, I’ve come to believe that the biggest problem around social media ROI is figuring out which digital marketing efforts should get credit for a conversion. It’s easy to say that social media needs to prove that it delivers ROI, but companies make that very hard to do with the analytics programs they have in place to track conversions.

Most website analytics programs attribute conversions to the most recent referrer source for a particular visitor. If they came from a Google AdWords ad, it will get the credit for the conversion. But it’s much more likely that a customer actually decided to buy your product because of exposure to your brand in various channels (i.e. A search bringing up your organic listing, your email list, your twitter and Facebook links, then finally your PPC ad). Which of these channels should take credit for the conversion? They were all responsible.

Multi-touch attribution, unlike the “last-touch” model most companies employ, allocates the conversion value across all of your marketing programs — all touch points receive an equal share of the credit for the conversion. Since social media is rarely a last touch referrer, and traditional web referrer methods break down in social channels, a multi-touch mode of ROI tracking works much better to give marketers the ROI justification their CEOs are demanding.

Additionally, building better links with campaign, content, medium, source, and term parameters built in, is an integral part of the multi-touch mode of measuring social media ROI. Obviously, adding all of these additional parameters will result very quickly in an unweildy URL, so baking all of this inside a short URL is the way to go. The only problem with many short URLs is the one I mentioned above — the analytics programs generally only actually attribute a conversion to the most recent referrer.

Like any new marketing channel, we’re seeing social media continue to make its way through growing pains as it reaches scale and maturity. The experimental and promising sets of tools and methodologies in the works can provide real answers for marketers.

Send me a line if you’d like to chat about some of the innovate social media ROI tools I’m using with my own clients. I’d love to chat with you about how they can also help you measure and boost your social media conversions.

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At the 10 Year Agile celebration, the conclusion was to focus on “Improving the entire process of value creation”. Notice that here again, the thinking on value stops…Click here to continue reading

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• Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto (allaboutagile.com)
• Agile Innovation (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in) (agilefocus.com)

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore, I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

And yes, I grabbed this post (with very minor additions and edits) from Daily Post to get me started again. A lot of transformations have occurred in the interactive marketing industry in the past 12 months, and my goal is to help you, as a marketer, keep up with and own a specific niche of this ever-growing space.

To your success,

Ghennipher

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That’s why social analytics companies are always fascinating to me. Consumers are spending more time living in a digital space — giving companies endless opportunities to gauge and adapt to public opinion on their products and services. Crimson Hexagon has one of the most innovative analytics tools I’ve seen. Reportedly, their software has a 97% accuracy rate in analyzing public sentiment.

According to a Fast Company article “Their approach is simple. Companies first design a question that needs answering.” The interesting part about Crimson Hexagon is that they then set up “possible public reactions” — basically a set of categories based on how they think the public might respond to the question, instead of using traditional keyword matching or semantic analysis. This software seems to go further into the group consciousness of public opinion to enable companies to become more customer-centered.

The technology to understand consumer feelings and behavior is quickly evolving. I think the real bottleneck with these types of technologies will be the companies themselves not adapting their offerings quickly enough to what customers really want. I’d love to see more examples of companies who are continuously adapting to customer sentiment.

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• CNN’s Social Media Analytics Tool Shows Reid Up on Angle, Boxer Tied With Fiorina (fastcompany.com)
• Major Enhancement to Crimson Hexagon Platform Delivers Groundbreaking New Social Media Monitoring and Analysis Capabilities (eon.businesswire.com)
• Crimson Hexagon Edges Forward in Social Media Analysis with Big Customers Like Bing (xconomy.com)

Reprinted from AppliedConnectioneering.com

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Social media, however, has changed shopper dynamics and given the customer control of their experience. There are a few companies who are managing their business outcomes by leveraging customer feedback in social media.

According to Adweek, “Apple is a spectacular example. You walk through that Apple Store and everything, from the way the sales associate captures the transaction near the display to the nature of their training bar in the back of the store. Even the way the point of purchase is organized reflects what’s important to the shopper and not what’s important to the brand. And look at their display labels: they’re not filled with technical specs. Instead they tell you what the product does for you. That’s great shopper marketing.” Read the rest of the article here.

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What does this mean for your business?

If you have an offline business, you stand to immediately benefit from location-based services. Here’s a few of the most popular mobile location-based apps you’ll want to leverage:

• Businesses using the mobile app foursquare engage in friendly competition to get locals back to their venue more often.
• Gowalla is a popular mobile app that allows customers to share their comings and goings with their friends, and every time they check in somewhere, their “passport” gets stamped, and they can win more prizes. Every city has featured Featured Spots and Recommended trips that your small business can become a part of.
• Every month, millions of customers turn to the mobile location-based app Yelp to share their experiences with local business. Small businesses can get a wealth of market information with the tools Yelp provides. The customer review power of this service is 26 million users strong.
• Another similar service is Loopt, which according to it’s website, “helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events.” You’d be smart to get your business and events listed on Loopt.
• Google Buzz is one of the newest mobile location-based apps to keep your eyes on. The site says that Buzz for mobile lets you “See what’s going on nearby, post a message tagged with your location, and follow your friends on the go.” Since it’s from Google, you can bet that Google maps is baked right in. Businesses promoting upcoming events have a huge opportunity for traffic with Buzz.

There are new mobile location-based services springing up all the time, but the most important thing you need to know to leverage these services is the power they have to fuel your business. Location-based apps increase traffic and sales to your business through the power of word-of-mouth. A customer is much more likely to come through your door if he knows her friends are there and love the place. A customer is more likely to impulse buy if the reviews about your business rock. An event venue is much more likely to be packed if people in a user’s geographic location are checking in with their mobile app. Businesses who ignore this inexpensive way to connect with their customers will leave millions of dollars of revenue on the table. Don’t be one of them.

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• Google Buzz is Going after FourSquare and Gowalla! (Pics) (cloudave.com)
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• HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready (mashable.com)
• Social media for small businesses 4: Using Foursquare to identify and engage customers (freshnetworks.com)
• Gowalla Android App Coming This Month! (phandroid.com)

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1. It hijacked my pages and redirected my US visitors to a China sex site (NSFW but not really porn)
2. Some of the ads on the redirected site featured pictures of people like Chris Pirillo and Darren Rowse who seemed to be celebrity sponsors (I really doubt they were!)
3. Ironically, there was even 1 video ad for Lysol disinfecting wipes at the redirected site!
4. My web host, 1&1 (in the Philippines) could not see the redirect when I phoned them for customer support — or else lied because they didn’t want to help

This was definitely unexpected and no bueno, but I had backups to fall back on in the case of something nasty like this happening. What about your business? Do you have a disaster plan in place?

Please consider running a virus/malware scan if you were redirected to some random site from ghennipher.net. I’d hate to be viral in a bad way.

Did any of you have other experiences with my hijacked site?

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Image by Ludwig Gatzke via Flickr

Do you have social network profiles that you just can’t seem to keep up with? If so, I’ve got a little story to tell you. A recent client of mine, a small corporation, once had an employee who created social network profiles all over the internet. This employee finally moved on to other things after 2 years, but left the CEO with no idea exactly where the company’s social network profiles were registered, or how to manage them.

Here’s how it all started. This corporation is very humanistic and communicative, but since it’s also a startup, funds are tight and they hired interns to take care of the ‘non-critical’ social media marketing. They definitely had a lot on their plate and didn’t really know where to start, so they took the scattergraph approach and created profiles at as many social networks as they could find. I know some of you are already starting to feel the pain…

After a couple of years of this, they were seeing no results and brought me in to work with their team. I started by looking at all of their social network profiles. I used a social media monitoring and analysis tool to find out exactly what was happening with their brand, and the kind of communiques their employee had put on social networks.

What I found is that in almost 2 years, most of their social network profiles were abandoned. There was some spotty engagement in Facebook and a business community, but for the most part, as far as these social networks could tell, the company might as well be out of business for all the interaction it had with the communities it was a member of.

But what’s the real cost to a company of keeping these social profiles active? Or more specifically, what’s the cost of allowing them to go dormant?

In working with this client, we identified 3 specific difficulties abandoned social network profiles caused for this company:

1. Missed Opportunities: This company was proactive in their marketing materials, and included their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles on their business cards. But they didn’t include social media in their communications strategy, and therefore lost business due to their lack of engagement. In a very uncomfortable meeting one day, we read the comments customers left for them in various social networks when they first registered. When these questions went unanswered, there was a quick drop in interest, and as expected, no additional customer communication.
2. Sullied Reputation: As much as the CEO thought the company was doing business the Web 2.0 way, the employee in charge of social media was really unclear about his role. Corporate social media is more about customer service and communication than it is about sharing news articles in Digg and Reddit.  2 years after the initial social network profile creation, we found that this employee thought social media marketing meant that he should spend his time favoriting funny articles in Reddit and Digg than providing solid customer service in social networks and community building through the blog.
3. Expense: This small corporation couldn’t handle their social media management in-house because they weren’t sure if all of the company-branded profiles out there were really theirs or not. They had a lot of cleanup to do and realized that hiring a pro to work with their team was the only way to fix it. As we worked through the mess, we found even more issues that were a bit easier to deal with, but their loss in productivity and money was significant.

In my experience of working with companies ready to develop and implement social media, social media literacy is critical to success. This list defines the ABCs of social media literacy:

• Assessment: Always start with an assessment of your company’s social media readiness before you jump in. An assessment should build on the foundation of your business objectives and company culture. You’ll want to assess your strengths and weaknesses in Leadership, Innovation, Engagement. You’ll need to ascertain the competitive landscape and learn if other companies in your industry are successfully using social media in their corporate communications and marketing.
• Buzz: Do your research. Find out what people are saying about your business or products, and find out what they’re also saying about your competitors. It’s easy to let this project engulf you, so break it down with tools. Some popular ones are Google Alerts, Techrigy, and Radian6.
• Communication: The real value in social media for business lies in how it’s broken down communication barriers between customers and companies. The latest tools and trends, the latest apps, and everything that people are talking about indicates how people’s preferences for how they want to communicate is shifting. It’s your job to stay fairly updated on these things. You’ll notice that a “social media campaign” is not at all similar to a traditional media campaign. You can’t just give it to the agency and forget about it. Don’t stay current, stay ahead.

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