LivLarge

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining that there is a lack of measurement and ROI tracking around the use of social media.

It’s not that hard to at least track the basics.   There are now a plethora of tools  for social media monitoring and you can get started by tracking trends and setting basic targets/KPI’s & benchmarks around these.

I have set up a social media dashboard or KPI report which helps me with tracking social media metrics for my blog and in a business context a set up like this can also help you to measure ROI on your time spent on participating in social media activities.

The below example is a very basic dashboard but it does let me attribute an increase in site traffic or other metrics back to social media campaigns/tweets/social media activity.  If you’re selling a product or service you can work out your average cost per acquisition from social media channels by working out your average conversion rate, average revenue per sale or lead and the cost of getting that lead i.e. the value of your time spent in social media, cost for creative and other associated costs.

Example: Social Media Measurement Dashboard & KPI’s
Note: This is sample data

Social Media Measurement Dashboard Example

Evaluating the quality of traffic received from different social media sites allows you to concentrate your time and efforts on the sites that are going to bring you the highest quality traffic.  I.e. if someone coming from Facebook spends roughly twice as long on your site or the average amount that a Facebook user purchases through your site is 20% more than a Twitter user then it would make sense to concentrate more time, effort and money on your Facebook presence.

Another useful metric is  the % age of new visitors from each traffic source.  I.e.  Is this site/portal mostly sending you repeat loyal customers that you could encourage to visit your site directly or are you attracting brand new visitors that have never heard of your site before.  Which type of user is more valuable for your business and how do you want to encourage them get to your site in the future?

Useful  Social Media & Traffic Monitoring Tools:

• Google Analytics or other web analytics tools such as Omniture
• Google Alerts - set up alerts for mentions of your brand or product across the web
• Social Mention - the Social Media Search Engine
• Twitter search/Twitter hashtag searches
• Facebook - track new fans/friends and referrals
• YouTube Analytics - if you’re tracking video
• Google Trends for Websites and Insights for Search

I’ve seen some terrible landing pages lately.  Remember that your landing page only has a few seconds to make an impression before someone decides whether or not they want to spend time on your site.  Is the page relevant?  Did they arrive where they were expecting to go after clicking a link?  Or was it deceptive?

You can buy banners and send loads of traffic to your site but the hard part is actually getting that traffic to then convert.

When you’re advertising or promoting your website online, take some serious time to look at the landing page you’re sending them to.

• Make it uber clear what you want the person to do when they arrive on the page.  A hundred different links, pictures & buttons competing  for a visitors attention are only going to dilute your response rates.  The desired action should be completely obvious within a few seconds of looking at the page.

• Keep registration processes as short as possible (and I mean short!).  As a user I don’t care that it’s useful for you to know my gender and date of birth.  I just want to get to the content or reason for the sign up process as soon as possible.  Once you’ve gained the trust of your site user you can collect ‘nice to have’ information later.  And heck aren’t we in the economy of free? Why should I have to give you my email address if you promised me  a ‘free download’?

Here’s an example.  I searched for ‘Travel Insurance’ in Google and got an ad for House of Travel that directed me to this page which happens to be the home page for their site.    Not really the best landing page for someone looking for travel insurance.  In fact insurance isn’t mentioned anywhere on the page  at all…  I imagine they would have a pretty high bounce rate off that search term.

House of Travel landing page example.

By contrast, an ad for Air New Zealand took me to the following page.  Nice and clear, three easy to follow options, the images are obviously buttons and it was clear to me what they wanted me to do.

Air New Zealand - travel insurance landing page example

A quick look around at who’s advertising online at the moment brings up a few other examples.

Briscoes

It’s great to see a retail brand like Briscoes advertising online.  I saw this banner on the Herald for their ‘Under Wraps’ promotion.

Briscoes Under Wraps Island ad

Clicking on the ad took me to the following page which explains the promotion in further detail.  Pretty good.

Briscoes Under Wraps landing page

What I was concerned about though was the Briscoes Better Buy Club, what exactly is it?   Looking at the form and  because they’re asking for sign ups online I’m going to assume  it’s an email that gets sent out with special offers and sales information.   The problem I see here really is the length of the form.  Why do you need my full address and post code to send me an e-newsletter?

Briscoes Better Buys Club sign up form

This type of information request may have been OK a few years ago and I know your CRM software would love to have all the boxes filled but the reality is that the length of this form is going to directly affect the number of people who join.  If you solely asked for a name and email address (which if you’re honest is really all you actually need to complete the e-newsletter send) you would likely achieve a much higher sign up rate.

It’s easy to pick out the bad ones so to finish off let’s see if we can find a few decent landing page examples.  I’m not saying these are perfect but from looking at them I can see someone has thought through the user’s process.

2 Degrees Mobile

A 2 degrees ad promoting ‘click here for a free sim card’ is sending me to a nice short form that promises the goods.  I don’t see a lot of lengthy marketing speak here, right down to action.  Looks pretty good to me:

2degrees mobile landing page example

Sky TV

An ad for getting Sky installed for free is sending me to this landing page.  The easy to see ’sign up now’ buttons are pretty clear and there a couple of options to choose from.   Overall it’s not a bad example.

I really don’t understand why they would have an animated banner promoting one of their TV shows to the right of this page though.  This will clearly compete with visitors who are about to enter into a transaction with the business.  The less distraction on this page the better.

Sky TV landing page example

The Great Kiwi Invite

Here’s a nice short, easy to understand form.  They want your first name, last name and email address.  Pretty easy!

Great Kiwi Invite sign up page

As you can see from these examples, it’s really easy to over complicate landing pages.  The most important thing is to try to make the offer simple and clear without providing too much information or too many distractions.  First impressions are sometimes also your last.  Make the most of them!

There are some handy tools out there to help you out with your SEO efforts.  Here are a few of the tools that I find useful for search engine optimization:

1. Download and use the SEO for Firefox plugin.  Every SEO I know uses this tool.
2. GSiteCrawler - easy to generate Google & Yahoo friendly sitemaps.
3. Google Webmaster Tools, there are still a lot of people who don’t know about this handy Google tool.
4. Yahoo’s version of webmaster tools - Site Explorer.

There are also a bunch of great forums all about optimization so if you have any questions they’re likely to be answered for you here: SeoMoz, V7N Forums, Digital Point Forums.

Following on from my last post on using video for SEO, here are some tips to help your video go viral.

If you’ve created a simple instructional video for your site then you’re probably not hoping that it will go viral.  If on the other hand you’ve created something spectacular and want to share it with the world then you may need to give it a bit of a helping hand.

Over 80 million videos are watched on YouTube & millions more are posted online every day.  The chances of your video going viral can be pretty low.  Most don’t go viral by accident - it takes a lot of effort, time and perserverance BUT it is possible.

If you have a video that is worthy of going viral here are some tips:

• Once you’ve uploaded your video - share it.
• Reach out to blogs that will find the content interesting.  Some blogs allow you to post video within the comments section.
• Be cheeky, label your title ‘unauthorised’, ‘leaked’, ‘behind the scenes footage’ or ‘exclusive’. Once it gets going and has more views you can update the title to something more relevant and findable.
• Use Twitter to share the video with your network.
• Forums - create a new posts on forums and discuss the video content.  You may want to create several accounts to start up a conversation. This is time consuming but can have huge benefits.
• Post your video on social networks, as many as you can. Think MySpace, Bebo & Facebook.
• Encourage people you know to watch the video and share it.
• If your content is good (which it should be!) email the video to your friends and encourage your coworkers to do the same.
• If you’re a power user on YouTube you probably have several accounts - so use them. Comment away, have a conversation with yourself and get the discussion started.
• A great tip I read about recently is to use tags strategically.  Create a set of unique tags that aren’t used by anyone else on YouTube and put these tags on all of your video content.  Once people have seen one of your videos you’d really like them to move on to another of yours rather than random ‘related’ content.   Done well, this allows you to have control over the videos that show up as ‘related’ on your video page.

There are so many great reasons to use video on your site, not least of all that it’s great for search engine optimization - SEO.

Why use video?

• It conveys  trust for your brand, showing a real presence online is important.  Visualizing things makes them seem more ‘real’.
• You can use video to help decrease customer support by using online tutorials.
• Video can spread like wild fire on the web - it’s so easy to syndicate on other sites by embedding through YouTube  and if people use your video they will often link back to your site as reference.
• Visitors to your site don’t always have the time or patience to read pages of information. Often a short video will get your message across faster.

Optimize Your Video Content -  SEO Tips

Bear in mind that search engines can’t see your video content.  This is done via video sharing sites, some of which are indexed & ranked by Google & Yahoo.  YouTube. Metacafe & Vimeo are all good options and you should upload your video content to these sites as well as your own.

When uploading video to a third party site you need to carefully consider the title, description & thumbnail that you use.  This is a prime place for you to include your top keywords. Consider adding different titles and descriptions for each video sharing site.

To ensure that your site directly benefits from the video content you should also provide a text version video transcript on your own site as well as a short bullet point breakdown of the video content.  It may take an extra 15 mins to transcribe the video contents but believe me it is worth it.

If it makes sense to, include a call to action in the video.  This could be a direct call to purchase or simply an encouragement for the viewer to visit your site for further information/content.

Track Your Video Content

You know I love measurability.  Track your video content with a tool such as Tubemogul.   You can also keep tabs on the number of comments, ratings and views on individual videos to measure your success.

It’s not surprising that a recent E-Marketer study shows search marketing spend is increasing around the globe.

People realise that in the current economic climate they really need to justify their marketing spend.  I think all marketers are increasing their focus on results, measurement &  budget accountability.

The graph above shows that 45% of respondents intend on increasing their PPC spend.  Pay per click advertising is cheap and effective.  You don’t need a designer to create the ads and you can set your own daily budget to keep costs under control.

Online banner advertising, email marketing & paid search or pay per click advertising can all show a clear ROI for every dollar spent.  If you are using the correct tracking tools you can see exactly how many people have converted on your site and from where for every dollar of advertising spent.   If only we could see those results for all forms of advertising.

The key to getting the best results online are measurement & optimisation.   Are you using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Omniture to track online conversions?  Are you keeping an eye on what people are saying about you using online reputation management ?  If not, you should be.

Track, test, optimise and make sure that you’re getting the best ROI for your ad spend.

Last month I created a social marketing survey to get a feel for how people are currently using social media and marketing tools.

The survey produced some interesting stats on how individuals and companies are using social marketing in New Zealand.

Here are the results:

Social Network Popularity

Use of Social Networking Sites

Do you have a blog?

What blogging software do you use?

Twitter usage

What Twitter app do you use?

Company use of Twitter, Facebook & YouTube

Social Bookmarking Services

You can download a pdf of graphs here:  liv-large-social-marketing-survey

Thanks to everyone who participated.

I’m always on the look out for great examples of Social Media in action.  This week I came across the US Air Force’s social media presence.

Spurred on by the fact that Al Qaeda have a huge web presence the US Air Force is definitely making an effort to move with the times.  In November 2007 the Secretary of Defence stated  “It is just plain embarrassing that Al Qaeda is better at communicating it’s message on the internet than America”.  One foreign diplomat also asked a couple of years ago: “How has one man in a cave managed to out communicate the worlds greatest communication society?”

You can feel their pain and I think many people and organizations large and small are on the back foot when it comes to knowing just how to get started with their online communications strategy!

Having now set up a dedicated Emerging Technology the US Air Force are embracing the digital world.

Far from being a closed agency they’re proactively using Twitter & Web 2.0 applications &  are encouraging staff to participate online as a way to actively engage the general public.

Here are some of the things that they’re doing well:

Twitter
Using the Twitter ID @AFPAA they’ve built up over 3,000 followers. They have a branded Twitter page that cross promotes their other online activity with links through to their website, blog and YouTube presence. They post regularly and cater to a large audience with their variety of Tweets.

US Air Force Twitter Example

YouTube
They’ve set up their own YouTube channel and branded it ‘Air Force Blue Tube’.  They keep content fresh by regularly uploading new videos and also use the channel to cross promote their Facebook profile, Second Life presence & blog.  I don’t see any mention of Twitter on here yet, I’m sure that’s on their to do list.

Example of YouTube Channel for US Air Force

Widgets & Podcasts
The Air Force have set up a news widget that encourages people to share their content and drive visitors back to their websites.  Smart.

They also have several regular Podcasts that include news and information about the Air Force, its people, programs and missions.

Counter-blogging
A great strategy - the Air Force encourage staff to get out there and comment on blogs that speak negatively about them or the government.

Being a government agency they obviously have heightened concerns about safety and security online.  As such they’ve built up clear guidelines for staff to follow and have a detailed blog assessment chart that empowers staff  to make their own decisions on how to react to posts in the blogosphere.

This is a fantastic tool.  If you deal with similar decisions in your workplace I recommend taking a look at this with a view of adapting it to suit your situation.

Blog Response Assessment Chart

If you’re not already engaging with your customers and the public online, this should give you some encouragement.  I understand that many organizations continue to struggle with the decision to join in social media conversations but the reality is that people are already talking about you online whether you like it or not and the opportunity to be involved  in conversations about your brand  is too valuable to pass up.

A colleague recently introduced me to Idiomag a personalized online music magazine site. It’s pretty cool you can search for artists you’re interested in and it pulls in articles, videos and information from all over the web into one place for you.

If you enter some info and build up a profile you can become a member and receive info on only the music you’re interested in.

I expect to see a lot more personalized sites this year as companies start to serve up more integrated content based on users personal taste & preferences.

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a group of people making a difference in the New Zealand electricity market.

Recently we became involved in Powershop - an online electricity retailer that allows you to choose between different brands of electricity with the click of your mouse.

Everyone needs power and we simply want people to have more choice and control over where and how they buy their electricity each month.

Enter Powerkiwi.  Powerkiwi is the company that we’ve set up to sell power through the Powershop Site.  We currently offer two brands of electricity: Flowerpower & The Green Power Company.

Right now if you sign up to Powershop with Flowerpower you can get $70 FREE electricity (as a credit on your Powershop account).  Now who doesn’t need that going into winter during a recession!?

Get $70 of FREE power with Flowerpower by signing up to Powershop now.  It’s easy to sign up, just plug in some info and Powershop will do the rest.