Monitoring and Measuring Social Media for Your Business

Social Media: One Year Later

This is a very well done slide show created by Marta Kagan of PRWeb. There have been so many view points expressed about Social Media and it tends to get confusing depending upon who you listen to but this presentation captures them all and is well worth viewing.

Marketers Can Mine Your Facebook Info

Recently posted on Wired…. Need an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each ? such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level?

Facebook has just the free feature you’re looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes.

The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list.

But as Klein points out, a marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, either legally or illegally collected and upload those through a dummy account which then lets the user see all the profiles created using those addresses.  Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-mail address, the harvest could be quite rich.

Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set.

Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation and interests.

While that information isn’t available for all users, Facebook changed its privacy settings in early December so that certain information can’t be made private, including one’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and friend list (the latter can be somewhat hidden from public view).

Anyone with your e-mail address can harvest that information, the company admits.

That’s unacceptable, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kevin Bankston, who says that’s not the Facebook people signed up for.

“Just because Facebook users want to share personal info with their friends does not mean they want to share it with any nefarious parties on the internet,” Bankston said, “but that is exactly what Facebook is forcing its users to do.”

With the new privacy settings, users can shut off being found by their name by changing who can find them on Facebook or by web searches.  But even if you restrict as much as you can, if an outsider knows your e-mail address, they can find the rest of your profile information that Facebook now designates as public, namely your name, profile picture (if you’ve uploaded one), current city (if you’ve filled one out), networks (if you’ve joined any) and pages you are a fan of, according to Facebook.

“If someone knows your e-mail address, they can find you even if you’ve restricted search privacy,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told Wired.com.

That’s very valuable information to marketers, who can use it to evaluate their product, understand their user base better, create targeted marketing materials or sell the information to others.

But Facebook says it works to catch rogue marketers and sets a limit on the number of e-mail addresses that can be run through its system, according to Noyes.

“We’ve developed several systems to detect and block malicious use of the Friend Finder,” Noyes said. “For example, we don’t allow users to upload contact lists past a certain size. We also block users who upload contacts at an anomalous rate.

Still, the onus is on users to make a decision about their information, according to the company.

“However, we encourage people with concerns to configure their privacy settings appropriately,” Noyes said.

Users should know that the information exposed in this little hack is not unlike that which is turned over to third-party applications whenever you or one of your friends installs an application, including such things as quizzes to decide what kind of pet you are.

It’s not clear if any marketers are using this loophole, but it would be very difficult to know

Facebook is pushing its users to share information in an attempt to keep Twitter from eclipsing the site as the center of the net’s online conversations. The site hopes getting users to publish more publicly will make it the place people turn when they need to find recommendations, a function currently dominated (with great profit) by Google.

But privacy activists say Facebook has broken the contract with its users. Some groups have filed a formal complaint with the FTC, saying the recent changes are illegal.

Augmenting marketing data to learn even more about customers isn’t new, and has been offered by companies such as Choicepoint for years. Rapleaf offers a strikingly similar service to the demonstrated hack for companies willing to pay money.

Five Easy Ways to Jump Start Social Media for Your Business

Believe Again!

I received this from an associate and I want to share it with you.

How To Grow Your Business Using Social Media

From John Hadley and The Blog Zone
A colleague of mine brought this Slideshare video to my attention and I enjoyed it so much that I’d like to share it with all of you. It really explains the power of social media and how important it is to become a part of this new and exciting way of growing your business. In addition, I found it to be inspirational because it stresses the need to engage with others to really gain valuable knowledge. Enjoy it and let me know what you thought!

The Importance of Real-Time

The momentum, was too strong. Real-time search — and Google’s (Google) inability to beatTwitter at it — became a huge trend in 2009. Everyone wanted a piece of it, and Twitter had the goods. When you want to find out what’s happening right now, this very minute, Twitter’s search trumped Google, and Google had no choice but to react. Luckily for Twitter, the reaction came right on time. Both Bing (Bing) and Google signed a deal with Twitter to incorporate real-time results from Twitter into web searches, just as Twitter’s flat traffic figures became impossible to hide. The effect of this deal is still unknown, but when Google sends you traffic, you can bet it’s going to be noticeable.

Twitter’s future is still uncertain. We still don’t know the overall business plan beyond a few hints at at least some current revenue, and we still don’t know if the service’s huge popularity boom in 2009 was just a passing fad. One thing is certain, though: The Google deal was the adrenaline injection Twitter needed. If Twitter is really destined to become the world’s new SMS, 2010 is the time to do it, and we’re happy to be along for the ride.

Why Interruption Marketing Does Not Work

By Gary Brewer

Traditional methods of marketing such as telemarketing, email marketing and even television advertising are becoming more difficult methods to reach your targeted audience.  With the introduction of Caller ID, Spam Filters and TiVo consumers have tuned out marketers who continue to interrupt them with unrelenting messages, offers, enticements and commercials.  Let’s face it, we are getting tired of being sold to and being interrupted.  So what do you do?

You need to pull “targeted” customers to your business or service instead of blindly pushing out content to an audience that may or not be your ideal client or even in the buy cycle.  How would you like to tell your message to only clients that need or are interested in your products or service and are actually in the market and ready to make a buying decision that very moment?  Well with technology you can and here is what you will need to know to get started.

There are 3 parts to Inbound Marketing Methodology

1. Get Found {SEO, Blogging, Social media}
2. Convert {Landing Pages, Lead Tracking, Competitive Analysis, Lead Scoring}
3. Analyze and Repeat (Marketing Analytics, Competitive Analysis, Lead Scoring}

We recommend that you not rely on just one element expecting to see great results. You need to have multiple arrows in your quiver all aimed at the same goal.  For example, Link building is great but if your Link juice is not coming from relevant sites your traffic will not be relevant.  In addition, SEO is like sex in high school everybody is talking about it but not everybody is having it. You need both on-page and off-page SEO and include proper tags, titles and crawl path instructions in your code so that Google can index your site for the content your audience is searching for.

One mistake we notice with many clients is they will do everything right to get visitors to the site but they have trouble converting. Upon further review we notice uninspiring imagery,  insufficient compelling call to action content and most importantly, poor navigation.  You have 3 seconds for the visitor to decide what they are going to do on average before they bounce back to the  search engines.

Here is a good recipe for getting started.  Install a WordPress Blog on your website.  Make at least 2 – 4 posts a week and use original content in the beginning if you can.  Although posting repurposed content is good for SEO it does not foster site trust.  If  you are going to use Facebook, join relevant groups and create your own Fan Page. This will generate a relevant following and qualified Leads.  See this video for more information on Facebook Groups and how to use them  http://bit.ly/29wuJ

For more information or to learn about how to use Inbound Marketing Methodology to grow your business, visit us at www.digitaleyemedia.com

OfficeArrow – End-of-Year PERSONAL Review

By www.officearrow.com

Manage Successful Social Media Promotions

With holiday shopping in full swing, social shopping is already making a big impact. Data from Hitwise shows that downstream traffic to the Retail 500 coming from both Facebook and Twitter increased 36% and 15% respectively on Thanksgiving from the previous day. Downstream traffic to retailers grew again on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as many retailers promoted sales through fan pages and tweets.

This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how brands can best engage their customers by offering what everyone now looks to social media for – a bargain.

New Strategies to Turn Buzz Into Buy

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Other recent research confirms the fact that people are increasingly turning to social networks to get deals on products and services. Razorfish found that the primary drivers of “friending” or “following” a brand were promotions and discounts. Over one-third of social network users and 44 percent of Twitter users engaged with a brand through discount promotions. This is good news for marketers, but the stats also pose challenges to the way marketing programs and advertising budgets will be structured in the future.

Brands have long spent big money on commercials, media placements, direct mail, and more. With most of these methods, there is little way to measure the impact on your bottom line. You either get lucky with a surge in sales after your campaign, or it didn’t work. Either way, success or failure was impossible to measure.

If done right, social marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of all worlds from a campaign – wide-scale and targeted distribution of your offer, for free. But to get it right, marketers have to step lightly. If you’re too pushy with too many promotions, your followers will feel “marketed at” or “spammed.” If you don’t offer good enough deals, your customers may become frustrated and stop following you. After all, they don’t really want to be your friend. They want bargains. Here are some steps for getting social media promotions right.

1. What Are People Saying About Your Brand?

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Find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. You have to do more than just get a vague reading on brand buzz. Track the actual pass-along of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings, etc. to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. You can use social media traffic tracking software to do this.

Tracking this word-of-mouth buzz is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions. You must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people’s interests.

2. Create a Social Promotion

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Once you figure out what people want using the tracking methods above, go ahead and give it to them. For example, you might find that everyone loved your last 20% promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that the most frequent negative comment was that shipping costs were too high. In your next promotion, offer free shipping.

Or, you may find that there was a huge surge in Twitter searches, blog comments, and Facebook updates about your brand’s winter boots during a snowstorm. This is a great opportunity to immediately put out a social promotion for 20% off boot purchases for one day only via Twitter, Facebook, and/or your company blog. Have fun with your social promotions. Unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don’t have to plan and budget for them. Instead, just try one or two out and see what happens.

3. Did It Work?

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Figure out whether your promotion worked, and what bottom line impact it had on sales and profits. Go back to your social media tracking and measurement tool and find out how much your promotion was shared, what increase it caused in traffic to your website, and what direct impact it had on conversion. You might want to compare two different promotions run during a similar time frame to see which worked better and why.

For example, did a 50% Off promotion drive more sharing, visits, or conversions than a Two-For-One? In addition to doing simple “A/B” tests, compare results for promotions like these against the data from your regular marketing analytics platform to see whether your social media promotions are performing better or worse than traditional paid marketing campaigns. Social promotions almost always perform better than paid media ads in terms of conversion, but paid ads may drive a higher volume of traffic to your site.

Lastly, do an ROI analysis of your social media promotions to find out their real impact on bottom line profits.

Conclusion

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Social media promotions are here to stay. Make sure you use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals that make your friends and followers feel special. They’ll thank you by making purchases.

What social media tools do you use to increase sales and measure your brand’s reach? Please share them in the comments below.

Like it or not, social media is becoming a business necessity

Consider this: if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth largest in the world by population, ahead of both Japan and Russia. 

When I talk to people about using social media to market their business, I usually get one of two responses. Either they love using Facebook and Twitter or they really don’t see what all the fuss is about. Unfortunately, both are missing the point.

Social media is probably one of the biggest developments in business since e-mail. Never before has the communications playing field been so level. Social media allows for a single-person, sole proprietorship to have the same potential consumer impact as a Fortune 100 company, without the million-dollar advertising budget.

And yet people still misunderstand social media or, even worse, ignore it completely as a fad.

Take my two earlier examples of responses. The first guy thinks social media is all about Facebook pages and Twitter statuses. The fact is, there are literally hundreds of options in the social media pantheon. The trick is figuring out which ones work best for communicating with your target audience and focusing your attention on those.

As popular as Facebook is, it might not be your best choice. This takes time and attention that not every small business owner might have. This is where outsourcing or contract work comes in handy. A good consultant will help you research your market and decide on the best course of action, while leaving you free to run your business.

Even worse is the second response – indifference. These are the people with their proverbial heads in the sand, assuming all of this social media hooplah will fade away.

Social media is not a fad, and it is not just for kids. Businesses small and large are making lots of money using this social media stuff. Look at upstart blender maker BlendTec, for example. They struck marketing gold with their popular “Will It Blend?” videos on YouTube and saw their sales increase five times as a result.

Now before you grab a digital camera and try your hand at becoming a viral video director, you should know that BlendTec invested a lot of time (if not money) in producing their video series. This is key. You must be prepared for the real cost of social media marketing. What you don’t spend in dollars, you will spend in sweat equity.

But at the end of the day, if it’s done right, the return on your investment could be legendary…and profitable