Remember the old Hans Christian Anderson story, the Emperor’s New Clothes?

Foolishness is exposed, more often than not, when we refuse to admit what we don’t know or see clearly.  Or to put it into a 21st century cultural context–our Poker Faces often as not end up exposing us.

All this is a pretty elaborate set up for a post on something fairly simple, that I continually hear people mumbling, privately, that they’re not quite sure how to do right: setting up a client’s Facebook page.

We don’t do a lot of “Social Media 101″ posts here, because lots of people cover that ground well.  This is less a “Social Media 101″ post than it is “covering a topic that no one is willing to admit they haven’t figured out” post.

I can’t really blame people for not knowing the best way to do it–”Facebook Help” is pretty much an oxymoron, and they change their UX about every three months, adding things like “Community Pages” that seem like a pointless duplication (pretty much because…they are a pointless duplication).  Also, I have a big problem with the way Facebook walks you through setting up a Page, because it’s pretty much designed to discourage you in every way possible from doing it the right way.

First, they threaten you with “violating the terms of use” if you create an alternate account.  Here’s the facts, Binky.  If “social media” is anywhere in your job description, you will have to have access to multiple accounts.  In any business case I can think of, tying all your clients’ Facebook accounts to your personal Facebook account is a bad idea.

Second, the language they use to explain “Business Accounts” is deliberately misleading and scary.  It’s designed to make you think that using a Business Account to set up a Facebook Page is going to hobble the Page.  It doesn’t.  It creates an administrator profile that can’t be used as a personal profile and can be easily reassigned to someone else.  Which is exactly what you want.

That said, here’s the way we’ve found, through trial, error and much hair-pulling, is the best way to set it up.

First, what NOT to do:

• Create the page using your existing, personal Facebook account.

Why not? Because removing the Creator (not Admin, but Creator) of a Page is a giant, massive PITA. I know–I had to do it on a major client when the employee who set up their Page left our agency.   Neither the client nor the former employee was comfortable with their Facebook account still having admin privileges to the Page, and it took weeks to get Facebook Support (yet another oxymoron) to even admit they could disconnect the two accounts.  Frankly, if the client hadn’t been a really well-known brand with potential ad dollars to direct at Facebook, I’m not sure it would have ever gotten done.

If you’re an independent consultant, accept that you and your client may not have a forever love connection.  And they’re not going to take it kindly when they realize that divorcing their Facebook Page from your personal account is roughly as complicated and time-consuming as executing a literal divorce.  Okay.  Point made, moving on.

Another thing not to do:

• Create the account using a “client@yourdomain.com” or “dept@yourdomain.com” email address that gets forwarded to multiple account stakeholders, an entire department, etc.

Why not? Because an even marginally successful or popular Facebook Page generates a heck of a lot of transactional emails.  You can either turn off all the transactional emails (which can hamstring the actual administrator of the Page) or get used to hearing a lot of complaints from people who don’t appreciate getting an email ping on their Blackberry at 2AM when a Fan simply needs to post a soliloquy on your client’s Wall.

Again, something we learned the hard way. We’re not above admitting our missteps.  We’ve being doing this a while, and that means we didn’t have a map in the beginning.

Here’s how to do it right:

• Create a special, unique email address for that Page only (or that client’s collective social media profiles). It’s okay if it’s on your domain, not the client’s.  Sometimes getting client IT to create a new email address can be a pain.  If you set up the Page properly, you can change that later if you need to.  It does have to be an email address that actually exists and that you (or whomever the FB Page administrator will be) can actually access.  Ideally, you’d auto-forward this email address to the FB Page Administrator’s primary email.
• Log out of Facebook. Go to facebook.com and click “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business.”
• Go with the “Create an Official Page” option. Ignore “Community Pages” for now.  Ignore Groups.  
• Create a Facebook Account. Go with “I do not have a Facebook Account.” Yes, I’m telling you to lie to Facebook.  It’s okay.  Really.  Trust me.  If they didn’t want people to lie to them, they shouldn’t have set up their Terms of Use to be directly in conflict with all laws of common sense.
• Use the unique email address you previously set up as the basis for the Business Account you’re creating to set up the Page, and populate it with your personal information (birthday, etc.)  That can be changed later, if staffing changes (something apparently Facebook never heard of) make it necessary.
• Activate the account and set up the Page. Add your personal account and any other accounts necessary as additional Admins.  Go to “Edit the Page,” look at the lower right column for Admins and click “Add.”  You’ll have to use the “Add by email” option, since your newly-created business account will have no friends.

So there you have it.  If you’re an agency social media manager, and your career eventually takes you elsewhere, or if the client eventually moves the business elsewhere, it’ll be okay.  You can change the email address and personal information associated with the Creator Business Account, and remove any Admins who will no longer have a business relationship with the Page.

You’re welcome.

I have always thought that social media marketing lends itself to right-brained “grammar geeks.”  Mainly, this is because social media marketing requires continually-generated, mostly-text, content.   Copywriters, public relations peeps, and bloggers can generally churn out the verbiage as-needed.

On the other hand, web analytics seemingly leans far to the left side of the brain, in the territory of the “numbers nerds.”  The ability to look at numbers and see trends and patterns is pretty key to being a good web analyst.  Not to mention the ability to rock a pivot table in Excel.

The problem with handing over the reins of your social marketing program entirely to the grammar geek squad is that sometimes, writers can fall in love with their own voices.  Without some kind of objective analysis of effectiveness, there’s no accountability on the creative/executional end of things.

Likewise, the problem with analytics being owned entirely by the number crunching crowd can be loss of context.  The temptation to let quantitative data (easy to get) dominate the qualitative data (usually a lot harder to get) to the extent that we fall into the trap of measurement for measurement’s sake.

Now, let’s take it to the C-Suite.

At the management/client level, there’s often a disconnect between the numbers nerds (who approve budgets based on whether the social media effort is being effective), and the grammar geeks who get their knickers twisted at the mere mention of the word “measurement.”

As a consequence, an unfortunate amount of the social content manager’s time is eaten up providing a convincing narrative explanation of the program’s value to CMOs who may or may not ever feel comfortable allocating budget based on a narrative with no supporting data.

They have to be the “social media expert” who has to continually keep selling and re-selling the program on the strength of their own conviction that it works, bolstered by case studies from other companies that may or may not apply.

Can’t we all just get along?

Ideally, the sticky peanut butter of content creation should be surrounded by the delectable chocolate of actionable insights.

If the person in charge of analytics goes beyond “monthly data dump,” and is capable of providing actionable insights to continually improve the response the social marketer is getting, they become the person who can make the social marketer look better.

[And since all of us social marketers are raving narcissists, that makes Mr. or Mrs. Analytics our good buddy.]

If the social marketer is willing to trust the analysts’ insights, and let the analyst provide sufficient qualitative and quantitative proof of concept for the social media program; then he or she can step back from the mission to constantly justify his or her existence.   The payoff for agreeing to be held accountable is freedom. The social content manager is then free to focus all his or her attention outward, on building fans and ambassadors for the company/client.

Can such an ideal scenario exist in the real world? What do you think?

I’ve been a home improvement enthusiast since I was a teenager.  I admit to being a longtime fan of decorating guru Christopher Lowell, whose show on Discovery Channel was one of my favorites for years.

His theatrical background (and personality!) appealed to the theater geek in me, and his ideas and suggestions were creative, fun and usually affordable.

So while I was on vacation last week, I nostalgically picked up a copy of his book, The Seven Layers of Design at my local bookstore.

In the introduction, Christopher shared the story of how he went from a guy with a failing retail decor store in the Midwest to an interior design expert with his own successful show.

The turning point for him came when he realized that fear was inhibiting his prospective customers from expressing their creativity in their home’s interior design.  He immediately changed his retail space into an education center, and began offering classes in Decorating 101.

Lowell recognized that instead of competing with other retailers for the limited pool of professional decorators, there was a richer, deeper pool of potential customers out there if he could give homeowners the CONFIDENCE to decorate their own spaces.

So how does this relate to business blogging? Simple.  A business blog can be wildly effective when it’s not about tooting your own horn, but about building up your customer’s confidence.

When you use blogging as an educational tool to create better, stronger, smarter customers, you create a relationship between your business and their own self-confidence.

If you can manage that, then you’re already on the first step of creating your business’ army of enthusiastic brand ambassadors.

We all knew “social media,” as a buzzword and a stand-alone job title, had a limited shelf life.

As I predicted a year ago, “social media” is cooling off just as “mobile” is building a nice head of steam, in the same way that “social media” picked up on the tail end of “web 2.0″ and “viral video.”

Are people still making “viral videos”?  Sure.  Just ask Rhett and Link.  Or Old Spice.  But “viral video” has lost its new car smell, and I predict “social media” will be looking for a hanging tree air freshener soon.

I think I find buzzwords and their evolution, obsolescence and replacement fascinating because language says a lot about a culture and the general headspace of people and industries.  It says something about what we value and the way we perceive things.

If I got to pick what we call blogs, forums, social networks, podcasts and the whole shebang next, I wouldn’t divide it along lines of the technology (blog) or lump it all together (social media).  I would divide it into personal media, passion media, and professional media.

Because really, that’s how the whole conglomeration is shaking out.  We get it: creating media is something almost anyone can do now, thanks to technology.  Sharing media on a global scale is something almost anyone can do, thanks to the proliferation of connectivity. That’s the old news that is exactly that: old news that we really don’t need to keep puzzling over.  If  this month they’re creating it on an iPad and sharing it on Foursquare, and six months ago they were creating it on a laptop and sharing it on Twitter, so what?  If WordPress is a better simple publishing platform than Blogger, or Vimeo is a better video platform than YouTube, who cares?

What we’re still figuring out (and just might be forever) is why people create media, and why people consume it.

You’ve got lifecasters and social networkers and personal diarists who are creating personal media.  Whether you like it or not, some people think the details of their lives and their inner monologue is fascinating–and some of them are right.

You’ve got people who create entire vast communities around silly vampire novels, or balsa wood airplanes. They write dissertations supporting their favorite “ship” on a television show (and other people read them!)  They craft detailed videos layered with music and graphics as homages and labors of love.  This is passion media.  While it would be great if they got paid to create it, the truth is, they would pay others so they can create it, because they already do.  They already pay for the domain, or the hosting, or the laptop, or the broadband connection.  Passion is a reason to create and consume media, and production values aren’t a reason not to, when the barrier to entry is low enough (and it has been for a while now.)

I’ve watched with interest while the mainstream, traditional, professional media has had to figure all this out again. They used to have resources and distribution on their side (and they still do).  But for too many of them, they saw the high barrier to entry that existed before the social media revolution as their Great Wall of China, keeping the Mongol hordes of “amateur” content creators safely at bay and their revenue streams safe.  They owned eyeballs and attention, big companies would pay for those eyeballs and attention.

Now, what I’m seeing is a merging between the best and brightest of the personal media and passion media creators, and the most agile of the traditional media into a richer, more vibrant professional media ecosystem with an exponentially wider spectrum of cost, quality and subject matter.

It’s not 200 channels and nothing’s on.   It’s 2 million channels, and there’s always something that you as an individual can lose yourself in.  It’s a beautiful mess.

As a consumer of media, I love this because I can now feed my attention with thirty-one thousand flavors.

As a creator of media, I love this because it forces me to clarify why I’m creating, and helps me prioritize.  Some outlets are for attention, some are for love and some are for money.  And that’s okay.

As a professional marketer, I love looking at media this way because it draws meaningful lines in the sand around my interactions with the new media ecosystem, because I know what they want.  Offer attention to personal media creators.  Offer resources and new ways to  connect with the object of their affection to passion media creators.  Offer cash money and acknowledgment of legitimacy to creators and organizations who genuinely meet the bar for professional media.  Pay them for their hard-earned eyeballs and attention.

What do you think?  I’d love to hear your take in the comments.

I took a public speaking class last fall, and my classmates were mostly 18 year old college freshmen.  So when we had to give a quick introduction, I mentioned that I get paid to Facebook.

Another student quickly responded “So do I.  My boss just doesn’t know it.”

**rimshot**

I remember what it was like when I was struggling to get buy-in for the idea that social media support services were something clients would and should pay for–and that I was the best person to do it.  Ironically, that was at an interactive agency.  A lot of things can change in three or four years.

I remember how excited I was the day I realized that I got paid to socialize online, and my boss knew it. It was awesome.

But ask anyone who has been doing the job long enough, and you’ll find that after a while, it really is just a job.  Being connected, looped in and social 24/7 is fun… for about a week.

img courtesy christiem on sxc

Then you realize you want your personal life back.

That’s the case if you’re working in an agency, or if you’re the internal corporate social media nerd.  The bell curve of your career is enthusiast, evangelist, “expert”/professional, burnout, cynic.

The “always on” aspect of social and mobile marketing work can lead to burnout really quickly.  Let’s face it, someone can decide to trash your clients’ reputations online pretty much any time of day or night, and it’s expected that you’ll be available to respond.

Accountants can show up to work in an awful mood, and either avoid people or be unpleasant all day, and still do their job effectively.   If a social media manager has a bad hair day, it’s a career-ending catastrophe.

You look forward to monthly reporting day so you can hole up in your office buried in analytics for eight hours and not have to be pleasant to anyone who is acting like an utter jerk.

So how do you keep on keeping on during the days when you’re just not that into social media?  Here are a couple of ideas (would love to hear yours in the comments).

• If possible, organize your workflow according to energy/interest.  When you’re really feeling creative, knock out as much content creation as you can so you have a stockpile of “evergreen” stuff to draw from.
• If you’re having an “I’m sick of people” day, back off a little and dig into your metrics and analytics.  You’re better off not forcing friendliness (at least for a day) and I often find that once I get digging into the analytics, I find stuff that piques my interest and gets me fired up and curious again.
• Explore again.  Yes, I know.  I just told you that the days of exploring social media are over.  I know that the glory days of VC capital flowing like milk and honey, and new open-source, web 2.0 services cropping up like kudzu in Georgia, are over.  But this is still a space with a lot of innovation.  I’m not saying revisit the days when you were trying 5 new services a day, but checking out some new cool stuff might refresh your perspective.
• Revisit your strategy.  I shamelessly stole this from Mike Campbell on Twitter.  ”Return to your vision/goals for SM. Re-evaluate, modify, & renew them.” Mike agrees this is a timely topic, as lots of people doing social media are starting to feel the burnout.

If all else fails, remember the immortal words of Nike: Just do it.

I don’t know about you, but I could use a vacation.  Apparently, I’m not alone.

Worn out from recession-related stress and scrimping, people are starting to book leisure travel again.  Just in time for National Travel and Tourism Week, which will be May 8-16, 2010.  According to the U.S. Travel Association, each U.S. household would pay $950 more in taxes without the tax revenue generated by the travel and tourism industry, so the travel industry impacts us all more than many of us realize.

The travel and tourism industry is one segment that has been especially quick to adopt social media tools as a means of promoting business.  Let’s take a quick look at different ways that social media has been, and can be, used to promote the tourism industry.

Destination Marketing Organizations:   DMOs are using social media to improve the overall perception and visibility of their destinations.   Aggregating flattering and fun photos of the destination on Flickr, posting enticing videos to YouTube, and recruiting fans of the destination to talk it up on Facebook and on travel review sites like TripAdvisor increase the positive share of voice for the destination online.

Since a recent survey indicates consumers will search the Internet for information more often than any other source when making travel plans, that kind of visibility is wildly valuable.

Hotels and Accomodations. Hotels have a huge opportunity in listening to social media to improve the customer experience for their visitors.  Happier visitors are more likely to book a repeat visit.  And by providing a higher level of service in the “common space” of social media, prospective visitors can potentially see that extra effort, influencing their booking decisions.

Restaurants and Attractions.  Event-based and location-based services can be a powerful tool for promoting restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

Airlines, Bus Lines and Car Rental Firms. If situations like the unfortunate Kevin Smith incident on Southwest, and the “United Breaks Guitars” video aren’t enough to convince you of the value of social media monitoring for airlines, bus lines and car rental firms, I don’t know what it would take.

The travel industry’s fast adoption of social media tools as business promotion channels has created some great, informative case studies that have applications in other industries.   If you’re in the travel and tourism industry, look to the leaders in your field for applicable ideas to your business.  If you’re not in the travel and tourism industry, you can still find many  ideas that will be truly innovative if applied in your field.

David and I recognize that we’re  fortunate to be working as Social Media Managers at Doe-Anderson.  We have great clients who’ve trusted us to help them navigate social media and achieve their business goals.  This isn’t to say we haven’t had missteps or made mistakes.  Social media is such a new field, anyone who tells you they haven’t made any mistakes is lying, or hasn’t actually done anything yet.

So we were thrilled to be expanding our social media department this month with the announcement that we will be hiring an Ambassador In Chief for our client, Maker’s Mark bourbon.

At least, we were thrilled until a candidate decided to hijack Doe-Anderson’s Fan Page in an attempt to, um, get our attention.

Yeah.  That’s not annoying.

So where did this candidate go wrong?  Let’s run the list.

1. Social media is not about shouting your audience into submission. Hitting your target in the face with the same uninvited message and hoping “frequency” makes them love you is an old media tactic. Social media is about inviting and engaging in a conversation.

2. Make sure you’re conveying the intended message. If you’re applying for a job, you want to convey professionalism and familiarity with best practices in the field.  What do we know about this candidate now?  That he/she is capable of getting a few dozen friends to copy and paste a message to someone’s fan page. Who exactly is impressed by that?

3. Attention is not influence. What separates a professional social marketer from someone who can start a popular meme is understanding that getting attention is not the end game.   Getting your prospect to take the next step is. Forcing them to shut down comments on their fan page is not really the kind of influence you’re going for here.

4. If it looks like SPAM, and smells like SPAM…

5. Do your homework. Maker’s Mark is a very visible brand.  It’s not hard to find examples of how the company communicates and the personality of the brand.  An ego-centric, “Hey, look at me! I’m awesome!” approach isn’t consistent with any of the other marketing and advertising the brand does.  It’s also not consistent with best practices in social media.

We appreciated this candidate’s enthusiasm.  We even appreciated his/her ability to rally their personal social network in an attempt to achieve a personal goal.

Too bad it was a really misguided attempt.

Let’s get a little zen for a minute, shall we?  Sometimes, our approach to web marketing reminds me of something Bruce Lee once said:

“It’s like a finger pointing to the moon.  **THWACK!!** Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.”

We sometimes get focused on the metrics and lose sight of the meaning.  This happens in traditional marketing metrics, and also with web metrics.  The PR person who rattles off pickups, but misses that the outlets weren’t targeted to their audience.  The media buyer who rattles off impressions without realizing their client doesn’t have an awareness problem, they have an adoption problem. This is concentrating on the finger.

On the web, our fallback position is counting pageviews and unique visitors (which replaced “hits” years ago as the go-to web stat.)  But not all pageviews or visitors are created equal.  If you spend all your efforts and energy chasing a bigger gross number of pageviews or uniques, you can sometimes miss  the more profitable fruit of attracting and deeply engaging the best visitors.

Did you know that Time-on-Site is a potential Goal (a trackable conversion) you can set in Google Analytics?  There’s a reason for that.  Please do click the link for Kate Morris’ excellent post on CRO (conversion rate optimization) versus SEO (search engine optimization).  It’s another, deeper example of “seeing the forest for the trees” in web marketing.

So what’s the “heavenly glory” in this little marketing koan?  If pageviews and uniques are the trees, what’s the forest?

Lifetime customer value.  (Warning: the post from Avinash Kaushik at the end of that link may, in fact, melt your brain.  But it’s totally worth it.)  Here’s the bad news:

You’ll notice instantly that almost none of the data above is available in your web analytics tool.

You can’t find lifetime customer value in your analytics.  You can segment your most engaged visitors.  If you sell online, you can look at that segment’s purchase patterns and compare it to your other visitors.  You can use monitoring tools to find data on that engaged audience’s activity around your brand off your website and see the people who are consistently talking up or talking down your company.  Our experience with our clients tells us that your most-engaged audience is almost always your most valuable audience.

Our 5 Cs model for marketing at Doe-Anderson is highly focused on  putting your energy into developing long-term relationships with brand ambassadors.  We’ve do it because it works.  Wonderfully.  But it is a lot of work.  We create curiosity because it leads to connection, which leads to confidence, which leads to conversation, which leads to community.  And community is the holy grail of lifetime customer value.

Put in more specific terms, pageviews and uniques are important when they lead to engagement.  Engagement is important when it leads to not just purchase, or even future purchases, but recommendation and sharing.  At that point, you’ve transcended “acquisition” and created a relationship, not just between the brand and the customer, but between your best customers and each other.   Which brings us back to that holy grail of community.

Relationships are more valuable than acquisitions.  You know this in an unquantifiable way as a human being, where “value” is some inherent, undefined quality.

As it turns out, even when you quantify it and assign it a monetary value, it still holds true.

Yesterday, Kama posted about how the spring weather we’re finally seeing here in the Ohio valley is getting her excited about gardening.

img "strawberries" courtesy swirus71 on sxc

My mom was an avid gardener as well, and gardening makes a great metaphor for your social media efforts.   Site selection, when you’re gardening, means finding the space with the best combination of elements to grow the results you want.  Some plants prefer sun and dry soil, others prefer shade and lots of moisture.  Planting the right seeds in the wrong place can make your efforts a waste of time.

It’s no different when you’re planning a social media strategy–except the “site” you’re selecting is a website, not a particularly lovely part of your lawn.

Certain websites are better suited to show growth for particular results.

If you’re looking to create a mass following, you’ll need to select the social websites with the broadest reach–sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.

If you’re looking to engage deeply with a very narrow niche audience, you may need to use tools like PostRank, RapLeaf or Flowtown to find lesser-known sites that are go-to spots for that crowd.

Or you might create a panel of enthusiast experts, whose tribal knowledge, to quote Avinash Kaushik, can point you in the right direction.

The important thing to remember is to begin with the end in mind.  Plant your efforts firmly in the ground best suited to produce the harvest you’ve set as a goal.

Work diligently, and odds are good you’ll be enjoying some tasty results sooner than you think.

"compass" courtesy digital_a on sxc

A few short years ago, my former boss went to Todd Spencer, the CEO here at Doe-Anderson, with a simple request to leave the safe sanctuary of PR and explore the relatively new (to advertising agencies, anyway) frontier of social media.

Meanwhile, I was at a local interactive agency, poking my nose outside the door of banner ads, paid search and email marketing and considering whether the world of blogs, forums and Myspace I’d been immersed in at a personal level had any value for my career.

But that was then.  This is now.  2010.  A whole new decade.

Are there still companies who haven’t entered, at any level, the social web?  Sure. But they’re so far to the right of the adoption bell curve, we’ve effectively entered the territory of the Amish.  They might make awesome baked goods, but don’t know diddly squat about marketing a brand in the digital age.

I have a friend who is a social media consultant.  He spends a large portion of his time writing social media policies and response plans.  While that’s admirable work that fills a need now, I warned him that there’s a limited shelf life there.

Social media has lost it’s new car smell, for many if not most companies.

What’s not going away any time soon?

Content strategy–especially channel- and platform-agnostic content strategy that thinks about mobile, social, email, and yes, print content assets as much as the corporate website or blog.

Media relations that includes publishers of blogs, ezines, podcasts, vlogs forums.

Reputation management that recognizes that stories break on Twitter and then migrate to traditional media, not the other way around.

Community management.  Brand curation. These are things we’re just starting to explore, and will be for a while to come.

I’m doing something with this post that we try not to do here at The Social Enthusiast.  I’m talking to my fellow social media professionals.  We try to keep the editorial focus aimed at brand marketers: CMOs, marketing directors, and others for whom social media fluency is necessary but not central to their work.  People who need to develop enough social fluency and mental frameworks to effectively interact with the people who are at the level of mastery and specialty, to be able to judge good ideas from bad ones.

We’re busy doing work in the field–good work.  We see smart, experienced marketers still struggling with this, and we still struggle to communicate with them, and we’re trying to use what we learn from those struggles to create a sort of Rosetta Stone.  That’s why last month’s posts were so allegorical and brief–we were using the common tongue of metaphor and relationships to communicate the universal aspects of social media (and other marketing disciplines) instead of getting bogged down in the tech of it all.

We could court wannabe social media professionals and get a lot more readers.  We could engage more with the fishbowl, and talk amongst ourselves with other social media professionals, and probably get a lot more comments and traffic.  I don’t know–maybe we should do those things.

But the truth is, courting the wannabes, participating in the fishbowl, and even building a Rosetta Stone for marketers who don’t get social media are things that have a limited lifespan.

I’m breaking an editorial mandate, here.  One I myself set up, along with David.  So I may as well deliver something more than another navel-gazing fishbowl post.  I may as well provide some actionable value here.

I ran across this post linked by someone in my Twitter stream.  Apologies–I can’t remember who, or I’d credit them properly.  It outlines exactly how to install Google Analytics on a Facebook Fan page.  Helpful stuff, if you run a Fan page for clients, and they’d like to know if it’s doing well.

http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/

The one thing that has really frustrated me with Facebook is that their “Insights” often fails to load, or the data export just refuses to download the file.  There have been a couple of times when people have wanted stats on their page, and I just flat-out can’t provide them for a day or two till I can get FB to unclench and let go of their data.

The days of social media being something clients are exploring, without any expectations of business results, are pretty much over for all our clients.  We have to be able to provide hard data that we’re moving a needle of some sort, somewhere.

Way back when we were convincing companies that they needed a website at all, we talked in hits.  Analytics nerds the world over are pretty unanimous that hits are an awful measurement. But it was a starting place.  It was something to count, till we could find something that counts.

If I have any advice for my fellow social media nerds, its that you need to start counting stuff.  Despite the fact that it’s not a numbers game. Despite the fact that it’s all about relationships.  Despite the  fact that you may, in fact, come from a non-techy discipline, and all this techy analytics stuff scares you as much as the touchy-feely social stuff scares your clients.

Because I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to join the Amish for anything but dinner.