…because we’re not using the “b” word (personal brand).

Earlier this week, David wrote about Spring Cleaning Your Social Profiles.  I’d like to offer a slightly more personal take on the subject.

When I was in college, I wrote for our student newspaper.  As a young and eager reporter, I covered many beats, from business to campus to the arts. The experience of working in a newsroom turned out to be a tremendous asset, and has helped me a great deal in my public relations career.

A few years later, while doing some job hunting, I decided to type my name into Google to see what links popped up.  I found the usual stuff—links to articles I’ve written for various publications, online petitions I’ve signed, and so on.  But one link in particular caught my attention.

I had written a short, informational article about getting prepared for Spring Break during my last semester of college.  A website that specialized in, shall we say, ‘spring break fun,’ decided to include the article on their news page.

I was concerned that a potential employer might see this and be offended, so I sent the web site editor a polite message asking to remove the link.  He obliged without hesitation.

The point of this story is that you never really know what’s out in the internet stratosphere…or who might be researching you. It pays to do periodic check-ups of your name on various search engines.  If you see something fishy or potentially damaging, contact the site editor and see if it can be taken down.  By keeping your online social networking profiles up-to-date can save you from problems as well.

After all, if you don’t care about your online image, who will?

"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.

Since the core of what we do at Doe-Anderson is building relationships between consumers and brands, we thought it would be cool to use relationships as a theme.  So in honor of Valentine’s Day, all this month we’ll be sharing 28 Days to Make People Fall in Love with Your Brand. We hope you enjoy it. Have you ever been out on a date with a person who keeps blathering on and on about himself/herself? You know the type.  It’s great meeting a person who can open up and share, and they may be genuinely interesting, but fifteen minutes into the “conversation,” you’re wondering if you actually need to be there. What are the odds you’re going to agree to a second date? The other side of marketing communications is listening.  And fortunately, there are some amazing tools for doing exactly that these days. If your budget is tight, something as simple as Google  Alerts can do the job of letting you know when your ears should be burning, because someone’s talking about your brand on the web. If you’ve got a budget for it, the monitoring tools space has really matured in the last couple of years.  Take a test drive on ScoutLabs, Radian6, Community Insights, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon… And in addition to looking at how many and which people love your brand, or hate your brand, take advantage of seeing the other things they care about. It’s valuable intelligence that can help in your quest to win their hearts.

 Hi, there, folks!  This week, David Finch and I are acting as your intrepid correspondents from Blog World Expo, one of the largest blogging and new media/social media conferences in the U.S.  

This morning, I attended a panel on social media monitoring with Connie Benson, Amber Naslund of Radian6, Margaret Francis of ScoutLabs, Nick Coudas of Sysomos. 

It was a great question and answer session, and during the session I asked the panel about something that’s been pressing on my mind lately in regards to social media monitoring.  

There is a strong tendency, when a company begins monitoring social media references to their brand, to focus almost solely on the negative mentions.

It’s often a case of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," and it often results in a social media engagement effort that spends all its time trying to please the unhappy people and none at all acknowledging, encouraging and rewarding the people who are talking up your brand to their friends.  

A reactive stance feels safe. But "safe" isn’t going to get people to love your brand.  For that, you need sexy. Being a brand that other people brag about is sexy.  

While I agree that it’s better to listen carefully to negative feedback (because it’s great research to identify opportunities for improvement your product or service offerings), there are two problems with this situation.  

The first problem is, social media can’t fix product or service problems.  You can make the unhappy folks feel heard and valued, and that does help buy you time to address the issue.  But fixing a tangible quality issue with the experience you provide your customers is not within the scope of what social media can do for a brand.  

The second problem is, it puts you into a reactive mode of operations that forces you to ignore your company’s greatest strengths, its previously undiscovered benefits and its stalwart but unheralded ambassadors.  

If you’re using social media monitoring tools, it’s important to be careful not to get your attention so caught up by what’s wrong that you miss the opportunity offered by what’s going right.  

So what about you?  How do you go about avoiding a reactive, "band-aid" focused approach to engagement and promoting a proactive, cultivational approach?  

Hot Potato Topic of the Week:  Social Media ROI

Measurement of social media activity to determine ROI is a hot (and controversial!) topic on the web right now.  You can see some examples of just how controversial it is here, here, here and here.  Hat tip to Chuck Fitzpatric of ImpactWatch blog for those examples and more (and for the sound of dueling banjos that played through my head as I scanned the list of headlines).  

Still, few people will argue that social media doesn’t have clear, distillable value to companies. Social media monitoring, in my opinion, is one of the most easily translatable value-driven elements of corporate social media, especially when viewed as an add-on to existing brand research efforts.

Getting a Clearer Picture of Your Customer

A better understanding of your customer is critical to effective communication with them. Put it in the context of your interpersonal relationships.  How many communications misfires do you have in your personal and professional relationships due to a poor understanding of the other person’s perspective?  

Brand research is an excellent tool for gaining a basic understanding of your customers and prospects from a demographic and psychographic standpoint.  

If you’re using personas in any capacity in developing your marketing communications, social media monitoring can be hugely helpful in creating fully-rounded, three-dimensional personas instead of stereotypes and cardboard-cutouts

By monitoring social media for references to your brand, your products, your industry, and your competitors, you can gain additional insights that can often help flesh out and provide depth and dimension to your understanding of your audience’s attitudes, opinions and vernacular.  

These insights can help your organization speak your customer’s language more like a native, and less like a tacky tourist.  

Particularly for businesses whose customer base is largely made up of passionate enthusiasts in a particular activity or lifestyle group, having greater authenticity in your communications with them is critical to success.

The Plural of Anecdote Isn’t Data, But That Doesn’t Mean We Don’t Like Them!

We’re always anxious to hear stories of ways in which social media monitoring has been applied effectively to improve brand communications.  Got an anecdote you can share?  Drop it in the comments.  Or if you’d like, contact us about doing a case study guest post.  We’d love to have it! 

img "mannequin" courtesy SXC

When you first approach your advertising agency or a consultant about social media services, is your attention focused on activities with direct customer interaction? I know that my clients often overlook monitoring and measurement, unless I direct their attention to them. The irony is that these less-sexy activities often provide the most practical business value, particularly at the outset of an organization’s explorations into the social media space.

Starting a social media program without first spending some time doing monitoring of their customers, brand references and competitors is much like launching a traditional advertising program without doing any market research. An even better analogy is that it’s like jumping into someone else’s conversation without first spending some time listening. You can just imagine the potentially embarrassing outcomes.

Beyond being the best foundation for social media marketing, insights drawn from social media monitoring can also improve your traditional marketing efforts. Understanding your customer—his attitudes, interests, and behavioral drivers—is critical to the success of any business. Using social media monitoring tools and analysis to draw specific and clear insights about your target audience can add value even to your traditional advertising efforts. What are the descriptive, emotional words people use most when they’re talking about your brand? How does that compare with your competitors?

Because the information is pulled from real online conversations, rather than surveys, the qualitative data provided can deliver deep, honest and accurate insights into the minds of your customers.

If you’re a marketing director, make sure that as you’re investigating the benefits of social media for your business, you don’t overlook monitoring services. And if you’re a provider of social media services, don’t forget that any discussion about those services should probably start with a discussion about monitoring.

One of the most compelling and confounding questions in social media is how to determine success or failure? Return on Investment is a persistent topic among social media professionals.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of things that you can measure. The question is, what should you measure, and what do those numbers mean in terms of business objectives?

At the outset, you may not know what measurements are the most important. Expect your measurement efforts to evolve over time, as you begin to learn by doing which needles your social efforts can move. Also, as activity evolves, the types of things you can measure become increasingly complex and meaningful.

That said, here are five traditional measurements that are probably a good starting point.

1. Pageviews: The most basic of all web-based statistics, pageviews have replaced “hits” (which was a metric that was so unclear as to border on deceptive) as the baseline measurement for any online marketing effort.
2. Visitors: Again, this is a fairly basic measure for nearly any online marketing effort.
3. Downloads or Clickthroughs on Calls-To-Action: If downloadable media (anything from podcasts to PDFs) are part of your social media content strategy, then you absolutely should be measuring the percentage of visitors who are consuming that content. Similarly, if your content includes direct calls-to-action, the success rate of those CTAs should be considered when determining success or failure.
4. Time-on-site or Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate can indicate a number of issues with your content, from poor targeting to issues with length and format. It’s a starting point for improving the relevance of your social media content. Understanding time-on-site changes can be trickier (for example, improved navigation can sometimes shorten TOS as users can more quickly find what they’re looking for) but any sudden sharp changes in time-on-site indicate a question that’s worth pursuing further.
5. Returning visitors or RSS and Email Subscription rates: Knowing how many people overall your social content attract is important, but knowing how many of those people found the content sticky enough to return or better yet, subscribe, is a good basic gauge of the quality and relevance of your content.

As I’ve said, these are very basic measurements. As your efforts progress, measuring things like the ratio of visitors to commentors on a blog, or the number of inbound links, or the number of times a widget has been embedded or shared, may make more sense, and be more meaningful. But it’s rarely a bad idea to start with the basics, especially when entering unfamiliar territory.