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Is Social Marketing Replacing Content Marketing – or Enhancing It?

Posted in Content Marketing, Focus.com, Social Media Marketing by Chris Selland on January 30th, 2012

Interesting post by David Strom on ReadWriteWeb this past weekend – Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500. As stated in the UMass Dartmouth study behind the headline:

Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008. In this new 2011 study, the use of blogging dropped to 37%.

Yet despite the drop in blogging, other Social channels are picking up the slack.

This was the first year that executives were asked if their company plans to increase their investment in social media. While 25% said they would keep their social media budget the same, the other 71% plan to increase their investment and only 1 company (4%) plan to decrease their investment.

There is clearly a shift going on around the focus of corporate marketing efforts. Personally I believe that the decline in corporate blogging is in part due to so many corporate bloggers having emphasized ‘tactics and quantity’ over ‘content and quality’ these past few years. Those organizations that blogged half-heartedly, churning out a multitude of uninspired & uninteresting posts in an effort to ‘get something out there’, have since discovered that their readers’ lack of commitment matched their own. We discussed this during a recent Focus Roundtable and the discussion continued on afterward.

It’s gratifying to see how clearly attention is shifting toward Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but in our view these social initiatives should be complementing, not replacing, corporate blogging efforts. There is no better way to promote and drive quality traffic to your blog than an effective social strategy, while at the same time well-written blog posts provide the anchor content for effective social campaigns and engaged customers, communities and audiences.

Content (or as many including our friends at Hubspot like to call it Inbound) Marketing remains highly effective and can and should be a key part of your marketing mix. Integrating your Social initiatives with your blog can enhance the success of both – and that is a strategy we endorse wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.

Tags: Blogging, Content Marketing, Corporate Blogging, Facebook, inbound marketing, LinkedIn, Social Marketing, twitter
Posted in Content Marketing, Focus.com, Social Media Marketing | View Comments

What’s ‘Best’ is What Works

Posted in Focus.com, Inbox Influencer, Social CRM, Social Intelligence, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Strategy and Analysis by Chris Selland on January 25th, 2012

I jumped into a discussion today on Focus.com where a community member asked the question “What’s the best time to post to social networks?”

My answer, which built off fellow Focus Expert Andrew Baker’s, is that the ‘best’ time is when your audience is attentive and available – and when you have the right content. And those times depend – so it’s very difficult (and I’d argue impossible – or at least overly simplistic) to say something like ‘11:00 AM”.

Which in turn got me thinking about the related and much-debated topic of ‘Influence’. I read a post yesterday on the Pivot Conference site which makes the argument that Influence is a ‘numbers game’.

While at Terametric we certainly believe in numbers (we have our own Timing Optimization and Influence Measurement algorithms in our Optimizer for Twitter and Inbox Influencer products), the answer still ‘depends’ on context – and on what you’re trying to accomplish.

As my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular (and Focus Expert) Paul Greenberg recently posted (using the much-maligned but also widely-used Klout score as a proxy):

Klout is good at measuring how engaged an individual is on social channels at any given time but doesn’t really measure influencers of the buyer kind or the industry kind. Three weeks off the grid would lower your Klout score but wouldn’t necessarily impact your influence. You see that don’t you?

In other words, numbers help but they only provide guideposts to ‘the answer’ – not ‘the answer’ itself.

‘The answer’ is ‘what works’ – and that only comes from defining what you will measure, and then in turn testing, and benchmarking those results against those desired results.

At Terametric we are, of course, rather partial to our own Timing & Influence algorithms but are also exploring opportunities to work with other offerings in order to meet customer preference and provide a more complete picture of your success in attaining the results that matter most to you. At the same time we will be rolling out a suite of services – some of them built around our own technology but also working in conjunction with partners – that can help you better define, measure, benchmark and improve the metrics you and your organization most care about.

Please contact us to learn more, and we’d love to hear your feedback and experiences. And of course, if you’re not already using Inbox Influencer (it’s 100% free) signup today!

Tags: Inbox Influencer, Influence, Klout, Kred, metrics, Timing
Posted in Focus.com, Inbox Influencer, Social CRM, Social Intelligence, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

How The Clymb Uses Top of the Funnel Marketing Metrics to Drive Twitter ROI

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI by Wendy Troupe on November 22nd, 2011

The Clymb is a private flash sale site for Outdoor Gear and Apparel. Kevin Palmer is responsible for their online marketing. At the Clymb, Kevin measures membership growth, customer service questions, and the reach of their Twitter posts which directly impacts their outbound activities.

Kevin follows a methodology that assembles metrics in real time to captures “top of the funnel” Twitter activity to track their marketing activities through to where sales are created.

It’s easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your brand in Twitter.

Like any ordinary marketing funnel – many prospects enter the funnel at the top but only a few continue down to the bottom. Those who make it to the bottom are your high value customers. In simplistic terms, all you have to do is attract many prospects in at the top – customers and therefore profits should come out the bottom.

However, there are two important things to note.

Many online businesses spend a lot of time and resources attracting people to follow them in Twitter, but not enough making sure that these people are converted into sales.
Businesses often neglect marketing to and supporting existing customers through Twitter. Marketing efforts should also be focused on moving people down the marketing funnel as well as into it at the top.

Twitter can become a channel that drives trust and engagement. Segmenting your measurement in real time into these four buckets can help you execute successful marketing campaigns using Twitter.

How The Clymb Measures & Monitors Twitter

Set benchmarks against their competitor activity and found that use of lists, follower influence, hashtags, authenticity, and which topics of conversation are trending which drove their targeted outbound Twitter activities.
Build their follower lists which include industry enthusiasts, brands they partner with, customers, and athletes.
Share content that people care about and try to leverage hashtags to track conversations.
Curate posts from their friends and partners at relevant peak activity time certain times.

How They Calculate the ROI and Close the Loop

Track actual membership referrals.
Measure customer engagement & support.
Calculate competitive growth and refine outbound activities.

This has been scaled with a limited staff because they are leveraging big data to become more efficient and effective.

What Are the Results of Their Closed Loop Measurements in Action?

Awareness: Their website has seen an over 300% growth in Twitter followers since the start of the year.
Intent: Twitter has a 3:1 share rate when it comes to members sharing product listings.
Conversions: Twitter has a 30% higher member invite rate than Facebook, their users are more likely to invite new members.
Customer Engagement: 78% of all customer service inquiries placed on Twitter that we have answered have led to a positive tweet about the brand.

“Concentrated content matters. It isn’t how much we post, but what and when.”
- Kevin Palmer, Senior Director of Online Marketing

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI | View Comments

Join Terametric on Google+

Posted in Content Marketing, Google+ by Chris Selland on November 18th, 2011

We’ve been keeping a close eye on Google+ since it launched a few months ago, and with this past week’s launch of brand Pages of course we had to launch our own.

At the moment the content is quite sparse but we’re anxious to learn more about how we might engage with our customers, partners and other members of the Terametric community – so please drop by, check it out and give us your comments, suggestions & feedback!

Posted in Content Marketing, Google+ | View Comments

The R and the I – What’s Engagement Worth?

Posted in Focus.com, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI by Chris Selland on November 14th, 2011

One of the biggest challenges in calculating Return on Investment (ROI) from any type of marketing initiative – social or other – is in quantifying the actual economic value produced by it. After all, at least as far as your CFO is concerned, that is the ‘R’ in ‘ROI – and it needs to be understood in at least a general sense if you want his/her cooperation to invest in it.

As a marketer, you almost always know your costs – how much you’re spending on those tools, consultants, services and of course the value of your own and your team’s time that is being applied to the various campaigns and ongoing initiatives you’re running. Those are the invoices and salaries you are always asking said CFO to pay – that’s the ‘I’.

There’s no denying the fact that calculating the ‘R’ has always been challenging. In the famous words of legendary merchandiser John Wanamaker (a quote often mis-attributed to David Ogilvy)…

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Customers almost never purchase directly from a marketing campaign, so how can one attribute the specific ‘R’ to a specific ‘I’ with any real precision?

However, that difficulty does not absolve marketers from making an effort. Especially since new marketing channels, technologies and platforms are making all of this much easier. As I chimed in on a Focus Q&A over the weekend

“Metrics such as clickthroughs, conversions, ReTweets, Likes, etc… are more easily measured on social media than similar metrics for more traditional media, plus measurement and analytics platforms have improved significantly (and continue to).”

In other words, it may be difficult to know your specific ROI but your ability to model and measure approximate if not 100% precise answers is getting better all the time. A recent lawsuit, for instance, values Twitter followers at $2.50 apiece – while this may not be your organization’s exact number (it almost certainly isn’t) it at least provides some context so that you can use to analyze your Twitter activity and determine whether the I’s you’re making justify the R you’re getting in the form of new engaged followers.

The important distinction is that ‘engagement’, ‘loyalty’, ‘influence’, ‘reach’ and similar commonly cited ‘metrics’ are qualities that our marketing activities are driving but they can only be measured by building models that are built on more specific and quantifiable figures such as:

“How many new followers did we get from that last campaign?”

“How many recipients clicked through on that link we Tweeted out and downloaded our White Paper?”

These numbers can be measured and counted – as can the investment required to produce them.

The point is that measurement is challenging but analytics are rapidly improving, and there are more and more third-party data points that one can use to at least approximate their ROI calculations. ROI is essentially a modeling exercise with the end goal of advising on relative decisions between the trade-offs we as marketers must make every day – where do we invest, how much, and why?

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your experiences and, of course, help you build those analytics and models. It’s what we do and we’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Focus.com, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI | View Comments

Twitter Curation: How Can Your Tweets Generate Marketing ROI?

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on October 21st, 2011

Here at Terametric, we’ve developed a methodology that analyzes a marketer’s relevant Twitter activity and can help them to compose a “healthy” tweet. What makes a tweet “healthy”? Tweets that can reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right message can drive highest likelihood of the ultimate goal – conversions.

Conversion activity is defined in volume of one or more of the following activities:

Retweets
Link Sharing
Replies
@mentions
Follows

Ultimately, composing a healthy tweet is based on your ability to include the the following components that are currently trending high in the Twittersphere:

The most influential people (@handle).
The right conversations (#hashtags).
A shortened url for further engagement beyond Twitter.
The right retweeted keywords.
A positive call to action.

Optimizer for Twitter Real-Time Curation Logic

So how do you know what is currently trending and relevant? Twitter is real time and knowing how to pick up on the right components and the right time is critical.

Terametric’s curation methodology is based on a letter grading scale of F (for failure to convert) to A+ (most likely to convert). A tweet gets a C (average) grade when it includes the basic components of a tweet including a hashtag, a shortened url, an “@” mention, keywords that are relevant to your brand, product or industry, and a positive call to action. If any of those components are trending in the Twittersphere, the grade goes up from there.

The Bottom Line

Marketers should be informed in real time when they are using Twitter. The data should work for them so that they can monitor trending conversations and are enabled to act on them when they are happening.

For a free trial of Optimizer for Twitter, sign up today!

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Social Marketing is About Leads

Posted in Inbox Influencer, Optimizer for Twitter, Social Media Analytics, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Twitter ROI by Chris Selland on October 10th, 2011

During last week’s Focus Roundtable Above the Funnel: Making the Connection Between Social Sales & Marketing and Measurable ROI, we discussed whether there is a connection between customer activity on social networks and the ability to drive qualified leads into sales opportunities.

Earlier today Sherilynn Macale addressed the same set of questions on TheNextWeb and agreed with us that, while results may not be immediate, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

Social media provides the unique opportunity for companies to more directly and easily target their most loyal or influential consumers. For example, a small business like “Joe’s Popsicle Stand” might begin a Twitter page, encouraging those who stop by to follow the brand on Twitter for real-time hints at when the stand is giving away free popsicles. Motivated by free food — everyone likes free things — both current and new consumers are more likely to be deeply engaged and develop brand loyalty now that they have a way to interact with the brand outside of actually visiting the physical popsicle stand.

It’s not just popsicle stands, of course – the same opportunity exists for organizations of all sizes. The question of ‘ROI’ may remain a challenging one, since metrics such as ‘engagement’ require assumptions to model and measure against – and also as Macale argues can take time to bear fruit. But that doesn’t make them any less real.

Again, social media provides the unique opportunity to target your quality leads. By identifying who is actively discussing your brand, who is reaching out to your company and who is actually willing to talk about issues with your service, you will be better prepared for the majority opinion. You may have heard that Twitter users are 3x more likely to impact brands than any other social network. This is true because daily active and contributing Twitter users are mostly bloggers, writers, or broadcasters of some sort who are more likely to spread the word about your brand or service on or off of Twitter than those who simply consume information.

As we’ve said previously (and often), success with Social Marketing is about going – and engaging – where your customers are – and it’s gratifying to see that, slowly but surely, organizations are increasingly recognizing that fact. Success is also about identifying the key influencers who participate in conversations about your (and competitive) brands. Identifying key and relevant influencers is a feature of our Optimizer for Twitter platform, and we are in the midst of rolling out a new (free!) service called Inbox Influencer which provides the same insight, delivered to your inbox, on a weekly basis.

We invite you to try Optimizer for Twitter and use Inbox Influencer at your convenience by clicking the links, and to contact us to share your thoughts and ideas on getting the most out of your Social Marketing activities.