Michael Senger

http://www.stonemass.com/blog/category/social-media/

Michael Senger points out that social media is a collaboration of all online media outlets (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, MySpace, etc.) and not just Facebook and Twitter. He states that ‘The platform and technology change, but that the customer is always driven by the same behavior, they just use different tools’. He indicated that we need to have a conversation with our customers rather than just report. Social media isn’t just about marketing and spitting out information & promotion; it’s about creating a relationship and interacting with our followers.
Senger stated that everything has an ROI, but that we need to measure it against the specific, measurable goals we have set in place (e.g. ‘Increase fans by 10%’). We don’t need to pay for the analytics software that helps us determine success as they are free of charge (Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, etc.). He says that in order to be successful, we need to keep our changes simple, tweaking and measuring after each change to rate what works and what doesn’t. From this I derived that the free analytics software is great, but without set objectives, it’s impossible to determine success. Analyzing customer trends and clickthroughs are only useful if we know whether or not our goal is more web conversation between customers, increased traffic, purchases, etc. Senger’s point is that we need to set clear objectives and then use analytics software as appropriate, but that we need not pay top dollar as it’s all available at our fingertips for a price we all love… free.

Chris Breikss – 6S Marketing

http://www.6smarketing.com/video-of-the-new-social-media-impact-on-sem-now-live/

http://www.6smarketing.com/services/promote/

Chris Breikss tells us that companies are starting to use Google+ because the +1’s bring Google to your site and drive traffic. For example, when they tested it on their website, the original clickthrough rate was 5%, but after they added the +1 button, this rate drove up to 24%.
Breikss indicates that search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are important because they generate more links back to your page. Of all the social media tools, Twitter has the most dramatic effect on search engine ranking. Twitter has recently built in a new analytics system that tracks traffic from tweets, indicates your most popular tweets, and monitors your account popularity, not yet released. Google also has a new analytic functionality to see how social media has assisted on goals within your company, which is game changing in analyzing ROI.
Analytics are best used to integrate marketing initiatives and social media together and assess their success. Analyzing web activity helps create actionable insight on what visitors are searching and viewing online. It helps you analyze which aspects of your website are creating ‘purchases’ vs. the unsuccessful areas. Breikss suggests that the new software being released will make analyzing ROI more efficient and that we’ll start to be able to compare clickthrough rates with purchases to see areas of success or failure. All in all, the new software integrates smart business strategy with your page views and clickthroughs to measure your online ROI.

Web Analytics Association

http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/?page=kr_marketing_opt

The Web Analytics Association is a company that focuses specifically on how to analyze online marketing initiatives including social media, email, and other ad methods. They state that you first need to determine what can be measured, then what is relevant of this data. They tell us that buzz marketing is a great start for creating awareness and backlinks to your website. This is a cost efficient method of increasing web traffic, but not necessarily sales. To them, one of the most important aspects of web analytics is testing where buyers are coming from and what links they are clicking. As a marketer, we need to find out more than just total purchases compared to total visitors. Key words and whether or not a purchase was made based on a return visit or first visit are important in determining patterns and buying drivers. The Web Analytics Association gives us key factors to measure in order to analyze customer buying patterns and why these are important, but they also make it seem very detailed and confusing, likely in order to sell their services!

Ted Talks – Other Social Media Opinions

http://www.ted.com/talks

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

Clay Shirky starts off boldly be stating that social media has been around for many years, but it wasn’t until people started getting bored with the new technology that they began using and abusing it and we started seeing measurable results. He also says that this is an era that brings communication capabilities to a new high being able to send and receive communication from anyone, anywhere. For example, when there was an earthquake in China a few years back, the events were being recorded AS they were happening. In fact, Twitter announced the earthquake before US meter reads even knew about it!
His point about this was that media today is global, social, and cheap. It no longer costs a fortune to get a message around the world. We shouldn’t focus on controlling our supporters, but communicating with them. Negative publicity is not always bad and we must respond positively in order to maturely and effectively use the new media.

Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter users

When you give people easier ways to communicate, good things happen.

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media

Alexis Ohanian shares his tips on how to use social media effectively.

First, it costs nothing to get online; so many people are doing it.
Second, be genuine – be up front with any information released.
Last, lose control – You cannot always control the message. But that’s ok, because it allows for media to not only come from the top down, but to move horizontally.

Summary

The two speakers, Senger and Breikss, seemed to draw the same conclusion of how social media is only effective with solid objectives and measurement tools set. They have opposing opinions on the actual tools that will be used, but drew similar thoughts on how we can effectively use social media and create a measureable ROI figure. The Web Analytics Association was the big company that Senger and Breikss warn us about, trying to make everything seem complicated so we feel like we need the superior help to run our online presence. However, the Association gave me some valid points on what needs to be measured in order to pinpoint success. The Marketing Metrics textbook related similarly to the Web Analytics Association by focusing strictly on how to measure the numbers of website traffic, clickthrough, views, visitors, etc. It was very quantitative, not taking in the qualitative factors or analyzing why we want to choose what method. While this information is pertinent, strategic goals and drivers need to be established before getting confused with looking at the numbers.
My conclusion was that in order for a social media campaign to be successful, we first need to have set objectives of what it is going to accomplish, as without, we are measuring blind. Then, we should be taking advantage of the free metrics out there to evaluate our success. Last, we need to be certain we are measuring the correct data to measure ‘purchase’ patterns (i.e. where buyers came from or what they clicked vs. general web traffic and purchases).