Social Media Of The Day

We’re excited to welcome guest blogger, Chris Treadway, today who wanted to respond to our blog post from last week about the Value of a Facebook Fan.

Measuring social media success has been a hot button issue since the first business spent the first hour on social media engagement. Often times, pundits will point to return on investment (ROI) as the #1 thing to measure and for good reason. Most companies have their fair share of zealots and skeptics. Zealots are looking for more reasons to innovate and spend more time on social media, while the skeptics are looking for reasons to stick with what has worked. ROI is a universal language of business performance, but a bar that may very well be too high and arguably too simplistic for the value of social media marketing in 2010 and beyond. Fortunately for marketers, social media provides a wealth of statistics and metrics that can help people assess their progress.

Organizations of all types (corporations, non-profits, government agencies, etc.) can better assess the value they can derive from social media by breaking down the components of ROI to focus on goals that are more directly attributable, achievable, and objectively measurable. Let’s break down the individual elements of ROI to see where we can show the impact of our efforts.

For me, ROI all starts with a simple equation – does the value of what I’m getting exceed costs?

If Total costs < Total value, Positive ROI

If Total costs > Total value, Negative ROI

Simple, right? Not so fast. It’s all about how your business defines a few key terms – total, costs, and value. Let’s dive in to help you create a report out of the metrics that truly matter to your business so you have an ongoing framework for measuring social media success in your organization.

Cost

- Salaries – % of time spent by salaried employees involved in management, maintenance, reporting, and upkeep of your social media presence.

- Agency fees – costs associated with outsourcing parts or all of your social media work (strategy, maintenance, manpower to execute tactics, etc.)

- In-house content, creative, and maintenance costs – personnel and equipment necessary to keep your social media presence interesting and fresh for visitors.

- Direct demand generation spend – money spent directly on social media advertising and demand generation campaigns that point to social media assets.

- Other indirect and unexpected costs – money, time, and resources devoted to other operational details and/or custom software necessary for social media execution.

Now there are certain variables that can affect the cost part of the equation. Do certain sunk expenses “not count” when determining your ROI? For example, you may have a marketing manager who needs something to do 15 hours per week. You aren’t going to fire that person, so he/she needs something to do anyhow so you’ll assign him/her to 15 hours a week of work on your social media presence. Those of you in large organizations may find yourself at the end of a fiscal year, but having a few extra dollars that you can spend because other initiatives didn’t happen as/when you expected. Other sunk costs are content that you’re creating for another purpose, agency or consultant fees that you’ve already committed to spend, brand assets, product documentation, or content that may never otherwise see the light of day. Some organizations want an airtight accounting of costs, while others are more willing to look past sunk costs.

Value

- Measurable & incremental sales – revenue directly attributable to social media execution via coupon code, cookie, or other objective statistical measurement.

- Customer Insight – knowledge gained by interacting with individual customers who have the ability to communicate with and/or about your brand.

- Customer Satisfaction – improvements in metrics that tell how happy customers are with your brand, product, or service.

- Current & future engagements – growth in number of fans/followers; lifetime value of a fan, follower, consumer, or other entity that agrees to receive ongoing social communications from you.

- Social recommendations and other viral benefits – willingness of people to say good things about a product or service that other people can read and/or act upon.

- Market segment execution – improvement in operations that affects certain demographic, cultural, geographic market segments.

- Domain expertise – your organization’s ability to efficiently launch new campaigns in the future or keep from launching bad ones.

- Accrual to other marketing efforts – willingness of people to engage with your organization via other marketing efforts (e-mail, web site, mobile, etc.)

- Goodwill – the long-term value to your brand of effectively using social media to reach customers and doing it better than your competition.

The challenging thing about assessing social media value is that many of these simply can’t be measured with available tools and information. For example, what is the lifetime value of a Facebook fan? Well, that depends on a lot of things that we don’t know yet. Is Facebook going to grow to 1 billion users or will it be usurped by a competitor? Will people continue to spend 55 minutes per day on Facebook in the future or will that number diminish over time? Depending on your assumptions and your line of business, I could make the case that the value of a Fan is $0 or $1,000. In other areas like demand generation, hard metrics are available and an ROI for that specific activity is available. But it is at best a piece of the puzzle for most marketers active on social media.

Another complicating factor in assessing success is how overall success can be attributed to other external criteria – how products and larger ad campaigns perform can have an impact on social media as a byproduct. Often times, the value gained through successful social media execution is all too subjective but we’re expected to produce objective numbers. Beauty is in “the eye of the beholder” – and that beholder may have an agenda that is favorable or unfavorable to social media marketing. That beholder may be simply looking for that bottom line ROI metric that more often than not calls into question assumptions and guesswork.

The good news is that the wealth of metrics in and around social media gives marketers an opportunity to frame the conversation in a variety of ways when reporting to executive management. If you can’t (or don’t want to) discuss the comprehensive ROI for your social media program, odds are you can talk about other benefits that help your organization. Select from the metrics above that truly matter to your business to show your progress. Many people focus on ROI because they want to show that social media is valuable. But success comes in many different forms – direct revenue, customer satisfaction, knowledge, customer engagements, and goodwill. Take control of how you tell that story and focus on the things you can control. Odds are your executives will appreciate the education and will share their expectations for the future in the process.

Chris Treadaway is founder and CEO of Lasso, a hyper-local advertising platform for media outlets and small businesses. He is also the author of the book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. He is on Twitter @ctreada.

by Kristen Malzone

Last night, I got the chance to spend some time with the of the Live Off Groupon contest winner: Josh Stevens (@Groupawned).  I learned a lot about the challenges he has faced so far and how he has utilized social media to overcome those challenges. We ate dinner at Oliva on the Lower East Side and discussed his journey thus far.

The Live Off Groupon campaign began as a challenge to see if anyone could live off Groupons for an entire year. Groupons are essentially discounted gift certificates to local businesses. After hundreds of applications and video submissions, Groupon selected Josh Stevens, a 28-year-old from Chicago, to spend 365 days surviving solely on an unlimited amount of Groupons. Groupon confiscated Josh’s apartment, credit cards, and all of his personal belongings. They provided him with a paper-suit (made from Groupons), a laptop, an iPhone, a digital camera, a Flip cam, and health insurance. From there, Josh was challenged to travel the country to Groupon’s 60 cities with Groupons as his only form of currency. This means that all purchases, from meals to activities to travel arrangements to hotel accommodations, must be paid for with Groupons. He may barter in exchange for goods and services that are not available with Groupons, such as leaving a tip at a restaurant. If Josh successfully completes this year-long challenge, he will be awarded $100,000 (in cash).

Josh blogs, tweets, and posts on Facebook as he travels across the country. He has been networking with social media users to find things to do and places to stay as he goes. It may seem a little risky, but overall he has been really enjoying the experience while making lots of new friends. This campaign truly shows the power of networking on social media. It’s arguable that Josh would not be able to survive solely on Groupons for a year without social media. What do you think? Could you do it?

Josh was interviewed this morning on the TODAY show with Kathie Lee and Hoda. Check out his interview…

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

EAVB_TXBVECZCDO

http://empireavenue.com/KERPEN

by Allie Herzog

With the recent success of big brands using the “tug on your heart strings” approach in their TV ads, Nike has unveiled what many are calling its best work yet.  The Write the Future Campaign, which will air for the first time during the European Club Final on May 22^nd, is a three-minute film that takes people on an emotional and vivid journey through the moments that truly capture the spirit of winning, losing and what it takes to become a national hero.  The spot will  air across 32 countries, sharing the campaign with millions of fans around the world.

Utilizing the power of social media , Nike ran teaser ads on You Tube and around the web and has since released  the film on its Nike Football fan page, only after clicking the Like button.  It is  also available to  fans around the world online at nikefootball.com.  On May 22^nd it will roll out its global partnerships with You Tube, QQ.com and Facebook,  including a way for users  to take their personalized content and build their own Facebook campaign in an attempt to get noticed and be selected for “The Chance”, which is an elite Nike Academy football camp that is scouted by the English Premier League.

Many say that Nike is vying for the top spot in “soccer supremacy” with the current leader, Adidas.  What do you think? And what do you think of this innovative use of video and social media? Watch the film here and let us know!

Write The Future from Nalden on Vimeo.

by Kristen Malzone

Pay what you want. It’s a risky concept and has proven to be successful for one franchise. Panera Bread Co. recently opened up a store called Cares Cafe in the city of St. Louis. It’s an “out-of-the-box experiment” that has created quite a significant amount of buzz both around the community and on social media. The cafe is run by a non-profit and Panera plans to expand across the country in the near future. This philanthropic initiative hopes to bring communities together and serve as a what could be described as a high-class soup kitchen.

This ground-breaking project is unprecedented in the restaurant franchise industry and has people talking. After searching Twitter, you will see the amount of positive buzz that is surrounding this story. People are sharing the story with their friends and commending @PaneraBread on Twitter. Customers who visit the store are greatly appreciative of the efforts Panera has made to improve their community. One third of customers are actually paying more than the retail value of their meal.

Panera’s social media team could really embrace this opportunity if they’re smart and build relationships with the customers of Cares Cafe. Many have warned Panera CEO, Ron Shaich that this will fail. He thinks otherwise: “The core of my life has been to make a difference. Now, I’m using my business background to make a difference in the world.” In our opinion, he is going in the right direction and other franchises should follow his example.

What do you think of Cares Cafe? How would your community react if one were to open in your city?

by Dave Kerpen

In today’s Watch Me Wednesday video, I poll a few new summer Buzz Builders on their opinions about the “Like” button and what it means for the future of the internet.

One Buzz Builder suggested that the “Like” button allows businesses to gain immediate feedback from their audience as well as increase traffic on their website. Another Buzz Builder suggested that the “Like” button should be expanded to include a “Love” button, similar to star ratings that you might see for restaurant reviews. This also allows users to express varying degrees of like for a business. Finally, and not surprisingly, a Buzz Builder brought up the desire for a “Dislike” button.

While this concept is widely promoted by Facebook users via Facebook groups, the reality is that a “Dislike” button is just not reasonable. The “Like” button’s main purpose is to generate positive talk on a website which allows for brand names to buy into the feature, and a “Dislike” would ultimately undermine that purpose.

What do you think of the “Like” button and Facebook’s other social plug-ins?

By Amy Slife

Social media novices and companies who have yet to enter the space might be the first to say the social sharing medium is a fad, but the growth numbers for many social media platforms should show anyone questioning the staying power of social media otherwise. According to a Nielsen survey of February 2010 social networking usage across 10 countries, the average time a person spends on social sites is five and a half hours per month. Of the countries surveyed, Italy landed in the top spot with just shy of 6 and a half hours per person and Japan fell at the bottom of the list with 2 hours and 37 minutes per person being spent on social networks. (The U.S. landed third with a hair over 6 hours per person.) You might think 5.5 hours a month spent on social networks doesn’t sound like much given the average 31 day month is 744 hours long, but the kicker is that globally we’re spending 2 hours more a month on social media than we did last year.

This blog post will dive into social media usage stats for four popular social networking platforms that show social media is here to stay. If you’ve been working to convince your C-suite that social media is a key element to have in your marketing mix, some of these numbers might assist you doing just that. Is there one social network that you tend to use more than others or you think has greater sticking power? Share with us in the comments below!

Facebook

With its 400 million users logging onto the site at least once a month, and with 50% of those users logging on every day, Facebook is squashing its social network competition. According to the same Nielsen survey mentioned above, Facebook is the social network destination worldwide. It accounts for almost 6 hours per user session across the globe and the average user logs on 19 times a month. According to a Facebook fact filled infographic, which you can see in its entirety here, 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. and it’s the second most trafficked website, behind Google. Facebook’s lead in the social media market and plethora of new features, elements and redesigns being added each year illustrate its stronghold in today’s environment and many brand marketing mixes around the world.

YouTube

YouTube turned 5 this month, and Sunday, via the official YouTube blog announced that the platform has surpassed two billion views per day. Now if my math is right, that’s over 83 million views per hour. That’s a lot of YouTube video watching going on around the planet. For an even more convincing YouTube stat, the two billion views per day, according to the post, is about double the audience for the three major TV networks in the U.S. during prime-time TV hours. Another interesting stat, as of a March 2010 article, states that 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute. Not only can the average Joe upload their own YouTube video, but it’s a place for companies and brands to house and share their own viral video content. Five years strong already, YouTube seems to be illustrating true social media sticking power.

Twitter

Our 140 character-only social media network experienced similar significant growth in its early days, much like foursquare’s recent growth (see below for more on foursquare!). According to a report on Twitter usage as detailed here, Twitter’s awareness level is now on par with that of Facebook, as such 87% of Americans are aware of Twitter, and only 5% were aware in 2008. While it’s safe to say the majority of Americans are aware of Twitter, only 7% of the population is using this social network. While this population usage rate seems nil in comparison to that of behemoth network Facebook, some specifics on who that 7% consists of might surprise you and encourage your brand to jump on board with Twitter. The study found that Twitter users are more likely to live in higher income households and are also more likely to be following brands on Twitter versus on other social media networks. This in itself might encourage your brand to jump on this network to spread the word, assist with customer service and offer promotions.

foursquare

Location-based social networking platforms, like foursquare, are the newest kids on the block, but I think it can be said that location-based social media is the way of the social media future. In last Tuesday’s blog post, 4 Reasons to Foursquare, I mentioned how other social networks like Twitter have added options for location-based tweets, and that Facebook is rumored to soon be launching their own version; location, location, location is the direction the social media world is moving. The company that seems to be doing it right so far, and growing at some pretty incredible rates, is foursquare. On Monday, foursquare tweeted that’s they’re averaging 600,000 check-ins per day, and earlier this month it was 40 million check-ins total, up from 22 million check-ins five weeks prior; that’s almost double digit growth in just over a month. In late April foursquare hit the 1 million registered user mark, growth that was encouraged by the 100,000 accounts that were created in the 10 days of SXSW. With other networks jumping on the location-based bandwagon, it’s safe to say the popularity of foursquare’s fun check-in based social networking platform has tapped into a new social market that’s going to continue to grow and spread throughout the social media world.

by Devin Sugameli

In the wake of all the news surrounding Facebook’s changes to its Privacy Policy, many found themselves scrambling to make adjustments accordingly. But there are plenty of privacy settings on Facebook that have been available for a while that you may have missed earlier. Below are our top 5 most important old and new Facebook privacy settings to understand:

1. “Connections” (Privacy Settings -> Friends, Tags, and Connections) – “Connections” are new and confusing to a lot of people. Facebook more or less defines a “connection” as anything with which you choose to associate yourself – meaning your friends, favorite movies, websites, activities, and even your hometown. Previously, these sorts of items merely constituted a static list of biographical interests displayed on your profile’s Info tab. Now each interest you list will be connected to an accompanying business or community page. Facebook provides a thorough description of the update here. If you’d like to limit public access to information regarding any of your profile connections, you can adjust your settings on the new “Friends, Tags, and Connections” section of your Privacy Settings (accessible via the “Account” drop down menu in the upper-right corner of your Facebook page).

2. Instant Personalization Pilot Program (Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites) – The Instant Personalization Pilot Program might be the single most controversial of the recent additions to Facebook’s privacy settings. Enrolling in this program enables Facebook to share your information with a few select partner websites (Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs.com to start) in order to better personalize your experience while visiting these sites. One can certainly argue that increased personalization with less effort will make for a more enjoyable experience web-wide for all users. However, there are those who aren’t so comfortable as to share this information freely, and the reason this program is so controversial is that all users are automatically enrolled unless they manually adjust the setting that applies to it. To opt-out, go to the “Applications and Websites” section of your settings, then find the “Instant Personalization Pilot Program” at the bottom of the list, click to “Edit Setting” and uncheck the box on the next page.

3. Public Search Results (Privacy Settings –> Search) – Though this setting and the two following have all been available to users for a good while now, many still aren’t aware of it. By default, your Facebook profile can be found on search engines like Google. However, if you’d like to ensure that your profile can only be discovered via Facebook’s own search engine, you can uncheck the box next to the “Public Search Results” setting on this page.

4. Photos and Videos of Me (Privacy Settings -> Friends, Tags, and Connections) – We’ve all heard stories about employees fired from their jobs or students suspended from school in response to incriminating photos or videos posted on Facebook. Even if you’re careful in regards to your own photo and video uploads, your friends might not exercise the same restraint. Rather than hope to catch and untag any potentially embarrassing or damaging items before somebody less understanding does, you can prohibit certain groups of individuals from seeing photos and videos of you that are uploaded and tagged by others outright. Simply return to the “Friends, Tags, and Connections” section of your privacy settings and click to edit “Photos and Videos of Me”.

5. What Your Friends Can Share About You (Privacy Settings –> Applications and Websites) – Whether or not you personally connect with various Facebook applications, you may be sharing more with them than you think. Many Facebook applications require access to certain pieces of information in order to work. A calendar or e-card application, for example, might need access to your or your friends’ birthdays so that it can send you prompts and alerts when a special day is near. What many of us don’t realize when rejecting application invites from a friend is that our friends might be the ones inadvertently sharing our information. To limit the kind of information your friends can share about you with an application, head over to the “Applications and Websites” section and click to edit “What your friends can share about you”.

While we do of course always advise that you refrain from sharing anything online that would be truly embarrassing for you, we also realize that Facebook’s extensive privacy options reflect real privacy concerns even as we choose to share more and more about ourselves with the world. Did we nail all the important ones? What are the most important privacy settings to you?

By Jenna Lebel

We frequently offer tips for growing your Facebook fan base, but recently we have also received many questions about how to utilize Twitter. It’s certainly not a simple task to gain loyal followers, and it depends largely on the content of your tweets. Here are some tips every one can use  to help you increase your followers. Do you have other tips for growing your audience? Share them with us!

Tweet Well

In a previous blog post I provided tips for creating better tweets and ultimately a better experience for your followers. Here are some highlights: keep your tweets shorter than 140 characters to maximize retweetability, add more value and be less promotional, be human and add a personality to your tweets,  and retweet others while adding something to it.

Tweet Regularly

It’s pretty simple. The more active you are on Twitter the easier it is for you to establish yourself and people to find you. If you only tweet a couple of times a week, where is the value in following you?

Use Hashtags

Hashtags not only allow you to index your tweets, but they also allow others to find you. Use hashtags when tweeting about something important to you or something you talk about frequently so that when people search for the topic, they find your tweets and can expect similar content from you in the future. If everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes not only easier for users to find that topic in search, but it increases the chance of the topic appearing in Trending Topics.

Engage in Twitter Conversations

This not only includes responding to @replies and finding people tweeting about similar topics as you, but it also includes participating in Twitter chats like #FollowFriday, #MusicMonday and others.

Ask Your Followers to Retweet you

It may look desperate, but asking costs nothing and often gets positive results. Ask for a retweet (“Please RT”) and let your followers spread your word.

Follow Users Who Share Similar Tweets

Use Twitter’s search engine to find people talking about the topics that you talk about and follow and engage with them.

Promote Everywhere

Cross-promote by providing the link or adding your Twitter stream on other social sites. Add your Twitter handle to all current channels of communications (website, email signatures, business cards, etc.).

by Leo Mikinberg

If you haven’t already heard the buzz, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team have announced a new initiative that may change the way you interact with Facebook and the rest of the web. The new “Like” button is part of a larger project called Open Graph, which is an attempt to incorporate Facebook into every possible page on the internet. Once you’ve logged in to your Facebook account, you will be able to surf the web and see just how many of your fellow users and friends “like” the website and content you’re checking out. While this sounds harmless, this announcement has ruffled a lot of feathers because it brings with it further changes to the very sensitive, and often controversial Privacy Policy. To clear the air and give a better picture of what is in store for a new Open Graph world here are a few pros and cons of the changes.
Cons:

1) Privacy Policy Goes Gray – The Privacy Policy on Facebook continues to fall into a gray area where the lines between private and public are constantly blurred. With the newest changes a lot of your information, including your name, names of all your friends, pictures, gender, likes, connections and shared content are, by default, visible to everyone.

2) You Choose Your Privacy Settings… If You Can Understand Them…Sort of -Facebook has always given its users the ability to limit who sees what on their profile. Over the years the options have gotten greater and the jargon has gotten much more confusing. Attempting to limit who can view your Facebook page is no longer a quick fix, but instead is a time consuming, head-scratching process that may leave you wondering what you just did or didn’t do. This becomes even trickier when you are trying to make your information more private. You may take the initiative to prevent people from being able to see that you are connected to Jane Doe, but she may have her settings on default; if that’s the case someone can still see that you two are connected through her Facebook page.

3) Now I Like It, Now I Don’t – With this new found ability to bounce around and “Like” every picture, article, and other piece of content on the internet, some of us who are known to get a little trigger happy may end up liking something that we either find we don’t really like or just don’t want the world to know we like. In the event that you did like something and want to unlike it, the process gets to become a bit of a nuisance. To remove the like you would have to head back to your Facebook profile, find your likes and interests to single out the individual object (which could at that point be one of hundreds) and remove it. If you are not a heavy user of the like button this may only be an inconvenience, but for those who are going to be liking regularly it may become more of an issue.

Pros:

1) Instant Personalization – No clever title needed here. Instant personalization, as Facebook has started to call it, is the best example of what is possible through Open Graph. A handful of websites like Yelp, Microsoft Documents and Pandora are going to be able to connect to your likes and interests so they are better able to customize the services they provide. Pandora can be able to better serve you by knowing what music you already like and are listening to, while Yelp can use your location to bring you more accurate responses. Social Commerce Today gives us a better look at what these three sites are doing with Instant Personalization here. While we may not see too many websites with the resources or the know-how to create this level of Facebook integration in the near future, it is a small window into what a social web can look like.

2) Go Straight to the Good Stuff – Even the best bloggers or newspaper columnists have their bad days. With the new “Like” feature, you will soon be able to see just how many other Facebook users and friends think that an article is worth reading. The same goes with almost any piece of content out there for the public to consume. Assuming you trust your friends’ judgment, you can skip over the stuff that isn’t “fit to print” and go straight for what is.

3) The Early Bird Catches the Worm – The businesses that are moving quickly and taking decisive steps to make sure that they are using the new “Like” feature to the best of their ability are already starting to show strong gains. While IGN is in no way new to cyberspace, it has shown a 20% increase in referral traffic from Facebook since it has begun incorporating the “like” button. This is of particular importance because many businesses that find themselves with active pages on Facebook may be surprised with the impact that implementing the new button will have on the traffic going to their respective websites. This feature is going to be beneficial for those surfing the web as well as the people who are creating the content.

Now that you’ve seen a few of the pros and cons, what’s your take on Facebook’s “Like” button and its Open Graph?