Tag Archives: social media

How do you track and measure social media marketing?

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How *Do* you track and measure social media marketing? It is all about figuring out what things you’re sharing are bringing people back to your sales funnel. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business shouldn’t matter.

I’ve had the privilege of researching this particular subject and interviewing some really great experts, Marshall Sponder, Justin Cutroni and Christopher Penn, for this paper I authored, which was just released by Vocus. You should download it now to understand:

  • Essential social media metrics and KPIs
  • Getting started with key Google Analytics features
  • Attribution modeling to discover which actions lead to outcomes.
  • Metrics for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Please let me know if you like it, or what other questions you have on the topic.

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Where It’s At – Local Marketing

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Harbrooke was privileged to get a writing assignment for Vocus on Local Marketing. The paper is out and available for download from the Vocus site.

Whether you work for a local restaurant chain or a regional architecture firm, the marketing function works to raise prospects’ awareness of your prod- ucts and services, and then to turn them into customers. If you’re a marketing officer of a mid-sized company trying to reach local customers, you already know those customers are looking for you online and you’ve likely done something about it. In the last two years, almost 79% of businesses have created a social network presence, up from 45% in 2010.

In the paper I covered social media, search marketing and SEO, email marketing, PR and metrics. It also includes the importance of mobile search, location based services, and use of social media on the go.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this paper without help from some great businesses and consultants who contributed their knowledge and experience to the piece.

Thank you to:

Brian Carter

Heidi Cohen at RiversideMarketingStrategies.com

Allison Lynch of Baskervill

Ric Dragon of DragonSearchMarketing

Joe Sanders at Meatheads

Aaron Strout at W2O Group

I hope you’ll read it and provide any feedback or suggestions for future things to write about.

 

Wired Workforce and Networked CSR

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Wired Workforce, Networked CSR (corporate social responsibility) is the title of a white paper I wrote with Tom Watson about the use of social media in CSR. It was published in cooperation with the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at NYU, where I teach a social media course. The paper was sponsored by JK Group and we’re launching it today at JK’s Forum on Philanthropy.

You can read more about the paper via this post at OnPhilanthropy.com called “Social Media and CSR.” The post also has the paper embedded for your reading pleasure. We welcome your comments.

 

 

The Legal Aspects of Using Social Network Data for Hiring

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Over at the Inc.Com Start-up Toolkit, I wrote today about Is It Legal To Use Social Network Data When Hiring?

The key elements here are how you find out the data, and how you use it. As a candidate, you should know what employers can and can’t ask you. As a potential employer, be careful how you ask your questions. I encourage you to check this piece out and learn more.

Listening With More Than Two Ears

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The Roman philosopher Epictetus said “We have two ears and one mouth so we may listen more and talk the less.” On the Internet, the sentiment is the same – in this age of conversation, we need to listen to hear if our customers or our market is speaking to us. Many firms forget this, but listening is (or should be) the first part of your marketing or sales cycle. However, we don’t only have two ears online – search and other tools can help you listen more effectively for markets or potential customers.
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search tools can make it easy to search for your company or brand name, and see what people are saying. It makes sense to regularly run searches on your company name, as well as things like “company stinks”, “company sucks”, “company bad” “company service” and variations.
Of course, you can’t search all the search engines all the time. One nice tool to help you is Google Alerts. Simply go to http://google.com/alerts and type in a search term, tell it how often you’d like to receive and alert (as it happens, once a day, or weekly) and Google will do the search for you and alert you in email when something matches.

This  YouTube video of Google Alerts step-by-step does a pretty good job of explaining it, but I suspect the example search for “Motorcycles” will generate too many pages of search results per week. You might do a test search on Google first to see the kind of results you’re getting. Google Advanced Search may help you tailor the query before you make it an alert.
Of course, blogs and web pages aren’t the only place your customers may talk. Twitter Search may help you find other relevant discussions. Search MySpace and Facebook via your own accounts to see if there are groups talking about your company or industry. Better yet, set up your own spaces on these services (a topic for another column.) Another place people talk about companies is a website called Get Satisfaction. Go search and see if anyone is looking for help on that site too.
Finally, once you’ve done your listening, don’t forget to respond. if your “company stinks” search turns up something, go talk back. If a blogger or commenter somewhere has an issue with your company, don’t be afraid. Think of this as an opportunity to win new customers by fixing the issue. It is also a face-saving tactic – maybe you can’t save the day, but perhaps you can apologize and people who find the post will see that you pay attention.
What are your favorite tools for listening? Leave a note in the comments. (We’re listening for you.)

(Originally published at the Inc Start-up Toolkit)

Newspaper Guys doing new media at Social Media Jungle

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Media Panel
Daniel Honneman – Works with Chicago Tribune, and LA Times @dan360
Etan Horowitz – Orlando Sentinal   @etanowitz
Kevin Sablan – Web Taskforce leader for Orange County Register – @ksablan

Dan: Journalism isn’t in trouble – it is going to change and adapt – you don’t necessarily need organizations, but orgs help. Reporters pitch editors, editors pitch other editors, and if you don’t make the cut you don’t get on the page.

Quote from Tom Friedman – amazed at number of Journalists who hate people.
Journalists are something of Entrepreneurs – they need to be willing to connect with people, with each others, and share ideas.

Etan: the idea of branding or self-promotion is blasphemy to many journalists. But, they need to make sure blogs cover their articles, articles should show on DIGG, etc. If it’s not good content, why not promote it?
Dan: But if you look at stats for stories some don’t really get read.

Kevin – Now with online you can really understand what is driving readership daily – and who those people are.  As opposed to Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers – which have less accuracy.

Journalists wouldn’t normally quote other paper’s articles – but now web properties would link to other paper’s stories if the story is relevant.

Etan- Twitter posts can point to blog posts that lead to hundreds of comments.  Once his blog is so well read, he can really have the discussion of “What is News” vs. What are people interested in reading.
Kevin Sablan – Didn’t start a new Twitter account related to the fires – they used their own followers and own audience . They also did a lot of listening.
They did create a page that aggregated Tweets About the California fires, and it was a useful resource for them and for everyone

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Susan Ettinger at Social Media Jungle

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Talking about practical ideas for helping companies relinquishing control, naked PR and the need for companies to develop social models for communication

Every company has to address the fact that Walled Garden PR is over  – except Apple. Until recently – the last few days – about his hormone imbalance announcement. Blogosphere created such pressure along with mainstream media that they had to disclose what was going on.

Corporate commnication can’t be closed off – when you open up to all other company areas – there’s major fear.

Top 10 list of things that need to happen:

Good conversation doesn’t scale – you need to accelerate it – let more people have relationships and facilitate more conversations.

Don’t forget to question tactics – embargos, ndas, etc – many of these things don’t work for bloggers, social media.

There’s an incredible amount of social media content creation right now – it is now a low risk thing to create content.

Social Media is called Social for a reason – put what you’re doing through that filter.

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