NicholeKelly.com

Let’s Buzz About Social Media Measurement

26 February 2010, 7:12 am

After my last post on social media measurement I had a nice conversation with several people at the recent #socialmediabaltimore Tweet up. Joel Witt, over at FolkMedia, and I are all really interested in hearing other peoples opinions, so it’s Friday. How about we buzz about social media measurement?

Personally, I broke it into 5 categories. Exposure, Influence, Engagement, Action/Conversion, and Retention. I have assigned metrics for each of these categories and use a combination of Radian6, Omniture, and custom business intelligence reports to provide the reporting. We are just finally implementing them so I’m so excited to see our first round of reports!

What’s your take? How are you measuring? Join the conversation over at Buzz or add your comments on this post. http://bit.ly/8Ylx25

Filed under Uncategorized.

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Universities Failing to Deliver – Students Left Holding the Bag

22 November 2009, 2:49 pm

Universities Fail to Deliver – Students Let Holding the Bag

Universities Fail to Deliver – Students Left Holding the Bag

Marketing and Public Relations Undergraduate students are less prepared than ever to enter the workforce. As these two industries rapidly change so too should the education system that supplies the industry with the human resources to do the job. The education system has long been known as a slow turning ship, but it seems as though most universities have forgotten their primary job. Many talk about providing a high level of education for their students. Sure, that’s important. But how would you define a high level of education? Is it a seal of approval from an Ivy League school? As a hiring manager, I say no. The job of educational institutions is to provide us with the next generation of thought leaders. Which means that students need to learn complex problem solving and most importantly how to think for themselves. When you add in the recent shifts in the marketing and public relations industry, many recent graduates are entering the workforce and immediately figuring out that their shiny new education depreciates much like the value of a new car as you drive it off the lot. Of course, after paying thousands of dollars for their education, students are left scrambling to learn the latest and greatest on their own so they can get a job to pay back all of those student loans. If you are an educator challenge yourself and your students to raise the bar and get the most out of their educational experience.

What are the schools missing that the rest of are dying to hire?

Millennials (Generation Y) That Get Relationships – This has long been the critical piece in the puzzle. That hasn’t changed, but the facilitation of relationships has. People expect you to be where they are, to connect with them, to hear them. Not vomit your marketing messaging on them, which parlays nicely into my second point.
Millennials That Get Social Media – I’m not talking about avid Facebookers here, I’m talking about graduates that not only understand the tools of social media, but can apply it to our business to help develop relationships. As Chris Brogan, brilliantly stated at Web2.0, how can we extend experiences and relationships and how do we develop relationships that yield? They may not have all the answers as recent graduates, but if they are at least thinking about it they are leagues ahead.
Millennials That Break the Rules- These are the students that can think for themselves, play devils advocate, and constantly challenge what doesn’t make sense. Good enough is never good enough. They try to solve problems and have a decent idea of how to execute their solution. They aren’t scared to speak up, but know how to do it professionally.

How can professors go beyond the syllabus and teach young students marketable skills?

Put Down the Textbook – Go beyond definitions; get your students reading business books with real world examples. Show them videos and blogs from influencers. Use tools like Skype to get these influencers talking to your students and asking questions.
Stop Vomiting Information – Standing in front of the room with a slide deck isn’t going to develop thought leaders it will develop clones and rebels. Facilitating a discussion on a topic is far more difficult, but it will allow students to start thinking for themselves and learn how to problem solve.
Let your Students Lead – Present your students with real-world problems that companies are facing and ask them to try and solve them. Guide their thought process, point out fallacies and easy answers, challenge them to do something new.
Educate Yourself – Go to industry conferences in your specialty. While I’m sure the conferences for educators are great, sitting and mingling with a crowd of business people will give you a whole new perspective on what companies are looking for that you can take right back to the classroom.

Filed under Corporate Culture, Education, Social Media. Tagged Education, Social Media

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Has Social Media Affected Traditional Networking?

7 November 2009, 4:51 pm

The Value of a Beer...hanging with @JBluhm et al

Using social media tools you can expand your network with people you know and those you don’t know. I’ve connected with friends, former classmates, family members and others via FaceBook. I’ve connected with former colleagues and peers via LinkedIn. I’ve met other marketers through LinkedIn groups. I’ve followed and been followed by fellow marketers who I probably wouldn’t have ever met naturally thanks to Twitter. I see people connecting with new people all around me online. I’m curious about whether it is increasing or decreasing traditional in-person networking.

Are people hiding behind their computers and not getting into the real world to really meet others? Is the value of traditional networking associations declining? I don’t think so. I think it is even more important than ever to continue traditional networking activities. But the business reality is that the recession has led to shrinking reimbursement policies at companies for membership in local networking associations and business travel for conferences. What are you doing? Are you attending conferences and networking events? Is it status quo at your company or are you paying the bill on your own? Or just dropping out? Are you still meeting others at local tweet ups and meet ups?

As individuals are working to create their online personal brand it is equality important to step out from behind the computer screen and continue to meet and learn in person. Personally, the in-person connection with those I’ve met online has been invaluable. It helps to transition a follower into a friend and friends into followers. It lets people see a whole other side to who you are.

While you are growing your online network, don’t forget the basics. Take every opportunity to meet those around you face-to-face. If you met online, step offline and meet in person to learn what happens between tweets, status updates and blog posts. If you met in person, connect online and keep up to date on what is going on with each other between events.

Regardless of where you met, get out of your every day environment and share a beer, a cup of coffee or a couple of sodas…have a laugh…and share your stories. Get out from behind the computer screen, out of the office and join networking associations, attend tweet ups, meet ups and the like. Use the opportunity to deepen your relationships and develop new ones.

What are you doing? Has social media decreased your traditional networking efforts or expanded them? How are you prioritizing your time between online and offline events? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed under Social Media. Tagged FaceBook, LinkedIn, Networking, Social Media, Twitter, web 2.0

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Get Buy In For Social Media

24 October 2009, 11:47 pm

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I recently returned from the Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS09) in Boston and had the chance to meet several social media junkies; many of them already had the support of their management teams. However, I know that we are in the minority and many of you are still trying to get positive support to use social media in your business. It’s kind of like putting together the pieces to a puzzle that looks complicated at first, but afterwards it seems far simpler.

Here are my thoughts on a couple of the objections I heard from you in regards to return on investment (ROI).

You can’t show ROI in social media – While it is true that tracking ROI in social media is not as clear cut as other channels, you can absolutely track ROI. It does require an engaged IT team to connect your social media monitoring tool (I like Radian6) with your CRM, making it not only possible, but realistic. And trust me, ROI is extremely important; you’ll never hear me say otherwise. However, there are some misnomers that you need to be aware of if you are getting ready to fight this battle.

Prospecting – First, the sales cycle is likely to be longer if your first engagement with a prospect is through social media. Why? First, because you aren’t out their pimping your services to everyone who will listen. Instead you are building relationships hoping that if your products and services fit your new “friends” needs they will consider you. Also, you might be engaging them long before they’ve searched for a solution or even know they need one. This part of the research phase typically doesn’t include any involvement by your company and is handled solely in the minds of your consumers. At some point they will decide they need a solution and likely do some sort of search and you hope that they think of or remember you. Direct intervention in the pre-research stage of the sales cycle has always been out of reach for businesses. Because of this millions get spent for “branding” campaigns, all aimed at trying to increase recall of your brand. Now you have a chance to engage people and be on their minds while they are in the “thought” stage. To me, not participating in the discussion at this stage is nuts. The ROI will be there if you do your job well in social media, but the close rate and time to buy may be different. So what do you say to that disbeliever?

Well, I liken this to a sales executive telling you not to make that phone call or sales call to a prospect unless you know for sure you are going to get the sale. Could you imagine having to prove out the ROI before you could make the call? That’s ridiculous, and so is not participating in discussions about your industry and your brand within social media channels.

Customer Service – Second, when looking at the benefits of using social media to provide better customer service it can get really dicey. Many times, the revenue is already in the door, but you are looking to build relationships for future purchases. If you were to put the customer service provided in conjunction with social media, up against your traditional customer service channels I believe you would see that it increases efficiency within your service team. I believe the ROI will be the same as with any customer service channel that provides superior service. I won’t go into what would happen if you were providing cruddy service before. If you were to measure the incremental lift in future business when comparing both channels of service, that would be your ROI for social media. If you also showed the value of a more efficient service model, you’d be golden. But you haven’t sold your executive yet. So what can you say to that skeptic?

If our phones in customer service were ringing off the hook, would you tell our agents not to answer them unless they could prove they would lead to future sales? Of course not. So why can’t we answer the phone? It’s ringing…it just happens to be in cyberspace.

The bottom line is that if you can put social media into the perspective of the current things you are doing within the organization, you may have an easier time selling social media through. And if you can talk of social media with stories related to the first time your company tried another new selling method such as a telesales force or even their first e-commerce site, hopefully they’ll remember that the beginning was slow but the ROI came. It might be a different volume of ROI and it might be a different conversion rate, but it’s there. And it will be for social media too. Good luck! Please share your story in the comments section.

Image provided via Free Stock Photos for websites – FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Filed under Social Media. Tagged Innovative Marketing, Return on Marketing Investment, ROI, Social Media, Success Measures

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IMS09 Takeaways

9 October 2009, 1:33 pm

At IMS09 with Brian Solis

I came to Boston knowing that I was going to meet amazing social media folks and learn some amazing things. What I didn’t know is that I would also develop amazing friendships that I will carry long past the 2 day summit. And that really is the interesting thing isn’t it. We spent 2 days talking about social media and how people are people are using it to exist and participate in conversations where their customers are. We heard case studies, talked with thought leaders, and a lot of authors as it turns out and at the end of the day it all came down to one thing for me.

Social media is a tool that helps you develop deeper relationships with your customers and prospects. The relationship is truly what it is all about as has been true for the last 100 years. I really loved Shiv Singhs modification of Peter F. Drucker’s quote ”The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Shiv said, ” The purpose of business is to create a customer that creates a customer.” That doesn’t happen if you don’t have a relationship.

“The difference is that social media makes the distance between you and your customers nill”, stated brilliantly by Tim Walker. Why? Because you can easily SEE what they are saying, WHEN they are saying it, WHERE they are saying it and WHO they are saying it to. Marketers in the 50’s would’ve gone biserk over this type of information. And knowing what is being said about your brand is critical. But the most important thing is WHAT you do next.

There was a lot of talk about listening at the summit. And I agree with the speakers if you aren’t listening you are an idiot. It’s too easy to not be doing it. The question is when do you engage?

Are people complaining about your brand? A simple How Can I Help You can go a long way, “the first thing to do is answer the phone and say how can I help you” from David Alston. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s 3 A’s that they define in Trust Agents are a great way to manage complaints. “Acknowledge, Apologize and Act.” This really goes into the authenticity theory. Actually care that people had a bad experience and FIX IT! It’s amazing how fixing someone’s problem will deepen your relationship with them. If you can’t fix it, be honest about it.

Are people raving about your brand? “Always say thank you when someone praises your brand online.” Another great thought from David Alston.

This really is simple stuff. It’s not rocket surgery as Chris said. But we all know that it does sound really simple but in practice it can get really complicated…really quick. Questions like how do you get buy in? How do you assemble your team? What do you do when you make a mistake? There were great insights into this as well. I’ll cover some of the tips on that in my next post!

Thank you to all of the presenters who really are game changers and some of the most down to earth, genuine people I’ve met. And of course to Justin Levy and Chris Brogan who gave us the opportunity to connect. And the real magic happened with the attendees who connected over a few drinks and forged friendships.

If you missed it go to slideshare and search for IMS09. Most of the presentations are there.

Filed under Social Media. Tagged IMS09, Social Media, web 2.0

4 Comments

Creating A Social Media Value Index

15 August 2009, 2:33 am

The question of the day is how do you measure social media? It’s the question brimming on every marketers mind as we look at how social media will fit into our current marketing mix. Because let’s face it, if you aren’t looking at social media you might just be left in the dust. So for those of you who are trying to tackle this daunting task, I’ve put together a few tips and a social media value index model that you can use to guide you in the process.

In looking at the #smroi conversations on Twitter recently, one of the big discussions is the ongoing debate of whether or not social media will prove a positive ROI. In addition, there are many who are using ROI to talk about value rather than an actual monetary return and it is causing confusion about the true value that social media can bring to an organization and how to explain it to stakeholders in a meaningful way.

To get started you need to develop a plan. I’m not a huge believer in the let’s try it and see what happens strategy. Not that you can’t try and see, but the trying it out should lead to a well-defined plan. There are four-steps to creating your plan.

Define Goals and Objectives
Align Strategies to Meet Goals and Objectives
Create Metrics to Measure Success
Develop Execution Plan

As I’ve said in my previous posts, I focus on three core goals. Will you use social media to retain existing customers, generate brand awareness and/or acquire new customers? For social media newcomers, I’d be very cautious about starting a social media plan geared towards acquiring new customers. This takes finesse that comes with experience and I’d wait until you’ve mastered the other two before broaching customer acquisition. Once you have determined what your goal for social media is, you can then start to align strategies with those goals, determine how you will measure if those strategies are successful, and put together a plan for execution. I’m not going to spend much time on those areas in this post, perhaps in a future post if readers are interested. Rather, I’m going to focus on how to create a model to measure success and then give you some ideas on different metrics you can use to build your model.

In order to be able to explain the value of social media to your stakeholders I prefer to use Key Performance Indicators as the term of choice. Mainly because this is a standard term that people are familiar with and you don’t have to do a lot of explaining about what it means.

: Social Media KPIs

So here I’ve defined 10 Key Performance Indicators for social media and I ranked them in importance from 1 to 10. Then I assigned a weight to each ranking.

Click here for the full list. Social Media KPIs

: Social Media Monthly Worksheet

Then I took the 10 KPIs and put in metrics for how to measure them on a monthly basis. For each one I used a baseline measure of 0-1 either through doing a percent to goal or a ratio. I used a 1,000 point system to determine where I stand on each of the measure and apply the weight to determine how many points each measure received. The actual formula is (Score on 0-1 scale)*(Percent Weight*1000) to determine the number of points that indicator received for the month. To see the full worksheet click here. Social Media Value Index Worksheet

Finally, I took the sum of each KPI score as the total for the Social Media Value Index. This gives you a baseline measure for how the all of your social media activities are performing over time. The closer you get to 1,000 the better closer you are to reaching your goals.

Social Media Value Index Score

You can chose any key performance indicator that you believe adds value to the organization. You can also choose more than 10 if you like. I chose to use ROI as one of my KPIs, but on its own I don’t think it tells the whole story, which is why I developed this model. Choosing your KPIs may be the hardest part. So I’ve included some ideas of what you can measure below.

Twitter

Number of Followers
Number of People You Follow
Relevance of Followers (I only follow people that are relevant and use a ratio of followers to those I follow to measure this)
Number of Retweets
Number of @replies to you/from you (you can do a ratio here also)
Number of Clicks on Links Posted
Twinfluence metrics
Twitter Grade

Social Networks i.e. LinkedIn, Ning, FaceBook, MySpace

Number of Connections Made
Number of Discussions
Number of Comments
Number of Groups Participated In
Level of Involvement in Groups

Video Sharing/Live Webcasts

Number of Monthly Views/Attendees
Monthly Average of Views/Attendees
Number of Linkbacks to Videos

There are many more I could list here. Joe LaTona did a really nice job of providing a list to start from in his “What Are Your Social Media Goals” post.

Now that you have your plan it’s time to execute, measure, and refine!

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on how you are measuring, suggestions you have for refining this model and what you would add to the list of possible KPIs.

If you would like a copy of the excel worksheets used to develop the model please email me at nichole@nicholekelly.com and I’ll send you a copy.

Filed under Social Media. Tagged Brand Awareness, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Return on Marketing Investment, ROI, Social Media, Success Measures, Twitter, web 2.0

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Return on Marketing Investment Measurement that Works

24 June 2009, 5:28 pm

Measure the Marketing Mix

I’ve seen a lot of buzz about marketing operations, marketing measurement and marketing ROI on blogs and Twitter lately. There are certainly very good reasons for organizations to put resources behind taking a hard look at the contributions of all of their departments including marketing. The buzz swings all the way to the left with people
claiming you can’t measure marketing and back out to the right with here’s how you measure it. What I’ve noticed is even those who claim to be able to measure, haven’t really detailed how. As we are building marketing plans and marketing strategy we must start to include measures of success that we can deliver on.

In organizations, the pressure can bring “old school” and “new school” marketing to a clearly drawn battle line. Many times I’ve heard the claim: you can’t measure __________ (fill in the blank) marketing, brand awareness, social media or anything else requested. I often wonder, do people really believe this? Or are these people just scared to be measured? This type of clear-cut measurement certainly puts a new perspective on whether or not you are a “good” marketer. It could equally be a result of people truly not knowing “how” to measure results effectively. It doesn’t help when there are a lot of theories about measurement and few true industry standards beyond “yeah we measure ROI.” Really?!? Who does it, how do they do it, when do they do it, what do you do as a result of it, and the big question…how long does it take them to pull the report together?

Many marketers are pushing the envelope at organizations and looking for ways to measure everything. The problem we are all finding is that we can measure almost everything and it’s easy to get caught with paralysis by analysis. What should you measure? How often? And what metrics really matter?

I recently read an excellent blog post called “Mapping the Marcom Mix to the Lead Funnel”. I was impressed with the thought process behind this as I have been doing a lot of work on integrating funnel management and marketing strategies for marketing and sales. This spawned what I like to call, a moment of brilliance! I admit they are sometimes fleeting, but occasionally things just align themselves in a way that provide previously unseen clarity. When I started to consider how all the activities map to the funnel, I immediately wanted to measure their impact.

So, I worked on creating a model to measure the Return on Marketing Investment. There were three core considerations to building a model that I believe would actually work.

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

Like many marketers I’ve tried to measure the success of individual projects and campaigns with varying levels of results. The challenge was measuring long-term, mid-term and short-term strategies and relating them to ROI. Because, ROI is return on investment which naturally requires you to track directly to revenue mid-term and long-term strategies end up with a result that looks like it was a failure. With strategies like Brand Awareness it is much harder to tie them to current revenue as the impact of your activities today may not pay off for several years, yet we struggle because we are being held accountable for these activities today. Trying to measure each item individually can lead to poor decisions based on short-term results. What really matters is how is the entire marketing mix contributing to overall lead generation. I believe the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts in marketing.

Make sure your measures are actionable

I think it is mission critical that the data you surround yourself with represents items that you can clearly use to make better decisions. A bunch of foo foo numbers that aren’t clearly aligned with the input and the output just increase the confusion. Use measures that matter and can be used as a diagnostic tool and a success measurement tool and you’ve hit the sweet spot!

To be effective your marketing dashboard should:

Enable you to identify failures
Enable you to identify successes
Enable you to see where those failures and successes lie within your mix and/or tell you where to dig deeper to figure it out

Don’t stop at the marketing team

In my previous experience, every position I’ve held had one purpose. To use marketing to generate more revenue and more profit for the organization. All of the best marketing in the world will fall flat if your sales team is not equipped to close the deal. Therefore, it is critical that you measure all the way through the sales organization. This is certainly not so you can point fingers at the sales team, rather it is an opportunity for more open discussions about the impact marketing is having on the organization and how sales is delivering on that impact. Never forget, we’re all in this together.

So what does this look like? As a visual person, I use graphics to help tell the story and here is what it looks like to me. Now to tie it all together, how does this deliver on the three considerations?

Measure the Marketing Mix

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

As you can see at the top of the funnel you are keeping track of all of the leads delivered from each type of source. I chose to do this independently by source. However, ROI is not calculated on one item, it is calculated based on all of the inputs and the resulting outputs. I went one step further, and decided to measure based on the time frame (short, medium, fast) to an anticipated purchase and the expenses for the lead nurturing that is being done for each of those groups. Certainly for you the break-down may be different. I’m a big fan of the old KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) philosophy so I go with the core things that matter to both marketing and sales and that is their possibility of conversion or how “warm” are they.

Make sure your measures are actionable

The proof really is in the pudding here. By looking at this graph regularly I can identify several critical things in order to gauge success over time. First, are leads piling up in one of the tracks? If so, we aren’t moving them along effectively and need to take a look at our lead nurturing and/or sales activities in that group. Second, are there enough leads coming into the funnel to deliver the revenue we’ve forecasted for the period. Over time, you will get a better perspective of conversion rates and how many leads you need to generate a certain level of sales. This certainly helps when you need to ask for more budget $$$ to fill the pipeline. Third, from a budget perspective you can see where you spend your budget and whether or not it is delivering the leads you expected. Once you identify where the problems are you can do more investigation into that particular area simply by digging into the raw data behind the item with a simple click instead of searching for the needle in the haystack.

Don’t stop at the marketing team

As you can see, leads are tracked all the way to revenue. By measuring all the way through you can clearly see whether or not your marketing activities are having an impact on sales. If not, you have some work to do. If they do, how can you make it better? Or you may find that some of the activities you are spending a lot of money on are preventing you from being able to spend where you are generating the biggest results.

So go big, be bold. Measure it and see how your team stacks up. If you don’t like what you see, fix it. If you do, congratulations! Fuel an environment where old and new school thrive.

Filed under Marketing Operations. Tagged Marketing Operations, marketing strategy, Return on Marketing Investment, ROI, Success Measures

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