The way we’re taught to measure and report on online paid media is by attributing direct transactional value to conversions as a result of clicks on tracked links. If you buy a lot of banners space this is great and pretty straight forward way of measuring the direct impact.

But is buying media space the only thing you do to attract new customers? Highly unlikely. You probably invest in SEO, E-mail marketing and run a couple of social media profiles as well. Most likely you report and measure these channels the exact same way; a tracked link where you attribute the value to the last click.

The problem with attributing all value to the last click

There’s nothing wrong in measuring and reporting on transactional value from your last touch points. But there’s however a giant problem if this is the ONLY way you look at your analytics data.

Then you won’t get buy-in to do anything that costs money but cannot be tracked and reported on with a tracked link. How does that resonate in social media when investing in your product and your customers are the winning strategies?

The reason we have the, now so common,  Twitter and Facebook profiles full of “Come and check us out, click here”-messages is just beacuse of the way we’ve learnt to measure and track paid media; by tagging and tracking a link.

These Social media profiles then rather become an attmept to satisy your internal customers (your managers) rather than trying to satisfy your real customers (the transacting customers). Because how do you attribute sales to that customer you helped in a forum, or that Youtube videos series with educational videos? Sounds like a good thing to do, but hard to prove how it relates to transactional value right?

Part of the solution is to look at assisted conversions

I’m all for justifying the reason for doing, any business not working that way is a dangerous business. However, you should never become a victim of your own measurement model.

I think it’s unlikely that the last touch point channels are going to change dramatically over the next years, what is changing though are the assisting channels that leads up to these conversions.

Let’s take an example; you’re being sent a Facebook message by a friend of yours with a funny video from Blendtech, you click it and land on Youtube, you laugh a bit and the close that browser tab. One week later your mom calls you and ask what to buy in present for you dad. You perform a branded search on “Blendtec blenders” click and land on Blendtec’s product page. You then copy the link and e-mail you mom who then buys the blender.

I know, not your everyday example but also not very unlikely. Tell me how your CPA report is attributing any value to that Youtube video?

Was the link easy to share? If you knew this behaviour existed, could you have made any features on your site aiding this type of transaction?

If you treat your last attribution report like god, then nothing of the above is likely to ever happen and you’ll stick with your Facebook page where you spam your poor “fans” with message after message with tracked links, and it’s more of a distraction than the asset it could have been.

Simply illustrated, your assisting channels leading up to a conversion could very well look like this:

There can be endless of assisted conversions (the whole offline world!), for the simplicity in this case I just illustrated 1 assisted conversion, and I’ve just made up the path in a random order. Your Google Analytics will tell you the exact path of your assisted conversions.

If you invest in TV-commercials your branded search traffic is probably going to increase as a result, as well as your direct traffic of course. A strong content strategy which resonates well in social channels, where you invest in producing whitepaper and holding webinars – unless you ask for personal details as payment to attend or download, there’s little you have to track and attribute and sales as a result.

This is not a future challenge to solve, this is today’s challenge to solve. We have no shortage of metrics to measure, quite the opposite actually, but we’re struggling with understanding how to correctly attribute economic value to our marketing efforts.

The solution won’t be that you can accurately track every single cent, the solution will be to intelligently look at the sea of metrics you have, and see if you can find relationships between them and your financial transactions.

Is Google Analytics telling you that Social Channels is leading to branded search, then what are your social metrics telling you? Is a lot of comments on your slideshare presentation making it more sticky, hence making it appear in search?

No one said this is going to be easy, and we’re been spoiled for too long with a model that was too easy for it’s own survival.

Baekdal.com recently wrote about the value, or actually the non-value, of traffic coming from the Social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. The problem with StumbleUpon Baekdal argues is the high traffic volume and the low conversion. He then explains very well why StumbleUpon sends loads of traffic and why the conversion will always be low.

Low value traffic from StubleUpon

Whilst the direct referral traffic may be to little value, there is one important part missing in this analysis; ranking signals to Google and other search engines.

StumbleUpon as ranking signal to Google

When looking at the referral data in Google Analytics and the direct attributed economic value the picture is not very nice. A lot of traffic that doesn’t generate any sales is not the kind of referral traffic you really want.

But a lot of traffic coming from StumbleUpon must mean that people on the social bookmarking site are sharing Baekdal.com links, and a lot of it as well.

Whilst I don’t have any data to support my theory, I’d like to argue that just as a link being shared on Twitter and “liked” on Facebook, a shared link on StumbleUpon must be a valuable ranking signal to Google. And I don’t mean that the actual StumbleUpon link with Baekdal’s page will rank, but the actual Baekdal.com domain will be getting the credit.

Thus the result of the link shared on StumbleUpon will make the bakedal.com pages rank potentially higher on Google hence sending more traffic from Google.

Ranking signals to Google from StumbleUpon

Readers and Baekdal, what do you think?

My very talented friend Minter Dial (The Myndset) have together with Yael Rozencwajg (Yopps) have spent a lot of time explaining how to look at the real value of  a facebook fan and our social networks. Just to make it more sticky they’ve branded it as the value of a Facebook fan.

Actually the title should have been “6 steps to understanding the real value of a [insert and social media channel here] fan”, but that doesn’t quite have the same ranking potential in search engines.

So how do we go about to solve this multimillion dollar question?

Haven’t every digital marketing agency in the world (that sells Facebook ads) already answered this question? Reading the publications available on the topic the value of a Facebook fan is anything from a couple of $ cents to a few dollars.

The problem with all of these studies are that they don’t measure the value of a Facebook fan. They measure the Cost of Acquiring a fan, or in best case the Cost of Acquiring a customer (CPA). That’s a very bad metric for measuring the potential value (or non value) of a Facebook fan.

Instead you have to attribute the actions, activities and information taking place on your Facebook page  and attribute this to your bottom line objectives. Easier said than done in today’s digital multichannel environment. Probably the best existing solution today to track and prove any economic value from Social channels is to use Google Analytics Multichannel Funnel and look at the Assisted Conversions (requires that you have properly setup your goal paths).

Minter and Yael have made a great 6 step guide on how you should think about the real value of  a facebook fan.

Real value of a facebook fan

Source: http://themyndset.com/2012/02/what-is-the-value-of-a-facebook-fan/

A brief discussion around the topics of “Mapping Social Media profiles with Customer records and how to Reward Social influencers” with some bright people at the ICE conf 2012 London.

Nick Garner, Global Head of Search Unibet - Pantelis C. Kotopoulos CRM Strategy – Regional Alignment Manager (Established Markets) Unibet – Tim Axon, CRM Director at International Mobile Sportsbook Company.

Successful Social Media programs are seldom accidental. Whilst you as an observer only see the tactics it’s important to try to also understand the underlying objectives these tactics steam from.

Razmus Svenningson, Ex Head of Social Media Strategy at Betsson Group, is a smart guy and one of the leading names within Social media and iGaming.

At the ICE conference 2012 London he confronted the audience with a crystal clear message; Success in social media doesn’t start with the tactical tools and technologies, but rather with what you as a business wants to accomplish.

Starting that now so common Facebook page may not at all be a top priority if you’ve properly made you due diligence and understood your organisation’s specific needs.

If you’d like to hear more from Razmus follow him on twitter here.

When I Googled Social CRM, the first thing that comes up as Suggest Search was ”Social CRM definition” – add to that 7 510 000 search results. That tells me we’re struggling to define the subject.

When we talk about such extreamly wide and generic topic as Social Media, I think it’s fundamental to break things down to ”What we really do; the concrete and tangible things”.

Paul Greenberg, a leading authority in the CRM landscape describes Social CRM shortly as “…the companies response to the customers conversation”. 

When customers have a bigger say than ever and good ideas are the ones that spread, what is a good framework to use when embarking on a Social CRM program for your company? In this presentation from ICE Conf 2012 London I show you the 5 keys to Social CRM as well as a few pick on how we’ve applied those at Betclic Everest.

This is going to be a slightly unconventional post, but recently I’ve been hooked on a new hobby. Here’s my story on how social media played in, and how successful companies use this to their advantage.

What for me started out with a single goldfish a few weeks ago have now taken serious proportions. Having educated myself and aided the poor goldfish with creative solution for a goldfish bowl filter, my interest quickly swayed to the marine side of the hobby… Nano reefs.

A couple of weeks later, having spent endless amounts of sleepless hours on forums, I now sit with here with a newly acquired 30L (8g) Marinus Nano Cube, Reverse Osmosis water purifier, few kilos of rock and a “sea” of other equipment and tools. The best part? In about 2 months time I may even be able to add a little shrimp to the tank (the water has to go through a certain cycling process).

So what does all of this have to do with Web strategy and Social media marketing?

After having been hooked on the idea starting a Nano Reef tank, I started my online research on what I needed to commence. Rest assure that I’vent been any near close to a trade show, a TV ad, print ad not even an paid online banner have influenced my buying decision.

So what have I been influenced by? By people and brands that could provide the information I was looking for, that could give me answers on questions and that seemed to be an authority within their field.

Although a number of sites, people and brands have passed through my eyes the past week, two really cought my attention and became my most visited sites:

• Marindepot.com (Online shop for all things marine aquarium)
• Nano-reef.com (Forum with loads of friendly and experienced Nano reef keepers)

So what is it Marindepot.com does so well?

Remember the 5 key areas of a successful social media program? Let’s look at a few excellent examples of how Marindepot.com does it:

Listening

I don’t know the organisation or technology behind their contact center. Regardless if they use tools such as Radian6 to keep up with forum mentions or just manually monitor a few key threads, they are actively listening to conversations. I’ve seen this being excellent on their owned social media channels, but also on forums such as Nano-reef.com:

Talking

Marindepot.com has an excellent content strategy in place based on educating their customers and prospects, both in how-to-use as well as in new product offerings. Blogger, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the propriety channels that Marindepot.com are publishing their content in, that’s secondary though.

A big issue I had was to understand how to mix the saltwater, after a while I understood from Nano-reef.com posts that I probably would need to go for a Reverse Osmosis unit. Being a total newbie to that Marindepot.com obviously had the answer:

Supporting

It’s one thing creating great branded content that your follower base responds with. It’s another thing being able to actively support your customers and prospects when needed. @wborroto had a question on the salinity of the water and Marindepot.com had a public twitter reply back the very same day:

Energizing

Although it’s standard on all online shops these days to have public customer reviews and ratings displayed, it’s probably still one of the best ways to energize your customers. Amazon has gone a step further and added wish lists. I would have added social sharing options once you have written the review, I’d be more prone to share my review than randomly Like or Tweet a product page.

Embracing

Embracing your customers almost literally mean “to hug them”, to take them inside your business and let them have a say. or at least let them belief and feel that they have a say. Many companies have chosen branded forums as their tactic for embracing their customers. Turn your browser to forum.marindepot.com and you’ll find a branded InstantForum.net setup. How well they are using this forum for research and potential customer focus groups is unknown, but they are at least on a good start. If not, their SEO-team is most likely enjoying it.

And how does Nano-reef.com and other forums fit into the equation?

I’d easily estimate that a very large percentage of Marindepots.com customers are also members of some online forum dedicated to marine aquarium life. It’s here where the decisions happens, it’s here where people go for advice and shopping tips. If you’re not stocking the products that are being talked about, you’re going to lose. If you don’t listen to the feedback and get a crisp picture of what your core influencers are thinking, then you’re going to lose as well.

This is not about reaching out the the forum admin and asking him to sweet talk your products in return of some free perks, this is about making really good things for real, things that works without taking cheap short-cuts that will back fire on you. This is about being a transparent and honest business having a real passion and commetiment to what they do.

Marindepot.com; hats off!

Identifying your customers’ social media profiles, and map these to your customer records is a growing need going forward. In order to successfully be able to have a 360 degree view on your customers you must now know your customers various identities around the social web.

Why is this important?

You have upgraded your Customer Contact Center with a monitoring tool allowing you to monitor your brand, products and competition. But you constantly ask yourself who these people are, and without doing a manual search in your customer database you can’t tell 1) if they are customers 2) what type of customers. The data you get is great, but if you could connect it with your customer records, it would be so much more useful.

You may have identified 10 Twitter users that heavily influence your brand online. Would it not be useful to understand their buying behaviour, or if they are transacting customers at all? A low transacting customer but heavy positive online influencer  may benefit from a little extra free perk on his next purchase. But this will be very tedious and time consuming to scale if you don’t automate the process of identifying your customers public social profiles.

Identify your customers public Social Media profiles

The first thing to tackle is to identify your customer public social media profiles. This can be a time daunting exercise if done manually, and a virtually impossible one if you’ve a larger amount of customers. The trick is do make the customer do this for you. But how?

You can for instance try to entice your customers with various kinds of rewards in exchange for their social media profile ID’s. This could be done in many ways, here are a few ideas:

• Free shipping on your next order when your profile information is completed with your Facebook ID
• Fill in your Twitter handle to enter the Mega Bonanza draw
• Your profile is only 80% complete, connect your account with your social profiles to benefit from VIP support

Enable your site with Social login

Social login allows your customers to register and login on your website using a choice of their social media profiles. Customers don’t need to create and remember another username and password in order to login. Instead they can log in with the same credentials they use for their favorite social network, bypassing long and tedious registration forms. You should also be able to cater for existing customer and allowing them to link up old account with their social media profiles.

Vendors to watch in this space:

• Janrain – Capture gives your site social login and stores social network profile data and friends lists
• Gigya – Social Login is similar to Janrain’s offering and let’s your customers link their existing account with their social media profiles
• Salesforce - Accounts and contacts pulls data from Jigsaw and Data.com, complete overview of your customers social media updates

Update: I made a video interview on this topic with some great minds from the iGaming industry at the ICE conf London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGti7yMwTNU

This post is short. 3 things you need to grasp before jumping on a social media program:

• Know how to treat people with respect
• Understand that customer have more power than ever
• Realize that great ideas spread

I know, nothing new. But is the above relected in your business plan yet?

As usual I copied it all from Seth. Watch the video here:

My friend and great source of inspiration Alex Grech appeared at the idependentaly organized TED event in Malta called TEDx Valletta. Alex who’s currently finishing his PHD related to social media gave us a 18 min long inspirational talk about the disruptive forces social media has brought with it and how we as citizens are going to adopt to it.