From the monthly archives:

December 2010

Telling Your Social Media Fortune

by Stephanie Schwab · December 31, 2010

Inside a recent fortune cookie: “Statistics are no substitute for judgment.”

Putting aside that fortune cookies are no longer fortunes anymore, they’re aphorisms (or “sh**ty observation cookies” as my friends Constantin and Paull call them), this is a pretty good aphorism about social media.

While I believe that it’s essential that social media managers, and their marketing and PR colleagues, figure out how to measure the ROI of social media – the statistics part – I also think there’s an important judgment part of social as well.  Kat French says it’s about narrative and anecdote – that you’ve got to put aside the “idiot gauges” and figure out what the customer and brand impact really is.

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1 comment

How To Measure Content Interest Using Google Analytics and AddThis

by Jeff Larche · December 29, 2010

A while back I showed you how to visualize user interest in your content. It was the last of a trilogy of posts on Content Interest Index (CII). Now here’s a real-world way that you can measure CII on your site. It uses Google Analytics and the social sharing application AddThis. Both are free.

What are the benefits of measuring CII? You’ll be able to see, right in Google Analytics, how many people are emailing, “Liking,” Tweeting and in other ways loving your content. This is particularly important for content that moves people to buy something. The more people who are interested, the more eventually purchase!

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4 comments

Franchise Social Media Tools: The Customer’s Perspective

by Jason Falls · December 28, 2010

Elizabeth McGee had a problem. In late 2009 McGee, the chief financial officer at Apple Gold Group, a 70+ franchisee of Applebee’s Restaurants in Raleigh, N.C., was browsing through the organically grown Facebook pages of her company’s network of stores. While she was excited that the managers had taken the initiative to build connecting points with their customers on the growing social network, she was also concerned at the lack of brand continuity in messaging, logos and the like.

“It was a hodgepodge,” she told me. “In the beginning our biggest concern was around oversight and governance.”

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24 comments

The Magic Words

by Ike Pigott · December 27, 2010

Businesses are clamoring to hear the magic words that will let them know what to do in the social space. And those magic words are as familiar in everyday speech as they are absent in any real conversation about social media adoption:

Yes and No.

Simple Answers?

I have a bad feeling about this...I was on a panel discussion recently in Birmingham, where the theme was trends for 2011. Our audience was not the tweet-up insider crowd — I was pleased to see that most of them were from small businesses, and most of them didn’t look like Digital Natives. I was also pleased to find out that most of them were on Facebook, and nearly all of them had heard of Twitter, even if they weren’t active.

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7 comments

Christmas: A Breach Of Trust

by Jason Falls · December 24, 2010

We live in a new era. One of radical transparency. Wikileaks is exposing state secrets. Facebook is reconditioning us to share more of our selves, even if we don’t want to. Whether it’s making your buying preferences known to fuel smarter advertising delivery systems or leaking war strategies, the global democratization of information is forcing our hand — good or bad — to be one important thing: honest at all costs.

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12 comments

Innogage Offers Interesting Corporate Blog Platform

by Jason Falls · December 23, 2010

Selecting a corporate blogging platform hasn’t been very interesting lately. Nimble solutions like Tumblr or Posterous aren’t feature-heavy enough. Open Source options WordPress or Typepad are okay, but are often thwarted by corporate IT departments for being too “unstable” or “virus prone” or whatever new term IT has come up with to mask their disinterest in learning something new. Enterprise platforms have pluses and minuses with most of the latter being pricey when you look at WordPress and see zero dollars for software investment.

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7 comments

BREAKING: Newspaper Quietly Launches Hyper-Local Location-Based App

by Jason Falls · December 22, 2010

It appears the Cincinnati Enquirer is about to take yet another step along the scale of social media innovation by a traditional media member to help increase reader loyalty, advertiser commitment and continued relevance in their market despite the industry trends plaguing most of their brethren. I stumbled across a new location-based service application doing some research in the iTunes App Store called Porkappolis (iTunes link)– a hyper-local, location-based service focused on the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky market. The author of the app? Enquirer Media.

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28 comments

Who Runs Your Business: You Or Your Employees?

by Eric Brown · December 22, 2010

Who runs your business? Is it you or your employees? Which is better? Does it depend on the business?

Perhaps there is merit to both sides

This argument came up in a recent blog post discussion about keeping our business open longer hours, Want Higher Occupancy, Stay Open Longer and how, in doing so, our business increased noticeably on several basis points. The move caused a little riff from our employees as you might expect. However, in this instance I didn’t give them an option. Many of the comments we received from the post surrounded the topic of employee dissatisfaction, or perceived dissatisfaction, about extended hours in a field of work that typically closes up shop by 6 p.m. Staying open until 9 p.m. is perceived as radical.

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