Social Media ROI

Social Media Measurement: What You Are Doing Wrong

by Nichole Kelly · May 13, 2011

Are you measuring social media in isolation from your other marketing activities? Are you overwhelmed trying to understand how social media metrics compare to other marketing metrics? Do you want to have a holistic dashboard for all of your online activities? Today we will focus on how to leverage standard metrics from other digital marketing channels so you can finally have baseline metrics that mean something.

26 comments

2011 Trending Topic: Social Media ROI

by Nichole Kelly · April 21, 2011

Did you get a larger social media budget for 2011? Are you being pressured to deliver ROI from your new budget? As the buzz around social media finally made it to executive’s ears their willingness to open the proverbial purse strings loosened, but it came at a price that many marketers were unprepared for … accountability.

31 comments

How To (Successfully) Break The First Rule Of Social Media

by Ilana Rabinowitz · April 13, 2011

Rules can be helpful, but they can also close your mind to possibilities and immobilize you. When it comes to social media, the first rule you’re likely to be told is this:

“Never start a social media initiative until you know your objectives.”

Not only do I believe that it is possible to break this rule (and still be successful), but in two situations, you are better off if you ignore the rule. The first situation is when you are so stymied with how to get started and fearful of getting it wrong, that you end up sitting on the sidelines. The second is if you have tried using social media but are disappointed in the results because you thought you’d get thousands of Twitter followers in short order or have your video go viral, ignore the rule and start over without expectations.

54 comments

Skip The Fluff Puff Marketing And Fix What’s Broken

by Eric Brown · April 12, 2011

I have thought for some time that the impending social media bubble will at some point burst. I am a true believer that digital marketing done right will drive sales, however folks can get sidetracked pretty fast. That, coupled with many marketers delusional perception of success, and things can get pretty murky.

One must have a keen understanding of why the business is marketing in the first place, to sell more stuff. That’s it. Most of the other yap you are doing is fluff puff marketing and both it and you could go away and no one would notice … except the person who’s job it is to do the tasks that might get eliminated.

11 comments

What Can You Expect From Your Corporate Blog?

by Ilana Rabinowitz · March 24, 2011

The first rule of measurement is know your objectives so you know what to measure. That said, it’s a challenge to decide on objectives for a blog when you don’t know what the possibilities are. At Lion Brand Yarn Company, we outlined objectives before we launched our blog in 2008, but what we discovered was that we would benefit in ways that we did not imagine.

Of all forms of social media, blogging can be the most time intensive. It is also a tool that requires a sustained, long-term effort. But therein lies the power of this tool. Developing a rich bank of content that serves our audience has been an important asset to our company. Here are five benefits of blogging that we have enjoyed:

18 comments

When is 31 flavors more than 11.5 million?

by Heather Rast · December 3, 2010

A while back I read a great post by web analytics master Avinash Kaushik. He wrote a bit about data geeks and the mountains of information they routinely collect and build. Information about traffic source overlain with pageviews, special segmentation, abandonment rates and exit pages, ad nauseam. Great piles of information that are watched daily and reported weekly. It’s the stuff the big-wigs asked for once it became known that the web analytics package could surface the goods. All the company needs in order to get ahead is a little more information …

4 comments

Can Content Scale Using Automation?

by Jason Falls · November 29, 2010

StatSheet serves up automated reports of sporting events written, in standard journalistic prose, completely by computers. The sports statistics company in Durham, N.C., produces content pages for all 345 NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams and pumps game recaps and similar content composed by the site’s software which uses the box scores and raw data to fuel its stories.

Never mind that I was a sports journalist and publicity professional for 12 years and this software nearly commoditizes what I once called my profession. What this software does is gives us a peek into the possibilities of content based on data. Bear with me, here. This will make sense in a moment.

13 comments

Are You Playing The Social Media Game To Win?

by Jason Falls · October 18, 2010

I’ve developed an addiction to a silly iPhone game called Block-Off. It’s one of those dumb block removal games where, if you find two or more blocks of the same color connected to one another, you tap them and they disappear, realigning the columns. The various opportunities to remove similar blocks, depending upon the arrangement, makes it difficult to “clear the board” which you naturally think is the ultimate performance.

25 comments