For those unfamiliar, B2B2C companies are any kind of company that sells a product to an end user through a reseller or distribution channel. For example, Energizer batteries are marketed by the Energizer company, but you buy them through big box stores like Walmart and Target. In cases like this, how do you measure ROI? The answer is simple (but not easy).

First, analyze what mechanisms, digital marketing channels, and methods you have control over and have data for. We’ll keep using Energizer as the example. You have control over and data for advertising you’re running. You have your corporate website traffic data. You have your email marketing data. You have data from all of the social media properties you operate. You also have your end-game financial data, the amount of money you earned. You might even get sales data back from your resellers.

Next, select a long period of time that you’ve been using all of these digital marketing channels – six months or so. Take your financial data for that period and adjust it for timeliness. For example, if your resellers lag in reporting sales data by 4 weeks, adjust your financials so that the earnings are roughly when they actually occurred.

Using a package such as SOFA Statistics or SPSS, take each marketing channel’s data from that period and run a Pearson Regression Analysis on it vs. your revenues to see which channel’s activities most strongly correlate to your actual earnings. Chances are good it will be something audience-related, such as website traffic. The more people who come to your website, the more likely it is they’ll be positively exposed to the brand and end up buying your batteries.

Once you have identified the strongest correlation, you can test it for causality. Let’s say we find that website traffic most strongly correlates to sales. Over a reasonably long period of time such as a couple of weeks or a month, if you forcefully increase website traffic, do sales increase commensurately? If the answer is yes, you’ve got a causal relationship.

If you find a causal relationship for a digital channel, you can assign a value to that channel. Let’s say you had 100 visitors to the website and 50 battery sales a day before your test. Let’s say during the test period you forced that up to 150 visitors a day and 75 battery sales. The difference is the value – 50 visitors = 25 sales. Take the value of the sales and you have a value per visitor. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say a battery costs $1. 50 visitors = $25, or each visitor is worth $0.50. Now you’ve got something that you can plug into Google Analytics for goals and goal values.

Once you’ve identified something that’s a goal with an actual value for Google Analytics, the rest of the puzzle falls into place. You can now assign value to all of the activities that drive traffic to your website (in this example), and get a sense of what your ROI is for all your other digital channels and methods.

Applying this method to your B2B2C business model will give you a start for measuring your digital marketing ROI. After this, it’s a matter of refining your data, continuously testing and experimenting, watching your metrics, and analyzing your data for changes and serious anomalies.

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I was sitting in a diner recently, ordering some breakfast, when the waitress asked the patron next to me the very short question, “The usual?”. He responded with a nod and a mumble, followed by his breakfast far faster than mine.

At the local Vietnamese restaurant, I have a particular dish I enjoy and get all the time, regardless of whatever else I order. As soon as I walk in, I note that the staff has already started putting it together without my having to ask, and I’m always delighted to get it.

There’s a very good chance that the usual does exist at your company, even in businesses that don’t clearly appear to be service-based businesses. For example, I was talking to someone recently about their experience with a software company and one of the things that was lacking recently was “the usual” from their account manager, a weekly phone call. There’s a “usual” that went missing – and noticed.

Think about even the most basic of social media routines. If you blog daily and you miss a day or two, do people notice? Do they ask? If they do, then you’ve got a “usual” that clearly has value to them. I know that when I don’t have an opportunity to post #the5 on any given day, people let me know that “the usual” wasn’t served.

Here’s your homework: identify “the usual” that you serve, then figure out how to slowly tweak it over time so that it’s even more valuable, to the point where, when it goes missing, people notice and ask you about it.

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First, let’s start with a mind map. Take your pick of software – I use Mindnode on the Mac, but there are literally dozens of different packages. The key is this: whatever software you use must be able to export industry-standard export formats of outlines. The two key formats you’re looking for are OPML and RTF outline. Make your mind map until you’re happy with it. Here’s our example:

Now we dump this into an RTF outline to start.

For good measure, repeat the process as an OPML outline.

Let’s think about our eBook first. As you know, I’m a huge fan of Scrivener. Let’s take our mind map now and import the OPML file version:

Now you’re ready to write, with each branch of your mind map a document inside Scrivener:

If you’ve ever wondered how I outline stuff so fast, this is the method. But wait, there’s more! Let’s say you’ve got a mind map that’s also going to be the basis of a webinar presentation. (that in itself is a secret – start with one map and build 2 different pieces of content from it) Let’s take our RTF export that we did and visit our old friend Powerpoint:

Instant presentation. You’ve got all of your slides laid out exactly as you mind mapped them, and you’re ready to begin fleshing them out into a solid presentation. If you use Keynote for the Mac, you’ve got an intermediary step – using OmniOutliner (which probably shipped with your Mac), you’ll need to import the OPML file from earlier and export to Keynote directly from OmniOutliner.

If you’re a PC user, Scrivener for Windows does exist and performs the same functions, and of course, Powerpoint is the standard. All you’d need is a mind mapping package for the PC that exports OPML and RTF.

The power of mind maps to help you develop content in a non-linear fashion is incredible. With these simple methods, you can then take your maps and build content rapidly and robustly using your favorite writing and presenting packages. Take this method and see how many other uses you can find for it!

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Over the weekend I had the privilege of attending a seminar with Stephen K. Hayes, my teacher’s teacher, at the Boston Martial Arts Center. The weekend’s topics were many and varied, but I took my own advice (as I always do with Mr. Hayes) and brought my list of burning questions.

Here’s the sign of a master teacher: when you ask your burning questions, you get answers that either are or spawn a whole new line of better questions, even if the question seems relatively basic. You walk away with refined questions and a better direction of where you need to go in order to continue researching. Bad teachers either hand you an answer that shuts down a line of inquiry or hand you a useless answer that on the surface appears witty or insightful but really isn’t all that helpful.

For example, over the weekend, I asked Mr. Hayes about where I was in my study of the Heart Sutra and where I need to go next. The answer I got back was that the Heart Sutra was more or less the table of contents for an entire library of research known as the Wisdom Sutra. Talk about a deep but useful answer – I’ve now got an entire library to read and study along with the things I’m already looking at.

As an aside, talk about a humbling moment. “Hey, I’ve been practicing and reading this text for some time now and it feels pretty good!” “Oh good. By the way, you’ve been diligently reading the table of contents for the book. Here’s the actual book…” Facepalm moment.

No matter what you’re learning, seek out teachers who can help you ask better questions and get more direction in your studies. The best teachers will often give you awful news, too: you’re doing it wrong, but here’s the right direction, the correct way to go about your studies.

This applies to all fields of learning. For example, when you’re at a marketing or social media conference, bring your toughest burning questions and ask around to all of the speakers. Compare their answers and see who gives you tougher questions to go ask and research.

Ultimately, we know the wonderful and awful truth that we have sole responsibility for the answers to our questions, even with the best of teachers. Find the teachers you need in order to ask better questions (ultimately of yourself) so that you can get better answers.

My thanks to Sensei Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center and his entire team for hosting this event, and to Stephen K. Hayes for generously sharing his insights so that I have better questions.

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One of the most common questions I received over the last few days from CEOs and executives was, “Can you automate social media?” The question was asked not out of laziness, but out of trying to be as efficient as possible or being very resource-constrained. The answer is yes and no.

Yes, you can automate social media to an extent. I recently said that automation is one of the keys to success, and the way you tell what can be automated is anything that can be defined as a repeatable process with a predictable outcome. Some things in social media absolutely can be automated. You can automate posting certain static updates; tools like Buffer and Argyle Social do this very well. You can automate the collection and processing of data. Tools like Google Docs and Radian6 do this very well.

The answer is also no in the sense that there are parts of social media that you can’t automate because they fail the rule test of a repeatable process with a predictable outcome. When you sign into Facebook to see what your friends are up to, you’re doing a repeatable process but the outcome is highly unpredictable. Imagine how tasteless it would be to automate an update to every friend saying “Good morning! It’s a great day!” and then going in to read their news feeds and hearing about how someone’s cat died. It wouldn’t be a great day, certainly.

Responding to a prospect’s inquiry about doing business with you? That fails both tests – prospective customer lead generation is highly unpredictable (therefore not a repeatable process) and what they want of you certainly is not a predictable outcome. People want to do business with you for a wild variety of reasons.

The way I explained it to the folks who asked is like living in a house. You can absolutely automate the production of the house and automate a decent number of the tasks within, but you still have to provide the human presence that makes it a home. Someone still has to make decisions about what to cook for dinner, someone still has to read the kids a bedtime story, someone still has to fix that suddenly leaky faucet at 3 AM, someone has to walk the dog or weed the garden or mow the lawn.

Apply the rule test of repeatable process and predictable outcome to all of your social media activities and set the bar high. You’ll find out very quickly what can be automated and what cannot be.

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I say look at your analytics. (there’s a huge surprise) Specifically, look at your analytics for periods when your content simply wasn’t resonating. Here’s the Site Content report in Google Analytics. Let’s see when my content simply wasn’t getting eyeballs:

We see the end of May and around Thanksgiving of last year were especially unkind to the content, even though I was creating it. I was writing about whether or not you had a swipe file among other things, but I think a lot of people went on vacation that week – it was Memorial Day weekend.

Thus, I have content I can simply re-highlight: stuff that people missed because they weren’t around as much to read it. I’d be willing to wager the folks who did read it probably weren’t giving it a ton of attention either, as their thoughts were about the upcoming or actual holiday, too. From here, I can choose to re-highlight the content with a newsletter or feature it in social media, or perhaps revisit and rewrite it to improve it.

Opportunity is often where people aren’t – whether it’s blue ocean strategy in business or looking at your analytics and finding out when your content simply wasn’t popular. Look in your own analytics and see what hidden gems you can extract, polish up, and share.

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A manufacturer of a durable good (I can’t remember which company it was) apparently was facing a plant closure due to environmental concerns. They were faced with having to close the plant and building a new one in a permitted area. The problem was, the local government told them the plant had to be closed in 3 months, and the time to build a new plant was at least 18 months.

What was brilliant was their marketing campaign – they approached all the customers of their product and said, here’s the situation. They laid everything out and then said, we’re going to give you the opportunity to buy two years of inventory at favorable pricing right now so that you can stock up and not run dry while we rebuild. Amazingly, almost all of their customers took the deal, which not only kept their business alive, but gave them the capital they needed to build their new plant without taking on significant debt.

The second story was about how to deal with the inherent competition between using a distributor and selling directly to the consumer, a fairly common problem. Distributors hate competing against direct to consumer sales because in many cases, the manufacturer can undercut them on pricing or eat into their margins. Some companies get around this by setting up territories or forcing exclusive agreements, neither of which is a strategy to increase overall growth.

Goodyear, the tire company, went outside the box and started manufacturing an entirely separate line of tires for their distributors that were not in direct competition with their direct to consumer goods. They were sold by distributors who could market them as Goodyear branded tires, but with different features and benefits than the direct to consumer product. As a result, Goodyear effectively doubled what it could sell and kept its distributor network happy and profitable.

These two stories are just a sample of what’s been an amazing event. My thanks to the Riverside Company for having me as a speaker and permitting me to participate in the rest of the event (it’s invitation only to select CEOs and CFOs).

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Let’s say you’re playing tennis, and the game isn’t going so well. You decide that you need a “game-changing move”, pull out a shotgun, and blast the ball out of the air. Have you changed the game? Absolutely. Have you changed it for the better? No, not to mention likely injuring the other player. The game has not improved, but it has changed.

Business folks who use the term game-changing are indicating that the way they’re playing the game isn’t working right now, so they’re looking for some new trick, new tool, new easy-win button that lets them sidestep what’s wrong with their own game. The idea of the game-changer can be a symptom of either laziness or desperation.

Bad news: there aren’t many game-changers once you’re competent at the game. Ask Tiger Woods if a new golf club has ever seriously impacted his game once he was proficient at golf. Ask Mike Tyson if he ever learned a new punch that delivered ridiculous knockouts halfway through his career. Chances are the answer is no, not after their rookie days.

Think about things like social media. Is it a game-changer? Not really. If you’ve always been good at creating great content and talking to people who are talking to you, it’s not that much different today except for scale. Think about search engine optimization. Is it such a stretch to go from being findable in the phone book or on main street vs. being findable today? Once you understand the basic techniques, you’re really doing what you’ve always done, for good or ill.

Now ask top athletes, top stars, top performers how often they practice, how often they work on improving their game, how hard they work and making their game better, and you’ll likely hear that it’s something they obsess with daily. In fact, they’ll probably have dozens of little tips, tricks, and strategies that have improved their game significantly over the years, things that they would have wished to have known early on.

As best as you can, put aside your quest for game-changing until your existing game is exceptional. Make an exceptional game, and you’ll instead have your competitors fruitlessly scrambling in search of game-changers.

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1. Conversions: I look at the end results first. I look to see whether anything of value is being generated or not. Examples in your world might include sales, donors, or contributors.

2. Key performance indicators: These are the numbers that are directly connected to my end results. If sales are the end result, qualified leads are a key performance indicator because they’re directly connected, one step away. Examples in your world might be filled shopping carts in eCommerce, qualified leads in your sales pipeline, or pledged donors.

3. The database: I look at the database next. How much increased reach has become possible? This includes things like email subscribers, social media audience, etc. If I had to reach out and make an ask, how much heat could this generated?

4. Leading indicators: The last thing I look at are leading indicators, things like website traffic. These are numbers that hint at what could happen but are so disconnected from the end result that they’re not reliable. Website traffic is actually a great example – you could pump in thousands of visitors to your site, but if they’re the wrong target audience, then it won’t make an impact at all. There are lots of leading indicators that have some level of correlation, like the number of phone calls your sales team makes, the number of shoppers that walk in the door of your store, the number of registered voters of your political party in your region, etc.

What do I look for? Mainly, I look for changes in trends, inflection points. An individual day’s data isn’t really worth much unless you’re measuring the specific results of a short-term campaign. Here are four examples of what I look for:

The first example is an upward trend. This means that things are generally okay if up is good. The same is true of the second example. If down is good, things are okay. If down is bad, then at some point I need to pull the trigger and cease whatever activity is causing that slow decline to oblivion.

The third and fourth examples are key. In each, we see an inflection point (indicated by the red arrow) that shows how a trend changed. The key with inflection points is to detect them as early as possible and make decisions as soon as the data is reliable. The catch is that if you wait too long, the consequences may get progressively more difficult to alter.

The key to doing this is to have a trend line and understand your business cycle. For example, every week, my web traffic trend line looks like this:

Am I worried by those dips? No. My audience is largely a business crowd and so Saturdays are the lowest traffic day. The week declines until Saturday where it bottoms out. Then on Sundays, I ship my newsletter. That has the net effect of getting the week started and seeding traffic for a few days. In the case of my website, because there’s so much noise daily in the week, I have to scale back to a weekly view of the month in order to see general trends up or down.

When you look at your marketing metrics, what do you look for?

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Mark W. Schaefer’s Return on Influence

I enjoyed Mark’s book quite a bit as I think he did a great job of looking at influence overall. He did his homework for sure, interviewing dozens of people and getting different perspectives on what constitutes influence in the digital age. He also explores Klout and other influence scoring mechanisms and offers some solid basic advice on getting started. I would have liked for him to explore some of the stranger manifestations of influence, but that’s perhaps a good followup book. Overall? If you’re doing work in social media marketing or you care about influence, grab it.

Bonus item: when Mark interviewed me, I recommended picking up Robert Cialdini’s work on influence as well, from a psychology perspective.

Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff’s Fatal Sunset

If there was a book I’d nominate for productivity book of the year, this would be it. Give it to your employees and they’ll never, ever go on vacation again. Seriously. Fatal Sunsets is a collection of stories about mishaps, murder, and other incidents pulled straight from the headlines that makes you wonder why anyone travels without armed guards and body armor, from the disappearance of Natalee Holloway to unlucky vacationers getting sucked into a surf blowhole and shredded by volcanic rock. All that being said, Nemcoff also does a great job of explaining what should be common sense safety precautions to take when traveling so that you don’t end up vanishing mysteriously on a cruise ship (like don’t go getting dead drunk and hanging out by the railing alone) or incurring other holiday sorrows. Overall? I’d recommend grabbing it as long as you’re not prone to anxiety when traveling. If your personality is such that things like ghost stories and the news makes you anxious, perhaps avoid this one.

Jon F. Merz’s Ninja Apprentice

Ostensibly, this is a work for young adults, but for us regular ol’ adults, it’s also a terrific read and a race from start to finish. Jon Merz has taken his experiences in the martial art we both practice (he’s one of my teachers at the Boston Martial Arts Center) and turned them into a great young-adult read. I won’t give away any of the spoilers or the plot, but it’s a worthwhile adventure that I would have loved as a kid. For the parents who are content-aware, the book contains no sex but realistic and accurate violence (with appropriate consequences). It also contains accurate portrayals of several martial arts in it, notably Togakure Ryu ninjutsu, Kukishinden Ryu hanbojutsu, and their modern interpretations. Overall, if you’ve got a kid (or you are a kid inside) who loves an adventure read to far off lands, martial arts action, and other cultures, they’re going to love Ninja Apprentice.

Amusingly, Jon shopped this book around to a variety of publishers, all of whom said enlightened things such as “boys don’t read”. By the looks of the numbers for his book on Amazon, I’d say it seems like boys read plenty.

If you or your publisher have sent me books to review, they’re on my desk and I will get to them at some point. Pro tip: some publishers have started sending Kindle/eBook copies for review instead of dead tree editions. I can safely say that if you send a Kindle version for review, the chances of it getting reviewed in a timely manner are greatly increased, because I don’t have to lug the thing around.

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