The 3 measurable social media engagement aspects.

• Activity - The metrics we are interested are in the number and frequency of actions one’s organization is taking on social media including but not limited to; blogging, tweeting, posting, promoting, etc. The focus is on the outbound share of information from the company.
• Interaction – Here is where we listen to the audience. the metics here report on how the audience is engaged with your social media. Metrics include; followers, comments, sharing, user created content, sharing, etc.
• Success metrics – measuring the buzz or amount of content out there doesn’t do much until you start to measure against the activities taken due to your social media efforts. Revenue creation, lead development, other finical metrics.

Now we have our three categories of metrics we are interested in. Our next step to get to six is to break these aspects into quantitative and qualitative measurements.

Activity – The things your social media campaign initiates / posts

• Quantitative: Measurements of the number of posts, Update frequency, types of posts, etc.
• Qualitative: Measure and review comments left on posts

Interactivity – Responses from the audience and audience created content

• Quantitative: Reports here include: # of followers, # comments, # views, amount and frequency of user created content.
• Qualitative: Here is where we track the “Buzz”, both positive and negative by reporting on customer sentiment, Content of posts and comments.

Success metrics – Here’s where we look for the rewards to our social media efforts.

• Quantitative: Measure the number of leads, the number of sales, other metrics such as the reduction of support calls, etc.
• Qualitative: Success stories, learnings, other activities that build a repeat customer.

Social media reporting is a necessary step in protecting one’s brand while maintaining a strong customer base that is happy about your products and services. If your social media plan is one way, just posting to the social media networks, you will quickly find that you may not be helping yourself as the community will start looking for you to listen. If you are not listening and responding, the community can switch from loyal customers to vocal negative reviewers who get their message in front of your potential customers before you had a chance to sway the sale.

Before we dive into a review of any particular we need to discuss what is a web conferencing client and what features does it need for the job at hand. Then we can evaluate the client’s current request and future needs to start determining which software best fits the organizations needs.

Let’s take a quick look and discuss features that all web conferencing software packages should have.

• Presentation Sharing: This would be the key element of any web conferencing software. You need to share information to others who are not in the same room with you.  Typically your presenter will normally speak to Microsoft PowerPoint presentations or Apple Keynote presentations. Your presentation software should be able to present these files without the presenter needing to run the parent application on their computer.
• Application / Desktop Sharing: Another key feature is the ability to show the presenters desktop or current application. Screen sharing is useful for demonstrating software, collaborating on presentations, and making changes to documents as the group meets.
• Text Chat: This feature is not used enough by presenters but is key feature allowing  attendees to type questions, problems or anything as they need  during the presentation, to be viewed by the presenter or a moderator. Moderators can handle any chat requests behind the scenes allowing the presentor to continue with the presentation to the larger group.
• Record and play back: Digitally recording presentations has become a more key feature now days as presentations are saved for later sharing & training sessions are recorded for later review.
• White board (shared): This feature allows users to make notes or draw diagrams on a whiteboard like window.  Sometimes an idea needs to be drawn where a verbal or text description is not enough to convey a point. The white board is key to collaboration.
• Live Video / VOIP: We group these together but the ability to hook a live camera (web cam or other) to the presentation to share video, and the ability to stream audio via voice over IP, not only cuts down on the use of a phone system, but keeps your voice and group audio recorded with your presentation.

The list above reviews the basics of any web conferencing software, and you will find almost all vendors have these features.  Lets look at some advance features or other “nice to have” features that will help separate the vendors apart.

• Polling: Polling provides instant feedback and polling of your audience. We have used it in the past to gauge a level of expertise in the audience at the beginning of a presentation to tailor our presentation to the audience. We have also used it in the end of a presentation to find out which attendees we should touch back with. Polling is not the same as surveying, but that is a different topic.
• Remote desktop or application sharing: If you have 2 presenters, or need to be able to see someone else’s desktop, you will need remote application sharing to allow presentation control to switch. Application sharing is key in collaboration for internal meetings when working on document revisions or showing what the other participant is speaking to.
• File deliverability: Presenters can upload files for participants to download during the presentation. Helpful for passing out materials to those that attend without gathering email addresses and sending afterwards.
• Customization features: Looking to brand your web conferencing portal or create your own help system for your presentations? Authoring tools or customization options will need to be enabled for your account.
• Customer support: As we are using a vendor’s software for web conferencing, we need live support for when participants can’t connect, or have trouble with the software.
• Elearning: These are modules built into the software that allow for structured distance learning with proper tests taking modules and student monitoring.

List of vendors to research for your web conferencing software solutions.

Part of the project was to develop a plan that can be presented to senior management to acquire the needed funds.  We struggled for a bit to show how each tactic of the campaign would drive traffic and leads to the site as data trees and wireframes were to complex for a PowerPoint slide.

We settled on a circular visualization, showing how each campaign tactic drives traffic directly to the web site or other tactics which ultimately drives website traffic.

View the larger visualization

The chart can get more and more complex. This visualization technique is used to map cancer and the human genome, but can easily be used to map out connections in a campaign or even more. We are looking to use this visualization technique to map visitor behavior on websites, search traffic to campaign goals, even leads to sales.

The Web is User Driven

Internet users are proactively seeking products and services on the web at a time when they are closer to a purchase. Will your company appear in their search results when they search on anything other than your business name? Search engine marketing is an easy and effective way to reach your customers at the time they are searching your businesses products or services before they make a purchase decision with your competitor.

Paid Search is Measurable

It would be hard to find a more measurable marketing effort out there today. Paid search marketing allows you to directly correlate your cost per click to sales. As every showing of your ad and click provides valuable answers to your performance questions you will gain immense insight into your customers and their buying cycle. Find out What keywords lead users to your Website? What ads interest potential customers? How many visitors from those clicks become sales leads?

Paid Search is Cost Effective

Paid search works differently from most advertising models where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Your business will still show in results and gain branding, but you only pay when a search visitors clicks on your advertisements. There is no minimum, and you can control your monthly costs.

Messaging

Due to the measurable results of search engine marketing, keywords and ad messages can constantly be tested and improved. The most successful words and messages can be included in your other marketing tools and programs such as marketing materials, your Website and direct marketing. Not sure which message will work better for a new ad campaign, paid search give almost instant A:B Message testing.

Most recently I was reviewing a design concept along with a site wire frame and came up against one of the top mistakes made by companies and agencies trying to be different  on the web. Changing the link cue information. 

Normally when you think of links on a web site, they consist of some text, in a different color, with an underline under the linked text. this has been the standard design for hyperlinks on thee internet forever. 

It is designers and clever programers who take this standard practice and change it to fit their designs, which then make their site less accessible for the viewing world. 

In the site design concepts I was recently reviewing, the hyper links on this sites homepage were a separate color from the base text color, but not underlined. The weight was similar as well as the font size. 

Other designers have fallen to keeping link and body copy text color the same, while only underlining hyper links.  Others have found that making links a lighter color, but without the underline is a way to make their links known. 

The main problem is that links need to stand out. Have a strong visual cue that they are links and provide information about where they may take the visitor, or user.  Too many times as a web site visitor or user do I find myself asking, which link should I be clicking on or where should I go next on this site. 

I like to follow a few rules. 

• If the link is in the body copy, is should be of the same font weight, and style of the sounding text. It should be underlined and of a different color to stand out from the sounding text. One can escape these rules for navigation and other link/ list areas. (the tag cloud is not underlined as it is defined as a link area. )
• Avoid using underline to stress words in you body copy. As we are reserving the underline for links, placing under lined text on a page poses conflicting visual cues for the viewer. 
• Links to separate pages should be place apart from each other. Wikis seem to fall to this rule as they try to link to other articles as much as they can. In the same breath, don’t make links smaller. you want users to click on your links, so making them harder to click isn’t going to do you any favors. 

Jacob Nielsen has some more guidelines for visualizing links
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html

Starting today if you type “me” into the google search bar, you will find a link to create your own profile on Google. 

Once you get into the process you will fill in some semi personal information about your self. Places you lived, worked, attended school, along with other personal traits which people looking for you might know are asked. You then are allowed to ad in some links to your picassa album, linkedin profile, personal homepage, blog, whatever. 

Here is what my google profile looks like to users: http://www.google.com/profiles/jaystein

    

Google Profile for Jaystein

One is left to ask, “does Google need this information, and what about one’s privacy and security?” 

As with anything on the web, post at your own risk, but having another way to get your website, business, or blog indexed by Google may not be a bad idea.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is planning to regulate online social marketing. Yes, that includes blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social networking.

In short the FTC proposes that bloggers and sit owners may be held liable for any false claims made about products or services.  While the FTC may focus on 3rd party endorsements, it will benefit all marketers to make sure any claims fit the typical results your users and customers will find. 

The common trend we will see is that the online marketing space will be enforced by the same standards for print media.

Myspace has launched a Welcome Back campaign recently to get users to increase usage. It seems emails are being sent to users who have recently logged in to Myspace, after not logging in for a period of time myspace has deemed too long. 

The email (Screenshot below) is a simple 3 action email promoting some of the new features to the service. 

1. Promote the streaming music services

2. Find and add friends via your webmail address books

3. Friend finder (similar to linkedin or facebooks people you may know)

myspace welcome back email

Will this increase usage or will people leave myspace for the same reasons they did before?

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz.org has come up with the following chart to show how the Google’s ranking system has changed over the years. 

Read the full post at: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-over-time-

By the 2008 NFL season NBC jumped ship and switched back to Adobe flash for video streaming citing the stat 98% of internet-connected computers have flash.

Now Major League Baseball is making the same move, leaving Silverlight for Flash. After one year of using Silverlight, MLB switched back to Flash due to problems plaguing Microsoft’s player. Saturation of the Flash player along with some major glitches that happen at last years opening games, made cause for the switch. 

Silverlight still provides coverage for NBA, NCAA events though CBS College Sports, and provides streaming for Blockbuster’s MovieLink and Netflix’ Instant Watch. Video services such as Hulu, ABC video player, Youtube, Vimeo, and countless other embrace flash technology for their online video players.

The first quarter of 2009 has ended and we are already moving strong into Q2, but have you looked back at your email campaigns? How were the Q1 email open rates? Unique clicks? Conversions?

Have you looked at your metrics to see how your year has started? How you compare to last year? 

If your open rates are down, it may be too easy to say, it’s the economy, but this is just an excuse for lower than expected numbers. 

Even if sales are slowing, your email campaigns need to retain current customers, and nurture the leads you do have. Make your email campaigns count for as marketing budgets shrink, your campaigns need to become stronger.

Take advantage or trigger initiated email campaigns, and auto responders to keep your site visitors in touch with your message and products. Invest now in analytics to know where your visitors are going and how to steer them in the right direction. Use abandonments to your advantage and follow up with users by email with product information and offers from which they had interest in but did not buy. 

If your Q1 was less than stellar, make Q2 count, and focus on your customers and keep your email campaigns targeted.

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon – from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

Read the rest of the article at Comscore.

From Adobe:
Deliver rich, social experiences on the web

The Adobe Flash Platform and Facebook Platform provide the ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web. Flash is available on more than 98% of Internet-connected PCs, so people can immediately access the applications, content, and video that enable social interactions. The Facebook Platform is used by millions of people everyday to connect and share with the people in their lives. Together, both platforms allow you to:

Share: Create rich interactions for users to share with friends.
Have fun: Make games social; let users compete against their friends.
Connect: Let users connect to your RIAs with Facebook Connect.
Solve problems: Build RIAs that harness the power of community.
Reach people: Reach millions of Facebook users through social distribution.

The new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API, fully supported by Facebook and Adobe, makes it easy to build applications that combine the strengths of the Flash Platform and Facebook Platform.

Get the code: http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/
Learn more:  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook/

Intuit, the maker of TurboTax is trying to drive new followers to their Twitter feed. 

The concept of aggregating tweets and syndicating them on web pages isn’t new, but one has to wonder if tweets work as PPC adverts. Normally tweets are aggregated via side bar widgets or other implementations on a website. 

Marketers will need to quickly find an answer to how valuable is a twitter follower and if one can use Twitter effectively to find new customers over customers who already have an invested interest in your brand.

The alert box reads:

Increase traffic by showing your best ads most often
Ad groups using the “Rotate Ad Serving” option shows ads roughly evenly. However, an ad group’s best ad typically performs about 15%-50% better than the ad group overall. To maximize traffic, we recommend using the “Optimize Ad Serving” option, which balances showing new ads to determine their quality and showing ads with high clickthrough rates more often.

In short, Google will determine your better perfuming ads and run them more than the lower performing ads. This is great if you are looking for traffic to reach your website and that’s the only metric you are tracking. Google delivers more ads that will result in more clicks to your web site, and Google will be rewarded with your PPC invoice.

What’s the downside?
If your campaign is not monitoring conversions from your PPC campaign, there isn’t a big downside. Traffic is reaching your site, maybe your ads start to get throttled if you are reaching the top of your daily allowance, but overall not a bad situation. Your best ads are being shown.

If you are looking for conversions, you may have shot yourself in the foot. If the lowest performing ad brings in 200% more conversions or purchases than your top clicked ad, you can quickly see the problem. Your best performing ad, which brings in revenue for your organization is not being shown as much, and Google is reaping the benefits of all the traffic from the high CTR ad, not your sales department.

Lesson to walk away with

• Set up your website to track conversions from your PPC and your CPM campaigns to best inform yourself as to what is reaching the market and what is benefitting your bottom line.  
• Monthly, at least, spend the time to look at your analytics and PPC reports to make sure customers are reaching the destinations and conversion are taking place. Make adjustments to the campaign and creative as necessary. 
• Don’t be afraid to test, but make sure you are testing properly. (Using the ad optimizer isn’t always bad.  But make sure your priorities are well defined) 
• If you are not sure what is working best, ask for help. A proper Search marketing vendor can make your campaigns work more efficiently.

The approach I’m referring to is the email campaign or communication that does not use any live text, but images to place the selling message into.  I’ve pulled out an example from my spam folder to show. 

Click image to view larger Kohls email with Images loaded

Click image to view larger Kohls email with images not loaded

These images are of an email from Kohls department stores.  Upon loading the email into the preview pane of my email client (apple mail) we are presented with large white space and image symbols.  The bits of Live text on the email are all in the footer with standard boilerplate CAN-SPAM opt-out instructions.  The marketing message is not available to the reader without images.  

Click image to view larger PopCap Games email without images loaded

Click image to view larger PopCap Games email with Images

This next example is from PopCap games. 

Notice this communication makes use of live text much more effectively. In fact, by switching between the images loaded and images not loaded examples, you will notice very little use of text in graphics. Proper alt tags are used for the header and main image as well. 

How can Kohls and marketers like it improve their email campaigns?

To prove that we as email marketers can move away from solid graphic marketing emails to a better solution, I took some time to quickly re-build the Kohls email into a proper mixed live text and graphic email.

Click image to view larger Kohls live text email without images loaded

Click image to view larger Kohls live type email with images loaded

By using inline css styles and spliced images I was able to quickly get the Kohls email to be close to the 100% graphic version they sent out.  With images not loaded, a email recipient can read the message of the email enough to make a decision if they wish to click a link, or click the load images button on the email client to see the email in full graphic state.

On this email we were even able to bring in the direct to site navigation at the top of the email which before was just text in a jpg using image maps.

I understand that stores like Kohls have campaigns where a lot of emails go out, if not daily. A simple template system and proper html coding will make your open rates increase, and return better ROI then having your images not viewed at all.
 

Rules to follow:

1. Place as much live text into your emails as possible.
2. Careful use of CSS and your customers will not notice a difference in the designs.
3. Code the emails to be cross browser, cross email application compliment. Not al email clients are the same. (office 2008 does not use background images, yahoo email will not render past 8 nested tables)
4. Test your email with images off.  (use the web developer toolbar in firefox or send to your email client and do not accept images)
5. If text is in a graphic, try to have it elsewhere in live text (Use alt tags, on buttons that say click here, have a text link on the page as well)
6. Make your designs simpler. Don’t spend too much time to design a masterpiece of layout design to have it not looked at or a total of 30 seconds.
7. Set up a html template system to cut down on design and coding time.

As Google Analytics is the platform choice for small businesses, lets look at how to set up flash for event tracking.

By using the javascript tracking tags on your site, Google Analytics allows you to track flash actions along with other javascript actions. From menu selections, ajax reveals, you can get creative with what you are looking to track. You can even set your flash video players to track how long a user watched a video. 

Option 1:

Use the _trackPageview function

You can assign a page filename to any Flash action with this function, and enter that filename into the appropriate goal or funnel step. Important: Please note that your Analytics tracking code and calls to _gat._getTracker must be placed on the page above the call to _trackPageview.

1. To track an event, call _trackPageview() with an argument specifying a name for the event. For example, calling: pageTracker._trackPageview(“/purchase_funnel/page1.html”);
   will cause each occurrence of the the calling Flash event to be logged as though it were a pageview under the name /purchase_funnel/page1.html. The argument must begin with a forward slash and be in quotes. 
2. The event names may be organized into any directory style structure you wish. The path/filename argument to _trackPageview need not represent an actual URL on your website.

Flash Code Examples

on (release) {
// Track with no action
getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/folder/file.html');");
} 

on (release) { 
//Track with action 
getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/folder/file.html');"); 
_root.gotoAndPlay(3); 
myVar = "Flash Track Test"; 
}

onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/folder/file.html');");
}

 

Option 2:
A more advance option is to use the open source Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component.

The GA for flash tracking component enables you to track specific events and functionality in your flash movies and seamlessly communicate with Google Analytics for tracking. It gracefully handles any DOM issues that could cause problems in other types of flash tracking using GA. 

For tutorials on how to implement GAforFlash into your Flash applications visit these sites. 

http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/
http://www.hmtweb.com/blog/2009/02/how-to-track-flash-in-google-analytics_08.html
http://www.insideria.com/2009/02/using-google-analytics-within.html

Ecomagination website: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

FLAR Toolkit: http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

Twivia (@playtwivia)
Twivia will ask a trivia question and the first person to @reply the answer gets points, specified in every Tweet. The answer is tweeted to all so you are not left wondering if your answer was correct. 

Tweetbomb (@tweetbomb)
Tweetbomb will pick a random twitter user (from it’s followers) for the Tweetbomb followers to ping. Players/ followers are then to @reply with absolutely no text to the username chosen. The chosen Tweetbomb recipient hope to gain new followers and it should ad a new fun time activity to your afternoon.

BeatMyTweet (@beatmytweet)
BeatmyTweet  is a another puzzle game but this time sends a scrambled word out. Players are then to unscramble the word jumble and reply with the answer.