We need to keep in mind two things:

1. “There is not such thing as Social Media ROI”; and,
2. “We should be asking ‘What is the big-picture goal and how do we appropriately measure this when using social media as a platform?’”

Indeed, talking about the “Social Media ROI” is like asking “What is the ROI of being in Newsweek?” The answer is: “Well that depends.” Are you placing an ad with a coupon for Lead Generation? Or perhaps doing a Branding-focused Ad? Is the CEO being interviewed in by Newsweek to address customer service issues? Or perhaps its a thought-leadership piece the President of your company has penned about the environment and your industry?

As a lazy marketer, I’ll choose to “stand on the shoulder of giants” and point you to three fantastic pieces that addresses how to really view the “ROI of Social Media” issue: 1) The Right Metrics for the Right Channels/Marketing; 2) Understanding the Right Metrics by understanding the Right Stakeholders; and 3) Remembering how the social media activity fits into the Customer Lifecycle.

1. Social Media Stakeholders
   Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing at Yahoo!
2. Social Media Analytics
   Coremetrics Whitepaper
3. Beyond Monitoring: Managing Social Media Engagements
   Chris Kenton, CEO of SocialRep

See more below:

1. “Social Media Stakeholders” by Laura Lippay (PDF Link: http://bit.ly/1zhEtO)

Laura Lippay resets the “You need to do Social Media” mantra that many are following and instead reminds us the following: 1) Remember what you’re using social media for (Customer Service, Branding etc); and 2) Do you have the right stakeholders in place to strategize, plan, and execute?

Her outline of the goals and stakeholders involved is not only a greater outline of understanding who needs to be invovled in what to succeed, but a great reminder that how you measure your Branding-based Social Media activity or your Lead-Gen focused Social Media Activity is dependent on who your stakeholders are.

All in all, it is a great piece and surprising that according to Bit.ly it has less than 30 clicks.

2. “Social Media Analytics” Whitepaper by CoreMetrics (Link)
Coremetrics’s whitepaper on Social Media Analytics goes into detail on how each type of social media activity (by channel) should be tracked on the tactical level.

3. “Beyond Monitoring: Managing Social Media Engagements” by SocialRep (Webinar)

Chris Kenton, CEO of SocialRep, gives a great webinar on reminding digital marketers to look beyond the tool and the platform to focus on remembering what it is the appropriate channels – not only for the audience – but also for what part of the lifecycle.

See EM's coverage: Click on the graph above

Closing Summary

As we continue to figure out how to measure Social Media and where it fits in Advertising, Marketing and Customer Relationships, it is important to go back to understanding the Customer Lifecycle and figuring out: 1) The Social Media activity impacts what part of the cycle; 2) Who are the typical stakeholders in the particular parts of the cycle; and 3) How do you translate what the stakeholders need to measure to what you can measure in the Social Media activity?

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For a number of years, I’ve spoken about SEO-PPC keyword management integration and I’ve spoken a few times about the need to integrate Social Media and SEO efforts. But what many of us have forgotten from time to time is that awareness via display can significantly impact search traffic and conversion.

Josh Dreller of Fuor Digital writes:

“As we move away as an industry from “the last ad click” methodology and start measuring all of the media interactions that influence users to perform our converting actions, it’s become clear that other engagement strategies should be considered within the media mix. In a recent campaign for one of my clients, 39% of all search conversions had a previous banner view in the mix. It’s very possible that a portion of those conversions would never had happened unless the banner drove a user to search.” (Emphasis mine)

Thirty-nine percent is a lot of paid search conversions that were assisted by display. Indeed, back in 2004, DoubleClick, working with Continental Airlines, did one of the most thorough and often referenced studies on view-through and found the following:

Click-through rates dropped slightly from 0.48 percent in the first quarter of 2004 to 0.43 percent in the second quarter, but view-through rates — which measure responses over time — grew considerably. According to DoubleClick, the view-through rate for Q2 measured 0.73 percent compared to 0.59 percent in Q1.

Take Aways

1. Is your team doing cross-channel tracking?
   People don’t experience media (and your brand for that matter) with a series of separate discrete media channels, and you shouldn’t track it as such.
2. Are you needlessly cutting Display for the sake of the ROI safety of Paid Search?
   Your C-level boss is breathing down your neck to ensure all marketing activities are ROI accountable and this sometimes means that display (online and offline like TV) gets cut for the sake of the trackable paid search. But maybe those sweet ROI numbers you’re getting on Google Adwords is driven by your local TV campaign?
3. Paid Search has limits.
   Many folks talk about paid search like it is the only game in town, but as Josh Dreller points out, conversion is a multi-stage process. Search is sometimes simply the final click before deciding to make a purchase.
4. Understand each stage of your customer purchase relationship lifecycle
   …And how you can help move the customer from awareness to customer to repeat customer and evangelist. Here’s how SocialRep define the customer relationship lifecycle, but your company is probably slightly different:
   

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Google Analytics: Tracking Online and Offline Worlds

For some time now, Google Analytics have offered the ability to track both website visits and television commercial impressions (views), if the commercial was bought via Google.

The graph has always shown a peak of what multi-channel analytics can look like: a single dashboard to see everything from TV commercials to mailed newsletters influences your website traffic and online sales. But TV Impressions v. Website Visits graph also begs the question:

What’s the correlation between TV Commercials and Website Views?

Understanding correlation and causation -essentially, understanding your media mix – is the holy grail and end goal of Multi-Channel Analytics. It’s one thing to track something and say “Gee golly, I can see my radio audience reach and PPC campaign on one sheet!” and it’s another to solve Wanamaker’s question: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Solving “How does this offline channel affect my website?”

For very easy graphs like the Google Analytics graphs, the equation is easy for any statistician to derive (yes, marketers need to re-read their college stat books):

• Total Website Visits = ~1.90 * TV Impression + 340,566.1 website visits

And here’s equation applied against my version of the Google Analytics graph:

Not bad, huh? Unfortunately, the real world is different with a lot more variables: multiple marketing channels, geographic differences, seasonality, public relations efforts, multiple cross-channel campaigns and more introduce a host of variables that effect a websites traffic and online sales.

Huge companies like Proctor & Gamble have entire teams dedicated to media mix modeling with some even using something called “agent based modeling” (used by the military) to determine how their massive multi-million dollar and cross-channel marketing campaigns effect sales.

So the question is: how will analytics companies like Omniture and CoreMetrics be able to extend multi-channel marketing tools into solutions that can solve the question:

“What types of marketing campaigns mixes generate the most sales?”

.

NOTES

Where did I get the data?
I carefully recreated the television data based on the 4,444,444 impressions over 30 days and created website data that would fit the Google Analytics graph. See below:

What analysis did I do to get the graph?
A simple linear regression analysis that any Microsoft Excel or TI-83 calculator can do.

How accurate is your analysis?
In real world applications? Probably not very. The equation works if we assume the relationship between the television commercial impressions and website visits is overly simplified: if you get X many commercials impressions, you’ll get Y amount of website visits.

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“Let’s face it, the news is more about entertainment and ad revenue than it is about reporting facts and accuracy. Just because it happened online doesn’t make it real.”

Unfortunately, he’s incorrect. If enough people believe in something it can be as good as real. Like I blogged about yesterday, anecdotal stories are powerful forces effecting products, brands and company images. And it is part of how our brains are generally wired.

People believing the Internet is why PR and and Social Media matters. Your brand is not under your control, it is beholden by the same people – that’s everyday people like you and me – who may believe an email forward, word-of-mouth story via an Amazon.com review or a powerful brand-bruising blog like the Consumerist.

Take a look at one of the top articles on Consumerist today “Delta Makes Woman With Muscular Dystrophy Crawl Off Plane“.

” Julianna, who has muscular dystrophy, missed the connecting flight because nobody came with a wheelchair until 8:05—the same time the connecting flight took off. To make matters worse, the plane crew told Julianna she might make the flight anyway if she stopped waiting for help and got off the plane right now, so she crawled down the stairs on her own.

While I have no reason to not believe what Julianna says, what if the Consumerist or any similar site not “double-checked the source” like Jeremy Toeman asks for? That doesn’t matter. Despite 4-5 pages of commenters denouncing Delta, no Delta community manager has responded to the article. Does Delta have a tool like Radian6 to monitor their brand online? Or a community manager to address issues?

Instead we are left with comments after comments of these:

I’m utterly aghast and disgusted. My sister also suffers from MS and I, for one, was furious to read about your treatment. Delta Airlines will no longer be seeing any more of my travel money.

For these Consumerist readers, Delta’s brand has been killed and there is no one at Delta responding.

Is Julianna’s account accurate? As of now, we don’t know and it does not matter. Damage has been done to the Delta brand for everyone who has seen the article.

Who cares if you should believe everything on the Internet? If you know enough of your audience does, you should be there to protect your brand. What are consumers saying about your brand right now?

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Hi Everyone,

For the duration of the week, I’ll be mostly blogging over at AdTechBlog.com to cover ad:tech San Francisco with Steve Hall and six other fine bloggers journalist.

Catch up on all the ad:tech fun over at:

1. http://AdTechBlog.com/
2. http://twitter.com/danielriveong
3. http://flickr.com/photos/emergencemedia

And if there are any exclusive ad:tech parties, please send an invite my way!

On another note, my employer, e-Storm International, is throwing an ad:tech party in Otis Wednesday night at 6pm. RSVP details over at the e-Storm Blog.

Cheers!

Daniel

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Ever wanted to reach Halliburton Employees, 30-65, from Texas?
I’ve been playing around with the Facebook advertisement system, even posting a few ads here and there. The most fun I have right now is using Facebook’s ad targeting tool to mine the demographic data from their user profiles.

A marketer can target users by workplace (ranging from the French Embassy in the US to Exxon-Mobile), countries (over 30 countries representing +39 million users) and interest (”A Clockwork Orange” to Judaism) and other data. For example, I can now target about 40 people who work for Halliburton (They have a Facebook Network?), live in Texas and are from 30-65 years old.

And more then that, I thought it would be interesting to get some high-level demographic data on Facebook in the following areas:

1. Top US Geek Cities and Facebook Users (Geek Cities as defined by Wired Magazine)
2. All Countries Facebook Advertising targets for by Population: From Lebanon to the Dominican Republic
3. US Facebook Users by Age Group: College Age Still Dominates
4. US Facebook Users by Educational Background: 21% are Highschoolers?
5. Largest US Cities and Facebook Users: 20% of Chicagoans on Facebook?
6. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and Facebook Users: Where are the Ask/IAC people?
7. Microsoft Facebook Users by Age Group: Over 30% over 35 years old
8. Top Software Companies and Facebook Users (Software Companies defined by Fortune)

Top US Geek Cities and Facebook Users (Geek Cities as defined by Wired Magazine)

Note that while the data from Facebook is interesting, one should be cautious about the data:

• Self-reported profile data always has accuracy issues
• Many users do not report their age, workplace, full interests etc
• Just because there are 10,000 Microsoft employees on Facebook does not mean they are active on Facebook.
• Despite Facebook’s stringent policies there are fake and multiple profiles on Facebook

With that said, see more below graphs and data below.

All Countries Facebook Advertising targets for by Population: From Lebanon to the Dominican Republic

US Facebook Users by Age Group: College Age Still Dominates

US Facebook Users by Educational Background: 21% are Highschoolers?

Largest US Cities and Facebook Users: 20% of Chicagoans on Facebook?

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and Facebook Users: Where are the Ask/IAC people?

Microsoft Facebook Users by Age Group: Over 30% over 35 years old

Top Software Companies and Facebook Users (Software Companies defined by Fortune)

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Google Universal Search, Google Personalization and the push towards appealing to social media (linkbaiting, content strategy) is part of a large push towards finally abandoning emphasis of ranking reports over to more holistic analytics reporting.

To use analytics reporting for better understand SEO & Content, there are three important ideas:

• Analyzing Entry Pages as Landing Pages
• Revenue Participation
• Content Consumption: Content to Visits Ratio

Sure there are more, but let’s focus on those three for now.

All Web Pages are Landing Pages for SEO

Modified Screenshot from Google Analytics
(Zero goal data for this example, sorry)

Just as one checks the search engine keyword referrals for pre- and post- SEO reporting, one should also check what pages contribute to SEO and revenue. What pages are acting like landing pages for SEO – that is, the entry page for visitors from organic search engine listings?

The Google Analytics screenshot above, answers questions like “What are the top landing pages for visitors who came organically from Google? And what Goals/KPI did they perform? What is the conversion value?”

“Revenue Participation”: What Content is Generating Revenue?

From Dennis M., COO IndexTools at VisualVenue

Your SEO Team has pushed forward for the creation of several new content areas, but what is the return on that content?

One metric to look for is “Revenue Participation” (though its called different things by different vendors). Basically, “Revenue Participation” attempts to answer “What content on the website helped generate the largest share of revenue?”

The numbers are usually not exact or exaggerated in assigning value, but it has value in signalling to a marketer what content seems to matter to visitors in deciding a particular action (KPI) or conversion.
Content Consumption: Content to Visits Ratio

Via Avinash Kauksik’s Emetrics EFO Reflections Posting

From Avinash Kauskik:

The blue bar shows the type of content on the site: Education, Research, Collections etc. The red bar shows the percent of Visits to that content.

To put it another way “what are the large chunks of content on the site, what are visitors to our website looking at”.

I am sure the insights will scream out at you. 86% of the content was being consumed by 23% of the visitors. For 25% of the visitors were looking at 4% of the content (Research). You can see how this translates into a richer understanding of 1) where the website was focused at that time and 2) what customers actually wanted.

This graph can help point to what area attracts the most visitors and identifying what content either has no interest or needs to be redone to better appeal to visitors. This information can be used to understand what content needs to be built out for SEO reasons.

Closing Words

The biggest challenge to the reports above is to gauge how much of the data will influence your decisions on conducting the next SEO Campaign and also how to explain to your boss/clients what these reports mean and why it is important to you (the marketing guy) and to your boss/client (the person in charge with proving ROI value of your work to their boss).

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You are leading a blog outreach and marketing campaign. You find over 550 blogs pointing to you – great traffic (you see a spike traffic from referrals), great exposure and great for SEO. But, how do you know what those blog visitors from those 550 blogs are up to? Converting? Registering? And Purchasing?

If Technorati has the ability to track and identify over 70 million blogs, why cant it help tell my analytics program, which of the 1,400 referring websites are actually blogs and what the quality of that traffic is like (KPIs like registration, purchase etc)?

Is there an answer to this already? If so, please leave comments below to let me know.

Blogging as a Marketing Channel

The typical Marketing Channels that are readily configurable in an analytics service is paid search (PPC), organic search (SEO), online display (banners etc) and email-based marketing. Click and traffic data from these channels are usually used to segment key KPIs such as registration, using internal search (esp. for ecommerce), and completing a purchase. But what about blogs?

As noted above, Technorati is already tracking over 70 million blogs. Technorati’s identification of blogs could be readily plugged into analytics programs like Omniture SiteCatalyst, which has a “Genesis” program that allows for third-party data integration. Similarly, Google Blog Search could send their data to Google Analytics, so GA can track blog traffic etc.

Of course there will be limitation, not all blog search have each and every blog identified correctly and major websites with quasi-blogging features, like Yelp & Facebook, would probably not be included.

So if this capability already exist for any analytics program – please let me know.
Tantek, David Sifry, Matt Belkin or Avinash: What say you?

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Summary: Up Your Analytics, Strengthen Your Content, Smarten Your SEM

A recent study by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association has found that traditional offline media – such as Magazines, TV and Newspapers – were a high factor (>~42%) in leading to consumers conducting online research on the product/service advertised.

This completes the conversion loop when comparing to the Google’s number showing that of the “25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

What does this mean:

• Analytics Integration: Reinforces the Need for Marketing and Sales Analytics that can take offline and online consumer activities and behavior, since consumers freely move from offline and online worlds.
• Multi-Stage SEM Strategy: The SEM Strategy (SEO and PPC) must properly target both research phrase consumers, as well as, purchasing phase consumers.
• Content Funneling: Good Content is key to help funneling consumers in “research mode” to become consumers in “purchase mode”.

Offline Awareness, Online Research, Offline Conversion

MediaPost has recently reported on a “Retail Advertising and Marketing Association” done by “BIGresearch’s Simultaneous Media Survey”, which found the following numbers that consumers were most likely to search online after viewing:

• Advertisements in magazines (47.2%)
• Newspapers (42.3%)
• Ads on TV (42.8%)
• From reading articles (43.7%)

Combine this with Google’s 2006 ComScore data which pointed to:

“Of 83 million Americans tracked by comScore who searched at one of the 24 top search engines in November and December, 25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

Tracking Offline and Online Marketing/Sales Analytics

At the moment, many companies house their online marketing/sales data completely segregated away from their offline marketing/sales data. Indeed, most website analytics tools are packaged this way, with the exception of the enterprise models that integrate with the company’s CRM datawarehouse. But that’s a major effort and still mostly focuses one way traffic flow: Online Visitor > Offline Purchaser.

Off the top of my head, hear are some straightforward suggestions I’ve offered.

• Getting the ZIP code (from the online registration) and geographic area (of those that visit online) and mapping that to where your stores are (or should be)
• Website-Only Coupons
• Ask your customers! Do a survey as part of loyalty program

e-Storm International, my employer, does have an interesting partner that has a powerful tool that can actually estimate how offline media can shift people’s behavior online and vice-versa. Time for Emergence-Media to conduct interviews?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy and Content Funneling

Keeping in mind that the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association data shows that online search is a major research tool for consumers, this reinforces the need for 1) “content funneling” (see below); and 2) also translates to need a smart SEM strategy to push that content to consumers who are researching those that are looking to by.

Note this applies to both consumers who convert offline and online; what ties these two together is both use the web as a research tool.

Content Funneling

Content Funneling is an issue that Emergence-Media has dicussed before in “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“:

“Content is King” is the old Maxim. And for “SEOing” e-commerce websites, it is about ensuring that the e-commerce website has the type of content the user is looking for for each step of the buying process: 1) General Research (”Why are HD DVD Players different?” Page); 2) Targeted Research (”HD DVD Player Review & Guide” Page); and 3) Purchasers (Product Page for the Specific Item).

It comes down to this: around 40% of consumers will be motivated to do an online search after seeing your ad on TV, Print etc, so when they do their research online will they find buying/product guides (for those not ready to buy) or maybe your product page (if they are ready to buy online)?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy

Avinash Kaushik has just done an incredible insightful posting on this in “How Thick is Your Head and How Long is Your Tail?“, so I’ll show a teaser here, but I highly recommended reading the whole thing.

Take From Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s “Killer Search Marketing strategy recommendation”:

1. Focus your SEM budgets deliberately to leverage the Long Tail (/Category key terms).
2. Focus all your SEO efforts on SEO’ing the heck out of your website / web pages for your Brand key terms (those that are in your Head).

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