Oct 26, 2011 | Change, Social Media
A while ago, when Google+ was first launched, I questioned its value, and by extension, future. The reason for my skepticism, was that an initial look at Google+ led me to the conclusion that the inherent switching costs involved in moving the focus of on-line social activity from facebook to Google would be too high for a sufficient number of users for Google+ to build the scale necessary for social media success.
It now seems that something from the old economy is working in Google’s favour, and my assessment will probably be proved to be wrong.
Momentum and initiative.
We all understand the value of momentum and initiative, in business, sport, and our private lives. Those who have it, all other things being equal, win, simple as that. It seemed to me at the time that facebook had all the cards, but Google seems to have grabbed the initiative, and built momentum, if the “tech-chatter” of which there is plenty, some of it from very well connected people, accurately reflects the extremely rapidly evolving social media ecosystems.
Oct 11, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media
Following on from yesterday’s post, on quantifying the value of social media, a couple of further thoughts.
Like any activity, it is crucial to undertake activity utilising social media in the context of achieving an objective, a commercial activity of any type is doomed to irrelevance without an objective against which to measure success, and learn how to improve.
Similarly, an effective plan requires that there be a logical, sequential series of activities that all play a role in the achievement of the objective articulated.
So, a three step process for achieving Social Media effectiveness:
- Acquisition. Where do yu expect the visitors to the activity to come from?
- Behavior. What do you want them to do while visiting?
- Outcome. What is the commercial outcome that you are looking for?
This this third leg, outcome, is the key one, and can be many things, but currently are usually centered around simple measures such as time on site, page visits, and purchase. However, these simple measures whilst useful ignore the power of the social media, its capacity to amplify a message, so a set of measures around the degree to which the message is “amplified” should be considered. The number of “likes”, comments, retweets, and similar measures of activity that “amplifies” a post are the real measure of social media effectiveness. This post by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics guru offers some great thinking.
Oct 10, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media
Finding ways to quantify the impact of investment on-line has become a real challenge for management. A dollar spent on line is a dollar not available to be spent elsewhere, so the need for a quantitative base from which to compare apples and apples is substantial, and it keeps the beanies happy.
Google Analytics is a set of free tools that can be used to ferret out the information needed to optimise any site. Currently with 130+ standard reports, and lots of opportunity to customise your own reports, the tools are of enormous value to anyone running a site. Forget all the expensive optimisation consultants, just pay a web savvy student a bit to dig around and come up with opportunities to get more out of your web ecosystem, the site, bloggs, Twitter, Digg, Tumbir, Linkedin, and so on.
Here are some lessons put out by the experts.;
- This series of videos by Appsumo offers lots of tips in a very easy to understand manner.
- Social Media Examiner, perhaps the best site for gathering information on social media has this interview with Google’s Avinash Kaushik on the use of Google analytics in quantifying activity on the web, and is a must watch for beginners to pros.
- Avinish’s blog provides a beginners guide to web analytics, 10 easy things to do to assess the effectiveness of a website, but that is only the beginning of the insight that can be gained from his blog, another must read.
- And just in case you want more….
Point is, the tools for measurement are now there, Google has an enterprise quality set for free, so there is absolutely no excuse for not using them.
Oct 4, 2011 | Social Media
The value of Twitter is still grossly misunderstood by many of my aged peers, whose view is generally from the “why do I need to know what someone I do not know or care about is doing now?” school of thought.
Following are some very simple ideas that may make it worthwhile:
# Only connect with those from whom you can learn something, or have common interests. Finding them is getting easier with tools like Tweetdeck, and once you have found them, engage by retweeting, commenting, and connecting with them.
# Do not be afraid to ask for help, for things of interest to be retweeted, and for information. People when asked nicely, can be very generous with their time and connections.
# Don’t try to sell on twitter, 140 characters is too few, and the environment is wrong. Engage first, build a relationship, and make it easy to find your website from which they can buy.
# Be aggressive about filtering out non productive connections, it is not a contest to have the most followers, or to follow the most people.
# Know what you want to know, and use Tweetdeck to do the filtering for you, delivering prioritised links and interesting connections to you without the rubbish.
# Lastly, you, and what you have to say has to be of interest to others, so be relevant to the audience you want to connect with.
Sep 23, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Innovation, Small business, Social Media
Ask a SME manager in packaged goods, “would you like a phone call from Woolworths ordering stock of your new product for every store in the country?” and you will most likely get a tear with the nodded head.
Enter the “Orabrush” story, they got the call from Walmart without any of the usual begging.
There are many hurdles for SME’s in the packaged goods industry to jump before distribution in the major retailers can be obtained, and then the problems really start, because SME’s lack the resources to move the product off shelf before the trial period runs out.
Social media has helped over the past couple of years, you now have the opportunity to reach highly targeted groups of consumers, and deliver them a message, but generally it has not helped much to get the product on shelf in the first place.
Orabrush really broke the mass market model with a product I still find odd, but great creativity and lateral thinking combined with social media has turned the product into a hit, and can now be found in Walmart stores around the world
Have a look at the Youtube ads in the link, gems.
Sep 21, 2011 | Communication, Management, Social Media
What a great term, coined by Euan Semple, to describe the phenomenon of older (largely) male senior executives pretending they have “got” social media.
Like many others, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade people of the value that can be generated by intelligent use of social media, most of those people run enterprises, and usually reluctantly can be persuaded to put a modest amount of resources into SM, often I think because their golf partner was telling them on the 19th last week that he has been able to cut the advertising budget by 50% by using SM.
Anyway, they become superficially engaged, in their hearts thinking this social media stuff is just their almost adult children behaving badly and then for some inexplicable reason, posting the footage on face book.
The term “Dad Dancing,” perfectly invokes a picture of the gyrations and uncoordinated usually frenetic and short term activity that emerges from such a conversion.
