Are you talking about me? Social media - Measurement

Tweet Reach

Social Media has become a place where people can express their feelings, saying things that they might not say face to face and it can reach unlimited amount of people.

So it is very important for companies to be able to listen what people are saying about them, most people would not contact the company to complain or give a feedback about their service or product of the company.

Many people send their messages on internet thought different forums such as boards.ie, Rollercoaster.ie, Magicmum.com and websites such as Twitter and other social media. It is likely that more people will engage with these comments or complaints. This information can spread out through the net and even can go viral, hurting the company’s reputation. Companies can’t ignore this reality and turn their heads away, they need to react and response, they should interact in these conversations giving clarification or any act of response to these customers.

Gary Vaynerchuk  is showing how to use social media effectively in particular in Twitter, how  to reach the audience, how to bring them to you by telling them about things that they are interested in, it is about content, listening and engagement with the audience.  (Gary Vaynerchuk -  Basic Social Media Principles)

They are several tools to listen to the audience, as mention in my blog O’Leary’s Analytics, the most popular would be Google alert, Twitter deck. In the case of Twitter, they are other sites to analyse information, such as Twitter search ,Twitter Counter; it gives you an analysis of tweet followers growth over the time, Tweeter reach; it shows historical analysis of past hashtag  regarding, tweets , retweets, replays, top contributors, etc. However it only shows a very limited information for free, if you want more than 50 tweets or older than 1 week you have to pay, you will get more detail metrics, statistic and analysis.

Hope you have enjoyed it!

Guest speaker Stephen O’Leary – O’Leary Analytics

The fact is that people are talking online, often telling what they want, wishing that someone will invent, create or provider  specific goods or services, this information is valuable. In many cases these goods or services are available but the potential customer is not aware of it, so by listening companies can respond and offer the potential customers what they want and where to buy it.

In addition, people are talking about their own experience with businesses, they are talking because there is something relevant to be said. Many cases are about complain, as people get engaged it can reach more and more people and it can very harmful for companies, they cannot sit back and expect that customers will contact them directly  if there is any issue.

In fact a single customer with the wrong information could create panic in the audience. If there is no one to rectify or clarify the information, it can create a serious consequence for the customer perception of the company’s brand. So companies should listen to the conversation and interact with the audience, it is important to monitor and analyse the information in the social media

It doesn’t need to be a large company to afford  tracking what people are saying about you company, they are several free tools such as Tweet Deck, Google Alert, Social Mention, Search Tweet advanced, Technorati (good for blogs), Tinker, Addictomatic and Howsociable. However companies such as O’Leary Analytics can provide a more detailed and depurated information.

They are several analyses available, but one which is a bit tricky is the sentiment analysis in Ireland, as people here are sarcastic, software can misinterpreted the real meaning behind the message

Let me send you emails! - Permission based Marketing.

This type of E-marketing, is quite the opposite to the undesirable interruption marketing, it is basically emails newsletters where most people voluntary subscribe and has the possibility to unsubscribe, it has very high rate of success as it gets into to the person email and it is more likely that the person will look at it. This is the preferred marketing format; in fact between 20% and 30% of people open them, with very high rate of conversion at low cost social media.

To increase you rate of success try to have a key  few words to make readers interested to open the whole email, think something that will bring value to them, not only a short relevant phrase but offering free report, discount, etc. Also using odd numbers, percentage %, make more specific and creditable the information. Having personal information such a date of birth could lead to set up personalised birthday email with the possibility to offer voucher discount  as birthday present and it not only lead to sales but also recognition of the brand.

The benefits of this marketing tool should be integrated to social media, increasing the relationship with these customers and helping to reach new potential customers.

Make sure to have relevant content, it also will help to improve you natural ranking as adding new relevant content in newsletters and sharing it and updating your site, all these will help your SEO.

Time for Measurement - KPI Key performance indicator

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Measuring the impact of your effort in time and money in your campaigns online is not always easy and it is ever harder for companies which are selling product or services offline (sweet, drink and everything which is sold in store).

However, using KPIs could give you a fear indation of how effective your campaign is and could help you to put this information into a money context but you have to use both soft metric and hard metrics.  IAB measurement framework for social media is very effective where you aggregate your KPIs in one of the categories to have more accurate information around your social media activity

Before starting a campaign it is fundamental to have clear your objectives, to set up your goals and put a number or value to these goals, for instance to increase awareness of the brand so increase searches of the brand key word by 10 %. Depending of the goals they are different KPIs and different way to measure such as increase in subscriptions, tweets, inbound links, brochure request, call centre enquires, etc. These goals will be reflected on sales so these increases need to have a value to be able to analyse the return on investment.

Having cleared your objectives and your measured goals are key element before you start your campaign. Know what you want to compare (against historic data, competitors, etc), which indicator you will need to use. Set up the tracking system and have a spreadsheet with the values and indicator to be used and monitor the progress before, during and after the campaign. Even when the campaign is over, you need to keep monitoring the data, it will give you an important indicator of the time effect of your campaign.

Analyze That!

[slideshow]If you are looking for getting more information about your site’s performance and the audience that visit your site you should consider using Google Analytics, it is an excellent tool and it is Free.

Already 55% of the websites are using Google Analytics,it is very easy to use and provides detailed statistics, you can find out information such as how do they find you, how much time do they spend in your website, which pages are more relevant, what time do they access, how many new visitors, where are they, which devise do they use to access your site and so many additional relevant information.

It has a report called Flow visualization which shows the path of visitors, you can identified how visitors are navigating, which pages are more popular and where are they dropping the site, In-Page Analytic report shows how they interact with your pages and to make it easy you can see the data superimposed in your website. It very useful if you are selling items, you can see how clients found such particular item and how they navigate so you can identify customer behaviour and run more efficient campaign for these particular clients.

Another excellent tool is multi-channels funnels, it is used to analyse conversions. Basically it analyse the different channels and interactions between them to lead to a conversion, the time in each channel and the stage where potential customers are dropping the process and can identified which campaigns are more effective.

For instance if you have a high percentage of Bounce Rate, means that they don’t go further than the landing page and if the time of the visit is short, could mean that you are leading visitors with the wrong keywords, the content of your site is not relevant and additional elements such poor navigation system, poor web design, etc. using the different reports you could identify what is the problem/opportunity to improve the site. Even Analytics can alert you if they are a considerable change in traffic pattern.

It also helps to understand consumer behaviour, demographic, interaction with the channels and it is not limited to desktop but also to mobile users.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz4yHOKE5j8&feature=player_embedded]

Video Uploaded in youtube by Google Analytics on Apr 11, 2011

Organic ranking, let them find you!

Back to the basics, companies have to be visible for their audience and/or have recognition in the clients mind. Social media is very useful to get your brand exposed and to persuade others potential consumers to find about your goods or services and hopefully to engage with your pages in twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

But having a good quality score on your website helps to direct people to your website, even if you use paid search as Google Adwords the price to pay will different as the quality score or ranking of your website is taken into account for the price per click that you will have to pay for the same position of the ad.

It is very important that you understand your audience and their needs and to reflect it in your website, in other word it should be relevant for them, the content is original, transparent, relevant to your business and the audience’s needs, the platform and navigation easy and fast, free of pop-ups and pop-under, website updated often with relevant content, relevant links to your business from trustful and well ranked sites, integrate social media in effecting way. Also it is a key factor to make the site relevant and understandable to the search engines using appropriate the meta tag, headers tag, alt tags, sitemap, content, keywords and in general to do a Search Engine Optimization.

All these elements should be used and integrated, they will bring more dynamist and they will bring not only more traffic to your site but also brand awareness and in general more business.

Paid Media vs Trust

Nowadays, you have more options how to make publicity to your business. However, the trends are changing very fast and it is important to understand what is actually reaching your potential customers and revising your strategy ongoing basis. It is very important looking at medium and long term, what is building trust and creating recognition of the brand.

The strategy of some companies to reach their target market can sometimes cross the line and it could make the audience feel that they privacy has been violated, it can create a very negative perception of the company and could be difficult to reverse.

Homepage takeover ads can be effective to “hijack” the attention of the target audience for some seconds but at the same time it can be very irritating and it could even make feel some people disrespected. With desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones users are feeling that they are 100% in control of what they want to see or read in contrast with TV and radio where users are more passive and they are used to interruption with ads as part of the push system.

The more effective way to reach your audience is through trust, people are more likely to visit your website if people they know recommend it through likes, followers, reviews and sponsored story. This last one is very effective at the moment, one reason is that most people are not fully aware that who owns the story is paying facebook to reach more people using the network of the user, and it is shown as recommendation of someone that you know.

Looking at a research done by Nielsen survey in trust advertising – Paid, owned and earned  consumers-don-t-trust-paid-media-report people trust 92% recommendations  from someone they know, 70% from  reviews, 58% branded websites and 58% editorial contain such as articles in the newspaper. In contrast with online banner add 33% consumers trust, text add in mobile phone with 29%, adds in social media and online video add with 33%.

It is more effective and positive in long term to use the audience’s network that they trust to build up the recognition of you brand, also direct traffic to your website from this channel and the website should respond to audience expectation.

Let see your POEM! – Paid, Owned & Earned Media

With the importance that social media and PR have been taken in the last few years, it has put more dynamic and channels have been diversified. As the same time became more difficult for brands to influence people and now they have more control and play a more active role.

From the 3 types of media; owned media, earned media and paid media, this last one is losing territory as credibility is decreasing, getting people attention is harder and with the massive advertising clutter is more difficult to stand out. Earned media is increasing and the audience is displacing the effect of the other 2 types of media.

For instance people often search for reviews, scores and general feedbacks from consumers  regarding products as they trust the source so what the seller or brand is saying about their product is losing relevance. For companies it is more important than ever to engage with the audience and to use them as a channel to reach more customers. However it depends on the type of business and the strategy and objectives of each brand. For instance companies such as Ryanair wouldn’t use their customer as a channel in social media as most customers actually don’t like Ryanair, just the prices.

Just a short definition of the 3 types of media:

Owned Media: The brand owns the channel and controls it, such as website, blog, and twitter account. It takes time to be consolidated and company communication is not quite trusted.

Paid media: Brand pay to expose them to the audience thought display ads, paid ads, sponsorship. It has immediate effect and helps to shift owned media and earned media. But it has low credibility and declining response.

Earned Media: When your clients became your channel though voice of mouth, social media, blogs, communities make possible that a campaign go viral. It has very high credibility. However, it is difficult to control, difficult to measure, can be negative.

These channels don’t work totally independent, paid media help to promote owned and earned media and earned is supported at early stages by owned and paid media. They have converged areas, to reach success usually is necessary a well coordinated use of earned, owned and paid media.

Website Design and Redesign

Web design has changed during the recent years, one of the reasons are the different devises such as smart phone, tablets and the conventional pc and laptops have different interface between the devises and the user. The sizes of the screen, the way we interact with it, the speed of the devise all these require different design. However there are many cases that the same web design is using for tablets and smart phone.

Also they are not limited to websites, but also app, social media, blogs etc. the possibilities are wider so the technologies and designers are increasing their knowledge of different platforms and different coding languages. The line between the web designer and the coder or web developer has almost disappeared and the roles are more integrated.

As technology improves, trend changes and audience expectation increases websites need to be revised and modified to adapt to present market.

Also is fundamental not only to design for the target audience but also to design for search engines such Google, if Google does not see the website relevant enough for the search of the target audience it won’t reach the target audience. It requires knowledge of Search Engine Optimization and some level of coding. Google works like sort of a facilitator/intermediary so it is important to see Google like sort of client and to make it like and understand your website your core business or idea.

It is not uncommon to see designers and web developers who are creating websites to satisfy the client and the audience but unfortunately they do not make much effort to optimise the website for search engines and the website ended up on the button of the search or using paid search.

How to run a web project - Online Project Management

For a web project, it is fundamental to identify the problem, issues or opportunity of the company and have a clear target to achieve. It is basic to have a full understanding of what the stakeholders want, by interviews, questionnaires, researches and reports.  Then the web strategy can be defined. It is very important to have a clear goal, defined responsibilities of each member and work within the time frame of each stage to the final target. Communication between the parts and during the process is very important.

Stages for web project management

• Brief, it is the full description of what the client wants, how the website should look like. Also, it is very useful to know what customers don’t like and samples of websites that they do like. Include research of the target audience, platform to be used (pc, tablets, smart phones), etc. Different interviews and workshop with the stakeholders should be done to have a better understanding of the project/issue /opportunity and their objectives.
• Product scope: How the final project will be, it has the objectives and results expected.
• Project scope: Describe the whole process in different stages within a detail timeframe. Detail description of the job to be done, by who and when. It includes everything.
•  The content will be created by the client and the content creator, this process will be run at the same time that the website design.
• Creation of the wireframes which is guide of how the website will look and work. Mockup  of the website,  Balsamic is good option to see how  going to look like. Work in the site architecture through workshops, Information Architecture, Wireframes and Functional Specification.
• User interface design, it is very important to design a site depending on the devise, a website design for a smart phone should have less contain and the interface is different.
• This stage is in relation to Page build, coding. The content will be integrated.
• Testing, it could have internal testing by different departments and also outsider to identify any potential problems and bugs.
• Handover, the website is ready and the project is officially finished. However the client will be provided with a maintenance agreement. Client should be provided with Content Management system, access to CMS, FTP and Analytics.

The agency should provide a full detail description for what the client is paying for. It is recommended to ask the client to sign every step of the project. If the client changes his mind in a later stage, wants a different or additional job, the agency is entitle to charge extra for it.