Interestingly, while there is some push from [>>]]]> Hardly a day goes by that I don’t come across at least one article, blog post, or newsletter about measuring social media success, in particular ROI. According to a recent eMarketer article, the pressure is on marketers to focus more on gathering solid metrics to gauge social marketing ROI.

Interestingly, while there is some push from the executive suite to show how social media is contributing to the bottom line, only 13 percent of respondents in Chief Marketer’s “2011 Social Marketing Survey” said they’re very effective at measuring social campaigns. A whopping 40 percent of those surveyed admitted they were either not very or not at all effective in determining whether their social media efforts are delivering results.

If you fall into that 40 percent of marketers who aren’t effectively measuring your social media, proving ROI is a big leap forward. It’s best to start small, then work up to more strategic measurement goals. In other words, you need to walk before you can run. If you haven’t been measuring any social media or only sporadically checking out your metrics provided by the given social channel, such as Facebook Insights, where do you begin? Here are some tips to get you started measuring social media success.

Choose your objectives
Whether it’s for a specific campaign or your social media program in general, you need to identify your goals. Because until you know where you’re going, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve arrived. Many of you (hopefully) identified the goals for your campaign or program at the outset. If not, following are some objectives to consider:

• Building relationships
• Increasing awareness
• Improving reputation
• Driving traffic
• Taking action

It’s best to limit your objectives. This will help focus your social media efforts, which in turn will make measuring results and success easier. Adhere to good project management form by making sure your objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based—otherwise known as SMART.

Also, think about what’s trackable in the social channels you use. For example, if you have a company blog, you can track comments, page views, and RSS opens and click through. For Twitter, you can measure replies and retweets. Knowing what you can track can help inform the objectives you choose.

Identify what to measure
Once you’ve determined your social media objectives, you can begin identifying what to measure to support those objectives. For example, if your goal is to build relationships, you could track the increase in fans or followers as well as comments and @mentions. If increasing awareness is one of your objectives, you can measure the number of shares, likes, retweets, page views, and linkbacks that a particular piece of content generates.

Think measuring likes and followers seems elementary? Consider this: 60 percent of respondents in the Chief Marketer survey still count the number of fans, followers, friends, and likes as their top metric.

Collect the data
Now that you’ve settled on your objectives and what you’re going to track in order to prove the success of your social media efforts, you need to collect the data. This can be easier than it sounds. Many of the social channels you’re probably using provide some analytics capabilities, such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. And sharing services like AddThis provide analytics, too. That low-hanging fruit is easy data pickin’s.

For channels that don’t provide their own analytics, there are a plethora of tools that you can use to track social media activity—some of which are free or inexpensive, like TwentyFeet. Even if your social channels provide analytics, it’s a good idea to use a few different sources for collecting data. Each tool tracks data a little differently and can give you a different view. Also, using multiple sources is a good way to confirm the numbers.

Don’t forget to collect qualitative data, as well. Examples of customer comments and tweets show how they’re engaging with your company or brand.

How are you measuring your social media efforts?

>]]]> If marketers had a template for creating the next Internet sensation—the next Susan Boyle YouTube video or the latest celebrity scandal—we’d have some serious job security. Sadly, there is no template to follow, but any marketer looking for a viral road map could take a lesson from Jared Holstein, editor for TopGear.com America.

Holstein, summer interns Matthew DuVall and Jonathan Masters, and editorial assistant Christopher Gifford created a fake video and photos of a non-existent prototype Porsche wagon. They then leaked the images to various enthusiast sites and let the grassroots fan base spread the word for maximum viral success.

We can all have a good laugh at the casual car enthusiasts and industry experts that were fooled by the fake news. But the facts and figures behind the hoax also provide a great, real-life example of how anyone can take a viral campaign from zero to the New York Times in little over a month.

It’s not about the money

For starters, you don’t need a big budget. The most successful and most talked about viral campaigns are often the least expensive.

“On TopGear.com America, for example, we ran clips with production values rumored to cost seven figures per episode, but we have a Mustang clip on our site that I shot with a handheld camera on the roof of a hotel and it’s the highest-performing video on the website,” Holstein says. “That got me thinking: How much havoc could we wreak with a minimal investment? As it turns out, a lot.”

Know your audience

A long product development cycle for vehicles has given rise to an industry of specialized automotive journalists, sleuths who make their living breaking news on top-secret vehicle models ahead of official releases by automotive manufacturers. Holstein knew that a rabid fan base would feed on fake pictures of a new Porsche in development—more than that, he knew which buttons to push to stir up some controversy.

Also part of the strategy: the reaction from Porsche. “We knew it would generate good PR for them. And if they were asked about such a car they would deny it—whether or not it actually existed,” Holstein says. In other words, Porsche couldn’t blow his cover even if they tried.

Plant the seed

“A lot of this has to do with psychology,” Holstein says. “When, where, why, who to tip, who not to tip? The seeding strategy is critical, as content will get more weight if one source picked it up versus another. All we did was take advantage of the greed for the big story—the greed to get a scoop.”

Holstein recorded the full timeline of events for the hoax, and it’s worth noting a few interesting occurrences in the path. For starters, the hoax never went viral on the Web’s stereotypical top sites: Digg, Reddit, et cetera. It took car news aggregators like Jalopnik less than a day to begin seeding reports of the fake story–essentially, a brief summary and rewrite of the blurb without any additional fact-checking.

The seeders didn’t let the story die out after hitting success on major aggregates, however. They began to launch additional information on sites with a tangential relation to the car scene to further the authenticity of the hoax. For example, a news snippet was released to a Czech fansite for the upcoming video game “Forza 3.” According to the source, the driving game was scheduled to feature—you guessed it—the spoofed car.  A quick tip to the news aggregates got the blurb in the enthusiasts’ eyes once again.

Persistence pays off, indeed.

Get the conversation going

In the first week alone, the video on TopGear.com America had more than 27,000 views and there were more than 400 Web comments. That’s a ratio of approximately one comment for every 68 views of the video. When the images spread to the Forza 3 videogame screen grab, TopGear.com America expanded from the car fan base to the excitable videogame fan base, giving the prank crossover appeal by bridging several significant Web audiences.

Holstein says that this type of hoax starts a dialogue because it forces consumers to question what they see on the Web—and that leads to real conversations and honest feedback. “You can go a whole year not buying a crappy product because instead of relying on a company’s spin, you can get honest opinions from your peers,” Holstein says. “People are hungry for open conversations and real information.”

Now if only the car was real…

Enjoy our look at the nitty-gritty of a viral marketing campaign?  Need to take a step back and examine the bigger picture? Check out our quick interview with fellow car enthusiast Trevor Traina as he reveals the three biggest facts marketers need to know about the online world!

If we developed a new email approach for a client, we’d certainly follow-up with some analysis on whether or not the redesign was successful and adjust our strategy accordingly. So, we’re doing the same for our internal effort and want to share the results [>>]]]> In January 2008, we redesigned Tendo’s monthly email newsletter, The Tendo View.

If we developed a new email approach for a client, we’d certainly follow-up with some analysis on whether or not the redesign was successful and adjust our strategy accordingly. So, we’re doing the same for our internal effort and want to share the results with you.

(Some call this “eating your own dog food” but we think it’s just fair play. If we’re going to hold our clients accountable, we should do the same for ourselves.)

What Did We Do?

The Tendo View is an email newsletter that we send to approximately 1,000 recipients each month. Our audience includes past, present, and potential clients as well as freelancers and marketing professionals that are part of Tendo’s extended network.

Given our business, we have many marketers and Web-savvy folks on our list—the type of people who receive a LOT of email newsletters.

In 2007, our newsletter metrics were very respectable. We averaged a unique open rate of 20.71% and an average click-through rate of 12.21%.

We believed that the content we delivered was good. It provided value to our users and we had a nice mix of different content types, from feature pieces to site reviews to our popular “jargon watch” to blog entries.

But we wondered if the look and feel of the newsletter was inhibiting our ability to generate even more opens and better click-through rates. So we decided to make some tweaks to the design—not a wholesale redesign, just tweaking some elements—to see if we could improve our metrics.

Here’s what we found…

1. Size Matters

We did something simple that made a big difference—we increased the font size of our headlines in the newsletter. It makes them “pop” more, they’re easier for people to scan at a glance, and it’s obvious where they are supposed to click if they want more.

The result: average click-throughs jumped from 12.21% to 17.09%.

2. Placement Matters

In our original redesign, we placed “jargon watch” in its own box on the right-hand side. We thought we were giving it a special feature spot. But the “jargon watch” click-throughs in that first edition were just .44%, one of our lowest performers in the issue.

We moved the “jargon watch” back to the left-hand side, with the other feature content (and larger headlines) and the click-throughs went way up—an average of 2.87% over the last three issues. (“Jargon watch” was actually our best performer in the May issue.)

3. Subject Lines Matter

The subject line is the single biggest factor in your open rate. (Although, with email preview panes, people can also get a visual hit and may see some of the headlines within the newsletter itself, but for the most part, you must grab interest with the subject line.)

We use the subject line to highlight the reader benefit offered by the main feature article. Recipients should be able to quickly answer the question, “What’s the value here and is it worth my time?”

The result: average unique opens jumped from 20.71% to 25.89%.

4. Call to Action Matters

What do you want your readers to DO? There has to be a clear call to action. We did two things in this area.

First, is the aforementioned font-size change on the headlines. Again, the size and color makes it obvious where we want people to click to read and learn more.

Second, we added a new feature called “The Tendo Tip Sheet,” where people could actually download a practical guide to address a particular Web marketing challenge. We made the button to download obvious and large: “Get it Now.” We use this as a lead-generation tool and can develop better insight about what type of help our customers are seeking. (Of our openers, 3% are downloading the tip sheet.)

5. Less is More

We try to keep each monthly newsletter short and sweet, with five or six links to content. You can see almost everything above the fold and it’s clear at a glance what’s available.

We believe that the increase in open rates and click-throughs is a confirmation of this strategy.

The Bottom Line

By making some small changes, we’ve seen significant improvements in our email metrics. We encourage our clients to do the same. —John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

Yeah, me too. I really did want to drop a few pounds and clean out the garage, but I just have a million other things to do.

Companies with large websites often find themselves in a similar boat. They resolve to “get control” of their Web content, but [>>]]]> How are you doing on those New Year’s resolutions?

Yeah, me too. I really did want to drop a few pounds and clean out the garage, but I just have a million other things to do.

Companies with large websites often find themselves in a similar boat. They resolve to “get control” of their Web content, but the day-to-day work of keeping the site refreshed and running keeps such initiatives in the background.

But getting a handle on your content—strategically managing how it’s created, deployed, and measured for success—is critical if you want to clearly demonstrate return on your Web investment.

Here’s what you need to remember:

You need a content strategy.

Does your company have a well-defined, broadly understood strategy for Web content?

If you spend most of your time responding to requests to “get this posted on the Web,” or have a dozen different business units creating stuff in their own silo, the answer is probably no.

To develop a good Web content strategy, you must first understand your company’s sales cycle, what your customers are looking for at each stage, and what you want them to do. Once you understand what your customers want, you can map out a strategy to deliver the appropriate content at the appropriate time.

Your strategy must then be integrated into the tools your marketing teams use on a daily basis. These tools help stakeholders ask and answer the key questions before posting: Why are you adding it? What are you hoping to accomplish? Is it providing value to your readers? Will it move you closer to your business objectives?

A content management system is important, but it’s not a strategy.

Six-and-a-half years ago on this very website, I wrote a piece called “Making the Move to a Content Management System.”

Today, many of the ideas contained in the article are quaint. Content management systems are standard for large sites, and off-the-shelf software makes content management accessible for even the smallest organizations. But like I said back in 2001, a delivery system is not a content strategy.

Many large enterprise sites have too much content. While the stats are fluid (and hotly debated), we’re in the neighborhood of 30 billion Web pages now. Content management systems are partly to blame-they make it simple to post, so everybody does. But just because it’s easier to do it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

A CMS without an integrated content strategy is like setting loose 1,000 construction workers to build a skyscraper without a blueprint. You’ll end up with a building, but is anybody going to lease space?

Think of content in smaller, bite-sized pieces.

There is a lot of buzz right now about modular content. Forward-thinking companies need to approach content in a new way.

In the “old days,” most people thought of Web content as a Web page. But now, a single piece of content may have online and offline applications-and online, it may be just one element on a given page.

At Tendo we’re developing tools to help companies strategically manage these individual content assets. It’s more than a CMS—it’s about using collaboration tools across the enterprise to give greater visibility into content creation. You can target content toward specific business objectives and leverage it as broadly as possible. You save money and time and increase ROI.

Ironically, we’re talking about fragmentation as a way to do more integrated marketing. By boiling content into its most modular elements, you increase flexibility and make sure that your messaging is consistent across communication channels.

If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

How do you know if your strategy is successful? You must be able to test and measure. If you can’t measure whether an individual content asset is moving you closer to your goal, you shouldn’t post it.

And that’s where metrics come in.

Like content management systems, analytics tools have made Web metrics more widely available. It also means that many companies are drowning in Web metrics without a clear understanding of what they should do with the information.

A good Web content strategy ties Web metrics into the sales cycle. It’s not just about click-throughs, but demonstrating progress moving people from awareness to consideration to preference to purchase to loyalty. That’s the true measure of Web success.

You need a maintenance plan.

Too much content on your site has a negative impact on your bottom line. It can make it more difficult for customers to find the information that is most likely to move them forward through the sales cycle. Plus, maintaining an inventory of Web assets has associated costs.

Companies should periodically review their Web assets, evaluate them in light of well-defined criteria, modify as necessary, and prune when possible.

My colleague Ian Miller wrote a great piece last spring called, “Pruning your Online Garden.” (We love our seasonal themes here at Tendo.)

But before you prune, you need a plan of attack. To create that plan, you must first understand the landscape. That’s why so many of our client engagements start with a content audit. You must understand what you have, map it to what you need, and identify the gaps.