One challenge with social media is keeping track of all the conversations and times that your name or company name is mentioned. SocialSeek provides real-time results for news, topics, brands or keywords in a specific location or anywhere from either a desktop or mobile application. Search by keyword and location, or just one or the other. Save searches and view updated results automatically every 30 minutes. SocialSeek makes it easy to keep track of what’s being said about your company and brand.

Birds-eye View

SocialSeek provides a great overview of mentions of your brand or keywords in blogs, Twitter, video, images, and events, either based on a location or in general. The desktop application automatically refreshes the search every 30 minutes so you can regular updates. Plus see what’s going on overall, or just in blogs, Twitter, video, images, events or add your own feeds.  You can also filter the results to look for specific people or keywords.

Trends & Charts

Also available are trends and charts on the social search, where you can see activity for your search results over the past 2 weeks (broken out by type), as well as Twitter trends and keyword cloud. While these are a nice addition, they’re not as indepth or useful as charts provided by other tools. It looks like you’re supposed to be able to compare two keywords within the charts, but I couldn’t get that to work — that could be handy for competitive analysis.

An overview of the overall activity of the search for the least few days:

Twitter Trends for the search:

Twitter cloud:

Overall: A Free & Useful Social Media Monitoring Tool

I’ve been using the SocialSeek desktop application on my Mac for the past couple of days.  When it does an update every 30 mins, it’ll send a notification to Growl if there are any updates (which brings up a window with a short update on whatever screen I’m working on). I’ve been able to easily keep track of mentions for sazbean without having to check on other tools, which has been very handy.  The charts are nice, but not as useful as provided by other tools. SocialSeek will save searches so you can easily switch between them, but it only reports on one search a time, which means it’s not as useful if you’re monitoring multiple brands or keywords. But, it’s free, so it’s definitely another useful tool for getting a snapshot of what’s going on for your brand in social media.

Have you used SocialSeek? What do you think?

Everyone gets caught up in how many fans, followers, visitors, commenters, etc. they have for their brand.  What do these numbers actually mean? Are businesses getting caught up in a numbers game instead of understanding what their customers need and want?  Some thoughts from Brian Solis & Chris Beck.

What do you think?

Competitive analysis is important to any business strategy.  Knowing what your competitors are doing and how they’re pricing and marketing their products will help you figure out how to market your own products.  Luckily, there are many online tools that can help you get a look (or spy) on what your competitors are doing.

1. Google their company, brand and product names.
2. Google any keywords associated with their company, your company and your industry.
3. Use Twitter’s search for their company, brand and product names (also important keywords).
4. Search on Facebook for their company, brand and product names (and important keywords).
5. Search Alexa for their company websites to see some traffic stats (estimated).
6. Check out their site profile on Compete to see traffic (estimated).
7. Use Compete to compare their site to yours or to other competitor websites.
8. Run Website Grader on their site — can also compare yours to theirs.
9. Run Twitter Grader on their Twitter feed.
10. Run Blog Grader on their blog(s).
11. Check out their site(s) with WooRank.
12. Use Google Trends to check stats on their site and then compare with others.
13. Set up Google Alerts for competitor’s company, product and brand names to monitor for mentions.
14. Add feeds for company names, etc. into TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic to monitor mentions on Twitter.

Do you spy on your competition? What tools and tactics do you use?

(photo by DaveFayram)

I’m often asked what KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important for understanding how a business is doing online.  My answer is always “It depends.”  There’s not a set of KPIs that works for every business.  Choosing the right KPIs for your business means understanding your business, your goals and what you’re trying to do online. KPIs are the metrics which tell you whether you’re moving closer towards your goal and objectives (see KPIs vs Metrics for more details).

Understand Your Business

This may seem simple, but truly understanding your business means knowing what benefits you offer to your customers.  Who are your customers and why should they care? Saying you’re a carpet cleaner is one thing.  But maybe what you really do is help housewives remove impossible stains so their carpets look like new.  Or help people who are selling their house get more value out of the sale.  Understanding who your customers are and the benefits to them is the first step towards choosing the right KPIs.

Know Your Goal

Unless you know exactly where you’re trying to go — what you’re trying to accomplish — it’s going to be almost impossible to craft a strategy that works with KPIs that tell you whether it’s working.  Choosing an easy-to-understand, specific, attainable and time delimited goal will help you choose KPIs that relate to that goal.

Choose Your KPIs

Now that you know what you do, who your customers are, what benefits you offer and what goal you’re trying to accomplish, you can start to think about how you can accomplish that goal online.  As you choose tools and tactics to help you with your strategy, take a look at what metrics are available for each.  Which metrics tell you whether you’re further along in reaching your goal?  (Those are your KPIs).

Thoughts?

(photo by Pink Sherbet Photography)

Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages.  The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point.  What if they came, bought something and then left?  That’s what you want them to do.  Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave.  While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful?  Yes and no.  Let’s look at it in more detail…

Defining Exit Rate

Exit Rate shows you what percentage of people who were on a particular page exited the site from that page.  It doesn’t show you how many pages they looked at before they got to that page.  They could have entered the site from anywhere. They may have even accomplished what they set out to do.  You don’t know.  You only know they exited your site from this particular page.

When Exit Rate is Useful

If you have a site where people have to go to more than one page to complete a task — say on an eCommerce site — Exit Rate can be very helpful for understanding where people are getting lost in the process.  Knowing where people get lost in the conversion process can help you fix those pages to increase conversion and decrease the exit rate on those pages.  Exit rate in this context is often called abandonment rate — or how often someone started the purchase process and then left.

When Exit Rate Isn’t Useful

When you’re looking at the exit rates for specific pages (other than those involved in a conversion or sale), exit rate just tells you what percentage of people left the site from that page — meaning that was the last page they looked at.  Those people could have entered the site from anywhere, looked at a bunch of pages and just decided to leave from this particular page.

Outside of the conversion/eCommerce example, what if someone came to your site looking for specific information, found it on that page and then left.  They found what they were looking for, which is what you want.  Again, you may be able to entice them to stay longer by providing links to additional pages on your site, but your goal of satisfying their need was completed.  What can you do with the exit rate?  Not really anything.  It doesn’t give you enough information to know what to improve.

An Alternative Metric — Bounce Rate

An alternative metric that’s more useful for the purpose of improving specific pages is Bounce Rate — or how many people who enter your site on that page never click anywhere else and leave without looking at any other pages.  Unless they happened to find exactly what they’re were looking for on the first page (you have really good SEO), a high bounce rate is an indicator of a problem on a specific page.

Use Bounce Rate to Improve Conversions

Even in the case of good SEO, you probably want people to go to more than one page on your site.  You want them to convert, which usually means more than one page.  Take a look at your top content report and top entry pages in your analytics package and look at the bounce rate for each page. Focus on improving the pages with high bounce rates to increase conversions.

Thoughts? How do you use exit rate and bounce rate?

(photo by Cellular Immunity)

Just like Metrics and KPIs, Conversion is another measurement term which is often mis-used (thanks to Jim Suchara for the suggestion). A conversion happens when someone completes an action you want them to take — purchases from you, signs up for a newsletter, registers for a webinar, etc.  So, just like KPIs (key performance indicators) measuring conversions requires first understanding exactly what it is you want people to do — what are your business goals and objectives?

Defining Conversions Starts with Your Business

I feel like a broken record, but again, when defining conversions, you need to start with your business.  What is your business goal and what are your objectives?  What is your digital strategy?  What actions do you want people to complete online which help you achieve your goal?

A Service Company Conversion Example

Let’s say you’re a service company with a website, a Twitter profile and a Facebook page.  Your goal (specific, attainable, time delimited) is to increase sales by 10% over the next 6 months.  After looking at your target audience and the benefits your services offer customers, you’ve decided that you have two actions which will help you accomplish your goal (increasing sales by 10%) — registering for a free webinar and requesting a quote — which will give you sales leads.  These are your calls to actions and they’re also the actions you’ll be measuring for conversions.  When a person registers for your webinar, you have one conversion.  Likewise, when a person requests a quote, you have a conversion.

Measuring Conversions

In our example above we have two different conversions – registering for a webinar and requesting a quote.  To measure these conversions, there probably is a form people fill out on your website and then an email is sent to you with the information from the form.  Every time you get an email is one conversion.

Analytics programs like Google Analytics can also be setup to measure conversions by telling them what page on your website is reached when a specific action is completed — usually a thank you page of some type.  Google then can give you some very valuable information about your conversion rates (how many people came to the landing page/form vs. actually converted), as well as where people may be getting lost in the process (checkout Funnel visualizations in Google Anlaytics Goals).

Improving Conversions

How to increase conversions is the topic for entire books (or at least another post or two) and really depends on your particular business, industry and online strategy.  However, if you have identified your business goal, your calls to action and your landing pages, you’ve made measuring conversions much easier.  Once you have data about your conversions and what’s happening on your landing pages, you can start to experiment with ways to improve your conversions — maybe your target audience isn’t quite right or maybe your messaging doesn’t convey the benefits to the customer.

What do you think? How do you define a conversion?

(photo by jaygooby)

While the Old Spice ad campaign, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” was amusing to watch, marketers were interested in whether it could lead to increased sales.  According to The Nielson Co. and SymphonyIRI Group, the answer is yes, as reported by BrandWeek:

Over the past three months, sales jumped 55 percent and in the past month, they rose 107 percent, also per Nielsen. Recent sales figures from SymphonyIRI  also show a lift for Old Spice Body Wash products. - Old Spice Campaign Smells Like a Sales Success – Brand Week

As the Old Spice Man responded directly to people via a series of videos, we took a look at the basic measurements available.  Let’s take an updated look now that we have sales information.

Mentions on Twitter spiked around the time of the response videos, but have increased over the past week as news of the sales reports has spread.

Searches for “old spice” on Google also spiked around the time of the response videos, but have remained higher than before them.

P&G Rep Micheal Norton weighed in on the results:

“Since the ‘Smell Like A Man, Man’ campaign broke in February, Old Spice has month-over-month strengthened its market position,” said Norton in an e-mail. He  added that Old Spice  is now the No. 1 brand of body wash and anti-perspirant/deodorant in both sales and volume with growth in the high single/double digits.

According to BrandWeek, the response videos have been viewed more than 40 million times and total brand views on the web are more than 110 million.

It will be interesting to see if Old Spice continues to converse with customers via videos and social media or if this was just a limited-time campaign.  If it is a limited-time campaign, time will tell if Old Spice can keep it’s sales lift or if it falls after people lose interest.

What do you think?

Yesterday, Ford revealed their new Explorer model exclusively on their Facebook page, and then followed up with live events in North America.  The reveal on Facebook was followed by other events, including an online chat with CEO Alan Mulally, among others.  How has the use of social media impacted the Explorer launch?  Obviously, it’s a bit too early to tell in terms of sales, but let’s take a look at some initial measures…

Mentions of “explorer” on Twitter skyrocketed yesterday (some due to Ford’s own actions), but have quieted back down to normal levels for today so far.

Searches on Google for “ford explorer 2011″ have increased over the past week or so as Ford has ramped up marketing efforts. Unfortunately, data for the past 4 days isn’t yet available.

The video created exclusively for the Facebook reveal only has 32,437 views so far, and certainly hasn’t taken off virally. Some of the comments suggest that people wanted to see more of the car and less about the story and the team. The Explorer is only on screen for the last 20s or so of a 3:48 video.

The video of the reveal in NYC with Mike Rowe and Alan Mulally may only have 3,391 views, but it’s #80 in the top favorited video today in Autos & Vehicles on YouTube.

The video tour of the Ford Explorer has 9,975 views.

I wonder if Ford wouldn’t have done better to have a Mike Rowe reveal on Facebook or a video that people would have been more interested in sharing. The reveal video on Facebook may have gotten 30k views mostly because that was the only way people could see the new vehicle at that point. There hasn’t been much take-up in terms of virally sharing any of the videos — at least so far. Whether social media has been a part of a successful product launch for Ford Explorer will have to wait until the sales numbers come in.

What do you think?

Keywords. SEO. Adwords. Content strategy. If you ask a business owner about concerns they have with their website, keywords and SEO are almost always on the list (unfortunately often taking a backseat to usability and proper marketing – but that’s a topic for another post).  Here are some free, good tools, from Google for doing basic keyword research:

Google Analytics – Keyword Report

Located under Traffic Sources in the menu on the left, this report lists the keywords used to get to your site by the number of visits, but also tells you the average amount of pages viewed per visit, the average time on the site, the % of new visits and the bounce rate.  You can also sort the list by any of these variables (for example, taking a look at the keywords that lead to the longest average time on site can be very insightful).

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools give you a look at the keywords the googlebot attributes to your site (with their significance), as well as when your site shows up for search queries (and information about how often it was clicked and for what keywords).

Sorting the queries by clicks and CTR can give you nice insight to which keywords actually lead people to your site.  Seeing all the keywords for which Google shows your site on search results may lead to some unexplored topic areas.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

AdWords has some nice tools for optimizing ad campaigns, but they can also be useful for understanding what keywords Google finds for your site along with their search volume (global and local) and competition.  Using this tool can help you find niches with less competition — both for ads, but also for content creation.

Other Keyword Tools

There are definitely other keyword tools available, some of which we’ve covered here, here and here.

What tools do you use for keyword research?

An important part of any strategy is measurement — so you know what’s working and what’s not and where to improve. Using Twitter to have conversations and provide useful information to your intended audience can be a valuable part of your online strategy.  But how do you know what your audience likes or dislikes?  Taking a look at your Twitter stats using HootSuite can give you some good insight to improve your tweets.

Daily Clicks

The daily clicks report gives you an idea of the total clicks your tweets got per day.  The default is the last 7 days, but you can easily change it to any date range you’d like.  Taking a look at the daily information will give you an idea of what days your tweets may be more popular than others with your audience.  The longer the date range, the more you can see whether certain days are better than others for announcing important promotions or information. This report will also help you identify if a specific day got more response than others, which can help you track down a specific tweet or event.

Clicks By Region & Top Referrers

Now you can see what parts of the world give you the most clicks.  You may be surprised to see an audience you hadn’t expected, which can lead to a nice expansion into an international market.

Top Referrers will show  you what sites sent your links the most traffic.  This can be especially useful if you use HootSuite to send a message to multiple social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to see where your messages are the most effective.

Most Popular Tweets

Now we get into the really valuable information — what specific tweets got the most clicks from your audience.  By taking a look at this information, you can get an idea of what topics and subjects really resonate with your audience.  You can also vary your phrasing to see if certain word patterns are more effective than others.

Individual Message Stats

HootSuite also gives you information on individual messages, which gives you an opportunity to dive a little deeper into popular (or unpopular) messages to see what makes them tick.  You can see not only how many clicks a message got, but also by day, to give you an idea of how people are reading your stream.  Do they only look at tweets immediately or do they go back through what you’ve said?

How about you?

Do you use any statistics to help improve your Tweets?  What do you use and how?

(photo by merec0)

Old Spice has turned their “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad campaign into a viral sensation by having the “Old Spice guy” respond to people’s comments and tweets via videos which were posted on YouTube (click on the response videos on the right) — my favorite is below.  The move has gotten quite a response, but only time and sales will tell whether it was successful for the brand’s bottom line.  Sales can a bit of time to react, but there are some measurable effects that can give insight into how the ads are doing now.

Mentions & Brand Awareness
People are definitely more interested in the Old Spice brand in the past week or so. As shown by the graph below, mentions of “old spice” have spiked in the past week with barely a blip before in the past 30 days.

Searches for “old spice” (and related terms) have also gone up in the past week — starting probably with the upload of the new commercial, and then increasing as people became aware of the video responses, which have been shared vigorously via Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.

Takeoff
How the campaign went viral can be seen a bit by looking at the statistics available with each individual video on YouTube.  For example, on the first video response posted:

Here are the associated stats:

You can see how the video’s popularity increased & what sites it was embedded on (and how many views it got). Interestingly enough, the video was most popular with men, their buying audience.

Interactions
While its a bit more difficult for an outsider to see this information, the number of interactions with the brand can be measured via the number of tweets, comments, posts, shares, etc. from a combination of sources.  Old Spice can also see how many people have subscribed and viewed their content (in total) since the start of the video responses — this info is available to anyone, but you’d have to do a bit of spreadsheeting to get it all and Old Spice would presumably have access to previous numbers to know how these increased.

Back to the Sale
As brilliant as these commercials and viral videos have been, it all comes down to whether or not they helped increase sales.  While it’s difficult to pinpoint directly whether there was an effect, Old Spice should see a lift in sales after the videos and the weeks to come, which is most likely attributable to this campaign — you’d have to take a look at all the numbers to make a more educated conclusion.

Thoughts?

For whatever reason, there’s this perception that social media is not measurable – that you just do it because good things will happen.  ”What’s the ROI of your phone?” is one thing I’ve heard in comparison to measuring social media.  But, if you know what you are trying to accomplish ahead of time, there’s always something that’s measurable (even with a phone).

Start at the Business Level

That’s the key issue with measurement — know what you’re trying to accomplish.  If you don’t know why you’re doing something or what you’re hoping to get out of it, it doesn’t matter how many numbers you have, you’ll never get anything out of them.  Instead, if you have a goal in mind, then it’s much easier to backtrack to see where you have data and how it can be used to give you insight into what’s going on.

What is the ROI of your phone?

Back to the phone example.  As long as you have a specific end goal in mind, let’s say increasing sales by 10% this month and you’ve identified how the phone is going to help you with that — for example, calling your list of contacts with a special offer — there are clear measurements to tell you how well the phone is working.  In this situation, you know how many people you’ve called, who you’ve called, how long you’re on the phone with each, and whether or not your call lead to a sale.  By knowing what you were trying to accomplish, you can find measurements to tell you how well that tool & your tactics with that tool worked.

How Social Media is Mesurable

The same goes for social media.  If you just get on Twitter and Facebook and blog because you think you should, measurements aren’t going to tell you much.  They will tell you some things — how many people retweet you, how many followers you have, how many pageviews you have, etc.  But, if you don’t have a specific business goal in mind, it’s difficult to connect the dots between tweeting and your goal.

Take a Step Back

Trying out various social media is a great way to see what they’re about and give you idea for how you can use them.  But, using social media is definitely measurable — as long as you take a step back and figure out what you’re trying to accomplish.  Then you’ll be able to look for what data can give you information about how well you’re accomplishing your goal.

What do you think?

(photo by MonkeyMyshkin)

Measuring, monitoring and tracking your website and social media presences can give you quite a bit of good information.  Some information and data requires the use of special tools or techniques, but here are some of what online measurement can tell you:

1. Who (what websites) is linking to your blog posts or website.
2. How much traffic your website or blog is attracting (pageviews, visits, visitors).
3. How much traffic search engines are sending to you.
4. What keywords are being used to find your content from search engines.
5. How much traffic is coming from other websites & blogs.
6. How much traffic is coming from Twitter or Facebook or other social networks.
7. How many people click on the links you send out via Twitter or Facebook or other social networks (requires URL shortener).
8. How often people amplify your messages & posts (via sharing, retweeting, reblogging, etc.)
9. What content or posts are the most popular.
10. How many conversions (sales or leads) you’re getting from your marketing efforts.
11. Where people are getting lost in your checkout process.
12. Which social networks are sending your landing pages the most traffic.
13. Which calls to action are working and from which places.
14. How long people are spending on your site and on specific pages (on average).
15. What percentage of people who visit your site only view one page.
16. Who is saying things about your brand or products or services.
17. Who is amplifying and advocating your brand and messaging (influencers).
18. How people are navigating around your site.

There are many more things that online measurement can tell you.  These are just some of them.

What does online measurement tell you?

(photo by Bludgeoner86)

Klout is a measurement tool which gives an idea of social web influence (at least via Twitter). Their data is used by applications such as Co-Tweet, HootSuite and others. Like Twitalyzer, Klout measures various aspects of Twitter usage and network, but focuses more on how influence and messages are spread via your network.  Just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t mean that all of them are actually listening and engaging with you (and they probably aren’t).  Klout gives you an idea of what your actual reach is and how engaged you are with your network (and vice versa).

When you first signup with Klout, you’ll be asked to connect with your Twitter and Facebook accounts (not sure what they do with the Facebook information, but I’ve since disconnected that to see what the impact is).  You’ll be given an initial score, but Klout takes a bit of time to chug through all your data to give you an actual score a bit later (up to a few hours – they’ll email you).

I’m not sure if this process is really clear.  I was a bit surprised to get an email later saying that my klout score had been calculated (since it seemed like it already had).  Another surprise is that your initial klout score will probably be higher than your actual one, since they have to take some time to process all the data.  I think this is confusing.  They need to make it really clear that the initial score is just that.  Maybe even just show some of the results with a clear message.

Klout score

Klout takes all the data they’ve processes and gives you a Klout score (based on actual reach and engagement and influence of your followers and network).  They also award you achievements – but what achievements are possible to get isn’t clear (seems like you’d like people to know what’s possible so they can strive towards them).

Influence Matrix

Next your network is broken down into your top 5 influencers and influencees (although this probably will change with time and is probably based on last so many tweets).  From these people (who you also can see a score for), they give you an idea of what type if influencer you are, as well as what type of influencer your top 5 influencers are.

Interesting information, but if you’re actually engaged in your network you probably won’t be surprised by this.  After I saw the Klout scores for my influencers, it helped put my own score into perspective.  As an aside, I think there are probably people in my network who I’m more influenced by, which is why I think Klout used the last so many tweets.  I would also expect this to change with time.  Interestingly, the people in the list of influenced by me changed from the initial klout score to the actual.

There’s also a content analysis of the top 5 or so of most influential topics which you cover.  It would be interesting to see this divided up by what topics you’re influenced by and what topics you have influence in to see how you’re sending messages through your network.

Score Analysis

Klout breaks down your score further, into True Reach, Amplification, and Network to give you an idea of how they calculated the score and where you have influence.  Of this information, I found Amplification & Network to be the most useful.

Amplification gives you an idea of the likelihood that your tweets will generate retweets and conversation.

Network gives you an idea of how well your network is working for you (and also places where you can improve).

Content Analysis

I didn’t find the content analysis as useful.  I think there’s better information available in HootSuite about what tweets are getting the most attention and clicks.  Also, the click analysis showed 0 clicks for all the tweets they pulled, which leaves me to believe that they don’t have the ability to collect information for my tweets since I use ow.ly.  Which also makes you wonder how this affects their analysis.

Overall

Klout gives some good information about how well your network is working towards amplifying your message, as well as how engaged you are with your network.  I think they could be more clear about the initial klout score and the actual klout score and the fact that it takes them some time to come back with an actual score.  With 0 clicks showing for all the tweets they pulled, I’m suspicious of how well they measure that aspect of their score (at least with my account), which makes me wonder what my score would be if I did use bit.ly.  As difficult as it is to integrate with different services across the Internet, they need to make these shortcomings clear or at least explain what’s going on.  Klout does give more information on how they calculate the various aspects of their score here.

Klout seems to be useful for looking for trends in your influence (and as a benchmark).  As long as you don’t change anything in regards to the way they measure (like switching to bit.ly from ow.ly URL shortener), you should be able to get some good information on how your influence is changing.  There’s also some nice tidbits of information about your network.

As with all metrics and measurement tools, use Klout as a tool to give you more information about what’s going on in your social web.  I’d recommend using it in conjunction with other tools (like HootSuite & Twitalyzer) to get a clearer picture of your Twitter network. Twitalyzer gives nice recommendations of places where you might want to improve. Some of this information is also available in Klout, but you have to dig a bit deeper (ex. in image mouseovers).

What do you think? Have you tried Klout?

HootSuite just released a new version of their social media application/dashboard/platform programmed in HTML5 for increased speed and performance.  Additional features like 2 new themes, geo-search capability, support for Twitter’s retweet and Google Analytics improve the overall usefulness of the app for social media marketing, monitoring and conversations.

To start with, the HootSuite app has more space for your tabs and streams, and makes more efficient use of the space for task-specific uses.  For example, when you go to add a tweet, or profile update at the top, the box will expand for more space, but will otherwise be collapsed so you have the space for monitoring your social networks.

Also nice is support for Facebook updates… with links and images being generated so now your updates look just like they would if you shared a link on Facebook.

They’ve also added a connection to Google Analytics so you can see your stats right from HootSuite (although I couldn’t get this connection working properly — although I only spent a few minutes on it).

With every new release of HootSuite, which is updated the minute I login, the application becomes more and more useful as a social media tool.  And the little owl head that blinks at you occasionally from the corner is just cute.

What do you think?  Do you like or dislike the new HootSuite 5?

I had a free webinar today on how you can use Google Analytics to measure success in your social media strategy. I covered what to measure, some measurement basics, what it means to measure success and what Google Analytics can tell you about success in your social media plan.  My slides from the presentation are below.  I’ll work on making a downloadable recording available soon.  If you have any questions, please let me know!

If you want to learn more, a great book on the topic is Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (amazon affiliate link) by Avinash Kaushik. I’ve read the book and I think Avinash does a great job explaining web analytics in an easy-to-understand manner, but also gives you good information to understand what’s going on in more depth.

As a Web Strategist (and an engineer), I’m a bit of a numbers geek.  I like to take a look at Google Analytics or FeedBurner or whatever statistics application to see how things are going.  Measurement is an important part of any strategy.  It’s imperative for knowing whether you’re on the right track. Picking the right metrics to measure can be tricky (you want to make sure what you’re measuring let’s you know whether you’re closer to your business goal and objectives).  But is measurement always necessary?

Sometimes you just know things are working well.  You’re getting more emails and phone calls and sales.  Or more people are retweeting your tweets or commenting on your blog.  That’s a type of measurement without actual numbers.

What if things aren’t working well?  What if you’re just starting off in social media or a marketing plan and you’re not sure whether it’s working? Measurement will tell you that — as well as what it is that’s working or not (if you’ve set things up correctly).

I certainly fall on the side of measurement as necessary, but Gary Vaynerchuk readily admits to not measuring anything, relying instead on his gut instincts.  His argument is that the numbers may tell you one thing while you have a gut feeling of the opposite. Or, as in the example he gives in his book, Crush It! (link to my review), what if you have low numbers at one site, but the people there have a lot of influence?

I agree that numbers aren’t everything.  There’s a lot of instinct and personality involved in building a great business.  I just think that measurement can give you some insights you may not have gotten otherwise.

What do you think? Is measurement always necessary?

(photo by Memotions)

There are lots of different ways to measure social media ROI (return on investment).  Some are short term (increase in web traffic, mentions, leads, etc.), but many are longer term and thus much harder to measure.  Whenever you measure anything, you want to be very clear about exactly what it is you’re measuring and what it means.

This video, Social Media ROI: Socialnomics is by Erik Qualman.  He’ll give you some ideas of the longer term benefits of social media.

We had a free webinar this week on measuring social media success – what that means, requirements for measuring, why you should measure, and some techniques for measurement.  My slides from the presentation are below.  We’ll work on getting a recording available soon.  We’ll also rerun this webinar sometime in May, in case you missed it.  If you have any questions, please let us know!

Ken Burbary gave a great presentation at FutureMidwest on some tools and techniques he uses to gather consumer insights for clients.  I took a ton of notes during his presentation and was happy to find out he posted the slide deck so we can all benefit.  Great tools. Take a look: