Quantifying Social Media

Everyday more companies and more consumers are joining the social media fray.  What does the increased noise level mean? Can you actually measure whether the investment has any impact on results?

Extent of Company Social Media Today

In June 2012 a two-day conference was held in New York City to share and discuss the State of Social Media. The conference served as a forum to discuss the results of data produced by a survey conducted by Useful Social Media from 650 participating corporations.

71% of the survey respondents said that they were responsible for developing and executing the company social media activity using a team of between 2 and 4 team staff members on a part-time basis.

Not surprisingly, 90% of respondents use Facebook for their company and 89% have a Twitter presence. These two are the unrivalled leaders for companies – and an incredible proportion of

businesses have taken the plunge and set up accounts on these two sites. YouTube and LinkedIn were also popular with 75% acknowledging regular participation. Also, 49% disclosed that they have created and promote their own blog.

Measuring Return On Investment in Social Media

Less than a third of respondents feel that they are accurately measuring the impact of their social media activity, and only 40% of respondents say they measure social media ROI (with only 23% confident they’re getting this measurement correct). Early measurement shows:

1. Activity/Engagement 14%

2. Conversion to leads or sales of those engaged 6 to 7%

3. Development of recommendations or customer testimonials from evangelists 2%

What is Next in Social Media?

The most popular replies from survey respondents about what to expect next year are:

1. 200% more companies will use social media to develop better products

2. A third more companies will offer customer service delivery through social media

3. 95% more companies expect to use social media for market research in determining future offerings.

What would participants like to be able to measure in the future? The answer is activity, growth in followers, increase in web traffic, translation to leads, and conversion to sales.

 

You can download a free copy of the full survey report @ www.usefulsocialmedia.com

Top Five Small Company Sales Shortcomings and How to Fix Them

The more opportunities I have had to provide freelance help to small owner-operated businesses, the more I recognize the differences in their approach and the similarities in their sales and marketing shortcomings.

1. Disappointing and inconsistent sales performance

*invest more time to manage and participate in your sales effort

*improve the consistency of your sales effort with a modestly priced CRM program like  SalesForce, Eloqua, or NetSuite to formalize your calling, emails, sales calls, tracking and reporting no matter how small your sales staff.

*Change your sales compensation to include commission based incentive.

*Eliminate sales staff members who have nor performed over a twelve month period.

Ninety Percent of All Data Created in the Last Two Years!

An IBM web page describes the company’s big data offerings by stating that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily now and as a result 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.

 I never claimed to be a math major but if I understand the data progression correctly, it goes something like this:

1 Byte is made up of 8 bits

1 Kilobyte           KB          10³          (or 1,000 bytes)

1 Megabyte        MB         10⁶

1 Gigabyte           GB          10⁹

1 Terabyte           TB           10¹²

1 Petabyte           PB           10¹⁵

1 Exabyte            EB           10¹⁸

 One Exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. To put this staggering amount of storage in some perspective, the world’s technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 exabytes in 2007. This is equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CD-ROM per person in 1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per person in 2007.

 Another way to begin to grasp the explosion is to realize that we are creating data at a daily rate of all the data that existed in 1986.

It’s Not SEO Anymore, It’s Marketing

When the topic of online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) is discussed in meetings every day and even at marketing conferences, unfortunately SEO is often viewed as a silo of  it’s own, separate and distinct from all other forms of marketing.

The Comscore January 2012 report says that the average American user spent a record 36 hours online in the month-that’s a full time job’s worth of time!

If you are a marketing decsi0n maker responsible for driving more leads and sales growth for your company-and you want to achieve your goals in 2o12, you better start believing that SEO is at the hub of all marketing.

The question no longer is where do you spend your ad dollars, its how do you spend your budget online?

SEO today is at the hub of all marketing!

Take this  quiz to confirm it’s not SEO anymore, it’s marketing!

1. At your desktop or laptop PC when you Google the word or words that best describe your product or service e.g. “widgets” (not your brand or company name), does your web site appear on page 1 of the natural or non-sponsored listings?

2. Same question as above,  only with your blackberry, iphone or other PDA?

3. Have you reduced or eliminated entirely your Paid search spend as a result of gaining more page 1 organic listings from your most relevant, high-volume search keywords?

4. Have you integrated your website with external social media by linking and bookmarking from their profile pages to your site?

5. Have you experienced a significant gain in organic search as a % of all sources of traffic to your website?

If you answered yes to  3 or more of these questions, you will have confirmed for yourself that it’s not SEO anymore, it’s marketing. If you scored 1 or 2 yes’s, you need to get busy talking with an SEO pro…

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Should You Use Google+ for Your Business?

By now  you already have  a Facebook and Twitter account or at least are considering how to leverage social media for your business.

If you haven’t taken advantage of a Free Google+ profile page yet and you want to keep your SEO strong and fresh this post is for you.

Add Recommended Links

In order to drive traffic to your website and create business leads, you should post helpful links under the ‘About’ tab that’s located on your Google+ Page. If you link to your helpful and informative blog posts, offers or anything that you think customers can benefit from, people will click them and be taken to your website. Take full advantage of this area of your Page, because if not, you won’t be making the most of what Google+ has to offer.

Promote

Why wouldn’t you promote your Google+ Page on your website and blog? If you promote your Facebook and Twitter Pages, you should also promote your Google+ Page. This is an easy way to be added to more Circles. Because your website and blog get a lot of traffic, it’s a no-brainer that you should be cross-promoting on these sites as well as on Twitter and Linkedin. By doing this, it’s a great way to build new leads and be added to more Circles.

Get more information at Google+ for business

Steve Emory, President & Managing Partner Emory Digital

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2012

1. Reputation-90% of people trust online reviews. Regularly review and post  comments about your company, its products or services. Leverage social media assets like Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Ask  clients, vendors and peers to contribute. 78% search a company online before buying.

2. Lead Nurturing-50% of online leads are not ready to buy and 90% or more visitors to your site do nothing. Include a CRM program in your budget and commit all employees to get permission from prospects to email and/or phone to stay in touch. Be sure to test or expand re-marketing as part of your display advertising to bring people back to your site that visited previously.

3. Mobile-Expect mobile to produce leads and sales for you this year. At a minimum be sure you create and deploy a mobile version of your web site. 90% of mobile searches result in action; 53% purchase due to mobile search and 71% of users search after seeing a mobile ad.

4. Local Search–Google now deems local search important and that means you should too. Last year there were over 4 billion local searches on Google each month. 20% of all searches are local; 61% of all local searches result in a purchase; 55% of consumers with mobile phones use them to buy local products or services.

SEO & Social are Merging

5. Social and SEO Merge-Google  has accelerated this inevitable change with 70 million Google + users since June 2011, and then there is Facebook approaching 1 billion members, Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google) and others. Any effective SEO campaign already uses social profiles and their content plus social bookmarks and links to make its companion Website more popular for search engines. If you don’t have both SEO and Social media cooking in 2012-you will quickly begin to lag behind your online competition  for search leads and sales.

In summary, 2012 may be the end of the Mayan calendar, but it will also mark the coming of age and necessity for true end-end digital marketing.

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Credits: National Positions our SEO partner; Nielson  Report, Cone Communications, Hubspot, Google Smartphone User study, BIA Kelsey, eMarketer