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

Freemium Digital Strategy Can Help Build Your Business

Have you even heard of the term “Freemium“? According to Wikipedia, its a  business model that includes a free service but a premium is charged for advanced services. This includes software, media, games or web services today but if you think about it, direct marketers-many of whom have migrated over to the Digital side have been using freemiums since the Sears catalog was invented(free shipping with purchase).

If you are reading this Blog, chances are good that you already have used one or more freemiums such as:

• LinkedIn is free, but they have great value added upgrades especially for job seekers.
• Zoho is an excellent free CRM and online meeting tool, with lots of optional advanced features like CRM and  unlimited meting attendees.
• Most businesses use WinZip which includes a free 30 day trial with upgrades to full service package.
• How about Google AdSense who frequently and regularly gives anyone who wants to open up a new Adsense account $100 to spend on a paid search  test. Once your test is cooking and shows promise-most people are hooked and can easily type in a budget you want to  spend to expand your test and everything else is already done for you. Google is like eating peanuts-once you start, it’s real hard to stop!
• Norton anti-virus software and its competitors started out by giving away Free Trials on disk, with an easy to upgrade to a paid service. This model has become a problem with the advent of freeware like a free download of  Microsoft Security Essentials and others.
• Words with Friends-who hasn’t played this popular game by downloading the Free app on their smart phone only to finally concede that its better to pay for the game than be constantly interrupted by ads?

Then there are some of my favorite retro freemiums like the Gillette razor. With Gillette, they will give you the razor for free…if you but the blades! Acme’s summer of 2012 Sweepstakes promises cars, boats and a million dollars free if you buy their groceries and your name is pulled out of a hat with a gazillion to 1 odds of your actually winning. Webmasters can use stock digital images free…if they want to create a mockup with the photo credits superimposed in a watermark, and they agree to pay a licensing fee based on the number of exposures online. Entrepreneurs, consultants, doctors and lawyers typically offer a free initial consultation and once you get a taste-they charge you top dollar. And then there is the ubiquitous buy one get one free-just another form of freemium!

So now you have a new word in your vocabulary and maybe you will be inspired to consider how to use a Freemium for your business.

Enjoy and Prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• Thinking of Going Freemium: Consider These Tips First (smallbiztrends.com)
• How the freemium app model will pave the way to profits (digitaltrends.com)
• Freemium defined                                                                                                                (Wikipedia.org)

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.

10 Important Things I Learned From Yogi Berra

To celebrate his 87^th birthday, I thought I would share 10 important things I learned from New York Yankee catcher and manager, Yogi Berra.

1.  Reciprocity:  “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

2.  Forward progress:“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

3.  On observation: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

4.  Miscalculation: “Ninety percent of the time the game is half mental.”

5.  Telling it like it is: “If you ask me a question I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.”

Fire A Client Today!

I took me a good ten years in business to muster the courage to fire my first client.

Since I am not Donald Trump, my early reluctance was based on a modest bank account, coupled with the lack of confidence that I would be able to replace them with a better client.

I am quite sure if you examine your customer list you can identify a few who are exceptionally demanding of your time, are very slow to pay for your service, who undervalue your contribution and are constantly looking for a discount. I have found that 10% of my worst clients (call them the bottom feeders) take up to 50% of my time and provide me with less than 2% of my professional satisfaction or sense of accomplishment.

Spread the Word with a Customer Referral Program

A good Customer Referral Marketing Program is a structured and systematic process to maximize word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers to talk to others about you, your company, and the value and benefit your products and services and to reward them for the introduction.

A study conducted by the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Pennsylvania, on referral programs and customer value which followed the customer referral program of a German bank that paid customers 25 euro for bringing in a new customer, was released in July 2010. According to Professor Van den Bulte, this is the first ever study published on the financial evaluation of customer referral programs. The study found that referred customers were both more profitable and loyal than normal customers. Referred customers had a higher contribution margin, a higher retention rate and were more valuable in both the short and long run.

On whether customer referral programs are worth the cost, the study says that it records “a positive value differential, both in the short term and long term, between customers acquired through a referral program and other customers. Importantly, this value differential is larger than the referral fee. Hence, referral programs can indeed pay off.”

Budget Your Social Media Time

Are you spending too much of your time on social media?

I am amazed at the people I know that constantly send or post messages during times that they are working as full-time employees. Surely, this a form of Russian roulette that will likely end at some point when their employer decides that their distraction with a social media obsession is interfering with achieving company objectives.

As a freelance Copywriter and Marketing Strategist, my income is directly determined by the percentage of client billable hours. At the end of the week I don’t want to feel like the attorney who can’t figure out where ten hours of my time went.

Is Brand Advertising Dead?

Is Brand Advertising Dead?

The most dramatic shift that is changing how we all do business is the rise of accessible information.

Only twenty years ago, our access to information was bounded by the books we owned, the TV shows we watched, and the newspapers we read. Today, because of the web, we’re seeing an exponential increase in the amount of information that we have access to.

Traditional advertising up until the early 1990’s tried to convert a customer at every touch point, taking them from brand awareness to customer in one fell swoop. Today, the age of brand persuasion at a single touch point is over, and instead most successful companies invest their advertising budgets in great content and in developing a relationship.

In an age of exploding social media, consumers rely more on the experiences of their friends and colleagues than they do on a TV ad or billboard. The influence of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, coupled with the instantaneous speed of smart phone text messaging in the last few years has changed the landscape forever.

The purpose of a piece of branded content is not only to grab the audience’s attention but to stimulate a positive conversation about the brand that becomes viral. In short, it is no longer enough for a brand to tell people it’s great, it has to encourage its customers to tell prospects it’s great.

Five Critical Changes You Should Make to Your 2012 Marketing Plan

Six  Dramatic Changes in the Performance of Traditional Media

Three months ago I delivered the first of a half dozen presentations to local small business groups recommending changes in their marketing plan for 2012. The ideas are driven primarily by dramatic changes we have seen in the last ten to twenty years in the performance of traditional forms of media.

Newspaper – Daily circulation, which stood at 62.3 million in 1990, fell to 43.4 million in 2010, a decline of 30%. Sunday circulation held up slightly better, falling from 62.6 million in 1990 to 46.2 million last year, off 26% according to the Newspaper Association of America. In short your newspaper ad today is seen by at least 30% less potential customers for your product or service.

TV – Television viewership has continued to decline and become more fragmented offering hundreds of channel choices. The latest Nielsen shows a 20% decline in viewership. 

Yellow Pages – Yellow Pages usage has been dropping at a rate of 2 to 3% since 2004 and the decline escalated to 10 % a year in 2009 according to the independent Kelsey Group.