By Rick Mulready
Published May 20, 2013

Are you looking for better ways to measure your social media activities?

Do you know if your social media efforts are worthwhile?

Social media measurement is one of the most frustrating challenges business face.

In this article I’ll show you three simple measurement strategies that can fit into one of your future campaigns.

Why Measure?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns, it’s critical that you know your objective.

Ask yourself why you are considering including social media in your overall marketing campaign in the first place. How will your efforts impact your revenue and grow your business?

You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place along with a timeframe in which to achieve the goal.

Always setup goals so that you can measure social media. Image: iStockPhoto

Now you can determine which social media platform aligns with your objectives.

For example, if you’re trying to reach a female audience and your business lends well to pictures and images, you might want to consider Pinterest.

If you’re a business-to-business brand marketing an upcoming conference, you’ll want to consider LinkedIn.

#1: Quantify Your Social Media Listening

“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.” – Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media (@FrankEliason)

Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing the point of social media.

But how do you measure listening and how does it impacts your revenue?

In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter to answer that question.

• In Twitter’s search field, enter your business name.
  

  Twitter’s search field.

• You can then select whether you want to view Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all” tweets containing your business name or tweets that contain your business name from only those people you follow.
  

  Twitter search.

• As you filter the tweets, look through them and decide whom you’d like to follow. These are likely either potential customers or your current customers.
• Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever possible.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too, especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to search specific terms related to your business that people who are near your location are talking about.

Twitter is an amazing tool for providing real-time customer service. You can learn things like:

• Exactly how many people you’re helping
• If you’re growing that number of people
• The issues customers are experiencing with your business
• What’s broken in your business

At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and improvements within your business. You can measure the direct impact on your business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new fixes give you.

#2: Create a Rating System for Your Social Engagement

“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media (@scottmonty)

This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when you’re trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.

Here’s how it works.

Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.

Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.

At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective to a numeric goal. Then, use a tiered point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.

Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:

• Likes: 1 point each
• Comments: 5 points each
• Shares: 10 points each

During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal or not.

Assign a point system to likes, shares and comments.

You can create similar point systems on any of the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.

#3: Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure

“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.

The Corcoran Group, a NYC real estate firm, adds value via their social media outlets.

For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend.

Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.

Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can quantify.

Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:

• Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
• Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
• Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful you campaign is.

I hope this article gives you some ideas for how you can simply measure your social campaigns and shows you that you don’t need expensive measurement tools.

What do you think? Can you improve the effectiveness of your social media campaigns with some of the above strategies? What simple strategies are you using to measure your campaigns? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Images from iStockPhoto.

Tags: measurement, return on investment, rick mulready, roi, social engagement, social media campaign, social media listening, social media marketing, social media measurement, social media strategy

The smartphone has interchangeable back panels which alters the phone’s software

A company made up of former Nokia employees has shown off Jolla, a new smartphone with a custom operating system known as Sailfish.

The software has been built from the remnants of MeeGo, a project abandoned by Nokia in 2011 in favour of adopting Windows Phone for its handsets.

The Jolla phone – pronounced Yol-la – is due to be released by the end of the year, and will only be sold online.

It will enter a market already heavily crowded with several operating systems.

“For a couple of years we haven’t had anything really interesting in the mobile phone market,” said Antti Saarnio, chairman and co-founder of Jolla.

“This creates opportunities for newcomers to come in. It’s different, but it’s purposefully different.”

The Other Half

The phone has a 4.5in screen, with an eight megapixel camera. It also supports 4G and is compatible with apps made for Google’s Android.

Among the handset’s other features is what the company has called “The Other Half.”

The coloured back of the phone is interchangeable – and the operating system’s interface will change depending on what type of cover you have.

These changes could include, for example, team colours for a football team.

“You connect it to the phone, and the user interface reflects the players and colours of the team,” Mr Saarnio told the BBC.

“It’s an interesting way to show you ‘belong’ with something.”

He would not confirm how exactly this feature works – but many speculate the use of near-field communication (NFC) technology.

Splinter group

Mr Saarnio left Nokia in 2011, along with several other employees who had been working on a joint Nokia-IBM project to create a new mobile operating system to rival the likes of Apple’s iOS and Google Android.

Nokia released one handset running the MeeGo software, the N9-00.

Mr Saarnio felt it was not given enough of a chance to succeed.

The smartphone will initially only be sold online

“The team really felt that this was one of the best phones in the market, even though it was quite under-marketed,” he said.

“Everybody felt so strongly that they wanted to continue.”

Several of the team left the Finnish mobile giant to start their own company and remain working on MeeGo, which it has renamed Sailfish.

Despite leaving the company, Mr Saarnio said he wished Nokia well – and that Jolla was open to letting them use Sailfish in future handsets.

“We are actually quite open – we are offering this operating system for other smartphone makers to use.

“Let’s wait and see and we will just do our best in our business.”

What’s This?

By Bob Garfield2013-05-20 15:44:46 UTC

Dear Bob & Doug:

We are husband-and-wife proprietors of an Arizona eatery I won’t name, but which rhymes with “Framy’s Fraking Frompany Frakery Froutique & Fristro.” Craziest thing: We were having some trouble with staff who seemed to think that “tips” belonged to “them,” instead of my husband and me. We were also getting some bad Yelp reviews (fakes obviously written by competitors), but then we were invited to be featured on a reality TV show starring some Brit twit whose name rhymes with Frordan Framsey. Well, surprise, surprise. The producers managed to gin up some “conflict” by assaulting us with vicious, groundless hostile observations and suggestions, such as not screaming profanity and homophobic epithets at customers waiting an hour for a pizza.

Let me ask you this: How are we supposed to bake a pizza when our kitchen is filled with disloyal incompetents dead-set on destroying our business?

—Scandalized in Scottsdale

Dear Scandalized:

Criticism on Yelp can be harsh and hard to take. Generally, though, patrons do not go to the trouble of posting a negative review if they haven’t had a genuinely bad experience. Actually, online reviews tend to be positive. Negative ones often are signs of trouble that you should be investigating in your business. As they say, where there’s smoke there’s three-cheese pizza with fig preserves, sweet pears, caramelized onions, fresh rosemary and Gorgonzola cheese topped with prosciutto burning to ash in the oven.

Dear Bob & Doug:

Whose side are you on? Don’t you understand we are the victims of HATERS who for some reason have conspired to destroy us, by complaining about our exquisite food and service? Everything good is worth waiting for, and if these LOSERS can’t wait for an asparagus pizza, we don’t need their business. Let ‘em PAY AND GET OUT.

Also, just we are a “baking company” — that does not mean we must physically “bake” the cakes we sell. Is there some law we don’t know about that says we can’t repackage baked goods and sell them? God has told us to resell. God loves us and has given us 3.5 stars on Yelp. Others are cowards who have hacked our Facebook page and Twitter.

“I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE. YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD. IT IS NOT UNCOMMON TO RESELL THINGS WALMART DOES NOT MAKE THEIR ELECTRONICS OR TOYS TO LAY OFF!!!!” Like we would say such nonsense. It is obviously the work of Free Syrian Army terrorists or Anonymous or local pansies. We have notified FBI and Interpol and Galactic Justice Tribunal of Crab Nebulae.

—Scandalized in Scottsdale

Dear Scandalized:

Now, see, that’s what we were getting at. Lashing out against critics on social media is unproductive. Replying to even the most harsh attacks requires patience and humility, even if you think the criticism is unjust. In fact, most of the time, calmly and politely hearing out your critics tends to disarm them and soften them — even turn them around altogether. Anonymity plus the instant gratification of the send button create a playground for the id. By surrendering to your own id, you have attracted legions of trolls who will LTFAO as they gradually drive you out of business.

Dear Bob & Doug:

Who are you accusing of surrender? YOU COMMIE PANSY REDDITS! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? IF YOU WERE MEN, INSTEAD OF YELP GOATS YOU WOULD COME SAY THAT TO MY FACE. I STEP ON YOUR THROATS AND EAT YOUR LIVERS. MY WIFE IS APHRODITE WITH SOUL OF GODDESS AND BIG AMERICAN TEETH. HOW DO YOU TALK ABOUT HER? I STUFF HERBED RICOTTA CHEESE & FRESH BASIL IN YOUR BODY HOLES AND COOK YOU! GOD WANTS YOU TO BE A LUNCHEON SPECIAL.

—Scandalized in Scottsdale

Dear Scandalized:

Check, please.

Image via iStockphoto, Cimmerian

Bob Garfield

Bob Garfield and Doug Levy explain the rules of the relationship era in their book Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results.

Topics: Business, contributor, Marketing, Social Media

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s rumors, Yahoo and Tumblr have jointly announced a “definitive agreement” for the former to acquire the latter for $1.1 billion. The agreement makes it clear that Tumblr will be “independently operated as a separate business” with its own branding and line of development. A frankly worded press release says that this arms-length arrangement will help Yahoo “not to screw it up” and promises that the 300 million monthly visitors to the blogging site will continue to experience Tumblr’s “irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.” If all this is to be believed, those who have allegedly fled to WordPress, for fear of Tumblr being shut down or re-versioned, may have slightly jumped the gun.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile

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Source: yahoo.tumblr.com

Now that Facebook’s share feature has settled into its own mobile apps, the firm has pushed its native Share Dialog for iOS out of beta, which allows developers to bake the function into their own applications. With just an extra line of code, apps will allow users to share things, tag friends and note their location without having to log into the social network or connect the app to their account first, removing some hassle from the equation. In addition, the built-in sharing options in iOS 6 can be bolstered with Open Graph actions. Click the source link below to snatch Zuckerberg and Co.’s latest SDK for Apple’s mobile OS, or hit the second link for the docs.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Source: Facebook Developers (1), (2)

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Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales gives his reaction to Yahoo’s deal with Tumblr

Yahoo says its $1.1bn (£723m; 857m euros) purchase of blogging platform Tumblr will boost its revenue as soon as 2014.

Yahoo’s chief financial officer, Ken Goldman, made the claim during a call with analysts, although he did not give firm numbers.

Its chief executive Marissa Mayer said Tumblr would operate independently, in a promise “not to screw it up”.

Tumblr founder David Karp will continue as chief executive officer.

The deal values Mr Karp’s stake at $275m.

The deal is the largest made by Ms Mayer since she took the helm at Yahoo last July, and she described the acquisition as a “unique opportunity.”

“On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo couldn’t be more different, but at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary,” added Ms Mayer.

Mr Karp, 26, who owns 25% of the privately-owned company he co-founded with Marco Arment in 2007, said he was “elated” to have the support of Yahoo.

“Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from,” he added. Mr Karp emphasised that neither its aims or team was changing as a result of Yahoo’s purchase.

Mobile devices

The $1.1bn price tag for Tumblr represents a significant premium on its $800m valuation when it last raised money from private investors.

Tumblr’s 2012 revenue was just $13m, according to a report by Forbes magazine, leading analysts to suggest Yahoo had overpaid for the deal.

“Even if revenue was $100 million, it means Yahoo paid 10 times revenue,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis. “Ten times is what you pay to date the belle of the ball. It’s on the outer bands of M&A.”

Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch.

According to its homepage, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with a total of 50.7 billion posts.

It also has a significant presence on mobile devices.

But despite its fast-growing user base, it has struggled to make money and has traditionally resisted advertising.

It said in April 2012 that it would roll out limited use of adverts.

Ms Mayer said Yahoo would now work with Tumblr to create ads that “are seamless and enhance the user experience”.

Tumblr’s founder David Karp will keep his role as chief executive

Brian Wieser, analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said that the quickest way for Yahoo to boost Tumblr’s revenue would be to combine its sales force with the blogging site, but that this would risk alienating users.

“It’s not clear that this deal will be favourable from a return-on-capital perspective,” Wieser said. “One billion [dollars] for one company is a big bet.”

Yahoo remains a giant in the internet world, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month. The majority of its revenues come from advertising.

But it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings.

It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.

Samsung showed off its Wallet app to developers earlier this year, and now Korean customers can download it onto compatible Android devices from the company’s own app market. Currently it only appears to collect credit card info, which customers can then use to pay for goods and services at online merchants, verified by a one-time password or PIN. Clearly aimed at both Google Wallet and Apple’s Passbook, Samsung plans to add a few features we’ve seen in Passbook that will make tickets, membership cards and coupons accessible all in one place. According to the translated press release it’s out for the Galaxy S 4, Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy S II HD LTE, although whether it will be featured in a Gangnam Style 2 video remains unknown.

Update: Commenter Chris posted a pic showing that the app is also live in the US Samsung Apps market, although it looks a bit different and lists more of the Passbook features we were expecting. This may be explained by a post on the Samsung Wallet Partners site, indicating it launched in open beta on the 18th, with support for transportation tickets, membership cards, coupons and event tickets. We checked and it’s not showing up on our Note IIs or GS4s yet, but if you have one it may be worth taking a peek at Samsung’s app store to see what’s waiting inside.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Samsung

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Source: Samsung Korea, Samsung Wallet Partners

The Pentagon has accused China’s army of carrying out cyber-attacks

State-sponsored hackers have renewed attacks on the US after a three-month hiatus, the New York Times reports.

In February, Unit 61398 of the Chinese army was named as the source of many cyber-attacks on American companies and federal agencies.

The publicity drew denials from the Chinese government, but also prompted the number of attacks launched from China to slow to a trickle.

Now, the newspaper reports, the unit has resumed attacks on US companies.

Cyber-defence company Mandiant told the New York Times the unit, which is believed to operate out of a heavily guarded building in the suburbs of Shanghai, had recently stepped up its activity. It declined to name which agencies and businesses had been attacked.

Earlier this year Mandiant published detailed evidence suggesting Unit 61398 was behind the vast majority of significant attacks on American federal agencies and industrial organisations.

Government documents, intellectual property, blueprints and many other confidential papers had been stolen during the attacks, said Mandiant.

Hide tracks

In the wake of that report and condemnation by the Obama administration, the unit apparently scaled back its activity, uninstalling spying tools and the remote access code it had placed on networks.

But now, Mandiant told the paper, the unit had sprung back into action and was working at about 70% of its former capacity.

In a bid to hide its tracks, the unit had started using different computers to insert its remote access tools, the company said.

China has persistently denied sponsoring the attacks, saying the US is the real cyber-aggressor.

It said Mandiant’s report was flawed and did not contain enough proof to back up its accusations.

The cyber-attacks are expected to be one of the main topics of discussion when President Obama’s national security adviser visits China for talks in late July.

It’s not uncommon for the Sky Sports iPad application to receive features tailored for fans of the world’s beautiful game, soccer (or football, if you want to get technical). To that end, Sky today released version 5.4 of the app ahead of next week’s UEFA Champions League final. Viewers will now be able to choose from up to 20 camera angles when watching game highlights, which should go hand-in-hand with the recent inclusion of that second screen experience. The update also brings the ability to view selected clips in slow-mo — and, hey, the way Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are currently playing, we’re definitely going to need to take things down a notch.

Filed under: Tablets, Software, HD

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Source: App Store

What’s This?

By Scott Gerber2013-05-20 16:59:11 UTC

Even the most social-savvy business owners can get caught up in the numbers game: counting and recounting likes, followers, fans, retweets, shares. Not to say those numbers don’t correlate to how well your business connects with customers online, but 100 shares doesn’t necessarily mean 100 sales — and it certainly doesn’t measure the potential value of those 100 shares.

For example, were any of the 100 fans sharing that post actually influencers? Did the fans in question sign up for your list, or share and forget? Are your likes and follows actually impacting your sales? Many business owners wouldn’t know how to start answering those questions.

To find out which social metrics are really worth monitoring, we asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs to share which numbers they’re tracking right now on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Facebook Engagement

We came up with a metric that we call “Facebook Engagement Ratio,” which is the number of people talking about us, divided by the number of likes. We believe this is a more accurate measure of engagement than just counting likes. And we track it on a weekly basis, compared to our competitors.

- Kit Hickey, Ministry of Supply

2. Not Just Vanity Metrics

Early on at Contently, we observed our content marketing clients struggle with not only how to measure results, but also knowing what they should track in the first place. So we built a social content analytics tool that tracks three scores: reach, engagement and influence. Each score is a mashup of various metrics. Reach comes from pageviews and social impressions, essentially asking, “Who was exposed to your content?” Engagement is total minutes spent with your content, generated by active time on page and pages per visit: “Who actually consumed your content?” Influence is “Who took an action because of your content?”; i.e., shares and subscribers. This way, we create a funnel for measuring both social and longform content, boiling it down to insights that actually map a brand’s goals.

- Shane Snow, Contently

3. Metrics vs. Influencers

Metrics and thought leaders are two different ends of the spectrum. When you’re looking at metrics and data, you’re looking at the whole or segments of it. When you’re looking at influential thought leaders, you’re looking at building relationships with individuals. Keep the two ideas separate — woo your influencers by building real relationships. Then use metrics to see how you’re doing with the masses.

- Laura Roeder, LKR Social Media

4. Virality vs. Likes

Measuring social metrics by “counting likes” on a single Facebook post doesn’t work. You must measure by “virality.”. A post that gets 17,000 likes (the number of unique people who see your post) may only get 0.1% virality (the percentage of people who create a story from your post, out of the number of unique people who see your post), while another that receives 10,000 likes, but gets 9.97% virality — this is a far better post. To go viral, you must connect with your fans’ passion and excite them. This is the toughest challenge of all.

- Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net

5. Repeat Engagment

For us, the real social media win is when someone becomes a fan and then stays one over time — someone who consistently shares, likes and tweets our content. What we measure is basically our number of super fans.

- Derek Flanzraich, Greatist

6. The Stories That Metrics Don’t Show

We measure our social media marketing in stories. How many stories can we tell others as a result of what we did online? Did an influencer retweet one of our tweets this month, which resulted in X amount of sales/followers/traffic? Did our social media monitoring tool discover someone using our products who wasn’t even aware that it was our product? Is that same person now a fan of ours? Did he buy more stuff after he rediscovered our brand? Did our social media community teach us something that we didn’t know about our own brand this month? All of these questions can bring out a story that shows why social media metrics don’t always tell the full story of how you’re doing online.

- Brett Farmiloe, Markitors

7. Conversions are all that matter

There is only one number that matters and that is how many conversions you are getting. Whether you have 100,000 fans or 100, what really matters is how many of those people you can make customers. Business is not a popularity contest, and in many cases having lots of attention and hype can detract from your brand and distract both your customers and team.

- Matt Wilson, Under30Media

8. Content Distribution

Rather than measure whether we are reaching the “right” thought leaders, we focus on scaling our social media to reach both small and large influencers alike. Our goal is to build relationships, so we try to spread relevant content that we think will match us with a person’s specific interests. It truly is a one-to-one model, extremely time-intensive and difficult to build. When we do achieve that goal, that person is able to trust us as a source of interesting and insightful content, so ideally, he starts spreading the word and the cycle continues.

- Patrick Curtis, WallStreetOasis.com

9. Unique Relationships With Followers

Relationships rule all when it comes to social influence. Social marketing strategies focused solely on increasing likes or follows don’t say much for a brand as a whole. Instead, brands should be focusing their attention on developing unique one-on-one relationships with every single follower — especially the thought leaders in their sectors.

- Heather Huhman, Come Recommended

Image via iStockphoto, zakokor

Scott Gerber

Scott Gerber is the founder of Young Entrepreneur Council, an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recenty launched …More

Topics: Business, contributor, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media