The image shimmers out of focus and disappears – an image of your accountant materializes and tells you that you’re a business burning through a million a month and when you get visitor to your site, there is nothing more than a form to fill-out for a call back.  The phone number on the ‘Contact Us’ page leads to a ‘Dell Hell’ kind of experience and no human being can be reached from outside.   Zombies?  Yeah – they get through, but only because they’re brain-eating, persistent monsters randomly pushing buttons on their Zombie-phones.

The final chapter in this scary tale is that you have no idea whether that $1.12 pay per click campaign has driven ANY traffic to cover your costs or whether the visitor has even been to your site before.  Scary huh?

It’s a horror story being repeated a million times in a million companies all around the world.  In spite of all the automated counters, data collectors and postings in the social web, businesses leap to use the technology that has been promised to get hundreds of customers to walk through your door.   Most businesses have no idea how or if the investments in marketing you’re made are panning out.

The hero in this horror story is that it’s not an unsolvable equation and making better decisions about where and when to invest is possible – more so than has ever been possible.

How to Escape the Nightmare

Start with the small things – listen first… listen like the mummy is somewhere around you – quietly and intently.  Find out where your customers are congregating like a crowd of brain-eating zombies.

Next, understand what your audience is saying and what they’re talking about.  Knowing that Dr. Jeckle is also Mr. Hyde will help you craft and time the message so that Mr. Hyde is prompted to connect with your Facebook page, leaving Dr. Jeckle out of the community of followers and friends.

Now reach out to connect. The tentacles of human-hunting aliens should have nothing on you.  Once you know what’s being said , who is saying it and to whom they are saying it means that you can regularly and easily participate in the discussions going on and not been seen or treated as the Monster from the Black Lagoon.

Now take a step back every time you post new content and see if you’ve put out what speaks meaningfully to your audience.  Include a call to action, a link and most of all, make sure you’re participation is relevant to the audience.  For the hard cost that goes into an installation of Google Analytics, you can see the correlation between postings and visits.  If you have a product that can be purchased online, even by using a Gift card or eGift card, you can then start tracking how visitors arrived at you site, where they came from and what they did after they left your site.

Is this all you need to do? Maybe… but I’d bet that this implementation would only be the start of the journey to improving the payoff of your online and social marketing investment.

Beginning with these steps will help keep you off the Elm Street of marketing when Freddy is prowling for a new victim.  As you participate in the discussions and communities relevant to you your product and company you’ll uncover what content drives participation and engagement – the first step in stopping what doesn’t work and what does.  Following these simple steps will keep next year’s Halloween Haunters away from the doorstep, out of the cellar and vanquished from the creaky attic.

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Brands are not yet settled into G+, but it’s reported that Google is looking for the optimum combination of brands and consumers so that it’s a more natural extension of how consumers want to connect to brands. My hope is that it is not yet another iteration of the interruption driven model that has predominated marketing for decades, but I got to wondering what would it look like if G+ actually addressed the paradigm and sought to try something better, what would a brand interaction in G+ look like? Here’s my take on what it might be like.

For brands to connect with consumers on G+, (when they can) the consumer will have to opt-in to the brand and include them into a Circle that they see regularly. I think we’ll see a permutation of the Google AdWords product that is smarter. Keywords will be scanned and the connection between the conversation and the offer will take on a better meaning. I think that brands will be able to better identify the real influencers in respective markets IF (and this is a big if) the brand can be given access to the social graph / Circle stats of the consumer. How will they get access? Consumers will grant it – usually in exchange for something of value. What kind of value? Some people will trade access to their social graph for a cup of coffee at , others will require a bit more consideration.

Accelerators to adoption will include connections between products like +Personal.com, which I really like, but do not yet understand how they’re going to be relevant if I cannot connect my permissions and profile to the social networks I’m using – profile fatigue is starting to set in with consumers and we, as an industry, have to find a solutions.  OpenID, Google profiles and Facebook Connect are just placeholders for now and the real power in this space I think has yet to emerge.

What to do for now is to develop a presence in the social space in a way that is both genuine and in a way that recognizes that your persona can vary relative to the audience you wish to address without being disingenuous.   Learning this, knowing it and being able to act on it for a brand though will be a challenge – too many of them are wrapped up in an old-school mindsets that places monthly and quarterly.

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Working at the intersection of ROI, marketing and social media in particular has been a topic that has drawn my interest since the early development of social media as a connecting consumer technology.

As social media came onto the scene, a debate cropped up that social media was a ‘tool of the people’ and that to propose its use as a business tactic was heretical.  We still see vestiges of that debate now and then, but by and large, we do not see much of it I think because the flood of early practitioners has subsided and the bar for entry as a social marketer has been raised past the point that creating a Facebook page and opening a Twitter account suddenly launched a new consultancy.  The discussions by marketers has risen to a point that business people recognize that marketing has an ROI that can be associated with it and that social media marketing can have a VERY high ROI indeed.

Social marketing ROI is not a dark, foreboding concept that only technocrats understand, at it’s base is the correlation of information from multiple points that helps us all understand how a marketing strategy that includes tweets or Facebook posts can impact revenues and costs.  The red-herring discussions of the ‘ROI of your phone’ or a ‘return-on-influence’, or ‘return-on-engagement’ are getting more and more hollow by the day.  I think it’s because we’re recognizing that these metrics are made up and promoted by evil minions of misdirection who may not know how to speak otherwise.

Truly savvy marketers are realizing that the only ‘I’ that matters in ROI is ‘Investment’ and that if marketing is going to get increased funding for their efforts, the rest of the organization (particularly those that manage budgets) speaks in business terms like these – so marketers are learning the particulars of ROI or facing the prospect of being replaced by someone who can talk the talk of the executive suite.

Just how much longer do we need to allow these minions of demonic misdirection to suck the life out of marketing initiatives and render them useless to management? *sigh* obviously longer than we should, but in order to get the conversation back on solid ground, I know we need to start with committing to a broader conversation about 1) where your customers are congregating and 2) then asking how best to reach them, always 3) seeking the genuine ROI along the way.  Either that or 4) drive a wooden stake thought their evil little hearts.

Steven Groves is co-author of “ROI of Social Media: How to improve the return on your social marketing investment” and your host at www.ROIofSocialmedia.com

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I was not sure if his question was for a survey, if he was looking for engagement or if it was a professional question he is trying to answer for CoursePark,  but his question made me think for a moment to a blog post series from July 2009 on ‘The Trinity of Social Media” that suggested the trinity should be a blog, a micro-blog and a social network.  I have thought of the post often and continue to wonder if the trinity might need an update eventually.  The 2011 edition of the Trinity I think does warrant a refresh and this will be the first in the series.

Let’s put the construct of the Trinity in context here for a moment; we’re talking about a business presence, not personal and we’re talking about spanning two of the relevant media networks; Owned & Operated (O&O) media and Earned media, which relies heavily on social media.  There is no distinction at this level of a B2B company presence or a B2C.

What’s changed for 2011 and beyond?

The objective has not changed – we want to drive traffic to the O&O site or network of sites.  Eyeballs on pages, not revenue at this point, but traffic – which is a proxy for awareness of our product, service or brand.   What has changed is the social technology and the features and capabilities of the various platforms.

Do any of the changes warrant a change in the model?

Yes – in one particular area: the social network component.  When the original Trinity model was introduced, Facebook Groups were supported and Business Pages were not yet introduced.  Are there be other changes?  Yes – but not in the tool selection I do not think.  The fundamentals are holding and IMHO the foundational tools and technology for an effective social presence are still a blog, micro-blog and social network.  The tactics we deploy however are different today than they were in 2009 and as we cover the new state of the Trinity, we’ll discuss the changes.

Audience Participation Notice

I’ll write the articles, but I’d like to include your comments.  Whose comments – you, the person reading this right now.  If I could reach through the screen and point at you I would.  Comment below on what you think the changes might be for you or send me an email with whatever your thoughts are.

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• The Trinity of Social Media

First item at hand is that NPT did not make it easy for me to participate in the discussion on their topic – here they are espousing social engagement and then THEY do not allow a conversation on their post or article.  It may be that as it is a reposting of the content from print, they thought may never occurred to them to support a discussion on this very hot topic.   In my experience though, it is not unusual to see this kind of behavior – a lot of organizations see social as just another form of media and treat it like it was print, radio or TV which is all one-way.

Beyond them apparently not really wanting to engage, my sense of the article is that the writer seemed to be taking issue with stats that show MySpace is declining (it is), that ROI in nonprofits is somehow different from other businesses (it’s not) and that there is work involved in correlating the data that can show an ROI that is meaningful (and there is!)  They present a spreadsheet calculator for nonprofits (from Care2.com) that delivers a projected ROI of some kind of online effort. 

IMHO, projected ROI vs. actual ROI are often two very different numbers and using a tool like this is maybe helpful, but if you deliver results that are wildly off, what then? Imagine that for all the money finance puts into treasury services they’re somehow off on their figures?  What if they’re off 10% – heads would roll I think, but somehow we’re expected to allow marketing projects to be off to an even greater degree.  The travesty to me is that most organizations spend far more on items like banking to measure and track their money (already in the bank) than they spend on measuring their marketing (impacting future revenue / donations).

The article is just a bit too off for me to say that I think it’ll be helpful to NPO’s, but if it gets them thinking about how social can support their mission then it’s a good post.  What’s possibly more relevant is a discussion that every outreach effort needs to be tracked, just like a marketing campaign anywhere else.  An ROI model that considers all aspects of media and marketing is what really relevant here – the burden of suddenly asking social-based marketing to prove an ROI when previous marketing efforts have is somewhat disingenuous.  All marketing should be aligned with ROI; the really cool part about social marketing is that it is by far the most measureable form of media we have right now.

So whether your an NPO, commercial entity with regional, national or global reach you should be demanding and working towards a relevant ROI model for all your campaigns and marketing efforts.

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• The Death of Social Media – Long Live Media That is Social!

I just had to take a moment to comment on a recent article I read over at MediaPost about copyright trolls, RightHaven, and their heavy-handed tactics in copyright enforcement. The article written by Wendy Davis cites a lawsuit brought by RightHaven against an autistic blogger for $150,000 for posting an image originally posted by the Denver Post.

Following what I understand is their standard modus operandi , RightHaven does not first ask for compliance, they file a suit first and ask questions later. No warning, no letter or email requesting compliance – just a lawsuit that the offending party needs to respond to or end up being thrown under the ever-turning wheels of justice. Justice?  Sorry, this action does not appear to be about justice – it seems to be about RightHaven lawyers looking for more and more billable hours I think.

In the article, Reporters Without Borders, (a free speech advocacy group,) has asked the Denver Post parent organization to please reconsider their association and behavior in respect to employing RightHaven tactics. They, and I, have no problem with a media agency wanting to retain control over its creative output, but is hiring a lawyer to bring suit the right first step if you believe a copyright infringement has occurred?

What ever happened to the idea of just asking to have the content removed?  Polite manners aside, what’s the ROI in paying a lawyer $250 an hour vs. a staffer $20 an hour to send an email that says the same?  If the offending party does not comply, maybe the $250 an hour lawyer IS the right way to go, but I’d make a bet that the $20 would often get the same result – and save the Denver Post thousands of dollars in legal fees.

This kind of behavior deserves the full light of the blogosphere to be regularly and constantly turned on it (stay in touch on these guys at RightHavenVictims.com).  As to RightHaven and the Denver Posts’ behavior – I just want to say shame on you guys! If you want to protect your content and save money, think about email and letters before lawyers. But going after a 20 year old autistic bloggers?! WTF?!

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What is most obvious to me is that social elements in marketing should not be considered apart from the traditional, non-social elements. Second is that the return on each part of the marketing mix can actually be measured pretty well – the social is actually the easiest part of it.  Today with the tools, tactics and technology at our disposal, we can definitely get the answer to these questions about what’s working.  The next question that seemed to come up then was “should the investment be made to measure ROI?”  Imagine it cost $20 to find out that a marketing campaign brought in another $5 in incremental revenue?  The investment in measuring the return on the campaign would just not make sense – it’s a question then of can we afford the ROI data itself?

What we’ve seen is that most marketers simply put no budget into measuring what the effectiveness is of the marketing effort at all.  Larger CPG or FMCG marketers appear to be spending 5% to 8% of their marketing budget on just getting the data and putting the tools to work to help determine what’s actually working, but other companies (small, medium & large alike) just are not getting data on what is actually working in their marketing.  Keep in mind that this is the investment set aside for just getting the data and putting in the tools and systems to know what is working – nothing on the actual creative or media buys.  Compare this for a moment to how much finance invests in measuring cash & cash flow in their relationship with banks – much more than they spend on finding out what marketing is actually working.  Seems a little backwards doesn’t it?

What we began with, as a class was a desire to connect social media marketing investments to data that helps with funding and increased investment in marketing and what we end up with is a well developed understanding that the ROI of all marketing is where a company really needs to start – not one media type vs. another – all marketing should be measured.

What I’ve also seen is that demanding a return on just the social part of a marketing effort has dropped off in 2011 vs. the last few years and investment in online & social media is growing.  What I am looking for is that we’ll see is a demand for ROI methodology in marketing overall – it might not manifest, but to their credit, marketers appear to be more interested in being able to state clearly the impact on revenue of all their efforts. 

How ready are marketers to pursue an ROI-based strategy?  An indication of the readiness of marketing in being able to connect their marketing with revenue was the answer to the question of “how many of you can produce within 1/2 an hour, a spreadsheet of current and past campaigns?”   It was an illuminating response for sure – most could not.  This is the kind of response we seem to get from marketers regardless of location; when we narrow it still further to just social campaigns the response is even more sparse.

Where to go from here?  I for one am happy to be carrying this question forward and to be an evangelist for marketing and social media ROI.  There’s not a quick, single post answer to the question, but rest assured, there is one – welcome to the journey.

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In the first episode, she talked about how they endeavor to make their content inventive and influential enough so that their “tech savvy and forward-leaning” audience takes the conversation offline with their friends.  In our last episode Ellen describes some of the metrics they use and how they came to create the Bravo “Talkbubble”, which is a mashup of various social media components all working in concert to provide a virtual ‘TV Viewing Party’ around Bravo show premiers.

As we continue the series in the ROI of Social Media podcasts, we encourage you to subscribe to the RSS or notices via email.  You will want to hear every minute of these insightful conversations with business marketers successfully deploying innovative social media solutions.

In this episode, Guy recognized that, like other participants in our interview series, Bravo has found that the use of social media has supported interactions that allows brands to connect more often with their audience and to increase their exposure without overwhelming them.

In an example of this power to increase the touch points with viewers via social media, Ellen points out that of the 92 messages posted during a Talkbubble session, it is very possible that those messages will be reposted / re-tweeted over 400,000 times around the world and that the audience will not think that they are being spammed or feel overwhelmed in the flow of messages.

Nonetheless, the Bravo Team does try to space the messages and make them relevant.  One of the ways they do so is to enlist the help of the Bravo-lebritites to drive even more engagement, all of which satisfies the consumers desire to feel like they’re involved with the lives of the people they see on the screen.

Ellen expands on the increase in the messaging that is possible with a social presence and we ask “How much Bravo can one person get?”, and if it is even possible to satiate the desire of the consumer or fan to engage with a brand like Bravo?  It’s a serious question that she and her team work hard to make sure they understand the answer to so they do not overwhelm a fan.

Where is social media going for Bravo though?  Social is part of their DNA and social is a critical outlet for the brand to ‘make the conversations happen’ is what Ellen tells us.  They are always on the lookout for new ways to connect to the audience, regardless of platform.  Social is likely an urgent part of the Bravo tool set and will be a part of everything they do from now on.  It lets you touch base and talk to the audience which is so important to the Bravo brand; it’s a part of everything they do.

Right now everything is new and exciting in social media and with the level of engagement for the team, the real challenge is understanding what the audience is saying about the brand in the social media eco-sphere qualitatively and giving fan what they want in the social channel.  As new platforms come along, they want give their fans what they want – an exciting interaction.

They watch the conversation closely looking for cues to see what they need to act on to support their fans and increase ‘the brand width of engagement’ or range of interaction with the audience with their fans.  You can find Bravo online, mobile and offline – they want to wrap the consumer with as much Bravo as they want, anywhere they want.

Play / Download Ellen Stone / Bravo Networks – Episode 3 Podcast Here

To get our posts as they happen, follow us on Twitter (@ROISocialMedia) or subscribe to SocialMarketingConversations.com via email or your RSS Reader.

For an MP3 file of the entire episode and (eventually) the transcript of the podcast, we invite you to visit and join our community site relating to the book at www.TheROIofSocialMedia.com and to explore best-practices in the ROI in Social Media.

We’re very interested in your perspective on the topic and, if you have a great interview who can add to the conversation, please let us know – we’re looking to interview them and put it up here!

Thank you again to you our listeners – hope you enjoyed the effort and work we put into it!

The Podcast and Credit For Where Credit is Due – This podcast / transcript was developed from a live recorded interview on April 7, 2010 between Ellen Stone Ellen Stone / Senior Vice President of Marketing with Bravo Media, Guy Powell and Steven Groves.

The podcast interview was downloaded and processes in Audacity, which is available from SourceForge.net, and with ‘4toFloor.wav’ music loop from member ‘Rooks’ and posted at SoundSnap.com.

The transcripts are sponsored by Social Marketing Conversations and the introduction Voice Talent is Ms. Cynthia Propst.

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In this episode Ellen talks about how they use mobile to connect to their audience.  Their first iPhone app was developed around the Top-Chef shows and they shared with the consumer, the restaurants and shopping venues the contestants liked to eat at and shop in.  The app evolved into ‘Guides by Bravo’ where Bravo celebrities (‘Bravo-lebrities’) share their preferences for shopping, dining and entertainment in various cities like LA, NY and Atlanta.

Subscribe to the RSS or notices via email, if you want to make sure you do not miss a minute of this series with Ellen Stone and other social-marketing savvy business marketers.

The #1 goal for Ellen and her team is to have a high level of engagement with the audience – there are a lot of quantitative metrics, but not as many qualitative.  The qualitative metrics are very important and include –

• how many people become fans of the show
• how often Bravo becomes a top trending topic on Twitter
• # of Bravo-lebrity tweets get comments or are re-tweeted
• what are fan talking about
• how long the topic stays alive
• page views during the shows

The Bravo team took the idea of a TV Viewing Party and produced an idea they call the ‘TalkBubble’; which a multiplatform (online / offline / broadcast) media event that uses Facebook connect and Twitter to help fans enjoy Bravo shows when they are debuted.  The events include Bravo-lebrities, which encourages audience participate and features real-time interactions.  Bravo can see in real-time how the audience is responding to the show while it is being broadcast.

The metrics for TalkBubble vary a bit, but it includes page views, # of tweets, and other qualitative criteria that are somewhat proprietary.  As they see it, TalkBubble is taking social media to the next level connecting the audience and show celebrities in a unique and immediate way.

With capabilities like TalkBubble in place, the Bravo team can focus on the key elements in crafting a successful campaign – for Bravo that means they take more time with the message content and how it is crafted; it cannot be too corporate and it needs to mimic the tone of the show / brand and not push selling. 

Ellen and the team feel it is important to monitor and understand the # of messages being posted and what’s already trending.  If they try to compete with news, they want to make sure that to audience doesn’t perceive Bravo posts as spam; Bravo knows they need to break through the clutter and noise of the message stream. 

Play / Download Ellen Stone / Bravo Networks – Episode 2 Podcast Here

To get our posts as they happen, follow us on Twitter (@ROISocialMedia) or subscribe to SocialMarketingConversations.com via email or your RSS Reader.

ROI of Social Media Community Site

Guy Powell and I are avid about uncovering the ROI of marketing.  It’s work we are both passionate about and enjoy.

To support our work in exploring the question of ROI in marketing and social media, we’re launching a community site using the Ning platform at www.ROIofSocialMedia.com where we will be posting a wide variety of content for our readers and fulfilling our commitments we made in the ROI of Social Media book to provide fresh and updated content around the question of ROI in marketing and social media.

We have set the community as open for anyone, but a membership is required to access content like the complete episodes of all the podcasts and as comprehensive a list as we can possibly generate of social media monitoring and measurement technology and tool vendors. 

Come join us and let us know what the pressing issues are in your efforts to determine an ROI in your social media presence!

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Bravo Networks has made social media a part of their DNA and with really powerful results.  In this podcast series with Ellen Stone / Senior Vice President for Marketing for Bravo, she shares some of the work that she and her team have undertaken to develop some award winning brand concepts and programs. 

You’ll want to subscribe (to your email or RSS reader) so you don’t miss a minute of what is an excellent podcast series on how Bravo has adopted social media to extend their relationship with the audience in powerful, productive and profitable ways.

In this episode Ellen describes the Bravo brand and the five entertainment categories they focus their programming and content on ; they are food, fashion, design, beauty and pop culture.  She also shares that they see that the audience for Bravo really expects a connection in social media and she uses the terms ‘tech savvy and forward leaning’ to help describe the audience.

Their goal in content generation is to provide inventive and influential content that engage the audience and that the audience then talks about it with their friends.  As a pioneer in social content, Bravo was one of the earliest brands to get involved in social media with their connection with MySpace in 2005. which Ellen points out as proof that social is really a part of their DNA at Bravo.

The partnership with MySpace was for shared content around show premiers, building & maintain buzz around a series, and promoting branded products (such as cookbook, clothing.)  Their work today includes leveraging Facebook, Twitter and a wide variety of new properties to better connect to their audience.

In the way of a true market leader, she suggests that their biggest obstacles is also a benefit too – it is that with the social environment changing so quickly, they get to / have to decide where and how they use social media to connect to their audience in ways that are helpful to the brand, have the audience talking and impact the audience with the messaging they want to get out there.  With the growth in social it hard to determine just what tools and tactics will work best early & impact-fully.

Play / Download Ellen Stone / Bravo Networks – Episode 1 Podcast Here

To get our posts as they happen, follow us on Twitter (@ROISocialMedia) or subscribe to SocialMarketingConversations.com via email or your RSS Reader.

ROI of Social Media Community Site

Guy Powell and I are avid about uncovering the ROI of marketing.  It’s work we are both passionate about and enjoy. 

To support our work in exploring the question of ROI in marketing and social media, we’re launching a community site using the Ning platform at www.ROIofSocialMedia.com where we will be posting a wide variety of content for our readers and fulfilling our commitments we made in the ROI of Social Media book to provide fresh and updated content around the question of ROI in marketing and social media.

We have set the community as open for anyone, but a membership is required to access content like the complete episodes of all the podcasts and as comprehensive a list as we can possibly generate of social media monitoring and measurement technology and tool vendors.  

Come join us and let us know what the pressing issues are in your efforts to determine an ROI in your social media presence!

Related posts:

• How to Give Consumers All They Want From Your Social Presence – Ellen Stone / Bravo Networks
• How Innovators Takes Social Media to the Next Level – Ellen Stone / Bravo Networks
• Strategy: The Graying of Social Networks