BlogIndiana kicked off with a keynote from Jay Baer. We stole him from Arizona just last year, so it’s awesome to see him catapulting straight to the forefront in Indiana. As Jay joked, it was probably a smart decision to start the morning with numbers, right after everyone had their injection of caffeine. The topic was a tricky one—how many times have you thought or said that social can’t be measured?
Jay Baer, from Convince & Convert, has a way, and he breaks it down into 6 simple steps. This is a live blog, which means it is largely unedited. You’re looking at notes taken throughout the presentation. It is not meant as an exact transcript but I try to capture the highlights along the way.
Don’t be afraid to admit social media doesn’t act alone.
The goal is not to be good at social media; the goal is to be good at business through social media. What are you trying to achieve – awareness, sales, loyalty? Pick one!
Don’t be afraid to measure differently.
There is no magic number for measuring social media.
Home Base & Outposts: concentrate on one social network that’s most important to your company while tracking & paying attention to the others
Holy Trinity: search, content, social
So, what should you measure? Behavior, not aggregation.
Awareness: positive social mentions, share of voice (positive mentions vs competitors), new visitors from outposts, inbound links, search volume trends
Sales: social-only offers, sales funnel behavior (which pages on your site will people only visit if they are considering a purchase i.e. testimonials), brand community participation, offline fan advocacy, online advocacy/sharing, content subscription, propensity to promote (scale of 1-10; subtract 0-6s from 9-10s)
Don’t be afraid to commit to your numbers.
Pick your metrics in advance – don’t try to track after you’ve already jumped in.
Just because everything is trackable, doesn’t mean you should track everything: pick 3 metrics, then see.
Don’t be afraid of ROI.
ROI always = (revenue minus investment)/investment
Multi-Step ROI (Ar.gy/blogROI), Market Research ROI, Customer Service ROI, Correlation,
Don’t be afraid to share the data.
Everyone working for the company should have the information to be able to support social media efforts.
Don’t be afraid of anecdotes.
Sometimes it’s about the stories, not the numbers.
Heather Sokol is a frugal, gluten free, chocoholic, bubble bath connoisseur. She’s a little bit crunchy, always opinionated and sometimes speaks geek, but not fluently. Heather is the founder of Inexpensively.com and tweets as @JustHeather.
