Multi-Channel Funnels are here!

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 25, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 1 comment

Google Analytics nerds, rejoice! Multi-channel funnels are here and they are AMAZING. I’ve been looking in my reporting for a little while now, digging in, and it’s really something. You can now see first interaction analysis as well as what channels (email, social, etc.) helped to get your visitors to a conversion.

Guess what? To no one’s surprise, they REQUIRE you to have configured goals and goal values. Read the earlier blog post on how to get started with goals in order to get up and running quickly.

You absolutely, positively need to start poking around in MCF as soon as you have goals and goal values turned on. You’ll be blown away. Bonus: if you listened to me and set up goals and goal values in the past, your multi-channel funnel data is already waiting for you.

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Social Media Job Search Webinar 10/26 8 PM ET

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 25, 2011 in Advertising, Economy, Education, Marketing, Presentations, Social media, Social networks, Speaking | 2 comments

Please join me Wednesday, October 26, at 8 PM Eastern Time, for a 45 minute webinar on social media job search. This is a webinar based on my past experience as a hiring manager, technical recruiter, and in my marketing and sales work today. It’s an expanded version of some of the course material I teach for the University of San Francisco and is one of the most popular sessions I’ve ever created, and for good reason in this economy.

Caveat: this is not a session on how to find a social media job, but how to use social media to find a job.

In the session, I’ll be showing you:

• how to set up some of the necessary groundwork in your social media profiles
• how to package up your expertise
• how to prospect effectively using social media
• even a couple of interviewing tips

The webinar is free of financial cost to attend, but I will ask for your personal information and subscribe you to my newsletter.

To register, simply complete this form:

What’s your cloud backup plan?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 24, 2011 in Strategy, Technology | 0 comments

The cloud sure is convenient. I can put stuff in it and never have to worry about managing or maintaining server infrastructure, system maintenance, etc. Someone else does all that, and I just show up, pay my dues, and have my stuff wherever I go. It’s perfect, right?

Except…

… when companies in the cloud get bought or go away, like CoHuman, which I had previously recommended and loved. One quick signature by its founder on a letter of intent and the service announces that it’s going away.

… when data is transient, like Twitter search. Tweets come and go, but not nearly as many are recorded permanently.

… when systems out of your control fail, like a major daily deal service experienced. Instantly their main source of income vanished.

… when, as Helena Bouchez pointed out, you run out of money yourself. Think carefully about how deeply invested you are financially in the cloud. Can you afford to pay for all those services if things get lean? How much of your business depends on cloud services that you might want to suspend until cash flow improves?

How dependent are you on the cloud? Have you investigated things like the Data Liberation Front?

Before you sign up for a cloud service, ask yourself these simple questions:

1. How easily can I get my data out?
2. How easily can I replicate the business processes that the cloud service provides? This is a lot harder than #1.
3. How dependent is my business on the accessibility and availability of the cloud?
4. What expense is there between the cloud and rolling my own, and is the trade-off worth it?

Based on your answers, you can judge whether you should be pursuing a cloud-based solution or doing something in-house. There are times when using the cloud just makes sense. Maintaining your own mailserver is a pain in the butt. I’ve done it, I don’t enjoy it, and I gladly hand that over to GMail to be their problem, with the understanding that I need to regularly back up my email on my machine.

There are other times when using the cloud is possibly the worst thing you could do because it locks you into a mission-critical solution that you lose control over, and if you can’t sustain the requirements of the cloud service, you’re up a creek without a paddle.

At the very least, before considering a cloud service, you should have in mind a completely viable alternative to it that’s local or self-hosted software. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same as the cloud, but it has to be good enough to fall back upon and still be able to manage your business. For example…

• If you’re a Salesforce.com user, you had better be aware of and able to install SugarCRM.
• If you’re an IM user, you should know what Jabber is and how to deploy it.
• If you’re a GMail user, you’d better know what Postfix is and how to get a hold of it.

Get out a sheet of paper and make a list of each cloud service and its non-cloud alternative. If you find a service that has no non-cloud alternative, and it’s mission critical to your company, be prepared to pay for it indefinitely or don’t use it.

Having those backup options will provide your business with the insurance it needs in case something goes horribly wrong with the cloud.

What’s your cloud backup strategy? Do you have one?

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How to set goals and goal value in Google Analytics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 23, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

It’s something I’ve said so many times that you could likely manufacture a pull-string doll of me saying it:

If you don’t have goals and goal values set up in Google Analytics, you’re doing it wrong.

At the end of the day, you absolutely must have some sort of tangible value assigned to your online work. It doesn’t have to necessarily be money, but it does need to be something that’s of actual use to you, your business or organization, etc. In the world of web analytics, that’s a goal.

A goal isn’t necessarily only the final sale of goods. It can be anything from your marketing funnel that has a direct line to your goal. For example, one of my goals on ChristopherSPenn.com is to get people to subscribe to my newsletter.

Setting up a goal is easy. Decide what actions on your site you want people to take and note the URLs of those actions and their confirmations. For example, if I want you to subscribe to the newsletter, then my goal is you reaching the “thanks for subscribing” page. Over at my company’s site, WhatCounts, one of our goals is having you reach a landing page’s confirmation after filling out a registration form.

What if your goal goes off your site? Easy enough – use event tracking as the goal instead. I do this on my newsletter subscribe buttons, as they send people off-site. By configuring an event (on click) for the button, I track how many people hit the button and use that as a goal. For more information about event tracking, read the manual.

The harder part of goals is setting goal values. What value does someone have for one of your goals? If you’ve got an e-commerce site, that answer is relatively simple, the average value of a sale at the checkout page. For B2B, one of the most basic formulae I recommend is value per lead.

Take the amount of new business generated via your website over the last major statistical interval (at least a quarter, preferable two quarters) and divide it by the number of raw leads for that time period. For example, if you generated $100,000 from your website last quarter and had 1,000 leads, your goal value for a new lead is $10, and that’s what you put in the goal value box.

Suppose it’s even more abstract than that? For example, I don’t currently derive a significant amount of revenue from my newsletter because it’s mostly a networking and presence of mind vehicle. The last time I had to change jobs, however, I hit my list and was able to find new work in very, very short order. In theory then, my email list is worth whatever my annual income is, and a new lead, a new subscriber, is worth whatever percentage of income/subscribers at the time I was looking for work. Now, that’s a bit of a theoretical stretch, but it’s better than nothing for the purposes of measuring goal value.

A third way to assess goal values for goals that have a very abstract value is to use the much-maligned-but-better-than-nothing ad equivalency value. Let’s say that I’ve got an event coming up like, oh, PodCamp Boston. If I had to go out and rent a highly targeted list of people, what would it cost me to do so? Here’s an example:

Brand Republic – Opt-In Email Addresses. Contact 9,051 subscribers to Brand Republic magazine through their email addresses. The publication is geared toward professionals in advertising, communications, marketing and media. Selects include job function, business sector, number of employees and more. Base list price is $555/M. Contact your list broker.

To hit this list of highly targeted professionals, it’d cost me $5,023.31, or roughly 56 cents per name. Thus, my goal value in Google Analytics can be set to 56 cents per subscriber to my mailing list and I’d be saving the amount of money that the list rental would cost me in ad equivalency value.

Hopefully you’ve now got a few different ideas for how to set your goal values. Make sure you actually go do it and soon!

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How to present with a mind map

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 22, 2011 in Advertising, Conferences, Marketing, Presentations | 4 comments

One of my favorite things to do at live conferences is present using a mind map instead of a deck of slides. Why? I love being able to show the audience the very big picture from the start, giving them a sense of perspective and scale (i.e. this is a very, very big topic), as well as giving them a sense of how things are related, something that a regular slide deck can’t do. With today’s mind mapping software, you can then dump your “slides” as a single PDF and provide it in advance (since it gets away from death by bullet point) as a download and after the event.

As a power tip for presenters, mind maps are also a lot harder for competitors in your space to make use of. Typical presentations are crammed full of language and data that, in addition to being boring most of the time, are also very easy to copy. Mind maps are a lot more brief by design, which means that someone else will have a harder time performing your exact presentation verbatim without studying you extensively.

Mind maps aren’t a panacea, of course, for presenting. There are downsides! They inherently require a lot more laptop driving, so you’ll spend more time at the machine than you do with a slide deck. If you’re the sort of presenter who runs around the stage a lot, using a mind map can potentially tie you down. They’re incompatible with virtually every clicker/remote out there, so be prepared to bring your own mouse. If you don’t have a trackpad or pointing device that supports full two dimensional movement, it can be awkward and slower than a slide deck. Finally, some mind mapping software does not support inline media, which is an absolute must for presenting, so be aware of that before you present.

How do you present with one? First, start with a mind map. That may seem obvious, but for presenters used to discrete slides of self contained information, mind mapping can be a stretch. Mind maps are not just your slide bullets in a different visual format; maps also encourage you to set up and display connections among related ideas. If you’re new to what makes great mind maps, I definitely recommend learning about them and trying them out first before going in front of a crowd.

Make sure your mind mapping software allows you to present full screen, and practice in advance every aspect of the presentation a few times, including moving around the map. You’ll find that it will take some practice and rearranging of your map for optimal placement on-screen. I like to present in clusters – that is, showcase an entire section of the tree and drill down into it, then zoom back out and head into a next main branch. That way, there’s a sequence of ideas that are all woven together.

One cautionary note: don’t drill down to the individual node levels if you can avoid it, or you’ll create a lot of dead time as you navigate the map. Present a cluster, highlight one or two pieces of media in it, then spend the rest of the time presenting and talking about your content rather than driving the map.

Should you present with a mind map? That’s up to you, but give it a try and see if your audience responds. Certainly, it’s different than what most other presenters are going to be doing on stage, so if you’re looking to set yourself apart, it’s worth trying out.

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