Build your base during the Facebook/Google+ wars

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 22, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 3 comments

Platforms are changing, evolving, iterating more rapidly than ever. With great change comes great disruption as people move from place to place. Familiar, stable locations suddenly become unstable as mass migrations occur. With that in mind, your home base is now more important than ever. It’s the one thing under your control, the one thing that is as stable and as predictable as possible in turbulent times.

Remember MySpace? So many people, so many companies, sunk thousands of hours and dollars into building out their presence. Companies launched million dollar campaigns to drive traffic to MySpace pages. Bands abandoned their websites in droves to set up MySpace pages. All of that marketing, all of that effort, and today MySpace is a digital foreclosure, with the same weeds and abandoned properties look of the worst neighborhoods.

Right now Facebook and Google+ are battling it out for mindshare and marketshare. Tides of battle will swing back and forth as each network seeks dominance over being the social network of record. This creates turbulence among your customers. Today’s most avid Facebookers might be moving to Google+ or vice versa. The audience you’ve come to rely on today in one network may suddenly be on a different network tomorrow. With this much migration, with this much uncertainty, home base is all you have.

What is home base?

• It’s the website you own and operate.
• It’s the domain name that you bought.
• It’s the content you wrote that is exclusively yours.
• It’s the mailing list that you encourage people to sign up for at every opportunity.
• It’s the discussion forum that you moderate on your site.

It’s the places you have under your control, the audiences that you manage, the only stuff that is truly yours.

If you’re not growing home base, you’re leaving yourself to be a casualty of war between the major powers as they battle for social media dominance.

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Your 10 Step Google+ Launch Day Checklist

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 21, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 1 comment

Google+ is now open to the public and with that opening, corner offices are asking marketing departments around the world: “What are we doing with Google+?” If you need an answer besides “I don’t know”, this post is for you.

First and foremost, brands are still not rolled out, so put the thought of a corporate page out of your mind for the moment. Let’s talk about building up your personal G+ presence. As with all social networks, size does matter, so feel free to send this post to the rest of your marketing team. The more people from your company that follow these steps, the more powerful your network of people will be to support the main company page when brands are allowed to launch.

1. Set up a profile that doesn’t suck. Take the time to fill it out and tell people about who you are. Bonus: add in your blog and other recommended links to ensure complete coverage of your digital presence. If you’re doing this as part of a company, make sure you’ve got your company in there!

2. Set up a redirect. Google+ still doesn’t have friendly URLs. Set up a redirect off your domain name that is easy to remember. I’ve got cspenn.com/g for mine.

3. Seed your network. Google+ pulls from GMail and Google Contacts. Take your personal mailing list and dump it into your Google Contacts, then find those people on Google+ and circle them as existing contacts.

4. Turn on those social widgets. The +1 button now lets you share publicly, so if you’ve got a blog or website that can use widgets from companies like ShareThis, AddThis, etc., make sure they’re up to date and active.

5. Lame as it may be, if you have pages on the web that are important to you (like your company, your blog, etc.) hit the +1 button on them now.

That way you’re getting your pages into G+ (and Google’s real time SEO analytics):

6. If you use social networks in your email signature, add in your G+ redirect.

7. Sync your social! On a regular basis, remind people on each network where you are on other networks:

8. Make sure all your welcome pages have Google+ integrated into them.

9. If you’re not already sharing and participating on Google+, now would be a good time to start.

10. Go back and read how to set up metrics on Google+.

Google+ is out the door and publicly available. If you haven’t had a chance to use it until now, use this checklist to lay the groundwork for getting up and running really fast.

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

How to value social media audiences

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 14, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics, Social media, Social networks | 0 comments

What’s the value of a Facebook fan? A Twitter follower? Suppose you wanted to get an apples-to-apples comparison of the value of different audience members. How would you go about getting that information? Here’s one method that might work for you based in Google’s Multichannel Funnel analytics.

To get started, first make sure you have goals and goal values set up for your site. If you don’t have these established, nothing else is going to matter much, so make sure they’re working first.

Next, go to Google Analytics and set up custom conversion segments for each of the channels you want to track. This follows the identical syntax for setting up social media segments in regular analytics, which you can find in this post. In this example, I’ve set up conversion segments for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

With the basic segments set up, you should now see your channel values for the individual networks and conversion overall.

It’s time to bust out your spreadsheet. Set up columns for each of the values that Google shows you – channel, assist value, last interaction value, and a summary column. Then, if you’re using the standard 30 day timeframe that Google Analytics uses, measure the average audience count on each of the channels you have over the past 30 days. For example, if you had on average 5,000 followers on Twitter in the past 30 days, use that.

Create 3 columns after the total, audience value per total, per assist, and per last touch, and set up simple division between the audience column and the dollar value columns:

This gives you a dollar value per audience member for the total, for the assist, and for the last touch. From here, start thinking about questions you need to ask and cases you need to test. For example, in the above chart, Facebook is bringing half the value per audience member of Twitter. Why is this? Is it something I’m doing with Twitter that I’m not doing with Facebook? Have I got a better, more targeted audience on Twitter? This is a case worth investigating – are there practices I could be doing on Facebook that would drive more value, or different pools of audience to fish in?

Another question that leaps out is that Twitter has a relatively low assist value, meaning it doesn’t push people into conversions, as strongly as it provides last touch value. Should I be doing something different on Twitter to improve assist value, and what can I do to improve assist value without cannibalizing from last touch value?

There’s an important warning I have to give here: none of the above data are answers. None of the above data tells you conclusively that you have the right audience, right offer, and right content. None of the above data should make you immediately change your marketing practices. The above data simply tells you what’s happening now and is the starting point for asking new questions. It is by no means an endpoint for leaping to conclusions.

By setting up apples to apples comparisons of the value of various audiences, you’ll end up in a better place, a better position to ask questions about where you’re finding your audiences and how they’re working for you. Try this out and see what new questions you can ask about your social media efforts.

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

How to set up a social media split test

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 12, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 1 comment

A split test is any situation in which you want to measure the effect of your content. Services such as Bit.ly, Argyle Social, and many other shorteners provide you with nearly everything you need to conduct an effective, statistically valid test. Let’s look at how you might deploy one using Twitter.

First, design your links. We’re going to use my blog’s Twitter welcome page as an example. I need to have four different tweetable links that track separately. I’ll start by feeding the welcome page to Google’s URL builder to ensure correct GA tracking.

This first tweet will be tagged dmwelcome1. I’ll set up four of these URLs:

• http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome1
• http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome2
• http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome3
• http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome4

Next, let’s feed each to Bit.ly so that we get a nice clean link for tweeting.

For this experiment, I’m going to set up a series of four direct messages on Twitter. You don’t have to use automatically sent direct messages. This methodology works for Facebook pages, public tweets, Google+ posts – anywhere that you want to test the same destination content with different hooks to try to bring in new eyeballs. I am using auto-DMs mainly because I can get a fair number of responses very quickly. Think outside the box!

Here’s the four tweets I’ll load up:

• Thanks for following me. If you’d like to get to know me better, visit: http://bit.ly/cpdm-1
• Thanks for following me. If you’d like to learn more about me, visit: http://bit.ly/cpdm-2
• Thanks for following! Get to know me better here: http://bit.ly/cpdm-3
• Thanks for following me. Learn more about me here: http://bit.ly/cpdm-4

Now we’re ready to test out this four way split. Obviously, you can substitute any content you like, such as calls to action to sales and other things of interest. We’ll load each of the tweets into TweetAdder:

And we’ll dispatch 200 tweets (Twitter wisely imposes a hard limit of 250 DMs a day).

Now we watch and wait as the test goes out, looking at two things:

1. Which of the four tweets was most appealing to people as measured by clickthroughs using Bit.ly?
2. Which of the four tweets was most in sync with my site’s content as measured by Google Analytics conversions to newsletter subscribers?

Setting up your own four way, eight way, or however many way test using these freely available tools is just as straightforward. One suggestion I’d offer is to add in a fifth message, a control, that you tweet out in public and compare it to see how private versus public messages works for your audience.

Take this recipe, this methodology, and apply it to your own marketing to see how impactful it is.

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Why your social media marketing isn’t working for you

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 31, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 3 comments

Having spent the last few days learning more and more about multichannel funnels and examining the analytics of a number of people I work with, I can safely come to two conclusions for why social media marketing isn’t working for you. This is based on two metrics inside the multichannel funnel: assisted conversions and last interaction conversions.

Last interaction conversions are the ask, the “buy now”, the social pimp. They’re the final touchpoint before the goal is achieved. In order to make anything show up here, you need to have a fairly large audience of people who are qualified to buy from you, even if you have a product or service with a relatively short lifecycle. Asking the same 10 people over and over again if they’ve bought a car recently will generate rapidly diminishing returns and alienate them in relatively short order.

Assisted conversions are the high funnel “conversations” and interactions that eventually lead to and contribute to crossing the finish line. In order to make anything show up here, you need to be loading your traffic into the top of your funnel, which is marketer-speak for GET THEM TO YOUR WEBSITE. If all you’re doing is being friendly and conversational, replying to everyone on Twitter as fast as possible like a squirrel on crack, and generally not moving people to the start of the conversion process, you’re not going to show any results here either.

How do you make social media marketing work for you, then? Do the opposite of the above ineffective practices:

1. Constantly be building and growing a targeted network or you won’t have anyone to ask. The larger you grow your network, the more people who will be eligible and interested on any given day in doing business with you. This will produce more last interaction conversions.

2. Constantly be gently encouraging people to move into the top of the funnel by offering them content and value on your website, off the social network. I can’t stress this enough. Get them off the network and onto your site! This will produce more assisted conversions.

Do these practices diligently for 30 days and watch your social media marketing efforts suddenly blossom.

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Do you have a social network home base?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 30, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 3 comments

In the past I’ve talked about making sure your blog is your home base, which still holds true. If Twitter or Facebook or [insert network here] ever collapse, close, or become irrelevant (MySpace?), your blog or website will endure as long as you continue to grow it.

That said, you also need a home base social network. This is a network in which you focus more effort than others into growing. Ideally it has your target audience in it in some capacity, and ideally it provides some level of federated identity. For example, many sites now offer a “Sign in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook” option as well as standard login forms.

Which network should you choose to be your home base? The first priority is wherever your target audience is. If you’re trying to build any kind of audience around a topic or a theme, then do the work to figure out which of the major social networks more of those folks are on. After that, decide which network’s federated identity scheme is more widely adopted. Right now, the main contenders are Twitter and Facebook, with LinkedIn and Google distant runners-up. I’m hesitant to recommend Facebook because most places have implemented authentication that uses your personal profile, which has a hard limit of 5,000 connections on it, whereas Twitter has no such limit. Right now, Google connects with your Google account and not necessarily your Google+ network (though I’m sure that’s coming).

Why does this matter? Three reasons. First, focus is important. Doing a little bit everywhere isn’t as beneficial and focusing in on one platform and growing it. There are only so many hours in the day; making the most of them demands focus.

Second, Metcalfe’s Law matters more than ever. Size does matter, for good or ill, and like attracts like in the social space. By focusing your efforts and attracting your right crowd in one spot, you increase the chances for serendipity and outreach beyond the borders of the friends you can contact directly.

Third, a focused goal of growing one network (with federated identity capabilities) means that you can grow secondary networks very quickly using those federated identities. My network of focus is Twitter. When I connected up my Twitter account with Stumbleupon the other week, I took my SU account from 0 to 2,500 followers immediately because of my Twitter network.

That’s enough to reap the majority of the benefits of Stumbleupon without focusing a lot of time or attention on it.

Take time to seriously consider your social networking strategy and if it’s not focused, if you don’t have a social home base, consider refining your efforts until you do.

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.