Posts from — October 2009

Have you read Trust Agents (afl) by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith yet? If you haven’t you should go and pick up a copy today because it’s just plain brilliant. One of the keys points they talk about is making your own game. Doing things differently.

They talk about how people throughout history have made big strides in what they’ve been doing and how they have made enormous impacts just by making your their own game or changing the rules a bit of an existing game.”Recently” the Johnnie Walker company released an amazing advertisement that embodies this spirit.

Unfortunately the smallest YouTube embed is slightly larger than my middle column here so it over flows a bit, I apologize, but I promise you the message told in this truly amazing piece of story telling won’t be lost.

Here was someone who saw the game, changed the rules, and made it his own.

Putting aside the the Trust Agent aspect of this video I want to make a comment on the other aspect that makes this video so great. Storytelling.

One of the key points to successfully using social media for your company is to tell your story. If you don’t know what that is, figure it out. This video is one of the best examples of a company telling it’s story in an interesting and compelling manner.

What do you think?

If Johnnie Walker were alive today would he use social media to continue making his own game and telling his story? Are you?

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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The FINAL word on social media ROI is this… sometimes. Give me a few minutes of your time and I’ll gladly explain.

Right now people seem to be fretting far too much over ROI and social media. Right now the camps seem to be polarized and split into two very outspoken groups. One side chanting “Social Media has no ROI” the other side scream ” Yes it does and you’re an idiot for not thinking so.” It’s getting to be rather annoying actually.

Social Media is a tool… that’s IT. It’s a very versatile and extremely powerful tool with an immense amount of potential I believe we’re only just beginning to tap into. However, by itself it is just a tool and has no inherent value of it’s own.

A hammer laying on a table has no use or purpose until it’s swung into action and used to get results. Social Media is absolutely, positively no different than any other marketing tool out there on it’s own.

PPC (pay per click) has no monetary value (and so no ROI) on it’s own. Media buys, affiliate marketing, SEO, SEM, and blogging have absolutely no value on their own. What gives them the value, and thus the possibility of ROI being calculated is how they are used.

If you’re using a hammer to put a screw in the wall you’re not going to get amazing results and end up wasting a lot of time. Why? Because you’re using the wrong tool for the job. You’d get much better results if you used a screwdriver or a power drill.

This analogy moves right over to internet marketing and thus social media.

ROI is a financial equation, a metric and that’s it. It’s not the end all be all. It’s not the ultimate answer to a broad question (the value of social media).  At the end of the day when you write up your reports you need to have solid business metrics to back up your success or document your failures and that doesn’t just mean ROI, because honestly, it’s just one piece of this puzzle.

Recently I wrote an article about The GAP, ROI, and Awareness where I laid out the 4 basic types of marketing campaigns. Acquisition / Lead Generation, Awareness, Brand, and Loyalty. There are many sub campaigns that can fall under these, but these 4 cover the vast majority and each have their own metrics.

4 Types of campaigns and their metrics

1. Acquisition / Lead Generation  – These types of campaigns are used to gather information (like email addresses, profiles, home addresses, etc) with the goal of winding up with a list of people who are most likely to buy from you.  This type of campaign uses ROI,but only after you’ve determined what each lead is worth to you based on previous numbers.

2. Awareness – This type of campaign can be used to increase the awareness of certain products or the brand itself. Here we would be looking at Impact. ROI doesn’t work here because there are no sales being made and the goal is not financial.

3. Brand – Here the goal is to associate the company with it’s services and offerings. This type of campaign will have hooks into the sales channels, marketing materials will be laden with copy points surrounding what it is, does, or offers and will typically have a CTA (call to action). ROI is prevalent here as the goal is to lead them through your marketing and sales funnels and make a purchase.

4. Loyalty – When a company launches this type of campaign their goal is to reward their current, frequent buyers or to entice customers away from competitors with their awesome loyalty program. This can take the form of a discount card, some kind of point system, or keeping a list of your best customers and having an event in their honor. Here you’re going to be using a mixture of Impact and ROI. Impact for how it’s being received and picked up, ROI  on the program as a whole (which includes SM spend) to ensure the campaigns health.

Looking at it broken down like this you can see where both sides are coming from. Once side who seems to only think Social Media should be used for making money have the battle cry of “ROI or Die”. While the side more concerned with awareness and building brand affinity shout “You can’t put a dollar sign on a conversation”.

Before I expose you to a seemingly “new” term here’s what I have to say to both sides. You’re both right and you’re both wrong, metrics are not one size fits all. So Knock it the #$%* off and start using the metrics properly!

And now for something new

While discussing this with my good friend Rick Galan he made a great point about all of this. Why are we squabbling over certain metrics when there is something already in place that fits very well with social media, and that is KPI.

Wikipedia defines KPI as “A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a measure of performance. Such measures are commonly used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals”

By now we should all know that social media is all about the long haul. We should know that social media is just as much about building relationships & making a soft sell as it is building a solid online foundation for you to grow over time.

Let’s look at that last part of the definition again “…typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals.”  Social media was built for that. Building your reputation and community while strengthening your brand over time.

I think we need to start a new chapter in social media, and I’m going to spend the next couple weeks creating articles that all run around this subject. Creating the KPI’s or adjusting current “accepted” ones for social media use. At some point you have to stop looking at only today and start looking towards the future.

All this debate about ROI is just going to keep going in circles until people remember that marketing has many facets as does social media. We need to stop point fingers, and start building the future of social media use in business.

What do you think the KPI’s of social media should be? I know that things will change based on goals of the business, but what basic measurements should be included in the overall KPI’s for a company?

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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There is a free Twitter seminar next Tuesday the 20th being put on by myself, Sharon Hayes, and Joshua Denney to give insight into our new project BrandedTweets.  This seminar is going to be at 12 PM Eastern/9 AM Pacific. During this seminar, we’ll be sharing some strategies and tactics to help you harness the power of Twitter for business, personal branding, or whatever else you choose. The one thing we won’t be doing is talking about how to be a Twitter spammer.

What we have done is gather our knowledge based on our various areas of expertise and put together a training program that includes, but definitely isn’t limited to:

• How to use Twitter to extend your brand
• How Twitter can fit into your organization’s sales cycle
• How to find the right mix of using Twitter like a TV station, town hall, cocktail party for networking, listening post and for customer support
• How companies and individuals have been using Twitter successfully

I hope you’ll join us for the free seminar on Tuesday and when you sign up, you’ll be entered to win access to the training program for free.

Register for the seminar

Thanks for reading, hope you’ll be there.
Josh “Shua” Peters

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When it comes to avoiding Twitter phishing scams (or any for that matter) there are 3 “Common Sense” things you can do to avoid getting swindled.

1. If you don’t know them, don’t click it. It’s really that easy, if you don’t know the person, or haven’t been in a social situation with them before then chances are they’re not going to have a “vid” or some “picz” of you.  Just like you’re not supposed to click on email from people you don’t know don’t click on links from people you don’t know.

2. The links usually hold some clues as well. Look at the url on this one: videos.dskjkiuw.com does that really look like a trustworthy URL with the garbled mess in the center? No one would remember that if it was a serious site. If it isn’t a shortened URL and contains a string of letters like that, chances are it’s no good.

However, lets say one of your friends got duped, sent you the link because their account became compromised and they are sending you a legit looking link… then what?

3. This is the easiest way to tell if it’s a phishing site. If it looks just like a site you’re familiar with, but the URL in the address bar is all wrong. In this latest phishing scam the above URL will take you to what looks like the Twitter sign in page, but when you look at the URL it’s that same garbled mess.

Twitter, FaceBook, your bank, etc are never going to have you log into their site through videos.ghjghjgy.com or twitter.lameurl.com or YourBank.scamcentral.com or anything else.

If you use a little common sense, and only use the accepted and sanctioned routes to access your accounts then you will never have a problem.

Thank you for reading
Josh “Shua” Peters

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There is a problem on Twitter and that problem is free speech. People are allowed to say what ever they want, when ever they want, and this costs Twitter money. Money that isn’t being well spent if people are getting no value from it and it’s causing unnecessary calls to their API and use of their service.

I’m not saying Twitter needs to censor, in fact far from it. I’m a huge advocate of free speech and all the inalienable rights we enjoy in America. What I’m saying is Twitter could save money and increase the value people get from it by allowing users to setup filters on their side.

Twitter is already filtering conversations based on who you’re following and who they are talking to. If someone you’re following sends an @ message to someone you’re not following the tweet never appears in your stream and you don’t see it. Why not extend that capability and make it so people really get what they want out of Twitter?

I live in Utah, and this past weekend was the LDS conference which happens 2 times a year and for 2-3 days straight my Twitter stream is filled with #LDSconf appended tweets and content doesn’t interest me at all. I like all of my Utah twitter friends and associates, but I have no interest in their religious based events.

Last time this came around I unfollowed everyone using this tag, made a list, and then followed once again on Tuesday when it was all over. I hate doing it, and this year I just moved my “Utah” column out of view, but that didn’t really help. As a last resort I just filtered out the tag using the built in feature in TweetDeck, but it’s very limited and so plenty still flooded in.

During the last election I saw many reports of people unfollowing people till it was all over, heck I did it too. I got sick of seeing the same stuff over and over so I made a list, unfollowed and once it was over refollowed them. I see people talking about it when certain conferences roll around (Blog World Expo, SxSw, etc) and people get burnt out on seeing all the same info from a dozen or more people.

Events have an odd effect on Twitter users. Usually low key tweeters become power users and start sending out more tweets than usual. Some twitter power users go into overdrive and it’s like you’re at the event as they tweet everything that’s said. It’s easy for it to wear on people, and TweetDeck’s filtering option just doesn’t fit the entire bill.

Right now when a big event we don’t care about comes along and floods Twitter we have 2 options.
1. Make a list, unfollow people, and then follow them back later.
2. Stop using Twitter until the event is over.

Ignoring tweets with a certain tag or subject is just not practical with the way Twitter is currently built and everything is mingled and mixed together.

The subject of why we would individually use filters isn’t the real reason of this post, it’s about the benefits we could gain from it. Besides allowing us to control the conversations and topics we see a bit more it would help Twitter with some of their own problems.

1. Spam – You could create filters based on currents spam trends so that you never even see the tweets. If you never see the spam then, for the most part, Twitter becomes a dead end for spammers.

2. API calls – Twitter is always worried about calls to their API because it costs them money in operational costs. Add to that the additional loss if it’s a tweet the end user doesn’t even want to see. This would lower API calls while increasing the value of what we did see.

3. Keep interest – It is so easy to get on, start following several hundred people and get overloaded. If users had the ability to filter out certain things and “tame the firehose” a bit it would make it much easier to manage for new users.

Twitter is obviously evolving, and who knows, maybe this is already in the works. I just hope robust filter options are in the works. Being able to filter and use operators like And, If, Or, But, & Not so that we as users can narrow down what we see. But what do YOU think? Would our ability to filter tweets be a good thing or would it ruin some of the subtle values of Twitter?

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

image by stephend9

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