Facebook features heavily - but Twitter a surprise?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended tool: Add This Services
Important if you value sharing in different global markets
We thought it would be useful to share this free tool available from Add This, the company behind one of the webs most popular sharing bar. Remember that companies such as Add This (and ShareThis whom we've mentioned before) track a lot of data surrounding the use of their social sharing tools. The service that we're referencing here enables you to look at the usage of share services by country.
Some key observations
Facebook dominates, as you would expect - but not necessarily for B2B
Twitter is second and surprisingly important in the UK in particular - companies who just share via Facebook or Google+ only are missing out
Email - despite social sharing "forward to a friend or colleague"…
How are you measuring the success of social media? This question remains contentious to say the least. This infographic shares some insight into just how the "R" in ROI can be interpreted. We hope it helps!
We also have a post from earlier in year on the goals and challenges of social media marketing which may also help you in defining the best way to group objectives for social media.
If you haven't seen this Altimeter report, then take a look, it's the best free in-depth report on creating a framework for developing a social media ROI measurement system.
A Framework for Social Analytics …
Three examples where absolute email marketing truth is...relative
As the original "killer app", email marketing has accumulated a lot of truths and best practices through its long history.
Some of those survive because they remain relevant, but some persist simply through the power of repetition and tradition. A constant challenge is working out what's really true in email.
What's a genuine best practice? What's a recommended practice for most (but not all) cases? What apparent truths are no longer relevant or accurate in an ever-changing online business environment?
Here are three examples of commonly-heard generalities about email marketing that are grounded in truth, but where the devil is in the details...
1. Email is about relationships
I'm not going to deny that. After all, in my previous column I argued that more attention should be given to the subtle, indirect and relationship impacts of a regular stream of emails passing across the inbox of your prospect…
and approaches to tackle them
Hi! I manage the LinkedIn Web Managers group of which Dave Chaffey is also a member. When Dave saw the recent thread we had running about the current challenges for web and digital marketing managers, he suggested I do a guest post on Smart Insights, so we can “share the pain” and help with planning issues that need prioritising.
So here we are. These are the main themes that we identified in our discussion. How do they compare to your challenges?
1 Managing the pace of change
The main theme is that everything is changing so fast. People who have worked in web for years and consider themselves pretty knowledgeable are having to think about their jobs in completely new ways. For some, it’s almost like last year they were a ‘web manager’…
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13 Sep 2011
Practical customer engagement examples #2
Last time I talked about the use of QR codes for engagement. My customer engagement example this time shows how to use gamification to make an app (or website) more involving and shareable.
Dropbox is one of those utilities I now find I can’t live without and I noticed this use of game mechanics (gamification) on their ‘Get Started’ page.
The goals for building this feature fit nicely with what I see as the essence of engagement in this definition of customer engagement:
“Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand”.
To encourage you to learn more about the product, use it and share with friends Dropbox have set a ‘quest’ to complete seven tasks. Your reward should you become a ‘Dropbox Guru’ is extra storage space. Motivating, fun and rewarding!
Other nice elements on the…
Part Two of a 12 part guide to Website optimisation
In Part 1, we explored how to use web analytics to benchmark performance and drive insight through data which is a theme throughout this series of in-depth articles. We continue this theme in this guide where I will look at approaches I use to review competitors. I hope you find the approaches interesting and I'll be interested to hear how they differ in the approaches and tools you use.
Competitor research is a core part of optimisation and involves studying websites that rank well for keyword targets.
While it's common to think of which keywords you should target, it's less common to research competitors in detail. But I think this is really important since each keyword and industry can be vastly different in terms of what puts a website at the top…
ToBeSocial tools enable you to benchmark your campaigns against competitors
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: ToBeTracker
We like this simple, free tool which enables you to visualise the growth history of fans of Facebook pages. This example shows how you can see the growth rates of campaigns once registered on the system. Data is extract direct from Facebook Insights using the Facebook API to extract data.
Note: this campaign no longer live, but is still seeing growth.
Marketing implications of this tracking tool
This is a simple tool that can help benchmark what is working for your competitors. You can browse different categories of companies or compare 3 or 4 pages - handy for presentations.…
Using the Geckoboard Business Dashboard for marketing
Value rating: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.geckoboard.com/
Update - see Geckofuel
Since we published the post we have had some feedback that Geckoboard looks useful, but doesn't support social follower counts. Well it does, but by this separate additional (free) service Geockofuel. Geckoboard supports any custom data feeds in an XML format and offers many ways of then displaying that feed. The Geckofuel site has prebuilt some of these for additional services including Facebook and Twitter. You can see that you could also use this for your custom reporting.
Our commentary
We're seeing a new class of business or marketing dashboard now which are distinct from the web analytics systems like Google Analytics, Adobe/Omniture Site Catalyst and IBM Coremetrics.
These dashboards use the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces for automated data exchange) from different systems to integrate data from different systems. This makes…
How changing one word can help you win more sales
The other day I was speaking at a workshop organized by Royal Mail. After my talk, the chairperson asked ‘What is the one thing that you will do differently when you go back to the office’.
When the people in the room gave their answers, almost every third person said the same thing. They all intended to change one single word in their copy because they were convinced that doing so would improve sales instantly.
I was pleased they had picked up this tip from my talk since the correct use of this particular word is very powerful. It’s also extremely simple, so anyone can do it to their own copy, right now.
I described it as ‘changing’ one word, but in fact, it’s even easier than that, because all you do is delete it.
And the word is….
But what is the word?…
Where social media marketing misses the content opportunity
I've been thinking about the key elements of ongoing inbound marketing activities - with the goal of driving sustainable interactions beyond one campaign.
Our agency, First 10, played a part in a small and successful campaign this week to help promote a local, Leeds based homeless charity called Simon on the Streets, and it's this that got me thinking.
Largely promoted via Twitter, the campaign has been great for the charity - and done with zero budget and no media spend. The content was creative images from a promotional campaign run by their creative agency, McGrath O'Toole. Aside from zero spend, the approach to the campaign echoes questions and enquiries that we get asked regarding digital media marketing campaigns - the requests tend to follow a familiar line:
Create a digital campaign to leverage a piece of existing content that already exists
Optimise that content, help make it…
