Social Media Strategies Summit – Las Vegas – February 7-9, 2012

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

I will be presenting at the 2012 Las Vegas Social Media Strategies Summit at the Mirage Hotel.

Session Overview:

Social Media – How to Monitor, Measure and Report for the SMB

So you’re adding social media to your game plan for your organization, moving it from an afterthought to front-and-center. You’ve even got a staff member ready to roll up their sleeves and manage your social media strategy for the organization (and that person might be you!) But now what? In this session, we’ll explore three key aspects of getting started with social media: monitoring, measuring, and reporting.

Your session leader will walk you through how to succeed in each of these key areas by taking a hands on and practical approach to identifying the tools, resources and processes that will position your SMB for social media success.  Some of the topics covered will include:

  • Identifying your objectives for using social media
  • Defining the metrics and KPIs for success
  • Why monitoring social media is important
  • Free and paid tools to get you started with monitoring
  • Policies and procedures for social media management
  • Using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights for analysis
  • Creating simple dashboard spreadsheets in Excel for reporting KPIs/ROI

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Posted in Analytics, Social Media

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Steve Jobs and his Lessons

Posted on January 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

Erik Qualman at ClickZ posted an article a while back entitled, “Steve Jobs: 10 Lessons in Leadership.” It’s a quick read and I highly recommend the post, whether you love Steve Jobs or hate him (or fall somewhere in between), there are some interesting concepts that will really make you think.

Now, it’s much easier to Monday-morning-QB Steve’s success after the fact, but since that’s all we have to go on, it’s not a bad place to start.

What the post by Erik fails to mention was that Jobs was not perfect. There were many failed products at Apple. The post points out that Jobs cancelled many products and that was okay, but do you think those failures tormented him? Perhaps… they may have also served as great motivators. After all, aren’t we supposed to learn from our mistakes?

Interestingly, people often forget to talk about Apple’s greatest mistake – the fact that it did not license its computing technology during the great home computer race in the 80′s. Instead, it kept the technology close to the vest and that allowed the PC market (dominated by IBM) to capture something upwards of 90%. Imagine if Apple had gone the other way? Where would we be today? Perhaps Apple would have had more innovative products or perhaps there would be no PC?

Regardless of the magnitude of that failed business decision one can argue it helped keep Apple products wholesome to Job’s vision without being muddled by inferior third parties. I would argue that while PCs got cheaper over the past 20 years, many of them got crappier too. After all, I am a firm believer of “you get what you pay for” in life.

I got my first iPod around 2003 or thereabouts, and am currently on my third one… I recently acquired an iPad for work, and after pleading incessantly with  me, I purchased an iPhone 4 for my wonderful wife. I can tell you this, when I am awake, I have an Apple device with me nearly 100% of the time. My wife has yet to let go of the iPhone since December. I can’t really think of any other brand of technology that has become such a crutch in my household.

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Who Should Run Web Analytics at Your Company

Posted on January 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

I just came across this somewhat humorous post on ClickZ by Andrew Edwards about a company’s IT  department mucking up the web analytics project that was successfully run by the marketing team for years… So, it begs to ask the question: “Who should run web analytics at your company?”

The answer is marketing.

Here’s why:

  1. Marketing’s role is to generate revenue opportunities for the company. The metrics for measuring these opportunities and the success of generating them are defined by marketing. They understand the objectives and therefore should be tasked with measuring the outcome. Having someone else do this who is less familiar with objectives and the outcomes inserts and element of risk.
  2. Access to web analytics should be democratized. In other words, the system should be central, and business analysts and marketing executives should be able to access the system at will, create reports, collaborate on metrics and dashboards, and so on.
  3. In my experience, marketing teams are collaborative by their very nature of having to communicate across departments to further the corporate objectives and coordinate consistent messaging, branding and awareness.
  4. Conversely, IT departments (in my experience) often govern by limiting access, creating policy and strive to eliminate risk. This is okay perhaps for tech stuff (though I would argue that it isn’t, but that’s for another day). But for data and analysis, this is bad.
  5. Blocking access to insight restricts a business’s ability to leverage it and make good decisions.

However, it is EXTREMELY important for the two shops (marketing and IT) to collaborate. For example, there is much insight in the data that would benefit IT with regards to planning downtime, fixing errors, load balancing, hosting and correcting errors. These are all issues critical to a business’s success. IT and marketing should work together on identifying these issues, the necessary metrics, and the course of action needed to further the business objectives.

For more on my view of technology within the marketing department, check out this post.

Above all, decisions about which platform to use and how to measure the business should be a collaboration between IT and marketing. As I have always preached, the most successful marketers are those with IT know-how and insight, as technology often is the genesis of marketing innovation. So why is it that these two groups at most companies often remain in silos?

 

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