CrapHammer

Beautiful High Speed Train - Japan

I fell in love with this movie taken from a high speed train in Japan.

I've often had negative reactions to the kaleidoscope effect applied to films and music videos. 

But this was just plain magical.

 

Shinkansen ver.2 from daihei shibata on Vimeo.

Some sage (and needed) advice on social media ROI

It was so refreshing to see this slideshare from 22 squared.

I'm not sure how I missed it until now!

A hat tip to Eric for flipping this my way.  And he is right.  Slide 10 rocks.

The True Value of Social Media

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A Total Unfair, Unscientific and Quick Comparison

A week doesn't go by that I don't find myself having to justify, make or support recommendations on which social media monitoring platform to use.

I currently recommend and use both Radian6 and Sysomos. Each product serves different needs really well. Also note that I have heard good things about Alterian's SM2 but I don't currently have access to or use this product.  

So without further ado, here is my crazy unfair, unscientific and high level comparison of three of my favorite SM monitoring products.

I'm giving a course today in Ottawa for the CPRS and I pulled together this chart based on my experience with each tool. I'll share my more in depth breakdown later if there is interest in such.

A couple of quick caveats. A lot comes down to use. And the prices listed above are ballparks based on my current usage and understanding of these tools.

 

Attention Surplus - Your Network Matters More Than You May Think

I think episode 7 is our best podcast yet.  We explore the power of Networks to determine our happiness, our weight and (I would argue) our ability to create positive change in the world. What I find fascinating about the research in this area is that friends 4 removed (that we don't even know) actually impact us quite dramatically.

 

Episode 7:  MP3 Link

I would love to know what you think.

And I sort of need to beg.  To all my friends in Germany, the US, Australia, Patagonia and elsewhere!!!

While we are  now featured in Canada (woot!), we're sort of lost in all the other iTunes stores.

So if you could take 3 minutes and rate us on iTunes, I would be forever grateful.

It's a big deal and helps us out a LOT.

 

Lever for Success: Being Liked

I was a bit floored the other day when I heard someone conflating shareability with viral on a video project. 

The conversation was along the lines of "we should not aim for shareability so much on this video as  less than 1% of all videos online go viral".

Shareability is not and should not be equated with viral reach. I can almost understand the confusion as shareability is a cofactor of viral (meaning that something that can not be shared is unlikely to ever go viral.)

And please don't misunderstand. I don't advocate trying to create viral videos. 

But to give up on designing content that is shareable is to throw in the towel. It is to surrender the value we bring as an agency. Our goal should always be to create things that resonate and bring enough value to our audiences so as to be worth sharing with their friends and associates. 

But how do we create things that are more shareable?

It's easy to say but not so easy to implement.

Here is a quote from Mike Arauz that I have referenced many times.  

“If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends.”

It is a wonderful way to capture the shift of thinking required to create content that is shareable.

And it is also just the tip of the wedge.

This presentation from PodCampTO got me thinking hard about why we share and to what ends we participate online.

Psychology of websites and social media campaigns

I've long been a follower and lover of Cialdini and this presentation was a great way to sum up a lot of Cialdini's work and how it might apply to the digital realm.

But I think it is larger than this.

There is no greater social pressure than the desire to belong. It is captured in our desire to be liked and in the social proof.

Take a moment and remember back to a time when you received something really funny or moving and you went to share it with your friends only to abort and not share it.

This happens to me all the time. I receive something from one circle of friends and then choose not to share it with a wider or different group of friends.

Who I am is not a constant. Rather, I belong to a number of social circles and each moment I share something is actually a decision I make, albeit most often not consciously. A decision that takes into account how this will make me appear and whether this will be well received from the circle I am about to share it with.

In fact, I might propose a new quote.

“If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s because I want to be liked by the friends I'm sharing it with.”

This is something the savviest brands already know. It is about creating content that references key social cues that resonate with a group and send an insider signal of belonging, or what my good (&brilliant) friend Paul McEnany calls acculturativity.

Google Analytics Magic - Part Two

This is an ongoing series titled, "Google Analytics Magic."  In part one I showed how and why to create my favorite Google Analytics (GA) report, a customized keywords bounce report with drill down. This report helps to identify where search engines like Google or Bing are leading people to pages on your site that don't answer their query. This is quite often low hanging fruit for improving your site and driving higher engagement and conversion.

In part two, I will be answering some of the questions people had and then showing how to use advanced segmentation in Google Analytics (GA). [edited]

You can read the follow-up to part one below or jump straight to the advanced segmentation section.

Part One Questions

Adam asked, "One request I would like to suggest is a "what now?" step or suggestions after identifying that a high bounce rate was actually caused by people not finding the right information. [...] I suppose my best options would be to either write a specific article based on those keywords, or to include some reference links to other sites that have info specific to a user's search."

This is dead on, Adam.

The line of thinking is to first determine whether it would be appropriate to rewrite or update the page to make it more relevant to visitors. Then I like to explore how to get the search traffic to point to more appropriate pages on the site. Below I outline three approaches to this end. Think of these as tools in your toolkit. You may use just one, or you may use all three as best fits.

1: I would pull a content report and if the page in question shows an equally high bounce rate overall (not just from search), I would consider rewriting this page. Is there a way to expand the page to address and include the search terms being used? In some cases it is not appropriate or possible to rewrite the page. A page about your product or service is likely not a good candidate to be rewritten unless the search terms relate to your product/service.

2: Can we create a callout box that is featured above the fold with links to other pages on the site that better address the search terms being used? Visitors to the page can then easily click to get to a page on the site that best meets their interests or needs. I would often create these links using Google's Campaign URL Builder as I want to know at a quick glance which links in the callout box people are clicking on. These clicks will then appear in the Traffic Sources | Campaigns report. Note that it's not necessary to create Campaign URLs as anyone clicking on a link will be a second click on your site. They will no longer be be a bounce which will help drive down your bounce rate and get people to the content they are looking for. So you will see the bounce rate dropping if the links are working you just won't be able to easily see which links are working best.

3: Callout boxes work really well in many cases, but it doesn't fix the problem that people are going from a search engine to a page only to have to click again to get to the page they really want. This extra step will always cause some attrition of visitors versus getting people directly to the appropriate page in the first place. This brings me into the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The question is why the search engine isn't directing people to your other page in the first place. Is it findable by the search engines? Could you rewrite the other page with more of the terms people are searching for? I recommend working with an SEO specialist. Good news is you have identified the problem. Fixing it is just a matter of effort and resources.

Eric asks, "Have you ever used Clicky for web analytics? Check out how they calculate bounce rates: http://getclicky.com/blog/214/why-clickys-new-bounce-rate-is-the-best-in-the-biz "

I am going to be experimenting with Clicky on a project with Eric. I do like their ability to differentiate between a quick bounce and someone spending time on a page. That said, I would still want to run a report like I outlined in Part One and look for disconnects between search terms and page content resulting in a bounce.

Fred asks, "Did it Sean. Thanks. I'd love for you to blog on how a small business should be using GA and how often."

Stay tuned for part three where I will do just that. I'll also explore a simplified model for determining key measures for your organization.

Keep the questions coming!

 

Using Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) offers a number of quick and powerful methods to understand what is driving increased traffic to your site. In the video below, I show you how to use Advanced Segmentation to do just that. It sounds complex, but it really isn't. It's one of the most powerful and easy to use features in GA.

A big shout out to Soundstreams Canada for letting me use them as a guinea pig. If you are looking for great, one-of-a-kind concerts in Toronto, I can't recommend them enough.

 

Here is a direct link to the above tutorial video in case it is not showing up in your browser.

Finally. Transmedia brought down to earth.

There's an almost endless amount of hooplah about Transmedia in our industry. This presentation  puts transmedia back in it's place while also placing it within its proper context.

Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience

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I'm off to Florida for a week of vacation.  My next Google Analytics post is ready to go and I'm praying that days full of overeating and avoiding sharks will allow me to get it up and posted!

 

Social CRM - Are Our "Measurement" Tools Throwing Away the Relationships?

[Update:  Marketing Profs just ran this article as well. There was a bunch of confusion on where it was going to run and I'm grateful and thankful that they opted to run it. They rock.]

I can’t tell you how many things come across my desk every week that purport to be “social CRM” measurement tools. Actually, I could. I could make a pretty little chart and break it down by type of article and even by source. It might look something like this.

I think we could all agree that the value of this chart is questionable at best. It’s pretty and if we tracked it over time, we might even be able to find some insights. We could use it as an indicator of how much interest there is in this topic. Some might even use it to predict growth in this area of marketing.

But no one would propose we use this method to determine the value of the relationships I have with the topics I’m measuring. 

So why are so many brands using tools just like this to measure social media engagement?

In a nutshell, garbage in, garbage out.

Before we can discuss how to get the proper data inputs, we need to explore what social CRM could and should be to an organization. I was quite surprised and saddened to see a quote from Joe Chernov at Eloqua implying that social CRM is about support requests. 

“Although social CRM and support are, justifiably, hot topics in the media, calls for support account for only 1% of all tweets”

Your Social Media Followers are Your Best Customers, Logic and Emotion, Joe Chernov, Eloqua

I believe that Social CRM is about building and managing relationships of value in a world where brands require a digital and social presence.

For someone from a promotions background, this means identifying likely candidates for offers and tracking them through to conversion.

For someone from a lead generation or B2B background, this means getting candidates to self-identify and passing them into a lead management system.

For someone from an advertising or media background, this means paying lots of money for TV ads with some mysterious end result of increasing sales. (Okay. This is a bad example.)

For a digital marketer, it means everything. We can no longer afford not to attach profit and revenue valuations to our efforts.

I will talk more about building Social CRM programs in a later article.  For this article I want to focus on a key aspect of Social CRM: our ability to measure our success at building relationships of value. 

Let’s go back to that first chart. It’s an indicator that could show us increased interest over time in the topic we’re monitoring. I could run one in January. Then in February I would run the search again and compare how many people are promoting these tools compared to January. Rinse and repeat. 

We end up with a chart that appears in just about every social media monitoring report. 

Here we see the number of people talking about terms of interest to us month over month. It could be about product mentions. It could be about key issues. This doesn’t matter. What really matters is how this data helps us understand the value of the relationships we are building (or not building).

But wait. That’s not what this chart shows us. It just shows us how many people are talking about something we are searching for. They could be the same people every period or there could be 100% churn with no consistency across periods. For all we know, our efforts could simply be driving volume at the cost of relationships. 

Someone usually pipes up at this point and shows me how they are tracking sentiment. Great. So we’re carefully tracking whether overall group mentality and conversation is trending positive or negative, but we still have no way to measure the relationships. Awesome.

I should point out that the fault for all of this lies partly with the tool providers. We are all starting with what social media monitoring tools just happen to provide. But what if we weren’t? What questions would we ask if we were designing this measurement program from the ground up? What knowledge would we want? How would we design the reporting tools to help us build long-term relationships of value to our brand?

Here are just some of the key questions I believe we should be asking.

• How many of the people from January are also active in February?  What about in March?
• Is there a core group of people driving different conversations?
• What percentage of these people want to engage with our brand?
• Is the group that talks about us more often over time more or less likely to purchase or participate in an activity?

If I go back to the charts presented earlier, we’re actually throwing away our data every month. So the first question we need to answer is what percentage of people from one period are still taking about us in a later period.

We need to start creating and seeing charts like this one.

If you’ve invested a lot in social or digital, I hope you have a growing percentage of people talking about you or engaging with you month over month and quarter over quarter. And if you do, who are these people? Which ones are driving the conversation? How does their sentiment compare to the rest? Or my favorite question: what else are they talking about?

In closing, I think it’s also important to look at how influence is being defined. Tools like Klout provide great shortcuts for understanding the activity and reach of individuals online. But what if your influencers don’t rate highly in Klout? What if they are everyday people who are so passionate about your brand that they are talking about you every month and you just don’t know who they are?

 

Attention Surplus Launch - Episode 1

I've taken the leap. 

Eric Portelance and I have launched a podcast.  I hope you will tune in each week as we explore the intersection of technology, culture and purpose.

Subscribe on iTunes

In episode one we discuss whether it's possible for passion to transfer from one person to another, and whether online and offline interactions can lead to similar emotional connections.

You can listen to the podcast, learn more and subscribe via iTunes, Tumblr or RSS at attentionsurplus.ca.

I hope you will check it out and leave us a comment on what you think!

The Day of Love, Passion and Sharing

I'm at work on the next Google Analytics post in the series.

In the interim, I wanted to post a quick and belated Valentines Day post.

But I won't be writing this post and neither will Mario.

I will just be pointing to some amazing resources I highly recommend reading.

Gavin explores why social marketing is an act of love.

Valeria shows us that we have to create intimate content that people relate to.

Both amazing articles! 

[photo credit: david_a_lea]