Friday, November 10th, 2006
I’ve been planning on writing about this in the next couple of weeks, but after reading Bruce Prokopets at Social Caster vent his frustration (Stop Yapping and Show Me The Results) regarding the lack of real performance data showing the value of Social Media Marketing, I decided to get some of it out now.
As a self-proclaimed SMM Evangelist, my instinct is to quickly defend social media as a marketing strategy. But, instead, it lit a fire under my butt to at least put this problem out there, sooner rather than later, for people to start crunching on.
But, alas, defeat must be conceded. For now…hint, hint.
Show Me the Data
One of the largest problems that I see with SMM becoming more widely accepted as a viable marketing strategy is that performance data hasn’t been disclosed by those who are having success with it. I have seen sites such as The $15k Challenge which disclose strict performance data directly tied to ROI, and HitWise has some great data that they disclose (though this is mostly in regards to inward and outward traffic).
If SMM is going to become a widely-accepted practice, people need proof. They need evidence. People need to know that the time, energy and resources that they are going to devote are going to be worth it.
Quite frankly, while it’s a risk that I’m willing to take with my career, I don’t blame others for not taking the same risk. If a newspaper called me tomorrow asking me to advertise with them, I would certainly expect hard performance data. Plus, when it comes to business and marketing, in the end, it is about the performance.
Make it Valuable to Me…oh, AND my boss.
I sense that part of the reason that numbers haven’t been released regarding successful campaigns is that people aren’t quite sure yet what to measure. We saw this with search marketing 5-6 years ago, when all of the independent affiliate marketers were screaming about the value of search and raking in cash, while everyone else blew them off.
It wasn’t until the right tools came along to make it easy to measure performance that search became valuable.
It wasn’t until metrics were defined and the tools to record these metrics were made accessible that search marketing became valuable. Until this happens with Social Media Marketing, it, too, will remain unnoticed.
The point is that until the perception of value is easily accessible and understood, that anything is worthless.
It then becomes our responsibility to define what these metrics are to become. “Engagement,” “Attention,” etc, those measurements are crap. They’re marketing speak for marketers who lack a focus on results.
What is needed is something that outlines how each social media tactic, Social Networks, Blogs, Messageboards, etc, should be measured. Then the tools need to be put into place to measure and present this information in a clear and compelling manner.
Stay tuned for updates on what should be measured and how you can measure performance of your social media campaigns. It’s a lot more fun to talk about marketing when you have numbers anyway. ;-)
Friday, November 10th, 2006
Congratulations to Seth Godin on his two 50,000 milestones today: Being able to donate $50,000 earned from high sales of The Big Moo, and Squidoo hitting 50,000 entries.
I highly recommend reading his inspiring and grateful post. It’s proof of yet another way that the principles of Social Media can change the world.
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
I’m not even going to try to out-do the in-depth analysis that Hitwise has done in their Consumer Generated Media Report.
The report also touches on something I was actually thinking about earlier today: The seasonality of social media.
It has been reported that there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September, which is a typical seasonal occurrence as school-aged users shift their attention from socializing online to academic pursuits. Last year, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreased by 7.6% from August to September 2005, but recovered in October, increasing by 10.8% from September to October 2005. This year, a similar pattern emerged, with visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreasing by 7.3% from August to September 2006. Category traffic was flat from September to October 2006, indicating a slow down in growth, but by no means a decline.
Certainly very telling of the demographic for consumer-generated media as well as social media.
EDIT: When I was tagging this, I wanted to also tag it in a category that might contain articles that are focused on Wikipedia. Is there a name for sites such as Wikipedia, Digg, etc, where the value of the media comes from social collaboration, rather than individual contribution (blogs, social networks, etc)? I’ve labeled this as “Social Information Media” in the meantime, but was curious if anyone had set out to define what this may be referred to as.
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
Well, it turns out that in the final week of the Search Marketing Scholarship Contest, I was able to squeak out a win with my article titled The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing. It’s a pretty big honor to win the week that I entered since not only were there the most entries, but it was the strictest competition with some great entries.
At this point, the winners of each of the four weeks now go in front of a panel of industry judges to decide which article will win the overall contest.
Andy’s done a great writeup titled The Anatomy of a Search Marketing Scholarship Contest. In it, he outlines the competition each week, various tactics used to garner traffic to each article, and the total uniqe visitors and percentages of the top referring sources. It’s a pretty great insight into the various marketing techniques that a lot of marketers are using to gain traffic to their sites, not to mention a great real-world example of the power of well-written headlines.
On top of the marketing lessons learned form the articles, you should definitely give it a read for ideas on how you can further engage your marketplace through a contest like this, or something similar. The breakdown of how he’s gone about the contest and how it played out week by week is certainly valuable from any sort of Social Media perspective.
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006
Mashable.com notes a report by eMarketer that predicts advertising spends on social networks have been consistently beating estimates and are on track to reach $2 billion by 2010.
“U.S. marketers are expected to spend $350 million in 2006, an increase of 25% over previous estimates. Estimates for 2010 are also up 16 percent to $2.2 billion, with social network ad spending projected to account for 8.5% of the U.S. ad market by 2010.”
Subscribe in a reader