Determining Success

Welcome back,

How do we know if Social media is working? I'm sure the question comes up in board rooms across the country nearly daily. Many companies employ social media simply because they feel they need to. They see company xyz is doing it and for fear of feeling obsolete, hire Andrew the 21 year old for his knowledge of social media. Well to make sure Andrew is successful in his tactics or bets used in their transition into social media they must define metrics to determine ROI.

Figuring out whether social media is providing ROI is a tricky matter however. Therefore, it is imperative in determining the metrics early on to provide yourself with a benchmark. Aaron Uhrmacher, author of How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business, provides greater detail about how metrics can be either quantitative or qualitative. After creating the metrics the company can see later down the road the success of Andrew and his social media bets.

Until next,

JC

The value of social media in politics

Whats up everyone?? I hope your enjoying spring and the great weather.

While last year's November poll results were monumental in numerous ways one of the lessons that has gone slightly unnoticed from that historic election is the advantage social media gave Obama's campaign. President Obama was involved in sixteen social media channels including myspace, Facebook, Twitter. One of the great advantages about being involved in social media is that obviously Obama can not call every eligible voter but one thing he can do is connect with them through social media. Social media was used by the President among other things to rally his base, keep his supporters connected and make known his stand on many issues. But perhaps the best way that Obama used social media was by connecting to specific ethnic groups, by joining "MiGente (Latinos), BlackPlanet (African-Americans), Glee ("gay, lesbian and everyone else") and others." To read more about Obama's use of social media read What Businesses can Learn From Obama's Social Media Strategy.

Some people are starting to learn from Obama and his use of social media in politics. Read

With social media, student school board members exercise influence. It is obvious there is a ton to learn from how Obama connected with normally hard to reach bases. This is enviable and in fact businesses could learn a great deal by not just marketing but in fact participating in the many different social media channels.

Until next week,

Jc

Are page views old news?

Hope everyone is having a great weekend, and holiday if you are celebrating easter!

This week I am going to be discussing analyzing traffic towards websites and whether it should be done via page views.

Every week, I can log onto Google Analytics and see a great wealth of iJust Joshin'nformation regarding my viewers. The first analytic I always look at is how many page views I have received. Secondly how many of them are unique views? I can see in what states or even countries readers are viewing my posts and even see how long the average reader is spending on my url. However, is tracking the number of unique views I receive for my blog the best measure?

An article,The Death of the Pageview, shows me that there may be much more important analytics which I should be devoting my attention to instead of simply page views. While this is purely hypothetical as I am not a for-profit blogger. However, if I was beginning a start-up company these are some of the anlaytics as shown in the article linked which I now know I should be paying attention to:

• click tracking
• event tracking
• conversion funnel analysis
• split testing

Please click on the link above to read the article in Read Write Start, for a much more complete analysis of the topics discussed above.

Enjoy the beautiful weather!

JC