You can measure ROI of your social media by using the right traditional and digital metrics. Two good tips for beginning to track how you do with social media is staggering your activities and using unique URLs.

1. Stagger your marketing activities will help you find out what’s working and what’s not working for your social media marketing.

A very important metric every business needs to know is the value of their customer. Without lifetime customer value, it will be hard to determine the ROI from social media.

To calculate Lifetime Value of a Customer=(Longevity*Revenue)*Margin

To calculate the value of a visitor:

Now, how this relates to your social media activities?  To calculate the value of your blog, use the value of a visitor that you already calculated and the amount of traffic your blog receives.

This is a fairly easy way to measure the return-on-investment for your social media.

2. Use a unique url to track all of your online activities. An easy and excellent way to see the type of traffic you are getting from each activity. Use unique URL for your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, video, and every digital action you take. This way, you will know very well what is working for you online.

Another way to see what the value of your Facebook page is will be to take an old email marketing approach to it. To calculate the value of your Facebook social media efforts based on your email marketing, you can use Jay Baer’s valuation worksheet below.

In addition to marketing applications from social media, we also have customer service return on investment from social media and sales return on investment from social media.

ROI on customer service. Studies show that by implementing social into your business, you can improve your customer service score, thus generating more word of mouth and referrals. To measure your customer service score you can use Net Promoter Score as a baseline before your social media and then measure it after making your business social.

 ROI on sales. Lowe’s sold $1 mil more in paint by implementing social in their business process and allowing employees to share ideas internally. For a good bog post on how to calculate the ROI for sales, check out this Social Media Examiner’s post.

Below is a good presentation from Social Media Today on return on investment on social media for both B2C and B2B. The screen shots and insights above were extracted from the Social Media Today’s presentation.

Thank you to everyone who came to listen to me. You are absolutely wonderful people and a great audience. As promised, below are my 3 presentations from the event.

It’s 2010 – Is your business social?

Do you need help figuring out how to best use social media marketing for your business? Do you want to understand how to use word-of-mouth online to compliment your traditional and online marketing efforts. Are you new to social media? Do you need justification for yourself or to your boss that social media is not just playing on Facebook? Do you think social media is some type of black magic and only young people really get it? Do you know how to deal with a social media crisis or prevent one? Do you have a social media policy for your employees? A social media strategy? Proof of return-on-investment?

I’ll try to answer all of these questions and more at the interactive 3 hour workshop at Parasol Tahoe Community Foundation, Incline Village, Lake Tahoe on Oct 7th. Book your calendar, save $10 from not buying a coffee at Starbucks for 3 days, and come hear real life case stories, learn from successful small Lake Tahoe businesses, and best of all learn from each other on how to use social media to your advantage.

Word of mouth is the best marketing tool in your tool box. Social media just helps spreading word of mouth by making it viral. Are you taking advantage of it? Can you afford not to?

It’s hard to speak in public.  It takes time to prepare a presentation. I promise you I will do my best to not bore you for one minute. We are going to have a lot of fun! Get ready for this high energy, 3 hour session. Bring your questions. Bring your friends. Bring your Starbucks coffee. But be there!!! I know I can count on you! All proceeds go to Parasol. I make nothing from this event except for the pure enjoyment of spending time with you and sharing information and knowledge.

Click on the link below to see the flyer with more information about the event. Post it on your wall. Mark your calendar. Please, RSVP to Parasol directly, the gracious organizer of this event.

Social Marketing Workshop Flyer

1. I enjoyed David LaPlante’s presentation.His passion for technology, social sharing, video, content and skiing is addictive and make a big impact on everyone who’s ever seen him speak. On the forefront of technology, geek by heart and skier for life, David talked about the past, present and future of technology. A lot of change is coming to us and it’s happening fast. Stay with the trends or be left out in the cold when it comes to how you do business online.
2. Jim Scripps gave a great overview of blogging – what it is, how to do it and best practices. It’s quick to set it up and businesses can use to engage online, deal with a PR crisis, help improve their search engine rankings, provide timely updates, use it as a hub for all of their social media efforts and engagement with bloggers.
3. Michael Kelly from ClickMail Marketing gave an extensive overview on how to best utilize email marketing for organizations with a ton of statistics and best practices. Knowing that the average value of an email address is $120 puts a different light to the email database list of any size.
4. Jake Fields, from Treeline Interactive spoke passionately about mobile marketing: iPhone apps, mobile advertising, text messages and various applications. Mobile holds a lot of opportunities for the future. As companies enter this new field with many unknowns it’s good to partner with someone that understands it and does it on a daily basis. Treeline Interactive seem to be completely at ease when it comes to speaking mobile advertising.
5. Finally, here’s the presentation I gave on Facebook and Twitter for business. Someone asked about social media ROI. Here’s a good video touching on the ROI question.

1. Video – YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Hulu has grown from 63 million streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009. (from Social Media Revolution video). 77% have watched an advertising on YouTube. (from Razorfish Digital Report 2009). 13 hours is the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 412 years is the amount of time it will take you to watch every video on YouTube. 100 million is the amount of YouTube videos watched daily. These and more interesting stats from What The F**K is social media presentation.  Video is here to stay. You can use it to sell your product, explain your idea, showcase your property. People prefer to watch instead of reading.  As a business, figure out how to embed video on your website, use video to sell your product or service, use video on online ads, explain your product and make sure your video is compatible on mobile phones.
2. Mobile - According to the Mobile Marketing Association total U.S. spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion in 2009 to $2.16 billion in 2010. More and more companies are looking for ways to get to consumers on the only device they always carry with them – their cell phone. According to the Razorfish Digital report 2009, 57% access the Internet from their phone, 50%  have downloaded an app for their phone and 30% have interacted with an ad on their phone. Two major trends for mobile marketing this year are going to be Mobile Money and Mobile Ticketing. You will be able to send money abroad from your cell phone as well as purchase airline and other tickets on your phone and not have to carry paper print out with you. Mobile applications for businesses are huge – from text messages for your business to iPhone apps, this is going to be an exciting year for mobile marketing.
3. Location/ Social Networking – this trend focuses on geo enabled games and software from companies are Foursquare and Loopt. Social network sites where people (and companies) are going to be aware of each others surroundings. People are going to be able to connect with friends near you and companies are going to be able to provide relevant coupons and messages. You will be surrounded with information stream that is relevant to your behavior and current location. Twitter may be overtaken by these technologies in 2010 as companies try to attract people who are physically closer to their location. A very interesting and somewhat scary trend to watch in my opinion.

I promised a few people in the UNR social media class that I will make the stats available. So here you have it. Your turn. What trends and interesting social media or online marketing stats do you want to share?

Click Here to See the Video

In summary:

1. Decide faster. People are making decisions a lot faster than they used to. Instead of booking their vacations 6-8 months in advance they are waiting to book up to a week in advance. Vail Resorts experienced a boost in their lodging occupancy from 50% to 80% in just one week before Christmas. As a result, they decided to change the way they advertise the mountains as well. Good thinking!
2. Adapt or die. Vail Resorts realized that they need to adapt together with the consumer or face the consequences. People want to receive information faster, make decisions faster, get the deals now. Instead of committing to messages 6-8 months in advance, it’s smarter for a business to wait and see what message they want to put out there next week. It will be more relevant to your guests, more real and more in line with the state of the economy. You don’t want to leave money on the table yet you need the business.
3. Traditional media is being replaced by social and online marketing. Vail Resorts reduced their print budget by 80%. Wow! They are still planning on spending it just in different places. I hope they do because now is the time to build mind share. Be smart about your marketing, stay aggressive and continue to remind your guests about your brand. The companies that manage to do this wisely will win when the economy improves.
4. Work together as a team. By getting the message out online and in social media you can constantly change it to report conditions, tackle slow periods, get the word out about a special event you didn’t anticipate having. Get your departments to work together as a team to have one consistent message. Your social media, PR department, web department and marketing department need to work all together to produce one strong and memorable message. Smaller businesses have the advantage of being able to coordinate this faster as they don’t have that many departments to begin with.
5. The importance of the message. Brand advertising is being replaced by a shorter term, more sales oriented message. People are interested in deals and having a more retail approach is key in this economy. Incorporate your brand with the message and always have a call to action in it.

How is your business changing to the economy and the recent marketing developments? Are you adapting or getting ready to close the doors? If you were the Vail Resorts CEO what would you do?

If you liked this post and don’t want to miss any future ones, why don’t you sign up for the emails now.

Photo credit: Jeff Engerbretson

I’m speaking tomorrow at the North Lake Tahoe Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Club. I’m looking forward to hearing the key note speaker, Bob Roberts from the California Ski Industry Association as well as seeing my colleagues in the industry. I hope everyone is as excited as I am about the start of a new season. In my presentation I’d like to make three points that I’m passionate about and keep me up at night.

3 things that in my opinion can help your ski resort in today’s economy succeed. 3 things that we as marketers and business owners need to invest in, understand and encourage.

1. Invest in Customer Service. This is one sure way to generate positive word of mouth. In this tough economy our customers demand better than ever customer service. I continue to get disappointed every time I go to San Francisco and visit the retail environment there.  Invest in customer service training for your employees. It will pay off for your business in the long run. Track customer service with surveys. Award your best performing employees.  Establish benchmarks. At Diamond Peak we have a mystery guest program where I personally select a customer for the day to keep an eye out for employees going above and beyond their regular line of duty. Once they spot this special employee they hand him/her a card with $25 bucks they can use anywhere at the resort. Coming from the customer, the message is a lot stronger than coming from their supervisor. We don’t announce the program to our employees; we let word of mouth spread it every year.  This program is extremely successful. In addition, we have mandatory customer service training that is taught by our General Manager at the beginning of the season. With every ticket purchased we hand out a card asking our skiers to go online and fill out a survey. We pride ourselves on high customer service and it’s one parameter in the customer experience we feel is within our control. People like to be treated nicely. They expect it and demand it. They tell their friends about it. Don’t disappoint them. Understand the Power of One – that one individual can make or break their day and you can win or lose a customer for life.
2. Understand the power of Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing. Now is the time to embrace new technology and the new ways people are demanding information and seeking to engage with brands. 44% of the online population is engaged on social networks. Close to 20% of the adult online population are word of mouth marketing influencers and this number is expected to grow in the coming years. Facebook is the number 3 website in terms of traffic, just past Google and Yahoo and before MSN, Live.com, Amazon, eBay and Graigslist. Your business needs to have presence on social media networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, FourSquare. You need to have a blog. Start building your online community. Start practicing “permission marketing” like Seth Godin refers to it. Ask people for permission to market to them. Stop interrupting them. It’s a vicious cycle when you try to shout at people and interrupt conversations. Don’t use the traditional marketing approach in the new media – it won’t work. People will turn you off. They will stop following you and stop being your friend. The ski resort industry is in a good position to show how fun and memorable the sport is. Use new media to get the image out and tap into people’s emotions with videos, photos and more user generated content. At Diamond Peak we are actively engaging with people on social networks. We are having fun doing it while establishing trust with our customers. Once they trust us they will be more likely to come and ski at our resort too.  Join in the conversation. Friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and watch our videos on YouTube. Let’s have some fun. Skiing is about fun.
3. CEOs and Business Owners – Encourage Smart, Honest, Aggressive, Transparent, Permission Marketing. Marketers – get 5-6 smart people in a room and start brainstorming how to increase your market share, create memorable programs, cut cost and stand out. Let’s be honest about our snow reports and ski conditions. Guess what? People can and will report ski conditions for us, right from the slopes. They will post videos, Facebook updates, Twitter posts, photos and write blogs about their experience. Now is the time to be more aggressive with our marketing efforts. The Bay Area is close and yet miles away when it comes to trying to convince a family to come and ski. We are competing for attention with other industries, other brands, other ski resort destinations.  It’s easier for a family to put the kids in front of the TV and play Wii or in front of the computer than to plan a trip to Lake Tahoe. Now is the time to build mind share. When the economy improves, and it will, they will remember us and the mind share will turn into a wallet share. Diamond Peak is known as Your Tahoe Place for kids and beginners. Diamond Peak has friendly staff. Diamond Peak created a new product this year called The Holiday Season Pass. Instead of blacking out the pass during the holidays when it may be the only time people can drive up for a ski vacation, we developed a product that’s good only during the holidays – 28 days for $249. That’s less than $9/day. Unheard of, right? Different? And finally, Diamond Peak has the most unique event in the Tahoe Basin – Last Tracks. We have some great programs in place for our customers to start the word of mouth marketing. You can discover them all at diamondpeak.com and help us spread the word – tell your friends and family about them.

To help with the networking and learning from each other I started a marketing chat room on Twitter with the hashtag of #mrktchat. It runs for an hour every Thursday at 2pm  PST. I hope you can all join us and we can all learn together as we are trying to figure out the new technology and tools available to us as marketers in the travel and tourism industry.

What are your thoughts? How are you getting ready for this season and this economy? What are you doing differently? What keeps you up at night?

Today, I want to share with you some even more amazing statistics pulled again from the same website, Quantcast.com. This time, I looked at the most visited websites online. I’m surprised to see that Facebook.com is showing as Number 3, just past Google.com and Yahoo.com and ahead of MSN.com, Live.com, Microsoft.com, Amazon.com, eBay.com and even Craigslist which is probably the Number 1 website to find a job and a lot of people right now are doing just that on a daily basis. Here are the top 10 websites in terms of traffic:

There is only one point to make here – if you are not considering Facebook.com to promote your business, why aren’t you? You can get the word out about your products and services, all at the fraction of what you will spend in traditional marketing and even online marketing? There’s very little investment cost involved in having your business presence on Facebook and you will be reaching 104 million people monthly living in the US, compared to 120 million people on Yahoo and 141 million people on Google. Facebook has become a website and a marketing vehicle that you can no longer ignore for the cost that it takes to be on it. Can you say Free? Is your business on Facebook yet?

1. Listening tool: It creates online space for people to interact with your brand. They can leave comments on your posts and allow you to get feedback. Although there are better ways to listen to what people are saying about your business, your own blog provides one more channel to receive feedback.
2. SEO: A blog can help you with search engine optimization. By continuosly adding engaging and fresh content, while still incorporating your main keywords in your posts, your positioning on the search engine will improve. Google, Bing and Yahoo will rank your website higher with your blog (make sure your blog is connected to your domain) thanks to your content and it will improve your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
3. Create a vibrant online community. By providing interesting content, uploading videos and photos and writing often about topics of  interest to you, you will create loyal readers on your blog. By building trust with these people, they will be most likely to purchase from you than from a competitor business that doesn’t show interest in engaging with their customers.
4. Expert positioning: By writing a blog about the topics you are knowledgeable and expert in, you will position your business as a leader in the industry. You don’t always have to write about your business, products and services. If you represent a hotel, you can write about the surrounding areas, special events and happenings, local tips, shopping places, ways to save when you travel, and anything else related to general travel or the activities that your customers mainly engage with why staying at your  place. You can highlight your chef’s specials, contribute some specials recipes and cocktails and make people feel at home before they have even arrived. When people start looking for a place to stay,  they will consider your hotel first because of the existing relationship they already have with you.
5. Engagement & Transparency: You are not afraid to put yourself on the web and open up to people’s feedback whether that’s positive or negative. You embrace the fact that people now have a lot more control over your brand than they used to. You are open to receiving feedback, you are listening and hopefully making changes to your business based on customer feedback.

These are my 5 reasons why a business can benefit from a blog. There are many more reasons why a business blogs. What are yours? What do you think abusiness blog can do for the bottom line of an organization? What are your favorite blogs? Why?