Highlights from the collection broken down by categories are:

Inbound Marketing

• In 2011, 61% of marketers invested more in earned media compared to 58% in paid digital media and only 14% in paid traditional media
• B2B marketers are shifting their budgets towards inbound marketing with 69% investing in social media
• More than half of marketers increased their inbound marketing budgets in 2011
• The average budget spent on company blogs and social media has nearly doubled in the past 2 years
• Inbound marketing is a lot more cost effective than traditional outbound marketing with a cost per lead  62% less on inbound than outbound lead

Search engines and SEO

• Google is the new yellow pages. 20% of the monthly Google searches are for local businesses
• 75% of users never scroll past the first page! If you are not on first page of Google for your keywords, you need to improve your SEO

• 2/3 of Internet users regularly use social network
• The world and business is becoming more and more social
• Social media conversations actually influence purchases
• More than 1/2 of small business owners say social media sites play an important role in active sales

• 2/3 of marketers say their blog is critical or important to their business
• Blog articles influence purchase decisions
• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors
• B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not and B2B companies generate 67% more leads

• Facebook has become the preferred method for sharing content second only to email
• 51% of B2B marketers agree that Facebook is an effective marketing tool
• Both B2C and B2B acquire customers on Facebook

• More than 1/2 of active Twitter users follow brands and companies on social networks
• 79% of US Twitter users are more likely to recommend brands they follow
• B2C companies with over 100 followers have 146% more leads/month than those with less than 100

To see the charts and graphs of these and many more stats as collected by Hubspot, check out the PDF document below. Enjoy!

Photo credit: Flickr. Sean MacEntee

2012 is the year that you need to create a social media strategy for your business if you don’t have one yet. Just make this your goal and I promise you it will pay off.

Radian6 report recently released states: “Strategic users are almost three times more likely to execute activities for engaging prospects than informal users (53% vs. 19%)” — and they were likely to see increased revenues.”

A few critical items to include in your social media strategy are:

1. Company Goals and Objectives – Why are you on social media and how does it align with your business goals. You can’t look at social media alone. You need to consider how it complements your existing marketing efforts and how it contributes to your overall business objectives. Starting off with your goals is the best way to make sure you are actually getting involved on social media in the right places and for the right reasons. Measuring your success down the road will also depend on the type of goals you are setting up for your company.
2. Listening – what are people saying about you, your brand, your competitors and your industry. Is it positive or negative. What can you learn from this information and how can you use it to improve your business, your marketing and your social media efforts. An absolutely critical part to every social media effort, listening is what will make you successful on social media. I see way too many companies skipping over this part and not spending enough time and resources to actively listen. Yes, it takes time but thankfully there are plenty of free and paid software options to streamline this process for you.
3. Content Strategy – a very important part to your overall social strategy is the content that you are going to send out to your community. Identify who is it that you are speaking to, what interest them, what makes them share your content, how often they would like to receive it and in what form – video, podcast, text, photos. Create an editorial calendar with your topics and leave some space for breaking news and stories that will come up. Think of the Call to Action you want to include with each piece of content and identify how your content relates to your business objectives.
4. Engagement Strategy – now that you have a clear picture of the type of content you are going to create, think of how you are going to distribute it on the social web. What are your internal or external resources for engagement? How much time can you dedicate daily/weekly to engage and be present? If you don’t have sufficient internal resources what can you outsource to a qualified person or an agency. I don’t recommend outsourcing everything you do as you lose your voice and your authenticity but done properly you can outsource certain tasks.
5. Tactical Strategy – only after you have considered all of these steps, you can dig deeper into the tactical area of your social media. What platforms are best to use to reach your customers. Obviously, we have the BIG FOUR: Facebook, YouTube, LInkedIn and blogging but there are niche social networks that may be more applicable to your business. For example, Pinterest is driving more traffic than Facebook to retailers. So even if Facebook has a huge population base, a social network like Pinterest may be your winner for increasing sales. Having a centralized social media hub from where you can distribute your content will help tremendously with saving time. A good social media platform will also help with your engagement and measurements. We work with a few and can make a specific recommendation for your business if you need assistance in this area.
6. Measurements and Benchmarks – a big conversation topic these days is the return on investment from your social media marketing. Although, there are no industry established measurements yet, there are so many ways to measure your efforts that unless you link them to your objectives (see 1) you will get flooded with data. Starting with your reach (fans and followers), engagement rate, leads, sales, share of voice and customer service just to mention a few, there are indeed ways to measure your efforts. If you are not sure where to start, give us a call and don’t be too alarmed. Only 13% of marketers today are saying that they are very effective at measuring their social media marketing.

7.  Review and Adjustments - a very important part of every social media strategy is the periodic review and adjustment. Once a month, take a look at what’s really going on, compare it to your plan and make the necessary adjustments to improve your social media effort. Drop the things that are not working and do more of the stuff that’s working. Only after applying your strategy in real life you will know what’s really sticking with your audience and what makes them engage with your brand.

If you need help with your social media strategy, give us a call. We’ll be glad to help out. And if you need more ideas for your social media plan, take a look at Radian6 30 ideas for your 2012 social media plan. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting nuggets of information that you can apply to your business today. Your turn – do you currently have a social media strategy and if not are you planning on creating one soon? Let us know in the comments below.

Businesses are starting to realize that social media goes deeper than getting a Facebook page up, linking it to your Twitter profile (more on this in another post) and telling the intern to update Facebook every day.

Businesses that are successful with their social media marketing are the ones that have prepared a plan that includes monitoring, content and measurements.

In November, WildFire in cooperation with Column Five executed an ROI social media survey with over 700 marketers from around the world.

Some important key facts:

• 97% of the surveyed marketers believe that social media marketing benefits their business;
• 75% intend to increase media spending this year;
• EVERYONE wants to grow their fan base.

The interesting part is, that there’s currently no standardized method how to measure ROI of social media success. For all the details, have a look.

Source: WildFire

How about you? What do you currently measure with your social media marketing?

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.

1. Social media marketing requires measurements. Social media continues to evolve, dominate time and demand budget increases. Although many marketers are still not sure of how to measure their social media marketing efforts, they continue to put more time and money into growing their online community. In 2012, marketers will demand more accurate measurements for social media marketing efforts and hope to start proving return on investment from spending time and energy on places like Facebook and Twitter. Rightly so, a marketer’s job is to measure how their activities move the needle and without proof of why this works, social media quickly turns into a waste of time. How are marketers currently measuring their social media marketing? This recent survey from eMarketer shows that fans and followers or size of network is still the number one measurement with 60% of marketers depending on fans and followers to prove their success.  Personally, I’m a lot more interested in the qualified leads from social media, time spent interacting with the brand and the potential increase in sales attributed to social media.

The Econsultancy report “The State of Social Media 2011” noted that 41% of marketers surveyed had no return on investment figure for any of the money they had spent on social channels as of October 2011. This seems to me incredibly high for the time investment it takes to commit to social media. Start measuring your social media marketing efforts today and if you are not sure what or how to measure them, please, give us a call so we can help.

2. Mobile will continue to grow as smart phones are becoming more popular, apps are becoming more available and marketers are realizing that websites need to be mobile friendly for smartphones and tablets. The statistics are staggering when it comes to mobile marketing. A snapshot of important statistics from 2011 from Mobile Marketer shows the incredible rise in mobile and a trend that will continue to go up:

I truly enjoyed the presentations I saw, starting with Troy Thompson from Travel2.0 setting the stage for the day, Mike Henderson from Arborglyph talking about destination marketing videos, Rob Gadtke from KPS3 n mapping media and technology to the buying process and Eric Bengston on Developing an Interactive Strategy.

Below you will find my presentation on how to engage with your fans on Facebook and create a culture and vibrant online community with lots of examples from local and national properties doing it right. I covered custom landing pages, affordable apps, best business practices and measurements. In addition to my presentation, feel free to use my handout on 10 Facebook tips to improve engagement. Some of these tips you can implement today in your Facebook marketing.

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

Photo credit: PeterSpain.com

This is one of two posts on how small businesses can use social media to their advantage. I got particularly interested in paddleboarding and decided to track the entire process of how social media is affecting the bottom line of a small business.

Adrift Tahoe is located in Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe, CA and they offer rentals, sales, fun special events and merchandise. It’s all about paddleboarding and surfing with very friendly staff.

My interest in paddleboarding started with a Facebook post by a friend – sharing her excitement about this addictive and fun sport. I decided to check it out for myself. It is a great sport, an excellent full body work out and a phenomenal way to spend summer time on the water in Tahoe.

I offered to create a short video about the shop and the sport and post it on YouTube. See it below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So far, I know that I have hooked a few friends and family members on the sport. They are interested in getting more involved, would like to purchase paddleboards and continue to spread their passion about paddleboarding in Lake Tahoe.

The second blog post will tell you how a Facebook update and a You Tube video delivered real dollars for this business. Interested? Stay tuned. Whether you are a small business or a big one, are you able to identify dollars from your social media efforts?

Have you tried paddleboarding yet?

Photo credit: Stephen Oachs

How do you measure social media? There are many ways to measure your efforts. How much time do you have?

There are free and paid ways to measure your social media marketing.

Here’s a good post on the topic from OptimizeThis who lists some valuable tools. What do you think? How do you measure your social media efforts?

Have you decided to cut on efforts in other areas? For example, I pulled out of trade shows. And you? Where are you finding the extra time?

Are 5 lines blogs the next step to our attention problem?