NM Journal

1/13/2010 – Estimating the Monetary Value of Social Media

How valuable are your efforts to promote your business using social media? Are your 500 Twitter followers worth the time you spend tweeting? How about your 2,000 Facebook Fans? Can you estimate the monetary value of your social media efforts? If not, it’s not likely that your boss will value your efforts either.

Jason Falls puts it nicely in his article, “Using Search To Prove Social Media’s Value“:

CEOs understand the value of spending $1,000 on paid search if those clicks can translate to 100,000 website visitors and $10,000 worth of conversions. They don’t often nod and smile when you say, “Well, we have 40,000 Facebook Fans this month!”

Here’s a summary of the steps Jason walks through:

  1. Get a list of the keywords your site ranks high in (use a keyword research tool like SEO Book or SEM Rush)
  2. Note the cost of PPC (pay per click) ads for those keywords (this can be found in the same keyword report)
  3. Use your site’s analytics software to see how many searches for those keywords led visitors to your site
  4. Multiply the PPC cost for each keyword by the number of visitors your site received for that keyword
  5. Add up the totals to see how much money would have been spent on PPC for those keywords; this is roughly the value of your social media efforts*

When using your analytics software, go to “traffic sources,” then “search engines” to make sure you’re only looking at the search results. These are people who clicked on your site because it ranked high when they searched for those terms. The reason your site ranked high was probably from content pertaining to those terms. If the page those users landed on was a blog, congratulations—your blogging paid off!

*Note: Remember that because this value is only for your organic search results, mostly generated because of keyword-rich content (on your blog?). Twitter and Facebook direct links won’t be counted, so your value is probably much higher. If you want to see how much just your blogging affects traffic, try posting other keyword-rich content to your blog and track only those keywords for a while to see how the traffic for those terms increases.

1/20/2010 – How to Pick the Right Keywords for Your Business

Small-to-medium businesses are frequently at a disadvantage when it comes to marketing and PR. They just don’t have the resources (money or personnel) that larger companies do. However, smaller companies can have an advantage when it comes to online marketing: because their market is smaller and more focused, it’s often easier to target that market with specific messaging. Picking keywords for your company’s website is similar. Small Business Trends has a good article on how to pick the right keywords for your business: Picking Winning Keywords For Your SMB Site.

Here’s a run-down of the steps they recommend:

  • Use your brain. Think about the words and phrases you would use to search for a business like yours. Since your business is small and specific, the search terms your potential customers use will also probably be specific. If you live in a small town and are one of the only businesses who offers the types of products or services that you do, people will probably search for the name of the town along with any other search terms they use.
  • Use tools. Google AdWords and SEO Book both have free keyword research tools to help you get started, and there are paid tools out there as well. Google Suggest can also help you come up with related terms that people have already been searching for. Use these keyword tools to help you narrow your focus to a few keywords or phrases that are popular, but which competitors are not already using.
  • Use your site. If there are certain words or phrases that are already sending some traffic to your site (however small), but which you aren’t using as keywords, you might consider it.
  • Ask around. Ask friends, family, colleagues, and customers what terms they would use to search for your company, or products or services similar to what your company offers. Peek at competitors’ meta tags to see what keywords they’re using. Also remember to look at Google’s “Related Searches” section to see if anything there might also apply to your business.

1/25/2010 – 4 Ways to Market Your Business with Content

In order to maintain a consistent, ongoing marketing campaign, businesses should always be publishing new content. That content can take many different forms, and most small business don’t have the resources to do them all, so it’s important you find out which content types your target market is most likely to consume. Amber Riviere has some good ideas in her Web Worker Daily article, “4 Ways to Market Your Business with Content.”

  1. Create and maintain a high quality blog
  2. Create and maintain a high quality video blog or podcast
  3. Create and maintain a high quality newsletter
  4. Write guest posts for other blogs

You’ll notice that each of these suggestions require consistent work over time. The key to keeping your site’s content relevant and to steadily increasing your traffic (and hence, your marketing effectiveness) is to continuously update it with quality content.

2/24/2010 – Badvocacy

Weber Shandwick says in the Good Book of Badvocacy that with the coming of the Internet, people realized they had influence like never before. I disagree for the most part. I think most individuals still don’t feel like they have much influence, especially since there are so many other voices on the Internet now. Even though each person has a greater ability to make themselves heard, their individual voices can often be muddled in the masses of other voices. However, I also think badvocates have more influential voices than others. Humans have a tendency to believe negative things more than positive things, which is why we’ve heard that it takes several compliments to repair the damage of an insult, if it ever can be repaired.

This is why, even if badvocates only make up a fifth of your customers, it’s important to listen and respond to them appropriately. This is especially true considering that “on average, they tell 14 other people about [their] bad experience.” Now, not only do you have to work to improve the badvocate’s opinion of your company, you have to work at improving those 14 other people’s opinions too.

While badvocates may voice their opinions in various forms, the most common will probably be negative reviews, comments, and ratings. Even if you do manage to earn their trust and respect again, these reviews will stick around on the Internet for people to see for months or years to come. It’s important that when you respond to a badvocate, you do so in the same way that was used to post the opinion and as close to it as possible, so that when people see the negative review they will also see your quick response.

At first it was surprising to me to learn that some of the most dangerous badvocates can be your employees, but thinking about it, it makes sense. Even though I love the people I work with and the culture of the company I work at, I often talk about the bad things along with the good when I’m describing my work to someone. Job satisfaction must be built up and maintained with employees over a long period of time.

Out of all the ways of deflating badvocacy that the ebook mentions, I think being prepared is by far the most important. It’s much easier to prevent badvocacy than to repair the damage it does. However, I think the second most important thing which companies often fail to do, is to apologize when you’re wrong. Everyone hates a liar, and people will feel like you’re lying to them if you put off the blame for something onto some external factor. Don’t just apologize, though, as this only confirms people’s negative opinions about your company; do something positive to counteract the negative experience, and make it personal and worth well more than any perceived injustice that the person who was wronged may feel.

The way of dealing with badvocacy that is most innovative to me is embracing badvocates by asking them for ideas or enlisting them to help you solve problems or have a public, face-to-face discussion. Establishing an advisory council of people who don’t like your company, products, or services sounds like an unintuitive thing to do, but I agree that it will probably help your company correct the areas that it needs improvement in faster than almost anything else.