There's no ROI in Analytics

I was watching Avinash Kaushik's webinar on multi-channel analytics today and saw a question pop up regarding whether ROI can be figured out based on analytics. The marketing world and those who use marketing are increasingly obsessed with trackability, and that makes sense. Money is tight everywhere. If you spend money, you want to know it was worth it. There is no doubt that programs like Google Analytics are amazing, and with advice from experts like Kaushik, it's becoming more and more feasible to look at an ad campaign or a webinar, compare it to your website's traffic, and learn from your triumphs and/or your tribulations. It's great. It's geeky. It's even fun. But there's a big but.

Analytics is not ROI. Or is it?

I think the definition of ROI has gotten a little bit fuzzy, and I think this is an increasingly dangerous problem. Why? Well, marketers can drive traffic to your website. Marketers can tell you how many people visited your site, what pages they visited, and if you have an e-commerce site, you can learn who bought what, too. However, a marketer can NOT force people to buy your product. And that's a really really REALLY important distinction that often gets lost in the shuffle.

Now, some companies might define "ROI" as how many clicks back to their website they receive. In that case, analytics and ROI could be synonymous. However, there might well be a disconnect between sales and marketing in that scenario. Ultimately, it's not visits to a website that pays the bills, as we all know.

The other danger in tying analytics and ROI so closely together is that even though the science of analytics is getting better and better every day, it is still very difficult to pinpoint where a sale comes from unless you actually ask. Kaushik talked about this in the webinar today. If you run ads in the same publication 2 months in a row, and the first month your traffic spikes while in the second month your traffic dives, does that mean the ad lost its power in 30 days? If your sales spike six months later, can you attribute it to randomness or the fact that people held on to your ad or your e-newsletter and thought of you when the need arose?

Analytics Sets the Table. ROI Cooks the Meal.

I like to think of analytics as if it were a butler making sure that everything is just so before a big dinner. Is your traffic strong? Is it going to the places you want it to go to? What's your bounce rate? ROI is the meal. It's the show. And while a person could analyze a cost per click for an ad campaign or an e-newsletter, ROI is not so easy. Analytics is important because it shows whether you are giving yourself a chance to get your Return on Investment. ROI is what comes after those clicks turn into customers.

ROI is just going to become more mysterious

We thought it was hard to pinpoint ROI when we were dealing with print programs, website development, and trade shows. Guess what's going to be even harder? Calculating ROI for a Social Media campaign. Here are just some of the questions involved.

1. Is my investment time? Whose time? What is that time worth? Is that time worth the same when responding to a tweet or updating a Facebook status?

2. Is my investment the salary of my brand new, shiny Social Media manager? If so, how can I determine if that person is performing well? Will it be based on likes, follows, retweets?

3. If a person buys from your company after seeing a YouTube video you had posted a year before, do you calculate that as ROI for the cost of developing that video, or is just bonus points for the new year?

Analytics will still work. You'll be able to see that person who clicked to your site from Facebook. You'll be able to track the success of your videos, too. But that ROI is just a different animal. It's wild and crazy. We need to cage it up, identify it, agree on that identification, and make it our friend. Because whether you're a marketer or VP of sales and marketing at your company, you're going to get asked to prove the success of a campaign based on the ROI. Explaining that it's a wiggly worm just isn't going to cut it. We can all agree on that.

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The Anti-Case Study

I've noticed something about business folk. We are a boastful bunch. We are all about case studies, testimonials, retweets, recommendations, comments, "likes," and providing the proof that one can find in the pudding of our success.

I'm not knocking this facet of the business world. Business is competitive. You need to prove you do stuff better. I get that. However, I would also toss out there that I tend to sort of skim-read testimonials and case studies. Okay, you did this, you made money, now you're telling me about it. I am very happy for you, I am humbled, nay blinded by your success and intellect. Ho-hum.

Where are the humans?

As much as a person can learn from someone else's success, I find that I tend to remember bloopers a little bit better. I mean, when you watch a television show, for example, you take for granted that everything is going to run smoothly, no one is going to forget their lines. That particular part of the project doesn't stick out. Of course it's great. These are professionals. But when you see a gag reel or bloopers? Man, that stuff sticks with me forever. It shows that the actors are human, that they are maybe of this planet. I think marketing could benefit from the same thing.

Now, there is an inherent risk in this, which is that you don't want to look dumb. But from my perspective, the world is pretty chock-full of experts who seemingly attained rock star status almost accidentally. I would love to hear about the mistakes that they learned from along the way. The bloopers.

Mistakes have legs

One of the things we preach to our clients is that case studies and testimonials have legs. You can use video testimonials as a multi-media dimension to your website or to your Social Media campaign. Testimonials are tremendous fodder for ads, e-blasts, and just about everything else. But I'm going to toss out there the idea that mistakes, or anti-case studies, could have legs, too. How? Why?

1. Mistakes are things people can easily relate to. They might be in the middle of the same exact mess you already experienced. If you can help them feel like they are not alone in their blunder AND that there is a way out, you will very likely earn their eternal admiration.

2. Admitting you can and do make mistakes makes you more credible, at least to me. I can't really relate to these experts who talk about the fact that they fell out of bed and ended up with 10,000,000 Twitter followers. But if you tell me that you started a Twitter account, had 17 followers for 5 months and then started growing your base...that I'm interested in. I want to know how you did that.

3. People are in to feeling like they are the smartest people in the world, and it's not hard to make yourself feel that way. With sites like Wikipedia and heck, with the fact that we can get people to not only LIKE us but to FOLLOW us, I think all of us are getting a bit of an ego problem. I think the idea of the case study may get overshadowed at some point by the fact that people don't necessarily want to know why what you did was great. They want to know either how to fix the one problem they can't fix or how you can help them.

Psst...the anti-case study can actually be a case study

Okay, so here's the neat part about this concept of the anti-case study. You can actually redeem yourself and create a believable, credible, realistic, easy to understand case study. Imagine, for example, if BP not only stops the oil gushing into our treasured wetlands but also manages, some centuries down the road, to redeem themselves. Wouldn't you want to know how they did that? And if they came out strong with how-to lessons on how to prevent another disaster like this, that PR would practically write itself. Become environmentalists, BP. Save the planet, save yourselves.

Tell me what you did wrong. Tell me how you fixed it. Let me use you as an example of how someone can get into a bind but then climb right out. It's a lot more interesting than retweeting a post or 5 from Mr. or Mrs. DoNoWrong.

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does efficient = good?

I "attended" a very very interesting webinar today. Jason Baer was the host, and it was about how to integrate "Social and email." There was a lot of good information in there, and I came away from the event feeling like I had learned a lot and that I had spent my time well.

A few hours have passed though, and one thing is kind of bothering me.

In the beginning of the webinar, Baer talks about an experience he had with the Yellow Pages. He was looking for a place that could fix his eye glasses, but when he found the listing for glasses - eye, he was directed to a list of "see also" ideas. This did not accomplish his goal. From there, the webinar segued into talking about a company's "taxonomy" and how to integrate those keywords into everything you do.

Not always, but sometimes, we are looking for information and we are not in a hurry. We are kind of open to seeing what's floating around out there. In fact, we are hoping that our exploration takes us to a really good place that we hadn't expected. And it is for these scenarios, rare though they may be, that I am pondering the following question. Does efficiency always mean good?

Maybe it's the librarian in me

I earned a Master's in Library and Information Science back in 2001, just as the online world was really beginning to explode as a source of information. There were still card catalogs at my local library and at the university library, so my education was planted squarely in between traditional and new types of research. The thing that I always thought was neat about research is that it carries you to all kinds of places if you're patient enough. Sites like Amazon, StumbeUpon, Pandora, and others cater to this adventurous desire in people to see what is related to what they know they like. Maybe people view such sites as fun. Maybe when a person is searching for your company, they don't want to have fun. They're at work or they're looking for something very specific, like a person who can fix some eye glasses.

Let me ask you a question, though. Let's say, just hypothetically, that someone started out looking for a person who could repair eye glasses. You're a company who makes those little self-help eye glass repair kits. What if that person, in skimming through the first page of Google results, sees your company's listing and decides, "Hey, I think I'll try that!" That person didn't start out by searching for a repair kit, but with some patience on his or her end and with some good SEO work for your part, it could well be a match made in heaven. Now the case is harder to argue for a more static medium like the Yellow Pages, it's true, but then again, if there was a company listed under "glasses-eye" that sold repair kits, it would be the same end result.

It all depends on what optimization means

I worry sometimes that we are becoming very 2-dimensional as far as information goes. Our thoughts are at maximum thinned out to 420 characters for Facebook. Texts and Twitter offer us less leeway. Fast sound bytes for a fast-moving society. In this kind of environment, it's easy to approach SEO the way experts like Baer recommend. Look at your mission statement. Look at how your prospects talk about you. Look at how your customers talk about you. Use those words. A lot. In a lot of different ways.

But what if society doesn't stay so linear? What if "decision engines" like Bing end up shocking the world by encouraging people to think in new ways? What if a person looking for a new bathtub ends up finding a company that can remodel the entire bathroom?

For search engines, for now, keywords are still key. But if Social Media continues to dominate the marketing world, that is going to change, I believe. Conversational, word-of-mouth marketing is going to rule the roost, and people do not talk in a linear fashion. You will not see an exchange like this, for example.

Person 1: Gosh, I really wish I could find a good contractor. I need to work on my bathroom.

Person 2: I just noticed that the following companies' websites included the words "contractor" and "bathroom." Perhaps you could try those.

No, people talk about experiences. They joke, they whine, they boast, they complain, they get angry, they get excited. Do your keywords account for a conversation that leads to your doorstep? If you're an eye glass company, are you using words like "hipster" or "emo" or "Buddy Holly?" It might seem silly, but these are the kinds of non-linear, non-sensical words that are sharing space with your keywords. And that's happening now.

So what are we going to do about it?

Well, I don't have an answer for that one. As is so often the case when discussing the current marketing revolution, the answer would have to be revolutionary. But I have done enough research to realize that people are already searching based on Twitter keywords or Facebook status updates. I know that a search for an image of candy canes on Google can pull up some truly bizarre and unrelated results. I know that a video search for manufacturing keywords on YouTube can pull up videos by heavy metal bands. I think that part of the new taxonomy, to use Baer's terminology, is going to have to be words that you see come up again and again in the same context as your prized keywords. "Classy" along with bathroom. "Fashion" along with eye glasses. There isn't a way to buy these words on sites like Facebook and Twitter. You have to claim them through association. You have to build them into your branding and integrate them into your interwoven marketing efforts. And if you don't, someone else will, and it could very well be a customer or a competitor.

Maybe "surgeon" has nothing to do with wanting to get your glasses fixed. Maybe we are right to try to streamline how people can find us. But I think the world is going a different way. It's the long tail, it's the winding path. It might not be as easy to find exactly what we set out to find in the future, but it will be easier to find exactly what we need. Will you be there for your customers?

Image by Jenny Z. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ohinsanity

The evil twin dilemma

I was looking through Twitter posts this morning, as I am wont to do, and I saw a post from an account labeled BPGlobal. The post was something along the lines of, "Just spilled salad dressing in my lap. Not sure how to clean it up."

I was pretty much stopped in my tracks. And I guess that's the point.

Later today, as serendipity would have it, I saw a post by Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone regarding that exact account (though sadly not that exact post. You can't win 'em all).

In fact, the BPGlobal account is a satire of a thing. All of the posts are sardonic.

A lot of weird things can happen in the world of Social Media. I remember reading about a woman who posted as an Exxon customer service representative for about a year till someone realized she had no real affiliation with the company. That was a beneficial account. In the case of BP, this is an evil twin on the loose.

The question Barone asks is the question I would ask too. Why isn't BP doing anything about this, or why didn't they act on it sooner? And that raises a debate. What do you do when a phantom account springs up on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere else?

Barone's suggestion to BP is to link up to the phantom account, which actually is run by people selling t-shirts to raise money for the clean-up. That would be a great way to help clean up the company's image in addition to creating plain ole good PR.


Be careful not to slap fans in the face

Sometimes, the risk in Social Media is the exact opposite of what BP is experiencing now, and more along the lines of what Exxon experienced with their excellent "customer service representative." Sometimes, especially on Facebook, where I suppose fan pages can still be created at least as of now, people create pages to support a specific brand or company. One of the most famous examples of this is the page that 2 fans created for Coke. Now, some companies approach these fan pages and say, "Hey, I need you guys to shut this down. We're going to create our own corporate page now." And you can't really argue with that. You want to be able to tie in your page to what's going on across your brand and marketing campaign. However, if you ask 2 "fans" to cease and desist, you are not only running the risk of upsetting them, but you could also upset all of the people they had already driven to the fan page.

In the case of Coke, the company did an excellent job of incorporating what the 2 fans had done while making it clear that theirs was not an "official" page. This likely increased Coke's "street cred" a great deal, and it kept an active fan page active.

The take-away

Whether they're out there to build you up or tear you down, there may be twin Social Media accounts out there. Part of the research that needs to happen when preparing to launch a Social Media campaign is determining on a corporate scale how to deal with either scenario. It's a new kind of marketing and brand diplomacy. Can you make it work for you? Or will that bearded evil twin undo all of the good that you have done?

So many flip-flops I feel like I'm at the beach

A few weeks ago, during and directly following the 2010 F8 conference, Facebook announced some pretty astounding changes that created a rush of excitement across the internet. Some of that excitement was happy and positive and some of it, like that coming from this particular Blog URL, was a bit on the angry side of excited. Maybe even apoplectic, to reference Hawthorne. I, among others, was not pleased as punch about my friends being able to share my cute little button nose with anyone who might wander upon the wonder of Pandora (.com, not the world of Avatar). More than that, I was disappointed that people on Facebook, like random family members and people I've been friends with since I was in nursery school, were not alerted about all of the privacy changes going on.

There were a lot of open letters, diagrams on how Facebook privacy has shifted, blogs telling people like me to kind of suck it up, and more. From Mark Zuckerberg and the rules of Facebook, there was mostly silence.

Then last weekend, the news hit that only pages with 10,000 or more fans (likers?) would be able to have customized pages. The outrage that poured out from the realms of business and developers was too much to bear. Facebook flip-flopped. "Oops...that was a bad idea. We might do it again, but not right now, k?"

I thought to myself at the time that if Facebook was so willing to "reconsider" or pull the plug on this action, why do it in the first place?

Now, today, Zuckerberg is finally making the rounds, announcing that Facebook is working on ways to make sure people have granular control in a bit more of a simple, less rocket science kind of way.

It might be that I'm just cranky because I stayed up too late watching Lost, but this kind of frustrates me. I'll be honest.

Stick to your guns

It's true that I've done a lot of complaining about Facebook lately, but I have to say that I kind of gave those folks a grudging respect. Showing people who visit CNN.com my thumbs up on a story is not a high priority for me, nor is sharing my friends' information. But Facebook thought that this was the battlefield of the next revolution, and they seemed to be standing their ground even in the face of a fair amount of pressure.

But now, weeks later, the sand castle is being taken out to sea. The wall is being knocked down. And other metaphors. What happened to changing the way the world uses the internet? What happened to just plain changing the world?

That Facebook launches ideas without careful consideration and then reneges on anything that seems particularly itchy is not the best business practice to follow. Now, I realize that Mark Zuckerberg does not really need any of my advice right now. I can appreciate that I am just one of 400,000,000 people suckling at the nutritious well of friendship and content that is Facebook. All of that aside, I would respect Facebook more if instead of simply flip-flopping they took the time to ease concerns but say, "No, this is our course. We really believe this is the right way to go. How can we make this work for you?" Barring that, responding more swiftly might make the flip-flopping seem more reactive rather than a begrudging, late reaction to a lot of angry customers.

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Integrated Thinking

I was thinking about the advice that a lot of marketing experts give regarding one of the big questions in Social Media world. "How do I generate content?"

I have always been inclined to write about things, for as long as I can remember. I write about things and then wonder if anyone will read it or what those readers might think about it.

For other people who are not inclined to write, however, generating content for all of this Social Media "stuff" can be extremely intimidating. The questions start coming, creating something akin to a mental Great Wall of China. "How can I do this? "Do I need to hire someone to do this?" "Who can come up with all of that content and also make it useful?"

As Shakespeare might say, "Yep, that's the question."

I have a tidbit of advice that helps me. It's not about integrated marketing. I call it integrated thinking. In general, integrated thinking follows the same pathways as integrated marketing, but before fingers touch keyboard, the pathways must be built and lined in your brain, in how you think.

I see and I respond

One effective way to integrate your thinking is to look at once source and use that as an inspiration to create content elsewhere. Blog expert Denise Wakeman notes, as do other experts, that sometimes a blog post can come from a question you receive from a customer. You are put on the spot having to generate content for that one person, although you might not think of that as content while in the process. The next time you receive a question from a customer, ask him or her for permission to talk about that topic in depth. If you think it's a really important issue and if it is possible without too much hassle, videotape an interview with that customer and your response. Moreover, as you are answering your customer's question, ask him or her to keep you posted on how your answer affected or changed their results. Not only will this give your content legs, but it will also pave the way for a future testimonial or case study. But all of this needs to occur in your head first. The actions will follow.

Another way to integrate your thinking in order to generate content is to simply review what the hot topics are in places you might be visiting anyway. Do you visit a blog that often makes you think afterwards? Instead of just absorbing those thoughts into the ether surrounding your desk, write those thoughts down. If you can link or mention that person's blog, you are also potentially building a relationship that will create more back-and-forth exchanges in the future.

It's about efficiency

It might seem like doing all of this thinking on the front end would or could get really darned time consuming. For busy business people, this is a real negative. However, integrated thinking can actually save time in several different ways. Take the following scenario as an example.

Your company has decided to make a real concerted effort to build the most comprehensive and updated website the company has ever had. This requires taking careful looks at your product lines, your past marketing efforts, consideration of keywords. A lot of effort!

Once the website is done, you want to of course generate buzz about it. You want to drive traffic to it. So, what you might find yourself doing is creating a campaign where each channel is being built from the ground up, just like your site was. What are my keywords for LinkedIn or Facebook again? What main points do I want to incorporate into my lit pieces? What points do I want to get across to my customers as I encourage them to visit my site?

Why start from the ground up? 

With integrated thinking, working on the website will by definition create content that could last your company for 18 months beyond the launch of the new site. How is that possible?

Record your objectives as you plan out your site. Record the site map and the conversations that occur. What facets of the site are you building because you think it will make your customers' lives easier? Keep these bullet points saved. When it comes time to write a press release or any other marketing effort aimed at driving traffic, just pull out those bullet points and tell your customers, "This is what we did for you."

As you determine your company's keywords, do a quick search on Social Media sites you think you might want to use in the future. Are those words coming up? Do your competitors show up when you search for those words? Begin the research while your site is still under construction so that when the site launches, so too can your Social Media campaign.

As you generate content for your products, keep those key copy points. Make sure that those same keywords and major selling points turn up in future catalogs, brochures, sell sheets, and more.

When you approach everything you do with a mind to integrating those actions into other parts of your marketing efforts, the actual implementation becomes far less challenging and far less time-consuming. A blog with 50 posts ready to go should practically write itself when launching a site or returning from a big sales meeting. You just need to train your mind to think ahead and broadly. You need to think integrated and you will be integrated. It starts with the brain and flows out from there.

Image by Artem Chernyshevych. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/artM

Can Social Media Really Have a Meltdown?

I saw an article this week raising the question about what kind of crisis could bring Social Media in general or a Social Networking site in particular to its knees. It's an interesting question, but my "blink" answer was that I'm not sure Social Media can really have a crisis at this point.

What makes Social Media so indestructible? I think it's the people who use it. Consider recent events that
have occurred.
     • The big Facebook Open Graph thing
     • The Facebook announcement that only pages with 10,000 or more fans would be able to create a
     customized landing page (they later reneged on this)
     • Credit and debit card numbers from Blippy published to Google

And the list goes on.

It would seem like any one of these events would be enough to give people pause, and for some people, it has been. But the sheer numbers involved when talking about Social Media, and the nature of a lot of the folks using Social Media, make me feel like Social Media may well nigh be indestructible.

To illustrate this point, a short time ago one of my contacts on Facebook made a post indicating that by signing up for an external site account, you could get a Facebook credit for one of the games. To me, this indicates that you would have to enter a credit card number somewhere in there. Given that exposing my profile picture makes me weak in the knees, doing something like this fills me with a dread that I can't verbalize. But clearly, when considering the entire Social Media universe, I am in the minority.

If people are not turned off by losing the ability to control what information gets published, if people are not frightened off by spammy posts and worms and the publication of credit card numbers and ID theft and telling the universe the names of their children along with where those children may or may not be at any given point, I can't really image what could happen that would make people pause.

It kind of reminds me of one of the early scenes from the movie Dumb and Dumber. The bad guys want to trash the apartment that Lloyd and Harry live in. The apartment is already disgusting, so the bad guys reflect on whether further trashing the apartment would really send a message. I kind of feel like that when it comes to Social Media. There are already plenty of risks. What would send a negative message at this point? Interested in your thoughts!

Image by Mac Pale. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/pale