Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Given the state of the industry and how the social media movement has disrupted traditional marketing tactics, one of the first things businesses ask themselves when planning to adopt social media is ‘what’s my ROI?’.

There are all sorts of people trying to answer this question and have come up with all sorts of ways to do it, there isn’t one framework yet and it’s still mostly trial and error but in the above presentation Olivier Branchard does a great job peeling the onion on where to start measuring social media.

And accompanied how to measure social media ROI can be found on Mashable.

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One question we get asked often is: how do I get my PageRank higher? and provide tactics and examples of how we’ve achieved a higher PageRank for a client. I always cringe when I hear this because we don’t set out with the goal of going from PageRank 2 to 6. And if the prospect still doesn’t get me I’ll do my best to direct him to a link building company who’s pure focus is that.

Don’t get me wrong, PageRank is important…as a variable to consider in the grand scheme of things. Not a goal!

And to prove my point, last week Google dropped PageRank from Webmaster Tools because they keep telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much” and they think it’s silly that they do.

What they’re saying isn’t that PageRank has become irrelevant, it’s just not a goal businesses should strive for. What we should strive for instead is to make sure we create content that people ‘want’ to share.

Social media is becoming more important than search and in the not so distant future we won’t use search to find products or services, instead they will find us through our peers.

If you’re a business who drinks the PageRank kool-aid, adopt the behavior of doing things that are interesting for your customers, make it easy for them to share it and they will help you connect with interested prospects.

What do you think? Does this sound too good to be true?

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Steffan Antonas brought up a great Twitter topic today…Focus on providing value.

Value and social media go hand in hand, as a society we’ve never had it easier to be able to influence a community. Tools like Facebook and Twitter provide us with a one-to-many connection but the very things that make us human such as building relationships are put in second place in favor of this new found capability of broadcasting!

Guy Kawasaki says that whoever doesn’t care about his number of followers is lying, I don’t completely agree with this but ok that’s how most people work. As recent reports state, Twitter is a self-promoters paradise. 80% of our followers will end up being self-promoters!

Do all of these followers really care about you? Not really sure. Michael Jackson has millions of fans around the world and I bet you each and every one of them cares!

Of course we want to get traffic from our followers, but do you know what the #FF (follow friday) means? It means someone is recommending you because you’re useful, not because you’re self-promoting your 140 characters off!

Why not focus on getting a whole bunch of times on people’s #FF list and the upcoming Twitter lists? That’s a sing of influence!

I find it way more important to post useful stuff and promote others, we can be retweeted and added to #FF and that’s a signal of influence. If some of those followers end up clicking-through to our website to see what we’re all about and like it, then we’ve done our job. That means they’re listening and paying attention.

To take a page from Steffan’s post: If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, how many of your followers would follow you elsewhere? Or to put it more bluntly, if you were to disappear tomorrow who would care?

Here’s to some happy listening!

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You have to be impressed by Ford Motor Company. They’ve turned around a BIG ship and made into one of the most ‘social’ companies out there by being committed to being accessible, authentic and transparent on social media.

One thing I’m always asked about is the ROI on social media. To answer this you first need to understand what the nature of these tools is, they’re not sales tools. They’re amplifications tools. They enable us to connect with customers on their terms in an authentic way while also spreading our ideas through them.

It’s how involved you get that counts.

Ford’s leaders understand that ROI in social media means ‘Return on involvement’ and this fundamental understanding has enabled Ford to break from the pack, it’s really impressive.

For your viewing pleasure, Scott Monty of Ford highlights some of these points in his presentation on how Ford has transformed into a social company.

Zero to 60: Ford’s Social Media Story, by Scott Monty; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal on Vimeo.

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What do you do to deal with bad feedback on Twitter? Do you quit?

You don’t!

Yesterday I got an email from one of our clients, The Jumpitz. Saying they wanted to stop tweeting because some of their followers said that they were tweeting way too much and that most of the tweets were irrelevant to them.

Ouch!

Ironically we had just advised them to create a Twitter account for each of their cast members so they could personally engage with their fans on Twitter and one of the cast members, Jake, was told by one of the fans about the issue.

As we diagnosed the problem we found the Alltop Kids feed pushing content to their Twitter account. We immediately shut if off and deleted all the irrelevant stuff that was posted to twitter.

Back to normal right? Wrong!

I personally suggested they not cut off Twitter communications as this would only make things worse because it would be the equivalent of disappearing off the internet. Engaging with your ecosystem is imperative right now.

You need to be actively participating in your community and sometimes there will be some problems, especially when you’re testing different approaches.

All in all they didn’t shut down the account but there are some lessons to be learned for sure.

Lessons learned

• Don’t put a random feed behind your Twitter account. It’ll be a firehouse of content you can’t control!
• Don’t Tweet about just anything. Ask yourself: Does it add value? Is it interesting to them?
• Don’t ignore the feedback. Ignoring it will only make it worse. Apologize and say what happened. Be transparent and genuine, this means your just as human as everyone else. Adjust and do things right.

In what other ways do you deal with bad feedback?

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