Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Six Simple Ways to Measure Owned, Earned and Paid Social Media ROI

There’s a popular misconception that it’s difficult to use targeted metrics to measure your social media ROI. Not true.

Nor is social media only good for measuring an increase in brand awareness, although that’s definitely a measurement gauge.

The fact is, social media can offer some of the best metrics for measuring your ROI. All you need to do is set your success guides?what you want to achieve and how long you want to spend achieving it?then measure your results against that.

Here are six simple metrics for the main networks ?to measure your social media ROI – financial and brand – across earned, owned and paid media.

Blogger Outreach

A key component of many (if not most) social media campaigns,?blogger outreach programs?can offer some of the best mileage and results of any marketing tactic. Measuring your success isn?t too difficult, either. All you have to do is determine the answers to the following questions:

How many bloggers wrote about you?
How many comments did these posts receive?
How many social shares did the post get?
What was your traffic pre- and post-outreach?
How much product did you have to provide for bloggers versus how many sales you received?

Twitter

One of the stalwarts for any product launch, service or business, Twitter not only offers instant eyeballs but great returns as well. Again, measuring your impact is relatively simple:

What was your?retweet?value (cost of manpower/resources versus follower who takes action)?
How often was your?hashtag?used?
How many times was your?vanity URL?used?
How many new (genuine) followers did you get while your promotion was on?
If you used something like?Sponsored Tweets, what was the cost versus the click-through and conversion?

Facebook

Although it has its critics (including me), Facebook offers some great built-in tools as well as demographic options to help gauge a campaign:

How many new worthwhile fans did you make versus how many you targeted?
How many times was your promotion message liked/acted on?
If you built a Facebook application, how many times was it installed or shared?
Were you successful in reaching your target demographic? (Facebook Insights?can help you here)?
How much did you spend on a Facebook ad, and how did click-throughs and new sales/customers compare?

Google+

While brand pages are still being judged on their effectiveness on Google+, and in-line Google Ads are complementing Google+ content, there are ways to measure your current activity there:

Has your profile on search, and resulting traffic to your site, been raised because of your use of Google+?
How many Circles have you been added to?
How many Plus Ones are your comments and discussions receiving?
How active is your community?
How many?Ripples?are your discussions creating?
How many attendees are taking part in your?Hangouts?

YouTube and Other Video Sites

More than just a fun place to see kids hurt themselves on bikes, YouTube is a key tool in any marketing campaign now?just ask the companies that?used it to such effect?during this year?s Super Bowl.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g9wXBkdWEg[/youtube]

Here are the questions you should be asking:

How many views did you get?
How many Likes/Upvotes and Favorites did you receive?
How many downloads did you get (on video sites that allow downloads)?
How many embeds has your video seen elsewhere on the Web?
How many subscribers did your channel attract?
If your video had a call to action with a vanity URL, how many times did people click through?
How many social shares did you get across networks your target demographic use?

Mobile

As marketing evolves, the different ways to reach an audience combine to create new outlets. Mobile marketing is the perfect complement to social marketing, and measurement can easily be achieved:

Did you use a?push SMS system?to drive traffic to a mobile-friendly site? If so, how many views did that account for?
Did you use?QR codes, and if so, how many times were they used?
How many downloads did your mobile app receive?
How many check-ins were used on?Gowalla?and?Foursquare?
What was the most popular operating system? (This can tell you a lot about your audience?s demographic and buying options.)

These six metrics offer just some of the immediate ways you can measure how successfully your social media goals were met. There are more still, including monitoring tools and more defined analytics. Which ones you use will? depend on the goals you’ve set and how you define success.

No matter how you collect the information you need, it all comes down to comparing man hours and financial outlay to your return to see how successful you were.

It’s important to remember that a lot of marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy?timing and a welcoming audience are key.

But the one thing you can control is measurement, and with social media and mobile marketing, measuring the metrics has never been easier.

So what’s the excuse?

Remember When We Just Hit Publish?

Remember the good old days of blogging? Come up with something to say, write it down, hit Publish, and onto the next piece whenever that came to mind.

Now we have to worry about content authority, author rank, Hummingbird, content overkill, content optimization, etc, etc.

It seems we spend so much time worrying on the presentation, we lose track of the real reason we blog -?love.

Love for the content; love for the experience; love for the audience; love for the?reason to publish.

Sometimes we need to say “Screw you, content rules”, and Just. Hit. Publish.

Facebook for Android and Why Zuckerberg Now Owns Your Ass

A little while back, I wrote about my concerns with the Facebook Messenger app, and the Permissions it ~~needed~~ demanded to function. It was these Permissions that saw me uninstall Messenger and ultimately close down my Facebook profile.

I’ve since activated a very stripped down Facebook profile, where I share a lot less than before and have it locked down to a very small number of family and friends – a very different experience from my “pretty much share everything” use on the deleted account.

Since I commute a lot, I installed the full Facebook for Android app. Usually, I have my apps to manually update, but because I had been testing the beta version of the new Android app before switching back to the “official” one, I’d neglected to change my app update settings.

This let Facebook download the latest update yesterday. And, originally, I was impressed – the new UI was slick and the experience far superior. So impressed, I shared a couple of screen grabs of the new interface.

As you can see, it’s a clean, easy-to-navigate experience. Finally, Android users had the app they deserved, right? Not quite.

The Devil Gives Better Choices than Facebook

You’ve probably heard the term “making a pact with the Devil”. Essentially, it allows you to have anything you want, in exchange for your soul being the property of the Devil when you die.

Facebook’s new Permissions kinda reminded me of this, given that they’re forcing you to give up any semblance of privacy you may have thought you still had left.

When I shared the pictures on Google+, Al Spaulding made me immediately regret the fact I was on auto-update. From his comment on the post:

It looks great. However I refuse to download it and am still using the older version from 2 mth ago. Why? Because the new one says pretty clearly that they can access your phone for anything. They can read your texts – take them off your phone and upload them to their server, place phone calls on your behalf, and even disclose your location without you wanting them to.

While I’m used to Facebook’s Draconian privacy settings, the part about accessing my SMS and MMS messages caught my attention. I don’t recall this being as explicit before (although it may have been), so I uninstalled the app and set about re-installing to check the Permissions out fully.

The results were a mix of scary and extreme.

The Calendar I’d seen on previous Permissions, and the Calls (while annoying) I’m pretty sure had been there too. But check out the exact wording of the SMS/MMS Permission, and that of the Contacts one.

Doesn’t that alarm you as a user? Read that wording again, especially this statement:

This allows the app to read all SMS messages, regardless of content or confidentiality.

Wow. Just… wow. Not even my wife gets access to my SMS messages (and no, Jacki, I have nothing to hide!). What honest and useful reason can Facebook have to get access to my texts? Seemingly they’re running with the “It will help us target better” message.

I call bullshit.

Target Publicly and Respect Privacy

I’m a marketer. I get that data helps us target campaigns better, and (in an ideal world) meet the needs of our customers and audience by that very targeting. Yet as I say time and time again, this has to be opt-in, and publicly available data.

The moment you track data beyond public access, you’re moving into both immoral and – you’d like to believe – questionably legal areas.

Facebook requiring access to my SMS messages, as well as the friends I speak with privately on the phone, sets off major alarm bells, and this from someone that benefits from the amount of data publicly available.

I’m not naive enough to think anything we put on the web is private. And, since the NSA-Snowden affair, I’m even less naive to think that we don’t face the prospect of being snooped on by our respective security forces.

But it could be argued it’s in the interests of public safety for this level of monitoring (though some of the arguments are very tenuous). Facebook doesn’t protect us, nor does it seem to have our interests at heart. All it wants are numbers, pure and simple, and the data that comes with these numbers to sell to the highest bidder.

These Permissions for their Android app merely confirm that, and is why my use of Facebook will now be restricted to the web version.

Your privacy, and how you place it in the Facebook ecosystem, is something Facebook is counting on you to ignore. The choice is yours.