Monthly Archives: June 2011

How Do You Measure Your Social Media ROI?

Do you have a social media manager in your company? How do you measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts? Do you ask for a social media ROI?

I remember I read somewhere a marketing person answering the question “what’s the ROI of social media” with another question: “What’s the ROI of your phone?”
The problem is companies are used to measure their wellness with numbers (some use profits, some others use revenues only, some others use bookings, some use any of the 3… depending of what is more convenient to share to the board). So now execs want numbers out of social media too. Do clicks matter? Do Facebook fan pages matter? what is a good number? 100? 1000?
And of course marketers do their best to keep their bosses happy.

Surprisingly, more business are offering a quick marketing recipe these days: buy twitter followers and Facebook fans. In the era of social networks, where the word “social” is key and where companies have an incredible opportunity to listen to their audience and learn from what their clients have to say, there is still a shortcut for lazy marketers who just care aboout delivering numbers and not results.

I went across a tweet today, taking me to a page where I could buy a good number of twitter followers for a very small budget.It’s like going viral for just a few bucks.

And after browsing some online forums and discussion groups around this topic, I also found there are a few markeers willing to use such resources to keep their executives happy. After all, their target was to reach a certain number of twitter followers by a certain date.

Not only, you can also buy Facebook fans, and for much less! This would make your boss (or your stakeholders, or your clients) even happier!

Are these solutions really delivering what you are looking for? Are you using social media to generate traffic, to show you are very popular, or because you care about your business and about your clients?

Brand reputation is built on credibility, not celebrity. If your marketing department is cheating on your brand reputation, maybe they are not the right people for your business.

The great value of social media is to bring your brand so close to your customers that they can touch it, and can finally let you know what they think about your company, what really works in your product and what doesn’t. What is your differentiating factor making your business so good. Or how you could improve your product to become a market leader.

While traditional marketing has been built to bring your voice out and let others know you, here’s the magic of today’s marketing efforts – or at least this is what your company’s social media strategy should be focusing on: you bring you’re customers’ voice inside your board meeting.

When you buy Facebook fans, this won’t tell you which is the segment (in terms of age, sex and location) that better represents your clients. When you buy Facebook fans, they are not fans. It’s like paying people to clap their hands at the opera theatre. It’s not getting a deserved applause or a standing ovation.

How can you measure your social media marketing effectiveness then, if not on clicks, fans and followers? You can measure it by the feedback your marketing department is able to gather and bring to your table.

But the point is: while the social media marketing role is now “to listen”, will company execs be able to listen to their marketing and update the company’s product portfolio following their customers’ comments?

Has The Job Market War on Social Networks Started?

One of the most interesting changes in the business world that all of us have experienced recently, with the booming of social networks, it’s surely the job market.

I had my first experience of how the job market was changing back in 1998 when I had my first job interview on a chat (it was for an internship in the first Italian online community and I ended up getting the job)- well before Facebook and LinkedIn changed the rules of the game!

Let’s see what’s new on the Job Market.

Raise your hand if you have a LinkedIn profile. Mine is here, in case you are curious to learn more about me. LinkedIn announced this year they surpassed 100 million users.

Incresingly, Headhunters and companies rely on LinkedIn to find their next talents. And having worked in the US for a while, I have to admit it’s quite surprising how often I got emails and messages with job offers while my location was “New York” (this doesn’t really happen that often in Europe, and now that my location is Milan, Italy).

Now, raise your hand if you have a professional profile (I mean like the one you have on LinkedIn) on Facebook.

Facebook's BranchOutNot many of you, I am sure, have the Facebook job App. Facebook’s Job app is called BranchOut and it recently went viral on the popular social network, as you can see from the figure above (Source: Inside Facebook). Nice work (allow me the expression) Facebook decided to have the app importing your LinkedIn data to have your profile ready in just a few clicks. A lot less work than the one required to fill in some job applications on some companies’ websites.

One of the things that I like the most of BranchOut is the ability to let you know who in your network is “closer” to a specific job post. And this is done in a much much nicer way than LinkedIn.

So, what happened to Monster.com? Before the job market moved to LinkedIn and (more recently and yet just a little) Facebook, Monster was “the” place for the job market.

Well: Monster is back! The company today announced through a press release they just launched a new Facebook app. BeKnown. If you can’t beat them, join them. This must have been the thought of Darko Dejanovic, global CIO and head of product at Monster Worldwide, who proudly spoke about the Monster-developed Social Referral Program (SRP) embedded in the facebook app, which encourages BeKnown users to pass along specific jobs through their BeKnown network. The Social Referral Program amplifies a company’s employee referral network and extends reach to passive candidates. Currently in beta, the referral program will be rolled out to select Monster customers.

We’ll see if BeKnown will go viral as BranchOut. And we’ll see if this app will really work well as Monster did in the past ;-)

Is the US Economy impacted by Facebook fans?

Yesterday FED cut its forecasts for U.S. economic growth. It’s been just a few days after ComScore, echoed by Mashable, reported some figures about the time spent online in the US.

A question came across my mind: is Facebook impacting the US Economy?

Surely, Facebook is the last, more powerful B2C marketing resource of the last two years. Surely, Facebook is helping a huge number of companies getting more clients and making profits.

However, partially as a joke and partially because I was curious to see if I could find a link between the most recent economic crisis (did you realize we are in mid 2011 and regardless of all the governments efforts it’s still on?) and the impact of Social Networks, I decided to investigate a bit more and compare Facebook’s success and gross domestic product (GDP) drop.

I started this analysis for the US, since more data are available for this region. Mind the font color red and green to find similarities.

According to ComScore, time spent online on top websites (US data) is overall growing if we analyze the period going from December 2009 and December 2010. During that period,time spent on Facebook went from about 7% to about 12.3%, according to ComScore.

In a more recent analysis ComScore stated that Facebook counts about 160M monthly visitors. Added to the 40M of MySpace, they represent over 1/3rd of the US population. Enough to influence the economy.

The highest growth in Facebook traffic in the US happened between September 2008 and November 09, when it went from about 40M visitors/month to about 120M. And then again between February and August 2010, with another 30% increase.

Unique visitors on Facebook and MySpace

What happened to the US economy during the same time?

There’s been a huge fall in the US ISM manufacturing index in the second half of 2008 and then again (yet smaller) at the beginning of 2010. Maybe just a coincidence.

More interesting is the GDP change over the previous quarter, based on official data by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

Starting from the second half of 2008, there has been an marked drop in the US GDP, taking from 14,470 billions of dollars to about 14,035 billions of dollars in the second quarter of 2009. The US GDP got back to over 14,470 billions of dollars only in the first quarter of 2010.

Another small decline appears in the second quarter of 2010.

Is this again just a coincidence?

The importance of being Social.

Do we really need to measure how “social” we are? Can we trust those measuring our “Online Sociability”?

It seems the more social we are on the web, the better for our pockets: from discounts to jobs, the social media score can help us in many ways.

Two interesting articles have been published today around this topic: the first one on TechCrunch and the second one on Mashable.

These articles reminded me of another article that I read a couple of years ago, when Facebook started to become the most modern, inoffensive and aggregating phenomenon that we all know today. At that time, in fact, like it still happens today, a good number of journalists, economists, universities and governments were analyzing Facebook. I am sure many of you will remember a few articles mentioning the Dunbar’s number, coming from a study saying that our brain cannot handle more than 150 friends (applicable to Facebook friends as well). Too bad I have over 500 on Facebook. And some of my friends are still amongst those who don’t want to be on Facebook because “they don’t do what all others do”- I still think 600M people cannot be wrong.

TechCrunch published an article - a few hours ago – about a new startup, Labels.io, that combines what – allow me to summarize it this way- Klout (or PeerIndex) and recruitment websites do. This way recruiters know if you are really a good match for that social media position you just applied to or you can have a preview of available jobs that match your online score. (For the record, no jobs available in Italy yet).

The article continued with a quick profile of those social score measurers.

Later on today, Mashable published an article about a new Facebook-gating system based on Klout scores, which unveils discounts and perks to Facebook users, depending on their Klout score.

The interesting thing is that websites such as Klout, PeerIndex and Labels.io are all at their early stages and they are all based on algorithms and scores that we (or at least those who made them “famous”) cannot verify. Yet a few respected news sources and blogs often refer to klout scores or PeerIndex numbers.

A while ago I tested Klout and connected my 500+ Facebook friends to my twitter handle. Well, guess what? those friends “lifted” my Klout score by 5 points!

How does your Klout score look like? Is this just a new way companies have found to get some of those data about users, profiles and buying habits that Facebook has collected over the past few years? Is this a new way to get more spam?

I still remember the days when your sociability was measured by your attitude to play sports and work in a team, and we all made sure we had sports and team playing on your CV. It was just yesterday.

High-Tech Meets Genuine Southern Italian food

I still remember that time when mobile phones suddenly became so popular that some companies used to give complimentary mobile phones to attract new buyers.

How many times did you find commercials of furniture shops giving you a brand new LCD TV or a shiny iPad for your new living room?

Surprisingly enough, it seems this trend may change, at least in Southern Italy!

Southern Italian High Tech flyerThis is a picture I just took. It’s of a flyer from a PC/ Phone shop in Puglia (Italy) – if you spend more than 50€ you get complimentary BBQ meat, red wine and typical bread!