3 New Ways to Measure the Social Web

Social media is highly competitive, and the biggest advantage you can have is data. To improve and grow, these companies need to gather as much information as they can, and they need more than simple pageview tracking.

The three of the most important things to measure for social applications:

1. Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates
2. Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do
3. Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?

There’s a lot to learn about analytics from the frontrunners in social media. The intense competition has resulted in many new and innovative ways to track and analyze visitor data.

Read full Mashable article >

Five Reasons Why Mobile Marketing Is Prime for B2Bs

In the B2C space there’s a lot of buzz around mobile marketing, but in the B2B sector it’s more likened to a whisper. Yet amid the low level of mobile chatter, B2Bs are missing out on super-sized opportunities for integrating a valuable new brand touch point for their customers and establishing a dynamic new communications channel with professional audiences.

Five Reasons Why Mobile Marketing Is Prime for B2Bs—And Five Key Questions B2B Marketers Should Be Asking.  Read more >

3 Quick Tips for Successful Email Campaigns

Emails campaigns can be one most effective and efficient ways of reaching your target audience, Here are three quick tips for a successful campaign:

1. Use targeted campaigns
One size, doesn’t fit all. For some organizations those campaigns take the form of emailed newsletters to internal lists while other organizations have their messages delivered by third parties. Break up your list into segmented groups by interest for more relevant content to the reader.

2. Leverage Social Media
Links to your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages as well as other social media outlet so that readers of your email can be connected.

Include in your email campaign a prominent link to a web page and that you include “share this on” options pointing to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

3. Content is king.
All of the social media and email campaigns in the world won’t help you  — if you don’t have content that is of interest to the intended recipients.

© 2010 LaChapelle Design

5 Steps to a Better Social Media Monitoring Plan

We don’t need to tell you that you need to be listening in social media, right? But perhaps you need a bit of help building out a listening program that’s sustainable, actionable, and actually helps you meet your business needs. Here’s a set of steps to take and questions to answer to round out your listening notions into a strategy you can execute on.

1. Decide On Focus Areas
2. Articulate Your Goals & Measurements.
3. Consider Resources
4.  Map Information Flow
5. Illustrate Results & Next Steps

Read full article >

5 Ways to Use Twitter Lists

Twitter users can now organize users they follow into groups, or lists. allows you to group the stream of messages from a specific set of users and isolate them in a separate time line.

Lists make it easier to follow the messages that flow through your account by categorizing them into various topics that you create. Twitter allows you to have 20 lists with a maximum of 500 persons per list.

How To Create Twitter Lists
Create a list by selecting “create new list” in the right sidebar.  By visiting your “following” page next to the username use the drop down menu allowing you to add that person to a particular list.

Create lists consisting of:

• Competitors
• Clients
• Prospects
• Friends
• News
• Industry Thought Leaders

What Lists To Follow and Who Has You Listed
In the right sidebar of your Twitter homepage , there are two tabs “lists following you” and “lists you follow”. You’ll also see other lists that twitter user has made and an option to block the Twitter user entirely.

Here are 5 Ways to Use Twitter Lists:
1. Access to Experts. Feed tweets into meaningful real-time experiences. OPEN Forum does a great job of this for small businesses.

2. Manage Who You Are Following Feed tweets into meaningful real-time experiences. New York Times has its featured and curated lists that make it easy to access the information.

3. Industry News Monitoring. Breaking news, trends and information

4. Job Search.  If your looking for a job, set up a list of companies for which you would like to work. Also include executive search contacts so you can keep on top of what jobs are available.

5. Private Lists.  Putting an account in a List doesn’t mean you are following them.  This is a useful tool for people who may post too frequently or that you don’t want to show up in your stream.

Check out tools like:
List Widget let you create a collaborative widget. Once you enter your information to customize it, you can see what people are tweeting about. There are other tools like

Looking for lists?
Listorious is a directory of lists on Twitter.

Ultimately, the value of any Twitter feature is only as great as the community of users makes it.

© 2009 LACHAPELLE DESIGN

Twitter Starts Testing Features for Businesses

Twitter has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features.

The first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.”

Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors can add the specific user that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.

The other big revelation by the company is that Contributors is just the first of several business features, some of which will be visible by users, and some which will be internal for businesses.

Twitter’s getting serious about ramping up its business presence. This may just be the beginning of the Twitter business model. We’ll have more answers soon enough.

Read full mashable article>

How social media impacts your company

These days, many social communities have migrated to the Web and new ones have formed. Facebook has fan pages, LinkedIn has groups, Twitter has followers and millions of people are blogging with enthusiasm about an endless number of topics, products and ideas. Each of these social communities are communities for one reason: they share similar interests, beliefs and values and view the world differently, yet similarly, from other communities.

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Sue LaChapelle of LaChapelle Design says, “With all my clients we are monitoring what ideas, feedback and suggestions people have with regard to a product or service. Utilizing the communities is the key to getting valuable, microscopic information from your target audience.” According to Sue, social communities can be used:

• To monitor brand reputation.

• As an early warning system for potential customer service or product issues. The Google team recently used Twitter to obtain feedback on the new Droid (“GoogleVoice rocks!” and “Don’t use it with a magnetic phone case!”).

• To identify competitive activities. Jeff Heger of Nixco Plumbing actively monitors the business community on LinkedIn and Facebook regarding local and national competition, to see what is working and not working for others.

• To provide insights for R&D, product innovations and initiatives. Brenda Stradley (ItsInTheDetailsLtd.com) has a Facebook group that drives traffic from different markets to her site. She studies where new buyers are coming from then targets those areas for Facebook. She constantly is learning what consumers like, which drives her product choices.

• To identify emerging social trends and new vocabulary.

Some social communities are even sparking off-line gatherings, giving firms an expanded opportunity to reach a group of like-minded consumers.

Read full Business Courier article by Carol Shea of Olivetree Research >

5 Ways to Grow Your Local Business with Social Media

Most small businesses do the bulk of their business locally. So, the thought of gaining access to Facebook’s 300 trillion users (may be more by now) isn’t that relevant or useful.

However, if those local businesses could use the some of the new powerful online tools and platforms to gain access to the 200-300 social media users in their town, now that might just make some sense.

Below are five things any local business can do to get more business using social media tools

1) Start a Local Group Online
2) Find and Network with Local Bloggers
3) Hold Meetups and Tweetups
4) Find local leads
5) Enhance Local Search Results

Read full article from OPEN Forum >

Corporate Social Media Usage Grows

A recent study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide found that approximately two-thirds of companies surveyed plan to use social media to connect with workers in the coming year. The study revealed that 80 percent of companies had upped their use of electronic communications and about half of the respondents had lessened their use of print communications.

What seemed to be a frivolous pastime last year will definitely find its place in business communications next year.

Of those companies in the study not implementing social media to communicate with workers, more than one third complained about a lack of IT support or insufficient technical capabilities. About 40 percent said they had limited knowledge of social media and 45 percent pointed to a lack of staff or resources.

Today’s workers are looking for authentic, timely messages that address how business changes affect them personally

Read full article >

Measuring Social Media Strategies

Both business-to-consumer (BtoC) and business-to-business (BtoB) companies are rapidly adopting social media.

Business.com recently published its “2009 Social Media Benchmarking Study” – and we take note because of the depth of their research based on insights into business social media usage provided by nearly 3,000 North American business professionals.

According to them, the two types of firms, BtoB and BtoC, have different social site usage patterns for business purposes – with BtoB firms demonstrating marketing leadership.

How companies are measuring Social Media Success:

The average company in this study used four different success metrics:

1. The amount of web site traffic generated — the most popular way
2. Engagement – with prospects and customers
3. Brand impact – awareness and reputation
4. Leads – both quantity and quality

This study should provide you with context to decide how proactive you are in measuring social media success (you can access the complete study here).

Read full article >