How to measure a return on investment for social media was the #1 question marketers and small business professionals had when responding to this year’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Why make it harder than it has to be? Or, to turn the question positive, how can you make measuring social media’s bang for your buck as easy as possible?

Thanks to Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, whose Social Media Success Summit webinar answered the ROI how-to question in depth. Here, in line with the make-it-as-easy-as-possible mantra, are three very simple ways to find out how well social media marketing is doing for you, in general and compared to other marketing efforts.

Ahh, Facebook readers…shame you can’t see it on the world’s most powerful social network, but with one more click, you can see it on YouTube.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You know that person who won’t get himself, herself, or their business or organization on Facebook because people play farming and mafia and fish tank and poker games on there?

Here’s what I’d like to know:

Mailbox Hit and Run, photo by Lars Plougmann

Did that same person remove their mailbox from their business office, or even at home, because they received unwanted mail?

Did that same person rip the land-line telephone out of the wall because a relative kept calling them at work?

Did that same person delete their email account when they received forwarded nonsense disproven by Snopes?

Did that same person cancel their cell phone contract because of the calls they got from people trying to dial the previous owner of the phone number?

Of course not!

And yet professionals of every stripe still use similar rationales to avoid establishing a professional presence on Facebook, the world’s most highly trafficked website - or second most, depending on the week.

Professionals want to know that their time - ultimately, the most valuable and precious commodity they have - will not be wasted on Facebook. That’s a completely valid concern, and it’s why we take people’s Facebook hesitations seriously.

But to dismiss Facebook because millions of people (professionals among them!) occasionally use it for frivolous purposes is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So, if you’re one of those folks pooh-poohing Facebook…what would you need to see to change your mind about it?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

And to think, this was a mild day! 15mph winds took out most of the audio - thankfully, YouTube’s annotation/subtitle feature covers the rest. As soon as you here me say “home of the ‘World’s Worst Weather,’” go ahead and mute your speakers, because you can’t hear much of my voice after that. (Hope you enjoy the scenery, though.)

Thanks to the tireless, round-the-clock-working employees and volunteers at the Mount Washington Observatory and Discovery Center for inviting me up to their stunning and gadget-laden aerie. This video gives a brief summary of some of the online reputation management topics I covered during a presentation for them during their annual all-staff meeting. Great day, great people!

For our Facebook readers, you can see the full video on the Aha Yourself! channel at YouTube.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

A deep thought for your business - and your life - thanks to a simple question from a boy perched on his Dad’s shoulders.

(Psst - you reading this on Facebook? They hid the video from you. Don’t worry, though, we found it for you.)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“THEY” say people are talking about you, your business, your brand, your products, your industry, your competitors, and all sorts of other things interesting to you as a business owner or passionate professional on Facebook…never mind who “THEY” are for a moment.

So thanks to a lovely webinar by Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, and co-founder of the 2010 Social Media Success Summit, here’s a great little tip for finding out what people are saying about your biz on Facebook. (Along with a nice meta moment about the Facebook book.)

BTW, yes, “THEY” told us you can’t see the video if you’re reading this on Facebook. So try this YouTube link instead, please!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There’s a famous story about Henry Ford and the invention of the V8 engine in the early 20th century. Ford’s engineers told him it wasn’t possible, but he believed it was, and set out to make it a reality.

That took place in the latter part of the Industrial Age. Here, in our idea-driven economy, you have more opportunities than ever to work from “What’s possible?” as your inspiration, and find the right team to take care of the “how” for you. Here, some thoughts on that as it relates to new-fangled social media platforms…

If you know how it’s possible to import RSS feeds to Facebook and still see the embedded video, we’d love to talk to you. In the meantime, here’s the workaround to see it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This Age we live in. This beautiful, frenetic, exquisitely unpredictable Age.

Call it the Digital Age, the Creativity Age, the Age of Possibility, Impossibility, Community, Psychosis, Personality, Rediscovery, Revolution, or simply the Age of Now.

Whatever cultural scene you’re digging, it’s all a cacaphony of paradoxes, competing paradigms, and shifting ideas of whether our third rock from the sun and its inhabitants are spinning dutifully on the collective axis, or right out of control, into galactic oblivion. 

Feeling brave? Nihilistic? Existential? Here’s an article from last week’s New York Times Magazine that invites you to marinate in one slice of the whole messy enchilada:

The Web and the End of Forgetting, by Jeffrey Rosen.  

Rosen presents a compelling, intelligent snapshot of what’s happening today in the worlds of social media and social networking, communications, technology, and humanity, and how it’s scaring the pants off of many scholars, privacy advocates, philosophers, political leaders, and futurists. This “urgent problem” all revolves around “the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets.”

Chew on this:

“Facebook…now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts, and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring - and permanently storing - the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.”

Yes, these numbers truly ARE staggering. In fact, I personally don’t have the brain configuration that can fathom the binary-code details of saving all tweets for official Library-of-Congress posterity, or the immense compulsion so many of us have to share all manner of content the moment we can text it.

But the issue isn’t about the numbers. It’s about what the numbers mean.

There’s been a colossal shift in our collective human landscape. No doubt about it. It started years ago, and it’s accelerating at warp speed. The shift is about how we literally connect - to ourselves and as a species, with ourselves and with others.

And like all gargantuan cultural shifts before it (has there been one this huge??), there are people on all sides of the fence. Some want to run and hide. Others want to dive right into it. Still others want to rebel, scream, kick, and fight until they drop.

In Rosen’s piece, he mentions Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School grad, who said, “The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.” He identifies the birth of companies charging pretty pennies to improve our online brands, and he shares a term called “reputation bankruptcy,” coined by Harvard cyberlaw professor Jonathan Zittrain.

Rosen talks about the dangers and increasingly dire consequences of oversharing, and tells us about Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University who studies “the behavorial economics of privacy,” which is “the conscious and unconscious mental trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure.”

Ultimately, he shines a piercing spotlight on “the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets.” The drawbacks spring from the rabid (and impossible) desire for control - control of our online reputations, what others think of us in general, and the amount virtual friends and strangers know about us.

In the second to last paragraph, Rosen writes:

“But a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts…”

I get it. I understand why people are freaking out. I understand the thousands of bad things that can happen to an overexposed human. Way beyond the lost job, compromised marriage, or unflattering photo, we’re talking everything from identity theft to leaving our children vulnerable to the evil of molesters.

But…but…what about the BENEFITS of living in a world that never forgets, even if it is thrust upon us all while we cling, kick, scream, and run futily in the other direction?

There’s so much energy being used to fight what’s happening right now. So many very smart people are trying to set up rules and systems to thwart this hyperspace shift into a radically transparent existence. Ultimately, they’re trying to contain technology, innovation, human imagination, and our genetic determination to explore new frontiers at all costs.  They may even succeed in delaying the inevitable for a while. But there’s no stopping this shift. It’s a done deal.

So, what if we got better at embracing this change? What if, instead of wasting time and energy fighting it, we found ways to consider it, accept it, and use it to our creative and/or evolutionary advantage the best we can?

At the heart of the fear is the fact that we can’t micro-manage others’ thoughts and opinions about us.

Okay.

Well, one benefit of having a long-tail history dragging in our data-saved past is we may all give far less weight to what others say, and even what Google says, and learn anew about how to nurture the relationships with our flesh-and-blood family and friends. More importantly, this may help us get a stronger, more secure sense of ourselves, so we don’t ever let anyone else define us.

“Never forgetting” by hook or by crook is a very effective way of BOOSTING AWARENESS of what we do, what we say, how we live, and how we choose to spend our time and energy.

EMBRACING our pasts - yes, INCLUDING OUR MISTAKES!!! - humanizes all of us. It gives the Holier-Than-Thou Police fewer places to hide. This desire to wipe our slates clean, to reinvent at the price of deleting what we think are the “icky” parts, denies some of the best (albiet challenging) aspects of learning, growing, and becoming better versions of ourselves.

Like the millions who are trying to wipe away the years with botox, lasers, and nip ‘n tucks, now there are millions who are trying to smooth away the online character lines of their wondrously imperfect lives. What if we nurtured a sense of curiosity about and pride of this wacky evolutionary process instead of hiding painfully behind feelings of shame, regret, and denial????

What if we all threw our shoulders back, puffed out our chests, and said, “Okay. I’m here. Say what you will. Document what you might. Input what you must, but that doesn’t change the essence of who I am, or what I choose to become.”

When I was in college, my roommate’s very wise mother said this to us one day:

“You wouldn’t care what other people thought of you if you knew how little they did.”

Perhaps we can seize this opportunity before us, the one that’s happening anyway whether we like it or not, and use it to ditch the shackles of gossip, perfection, and intolerance.

Perhaps “The End of Forgetting” is not privacy’s armageddon, but a cosmic shove to help us transcend our pettiness, respect our flawed journeys, and invite a compassion for ourselves and others never before seen in the world - online or otherwise.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Success Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Fast fact for you: The “Description” field for a YouTube video allows you to type up to 5,000 characters in there. So let’s do some quick ‘n dirty math!

Assuming an English language average of six characters per word (five + space/punctuation, based on unscientific Google results), that’s about 833 words. And assuming about 250 words per standard-margined, double-spaced Word doc page, that more than 3 pages of text you can stick in a YouTube Description field.

Holy keyword-stuffing temptation, Batman! Before you go nutty with this, check out the video for other ideas. Incidentally, it’s not the first time I’ve been seen in public with a wig for our company. But that’s another story entirely.

For those of you on Facebook who can’t see the video, but the wig comment made it absolutely necessary for you to see this at all costs, a quick trip over to YouTube will squelch your curiosity. (Thanks, too, to YouTube Marketing: A Hour a Day author Greg Jarboe for inspiring this video with his presentation during the 2010 Social Media Success Summit.)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Over the past couple years, in the midst of economic downturns and zigzags, between the cracks of reinvention and possibilities, among the trends of what’s happening NOW, and where things are going with marketing, communications, business, brand-building, and community-driven movements of all shapes and sizes, we’ve had a few real stand-out things happen for us and our business.

First, a smidge of backstory:

When we moved from Los Angeles to New Hampshire back in 2003, both of us quite immersed in the power and potential of the online space, we set an audacious goal of helping hundreds - even thousands - of businesses in New Hampshire jump in and embrace the opportunities of the Web 2.0 world.

Last year, that goal was manifested - and catapulted! - in a big way when we were hired by the NH Division of Economic Development (NH DED) to get them blogging, tweeting, and active on Facebook and other social media platforms so they could connect and communicate more effectively while leveraging their  limited time and resources.

Now, with Steve Boucher at the helm (NH DED’s  insanely smart, creative, driven, and prolific Communications and Legislative Director), after the first full fiscal year of our collaboration with the State:

1. NH Economy’s No Bull Blog has increased the site’s overall Page Views by 70% AND literally doubled the site’s Unique Visitors, adding more than 20,000 targeted sets of eyeballs every month while giving them unmatched, content-rich SEO dominion on Google AND peer respect in the NH business community.

 

2. NH Economy’s “No Bull Business” Facebook Page shares resources, information, and conversation with more than 1,160 “Likers” while being one of the most “Liked” Economic Development Facebook Page in the United States…right behind New York City. (They’ve got 1,386. C’mon, New Hampshire, let’s beat ‘em! We’re soooo close…and they’ve got 8 million residents compared to NH’s 1.3 million!)

 

3. The “No Bull” Twitter feed (@NoBullBlog) has attracted more than 1,440 Followers, with more joining the fun every day.

Allen, Steve Boucher, and Lani

Those are just a few numbers, but the real miracles are not quantifiable. The real miracles are the friendships that have been forged, the seeds of change that have been planted, and the projects that have been either invented or evolved, all with the intent and purpose of adding to the economy and quality of life of the beautiful, inimitable Granite State.

Just goes to show that no matter how much we all want to be in control, no matter how much we all wish you could predict the future, sidestep the present, and plan our adventures to a fine-tuned pulp, we really don’t know how these dreams and opportunities in our minds and hearts will unfold.

Our job, then, is to trust that they will, in ways that are better than we would dare hope or imagine, and do our best to enjoy the heck out of the white-knuckle ride along the way.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From a high-level, executive-summary-like, 30,000-foot view (how many more of those could we use?), if you’re just starting to think about using social media platforms for you business or organization, start here. Truthfully, these ideas apply to pretty much any online marketing or so-called Web 2.0 platform, and that’s the real point in all of this.

Social media hasn’t changed the rules of marketing - its our own experiences and preferences that have changed, and social media tools happen to cater to those changes very well.

Oh by, the way, we know you can’t see this on Facebook. As my two year old likes to say, “DANG IT!” It’s out of our control, but we can give you this tidy little YouTube link to see it there.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.