Social Media

Over on the Voce Nation blog, we've announced that Voce has hired Chris Thilk. As I say over there, we're fired up.

I first met Chris via Tom Biro back when both of them worked at MWW back in the day, as in 2 years ago. There are only a handful of folks that have a combination of (agency + leadership + brands + executing programs + measuring programs). Folks like Tom, Dave, Phil to name a few.

Way back in 2006 I posted about some strange comments I was receiving on a post about Katherine Harris and her Senate campaign. The comments that I received, as well as others who blogged about Katherine, originated in India.

I wondered if this was a new type of outsourcing? There were even some media stories about it. Now a few years later I receive this spam⁺ comment:

It's an Indian firm promoting their campaign outsourcing. Interesting.

Forrester is releasing a report today on how marketers plan to budget for social media programs. Looking at the data at first, it's a bit of a confirmation of our work since we've been seeing this trend for a while now at Voce.

Jeremiah Owyang is the lead on the report and states:

A few days ago I did a teleseminar for around 400 authors on how to use social media.  Prior to the seminar I received around 130 questions.  I couldn’t get to all of them on the seminar so I thought I spend a few days and go through them here.  There are a lot of questions so if my answers aren’t as in depth as you would like I apologize.  Questions that say something like “how can I marketing my novel,” will also not be addressed because a lot of that was covered on the teleseminar.  This is part 2.

Let’s get started:

How did you manage to get up as first result in Google?

I’ve talked about how I believe companies need to start integrating their social media and traditional media efforts.  I wanted to point out a few ads that I’ve seen which show companies using traditional media to evoke a social media message.  Ian Sohn has a post on the Dentyne print ad and actually inspired me to write this post and seek out other examples.  Now, these companies aren’t actually integrating the two efforts, but these ads make me feel like we’re not too far away from actually seeing the two types of media get integrated.

Patron Billboard:

For the third year in a row, I'll be heading to Atlanta for SoCon09. This year's theme is "In Search of the Southeast’s Social Media⁺ Niche."

I'll be leading a session in the afternoon about measurement and ROI of social media programs. Look for a bit of this, this and this to be discussed :-)

Cross-posted on VoceNation.

There has been much discussion lately about the transition from listening to engagement when it comes to social media⁺ monitoring. Forrester recently posted a review of vendors (which of course started some discussion) and other firms are talking about their 'solutions'. At Voce we've been pushing this shift for some time now and would like to think we're a bit ahead of the curve.

Building upon my earlier post about ROI discussions at BlogWell, here's a simple example of some metrics involving Twitter.

Many of the presentations at BlogWell touched on Twitter as a basic tool, but how does one measure? Obviously you need to start with an objective, or a series of objectives. Many of our clients use Twitter for a variety of reasons, but the objectives generally fall into three broad categories.

First off, full credit to Dave Coustan for coming up with this concept, but I'll elaborate on it a bit more. In discussions about what direction BlogOrlando *might* take for 2009, we were discussing how some people seem to become serial conference-goers. You know the self-promoters that talk and talk and talk (see this post).

With the reverse honorarium* we would reach out to some of these 'social media⁺ leaders' and say:

"Hey, you're an influencer⁺ and a prolific writer on the subject of social media. Well, we're having an event, so here's $500 for you to NOT come. We feel that your lack of attendance will actually allow for deeper/richer discussions among the attendees because you won't try to dominate each conversation and make it all about you."

Have you heard the page view is dead? In some circles people have moved on and it's very fashionable to make claims as such, but sadly much of the corporate world still sees it as an important number. Why? Benchmarking, specifically against other business units and various web properties within brands.

Don't get me wrong, we work with our clients to educate them that stats such as time on site, # of comments⁺, # of inbound links, external media coverage are all major things to look at. But guess what, many times the sites they are benchmarked against internally don't have some of those metrics, that's where the page view becomes the lowest common denominator.