How to Measure the Value of What You're Doing

Understanding the value

• Receiving more e-mails than comments: The comments are great, they bring more value to the subject in question and sometimes can generate passionate conversations. However, on a monthly basis I receive more personal e-mails than comments. Intimate e-mails with personal history: this is what you should be looking for, be in touch with the people who read, follow and value your work and what you do for them. That is what changes everything - you start to bond with these people that allows you to cross the street to see them and share with them what you are doing, and getting recommended to their friends.
• Changing people: When your articles, speeches, projects or even tweets allow somebody to start a project, confront their fears, deal with delays, realise their mistakes and enable them to learn from them, or finally understand that they've got the capability to excel in whatever they want, that's when the best results start going the right way. The most powerful KPI is to how much you can change people's work, business results, perception or lifestyle - for the better.
• Being conscious about your work: There's a type of work that can't be measured and it's the one that enhances you as a professional. It might be making a podcast, it might be being reponsable for all the digital work for a NGO or even writing down your thoughts and feelings on a piece of paper and posting them on Instagram every day. Look for ways to impact the relationship between your communities.
• Stop defending and start ignoring: It's like everything, there's always that skeptical person that says, "If you can't count it, it can't be measured." This might be true, but only when you have to back your results up in front of your boss, a teacher or a client. But never think that everything has to be measured; this way of being is only for those who need to count and measure everything they do. The people who don't appreciate your work now, will never do, and that's their problem, not yours.

Always meausuring, exposing your results, showing your superiority and improving your own records. That's all great and fascinating, but only when you can turn these numbers into:

• More economical stability.
• Creating more work for you and for others.
• Changing more lives.
• Starting more projects.
• Having a group of colleagues that will help you in what you are doing.
• Work less and produce more.
• Speak about numbers that can be turned into positive effects for those who can help you achieve those numbers.

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Evaluate Your Surrounding Community to Spark Fresh Ideas

During the course of human events - well, at least when engaging your community - it becomes necessary from time to time to step back and take a look at the network of communities that surround your brand. A quick surface evaluation of the ecosystem you operate in can provide insights into your community and how you can serve them better.

This kind of evaluation is not a deep dive into competitive intelligence, however. This is something a community manager can easily accomplish in a few hours. It is designed to spark fresh ideas and gain perspective on what might be happening in the brand echo chamber.

First, consider what things your community might be passionate about outside your own brand.

Generally, our brand taps into the passion for saving money when shopping online. Naturally, our community shops online…A LOT. Sure, some of them are probably connected to direct competitors that offer similar services to ours, but most likely they are also part of the communities surrounding Amazon, eBay, and tons of other brands that offer online shopping.

What if you own a French restaurant that specializes in regional cuisine and authentic provincial atmosphere? Most likely your community is into all sorts of things related not only to food but travel. When you start to choose what brands beyond your competitors to take a peek at, you should consider looking at travel sites large and small.

By considering what other passions your community shares, you can then choose other social brands to evaluate and gain fresh insight.

Next, choose a mix of competitors, big brands, and niche brands to evaluate.

To really get a feel of what is going on in the network you’re connected to through your community, you should pull together a varied mix of other Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Pinterest accounts to survey. Then, you need to decide what you’re evaluating them for. Since you have no idea what KPIs they use to determine success, you have to judge them on how their friends, fans, and followers interact with them.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

• Do your competitors have the same mix of content you do?
• Are there untapped content types like chats or hangouts?
• How do those communities engage with photos, links, videos, and humor?
• What seems to get the most attention and does it really serve the brand purpose?
• Do the big brands you chose get any better engagement than you or your competitors?
• What kinds of content get shared by any of the communities you’re evaluating?
• What do the very niche brands do differently to engage their communities?
• How do these brands express identity with visuals?

Questions like these help you to evaluate public perceptions in the social space.

Finally, take a look at your own brand with fresh eyes.

Once you’ve gone through this exercise with several other brands, go back and do the same for your own brand channels. Try to see the overall story your brand tells through the eyes of your community.

Where are you missing the mark? Are there opportunities to grow popular content and give your community more of what they love?

Testing the waters around your brand can be informative without being a major chore. A quick survey like this does not replace a serious competitive evaluation, however. Keep taking that deep dive on a regular basis, but use this quick look to keep your own day-to-day social efforts fresh and relevant.

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Social Media Manager vs. Online Community Manager: Same or Different?

Community Manager: Operates from deep within the company, managing customer relationships with a brand or product, and each other. Potentially she can be a fully Enterprise Community Manager, involved in facilitating efficient inter-team and staff communication and collaboration. She is focussed on the flow of information and knowledge, strengthening relationships and promoting productive collaboration, which may include moderation and hosting of both micro- and macro-events on the company’s community platform. Placement within the Organisation chart is more likely to be connected to Editorial, Product development, Business development, and Marketing.

 

Social Media Manager: Operates from the edges of the company, managing brand recognition and reputation outside of the scope of the brand website. He is focused on listening and evaluating brand perception, planning campaigns and promotional material or initiatives to promote the company’s message, building and leveraging social networks on social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to facilitate depth of communication. He will usually be found within the Organisation chart connected to Marketing, PR, and Sales.

 

Another aspect of the blurring and overlap in roles is the type of organization doing the hiring -- what is the business focus for the role? Business-to-business (B2B) and consumer companies have very different requirements. In consumer organizations, the community focus is individual consumers, and consumers generally frequent public social media channels with broad reach and large numbers. On the other hand, B2B organizations focus on building customer intimacy using channels such as online communities, customer councils and executive briefing centers along with offline outreach. For B2B, the desired relationship is deeper, just as the purchase cycle may be longer, revenue potential much greater and the depth of engagement (think suppliers and partners as well as customers) may be much greater and more complicated. In B2B organizations the social media manager is part of marketing and PR, facing outward for the most part. The B2B community manager has some outward responsibilities, but is connected to more core operations at the firm.

 

These distinctions are especially visible in the success measures for each role - the key performance indicators. Of course, both roles may share responsibility for a number success metrics and will need to partner effectively to deliver results. Here is a short tabulation of key B2B success measures, the role involved and the organizational accountability path.

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Five Tips for Developing an Adaptable Approach to Online Marketing

1. Start With a Goal

If you are going to go to the trouble of creating content and publishing it online, you need to have a specific goal in mind. As Odden

 asks, “If there’s no reason for it, then why do it?”

The specific goals of your online marketing strategy depend on your business, your customers, and numerous variables, but you must have goals. “If a corporation is publishing content just for the sake of publishing content, then they’re not that different from a spammer,” says Odden. So, don’t be a spammer! Have a goal.

2. Develop a Hypothesis

With your goal in mind, you begin selecting and implementing the tactics you will use to achieve it. Those tactics may include creating a blog, launching a podcast, devising cool infographics, or doing something crazy that no one has ever considered.

No matter which tactic you choose, you need to have a hypothesis about what’s going to happen. How exactly are things going to work? Developing a hypothesis requires you to think things through and to have a way of figuring out whether your efforts have borne fruit.

3. Monitor and Measure Progress

Your hypothesis said, “If we do X, our customers will do Y and that will result in Z.” You did X. Did Y and Z follow?

To answer that question, Odden says, “We need a methodology for monitoring our progress.” A methodology will have at least two components: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—the actions or events you want to measure—and some way of collecting data. The beauty of online marketing is that, by virtue of its being online, we can collect mountains of data. The difficult part is figuring out what type of data is meaningful and what is noise. You will need to look closely at what measurable actions are most closely correlated to which measurable results.

4. Analyze and Revise

You have a goal and a hypothesis. You’ve identified ways of measuring your progress. And you’re actively gathering data to “measure actual impact.” Now, you need to analyze that data and draw some conclusions. Is our strategy working? If so, why? How could we make it work better? If not, why not? What do we need to do differently? The purpose here is, as Odden insists, ”to extract insight to further refine our goals.”

Going through this whole process is pointless unless you take the insights you’ve gathered, reapply them to your efforts, and strive for continuous improvement.

5. Adaptation and Optimization

It’s a cliché to say, “Change is the only constant.” However, that cliché happens to be true. An adaptable approach is one that allows you to adapt to change. The only way to do that is to clearly perceive what is happening and to adjust your actions to fit the changing circumstances. Developing and test hypotheses, and learn from these activities. By doing so, you are also following the path of optimization, which Lee describes as “continuous effort to make better, make perfect.”

And isn’t that the path we should all be on?

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Using Google Analytics Dashboards for Better Insights

If you’re a typical website owner/manager or marketer you probably often find yourself clicking through Google Analytics, digging for information, getting buried in data, and then doing it all over again the next time you log in. If you’re a typical business owner with a website, you probably don’t even log into Analytics for fear of being overwhelmed, which means you’re missing out on a wealth of insightful business data.

Introducing the solution to your problems: Google Analytics Custom Dashboards. If you don’t already use dashboards (they’ve been around for about a year) welcome to the world of fast and easy information on your web traffic, to help you make better-informed business decisions.

What is a Google Analytics Dashboard?

When you log into Analytics, the first thing you see is the Standard Reporting dashboard – that’s the one you’re probably already familiar with, and its chock full of template reports of all kinds. Powerful, yes. But sometimes it’s like diving for a pearl, only to throw it back in the ocean, which means you have to dive again tomorrow to get it back. Exhausting!

Dashboards allow you to collect all of your pearls, put them on a nice little string and admire them day after day without having to hold your breath to dive into the data sea.

Dashboards allow you to grab bits and pieces of data from various reports, and collect them all into one simple and easily digestible overview. Even better, you can have up to 20 dashboards per profile, which means you can create specialized dashboards for different needs. Within each dashboard you can have up to 12 widgets (each widget contains a specific report, or set of data, that you specify).

Gaining Insights from Dashboards

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to analyzing your website traffic data. It was designed to meet the needs of the many diverse kinds of websites and businesses that operate on the internet. That means that the template reports you find in the Standard Report won’t always meet the needs for your specific business or website.

Custom Dashboards allow you to pull together data that you won’t find (or won’t easily find) in the Standard Reporting. You can put together data in unique ways, to suit the unique needs of your business.

Part of the challenge of drawing insight from your website traffic data is being able to check it on a regular basis. Using a Custom Dashboard removes a big barrier, making the data you need much more readily accessible. In other words, it saves you time and effort, which means you can do it more often.

Setting Up Custom Dashboards

We won't go into too much detail because it’s straightforward. Google provides a good step-by-step resource here.

There are two simple ways you can add reports to your Custom Dashboard. If you know exactly what report you want, you can click the “Add Widget” button from within your Custom Dashboard, and set it up as you like. The other option is to run your desired report from within the Standard Reporting dashboard, and click the “Add to Dashboard” button to add that report as a widget within your desired Custom Dashboard.

Custom Dashboard Examples

So now you know the ‘why’ and the ‘how’. But what about the ‘what’?

As I said before, each website or business has its own needs. If you haven’t yet set your KPIs, goals, benchmarks and such… think about bookmarking this article, taking a step back, and doing some research on that stuff first.

You need to know what you want out of your Analytics data before you can get anything truly insightful. But here are some suggestions to get you started.

The Conversions Dashboard

This is a dashboard where you can take all of your conversions – contact form submits, e-commerce purchases, or anything else you have set as a goal – and put them all together in one spot so that you can get a quick look at how your website is performing.

Eugen Oprea provided a solid example of a Conversions Dashboard for a subscription-based content website here. While you’re at it, check out his other example dashboards for inspiration.

If you run an e-commerce site, you might want to set up your Conversions Dashboard to focus purely on revenue, number of purchases, top products, etc.

Let me give you an example. Perhaps you would like to know which sources of traffic is providing you with the most goal completions, to help guide how you invest your marketing budget… you may want to add this widget to your dashboard that gives you a nice little pie chart showing Goal Completions by Source/Medium:

But… maybe that’s not the right widget for you. You could make the same type of widget, but instead of basing on Goal Completions, you could use Goal Conversion Rate, or Revenue. Put that widget right next to a bunch of other related widgets, and you’ll have a nice, insightful overview of how your traffic is converting on your website.

Read Full Article Here

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