The most surprising thing about the sentiment expressed during the panel showed how little the attitude towards Social Media has changed within business. Much of the visible discussion about ROI for Social Media is focused on arbitrary “value of a fan” figures, engagement, conversation and raw fan, like, retweet and follower metrics. Revenue and cost rarely get discussed.

What is the ROI of Trolls?

Return on Investment is actually a very straightforward concept. An old textbook from university defines it as “a ratio of required costs and perceived benefits of a project or an application” (King, Lee & Viehland, 2004 p. 569). At its simplest you measure what goes into a project or business process, be it cash, time spent by employees and other resources, and compare that to what the business gets out of it. It is practically gamification, where businesses keep score on what what is working and what is not by the numbers in the bottom line.

Finding the ROI of a Telephone

One of the persistent memes dogging the discussion compares finding the ROI for Social Media to establishing a return for using now ubiquitous, common technology. Kind of like this remark seen bearing the #SXSMROI hastag:

 Asking if there is ROI for Social Media is like asking if there is an ROI of the telephone or a pencil.

It is a witty statement and fits into Twitter’s 140 character limit. It is also wrong. You can find the ROI of a telephone, or a pencil for that matter. Service and technology companies such as Intel (PDF) think so. Aside from the savings of switching to a VoIP system, Intel’s case study also outlined another business benefit for adopting their systems: productivity gains. The return on a project is not always in creating a new revenue stream.

The worst part of the analogy quoted above is that practically every piece of technology in common use now at some point had to be shown to have value. From the phone, to mainframe computers, desktop machines, mobiles and the Internet.

Business systems often provide more benefits to the bottom line than just directly generating revenue or cutting costs. In many cases it is how these tools create efficiencies internally or assist in acquiring and serving customers that creates the return for the business.

Meet Ms Revenue and Mr Expenditure

There are two things fundamental to running a business and ROI; revenue and expenditure.  Most organisations attempt to link expenditure to a source of revenue, either directly such as in the case of marketing, or indirectly in the case of business functions such as customer service and HR.

A successful, sustainable business

The one simple, inescapable fact at the centre of this discussion is that Social Media projects cost money. Either as cash for supporting marketing, tools and external experts, or the money spent on the wages of those involved with posting content, creating cat-themed memes and responding to customers.

Just don't cross the streams

It is important that posting cat photos and building love and trust contributes to the business’ bottom line. Knowing what works for the business makes it possible to decide if the marketing department should spend their time drafting tweets or creating another eDM. It means knowing if customer service staff should stick to the phones, or be trained to respond to questions on Facebook. Pouring money and resources into projects with no return is not a sustainable practice, no matter how many Twitter followers a brand might gain or the number of happy Facebook fans who have won an iPad.

Finding the Return on Social Media

Tools like Google’s Social Reports in Analytics and Assisted Conversion funnels do make it easier to track the effect of a Social Media campaign on online activity and sales even if they don’t reveal much about other channels. However measuring the return on engaging in Social Media for business is not limited to last click attribution and cross channel sales tracking.

Social Media is more than just another marketing channel. Because of the nature of the platforms, an organisation’s Social Media spaces will inevitably be used by the community as they see fit. Social Media sites such as Pinterest and Facebook have more in common with shared public spaces than dedicated media channels.

One of the more common ways an organisation’s audience appropriate these spaces is to expedite customer service and to make general enquiries. In fact a number of very successful Social Media initiatives have taken advantage of this behaviour, such as Dell with @DellCares.

Because of the ease of disseminating information and the access they can give to a pre-existing audience, Social Media is a natural fit for Business Communication and a powerful way to serve customers directly. These functions often do not directly generate revenue but they still create value for the business.

For example, while I was with Greyhound Australia the brand’s Facebook page was often used to respond to product questions and customer service enquiries, in addition to normal promotional activity. By responding to questions in public in a shared space the brand was able to communicate with the person who ask as well as others with the same question.

Under normal circumstances using online spaces to address customer queries helped to improve customer service in general, it was during extraordinary events where it created the most value. During the Queensland floods Greyhound’s online spaces, including Facebook, were important for keeping customers informed, and managing direct customer enquiries. It made it possible to communicate with customers directly and en masse.

Using online tools such as the company’s website and Social Media spaces made it easier for customers to find the information they needed to be aware of changes to services and manage the load experienced in other customer service channels. While this is an extreme example, it was an expansion of existing practices in response to an extraordinary situation. Facebook was already used as a communications and customer service channel as well as a marketing tool, and the return on the time and resources invested were measured as such.

Love, Trust, Engagement and Staying in the Black

Social Media projects for business will be treated like any other. Goals will be set, processes put in place and KPIs assigned. Until someone discovers a way to pay for servers with love and trust, some form of economic benefit will be expected, which in turn will be weighed against the costs associated with the project.

The idea that Social Media is different really should be dead and buried by now. Developing and managing online communities takes effort, and in a commercial setting, this costs money. Likes and retweets don’t pay bills, and at some point, people need to get paid.

King, D, Lee, J & Viehland, D 2004. Electric Commerce; A Managerial Perspective, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

According to Google, the three big features will be:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Google has not provided a single universal search experience for a while, so the first of these three features is not as significant as it would seem. The second and third however are a different story.

Profiles in Search

This is probably going to the most significant feature in terms of actual user adoption, and it is also in line with the steps that Google has been taking towards becoming a key identity provider online. Search is as much a destination in itself as it is a directory, and Google is close to filling the same role as portal sites like Yahoo! used to in the 1990′s.

Adding the profiles to which the user is connected and those they might want to add to their Circles is an important piece of social functionality for Google+. On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, the people search tools have been one of the tools driving the growth of their users’ networks.

Making Google+ profiles more visible in the results and autocomplete also creates social proof for uncommitted users that Google+ is used, and I suspect will encourage people to use it more.

People and Pages

The third feature being introduced with Google+’s closer integration with Google’s search results is the inclusion of personal profiles as  results in search, outranking older, more active and ostensibly more linked-to web properties. The importance of personal Google+ profiles in search was hinted at earlier with Google’s replacing ‘+’ with quotations for marking a word as exact match.

Google+ on a logged out vanity search

Considering how Google has used YouTube, Google Places and a number of other services within their search results, this should not have taken anyone by surprise.

How well Google+ profiles are performing in search compared to other web properties has certainly drawn criticism, although not much astonishment, from the more cynical commentators online.

There is a positive side to the performance of Google+ content in search, and that is in reputation management. It is another way to get content ranking for a brand or name that could outrank less than favourable results and bury them.

With More Social Content comes Greater Transparency

As well as the new social features, Google also announced a number of changes to their interface to give the user greater control over their search experience and to create more transparency in how the social content is used in search. The search engine also made it easy for users to remove personalised results, which feature is accessible through a toggle button:

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

Crowding the Social Bandwagon

The most interesting reaction to Google’s Search, plus Your World came from Twitter, who seemed understandably annoyed. Even though the two companies parted ways, Search, plus Your World became an opportunity for Twitter to state their concerns on how as a “result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone” to find the breaking news and event information that Twitter has become known for.

Google+ could become a competitor for Twitter as a realtime news provider and aggregator by displaying breaking information inline with organic search results, and it is interesting to see Twitter publicly take a shot at Google over this. However, it has been a while since their content agreement expired without renewal, leaving Google’s realtime search tools dead just as Google+ was being launched.

With Search, plus Your World, it seems that Twitter is concerned that Google might be able to revive the functionality of realtime search, without having to enter another deal with their own social network.

Social without the Site

For Google+ to pay off for Google, it does not need to replace Facebook or Twitter. To succeed as an identity provider it just needs profiles, and for its users to remain logged in while using other Google products.

The search results themselves are shaping up to be the most important part of Google+, with the addition of everything from friends, personal photos and shared content, to potentially realtime updates on subjects of interest (Remember Sparks? Maybe they will come into this at some point). Google+ is not about being a destination in itself, and frankly, it does not need to be.

Social Media and a Fractured Narrative

Post-purchase care won’t save you because once it is online, spidered and shareable, it is too late. Customers broadcast the entire purchase process from research onwards through social media in real time, online, to all their friends, and the search engines, it is inevitable that they will post the good and the bad. When every frustration and problem encountered in dealing with a brand is put online for all to see as it happens, giving them a refund doesn’t help as much as it used to. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, even if the original problem has been dealt with, their frustration is still going to be there, out in public and sometimes even in Google’s index.

Customer Care Online isn't Retroactive

Both Google and Bing take travel seriously. Google has released products like Hotel Finder and a flight search feature and Bing Travel is continually featured in the search engine’s official blog. Even as both major search engines show more and more portal-like tendencies, there is a large number of other sites providing reviews and information and hosting communities of travellers or travel blogs. Travel is a big business, and one where the market has an insatiable desire for information, especially for the longer, more expensive trips.

Read the full Post-purchase care won’t save you post on Marketing Magazine online.

Whenever a brand throws out the old in favour of something topical it gets attention. It is bold, and both the professional and amateur media love it. In the end the numbers will either vindicate or invalidate the experiment, assuming they measure the ROI in a way that reflects reality. Everything else is speculation, informed or otherwise.

Facebook has got to be better than email...

As interesting as the lively debate between the social media exponents and eDM professionals was at the time, it just begged the question: ‘Why not just do both?’ After all, I am sure you won’t get tarred and feathered at your favourite morning coffee do if you dabble in the black arts of using stuff that works.

Social Media and Email: With, not Instead Of

How you can use a social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, et al, is different from the tools available with email, from users’ expectations regarding content and frequency to how the user can interact with the material, and the platform’s restrictions on what can be delivered in what form to whom.

To borrow from Mitch Joel, it is ‘With’ not ‘Instead Of’. Using both social media and email gives you more options, and increases the size of your potential audience. Connecting with customers across multiple platforms facilitates different interactions, and gives the customer the choice of how they want to connect with the brand. Maybe a Facebook fan that finds no value in your updates would actually love the email newsletter, or perhaps the Twitter account amuses them during their work day while they find eDM invasive. Giving the customer the choice can mean that when they opt out of one channel, they might still connect through another.

Building Audiences on Other People’s Platforms

Building eDM and Social Media Audiences

Facebook fans are not really yours; neither are Twitter followers. Without the accounts they are connected to, these audiences don’t exist. Unlike email. There is also little point in building different engagement strategies for multiple channels without cross-promoting them.

Competitions, surveys and other data collection or content driven special events can accomplish both of these goals:

• Making the brand’s audience aware of other touch points and
• Collecting contact details and other information through either a microsite or the brand’s main web presence.

The nature of eDM as a one way communication channel without the ability to demonstrate social proof makes it better suited to direct customers to a range of appropriate social media touch points, where most of the content would be published during the campaign. Cross promotion of the brand’s social media touch points and a call to action that would lead to further entries in the brand’s email database and CRM will generate better connection with and a better picture of the audience.

Promoting campaigns such as these should not be restricted to just eDM and social media. Getting the most out of it requires that other media is added to the mix, be it print, broadcast, SMS, MMS, PR, online display and promotional activity on the brand’s site. However it is executed, there should be two returns to the business:

• More information on the brand’s customers
• More points of contact with the brand’s customers.

Do Everything You Can Do Well

Limited access to resources and avoiding uneconomic channels are the only reasons that should affect what tools are and are not used online. There is no reason to abandon one kind of promotional activity online in favour of another. With so many ways to go online and consume information, arbitrarily limiting a brand’s options in how it can reach and be reached by its customers is not a winning strategy.

Generic versus Brand Searches

Creating a Generic versus Brand Search Rule

Brand search term rules are so important that Google Analytics uses ‘Generic Keywords vs Brand Keywords’ as an example name during the custom Multi-Channel Funnel grouping creation process. It is a very powerful tool, assessing the general performance of a search related campaign, paid or otherwise. Further segmenting search by paid and unpaid and adding both direct and referral traffic makes it even more useful.

Search, Direct and Referral Paths

Search marketing is a great opportunity to reach people without much awareness of your brand and change their behaviour. Online search is more or less a de facto collection of bookmarks, where people enter queries based on URLs, brand or product for sites they have already visited. Tracking queries by the presence of brand terms through Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal how often non-branded search leads to branded queries, direct or referral sales. This can be a great tool for selling the value of SEO internally by demonstrating its value in the customer’s product research behaviour.

Regular Expressions for the rules

Regular expressions are a great way to keep your sanity when you are building the rules for any group of keywords. For example, brand traffic is not just going to be attributed to the correct, proper name of the brand. Variations in spelling and construction have to be accounted for. As an example, for tracking queries on the brand ‘Greyhound Australia’, the regular expression would include the brand and its most common misspellings:

greyhound|grey hound|grayhound|gray hound

The same kind of regular expressions can be used in other rules, like product terms or search terms targeted in a focused SEO project.

Product Terms with or without Brand

Whether or not a search contains a brand term only really speaks to awareness. Brand terms alone don’t distinguish between navigational, informational or transactional queries. A search for just ‘Greyhound Australia’ is clearly navigational. The search lacks any other qualifying term and Google’s recent change to how sitelinks are displayed for some queries seems to indicate even they regard such searches as purely navigational.

Brand rules with and without product terms

Creating rules that label traffic using qualifying terms and traffic that doesn’t can make the difference between navigational and informational searches in the funnel clear. Differentiating between a search for ‘Greyhound Sydney to Canberra’ and ‘Greyhound Australia’ is the difference between seeing a funnel with two brand searches, and a funnel with a search for a product including a brand term and a navigational brand search.

Campaign Source Attribution

There are more online customer acquisition channels than search. Directories, display networks, guest posts, links and advertorial are all tools that can reach new customers or initiate research and purchase behaviour. Multi-Channel Funnels and custom groupings make it easy to see how they feed into other traffic sources.

Tracking more than search traffic

Adding rules for campaign URLs used in advertising or branded content and source URLs such as social media touchpoints make it possible to see how these activities drive customer behaviour. The ability to identify campaigns that drive sales both directly and through other channels make informed decisions regarding future activity easier.

Custom Groupings: Just Start Using Them

Multi-Channel Funnels make it easier to see what works, what doesn’t and how certain activities can lead to sales. The ability to differentiate between broad information searches and brand focused queries and identify how they are linked across different search mediums is valuable. Tracking conversions across campaigns and channels makes it easier to make informed decisions about social media activity, guest posts and display advertising or directory lists as well.

Plan how to integrate Multi-Channel Funnels with your current online activities. The process to get started can be as simple as:

• Create custom Channel groupings focusing on sources that matter:
  • To you
  • To the people you report to
• Create new Channel groupings from existing ones to monitor new campaigns and sources
• See what works, see what doesn’t, see what can be improved

What are your Must Have Multi-Channel Funnels?

The single most important thing I think Multi-Channel Funnels can give you is the ability to see what broad research behaviours lead to direct navigational activity, either as direct visits or navigational brand searches.

How are you going to use these new tools in Google Analytics?

Diaspora's Kickstarter t-shirt

Diaspora’s privacy management is based on Aspects. The user groups their connections by a set of personal criteria, and can choose who gets to see which updates, and which stream of content they consume. Grouping people in this way isn’t really new; Google’s other social network, Orkut, employs a similar system, as does their new social project, Google+, with its Circles. Diaspora’s big point of difference is as a federated network. Anyone can take the software, install it on a server, and connect it to other installations, called pods. Now after almost a year and with Google+ live to a limited audience, how has Diaspora gone?

The View from Diaspora

The view from Diaspora

Since launch the development of Diaspora has not stopped. The interface has been improved, Diaspora supports mentions and hashtags in status updates and searches on public posts. Users can post from Diaspora to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and anyone’s public stream is available as an RSS feed.

Diaspora has a few more tools than it had at launch that make it easier to share sites and images while not on the site. A bookmarklet and an awesome photo sharing tool called cubbi.es (It saves an image on shift+left click, posts it to your cubbi.es account, into your stream on Diaspora, and can back it up to your Dropbox account as well). But there is one part of Diaspora’s user experience that has been stagnant for a while, and that’s mobile.

Personally Diaspora never really took off within my own social circles. No-one I know in real life, or through other social networks, is currently active within Diaspora. All the people with whom I currently interact on Diaspora, I met there, and they all sit in a ‘People from Diaspora’ Aspect.

Adding Google to the mix

A Google+ Perspective

And now there is Google+. The project has had an awesome take-up rate and already has over 10 million users. A lot of my acquaintances who were on Diaspora but never really used it are now very active on Google+. Whether this is the result of a solid product on Google’s part, or simply of the initial hype, remains to be seen.

Google+ does a lot of things differently to Diaspora (and Orkut) even if there is some overlap of the core mechanics of Circles vs Aspects. Notifications for activity on Google+ are visible while on other Google products, like Gmail and Google Reader, and can be acted upon without returning to Google+.

Eric Schmitt’s “Put your best people on mobile” is obvious on Google+. The project’s mobile experience is awesome on both mobile web and the Android app (which I love). Google+ has a number of other features, the most talked about being their desktop video feature called Hangouts, and mobile group messaging feature called Huddle.

Google+ probably won’t ‘kill’ Facebook. The size of the networks most users have built on Facebook represents a massive switching cost should they wish to migrate to another platform. Google+ will, at least for now, be a second social network, similar to how many people have active LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other social media profiles as well as their Facebook accounts.

Where Google+ can clearly replace Facebook is on mobile. For ages the Facebook mobile experience has been bad, bordering on malicious. The only reason that Google+ isn’t actually replacing Facebook on mobile for me is because I stopped using Facebook on my phone ages ago. Facebook’s app and mobile website are horribly slow and unstable, and do not offer me enough as a user to make it worth the aggravation to use. Google+’s Android app is the opposite. It is fast, easy to navigate and use, and lets me see public posts by people near me and tag posts with my location.

Why Google+ will expand and Diaspora will remain niche

Diaspora is a solid, open platform that gives the user as much control as they want to take on, and judging from the work the team has put into it so far, will continue to improve. Google+ has a lot of awesome features on launch and has the benefit of the Google brand and integration with their other products. Both platforms have good reasons to use them and both cover areas that Facebook does not. Diaspora is more sensitive regarding user privacy and Google+ offers features that Facebook either doesn’t have, or does badly.

The biggest difference between Google+ and Diaspora is that while both do things that Facebook does not, most people don’t care about the needs that Diaspora meets, whereas those Google+ cover are obvious from the start. There are a few small differences, like how Diaspora sorts posts either by the date of the post, or the latest comment, which Google+ does not do. There are also other similarities, in that both let the user export their data easily and fully, unlike Facebook.

Diaspora does have a future, but it won’t be as large as Google+. Facebook will probably start to fill the gaps that Google+ seems aimed at, and this can already been seen in the rumours surrounding Project Spartan. For now though, Google+ will continue to gain users at a greater rate than Diaspora, and for all its flaws, Facebook isn’t going anywhere.

Apparently Google Does Search Too

What do you love? The obvious answer.

This week Google also announced a cool search tool called ‘What do you love?’ and the inclusion of author attribution in the search results. Google’s core strength is information retrieval. Becoming the Internet’s content curation tool of choice and consequently becoming a major source of attention and traffic is why the company is where it is today.

One of this week’s releases was a cool new search tool with an engaging interface. ‘What do you love?’ runs a query against a number of Google services and products, including search, books, images, 3D objects and maps. The result is more of a subject orientated page than a search result, and it links off to each Google service listed. The tool is very new, and there is a small box at the bottom of the page promising ‘More coming soon’.

Finding the Authors or the Publishers?

Earlier in June a blog post titled Authorship markup and web search was published on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Only two weeks later another blog post called Highlighting content creators in search results stated that author attribution would be added to the search results pages.

This feature is powered by the authorship markup which we announced two weeks ago. We hope as more authors link to their content, it will improve your search experience and the quality of content being created on the web.

Authors, Attribution and Snippets

People develop preferences for certain content creators. There is no need to look further than traditional media like books and movies for examples of this behaviour. Selecting content by author is about trust and choosing a style and view you prefer. On the Internet most methods of content discovery, from search to social media, draw more attention to the publisher of a piece or the platform than the author.

Trust in exploration and selection of information is skewed heavily towards the source, be it a link from a friend or a listing in an aggregator or a search tool, and the publisher who provided the space for it online. Most of the time the author is invisible at the point where the user decides what to click on.

Google seems to think that authorship and attribution are important. Solid attribution is a real issue online in an environment where it is increasingly separated from its origin. Tying individual identity to work has potential for authors developing their personal brand or apps collating an individual’s work for easy consumption. It will be interesting to see how author attribution and the tools to make it happen in search will affect other personal aggregators as online content consumption becomes even more separate from the sites that host it.

Google+ Project

Reading through the features list, nothing stands out as revolutionary, but that’s OK, because this does not actually matter. Google+ seems to be aimed at refining tools and features that already exist in other networks. +Circles appear to mirror Diaspora’s Aspects (you add people by dragging and dropping on both too), topic-focused groups will be called +Sparks, and +Hangouts look interesting, almost like a video IRC channel. +Mobile and +Huddle look like the real point of difference for Google+ in a market dominated by Facebook. A better mobile experience and well-executed group messaging are both areas in which Google+ can sidestep their competition.

Google’s “mobile first” approach is potentially Google+’s best chance of success, and their love affair with web-based applications will probably be seen in a polished browser-based product. However Google+’s biggest problem in gaining engaged users is other networks. The more connected a user is in an existing social network, the higher the cost of switching to a new platform.

Jumping on the Social Bandwagon

Joining the Social Bandwagon

This does not mean that Google+ and its range of services can’t become someone’s ‘as well as’ rather than ‘instead of’. Facebook’s galleries didn’t stop people from using Instagram, and Twitter seems to be doing OK even though Facebook has the Wall. A solid mobile experience providing services Facebook either doesn’t offer or doesn’t do very well, like mobile sharing and group messaging, is Google+’s biggest opportunity.

Google+ isn’t likely to become 750 million people’s primary social network anytime soon, but there is a good chance that if it delivers something genuinely useful it’ll become one of the many other social tools we use. Google+ won’t replace Facebook, but this doesn’t automatically mean it will fail either. After all, how many people use just one social network?

Schema.org and Google's +1 Strawman Deathmatch

Button versus Standards for Blogger Attention

On launch, the +1 button got the larger share of attention, while the Schema.org project kicked off in relative obscurity. Which is a shame, because it isn’t often that the two major search engines (and Yahoo!) agree on something, sitemaps being the last time. That they have all agreed on a standard for organising information that they will all follow is significant in itself. It is also interesting that their markup has been promoted ahead of WC3′s microdata standards.

Historically each search engine has developed their own markups to create a more semantic search experience, such as Yahoo!’s now defunct Searchmonkey and Google’s microformats. Other services like Google Base and their Maps product also produced the same user experience, by making it easier to organise information in a meaningful way in the results page.

Richer Content in the Search Results

Google is now:

…able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

Google Flights

And Bing is talking about how:

Consumers benefit from this effort by experiencing much richer search experiences (see example below) across a much broader set of publishers.

Bing Film Times

The Search Engine as a Portal

As well as making the content on a site easier to categorise, microformat projects like Schema.org will probably also continue the trend towards a more portal-like search experience. With publishers providing more content to be displayed within the search results themselves and search engines facilitating this trend through supporting it in both organic and paid listings, mobile and otherwise, the Search Engine Results Page is as much a destination as content discovery aid.

Living in a Fishbowl

When certain Queensland Association for Healthy Communities (QAHC) ads were pulled from bus stops around Brisbane this week, my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with protests, jokes, demands that the ads be put back and a…

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au