FREEDyourMind

Yes, You Can Calculate ROI for Social Media Efforts

Know what you know. Know what you don't know. I say it all the time to the people who work at ForeSee Results. And while those of us using social media to market our businesses know A LOT about how well it's working, we have virtually no information about the actual impact of social media marketing on our bottom lines

• We know how many tweets mentioned us or our competitors (but we don’t know if the people who are mentioning us or reading about us are buying)
• We know how many “likes” we have on our Facebook page (but not if they are more likely to visit a store than non-Facebook fans)
• We know how many people visit and comment on our own blogs
• We know what our customers and prospects are talking about (but not whether chatter contributes to dollars)

In short, we can count, but we can’t measure how social media is actually driving revenue. As the saying goes (you may have heard me say this one or one thousand times), you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
 

But we think we've figure out how to understand the effects of social media on revenue.
 

ForeSee Results uses a scientific methodology created at the University of Michigan to measure customer satisfaction and assess its impact on future behaviors. Using this proprietary methodology, we’ve created a way to link what drives customers to a website, store or call center with what they spend. We can help businesses understand how much revenue is being influenced by social media versus traditional advertising, marketing emails, brand awareness and other factors. We call it the Social Media Value Calculation.
 

It looks like this: we find out what influenced a customer’s visit to a store, website, or call center. Then we find out how much that customer did or didn’t spend. For a brand website, financial institution, nonprofit, B to B, or other non-retailer where there is no purchase, we can tie what drove the customer visit to another valuable, business-specific outcome such as opening a new account, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, etc.

 

Linking these two pieces of data (what drove a customer to a site, store, or call center PLUS what they spent or did as a result) allows for a proprietary Social Media Value Calculation that can help you actually determine social media ROI. You can accurately compare what you spend on social media marketing against the direct revenue it generates.

 

You may find out that social media is a primary influencer of $38 million of your revenue. If you’re spending $1 million on social media, then you’re making a pretty good investment. Or you may find out that social media is influencing $12 million in revenue, and you’re spending $15 million in advertising your social media presence, in which case you have some realigning to do.

 

The point is that you don’t know until you ask your customers, measure, and run the analysis. Do it in a smart, thoughtful way using the Social Media Value Calculation, and your customers will tell you everything you need to know about where to invest to get the most traffic, purchases, and loyalty.

 

We have a slightly longer version of this blog post available for download on our website as an executive brief, and of course I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.

 

So what questions do you have about how this works?

 

 

Announcing a Beautiful, Bouncing . . . New Technology!

ForeSee Results is proud to announce our latest innovation, CS SessionReplay, introduced today at eMetrics in San Jose.

CS SessionReplay is a brand new technology that lets you record and watch actual site visitor sessions in our Online Portal, enabling you to extend the benefits of your ACSI-driven satisfaction analysis of key visitor segments down to the individual respondent level. In other words, let satisfaction data and open-ended comments show you which sessions will be useful and relevant, and then watch what your users are actually doing on your site, including their mouse clicks and movements, page scrolling, form entry, and all interactivity with a website (all while adhering to the strictest privacy and security standards). It even skips over idle time so that you're just watching the good parts, just like TiVo for your website!

Here's a link to watch a video showing you how it works. Caution: it starts playing as soon as you click the link, so turn your volume down if you don't want to blast everyone away! It's about a minute long. CS SessionReplay Video. (Look closely and you may just see Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson!)

The clients that are already using it are finding it's a great way to get usability insights without the cost or artificial environment of a usability lab. The addition of CS SessionReplay to existing customer satisfaction analytics and usability services allows ForeSee Results to provide a single, unified platform which links recordings of visitor sessions, customer satisfaction scores and impacts, comments and feedback about a site, and third-party data--all in one place--which is good news for companies who want to simplify without losing functionality or analytics capabilities.

We bought the technology from Nitobi last year and have been working furiously to integrate it with our platform and get it ready for prime time. It finally is, and we couldn't be prouder. Great job to everyone on our technology team and product team, who did an amazing job creating a valuable solution for companies struggling in a recession.

Is Securing Access To Our Websites Locking Us Out?

I just had an interesting experience today trying to access my credit card online.  When logging on I got prompted to set up a "security shield".  Now, that sounds like a good thing.   But after answering a number of questions, picking an image and a sound, I can only imagine that this security shield will most likely end up shielding me from my own account. 

Is this really the best answer we can come up with?  There must be a better way to secure our access to critical and private information on the Internet.  What about security tokens, password challenge devices and other technology solutions.  Now, we don't want to end up with a situation where we have a token for each site we access, but can you imagine how simple (and secure) things would be if we had a token that could work with any website?  No more questions about our favorite pet, etc.

It is time for industry standardization of a more secure and more user friendly solution.

A New Internet ?

Interesting article in New York Times over the weekend. 

Do we need a new internet?  There clearly are major security risks, and believe it or not, we are probably lucky that we haven't had more attacks on the internet.

The idea of a "gated community" is an interesting one.  If you want the security you give up your anonymity while browsing.  Would you be willing to do so?  I would.  I know there will be many privacy advocates that will protest loudly.  But the choice would be yours, in essence you would pick which internet you wanted to access.

There is a ton of effort going on to make the internet safer, one small step at a time.  And these are worthwhile efforts.  But to really fix the problem we will have to think out side of the box.  A better firewall or virus protection program won't solve the problem.  If you can write a program to protect something, someone else can write a program to break it.

What other ideas do you have?  And what should we call this next generation of the internet?

Wow - 15th in the world! Not good.

President-elect Obama, in his Press Conference last Saturday, spoke about how poorly our broadband adoption in the US is and vowed to improve it.  I was shocked that we are 15th in the world.  That is sad.

He went on to say, "Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm President, because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world."

Now I clearly agree that we should have much higher adoption of broadband usage (which means we need broader and cheaper broadband made available).  And clearly, the youth of today are the ones that are the hope for our future competitiveness.  But I think it will take a little more then just getting every child online: we also need to rise above the competition from other countries on Instant Messenger, Facebook, YouTube, etc..  And in my house of 3 boys, we definitely can take on the world in Fantasy Football.

All kidding aside, it is embarassing that we are 15th in the world in Broadband adoption.  Maybe part of Obama's works program will include a national grid of internet accessibility.  This might be a good use of wimax. Eric Peterson's letter to Obama (which was excellent) should have a p.s. added to it on building an accessible internet grid. Also a good reason for a E-Gov Czar (or Chief Internet Officer) to be added to the office of the Government CIO.

Google's Mail Goggles

A recent Google Labs creation is Google Goggles, a feature that is supposed to prevent hasty and poorly-thought-out late-night email messages.  The theory is that it will stop those emails you wish you had never sent after a long night at the bar.  Now I never have that problem.  It works by asking you some math questions before letting the email go out.

So I started thinking, where else could an application like that have value - especially if you can apply it to any decision. 

• Would McCain have selected Palin if he had a version of Google Goggles?
• Would Obama have let himself be at a meeting with William Ayers if he had a version of Google Goggles?
• Would George Bush ... (too many to choose from)
• Would Kwame Kilpatrick (the former Mayor of Detroit, now serving time) have let himself send text messages?.

Was there a time you wish you had Google Goggles?
Was there a time that you wish someone else had Google Goggles?
I would love to hear your best!

Searching Google's Oldest Index

Oh, this is cool! In honor of their tenth anniversary, Google is giving us the ability to search their oldest available index from 2001. Meaning, you can go see what it would have looked like and what search results would have been before and during the absolute explosion of the internet.

Observations:

1. The page looks almost the same! How many online companies have made such minimal changes to branding and site appearance in ten years -- and been as succesful as Google has?

2. In 2001, Google bragged about indexing 1.3 billion web pages. Their index is now well over a trillion unique URLs, and growing by several billion every day. That's a thousandfold increase.

3. For fun, let's compare some search terms from then to now:

"Sarah Palin" in 2001: Your search - "sarah palin" - did not match any documents.
"Sarah Palin" in 2008: about 24,200,000 for "sarah palin"

"Barack Obama" in 2001: 672 for "barack obama".
"Barack Obama" in 2008: 80,400,000 for "barack obama"

"Michelle Obama" in 2001: about 43 for "michelle obama"
"Michelle Obama" in 2008: about 5,160,000 for "michelle obama"

kangaroos in 2001: about 84,300 for kangaroos.
kangaroos in 2008: about 6,240,000 for kangaroos

Iraq War in 2001: about 414,000 for Iraq war.
Iraq War in 2008: about 29,600,000 for iraq war.

"American Idol" in 2001: about 158 for "american idol"
"American Idol" in 2008: about 31,200,000 for "american idol"

"online customer satisfaction" in 2001: about 3680 for "online customer satisfcation"
"online customer satisfaction" in 2008: about 98,700 for "online customer satisfaction"

A search for "Wii" in 2001 turned up results for Willamette Industries and the Wildlife Institute of India. The same search in 2008 turned up results for, well, Wii.

4. Gene Weingarten, a nationally syndicated humor columnist for the Washington Post, coined the term "googlenope" meaning a search term that returns zero results. As soon as it is identified and written about online, it of course automatically becomes a "googleyup." Examples of googlenopes that were googlenopes until identified as such are "ferrari to produce minivan," "finger severed in blogging accident," and "I can't find a starbucks anywhere." You get the idea.

But in 2001, there were quite a few phrases that it's hard to imagine were ever googlenopes:

    * "dumb Paris Hilton" (0 hits in 2001; 971 hits in 2008--now 972!)
    * "fried chicken is healthy" (0 hits in 2001; 450 hits in 2008)
    * "Red Sox won World Series" (0 hits in 2001; ,640 in 2008)
    * "Washington Wizard Michael Jordan" (0 hits in 2001; 97 hits in 2008)
    * "social media websites" (0 hits in 2001; 52,200 in 2008).

5. I couldn't find any examples of things that actually have fewer results now than they did in 2001. I tried out-of-date technologies like VCRs, bankrupt companies like Polaroid, failed products like New Coke. But with a trillion web sites compares to a billion, it's almost impossible that anything would be mentioned less, even if NO ONE is talking about it anymore.

Can anyone find any examples of something that have fewer mentions now than it did 8 years ago?

Are Domain Names Not Intuitive Enough Already?

This is fascinating to me. Google has a tool in beta that allows you to see the top searches in the world (or by region) as well as which searches are gaining in popularity.

A few days ago I looked at the top 10 rising searches in the last 7 days? Eight of them are domain names:
1.       cnn          +50%
2.       you          +20%
3.       hi5           +20%
4.       google      +20%
5.       games      +20%
6.       firefox       +20%
7.       youtube    +10%
8.       you tube   +10%
9.       wikipedia  +10%
10.     orkut        +10%

Why would you go to www.google.com and then type in "google?" Why google "firefox" or "wikipedia" instead of just typing in "wikipedia" into your address bar?

I don't know what "you" is supposed to be. When I googled it, the sponsored result is YouTube. There's also a South African magazine called You. What caused the search term "you" to go up 20% in the last 7 days?

You can also search by region, so the top 10 news and current events search terms in the United States from the last 7 days are:

1.     news        
2.     msnbc    
3.     new york times    
4.     nbc    
5.     wall street journal    
6.     cnn    
7.     washington post        
8.     usa today        
9.     ny times        
10.     fox news

Again, all domain names that shouldn't need to be googled, except for the first one.

The top 10 searches in Michigan are:

1.     news    
2.     free press        
3.     detroit news        
4.     msnbc        
5.     free press detroit        
6.     freep        
7.     new york times        
8.     nbc        
9.     cnn        
10.     wall street journal

Whereas the too 10 searches from California are:

1.     news    
2.     msnbc    
3.     clarin    
4.     new york times    
5.     nbc    
6.     wall street journal    
7.     ole    
8.     noticias    
9.     la times    
10.     cnn    

What's interesting about the California list is that one (possibly two, I guess) of the top 10 search terms is in Spanish, which gives you a sense of just how many Spanish speakers there are in California.

I don't know what you actually DO with this tool other than play around with it. But it is interesting. I would have expected your average internet user to be savvy enough to type in msnbc.com instead of needing to do a google search for "msnbc." But I guess not.

Into the Wild: Web Analytics as a New Frontier

Into the Wild is a bestselling book by Jon Krakauer and a movie made last year by Sean Penn. It's about a young man named Chris McCandless who disappears into the wilderness of Alaska for a planned stay of several months. He had no compass and no map and his only food was a 10-lb bag of rice. McCandless died after a few months alone in a bus in the Alaskan bush; accounts differ on whether he died of starvation or because he was poisoned by some seeds he misidentified.

There are debates about whether McCandless was crazy or stupid or idealistic or heroic, but what seems clear is that he could have easily survived with a few more preparations and a better understanding of what he was getting into. Admirers and detractors alike agree that he didn't have the proper respect for the challenges he was about to face, and that he mistakenly trusted his own instincts above logic and facts.

Bear with me. I promise this is related to web analytics!

Just like hikers and mountain climbers talk about preparedness and proper tools and equipment, those of us working on making successful websites have our own tools and equipment. Using a website to foster online and offline sales, loyalty, and recommendations does not have to be a random attempt filled with educated guesses. There are proven, scientific tools to guide your choices and you can easily determine what kinds of metrics have the greatest ROI and which tools to use for which problems. As they say, when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Somehow this all reminded me again of Eric Peterson's white paper about the ecosystem of web analytics and how to integrate various web metrics for maximum success. I guess the point is that you don't have to be going "into the wild" when you're running a website--you don't have to go out there without proper tools and protection and eqiupment. The right tools will equal success. McCandless would probably succeeded if he'd only had a map.

So while others debate about McCandless' mental health, you can question mine because everything makes me think of web analytics.

Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE: Let's Get Ready to Rrrrrumble!

Remember the days when Internet Explorer had 95%+ of the market.  No more.  Firefox, Safari and now Chrome.  People are reporting that after just a few days of being available as a beta release, it has already surpassed a 1% market share.  WOW -- that is amazing.  Are we that desperate for a new browser?  Can it be that much better then the ones we have today?  Or is it just the magic of Google?

Yet, there are also many negative comments out there as well.  Now, we can't hold the bugs against it, remember it is a beta release.  But more importantly, some are suggestiong that Chrome brings with it many concerns including privacy issues. That joins the recent complaints about Google taking over the content world as well. 

Now Google has always had great technology and innovation.  And not just on search, but from Gmail, to Google Maps, to IGoogle and beyond.  Is Chrome the next great innovation from Google or part of their plan to take over the "internet world"? 

What do you think?