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The other night I got to go speak to a great group of Credit Unions about Social Media Best Practices. As I was preparing my presentation, I was happy to find that there is a specific TweetChat exclusively for Credit Unions looking to use social media. What a cool way to connect with your peers on a topic and learn from each other!

If you are not familiar, a TweetChat is usually an organized regular event. The participants have a determined time to ‘meet’ on Twitter and discuss a certain topic. To mark their conversations, they use a hashtag. What you have is a large group chat and you can discuss your topic in real time with people from all over the world.

Why would you want to participate in a Tweet Chat?

1. Network with people like you all over the world – You can attend a Tweet Chat from anywhere. In your specific industry, you may have very different needs, customers, challenges and opportunities. Sometimes the most helpful ideas come from people who understand where you are coming from the best.
2. Establish yourself as an expert and build your network – An idea that may seem obvious to you could have been bogging someone else down for months. Share your experiences with your peers and establish yourself as an expert.
3. Get traffic to your blog and/or website – As you are meeting all these new people on Twitter, you can refer them to blog posts or services you provide around the topic you as a group are discussing. Also, just by networking with new people, you will generate some interest and traffic as they take a look to see who you are and what you are up to.
4. Get more qualified followers – If Twitter is merely a numbers game for you, you are probably not using it to it’s full potential. How many followers you have isn’t as important as WHO those followers are. By participating in a TweetChat, you will meet real people who share your interests, work in your industry, are experienced Twitter users and it will, in turn, boost your number of quality followers.

Participating in a TweetChat

Tweet chats can be whenever. Most are set to particular days and times of the week. Some have the same moderator each week while others cycle through guest moderators for a different feel each chat. Most TweetChats run about one hour.

So how do you find a good TweetChat for you? There is a pretty reliable schedule of TweetChats that you can refer to. Once you try one out, you may find others people like to recommend specifically for the topic you are most interested in.

Where to start?

Some of the more popular business TweetChats are:

• #blogchat, Sundays 9P EST – all about blogging. Mack Collier brings in some great guest moderators. This is a very popular one so be prepared to read a lot of tweets.
• #smallbizchat, Wednesdays 8P EST – for small businesses and startups.
• #B2Bchat, Thursdays 8P EST – a chat specifically for those of us in B2B industries.
• #LeadershipChat, Tuesdays 9P EST – leadership themed.

Some of these chats are more popular than others and keeping up can seem overwhelming. To keep up with a TweetChat you can either just use a Twitter search or if it is a popular one, use the service TweetChat to keep up with rapid tweets.

The first few times may seem a little odd but once you get into the swing of things you will really come to appreciate some of the conversations you have and people you ‘meet’. If you don’t feel like you have anything to say, feel free to linger in a chat until you do. As with all of your social media marketing and content – make sure when you participate you are adding value to the conversation!

Photo credit: opensourceway

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to speak at Social Media FTW here in Portland. Social Media FTW is a nice local conference helping local businesses figure out all this social media stuff. I had the tough task of talk about social media planning, policies and measuring at the end of a long day of great content.

I tried to make it as fun as possible but thought I would take a few minutes to talk about some of the more advanced features we talked about here and give you more resources to get started.

Google’s URL Builder

You may have noticed when you click on a link on a social media site or someplace else, that when it opens in your browser it is much longer. It may contain ?utm and then a bunch of numbers. What that long link is doing is tracking where that link came from, perhaps from what network and campaign. You can do that too!

Using the Google URL Builder you can tag your links with the Source, Medium and Campaign Name of you links and keep track in Analytics how that particular campaign link worked. Take that long link, shorten it with a service like Bit.ly and post it to see how it performs.

Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

By creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics you can create reports tailored to your specific needs. For social media you can put multiple sources together. The example I gave was to aggregate all of the different traffic you have coming from Twitter (even though now we have t.co).

Once you have that segment set up, you can compare how your Twitter traffic is performing versus all of the other traffic from your site etc. This can tell you more about the Twitter users that come to their site, what they are interested in and how engaged they are.

Google Custom Reports

You can create a Google Custom report and just display the information that is most important to you, just the way you want to see it. To set up a custom Social Media Report you can choose the Metrics that are most important to you, then add a Filter to include all of your social media URLs for the sites you are participating on.

Once you have that set up, you will have a Custom Report that just lets you look at that data you want. You can compare social media site to social media site and even compare date ranges (how one month did to the last).

If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube

Multi-channel Funnels

This is so cool (in a nerdy way). Social Media is hard to track the ROI of because often it isn’t the last action someone does before completing a sale or making the deal. It DOES help in the decision making process, in building trust and in getting your content, products and services in front of new eyeballs.

With multi-channel funnels, what you will hopefully be able to do is track each touchpoint that someone had with your website. Maybe they found you on a social network first, then later they Googled you and maybe the final sale was made when they saw your PPC ad, clicked on it and contacted you. With Multi-Channel Funnels, Google Analytics is trying to track that.

With that information you can see all the different places someone came into contact with your website, notice trends in the conversion paths, see where your overlap is and get an idea of how many impressions it is taking for people to convert on your site

For Multi-Channel Funnels to work you need to go to the New Version of Analytics (top right hand corner) and have goals set up on your site to track conversions.

If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube

Social Interaction Analytics

With Social Interaction Analytics you can finally measure the impact of the social sharing buttons on your website. This is also in the new version of Google Analytics. What you are doing is adding some modifications to the javascript Google gives you to put on your site. After this is set up, you can see what social actions are happening on your site and compare that data against itself month on month, quarter on quarter etc.

This one is pretty complicated. Google explains it here, Social Media Examiner explains it a little better here (for us common folks).

There you go! That is enough information to get you into some serious trouble! Thanks so much to everyone who made it to my presentation. The full slides are below. Let me know if you have any questions!

Greetings from Inbound Marketing Summit 2011!

My brain is already crammed with lots of great takeaways from this conference and I still have one more day to go! I thought the best place to start digesting some of what I am learning and hearing is right here on this blog – to share with you!

The biggest takeaways from yesterday are things that we talk about on this blog and in our webinars; what I believe is the future of online marketing. The first is the idea of differentiating yourself from your competition by embracing the uniqueness of your company and the second is offering a personalized online experience with your audience in all the stages of the buying and customer cycles.

Being Different is Hard

Yesterday morning, Youngme Moon started the conference off with one of the most thought provoking sessions of the day. Youngme is the Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School and author of “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd“. She presented the importance of differentiating yourself from your competition. She explains that as we try to keep up with the competition, we end up conforming and becoming more like them. The way to do this, she told us, is to embrace what is different about your brand and don’t be afraid to say “no” when everyone else is saying “yes”.

Youngme talked about Ikea; a huge brand that people LOVE. We all know that Ikea is different, it has a unique shopping experience, the store offers a restaurant, and childcare; what other furniture store does that? People LOVE this store and they tell Ikea how much they LOVE the store but they also offer feedback telling them if they could be a little bit more like XYZ Furniture Store they would love it even more. Youngme explains that by offering something less, Ikea is giving customers more. Ikea is really creating a loyal fan base where they see Ikea as irreplaceable; there is no substitute.

Similar case studies were shared that described different companies’ visions to really stand apart from the competition, be proud and profitable while being different. Although it’s hard and sometimes uncomfortable, Youngme reminded us that in order to get some traction, it requires some friction. Differentiation comes from lopsidedness and from resisting the temptation to “over-listen” to customers. The hardest part of being different, however, is having an idea on how to be different.

Presenting Your Unique Qualities

The idea of presenting uniqueness also came up during a breakout session presented by Bret Peters, a Partner at Fig Leaf Software. He spoke of some case studies where the brand had a unique offer but chose a creative way to present that content to reach their individual marketing goals. One case study that really stuck out to me is how the American Association of Museums changed the way they presented their premium-only content. Previously, the user had no access to see what the premium content was unless they logged in first. To try an increase memberships, American Association of Museums created an internal Google Search and allowed all of their content to be searchable. However, if one of the results was distinguished as premium content, the user would navigate to a log in page. By making this change they saw an 8% increase in membership in the first month!

What makes your brand unique? Are you taking advantage of it and presenting it to your audience in a creative and captivating way? How are you differentiating yourself from your competition without conforming?

Personalization is the Future of Web

One of the sessions yesterday was “Inbound Marketing 2.0″ presented by Brian Halligan, CEO & Founder of Hubspot. He explained the idea behind Inbound Marketing 2.0 is really about creating a “Segment of 1″ as a web experience for each individual user.

At Hall, we talk a lot about developing unique content for all your different audience types. Once you are able to identify who you are talking to, you can speak more intimately to their needs and specific challenges, which, in result, can lead to improved conversion rates. Think about your website and what you know about the audience that visits it. Some people are researching, some are buying, some are even your current customers.

Brian used examples like Netflix and Pandora; where, once you’re logged in, you are given suggested music to listen to or movies to watch based on what you already like. These websites adapt to your own personal preferences. The experience offered makes the user more likely to continue to use these services because they make it easy to consume information that you like.

The idea of “personal experience” also reminds me of when I worked at Walt Disney and helped kicked off the “Year of a Million Dreams.” Throughout the year, cast members sought out a guest and gave them a “dream” or something special. Though it might have been something small like a free cast member pin, the experience was something unique to a single person or family, but made a memorable impact. This is what encourages word of mouth marketing and customer loyalty.

In all your marketing mediums; website, social networks, email, mobile, direct mail, don’t send one broad message. Segment your audience – get as granular as your data allows – be direct and speak to the individual needs of each segment. Think of your website as your “personalization engine” is how Brian Halligan put it. Not only will this likely improve conversions, this will also strengthen relationships between your brand and the customer. From brochureware to interactive experiences, personalization on the web is what we’re moving towards in the future.

What are some ways you can personalize the experience you are offering your audience? Are your sending targeted messages to the right audience?

Lots of good food for thought and I’m sure I’ll be thinking and blogging about these topics more in the future!

Yesterday I spoke to the Mid-Maine Chamber about Social Media for Business and I am putting the finishing touches on my Measuring Social Media presentation for Social Media FTW. Needless to say, I have been thinking a lot about measuring social media, web marketing and even SEO.

Before working at Hall, I worked for a large radio station group. Before the radio station, I worked for a small magazine. In those years of experience I don’t remember clients or advertisers asking for the ROI of their ad. It was just something they did. In the case of radio, they usually were happiest when someone came into their store and said ‘I heard your ad on the radio’.

So why the demand now on ROI for online marketing? I have a few ideas but I will stick to the point – Online marketing is more measurable than any other kind of marketing.

I am a numbers girl. I like them. I could drown in them and with online marketing you have more numbers than you know what to do with.

With web advertising, you can see exactly how many people clicked on your link, went to your landing page or converted on your site.

With SEO, you can see how many people searched for you, whether your ranking for key search terms rises or drops, how much of your website traffic comes from search engines, how many people are linking to your website and so much more.

Social media, the belle of the ball, is being falsely accused of being unmeasurable. There are lots of key data points you can measure in social media.

• Traffic to your site data
• Fan/Follower data
• How often people interact with your content
• How well some content performs over others

So where is all the worry coming from? These days we need to justify our cost and spend with actual results and not just hope. Find the data points that you feel are important to show success and start measuring!

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