Analysis & Goal Development for Leveraging Social Technologies – If you don’t know what your destination is it can be very difficult to get there.  We’ve seen countless examples of people jumping into Facebook and Twitter only to get frustrated with lack of results.  Evaluating what can be accomplished and then setting goals is a critical element to get started.

Assemble a Social Tech Team – The online social movement has connected all of us together and given everyone a voice.  You should involve the right people in your company to take part of your organization’s voice.  There is a technology component, a marketing component, a human resources component and others.  Effective social marketing online involves more than just the marketing team.

Creation of Governance Policy – There are a number of possible negative factors that need to be controlled. For example, since any employee can now talk online to two billion other people with the stroke of a key, it is a good idea to document rules around how employees can speak on behalf of the organization (if at all).

Integrating Social Tech with your Web Properties – Since social tech normally provides a conversation and connection that is much more frequent than a website visit, you need to ensure a smooth integration with all your web properties, including your website.  Your web properties have a much better ability to archive information and provide transaction capabilities. Connecting the all together will achieve greater results.

Build Awareness & Education Among Your Employees – Social tools and Web 2.0 have created an exploding amount of content to be delivered to, and through, the Internet.  Continual learning and access to information faster than your competitors is not a luxury or option at this point. It can be a matter of career survival. Creating an efficient and disciplined process for your employees to tap into such massive information sources will raise their individual career IQ’s, and collectively, the IQ of the whole organization.

Integration with Sales Process – You might sell an expensive complicated product or service through sales people with long sales cycles.  On the other hand, your sales process may take place in a retail store for a few dollars at a time.  Either way, social tools can be used to improve the close rate you are experiencing.  Socially Facilitated Selling and Socially Directed Buying are methods that capitalize on social technology tools that improve your sales performance and revenues.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) Process – Your personal reputation and that of your organization will forever be shaped by what other people say about you online. The collection of what they say will sway others toward doing business with you, or without you. Most people vastly misunderstand and under-estimate how critical an online reputation is going to impact success or failure. Ignorance or neglect will not save you if people talk about you online.

Crowdsourcing – Many people think social tools are only used to generate revenues though marketing and lead generation. Crowdsourcing is a perfect example of how social can be used to lower costs. By contracting work out to the “crowd”, you can often get tasks done cheaper, faster, and with more innovation than you are getting today. Learning to harness it before your competitors will give you an advantage in the market until they catch up.

Measurement & ROI Process – Much has been written on the difficulty of measuring all the ways that social connections can be a benefit. With that said, there are specific things that you can measure that will enable you to at least infer an ROI, if not prove it outright. Measurements can also be used to show progress and help identify the drivers of success.  Don’t end up like others – wasting huge amounts of resources going in the wrong directions, or making mistakes without even knowing why.

Assembling the Organization’s Social Technology Tools – There is likely not a person in the world that has a full inventory of all the social tools available. There are new tools coming on the market literally every day. There are also tools that have capabilities that most people are unaware of.  In order to be organized about how we implement social tools, you must be organized about what the tool set is and advertise that across the organization.

Social Technologies Security & Regulations – It is unwise to get people excited about using social tools without teaching how to use them safely. You will often hear the IT department talking about their concerns over the security dangers inherent in free social tools, and they have good reason. Social applications have now replaced email as the most dangerous to opening the doors for bad guys to reach a computer and steal information.

Summary – The most important thing to understand about Social Media/Technologies is that it must be woven into the very fabric and strategy of the organization. This is not a separate effort that is done one time. These are a collection of new tools and processes that need to have a strategy of their own, specific people that hold the responsibilities for managing them, and measurement systems so that we can gauge the level of success or failure.  The value of social technologies should grow over time as you continue to find new ways to leverage the new tools and methods that are born.

This looks interesting...

Then it happened.  You know, you’re moving right along and then the navigation is gone.  I guess there is an over-estimated amount of text for this slide, which has pushed the nav out of sight and usability.  There’s no scroll bar, my scroll wheel doesn’t work, and I can’t select text and drag down.  Hmmn.  I guess I’m done with this now.

This unfortunately is more common than is aware of, particularly with popped windows that want to create the feeling of a sideshow and restrict scroll bars frequently.  With active awareness of the data created from Google Analytics, I have a feeling this problem could have already been corrected.  I don’t mean to pick on Slate – they have great content and I appreciate what they do, but this is a classic example.

Web usability isn’t just about eye tracking and tendencies, it’s about people being actually able to use, in the most basic form, your website.

Popped Window

With some investments in time in Google Analytics, this type of issue could have possibly been spotted.  For example, I’m sure the data would tell us that a greater percentage of sessions ended on the fourth slide, alerting us of a potential usability issue or problem.

Hmmn.

Through Google Analytics, this type of situation could have been spotted for automatically and drawn the attention of the appropriate person.  It’s also worth mentioning that you can navigate through the sideshow by clicking on each image, but if I begin my navigation through a particular convention and then it’s no longer accessible I get confused and generally leave.  I would submit that most others would as well – but I’d be curious to compare the data with my opinion.

We’ve searched, and found.  If we don’t find exactly what we’re looking for, we have a decision to make.  Do we change the search term in general or perhaps make it more specific?  Research shows us that over the years we have done both.

In 2000 I might have searched for “pizza Blacksburg Virginia”.  In 2010 if I want pizza I search for “pepperoni pizza specials 23221”.  Why?  Because in the last decade we’ve all grown more and more accustomed to being able to find what we are specifically looking for.  If the search is too specific we can always make it more general – but this model has flipped as usage and growth of the internet has taken place.

Take a look at the average amount of keywords per search query over the last few years. Between 2004 and 2005, 1 and 2 word search terms comprised more than 50%.  Since January of 2009, more than 50% of all search terms are 3 words or more.  Not surprisingly, research also tells us that user satisfaction increases with the length of a given search term.  People know that they can look for whatever they want and most likely find it.

Keywords per Search

The implications involved with this to me aren’t always apparent to most business owners.  To me, this is what that means for any business (especially niche businesses or B2B): whatever you do – it’s no longer a niche because the world has the ability to look for exactly what you do at any moment – and they are!  If you have one single competitor, you should probably look into making sure you are in front of the people that are looking for you regardless of how your business has been successful in the past.

Sources: http://ils.unc.edu/~dianek/belkin-sigir03.pdf

http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog

Your billboard, television, print, and radio consultants will most assuredly provide you with metrics relating to visibility and penetration, making broad assumptions relating to conversions or actual sales.  But at the end of the day most business owners that I talk to answer with “I’m not sure” when I ask them what their ROI is for their creative advertising.  Now I’m not here to say you shouldn’t be investing in creative advertising; for most businesses the right portfolio should really be the goal.

A lot has been lost when it comes to the argument between web advertising and creative advertising.  Creative consultants say that web advertising is expensive and complicated.  Web consultants say that creative isn’t accountable and can also be extremely expensive.  I’m here to say that business owners need to come to terms with the strengths of both.  Make a decision to effectively manage the risks involved and diversify your portfolio (just like any other investment).

If I know that television advertising isn’t going to provide me an exact ROI for my dollar, but I know it helps grow my business, that’s fine.  I’m not saying any traditional business should be doing 100% web or 100% creative; my submission would be to decide how much of your portfolio you want to be accountable and how much of it you want to be simply “proven”.  Come to terms with your comfort level regarding how measurable you’d like your investments to be and make smart decisions.