Social Media Engagement

One of the reasons that I enjoy writing blog posts is that it helps me better organize and sort my thoughts. When posts resonate with the readers or followers and as conversations unfold, further understanding ensues. One of the things we have been grappling with internally is engagement, and does that mean that we have achieved success with our clients because we added (10) twitter friends every month, or does that mean we failed because we re-purpose content on a blog post in order to meet a blog quantity metric.  Frankly, it is neither, and sometimes we all miss the point of the Real Value of Engagement, and the order in which it even occurs, which is sometimes different for different clients.

Social Media Engagement

Social Media Explorer and friend Jason Falls recently penned post titled , What is Engagement and How Do We Measure It, that attempted the question, but it seems there are a variety of answers, depending on who you ask.

One of the most powerful business objectives social media can deliver is consumer engagement. At least that’s what all the social media advocates tell you, right. But what exactly is “engagement,” how do you measure it and why is it all of a sudden the holy grail of marketing?

Frankly, engagement is just a bullshit term made up to apply to making people do something in the online (or offline) space. Sixty years ago engaging a customer meant you said, “Hi. Wanna buy some stuff?” They said, “Sure, whatya got?” Then they bought something.

Jason points out in his post, It’s always about the bottom line to the people who sign the checks. We tend to agree here at Digital Sherpa, and have a saying that If You Aren’t Selling More Stuff to More People for More Money, Then Your Social Media Campaign is Just a Hobby. That tends to get the Social Media Purists in a bit of an uproar, but it really is the bottom line. Sometimes it even gets our own staff in an uproar as they too can tend to cling to a self imposed need to be right.

There a zillion and one ways to engage with your customers and clients, and we will start to cover some of those with a couple of examples.

What to Measure; Hard to go Wrong with Results

As simple as it sounds, I tend to gravitate toward results. I am not always the most tactful guy in the room, so delivering sustainable results has helped me immensely throughout my career. Social Media Marketing, frankly any type of marketing, can be a little vague. One of our clients, Paragon Properties, a regional apartment operator in SE Michigan with about 7,500 units engaged us to help them with their internet marketing and to Expand Their Digital Footprint.

Rather than starting with adding facebook fans, twitter followers and the like, we started with Increasing Web Presence. According to studies, we continue to read that over 80% of consumer interactions w/ a brand start in a search box. If that is the case, don’t you wnat your business showing up in search results?

That is exactly where we started with Paragon, and we delivered. We started the project in September of last year, and after (106) blog posts and several web site optimization tweaks, here are January, Year over Year Results

Web Traffic Increase       93.44 % Increase

Page View Increase         112.47% Increase

But if you are the check signer, do you really care about web traffic increase? I have done enough of this to know though, that with those kind of increases, actual physical traffic in the door had to increase, and so it was no surprise when the company president phoned to tell us they experienced their highest traffic and rental month in January that they have had in the last six months! Being in SE Michigan, with the highest unemployment in the nation, helping the client have the largest traffic month in six months in January is of real benefit, and makes renewing the contract a shoe in.

Next post, we will cover another client, Harvest Power, and their specific goal is to build a following first, and we will outline how we soared past 1,000 relevant twitter followers on our way to 2,000 followers in weeks, not months.

So, What are you looking with Engagement?

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.

It’s Not About the Tablet, and Everything About the Experience

A few  things that Robert  Scoble expects from Steve Jobs Apple presentation today, differnt form Steve Ballmer’s recent pitch

The use cases I’ll be watching for are:

1. Classroom. Steve will tomorrow show off a textbook of the future. One where there isn’t just text and photos like in the textbooks that I grew up in, but ones where there’s augmented reality. Where 3D objects, maps, and videos pop off the page ready to be interacted with by the user. A company named Metaio has already shipped a book that does this, but Steve Jobs will bring these capabilities to the masses.

2. The Couch. TV is about to radically change. Imagine sitting on a couch, looking at a new virtual TV guide like the very cool Clicker, seeing a cool video on YouTube, then flinging that video up to your big screen. Or, let’s say you are watching what your few hundred Facebook and Twitter friends are sharing tomorrow morning from the Apple keynote in real time and you point at one of the videos to play it. Using a service like Redux you can already do that tonight! No need to wait for Apple to show it off, but Steve Jobs will make this integrated media experience cooler and easy for non-geeks to do. Tonight look at Boxee, it has been shipping for months what Apple will bring to the masses with the new tablet.

3. The car. Yeah, you can’t text in the front seat of the car in California, but come on, if you had an always connected slate wouldn’t you find a way to mount that to read Tweets to you like Buzzvoice does, or show you a Google Map, or use Waze to report traffic conditions to others. But put the tablet in the back seat, and it becomes an entertainment device for the kids. I already see how valuable that is. This is where Jobs will bring out a few new games that will let tablet owners play against each other, so my kids in my car could play against friends in their cars on a long road trip, or on the way to school, etc.

4. The coffee shop. OK, most humans still love visiting their local coffee shop, checking in on Foursquare, and then sitting down with a magazine or a newspaper. But watch as Jobs makes those things come alive and do stuff that a Kindle just can’t do. Videos, augmented reality again, games, graphics that move and flow, charts that show up-to-the-minute info from Skygrid, which already is way better than any financial newspaper printed on dead trees.

5. The airport/airplane. I flew in a rich guy’s private plane a few weeks back. What did he have in the cockpit? An Amazon Kindle. No, not to read newspapers or Tweet or anything stupid like that. He had all the airport charts loaded on his Kindle. But, he showed me how weather maps use color and he wasn’t able to display those on the Kindle. OK, OK, there aren’t enough rich guys in the world for that use case to matter, but what about those of us who sit back in coach? Well, how about showing off how Tripit will help you find a better seat when you buy your ticket, or how it’ll warn you if your plane is running late, etc? Yeah, not to mention that watching a movie on a Tablet will be a lot more comfortable than watching it on a laptop, and there’s lots of game scenarios, etc, that would be fun to see him demo here.

6. Healthcare. Tablets make a HUGE amount of sense in healthcare. Remember Epocrates, the iPhone app that Steve Jobs’ own health team helped influence? Now imagine they came out on stage and showed off their new version which has much better integration with your entire health chart.

Social Media Marketing; Your Blog is the Center Hub

We have written before that the Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed. No longer does buying a larger block of advertising work so well at increasing sales. If you harness Social Marketing, it can have an extraordinary reach for your product or business.

But Where to Start

Glenda Watson Hyatt has a great graph over on her blog titled Mapping My Social Empire, and does a nice job of illustrating how her blog is the center of her media empire with seven smaller territories

The directional numbers represent Glenda’s actions

1. Manually Tweet the blog post, bring readers back to the blog
2. New blog posts are automatically added to facebook
3. Tweets are fed automatically to facebook
4. LinkedIn profile brings readers to the blog, it theory
5. Videos posted to You Tube bring people to the blog
6. Manually Stumbling posts brings readers to the blog
7. Blog posts are automatically sent to email subscribers
8. TweetMeme on the blog enables readers to share the post easily
9. TweetMeme is also embedded in the email broadcast

Your Blog is the Center of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

The above referenced is a pretty solid plan to increase and expand your digital reach. If you use this strategy consistently, your digital footprint will expand over time. the key though is consistent posting of relevant content.

The good news about all of this is, it really isn’t all that complicated. If you are a start up or a small business you can do it yourself. These Internet marketing services can also be outsourced. Either way, both take time, and creating a Long Tail doesn’t unfold overnight.

Google Juice and Social Media Marketing

A proven strategy for Moving the Google Needle is Consistent Content, which starts with a Content Strategy Plan. Dan McCarthy in his post titled A Case Study in Building Google Juice lays out how consistent posting, with relevant copy can and will  serve up some of that famed Google Juice.

Dan points  out some flawed thinking surrounding the Google Juice and Internet Marketing debate;

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1..

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubnerpoints out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Content Strategy

Valerie Maltoni, over at Conversation Agent lays out a the importance of a Content Strategy.

Static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it’s still very early days. We’re trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it’s activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn’t kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company’s hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search – for answers
(2) sharing – of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don’t – by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs Are the Cornerstone of  Your Digital Footprint

As both Valerie and Dan point out, a company blog is an excellent tool to Expand Your Digital Footprint, and create Google Juice. While your individual approach for your business may differ, the fundamentals are mostly the same.

Think about this, most companies create a web site, and then sort of forget about it. That doesn’t work for Google, as they are scouring the web for fresh content regularly. A blog, which is just another web site allows you to easily update content easily.

We would love to here what is working for you, and what may have been a challenge,

Yelp Ratings Virtually Showing Up on Your Door

So, If you are thinking you can avoid those Ratings and Reviews, think again, they are now showing up literally on your front door. John Jantsch penned an article over on his blog titled Yelp, Changing the Local Game Some More

The image below is a screengrab from my iPhone as I am pointing it down a street. The phone is using an augmented reality feature of the  Yelp! iPhone app called Monocle. What your seeing is that as I point the camera at a location Yelp! reviews pop on the screen. I can click through or simply choose to skip that shop I was going to go into based on the slew of two star reviews. If this image doesn’t get your attention that reviews on sites like Google Maps and Yelp! are important then nothing will.

Yelp! also added a “check in” feature so people using the app can note when they visit a location. At some point this information will become very valuable and expect Yelp! to build advertising opportunities around check ins – on your 10th visit to a coffee shop you get a free drink coupon, for example. This could be bad news for location games  Foursquare and Gowalla.

So How Do You Feel About That

So, now anyone can see those reviews and ratings pasted virtually on your property, building and place of business. And, You can’t remove them or do much about it. How does that make you feel. If you have a crappy business model, I would guess you are worried.

But what about the shop thats is doing it right, be it an apartment community, a restaurant, a baker or an auto mechanic, this is like having virtual customer testimonials. Take advantage, get involved with Yelp, start to build your Digital Footprint, Why would you wait any longer?

ApartmentFinder.com has recently launched a new cool social media integration feature where any of their advertisers can have their Yelp reviews displayed on their property details pages.

Talk Directly to the Top Gun at Yelp

In an effort to dispel some of the fears Geoff Donaker, the COO at Yelp, has agreed to participate in a joint webinar with NCI on February 5th  for anyone to hear directly from Geoff and the team at Yelp about how their product works and their understanding of how rental prospects use their site

This webinar is FREE, and you can sign up here, Don’t miss this one friends. We are expecting a big turnout for the event and most importantly to see what kind of questions our industry has for the guys at Yelp.

Commercial Real Estate Professional Leverages Social Media Tools

Posted by: Adam Japko, ajapko@nci.com

It has been a busy season for us at DigitalSherpa releasing industry focused social media service programs helping both local and national businesses harness the social web as part of their marketing programs.  As we were preparing for last week’s release of CRE (Commercial Real Estate) Sherpa, we discovered John Reeder, a local commercial real estate professional associated with Sperry Van Ness in Southern California. 

John has a really fine commercial real estate blog.  You can check it out here.  It is an impressive centerpiece for his overall social media campaign on several fronts:

1) There are not that many commercial real estate blogs to begin with.  This is one of the reasons that we introduced CRE Sherpa to help the industry leverage the available tools that can drive their personal and business brands like John is.  John is breaking new ground and is an early adopter in the CRE space.

2)John has integrated other social identities, like Twitter, and has also leveraged some good tools on his blog such as Disqus Comments.  

3)His posts are regular and frequent, a key to a good social platform and engaged following.  In addition, he is providing a “News Dump” that he powers that includes CRE content from around the web.

Most interesting of all to me, as a hungry learner on how and why businesses begin leveraging powerful returns from social media participation, was John’s starting point thinking found on his “Who Am I” page:

Why am I blogging?  Good question.  I don’t know for sure, but here is what I suspect:

30% because I am a shameless self promoter, but corporate websites are a poor venue for random thoughts about the market.  I see the power that having an online professional persona has had for my blogger heroes (Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) and it seems like leveraging an online presence is a no brainer for a CRE professional.

40% because I always end up creating a bunch of charts and graphs, and I figured I may as well post them on the internet so that 6 visitors a month can look at them.

15% because I wish there was a really good commercial real estate blog.  I’m skeptical as to whether this site will be the really good blog I am hoping for, but it never hurts to try.  Investment real estate gets very little good coverage in the mainstream press (as in journalists do not understand investment real estate, not that it gets bad press), so the internet seems like a natural place to be able to read thoughtful commentary on the market.  But I guess I don’t really see it online either.

25% because I believe that we are nearing the next sea change that will affect the way that we conduct business.  Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are only starting to influence the way we conduct business.  I see this trend accelerating as the tools become more useful.  So I want to have my boat in the water when this sea change happens.

This is a common and prevalent perspective that new businesses or personal bloggers embrace when they begin deploying social media tools.  They have something to say, figure there is an opportunity to be heard, and there is little to lose besides some time trying it.  As you can see, John figured only about 6 visitors a month would show up and see his charts; and I am sure he was only half kidding when he wrote this as he was probably preparing to launch his blog.

It is not clear to me how long John has been at it.  I can’t find an archive on the blog.  But, his results have been impressive.  First, traffic to the Real Property Alpha blog is substantial.  According to Compete reporting, the site has been averaging 2500 t 4500 unique visitors for several months.

In addition, John has been active on Twitter and has about 480 followers and is on more than 20 lists of real estate related twitters.

The traffic results and engagement that John is driving around his content marketing effort is impressive, but not out of the ordinary for local businesses that approach the social web systematically.  The amount of web benefits that most social media participants see far outstrips the returns they previously experienced with more traditional tactics for driving traffic to their web sites.

I have not met John Reeder in person yet, but I have an impression of him as a smart CRE professional and somebody that I would turn to if I was looking for advice in Southern Cal CRE.  That’s the power that John has unleashed.  And it is doubly impressive that he has accomplished this in a marketplace that is under leveraging the power of the social web to date.

Social Media Marketing: facebook news

One of the things that make the digital world so fascinating is the ability we all have to Share Content with our  Community of Interest Sharing can consist of our own content or others content we finding interesting, engaging and of value.

Facebook Makes Sharing Easier

As reported by Mashable on their blog titled Facebooks Version of the Re-tweet has Arrived

It appears the feature is live for everyone. To try it, just go to a friend’s posted item in your news feed, click “share,” and you’ll see a “via [your friend’s name]” (with an option to remove it). Once shared, the item will appear on your profile, with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feeds, creating the viral loop that is the Twitter retweet.

It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds, and we will keep you posted of what we see and hear, and how it affects your Internet Marketing Strategy. We sure would like to here your comments on this too.

Does increased web traffic result to increased sales?

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going surrounding web traffic and apartment communities!

Here is Jennifer’s post;

Measuring Web  Traffic

This topic came up on the January 5^th blog talk radio Apartment Marketing Gone Digital. I was inspired by the comment made in relation to traditional property tours.  As an industry we have a standard expectation that if a certain number of prospects walk through the door we expect our teams to close and lease a certain amount of apartments, thereby know how much traffic we need to generate to reach our occupancy goals.  However, how do we measure our website traffic? How much traffic do I need to generate to my property website to secure a lease?

Apartment operators and owners need to answer these questions for their business, and the way to measure website leads will vary from company to company depending on the marketing of their websites and the way the sites themselves are organized.  For PCMG the property websites are both for prospects and residents.   Based on the dual roles for our sites, when it comes to generating leads we look solely to new visits to our site that resulted in an online guest card.  We found that as a company 5% of new visitors completed a guest card.  We had one site as low as 1% and one as high as 10%, but the majority hovered around 5%.   Five percent sounds low until you put it in the perspective that our average number of new visitors to our website is 237.

This information generated a new set of questions.  How can I make 10% the standard?  What did my site that hit 10% do differently?  Was the traffic generated from different sources than my other properties?   Answer these questions and you now know what sources deserve the most resources allocated to them.  There are so many mediums that can be utilized to push traffic to your site it is paramount to determine where your time and money should be spent.

I urge you to start measuring today!  Complete an analysis that is appropriate for the purpose of your site.   As an industry we have to start measuring the effectiveness of our sites in order to progress and continue to take online leasing to the next level.  If we don’t have a measure for our online efforts, we will never know the extent of their success.

Your Customers are armed with a Media Arsenal

Why Should You Care About Twitter

I have heard the line from sportsman, Fish Where the Fish Are, and that also rings true for Social Media Fishing. Perhaps that seems self explanatory, however when we talk to small and mid size business they frequently question the validity of twitter, and sometimes rightfully so, who cares what someone is doing right?

Well, if it is your taco shop, (insert any business) you just gained a whole lot of free marketing, and customer loyalty as outlined in the below listed post

This was posted by one of our bloggers over at The Urbane Life Blog, and it really illustrates just how a Twitter Exchange occurs. The general gist is the blogger, Erica Finley is a really passionate and frequent patron of Qdoba, and she knew something wasn’t right. But the whole underlying piece here is how quickly you can get valuable information from your core customers, IF You Are Listening.

Here is part of the story, and the Twitter Exchange

On a seemingly ordinary visit to the Royal Oak location, I ordered my chicken 3-Cheese Nachos, just as I have during my past trips to the famous Mexican grill. But instead of ladling the queso goodness into the bowl as they always have, the staff member put it in a tiny cup typically reserved for guacamole, put the tortilla chips in the bowl, and proceeded to pile the chicken and shredded cheese on top of the chips.

My deer-in-headlights reaction was reflexive and impossible to hide. I felt betrayed. How could my beloved Qdoba so callously change one of their signature dishes, the very reason I became so loyal in the first place?

For those without the inside scoop, there have always been two ways to order your nachos: chips on the side, with all of your ingredients in a separate bowl (i.e. the right way), or the all-in-one approach, with the queso, salsa, meat and other toppings poured over the top. I had always rejected this option, as it is more difficult to eat and results in soggy chips.

But this new set-up was a violation of both options. I easily got less than half of the queso that I typically did, and it required me to dip a chip covered in chicken and shredded cheese into a tiny cup of melted cheese. It was a mess.

I immediately but politely questioned the new method. The manager apologized profusely and said he had already experienced a backlash from other customers. He said it was a corporate decision to construct them differently, and his hands were tied.

And so I did what any social media enthusiast would do – I turned to Twitter for help.

Note The Twitter Exchange

Another thing to remember friends, Your Customers are armed with a Media Arsenal, cameras, cell phones, videos and laptops and can distribute and augment content in a flash as you will note below;

I was already following @QdobaMexGrill and knew the staff member who manages the account was Doug. So I tweeted my plea, complete with a Twitpic of my meal for evidence:

Doug responded less than two hours later, at almost 10 p.m.

To which I responded:

Doug responded to my tweet with a direct message. Note the time: 11:49 p.m.

My response:

I had also taken to the Qdoba corporate Facebook page to express my frustrations in a tongue-in-cheek, but to-the-point “letter” to Qdoba.

It was there that Doug kept me updated on the progress of the issue. On December 4, I was told that he had forwarded my issue to the Operations Team, who would determine how to address the problem. Then on December 9, I was informed that a communication was sent to all of the Michigan restaurants the week prior, instructing stores to continue honoring “chips on the side,” at the request of its guests.

On December 12, I decided to test the Royal Oak location. I was skeptical. What if they hadn’t gotten the memo?

Lo and behold, it was back to business as usual, and the glorious meal I had grown to know and love was mine once more. I tweeted to Doug about my enthusiasm:

Just a few short hours later, a response.

It was definitely in the company’s best interests to resolve my issue. Losing me as a brand ambassador would mean lost revenue, not to mention the damage that might be done by word-of-mouth both online and off if I shared my story.

But they didn’t have to help me. And they did. Which means they get it. They understand the tremendous customer service power that Twitter houses, and how providing value to followers on the site helps build the Qdoba brand. Just one of many shining examples of a company using social media to get things done.

Follow Qdoba Mexican Grill on Twitter @QdobaMexGrill.

Next Page »