That’s a great starter explanation for anyone who wants to get into social media, but this video by Perry Belcher really starts to get into how you can use social networking and social media, not to make money, but to make friends. This refers back to my article on social media ROI, social media is about building a loyal community. Perry describes social networking as ‘a party’ and that is exactly right. Don’t be that asshole at the party that tries to sell stuff, be that nice guy at the party that invites people to your house (your blog) and provides people will information. Then they might buy off you or refer you to someone that will.

Pow. That’s how you do social media.

Related posts:

1. Measuring social media return on investment
2. 10 reasons why your social media effort will fail

I hope you enjoy this collection of over one hour of infographic videos! If you don’t no what information graphics are Wikipedia describes them as:

Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge.

Thanks to all of the creators.

Creators: Outside Line
Client: Friends of Butter campaign

Butter & Marge: A Tale of Two Spreads from Outside Line on Vimeo.

Creators: Glossy
Clients: Eat Real, Eat Local by the Unilever brand Hellman’s.

Hellmann’s – It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Creators: Feel Good Anyway
Clients: They Might Be Giants

Creators: H5 (French site)
Clients: Areva

Creators: Tomas Nilsson
Clients: School assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red riding hood.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Creators:H5 (French site)
Clients: Royksopp – Remind Me

Remind Me from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

Creator: HuesForAlice
Client: Stop the Big Brother state

Creator: Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit
Client: -

Creator: Jonathan Jarvis
Client: Assignment

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Creator: Superfad.com
Client: Nextel

Creator: Mocro.tv
Client: Health Reform

intro to Health Care Reform Series from MOCRO.tv on Vimeo.

Creator: Quub
Client: What’s the big deal with status updates?

Status updates explained from quub.com on Vimeo.

Creator: Jess Bachman
Client: Mint.com

Creator: Laurie Thinot
Client: “Stay The Same” by Autokratz

Creator: Melih Bilgil
Client: picol.org

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Creator: GOOD magazine
Client: GOOD magazine

Creator: Molly Snowberger
Client: Assignment

Been Caught Stealing: Earmarks Revealed from molly snowberger on Vimeo.

Creator: Ian Lynam
Client: GOOD Magazine

E-Waste PSA from Ian Lynam on Vimeo.

Creator: MAYA Design
Client: MAYA Design

Information from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Creator: Kalimera
Client: -

Mafia spa _ Postal_m@rket from Kalimera on Vimeo.

Creator: FF3300
Client: The writing was in Italian so not really sure…

Venice in Peril from FF3300 on Vimeo.

Sources:
Simple Complexity
Information Aesthetics
Cool Infographics
Smashing Magazine

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It can be pretty hard to measure direct ROI on social media efforts and just as hard to persuade companies that social media is good for them. Just like SEO, social media takes time, effort and iterations of ideas for real benefits to begin to show because the real value of social media is the community that it builds around your product or service. Communities have to be netured to survive and grow and finding quality, loyal followers can be a real struggle. The best way to grow a community is to create something of value and something that your followers will want to come back to again and again. Then give it to them for nothing. That could be the content that you write on a blog or it could be the community itself in the form of a forum or chat rooms.

Jason Falls states that “The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.” While I agree it is difficult to measure the return on investment  of social media there are a number of metrics that can be used to build data and evidence to prove the effectiveness and need for social media.

What are the metrics?

So how do you measure the ROI of social media? Not by seeing how many direct sales you can get from your spammy tweets, that’s for sure. There are several different metrics we can use to measure our social media efforts:

• Paths of your visitors – What consecutive pages are your visitors going to on your site? This shows us what content people are interested in, what content is encouraging vistor engagement and what series of pages lead to sales.
• Traffic - Measure your pageviews, unique visitors, click through rates and the time a user spends on specific pages to also see what content creates the most interest and engagement.
• Referrers – Analyse what sites are sending you traffic – Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc to see which are the most effective at referring visitors to your site.
• Sign ups – Getting sign ups is important as it shows you that those visitors are putting their trust in you as a valuable content or service provider. This could include RSS subscibers, email subscribers, forum members,Twitter or Facebook users etc. Getting sign ups is difficult but is the key to creating engaged users that can’t forget you. There are a number of ways to encourage sign ups such as a Twitter competition or Email only content.
• Sharing – How shareable is your content? How often is your content shared on social bookmarking sites such as digg, stumbleupon, reddit etc and how often do people refer to your content on blogs (trackbacks) or retweet it on Twitter?
• Visitor or user engagement – This is the most important metric as an engaged user is the most likely user to buy your product or service. Engaged users can be measured by blog comments (and length of those comments), forum use (and how often users return to the forum), Facebook page comments or Twitter replies.

Mix all these together and you can analyse and use the data to build up an idea of what people want to hear, what keeps them loyal and what builds discussion therefore creating a strong metric, data based argument for the use of social media. From there you can build a great product or service that you already know your users and community will want.

A loyal user that trusts you to bring quality content and a strong community will be far more likely to buy from you then someone who doesnt know who you are. The key is to provide value, build a community and then sell that community something you already know they will be interested in. It does not matter how many eyes you have on your content if you cannot turn them into paying customers but you have a much greater chance of turning those visitors and loyal content consumers into paying customers if you know what they want.

What’s your ROI of social media?

Related posts:

1. 10 reasons why your social media effort will fail
2. Social media in plain English and how you can use it
3. Brands in public. A total rip-off?

Many companies fail at their social media campaigns and here are ten reasons why yours probably will too:

1. You’ll get bored
2. You’ll start to spam
3. You don’t understand it

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z1aZ7Gs46A

4. You use it as a megaphone
5. You don’t listen
6. You don’t know who’s role it is in the company
7. You don’t provide value
8. All you talk about is me me me
9. You think you’re too good for the little people
10. You don’t tie in all your social networks into one another

Related posts:

1. Measuring social media return on investment
2. Social media in plain English and how you can use it

Twitter spam is getting completely out of control. Let me rephrase that – It’s getting completely out of control for me! Just take a look at my @reply wall! I never realised the extent of the problem until someone tweeted me with a trending topic in the tweet and it got picked up by spam bots quicker than I could block them… It’s been repeated over 50 times in two days now and it’s getting a tad annoying to say the least.

The spam didn’t really bother me to start with, I could deal with blocking the odd bot that followed me now and again, and they wouldn’t bother me anyway and I could ignore the odd DM but now the trending topics are near useless and doing away with these would probably solve a lot of the problems but they are part of the core of Twitter’s success, that shown on events like Michael Jackson’s death.

How do we stop the spam?

There are a number of websites dedicated to the fight against spam on Twitter such as Twitspam.org or stoptwitterspam.com and Twitter themselves insist that they are making progress against spam but I haven’t personally seen much progress at all and until ‘snow leopard’ stops trending I’m going to have to keep the push notification on my phone turned off to stop the damn thing buzzing for every spam @reply!

The best way to deal with spam is to continue to be trigger happy with the block button, I tried to report them to the @spam account but it seemed to just aggravate them and the speed in which the spamming was happening just increased! There are a couple of tools such as TwerpScanner that can give you suggestions of potential spammers or BSers or Topify that gives you the choice to vet your new followers straight from your inbox.

Twitter need to get going with some kind of image recognition that scans avatars for thongs or read tweets that contain the words ‘dirty pics’ and flag up these people. There needs to be community involvement maybe or a better algorithm. Akismet has caught over 12 billion spam messages and it’s time to integrate some of that technology into Twitter.

Will Twitter ever be spam free? No, probably not, but let’s make it bearable again.

Photo: Freezelight

Related posts:

1. 10 reasons why your social media effort will fail

I’m no word class writer. That may come as a surprise to some of you but it’s true. That’s not to say I’m a bad writer, I have an A* in GCSE English that says I’m not, but I just don’t have that pizazz or flare that you see in some bloggers, whether it’s Manchester based web guy Nathan Beck or world renowned web guy Jeffrey Zeldman. Both writers never fail to draw me in and keep me reading whether they are talking about Why Standards Fail or keeping a travel diary. They may have a natural talent for writing or it may be the accumulation of years of hard work and experience but there is an element to their emotive and descriptive writing that I just can’t seem to grasp. Maybe I’m too critical of my own writing but I think I have a long road ahead to build my standard of writing to something that I feel comfortable clicking the publish button, and releasing my writing into the world, without hesitance.

So what has this got to do with SEO copywriting?

SEO copywriting is an art form in itself, it requires skill to craft flowing sentences, imagination to think like your audience and knowledge to know what works. SEO copywriting can do great things to improve your writing skills. You must mix natural language with your keywords, forcing you to think hard about sentence structure and whether what you are writing makes sense. It forces you to write creatively, working over revisions to ensure you have got the perfect piece of text. You must think hard about what your visitors are coming to your site for and how your copy can determine who visits your site.

Obviously SEO copywriting isn’t the magic bullet that it used to be, Brian Clark states that “most of what determines the ranking position of any particular page is due to what happens off the page, in the form of links from other sites” whereas SEO Book CEO, Aaron Wall believes that the way to gain long term optimisation in the search engines would be to “create high quality content that users like that would make a search engine inadequate if it was not ranked.” Essentially the key to SEO copywriting is creating high quality content that people will want to link to. But this is about using the restrictions of SEO copywriting to improve all of your writing online and offline, no matter the context.

Can your creativity thrive in a restricted environment?

Image: Laineys Repertoire

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This has been in the pipeline for over a year now, iterations of designs and drafts of content littering my hard drive but working on other projects and agonising over the small details consequently prevented me from getting anywhere with it. I finally decided it was time to ignore the design and launch a bare(ish) blog to enable me to start creating content with the idea that this would push me to work on the design once I started getting some visitors. So here is my statement to you: I will design, code, and skin this blog with my own bare hands within a 4 month period. This will give me time to work on it while continuing to write and create compelling content at the same time. I think that’s fair?

That would make judgement day the 18th December 2009. Hey, so it will be a nice Christmas present for everyone!

The build and the blog

I will most likely use Elliot Jay Stocks’ ‘starkers’ theme:

Free of all style, presentational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for your projects, as it’s a stripped-back version of the ‘Default’ theme that ships with WordPress.

This will enable me to have complete control of the design and mark up to create a beautiful, valid and standards based website that I can be truly proud of. This will also be a learning experience for me, helping to enhance and build upon my WordPress knowledge as well as my design, content writing, front end, back end and well, everything really. A blog really is an incredible way to build on so many skills.

The blog’s content is going to be a veritable mix of social media, WordPress, web Dev/design, inspiration and my thoughts and ideas. Anything that pops into my head to be honest. This will be my artist’s canvas, experiment lab and personal journal for myself and the community. It will be a document of where I have come from, where I am and where I want to be and will hopefully help me be recognised as a force to reckon with in our humble web industry.

This is where it begins, who knows where it will end?

Image: clickflashphotos

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