Don’t understand online metrics? Then you don’t understand online marketing.

There are too many marketing experts that just simply don’t know how to navigate or use metrics softwares. It’s a tragedy…

The greatest advantage online marketers have over their traditional counterparts is the ability to track and measure almost every interaction digitally. Being able to justify cost increases, new contracts, and resource allocations is what makes online marketing attractive to brands.

If you think you can get away without knowing online analytics inside and out, you’re sorely mistaken.

Here are five basic reasons why you need know and use online metrics when creating online strategy…

1: Data Driven Decisions

How are you making decisions? Is it just by what you feel is right? Are you just using your gut?

Sometimes that’s not the best way to make decisions. You don’t know why something worked and if you just go by what you think is right, it’s harder to recreate or learn from the campaign.

Using data allows you to analyze why something worked. It gives you the option of identifying important markers and to tweak your thought process for the future.

Don’t confuse experience with arrogance; luck with success. Prove that your path is correct with data.

2: Intelligent Investment

Resource allocation requires a data driven approach, otherwise you risk wasting money through inefficiencies.

Before making an investment, you should understand the following:

• What metrics will be tracked?
• How will success be measured?
• What is the timeline?
• What is the forecasted cost?

Without knowing at least the above any decision would be no more than a gamble.

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3: Success and Optimization

A focus on data and metrics allows you to identify indicators of success and optimize results.

Imagine that you are attempting to optimize your social media marketing campaign. You notice that if you update your status on Mondays between noon and 3pm, it receives the most attention and click-throughs.

If you werem’t measuring click-throughs and applying it to your campaigns, you would have lost out on this optimization opportunity. Without the data, you would never have been able to identify this trend.

4: Math is Ubiquitous

No matter who you are, if you’re a marketer you have to justify your worth to someone. It could be either a boss, client, or even yourself.

Data allows you to clearly and effectively convey your value. You can identify how many conversions, what the conversion rate was, how many visits the site received, and even how many people were mentioned the product.

Explaining metrics is a lot easier than attempting to prove value through anecdotal examples or ideas.

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5: Numbers Don’t Lie

Lastly, it’s the simple truth that numbers don’t lie. At the end of the day if a campaign only sold one product, but another campaign sold four – it’s simple enough to see that more resources should go to the more successful campaign.

Data helps make decisions less subjective and more black and white. By understanding the numbers, a manager can better make decisions without bias or influence from office politics.

Final Thoughts

Numbers, metrics, and measurements are by no means the end all be all. Marketers still need experience to actually understand what the numbers mean. But having the proper data helps when making decisions.

Online metrics should be a required tool in every marketers toolbox.

How are you making sure you fully understand your metrics and data? Are you basing decisions on data or feelings? Are you simply copying examples and anecdotal advice or are you testing and optimizing your campaigns?

5 Reasons Online Metrics Matter is a post by: Samir Balwani

The online marketing landscape is ever evolving. Today, we use an integrated approach that includes, search marketing, SEO, display advertising, and many more. But, as consumers change so do our marketing strategies…

We often see marketing tactics gain and lose power as users become more aware of them or consumer intent changes. It seems as if we’re at a marketing crossroads again.

There’s been a recent trend, showing that social media marketing has been growing, while display advertising has become less effective.

What is Display Advertising?

Before exploring how display advertising has become less effective, we have to first explain how it works.

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There are currently three advertising models in the display-marketing world: Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Action (CPA), and Cost per Mille (CPM).

In the CPC model, an advertiser pays every time a banner ad is clicked on.

The CPA model charges the advertiser only when a user that clicked on a banner ad actually performs an action. For most this means a product was bought or a lead generated.

Currently, the most common model is the CPM payment style. In this instance, ads are sold by inventory based on impressions. Advertisers pay for the number of times the ad is shown to a consumer.

The reason why CPM is most common is because banner ads generally have a low click through rate. This makes it difficult to make an ad that maximizes CPC and CPA rates.

Content producers try to minimize the focus on conversions and instead focus on impressions.

How Does it Work?

The actual process for building and executing a display campaign is extremely in-depth. It’s difficult and definitely takes a specific skill set. In it’s most basic form the process follows these steps:

• Advertisers identifies campaign’s target demographic
• Based on tools such as Quantcast or Google Ads Planner, the advertiser decides which sites their banner ads should run on
• The advertiser sends an proposal outlining what they’d like to do and what their goals are
• The content provider responds to the proposal with either a general run-of-the-mill ad campaign or some form of sponsorship
• The advertiser decides which proposals fulfill their goals at the price they’ve outlined and the campaign begins
• Once a campaign is completed a report is generated that outlines the total number of impressions and total cost
• Then the whole process is repeated again

The problem with this process happens when site owners allow advertisers to create custom ad units, full-page takeovers, and other sponsorship ideas. If you can think of it, and are willing to pay for it, site owners will do it. Creating an interesting predicament.

The Economic Concerns

For an economy to be sustainable, the laws of supply and demand need to be in equilibrium.

If there isn’t enough supply, then the price must go up to lessen the demand. If there is too much supply, then the price must go down to increase the demand.

But what happens when the supply is infinite? The economy begins to break down because the commodity starts to become worthless.

This is what’s happening in the display-advertising world. Site owners are continually reducing their value instead of increasing it.

The supply of advertising space continues to grow as new content producers enter the space, and as current content producers continue to add more advertising space to their online platforms.

Demand is having a hard time keeping up with the increased and potential supply.

The User Problem: Ad Blockers & Ad Blindness

Even if we ignore the economic concerns, there are a number of user concerns. As site owners and advertisers become overzealous with ad units, consumers have started experiencing “ad blindness”.

Ad blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors due to various reasons like irrelevance, vanilla design and familiarization of the webpage layout. For example, ad blindness is a behavioral challenge presented by frequently re-visited portals like news portals, discussion forums and blogs. Worst affected tended to be the right hand column of standard tri-column layouts, which usually holds text ads. In this case users tended to ignore this column even if non-ad content was placed there. [source]

Some users have taken their disdain of ads to a new level and have started using ad blockers. These plugins allow a visitor to block ads from their site entirely; a problem sites like digg are extremely familiar with.

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So what is the future? If content providers and advertisers don’t find an innovative way to evolve the display advertising medium, what will happen?

The Future for Content Creators

If nothing changes, content providers will have a hard time being profitable while trying to sell an ever-devaluing commodity.

Instead, content providers will be forced to look for new ways to monetize their content through new business models.

This has already started as a trend. A number of social media sites have shown that they’re supporting their advertising income with paid programs and commercial accounts.

For many sites, the commodity is changing from impressions and content to data and engagement.

Twitter is the prime example of this evolution in online profits. Even though they’ll be launching an advertising platform, they’ve also announced commercial accounts and data partnerships with major search engines.

But these business models aren’t feasible for everyone. What about pure content producers, like newspapers?

The Newspaper Model

Newspapers struggle with a predicament in that currently the only business model that has worked has been a pure advertising one.

Only a select few sites have seen success in changing to a business model that includes subscriptions. Even those that have succeeded have been extremely niche, with content that has been deemed more valuable than straightforward news. Example: FT.com.

So how do the other pure content producers survive? They must find a balance between free, ad driven content, and paid content.

Many newspapers are experiencing this flux as they tackle the question of how much is too much free content and what are consumers willing to pay for?

As more content producers begin to rely less on advertisers for profit, they’ll lessen supply of ad units. Decreasing the number of ad units would make them more scarce, decreasing the effect of ad blindness and allowing demand to finally catch up to the supply.

The Future for Advertisers

Content producers are not the only ones that will be forced to evolve; advertisers will be forced to think of new innovative ways to reach consumers.
As display advertising becomes more and more marginalized, new mediums such as social media will begin to gain importance.

Advertising will need to be subtler. We’re moving away from interruption marketing and enter a world where advertising blends harmoniously with consumers in their everyday life.

How are you preparing for this shift? Have you noticed a changed in display advertising? What do you think will happen next?

The Slow Death of Display Advertising… is a post by: Samir Balwani

Some of you may have noticed that this blog has slowly changed over time. First starting as “Left the Box”, then moving and rebranding, next a new theme, and now a new direction.

I’ve been working on a blog post tentatively titled “Do you have marketing tunnel vision?”, and it made me realize that I, myself, had fallen for marketing tunnel vision.

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I and this blog have become so much about social media that I’m losing sight of the other marketing disciplines and how they could all work together. There are harmonies between display campaigns, search marketing, social media, and definitely SEO.

Not only that, but there are entire strategies which are forgotten when we focus only on one. For example, we’ve been talking about social media so much that I noticed branding as whole being focused on from a social media perspective instead of holistically.

Smart marketers don’t lose sight of the whole picture. To make sure that we’re always thinking about marketing as a puzzle with hundreds of pieces, I’ll be making small changes to the blog.

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Already, you can see that I’ve changed some of the article categories to highlight the broad types of marketing.

Also, there will be more about online marketing as a whole. Expect to see more marketing and branding articles. It won’t be a lot of how-to’s and tactics (there definitely will be some), but more strategic – higher level thinking.

Let’s talk about and try to figure out how brands and businesses best market themselves online.

What do you think about this? Would you rather I stick to social media or would you rather we explore online marketing as a whole? I’d love to hear your feedback!

This Blog is Evolving: Are You? is a post by: Samir Balwani

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how social media has been a part of our overall marketing program. I started to realize that our definition of marketing and advertising is slowly evolving.

In my mind advertising was the driving force of a marketing campaign. The idea was to create something interesting and broadcast it with advertising.

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Advertising was more important than the actual campaign. If you spent enough money and as long as it was marginally interesting, you could be successful.

Nowadays, there’s seems to be a tip in the scales. Marketing is becoming more important and is being supported by advertising.

No longer can you just spend money to be successful. Your campaign needs to be interesting, exciting, and buzz worthy. Without being unique, the campaign doesn’t spread itself.

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I’d love to know what you think. Do you define marketing and advertising as I have? Do you think that marketing is becoming more important than advertising? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Are You Marketing or Advertising? is a post by: Samir Balwani

More talk about social media ROI and measurement? You know it.

This time Mitch Joel of “Six Pixels of Separation” wrote a post about measurements and metrics. As much as I like Mitch (his articles are great and I highly recommend his blog), I really disagreed with his take on social media ROI.

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He states that…

“Thinking about business objectives instead of ROI makes the whole strategy that much workable and doable. In the end, instead of looking for the ROI in Social Media, maybe the smarter thing to do is to focus on what the business objectives are, and then figure out if Social Media is an effective means (from both a strategic and budgetary point of view) to help you and your business accomplish your goals.” [Source]

He uses two phrases that stand out: “business objectives” and “effective means”.

Here’s where I disagree with Mitch. I don’t agree that business should be run by “effective means”. It should be run based on decisions that lead to the most “efficient means”.

What’s the difference? Well, imagine my business objective is to build awareness about my product. I could do a number of things.

Picking up the phone and going through the phonebook would be extremely effective. Nothing beats a personal connection. But is it the most effective? Most likely, no.

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Without being able to assign an ROI to marketing efforts, managers can fall into the trap of allocating resources to measures that do not efficiently achieve business objectives.

The Problem:

If we agree that determining the ROI of social media is a necessary evil to making intelligent marketing decisions, then how do we measure it? Therein lies the problem.

Currently people have measure social media loosely, if at all. We’ve been using metrics as indicators of succes.

I hate to use the Dell example because I think they’re doing a great job with social media, but the response they gave about ROI (“Binhammer responded that ROI was nothing more than an accounting term and probably has little to no place when it comes to measuring the success of any Social Media marketing initiative”) seems unsustainable.

Dell is also well known for there announcement, stating that they “surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts”. It’s important to note that this figure is slightly disingenuous. You don’t know how much they spent on social media. How much is spent to have a team dedicated to social media? What is the profit?

A second form of anecdotal “ROI” that doesn’t actually tell the whole story is when managers say “Company x is making more money and they’re using social media, therefore social media must be making money”.

It seems logical at first, but when you delve into the statement you realize the hole. How are you to assume that it wasn’t consumer interest, a by-product of more efficient marketing, or just being lucky? Without examples or data, you can’t prove or disprove that social media helped the business be more profitable.

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Without data and without being able to clearly track sales, social media can’t be proven to work. It requires a leap of faith, which businesses should not be forced to make. Efficiency is dictated by testing, by data, and by understanding.

The Marketing Mix Model:

One of the most important tools a marketing manager will have at his disposal is a marketing mix model. The model, an equation, helps marketers “optimize promotional tactics with respect to sales revenue or profit.”

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Social media marketing doesn’t fall within the model. Because of its dynamic and fluid nature, social media becomes an outlier. But, without being able to measure social media’s effectiveness, we won’t be able to assign it a value in the marketing mix model.

Herein lies our goal. We must identify a way to measure and assign social media efforts a value in terms of sales revenue or profit.

Finding a Solution:

There’s no point in complaining about social media measurements without offering some kind of solution. The first step is outlining exactly what we need.

To accurately measure the effectiveness of social media, we must be able to:

• Identify users that have engaged through social media
• Assign the appropriate value to social media interaction in the click-stream
• Determine if the user converted to a sale

In my mind the best way to achieve these measurements is through a cookie.

A cookie (also tracking cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie) is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by a web browser. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information such as user preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites. Source

Why use a cookie to measure social media? With a cookie we’re able to determine which social media profiles the user interacted with and when they finally converted.

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With this kind of data, marketers would better be able to understand and optimize all online marketing campaigns.

There exists two major problems with this potential solution: privacy and the social media sites themselves.

Addressing Privacy Concerns:

Most people want some kind of privacy on the web. I agree, I tend to clear cookies when I close my browser. I’m the person that Comscore and Quantcast hate.

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Nonetheless, being tracked online has become second nature. For example, social sites like Facebook and Twitter already cookie users to track engagement and other site metrics for themselves. Most ad networks use some kind of cookie to retarget users and show ads across the network.

Allowing individual brands to create and deploy cookies that almost “piggy-back” on the cookies already being used shouldn’t lead to a huge outcry from privacy supporters. The information is already being gathered, the question is how can marketers get it, and how can it spread across multiple platforms?

Concerns of Social Media Sites:
Another obstacle to overcome is the mere fact that most social media sites would never want to freely share this information. Data is their money and collecting it is extremely important.

It’s interesting that social media sites, the herald of change on the web, have maintained an old model for monetizing their sites.

Instead of using the data to target advertising, why not allow marketers to optimize their social media campaigns?

I know a number of brands that would pay for a “brand Facebook page” that allows for useful metrics. Throw in the ability to cookie users and an integration with Google analytics, and I wouldn’t even have to think about the decision to pay for a fan page.

Twitter has a unique opportunity too. Cookie users as they click links and give me click through rates. These kind of metrics and measurements help social media marketers allocate a value to social sites.

By not working together you hold back social media from growing and becoming a data driven marketing path. Which leads us to the next section.

Isolated data isn’t enough, it must be comprehensive. If we’re to create cookies that work across platforms, we need some kind of standard.

Proposing a New Standard:

So why do we need a standard? Well it’s simple really.

No successful social media campaign covers just a single social media site. Social media marketing thrives when multiple platforms are used in harmony.

It would do us little good if we could only track conversions through Facebook, but not Twitter. Also, it’s no help if we’re tracking Facebook and Twitter independently.

Marketers should be able to allocate each site’s involvement in the sales process. Imagine that a user finds a Facebook page, then follows the brand’s Twitter account. Next thing you know they buy a product that is Tweeted out.

Should only Twitter get credit for the sale? It was Facebook that originally introduced that user to the brand.

With a cookie that is standard across platforms, similar to OpenID, marketers would be able to properly identify the value of each individual platform.

A Short Term Fix:

The standard cross-platform cookie might be months, if not years, away. So what do we do in the mean time? How do you measure social media to the best of our ability?

When it comes to social media measuring right now, it breaks down into three sections.

• The first is measuring outreach effects.
• The second is measuring profiles reach.
• The third, and I think most difficult, is measuring the effect of status updates.

Measuring Outreach Effects and Profile Reach:
Before we can explore how to best measure outreach and social media profiles, there are a few things you need to have in place ahead of time.

The first is to be able to create virtual pages or 301 redirects. If you’re on Wordpress, you can use the Redirection plugin. The idea is to create a “vanity” URL that redirects to a “tracking” URL.

Secondly, you need to have Google Analytics installed on your site for this technique.

So how does this technique work? Well we can’t actually track the user through the entire social media funnel, instead we can track them as they jump from one profile to our site.

This gives us an idea of the final step of the process and if people are converting from the social media site.

The best way to explain the practices is to use an example.

Imagine I have a Facebook page. On the page I have a landing page that highlights my latest product, a new Dell Monitor (The Dell Ultrasharp 3008WFP to be exact).

Instead of posting on Facebook the URL [http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=223-4890] that is the exact product page, instead we create a vanity URL. The new URL we use can be http://promotions.us.dell.com/fb/dell-3008wfp. This vanity URL will redirect to the product page URL, but with a few additions.

The additions come from the URL builder from Google. Paid Search Marketers have been using this tool forever, to tag and identify campaigns. Social media marketers can do the same.

In this instance, because we’re posting the link on Facebook we name the Campaign Source – Facebook, the medium is our Landing Page and the Campaign name is Social Media.

So let’s walk through the user workflow. The user comes to Dell’s Facebook page. Sees the landing page and clicks on the link, http://promote.us.dell.com/fb/dell-3008wfp.

This link redirects to:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=223-4890&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=landing-page&utm_campaign=social-media.

Google analytics tracks this as a Facebook sources referral with a campaign assigned as “social-media”.

It becomes powerful because as people share the vanity URL, we’re still able to attribute any conversions to the original promotion and effort.

The same can be done for blogger outreach. When recommending a page bloggers link to, the link could be a vanity URL which redirects to a UTM encoded page. This allows you to track the overall effectiveness of your blogger outreach campaign, as well as conversions from these links.

Although not perfect it gives us a basic idea of outreach and profile reach. Mixed with advance use of goal funnels and event tracking in Google analytics, you can get a better understanding of the ROI of the social media campaign.

Measuring Effects of Status Updates:
I stated before that tracking the effectiveness of status updates is more difficult. The reason for that is because it’s so open.

A link shared on Twitter can easily spread to Tumblr. Also, the life of each individual link is so short that it’s difficult to gather a comprehensive amount of data.

We can’t perfectly measure the effect of status updates, but with a few tricks we can attempt to gauge a campaign’s success.

The previously mentioned technique of “vanity” URLs could work for status updates, just as it does for profiles and outreach campaign. Awe.sm is an application which lets you use your own domain to create shortened URLs and automatically add the UTM code.

Another trick is to use coupons to gauge conversions. Sharing Twitter or Facebook specific coupons via status updates allow you to track the number of coupons used and measure the status update’s reach. The coupon needs to be published multiple times to take into account variables such as time and overall Twitter noise.

Finally, another quick way to gauge overall effectiveness of status updates is to create a specific landing page for the status update. Let’s use the Dell monitor again as an example.

The goal is to test the effectiveness of our reputation and clout. The first step is to create a landing page separate from the current product page. Next, we tweet out a link to the page with a message like “Just sat next to my new dell monitor, it’s nice and bright! [link]”. Now we track click-throughs to the page, but also over-all traffic to the page.

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More than likely, the number of click-throughs will be less than the the traffic the page gets. The reason is because people re-shorten links, or use different tools, like ow.ly to retweet the link. By creating a separate landing page for this test we’re able to collect the total data.

Also, we test our “clout” by not pushing the user to actually buy the product in the tweet. The only thing influencing the consumer to buy the monitor is that the Dell account stated it was a bright monitor.

We’re looking to track impulse buys that are based solely on the fact that the product was tweeted by the account. The number of conversions will be extremely low. This shouldn’t be disheartening since the goal of status updates isn’t to create large conversions, but to slowly convince a consumer to buy product over time.

As you can see tracking status updates can be a difficult task. Instead of attempting to continually measure it, we’re forced to spot-check the success of campaigns to gauge effectiveness.

Conclusion

It’s clear that social media measurements need to mature. The problems are numerous and obstacles great. The question is, will we pass this phase where marketers are saying “Social media works, trust me…” and enter a paradigm where social media is measured and optimized thoroughly.

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Until social media sites work together to offer full tracking and data, we’re forced to using incomplete metrics as indicators of success. We’re using snapshots to track entire campaigns.

Social media metrics must mature to a point where smart social media marketers can clearly track ROI so they can make informed data driven decisions. Most large brands are risk-averse, and without clear data, social media becomes a huge business risk.

For social media to continue moving forward its effectiveness to build a business profit needs to be proven. Otherwise, why would I invest in social media when I know a TV ad will net me a profit?

This is How You Measure Social Media ROI is a post by: Samir Balwani

Social media… what a buzzword. It’s grown, exploded, and ushered in a new paradigm in marketing. Kind of.

It seems like everyday there’s a new social media guru, someone to tell you how to use your Facebook, when to Tweet, or berate you for not having a FourSquare.

The social media industry, in its current form, is not sustainable.

Why do I say that? Well, two main reasons stand out.

First, it’s not easy to assign or forecast ROI from social media. Without being able to at least estimate return, managers have a hard time justifying investment.

It’s not a large issue right now because social media is still new, it’s exciting, and everyone’s doing it. Once the allure wears off and people will begin to ask about profit.

For social media to continue to grow we must find a way to directly relate investment to sales.

Secondly, social media is full of “experts”. There’s not enough actionable research and too much chest beating.

The number of fans you have is not an indicator of your ability as a marketer. Your ability to sell products, increase brand awareness, and achieve profitable goals is what differentiates a good marketer from a “social media expert”.

This explosion of experts is detrimental to the industry. It muddies the truth, over-hypes what’s possible, and hurts everyone’s credibility.

Thankfully, I foresee this being less of a problem soon. It ties in directly with the first obstacle – accountability. People were drawn to social media because of the lack of accountability. Since you can’t prove ROI, you didn’t have to prove success.

As more and more people demand proper metrics and tracking, less people will be able to fake social media expertise. Hopefully, this change will happen sooner rather than later.

I really want to know what you think the future holds for social media marketing? Will it change marketing? Or is it just a flash in the pan? How do you plan on using it? How do you plan on making differentiating yourself from other “experts”?

Will Social Media Survive? is a post by: Samir Balwani

Investment is a word that rules business decisions. How much do I need to invest? It’s a question I hear on a near daily basis.

So why is it that when it comes to social media, many focus on money and ignore the cultural investment?

Everything you do has a cost, whether it is monetary, time, or some other abstract resource. Social media although not the most expensive, requires a cultural evolution.

For many of the largest companies, a cultural investment can be greater than a monetary one. To change a business culture requires a form of dedication and collaboration rarely achieved.

But what exactly is a cultural investment? It would behoove us to answer this short yet not-so-simple question.

As businesses begin to shift their focus to the online world, so too must they shift their culture. This means creating a company that is nimble, lean, and efficient. Where these adjectives were goals for a business, they now are requirements.

A company must be able and willing to take risks, optimize campaigns, and work together efficiently.

Although an overly used example, Zappos embodies the idea of a web culture. Marketing, customer service, and product delivery all overlap. Each department works with an understanding that the ultimate goal is customer happiness and satisfaction. That this satisfaction will equate into returning and new customers.

Most businesses don’t achieve the success that Zappos has and for many it’s not even a possibility. Companies, especially luxury companies, tend to be too far on the spectrum to embrace the openness that the web requires.

Identifying where your business lies is the first step in evolving your identity. Using the above indicators can help you plot a course. The graph will not perfectly define every company, but it can act as a guide for most.

With an idea of the current overall culture and a goal in mind, an employee must take lead. Sadly, although the change must come from within, no single person can have both the drive and power to bring it to fruition.

The change, to have the most effect, must come from a group of individuals of power. Department heads and C-level executives can lead the charge, yet the revolution must be company wide.

For this to occur, social media and web culture needs to be sold to the company. It cannot be a policy demanded, it must be ingrained and incentivized.

For many, the first step is to identify employees, company-wide, that embrace the web culture.

Look for those that want to work together, share knowledge, and are leaders. Another group to include are employees that blog, have a Twitter or Facebook, or are active on social sites and forums.

These employees can be a jump-start and example for others. Create a task force that is comprised of employees from each department to identify ways to shift the company culture.

This task force should answer questions such as:

• “How can we better share information between departments and consumers?”
• “Is the company making the most out of each customer interaction?”
• “Has the business defined and identified an online brand strategy?”
• “What can be done to spur culture shifts?”

Answering the above questions should help create a plan and goal for the culture change.

Similar to almost any other, a cultural investment hurts profitability in the short-term but begins to show returns in the long run. The loss of productivity from employees as the transition occurs can be recouped as the new culture inspired collaboration and togetherness.

As the world becomes more Internet savvy and consumers evolve, business culture becomes more important. Consumers are looking to buy from companies we enjoy, those that they are connected to, and the businesses that make them feel special. It may not be a conscious decision, but it’s one that influences the buying process.

How are you investing in a culture that aligns with your consumers? Do you talk about company culture? Are you prepared for the transition?

Social Media Requires a Cultural Investment is a post by: Samir Balwani

It’s January, the month where the gyms are packed, fitness rules, and ad campaigns take an odd turn towards diets. But as much as we’re trained to make weight loss resolutions, your business should be looking to lose excess baggage as well.

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I’ve written fairly extensively on how most brands tend to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to social media.

Almost always, the largest culprit to online marketing failure is bureaucracy. It’s the reason why small businesses can excel at social media, while adoption is slow for large brands.

Online marketing requires a company be nimble. Your ability to make changes, react to online trends, and keep up with technology will forecast your success. The Internet changes, technology grows. Moore’s Rule states that our technological advances will double every two years. Can your marketing keep up?

The larger a boat, the longer it takes to turn. Similarly, the more bloated your company, the harder it is to adapt.

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I titled this post “Welcome to 2010… Now Trim the Fat” because I wanted to make a point. Employee bloat is holding back your business. Processes that are long and drawn out, hurt your marketing. Being unsure is no longer an option.

A by-product of the paradigm shift towards online marketing is that decisions can be made with data. We can test what works and what doesn’t work – we can do it quickly. Avinash calls it failing fast.

Every decision doesn’t need to go through a committee. The Internet has made it easy to make educated decisions quickly.

Want to figure out which product you should promote? Ask your customers what they like.

Need to know whether something on your site is working? Run a eye tracking test.

When your business isn’t nimble, isn’t quick to adapt – you fall behind. You lose opportunities to better your product, your business, and to retain your consumers.

How is your department, business, or team streamlining for 2010?

Welcome to 2010… Now Trim the Fat is a post by: Samir Balwani

Recently I wrote a post about what I would tell a social media professor. After publishing the article, I’ve spoken to a number of professors about how they teach social media.

What I realized is that so many of these teachers are using social media, are interacting with students online, and sharing their thoughts. They might not have the most followers or be the easiest to find, but they share valuable information.

I’ve created a “Professors” Twitter list to help compile these instructors in one place.

So in true crowdsourcing fashion, I’m asking for your help! If you know a professor that is teaching a social media course or a marketing course that talks about social media, leave a comment. In your comment please leave the professor’s name, twitter name, and college!

Let’s see how comprehensive we can make this list!

Professors Teaching Social Media is a post by: Samir Balwani

Thank you everyone! I wanted to take a moment and thank each of you for making this year amazing. I hope you have an amazing holiday season.

I’m looking forward to a great 2010. I hope we can all learn more and grow together.

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A special thank you to some of the people that have helped me achieve all that I have:

• Tamar Weinberg
• David Harry
• Angie Haggstrom
• Steve Gerencser
• James Morris
• Justin Parks
• Miss CJ
• Mike Wilton
• Charles S
• Tim Nash
• The Dojo Community
• My Friends at Mashable
• All the Great Commenters, Twitter Followers, and Facebook Fans!

Happy Holidays!

Sincerely,
Samir Balwani

Thank You My Friends and Community is a post by: Samir Balwani