Sound Effects for Queen City Radio Hour

Sound effects setup for live radio show.

I made and performed the sound effects for the July 2nd show of the Queen City Radio Hour. It was a lot of fun to do. You know, growling like a wolverine into a microphone in front of a thousand people.

When the Burlington’s Champlain Quadricentennial producer Jay Craven asked me to participate in the show I was psyched. The performance features Tom Bodett, Gary Farmer, Tantoo Cardinal, Rusty DeWees, Abby Paige, Henriette Mantel and others. It was also the first official U.S. performance of the Quebec’s The Lost Fingers.

Judging from in-person comments and web references, it looks like we made things people like.

The show will air on Vermont Public Radio in early August.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Thanks!

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 24

Thanks for your time. I hope you liked this presentation. If you have questions please don’t hesitate to use the comments or drop me a line.

Take care.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: You can develop a clear approach for aligning your social media plan with your business goals.

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 23

So I hope this presentation helps you determine your business goals using the Reach Acquisition Conversion Satisfaction model, and helps you use web analytics and other measurement tools to align your social media plan with your business goals.

I also hope the OODA loop turns out to be a useful tool for developing a clear approach to continuously improving your social media and other online activities.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Putting Satisfaction in context

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 22

You’re probably noticing a theme in putting things in context… by channel, by the kind of satisfaction: recommendation or a simple star rating, satisfaction by how many times your content was used, expression of satisfaction by a specific individual.

You can put this stuff into context to help inform where you need to improve and what you can do to make things better.

It’s gonna require a lot of listening and sometimes it’s gonna be painful. But if you have a culture of accountability, you can be accountable for listening and making things better just as much as you can be accountable for not listening and not making things better.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Observations on Satisfaction

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 21

Satisfaction–everything’s going right and you want to keep it that way. What are some things you can do to increase satisfaction?

You can use survey tools like 4q to find out whether people were able to accomplish their task on your site or not. Super helpful for making improvements and seeing things from the point of view of your customer.

You want to know what people are saying about you online as well. There are a lot different reputation tools online as well. Google Alerts is the poor-mans reputation management tool. There are others like Radian6 or Alterian’s SM2 tools too.

Measuring individual influence is another thing that might be a good idea. Using something like Klout can help you get a sense of how influential an individual really is on Twitter, so you don’t have to rely on the raw follower count.

Remember, there’s people who will never be your customer but might say a lot of nice things about you. It’s even nicer when they’re influential. I mean, if you want to be calculated about it…

Also, social sites often have a way to express a level of satisfaction though a “like” button or a “star” button. Or maybe a recommendation system like on LinkedIn. All of those are satisfaction items you can measure.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Putting Conversion data in context

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 20

If you’ve been able to gather some conversion data, you can start to put in context: which channels are working best for you? Which topics? Is there a seasonality for your topics?

You can compare the acquisitions to the conversions by channel to figure out which channel gives you the most qualified leads. For example, Facebook might get 200 people to your site but only 3 fill out a form; while participating on your local newspaper blog brings only 30 people to your site but 8 fill out a form.

Figuring out quality this way can be pretty useful for informing future actions and helping you determine where to spend the most time.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Observations about Conversion

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 19

Maybe you get a lot of traffic to your site but no one is converting. Then it’s time to look at fixing your site or your process. Conversion optimization is a big deal. No point in spending tons of time and money driving people to your site if your site doesn’t do a good job of converting.

Conversion in social media is where it gets really hairy for the old school web analyst. It used to be we could just measure the lead gen forms on our own site and call it done. But all of these social media sites have their own messaging systems: direct messages, inboxes, walls … all sorts of ways to make direct contact without ever even coming to your website. For that sort of thing you’ll need to be disciplined about measuring the conversion. Ultimately CRM tools are going to have to step up to the plate with this for more automated measuring.

Of course, our good old lead form is still on our site and we can measure it.

And don’t forget about the live events and meetups that you go to as a result of your social media activity. This blending of the real world and the online world is only going to increase. Especially for lead generation businesses like real estate.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Putting Acquisition data in context

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 18

Once you know more about your acquisitions, you can start to put it all in context. Of the people you can reach, how many are taking action on your messages? If you’re using campaign tagging or a link shortener with analytics you can see what topics your audience likes enough to click on. You might be able to figure out what time of day gets the most clicks or which sites generate the most traffic.

Sometimes it’s good to just make sure your audience is awake. And measuring acquisition is part of that. If lots of people like you on Facebook but don’t take any action on your messages, then maybe you need to do something different.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Observations about Acquisition

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 17

Here’s a fun one, Acquisition. Say you’ve got tons of followers. Lots of fans on Facebook or whatever other network you’re using. How do you know if it’s helping, or what’s helping?

Here are some things we can do to measure acquisition. You can observe people coming to your own site from your social media sites. In your analytics reports you can simply look at the traffic source reports and find out. Using a technique called campaign tagging you can learn more though–which messages, how those links were delivered and stuff like that. It takes a little time and discipline–but if you’re going to get better at this… and if you ever say “ROI”… you should be ready to commit to campaign tagging.

You’re probably sharing links to other sites via social media. I hope so anyway. The problem for measuring these off-site links is that you can’t see the analytics reports for the sites you don’t control. For that you can use a link shortening service that has some analytics built in, like Bit.ly. Then you can observe which of your links generate the most clicks–the most acquisitions.

Improving Social Media via Web Analytics: Putting Reach data in context

Getting Started, Getting Better: Social Media and Web Analytics Slide 16

Once you’ve done some measuring around Reach you might want to put that data in context. Are there opportunities for growth somewhere? Say you’re a realtor in Topeka, are there lots of people involved in conversation about “single family homes in Topeka” but none of them within reach of your messaging? That sort of thing. Figure out where the best opportunities to grow your reach are.

One tip is to use paid advertising as research. Paid advertising has a great advantage in that it’s fast–it happens as fast as you can set it up. Use advertising to identify opportunities in potential channels and conversations.