I had the absolute pleasure to interview Jason Falls.   Jason blogs at Social Media Explorer and is the author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing.  He is a straight shooter, no-holds-barred marketer and it was a real treat to spend some time with him.  He’ll be speaking at Content Marketing World on “Cut the Bull – Blog with a Purpose and Drive Your Business.”

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

• Some things businesses need to be aware of as we move further into this digital age and social media
• Some of the common fears from business owners who are hesitant to take the plunge into social media
• How to break down the fear of sharing too much competitive intelligence in the age of digital marketing
• The seven business drivers of social media marketing
• How to measure social media
• How to use content marketing and social media strategies to drive sales
• A case study on how to use Foursquare to drive business
• How social media can help with research and development — with a great case study

There are several ways you can get the interview with Jason: 

• Subscribe to Next Stage Online Radio via iTunes. [Note: This feed includes additional topics beyond content marketing.]
• Download the MP3 from Content Marketing 360′s Facebook page.
• Read the transcript below.

Pamela: My guest today is Jason Falls. He is author, speaker and CEO of Social Media Explorer. Of course, social media strategist extraordinaire. I’m very excited to have Jason today. He is also a co-author of a book that was recently released. And, Jason, this title is truly one of the best I’ve seen in a long time, No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing.

Jason, welcome to Content Marketing 360 Radio.

Jason: Thanks for having me, Pam. I’m glad to be here.

Pamela: This is so fantastic. This is the Internet so we can swear if we want to. The FCC doesn’t regulate us yet. However, I love the fact that I get to say bullshit as a title. I got to say that.

Jason: It’s really funny. The reaction has been 99 percent of the people love the title. And then, there’s that 1 percent that’s going to be like, “Oh, that’s offensive.” Or, “That’s unprofessional,” or whatnot. And those are the people that, obviously, number one, the book wasn’t meant for them. That’s fine. They don’t have to buy it. But, if they actually read the book and realize why we’re saying that, they might actually come down off the high horse a little bit and say, “Oh, OK, I get it now.” But, we anticipated there would be more push-back against the title. But, quite frankly, most people have the same reaction you have. “Oh, that’s a neat title.” 

Pamela: Yeah. It’s great. And it’s an attention-getter. But, even more than that, Jason, I’ve had the pleasure of following you for a few years now with Social Media Explorer. You have a fantastic blog, and you put out some great information. This is really you. This is your brand. And this is the personality that goes along with who Jason Falls really is. 

Jason: Yeah. And the inspiration for the title actually came from people that I talked to around the country. I tour around and speak about social media and have done so for a couple years now, long before I had a book. And it seemed like every time I would come off stage, somebody would come up to me and say, “Man, I really appreciate your style. You’re kind of a straight shooter, no BS kind of guy.” And it just sort of evolved from that. And I kept hearing that over and over again. So, I thought, “Yeah. That sort of sums up the way I look at the world.”

And when Erik, my co-author, and I were sitting down trying to figure out a title for the book, I said, “We’re really doing the no BS thing. We need to call it that.” And, of course, we were a little nervous that the publisher would say no. And the publisher was like, “You know what? We don’t have a problem with it. We need to make sure that the retail channels don’t have a problem with it.”

And so, they had to go to the Barnes & Nobles and the Books-A-Millions and Amazons of the world. And they all liked it, by the way. Nobody ever complained about it. But, it’s funny. You cannot use the word bullshit in an Amazon review of the book that has bullshit in the title because it doesn’t pass the Amazon profanity filters.

Pamela: Oh, that’s good.

Jason: So, the title of the book’s there and the header’s there and everything. But, if you go comment and say, “I read ‘No Bullshit Social Media,’” it’ll flag your comment as being inappropriate.

Pamela: Oh, that’s hilarious. That is fantastic. Now, I think it’s great. And we’re going to be talking about a couple of other things where I’ve got to warn the audience, my friends out there that are listening. There may be some swear words. I should have probably said that when we started the show. One of those disclaimers we tend to see before television shows, that if this is inappropriate, you may want to stop now.

Jason: No. We’re not going to go NC-17.

Pamela: No, no. I think it’s fantastic. It’s an attention-getter and you’re absolutely right. I’ve seen you speak. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you speak in person as well. And you are. You’re the straight shooter. You’re this straight talk kind of guy. And in a world where, gosh, we’re seeing a lot of different media personalities, I think it’s very refreshing. So, I’m very excited to have you participate in our radio show and share a little bit of your straight talk with our listening audience as well.

Jason: Thank you.

Pamela: So, let’s do that. Let’s kick the tires, if that’s OK, and start with an area of the conversation. Like you said, you’ve been doing this for some time. And you’ve seen the evolution, I like to say, when we talk about anything digital, especially social, we kind of talk about like it’s in dog years.

So, one of the areas of your business that you really focus on is how the consumer has changed. And just the way that businesses need to, not only to be aware of it, but how we can start addressing that and working with that. So, tell me a little bit about that. How has the consumer changed? What are some things that businesses need to be aware of as we move in further into this digital age and social media?

Jason: Well, and keep in mind that a lot of this argument that we make in the book is really focused on those businesses that aren’t really touching social media yet. We wanted to sort of draw them in a little bit. But, the consumer has changed. And I think people who have been talking about social media for the last few years sort of understand this. But, the Internet and social media, the lowering of the barrier to entry to get online and to publish your own thoughts and comments and to connect with other people of like mind through social networks and whatnot, has really sort of unleashed this Pandora’s box of consumer behavior.

In the past, when we wanted to share our ideas, we had to be pre-qualified. We had to be edited by a newspaper editor. We had to go to journalism school and learn how to be a broadcaster. There was some barrier to entry for being able to publish yourself. Whether it be convincing a publisher that your book was worth publishing, whether it be getting hired as a writer for a local newspaper, etc., etc. There was some barrier to entry. Although a radio station did put me on the air at age 14, which was ridiculous. So, there were some exceptions to the rule.

But, if you wanted to be heard by a larger group of people, there was a barrier to entry. Now, there’s not. Because the technology has advanced and the Internet is so ubiquitous, really, in today’s world, that anybody who just has access to the Internet, which you can get for free at a public library, can publish their thoughts online and can connect with other people outside of the geographic bounds of their life. And so, it really expands everyone’s world and everyone’s world view.

And so, when you have that sort of power of connectivity and the power of publishing and sharing, what has happened is the online consumer, which is the majority of the people, at least, in the Western world. Certainly, there are some folks in third world countries that aren’t online. But, at the same time, I’ve been told by my business partner who’s traveled there a couple times, you can go anywhere in Africa and, literally, kids who you think are dirt poor are walking around with cell phones.

Pamela: Right.

Jason: So, people are plugged in. People are connected around the world. And so, what that means is the consumer’s attention has deviated from traditional media. Now, I’m not going to make the argument, and I think it’s a mistake to make the argument, that newspapers are dead or radio’s dead or TV’s dead. I would never say that because they’re not. What I think has happened is the Internet has become the primary screen. The television has maybe been relegated to a secondary screen. I watch TV and tweet at the same time.

Pamela: Yes.

Jason: And I know lots of other people do, too. I know that people still pick up printed newspapers and read them in the morning. I know that I still subscribe to five magazines. Not digitally, the actual analog printed version of the magazine. So, none of these other mediums are dead. But, how people consume them and when people consume them and how long people consume them has shifted and has changed.

What that means is for brands and businesses, in order to reach the audience that you reached 15 years ago with advertising or with direct mail, so on and so forth, you’ve got another channel to consider. And that channel is the Internet. And that channel is broken up into multiple sub-channels. Blogs, social networks, micro-blogging, online advertising, so on and so forth. So, there are lots of more ways to reach consumers now. And what you want to try to do as a brand, as a marketer, is find the most effective way to reach the audience that you want to try to reach and deliver a very relevant message to them.

The digital world offers you some unique opportunities to do that in ways you didn’t do 15 years ago. But, it also offers unique challenges because you’re basically having to fragment and segment your audiences and your messages in ways that you never thought you would need to before. You’re having to reach much, much smaller, more relevant audiences which means your marketing is much more effective, but with a smaller group of people.

And so, instead of the spray and pray approach of the old days, buying a TV commercial and hoping a bunch of people see the message and think it’s cool and come buy your product. Now, you have the opportunity to actually go talk to 50 people in a chat room who are really, really interested in your product. And you can convince those people to try it or even to buy it. And then maybe, if they like it, they’ll turn around and tell their friends as well.

So, the consumer behavior really has further fractured the media landscape. It’s not just about 500 television channels and nothing’s on any more. It’s about there’s millions of options. And finding your audience amidst those options is a bit more difficult. But, when you do find them, it’s a bit more effective because you’re finding an audience that is ripe for your message and ready and willing to listen.

Pamela: And it’s interesting that you mention all these traditional components to the marketing process. I agree wholeheartedly that nothing in terms of traditional has truly died. There’s just an evolution going on of how we use these tools. And man, it’s amazing. And just for the audience, we are actually recording this show here. Where are we at? March of 2012. So, if they end up downloading later, they kind of get a sense of what I’m referring to. But, recently I just saw the first ad on television, Jason. It’s for Lowe’s, the hardware store. 

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Pamela: And, of course, now we’re seeing the Facebook and the Twitter icons at the end of commercials, which is indicating we have a Facebook page. We have a Twitter handle. But, I saw my first Pinterest on Lowe’s. I said, “OK. That was quick.” So, what you’re really talking about is that 360 degrees of how we intake information and media and content. And that it’s all kind of working together. You mention that your book was written for those that are needing to step further into the space.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Pamela: And so, one of the questions that comes up as you talk about this consumer change. If I can ask this, what are some of the fears that you’re seeing with companies that are hesitant?

Jason: Oh, wow.

Pamela: Why they’re not stepping in faster because it’s not going to go away. It’s going to continue to evolve. So, what are some of those fears that you’re seeing from business owners that stop them from taking the plunge?

Jason: Yeah. Well, the fears that we’re seeing today are the same fears we saw three or four years ago. And what we’re having to realize is that the world’s a really big place. There are lots of businesses. There are lots of executives out there. And so, the success stories that we can look back three years ago or four years ago and say, “OK. We convinced this company to take the plunge. And now, they’re seeing some value from social media marketing.” There are hundreds and thousands of other companies out there that are still afraid of it. And the fears that I’m seeing are the same ones.

Number one, they’re afraid that they don’t understand the technology. When I ask my mother-in-law how she gets on the Internet, she still says, “I double click the big, blue E.”

Pamela: Right.

Jason: So, she goes to Internet Explorer and that’s how she knows to get on the “internet,” even though her entire computer and every software program on it are connected to the Internet. But, you still have, I think, several generations. Two or three generations of people out there, especially decision makers at large companies, small business owners, so on and so forth, that are just simply intimidated by the technology. They just don’t understand how the web works and how websites work. And they just don’t get it. They know they can open up a browser and go to different places, but they never see themselves being able to create a place for their business online. 

So, fear of technology is one. When you start talking social media, one of the first things you hear is, “Well, there’s no return on it. There’s no ROI on that. So, I’m not going to try it.” And it’s because they don’t understand what social media marketing can do for their business. Therefore, they assume it can’t do anything. And they don’t see case study after case study of businesses saying, “We invested this much money and we got this much money out of it. And, therefore, we had this fabulous ROI.” There are lots of different reasons for that. And we can dive into ROI a little bit more deeply a little bit later. The one that really continues to surprise me is that they’re afraid of letting people say bad things about them on their own website.

Pamela: Yeah.

Jason: And I don’t get that. I really don’t get that because, first of all, if someone comments on your blog, it’s not above the fold right under the headline on your website. It’s buried on one page that very, very few in the grand scheme of things, very few people who visit your website, are actually going to see, first of all. Second of all, you can always establish expectations for your audience and say, “Look, if you want to comment on this blog or if you want to leave a review or recommendation on this website, here are the parameters that are acceptable to us. You can’t use foul language. It has to be on topic. If you call us names, we’re going to remove it.” 

And so, you can moderate and control as long as you establish those expectations for your audience. And I still, to this day, hear executives saying, “Well, we don’t want to allow negative comments on our blog.” Well, first of all, A) you don’t have to and B) even if you did and it was someone being constructively critical, it’s a lot more powerful if you actually just respond to them and say, “Hey, thanks for pointing that out. Here’s how we’re going to address that issue.”

Pamela: Yes.

Jason: Makes you look so more invested in your audience. But, there are still executives who feel like control is what they have to exert in their marketing. And I’ve got news for them. They’ve never had control over their marketing. The difference between 15, 20 years ago and today is that 15 or 20 years ago there were several hundred thousand water coolers across the country. And people would go to the one nearest them, and they would have conversations with other people. And sometimes, they would mention brands and companies and so on and so forth. 

Today, there’s one big water cooler where everybody goes and the conversations are documented. They’re indexed. You can search and find them, so on and so forth. That’s the only difference. You didn’t have control over the hundreds of thousands of conversations about your brand when you screwed up really royally, and it was publicized in the media 15 years ago. And you don’t have control over those conversations today. Only now, you can see them. So, it scares the hell out of people.

Pamela: Yes. It’s interesting because I’ve had that same confusion. I just can’t understand why folks get so excited about the idea of negative comments when there’s so much opportunity to actually serve a consumer in front of so many eyeballs. It’s usually the reaction of a bad experience that creates more loyalty.

Jason: Sure. 

Pamela: And I just want to touch on those fears. Because I think just hearing them, if you’re a business owner listening today and hearing some of the things that Jason is saying, maybe we struck a chord. And part of our conversation is to hopefully alleviate some of those myths and fears. And get you to step that foot a little further down the social media path.

And another one that comes up is the whole competition conversation, Jason. I know I’ve run into this myself a few times. I don’t want my competition to see what I’m doing or my competition X. Just this conversation of if I put my stuff out there, my competition can have it. Well, you write some really good stuff in terms of your competition in your book. And I’m just going to say it because, again, I get to say it without FCC regs. Your competition may have already kicked your ass.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.

Pamela: Because if you’re not out there, somebody else might be. Give us just some insight to that, into breaking down the wall of this whole competition conversation and digital marketing.

Jason: Well, I think there are two things that we need to address here. First of all, participating in social media doesn’t mean that you have to unroll proprietary information about what you’re doing. Or insider based secret plans for your company on your blog. That’s not what participating in social media necessarily means. But, let me paint a picture for you because there’s a really good analogy and case study that’s in the book that I think will help people. And for those of you out there who don’t want to get into social media because you don’t want to share things that your competition may see, you’re going to be Telligent . OK, that’s the name of a company. And you’re going to be Telligent in this particular scenario.

So, one day on Twitter there was a gentleman by the name of Chris Geiger [SP]. And he tweeted one day. He worked at the time at a business process management software company. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what they’re called. The name of the company is K2 and they’re in Redmond, Washington. And one day he tweeted, and I quote, “Alternatives to Telligent community server recommendations.” So, you are Telligent and he’s tweeting that he’s a little dissatisfied with a product that you are presenting him or that he’s a customer of. And he’s looking for alternatives to you.

Pamela: Yes.

Jason: And so, you’re not locked into social media, so you don’t know that he’s tweeted this.You don’t know that he said this. But, there’s a gentleman by the name of Michael Fraietta who works at Jive Software, which is a competitor of Telligent. And he sees that tweet. And so, he responds to Chris Geiger on Twitter in a very natural, organic way and says, “Chris, check out Jive Software. If you’re looking for an external community server, here is ours.” And he drops a link to it.

Now, Chris and Mike didn’t know each other. Chris had no idea who Mike was. But, Mike responded to that tweet and said, “Hey, Chris. I saw you were asking. Here’s an alternative, and it happens to be the company that I represent and that I work for.”

Now, the Telligent folks. If it was you and you were afraid of social media and you didn’t want to participate because your competition might see what you were doing, you would not have known that Chris was even dissatisfied unless he told you. You wouldn’t have seen the tweet because you wouldn’t be monitoring the web. But, your competition was monitoring the web. And they were participating in those conversations. And they reached out and said, “We’ve got an alternative solution.”

Now, I don’t know if the deal actually closed because Chris and Mike both left their respective companies shortly after this conversation started. But, I do know that K2 started talking to Jive Software about switching from Telligent to their solution. And so, it was a qualified lead. It was a hot prospect. And Michael Friada, the community manager at Jive Software, potentially won Jive a converted customer that day. And Telligent lost it.

So, you’re Telligent. You’re afraid of social media. You don’t want to be in it. You think your competition’s going to see all your stuff. Well, guess what? They already are and they’re taking your customers away from you.

Pamela: Right. That’s an excellent example. By not participating, there’s an absolute bottom-line loss. And that’s one example but there are hundreds of examples that are going on out on the worldwide web with that. And in terms of the competition and the customer, one of the things that we’ll probably touch on in R&D is writing a little bit of research and development. But, you touched on not being a part of the conversation as possible ROI challenges.

Now, the return on investment conversation is one that I think all of us that work in any marketing or social marketing space, we get this question from business owners and the folks that make the decisions. In today’s world, we’re doing this in 2012, there are some things that are available to us now that weren’t there even two, three years ago in terms of being able to measure and the analytics and things that we can look at. But, this is a passionate area for you. I know it is. You write about it a lot. This is a part of your blog on a regular basis. You do a great job of sharing it in the book. This measuring of social.

Talk to us about what measuring social media means, Jason, to you.

Jason: Well, the first thing you need before you even talk about measurement, you have to understand what social media marketing can potentially do for your business. Because you have to know what you’re going to try to measure. And so, in the book we spell out what we call the seven business drivers of social media marketing. And these are the seven big bucket things that you can use social media marketing for.

So, the seven are, and I’ll try to go through them from memory. I don’t have them written down in front of me. But, I’ve talked about this book enough, I should know them by now. You can use social media to enhance your branding and awareness. So, make people more aware of who you are. You can use social media to protect your reputation. And that can be in the search engines to make sure you rank well. If you deserve to be the number one result for a certain keyword term, there are things that you can do on the social web to help you stay there.

And then, there’s also finding those negative conversations about you and participating in them so that you can mitigate them and, at least, bring those conversations back into a neutral not negative standpoint. Maybe, even turn them from a detractor to someone who is an advocate. So, that’s the second one.

And the third one is it extends your customer service. So, you can perform customer service on the web. It also allows you to enhance your public relations. So, PR has a lot of fingers, and each of them has some sort of corresponding activity online. And social media plays a big part in that. You can use social media marketing to build community. That’s the fifth of the seven. The sixth is you can use it to facilitate research and development. And the last one that we talk about is the one everybody wants to talk about. You can use it to drive sales or leads.

Pamela: Right.

Jason: So, if you look at those seven and you think, “OK. If my goal is to build community, how do you measure building community?” Well, you measure it by the size of your community. Maybe, you measure it by the value of the members of the community as customers compared to people who are not in the community. So, people who purchase who are community members, how much do they spend with you versus random people who come by and buy things who aren’t necessarily interested in being your community? So, there are a lot of different ways that you can contextualize and measure community and see how successful you’re being there. And money has a play in that regard.

But, let’s think more broadly. If you’re using social media marketing to enhance the awareness of your brand, think about how you measure that. You have to plan to measure your awareness. And wouldn’t it sound silly if I were in a board meeting and the CEO of the company said, “Hey, Jason. How is the branding and awareness campaign going online?” Wouldn’t it sound silly if my answer was, “$57.000?”

Pamela: Right.

Jason: Because you don’t measure awareness in dollars and cents. You measure awareness in how many more people know you. What’s the reach of your messaging? Are those messages resonating with the audience that you’re trying to reach? So, you measure awareness in lots of different things. Number of eyeballs reached. The pervasiveness of your messaging once it gets out there.

And you actually, physically measure that by doing surveys and looking at social media monitoring to see how many people are mentioning your brand. Did they have a positive reaction to you, a negative reaction to you? Q scores fall in there, so on and so forth. But, you don’t measure awareness in dollars and cents.

In fact, if you look at the seven business drivers that I mentioned, there are really only two that are primarily measured in dollars and cents. Obviously, driving sales and leads. And then research and development, I think you can make a really strong argument. Because if you develop a new product based on a social media idea or you enhance a feature based on a social media idea, you can then measure how much revenue you get from that new product or feature being in the marketplace.

So, those two you can absolutely say the ROI of what we’re doing is XYZ. The other five are more primarily measured in intangible benefits. They’re still important. You still need to build community. You still need good customer service. You still need good public relations. You still need branding and awareness. You still need to protect your reputation. But, you don’t measure those things primarily in dollars and cents. Like I mentioned in the building-community example, there are ways to bring dollars and cents into that measurement, but those are more intangibly measured.

And, therefore, asking the question of ROI, I think, is the wrong question to start with. You still want to ask that question because you need to be looking at money and the bottom line. But, ROI is always going to be a financial metric. It’s an accounting measurement. It’s how much money you made, subtract how much money you spent and then divide by how much money you spent. And the result is a percentage. And the key factor there is the two numbers that you need to measure that are dollars and cents.

So, you can’t possibly measure ROI of an awareness campaign because you don’t measure awareness in dollars and cents. So, what I say we need to do is pull back further and say, “What do I get in return?” Because you still are including return on investment. You’re still including money because you can get that in return. But, you’re also including the other intangible things that you can get. You can get more subscribers, better website traffic, lower cost per lead, lower call center costs, higher customer satisfaction scores. There are lots of different things you can get out of social media marketing. You first need to decide what you want to get out of it. And then plan your strategies and your tactics to achieve those goals and objectives so that you can measure them.

And I think the one mistake that most companies make, even mature companies in the social media marketing world right now, the one mistake they make is they don’t plan to measure.

Pamela: Hmm.

Jason: They say, “We’re going to do this for branding and awareness. And they don’t ask, “How are we going to measure that?” until three or four months into the campaign. And they go, “Well, how many ‘Likes’ do we have on Facebook? Did they go up? OK, I guess we did well.”

Pamela: Right.

Jason: You’re always going to be dissatisfied with your measures if you don’t first define what measures are important.

Pamela: That’s an excellent point because you can only manage what you measure.

Jason: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Pamela: A couple of things that you mentioned throughout today is this qualified prospect who becomes then converted to a sale. Which is what excites me about today’s world. When we were in the industrial model, it was so much more 100 calls a day. As much as you tried to get qualified, there’s nothing like the qualification process we can do today with the data, the intel and the conversations we can have.

Jason: Yeah.

Pamela: So, when I talk to business owners I say, “Would you rather have 100 people and have 20 percent convert or would you rather have 10 and have 80 percent convert?” That’s really the kind of numbers we’re able to deal with today. And you’re talking about, creating almost a sales funnel with some of this process.

I want to talk a little about research and development. But, since we’re talking about the sales piece, if it’s OK, let’s touch on that because this is an area, I think, is very confusing for some businesses. How can I use these different strategies of content marketing and social media to really drive sales? What does that really mean? Obviously, measurement. Knowing what you want to measure. But, what are some examples or, I guess, insight you can provide, Jason, when talking from that sales conversation?

Jason: Well, let’s start out with a small business example because I think that’s going to help a lot of people sort of wrap their brain around how social can really help you. Miss Shirley’s is a restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. And they have an awesome Sunday brunch. And the Sunday brunch is so good that they often have a two hour wait for a table. So, apparently, Miss Shirley’s is the place to go on Sunday mornings if you’re in and around Baltimore. They have two locations. So, look them up and go check them out.

Pamela: Excellent.

Jason: They sat down and said, “You know what? We’ve got Sunday under control. But, we want to drive more sales during the week. We need to figure out how to drive more Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday sales. And so, they started brainstorming and looking at all the options out there, both social media and digital and then offline as well. And they landed on Foursquare. And for those out there who don’t know, Foursquare is a mobile app you pull down on your phone.

And when you go to a place, you check in and you tell your social networks, “I am at this place. I am at Miss Shirley’s. I am at the bank. I am at the grocery store.” Whatever. And your social network then sees that and the potential is, “Oh, they are shopping at this store. Or they’re dining at this restaurant. Maybe I should, too.” So, that’s kind of the nuts and bolts of how Foursquare works.

Well, Foursquare also has this sort of silly little thing where if you check in more frequently than someone else at a given location in a certain amount of time, Foursquare names you the virtual mayor of that location which sounds really stupid. And, quite frankly, it is really stupid unless you think about it. It’s kind of rewarding people for checking into the location.

Pamela: Right.

Jason: But, if you’re the business, and you don’t have any control over who the mayor is, that’s all Foursquare activity, you can actually use that to your advantage. And what Miss Shirley’s decided to do was, “We’re going to educate everybody that comes to Miss Shirley’s about Foursquare. We’re going to put table tents and posters and we’re going to do emails. And we’re going to say, ‘Download this app on your phone, and when you’re here, check in. Because we want to know when you come to Miss Shirley’s. We want to be able to identify our loyal customers.’” So on and so forth.

And so, that motivated people probably to download the app and start checking in when they got to Miss Shirley’s. But, then they added a little incentive. They said, “If you come in on Sunday morning and you are the mayor of either location, you don’t have to wait for a table.”

Pamela: Oh, nice.

Jason: So, now all of a sudden, instead of having to wait two hours for your Sunday brunch with your family, if you come to Miss Shirley’s several times this week and check in and you become the mayor, you don’t have to wait. Well, they saw a 427 percent increase in check-ins on Foursquare.

Pamela: Wow.

Jason: Which is a little bit of what we lovingly refer to in the book as a hippie and tree-hugger stat.

Pamela: Right.

Jason: Because it doesn’t actually mean anything for your business other than you taught people how to use Foursquare. Good for you.

Pamela: Right.

Jason: But, they also measured a corresponding 18 percent increase in sales. Because in order to be the mayor, you had to check in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and other days other than Sunday. You had to come in more frequently. And when you came in more frequently, you probably had a beer or you bought lunch or you bought dinner or whatever. And so, they noticed that because they did this one little isolated social media thing, they had an 18 percent increase in sales over a three month period. And that’s an 18 percent increase in sales in the middle of a recession in the restaurant industry, which is incredible.

Pamela: That’s amazing. That is amazing. And there are so many other elements that you talked about, Jason. They did; they know their community, so they worked with their community. And their brand awareness probably went up as well if more people were checking in. There are a lot of different components to that. And I think the most important is they knew what they wanted to measure before they went for it.

Jason: Yep. Absolutely. They knew that Foursquare check-ins would be an important metric for them. But, they also knew that they needed to watch sales. And from what I understand, that was really the only sort of marketing thing that they changed over that three-month period.

Pamela:  Wow.

Jason: So, they can definitively say that 18 percent increase in sales was most likely the result of this Foursquare promotion and what we were doing on Foursquare. Now, you can always say, “Well, there are marketplace changes and fluctuations and weather.” And all that stuff has a lot to do with it. But, from what they were doing for spending their marketing dollars, they can attribute that 18 percent increase in sales to Foursquare.

Pamela: I think that’s fantastic. That’s a great example and a great small business example. Let’s face it. That’s the majority of what we have out in our wonderful country. And these are the folks I think have the greatest opportunity with the level playing field that has become marketing. Because you could be a Coca-Cola or you could be this little restaurant in Maryland, and you could be using the same tools.

Jason: Absolutely.

Pamela: I think that’s phenomenal. I mean this is just an unheard of opportunity for marketing and small business. And one of the pieces I just want to touch on as we kind of wrap things up and we’re moving into that space here, Jason, is research and development. Again, I think small business owners sometimes miss the boat on this. And I know that this is an area that you share about really well, is using social as a research tool. Launching new product. Getting intel or due diligence on your customers. So, tell us a little bit from your perspective about how this space can really help a company with research and development.

Jason: Sure. And when we’re talking R&D, we’re probably talking larger businesses, because those are the ones that have the money to invest in research and development. But, social media also, though, makes it very, very possible for small businesses to conduct R&D on a reasonable level. Now, you’re probably, if you’re doing a customer survey or a consumer survey that you’re throwing out there on your Facebook page, will not. You have to worry about sample size and how many people are going to answer the survey and is it really relevant data.

But, at the same time, a small business can very easily throw up a poll or a couple of questions on their Facebook page and start getting intelligence from their customers right away. So, R&D in social media sort of levels the playing field to a degree.

Probably my favorite R&D story is actually a big brand. But it’s a big brand that saved a ton of money and did not have to spend a ton of money to get some really good insights. And they’re my home boys here in Louisville, Papa John’s. I don’t work for them. I’m not endorsing them at all. But, they’re in Louisville and I’m in Louisville. So, there you go.

But anyway, the Papa John’s folks did a Facebook contest. And on the surface it appeared to be just a gimmicky way to get “Likes.” They basically said instead of going to our executive chef and getting a new pizza recipe to put in stores, we’re going to turn to our Facebook fans and say, you guys submit a new recipe to us and we’ll choose a winner and we’ll put that in the stores.

And so, it looked like this gimmicky thing. But, they actually formulated the contest for a specific reason. And that reason was R&D. And the requirements of the contest were if you’re going to submit your recipe, you have to videotape yourself making the pizza. And we want to know why you’re putting the ingredients in. We want to know how much paprika and how many pepperoni slices and how you’re going to knead the dough. And how long you’re going to put it in the oven. And you have to explain to us the logic and the reasons why you’re putting all this stuff in this pizza. So, that was the video requirement to enter the contest.

Well, they got hundreds of entries. And, therefore, they literally got hundreds of hours. I don’t know if it was hundreds of hours, but they got dozens of hours of actual consumers looking in the camera and saying, “This is why I make this pizza the way I do. This is why the ingredients go in.” Can you imagine how much money they would have had to pay to a market research firm to go out and get that from focus groups and whatnot in the field?

Pamela: That’s phenomenal.

Jason: It would have been millions of dollars.

Pamela: And not only that, but it almost feels competitive. You talk about the Foursquare checking in process. There’s something about this competitive nature of human beings that you can tap into as well. That’s fantastic. I love how they asked all those specific detailed questions. You have to literally give us your reason why you did X, X and X.

Jason: Oh, yeah. And the winning entry, by the way, was Cheesy Chick Cordon Bleu. It actually made it into the stores. They sold it. So, they were able to say, “Hey, Facebook contest has an ROI because we sold Cheesy Chick Cordon Bleus.” They also put a bunch of the runners-up in stores as well. I think they gave the winner $10,000 or something in honor of having their pizza in stores.

So, it was a gimmicky little contest. But, the reason they ran it was to get all that consumer insight that they would have literally had to pay millions of dollars for. So, that whole thing had an element of gaming, because there’s competition between the people. It had really high engagement levels because people were looking into a camera and talking to the brand. But, they were able to glean insights that really helped them understand their consumers a lot better. And they didn’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.

In fact, you can go out and do a video contest on Facebook. And you can probably find some third-party applications and whatnot that you can do it for probably under $10,000 if you wanted to. Now, Papa John’s is Papa John’s. They probably spent a lot of money to make it, design it nicely and have all these bells-and-whistles functionality. So, they probably put a little bit of money into it. But, I promise you, they didn’t put as much money into it as they would have had to have done if they’d gone to a market research firm and gotten the same information.

Pamela: Well, the hit-the-streets factor is so different.

Jason: Yeah.

Pamela: The manpower it would have taken before social media to get that kind of intel at that scope.

Jason: Yep.

Pamela: It would not have happened.

Jason: Absolutely.

Pamela: I just don’t think it would have happened because they would have started going through the cost process and say, “Ah, we’ve got to try a different route.” No, I think it’s fantastic. And I love these examples because even though it’s a large organization, I believe that we as small business owners or folks out there listening as a small business owner, you can take an idea from that.

Jason: Yeah.

Pamela: There is something in that, like you said. And you mentioned the quality. We seem to be a little more forgiving in terms of quality since YouTube.

Jason: Yeah, that’s true. It’s really funny. I’m actually seeing bigger brands are becoming more and more insistent upon higher quality, which I find ironic. Because, I think, we in the social space have tried to show them over the years that it’s OK to just throw up a flip cam and ask somebody a question.

Pamela: Yeah. 

Jason: But, the more bigger brands get involved in it, the more they say, “Well, this is a way we can separate our video content from others.  We can still put some production value into it.” I don’t see any problem with that. I really don’t. But, at the same time I still think it’s cool to have . . . If Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company is at a trade show and opens up a flip cam and interviews somebody for two minutes and throws that up on the Ford page, that’s much more compelling to me than some slick video of a car driving around a beach.

Pamela: Well, it’s authentic. It’s the real deal.

Jason: Yeah.

Pamela: It’s kind of the straight shooter approach.

Jason: Yep. Absolutely.

Pamela: Well, Jason, I always enjoy hearing you speak on the topic of anything social and digital and content. And you have a great way of getting the information out to the audience that I think is pretty much no BS, straight shooting, direct. I could talk to you again and again. I think there’s a lot of stuff here, especially in your book, that folks need to embrace, understand and move on. Let’s do it, people, because now is your time. Now is the time to get involved.

Jason: Absolutely.

Pamela: So, Jason, as we wrap up, I always want to make sure that our audience knows all the different ways that you would like them to connect with you or the easiest way to do that. So, how do we do that, Jason? What’s the best way to connect with Jason Falls and Social Media Explorer?

Jason: SocialMediaExplorer.com is a real good starting point. That’s the blog and then you can find links to our events and the other things we do there. I’m really easy to come by. I’m Jason Falls on most social networks. I’m on Twitter probably more frequently than I’m on anything else. But, I’m happy to connect with folks on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ or whatever else. I’m out there and when I have time, I respond as frequently and as in depth as I possibly can.

Pamela: And I highly recommend that you do check out all the stuff that Jason has. Connect with his blog. Put that in your RSS feed because it’s good stuff. In the meantime, I want to also remind folks that his book that he’s co-authored with Erik Deckers. Is that your co-author? We want to give him a shout out, too.

Jason: Yep.

Pamela: OK

Jason: Yep. That’s Erik.

Pamela: Hi, Erik. Thanks so much for being a part of the book, No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. Jason, it’s a great book. You do a great job. I look forward to seeing you again live really soon. And I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to be a part of our show today.

Jason: Well, thank you for having me, Pam. It’s an honor to be here.

Pamela: Excellent. Thanks so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

Jason: You, too.

Web analytics is often the go-to resource for measuring content quality and understanding user behavior. But it’s also a great resource for evaluating user needs, including the content that users find desirable and valuable. It fact, users tell us what they like every time they visit our website. We just have to stop and listen.

Here are a number of ways web analytics can help you discover what content topics your readers care about.

1. Blog categories and tags

An effective website navigation scheme not only improves usability but also supports content analysis. Using a topic-driven navigation, you can gain insight into which topics are most popular and, thus, which valuable topics you can revisit or expand upon for new blog posts.

A common blog feature is to list links to blog post categories and tags. When users browse these category pages, they’re informing us about topics that interest them (and consequently, when they ignore certain links, ones that don’t).

In Google Analytics or other analytics tools, evaluate page views for your category (topic) pages.

Top page views for topic pages.

In the example above, communications is the leading topic for this blog, followed by creation, usability, and analysis. This is a good place to start in understanding what topics interest your users. Conversely, if other categories have relatively low page views, these may be topics that don’t resonate with your audience and perhaps shouldn’t take priority over other more popular topics.

As with categories, also evaluate the popularity of blog tags. While category pages give you an idea of the broad topics users find interesting, tag pages give you insight into more specific areas of interest.

Category and tag page metrics are general and shouldn’t be taken at face value. Instead, use them to start your research. In the example above, strategy could be toward the bottom of the list because of the placement of the link on the page or because the keyword is inappropriate. If posts are more popular than the category they fall under, you may be using the wrong keyword to describe the topic.

After using this method to uncover potentially valuable topics, you can dig deeper with some of the following methods to help validate your insights. You can also then use traditional metrics such as bounce rate and time on page to help answer more specific questions, such as “Do people who view this topic page find what they are looking for?”

Tip: Configure blog permalinks for easy segmentation. To evaluate category and tag pages, it helps to create a web address structure that supports segmentation. By including topic or category in the web address, you not only provide a descriptive web address for users, you also enable easy segmentation of these pages for analysis.

2. Top-performing blog posts

Viewing top-performing pages gives you insight into more specific topics of interest on a per-post basis.

Sort blog pages by page view. Take note of the topics, including related category and tag pages, and pay particular attention to combinations of topics. You may, for example, find that posts covering both communication and social media are very popular.

Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz can help you dig deeper through evaluating top-performing pages by search engine authority, inbound links, and social media shares (with a Pro Subscription). Discover which posts and topics rank well in search results (i.e., those that are most referenced by external sites) and which are most share-worthy.

Top two CMI blog posts, sorted by page ranking authority on Open Site Explorer.

3. Search (internal and external)

When visitors use the search box on your website, they’re again telling you what topics interest them most right now.

Internal site search.

However, visitors don’t always know the right search terms to use, so don’t take search terms completely at face value. Dig deeper.

In your analytics tool, view individual internal site search terms to evaluate whether the search results match the inquiry (i.e., does the user find what she or he is looking for?). This can be measured, in part, by whether visitors click on the search results or choose to leave your site and abandon their search.

The same goes for external organic search from Google and other search engines. What are the top topics (keywords) driving traffic to your site? This approach is focused on prospective readers. View search terms to learn what topics are attracting new visitors. Where are the opportunities for increasing your readership with new, relevant content?

For this exercise, focus less on the exact search terms and more on the topics they relate to. What topics are people searching for?

4. Evaluate referral traffic by topic

In my experience, referral traffic is a metric that is often overlooked. Yet, it provides valuable, dual insight, revealing details on who your readers are as well as on which topics they care about most.

Who is referring traffic to your website? Look past the common referring websites (Facebook, Twitter, affiliates, etc.) and note sources that are new or different. Who are they? What is their business? What topics do they cover? Go for the long tail. Dig deep to discover sites that don’t refer to you often but have shown an interest in your content.

Which blog topics are referrers linking to? Once you have a sense of who your referring readers are, discover what content they are looking for. View top blog posts by page views and referring websites to find out which of your blog topics your readers are commonly linking to. What are new referrers linking to? More importantly, what referring links do people click on most frequently?

5. Outgoing traffic

Track outgoing links to learn what external resources and related topics interest your readers. By default, most web analytics applications, such as Google Analytics, don’t track outbound links, but you can tag them manually or use third-party plug-ins (such as Google Analytics for WordPress that will auto-tag outbound links so that you can track them.

Outbound links to CMI blog posts.

Again, pay attention to topics. What external websites do your readers find desirable? Do those websites cover topics that would be valuable and appropriate for your readers?

6. Comment rate

User engagement is an important benchmark for evaluating content quality — and one of the most effective ways to measure engagement with blog content is comment rate. Find out what percentage of readers comment on your blog posts. But don’t stop there. Look at the comment rate by topic. What topics resonate most with your readers?

Coupled with some of the aforementioned methods of evaluating popular posts, comment rate by topic can help you understand what topics your readers are most excited about.

7. Sharing rate

While you are evaluating comment rate, also take note of what percentage of readers share your posts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, email, and other social platforms. What blog categories and tags do users share the most? Sharing rate can speak to the caliber of your topic. For example, a big retweet number gives your topic a high qualitative value, not just bragging rights.

Finding inspiration

It can be hard to find inspiration when you sit down to write a blog post. You wonder what new content will attract, inform, engage, and retain your readers. Fortunately, many of these insights are sitting right in front of us.

While web analytics is not a fail-safe method for evaluating user needs and intent, it does provide a great starting point. To learn more, you can follow up with formal or informal qualitative analysis, such as user surveys or feedback gathered through your communication channels.

With a clearer idea of your readers’ interests, you can develop a running list of valuable topic ideas. And, better yet, you can say goodbye to writer’s block.

What analytics insights have you used to evaluate blog content? What other quantitative (or qualitative) methods do you use to generate topic ideas?

The content engineer is a marketer who creates and optimizes the many forms of content required to engage social customers, based on the data presented by available analysis tools. They listen to the customer — through all the newly available media — before crafting the content (and marketing messages) for each medium. For example:

• Social media monitoring and analysis give them a pulse on buyer sentiments on brands, products, and ad campaigns.
• Web analytics tell them which content is engaging which types of visitors, and from which sources.
• Search engine optimization tools present them with the right keywords to include in their content to improve online visibility.

By leveraging all the social and behavioral intelligence available to them, content engineers develop and apply the right content, at the right time, to engage the right audience in the most effective manner possible. Part creative right brain and part scientific left brain, content engineers live and breathe the new marketing math:  creativity without conversions = zero!

So what does it take to be a content engineer? Here are the seven areas of expertise that these professionals must master in their quest to attract and enchant their readers:

1. Align Yourself with Business Goals

You can’t be an effective content engineer, much less an effective marketer, if you’re not properly aligned with your company’s business and marketing goals.

Understanding goals is the key to setting effective strategies. So before you unleash your content wizardry, ask yourself key questions, such as what is your company trying to accomplish, who are your target audience segments, and what are the key messages that are likely to resonate for each segment.

2. Know How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Once you have a clear picture of business goals, you can begin to chart your content marketing strategy, including determining what types of content you’ll need to achieve various company goals, what existing assets you have to work with, and which types of success metrics to use.

Remember, content comes in many shapes and flavors these days, including video, live or recorded webinars, blogs, and tweets, as well as more traditional formats like white papers and case studies. Below is a chart showing the most common types of content and their alignment within the traditional customer lifecycle of acquisition, conversion, and retention. Some content assets can fall into multiple categories, though there are a few that are definitely more suited to one specific purpose.

3. Unleash Your Inner Data Analyst

Here’s where your left-brain kicks in. One of the keys to being a good data analyst is being able to use data and measurement to plan, report on, and optimize content. If you’ve never familiarized yourself with Google Analytics (the most popular free web analytics service) or one of the many social analytics tools available (such as Viralheat or Radian6), now is a great time to start. This is where the content engineer earns his bread and butter, and it’s what truly separates the content engineer from the copywriter. Here some ways in which the content engineer leverages data:

• Planning: Which topics and types of content have driven the best results in the past? How can you can re-purpose or re-imagine those topics for future use? What’s trending within web and social circles that might help you better connect with your audience?
• Reporting: Is your content meeting your marketing objectives? How much traffic is your company blog generating, and how many people are converting from that domain? No what matter type of content you produce, its reach, engagement, and conversion effectiveness must be monitored and measured in some manner.
• Optimizing: Optimizing content first starts with establishing a measurement benchmark based on the objective, and then continually testing against that baseline. For example, for content geared toward extending reach, you need to establish specific reach benchmarks (see: recommended metrics, below), and see how your various forms of content perform against those metrics. Different forms of content will work better for different businesses, so don’t be afraid to experiment to determine what works for you!

4. Know the Right Tools

Content engineers must make it a point to know the tools and technology that will help them save time and be more effective. For example, a content engineer knows he or she doesn’t have to be an SEO expert to help optimize content. Instead, they can rely on tools such as InboundWriter to do that work for them. Here are a few categories of tools the content engineer should be familiar with:

Content production: Tools such as Zemanta, CurationSoft, HubSpot, and others make it easier to create blog posts and curate content.

Content optimization:  InboundWriter, Scribe, and other optimization tools can help you increase content relevance and improve search visibility.

Content measurement: Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Viralheat, SocialMention, and Bit.ly are a few of the tools you can use to help measure content effectiveness on the web and within search and social channels

5. Create Relevant Content

Content engineers have to be good at creating relevant content that speaks to their target audiences. One of the best ways to create relevant content is to use analytics to understand what’s worked in the past. Find out what topics sparked interest among your readers, and use these topics as a jumping-off point to brainstorm other useful topics.

A great way to do this is to speak directly with your customers and ask them what interests them in the here and now. One of our favorite quotes is from content marketing expert Marcus Sheridan, who said, “Your customers’ first 50 questions should be your first 50 blog posts.” Other ways to fine-tune your content for relevance is review the search keywords driving traffic to your site to see which words and phrases your readers are using when searching or sharing. To find more general trending topics, you can use web sites such as Alexa, TweetMeme.com, and Google Hot Trends.

6. Get it Read

The content engineer isn’t solely in charge of content distribution, per se, but should have a good knowledge of how to spread relevant content, starting with search optimization. Content engineers should work with their marketing and PR colleagues to leverage their entire community: social channels, customer advocates, influencers, paid media, etc.

One final note: Get employees involved as much as possible in helping share your content via social channels. This is a heavily under-utilized resource and can significantly increase your reach. Don’t make it mandatory, but be sure to let co-workers know about new pieces of content so that they can help promote them to their relevant business and social networks.

7. Measure & Adjust

We spoken a lot about measurement, but it can’t be overstated. Measuring the effectiveness of any marketing initiative, whether it’s content or something else, is extremely important. It helps guide future decisions, as we work toward that universal truth: creativity without conversions = zero. We all need to become data-driven content professionals. On that note, here are some success metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing initiatives, mapped against the stages of the customer acquisition lifecycle:

Reach, as measured by:

• A change in search engine rankings
• A change in total and unique visitors
• A change in pay-per-click (PPC) impressions served
• A change in search engine referral traffic (organic)
• A change in specific campaign-driven traffic to site
• A change in social referral traffic to site
• A change in social activity and shares via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.
• A change in total impact (e.g., the aggregated following of those tweeting about your content or brand) 


Engagement, as measured by:   

• A change in average time spent on a webpage
• A change in average # of pages per visit
• A change in average bounce rate for visitors
• A change in return visitors
• A change in average time spent in-app (cloud app/ web service)
• A change in log-ins (cloud app/ web service)
• A change in engagement within social channels

Conversion, as measured by:

• A change in conversion to sale for all visitors who landed on a page
• A change in conversion to lead form
• A change in free to paid user conversion rates

Last, but not least, don’t forget your marketing basics. You may need to segment your audience — by role, age, gender, education, intent, etc. — to create more targeted content. And, always be sure to test your content for different audience segments and marketing media to ensure the highest impact.

Being a content engineer is not easy. It requires unlocking both halves of your brain and alternating between several roles (marketer, copywriter, SEO specialist and web analytics professional). It requires discipline and patience, but when done correctly, content engineering can help separate you from the competition, and enables you to generate powerful, quantifiable — and more predictable — business results.

I like things simple, neat, explainable, and relatable. So here I stand in the complex world of online marketing amongst too many search results, too much data, and way too much advice on how to read it. I’m going to come right out and say it: Content marketing and online marketing, in general, have gotten seriously complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.

So, what makes content marketing so complex? And how can we simplify it for the sake of all our sanity?

Complexity #1: Too many flippin’ options for outbound communications

This happens all the time in strategy meetings with clients. A client says, “Have you tried [insert new social media site of the day]? We hear it’s the next big thing! We should add it to the strategy!”

There are more online marketing vehicles and social media outposts than we can possibly keep up with. Testing the effectiveness of every new content space that emerges could become a marketer’s full-time job. Adding every shiny, new outpost to your strategy can make it unmanageable.

How to simplify it: Here’s the No. 1 question I get from my clients: “How do we know which outposts are right for our business?” Ah!  The question that simplifies everything. We must remember — and I’ll steal a concept from my partner Brody Dorland — there are a million places to disseminate content, but we only need to find the few ponds where our fish are swimming now (or will swim soon). In other words, our customers are probably much less aware of the newest, greatest content outposts than we are. If you do some listening and find the ponds they’re in, customers will find your content. And the No. 1 way to simplify? Start small, see how it goes (track it), and then add on when necessary.

Complexity #2: Content strategy segmentation nightmare

Within a given company, there could be 10 or more different audience personas to market to based on products and service offerings and different industries. So the resulting content strategy can get complex. Which messages go to which personas in which spaces and with what frequency? Then consider the actual content production that in order to hit all of your targets has to be molded to the different needs/ wants/ pain points of each persona. That’s enough to make a corporate marketer run back to cable TV!

How to simplify it: You could develop a separate content strategy for each of your 10 personas, or you could determine the one to two overarching content paths that will resonate with the majority of your buyers and stick to it. For instance, let’s say you have four buyer personas, but all of them want to work with/ buy from a thought leader. An overarching content strategy (or path) of thought leadership should be your focus. You can also simplify by combining personas that have some common needs/ wants/ pain points. By combining messages, you need to create fewer pieces of content.

Complexity #3: Collaboration and content production process madness

I’m not even sure I need to explain how difficult the collaboration process can be, especially when you have both an internal team and external contributors.  These are just few of the pains in a content manager’s butt when trying to manage the production process:

• Keeping everyone in the loop with what everyone else is working on
• Sharing assets and spreadsheets
• Making sure everyone is looking at the most recent versions of things
• Trying to manage the workflow process
• Handling the problems of contributors trying to share ideas with the rest of the team.

And, these are the pains you realize when you have a formalized process. If you don’t have a formal content production process, you’re realizing some additional madness. Hate your job yet?

How to simplify it: You need to formalize the content production process, put the right (and right-sized) team in place, and equip yourself with the right tools to get it all done. Here’s my suggestion:

1.  Decide how many hours each week you can dedicate to content marketing. You can figure out this number if you know how many projects you have, how many hours you estimate the projects to take and how many team members you have to complete the projects.
2. Figure out how many people it will take to get this done. Do you have internal folks or do you need to outsource? Keep in mind, you may find talent in unlikely people; for example, maybe your CFO is an amateur photographer who might want a chance to test his/ her skills. Establish a workflow process based on your production steps. For example, your process may look like this: assign to writer, send to editor, send to client for review, finalize your proof, publish, promote.

Too much talk about Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter ‘followers’ is dumming down your analytics.

If you were asked for the most important metric you track related to your online marketing efforts, what would you say? What is the very first thing that came to mind?

Depending on your responsibilities within your organization and the goals for your website, there are bound to be a variety of responses.

Social media managers might say “share of voice” or “social mentions”. Or maybe they will point to traffic sent to the main website from their social activities such as Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube videos. Let’s hope they didn’t say Facebook likes or Twitter followers as their core measurement focus.

Content strategists might say they focus on measuring their most popular pages or possibly the most popular landing pages (there is a difference). This is good information and easy to obtain. I hope they didn’t say they measure the number of blog posts produced by their team each month as a measure of success.

Search engine optimizers might say the most import thing to measure these days is traffic to the website. A couple of years ago, a lot of search engine optimizers were totally focused on the number of backlinks and pages indexed. Generally this equated to higher search engine rankings for keywords, and that was all that mattered. Not anymore.

Company presidents might say sales are the only thing that matter. And as a business owner I can’t blame them. I often say the top line (revenue) can fix a lot of issues. But I would be disappointed if any executive said the number one metric was traffic to the website.

All of them should have said the only thing that matters is the cost per lead or cost per sale.

I’m here to tell you that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is conversions. If you don’t have conversions, you don’t have a business.

Focusing on conversions means you need to track two things:

1. How much you are spending to convert customers.
2. How you can optimize the process of converting customers.

Determine the cost of customer conversion

An entire article can be written on determining these costs of converting customers, but let me boil it down to four steps.

1. Revenue goals:

Define your business objective for the year.  To keep this very simple, let’s say your team’s goal is to generate $1 million in new sales.

2. Customers:

Identify the number of new customers you need to meet your goal. To accomplish this, you need to determine the average revenue generated by your typical customer. In this example, let’s say that is $5,000. Divide revenue ($1M) by your average customer ($5K) and you get two hundred. This means you need to close 200 new customers to make your revenue goal.

3. Conversion ratios:

How many leads does it take you to close one customer? If you close one new customer out of every 10 leads, your conversion ratio is 10 percent. This means you will need 2,000 new leads (calls, walk-ins, online registrations or completed lead form) to get 200 new customers.

4. Cost per lead: 

Your business plan tells you marketing cannot exceed 10 percent of revenue. Following through on our math, you now know you need to keep your marketing costs below $500 per new client. It takes 10 leads to get a new customer so our cost per lead needs to be $50 or less.

This might seem too simple and too obvious, but how many of you know whether your content marketing is paying off? Are your white papers, your YouTube channel or even your blog cost effective? Are they generating leads at or below your business goal of $50 per lead? A typical response from those who don’t know is “but we do that for branding.” Really? Even though you have the tools to measure all of those channels right to the cost per lead or sale? It is so tempting to brag about likes, views and subscribers, but if you cannot quantify whether they helped achieve your business goal, why measure them?

Optimize the conversion process

There are a number of metrics you can track to help improve your cost per conversion. By tracking these metrics you can make incremental improvements to many aspects of your content marketing program, which will result in improved conversions. Here are several examples of metrics to follow that will help you optimize your process:

• Source and quantity of traffic to your site. Often called “web referrals,” this metric is probably the most basic measuring stick and indicates where your website traffic is coming from and at what rate. If you have conversion tracking set up in your analytics, you can determine which referral sources have the highest conversion rates. This should be measured over an extended period of time.
• Visits to purchase rate is defined as the number of sessions your visitors require to move from first interaction to a completed purchase. This metric is loosely related to days to purchase, another measurement worth noting. As you might expect, more complex sales generally require a few visits before buying, whereas sites focused on lead generation might be able to see conversions on first visits.  
• Popular landing pages are those pages of your site that have the highest entrance rates. This is the first page visitors see when they arrive at your website. Many people assume this is your home page, but in many cases this is not the case. You must consider every piece of content and every page of your site a landing page. Take a close look at the top 10 or 20 landing pages. What would a new visitor think of it each without other context? Does it have a clear call to action?
• Page load speed is the time from which the page starts to load to the time when all the objects on the page are loaded. Fast-loading content improves the user experience and reduces bounce rates. Google’s algorithm is now taking page-load speeds into account for search rankings.
• Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site, rather than continue to other pages within the same site. Even visitors who stay on a page for 10 minutes to read an article or watch a video will be considered a bounce if they do not move deeper into your website. Any page with a high bounce rate will be unlikely to convert customers effectively, and may even hurt you in search rankings.
• Time-on-site or engagement measures how long a visitor remains on your website during one session. Time on your website can be an indication of the level of interest or involvement that a visitor has with your content. If you have solid engagement on specific pages, but no conversions, you should check to see if you have a clear call to action.
• Number of re-tweets and Facebook shares (not “likes”) are two metrics that speak to the Holy Grail of social media marketers: “shareability.” Re-tweets and shares not only indicate whether your content has found an audience, but evidence also shows the major search engines are tracking this type of sharing to determine how this content should rank within search results. Again, if the content is being shared, but not converting, you may need to improve your call to action.

These metrics are all useful to track, but remember: conversions are the lifeblood of virtually every business. Thousands of “likes” may win you a popularity contest, but also may be completely unrelated to revenue growth. The happy glow of your newfound social media status will not impress your CFO if it doesn’t also lead to business growth. Period.

Why a hyper focus on measurement and incremental gains makes marketers average.

Let’s talk about how a myopic focus on measurement can suck all the innovation and success out of our strategy. Here is an experiment: Walk around your office and ask everybody three questions. The first question: “Should companies be innovative?”  I’ll take a wild-ass guess and predict a 90-percent-plus response in the affirmative.

Then, independent of that answer, immediately ask the next one. “Has our company ever been innovative?” Here, you may get that confused it’s-4 p.m,-and-I-haven’t-had-my-Snickers look. They may ask “Do you mean are we innovative right now?” And you’ll reply, “No, I’m asking whether we have ever been innovative? Ever?”

Here, your mileage will vary, but I’ll bet you one thing to be 100 percent true. Of those who said “yes” to the second question, when you ask them the third and final question, everyone will cite a success.

You see … everybody LOVES innovation. You know, just so long as it worked.

Nobody wants to be the dope who said “yes” to the new content marketing strategy that wound up causing a social media tsunami. As a friend said to me recently, “I’d rather get a zero out of 100 on a test rather than a 22. Because a 22 means I tried.”

Today it seems we are under constant pressure to obtain data, prove ROI and justify our choices—even those we haven’t even made yet. Content marketers in particular seem to be in the grips of ROI monomania. At almost every conference, webinar and client meeting I attend, one of the first things I’m universally asked is “We’re thinking of doing some content marketing, but my boss wants to know it will work. How do I show the ROI?”  

So, what are we really looking for when we ask that question? There is almost certainly no way to draw a straight line between the expense of a content marketing initiative and revenue. And, arguably, many successful content marketing initiatives aren’t designed to generate revenue anyway. No, what we’re really looking for are best practices. They’re safe. Whenever we’re trying something new like content marketing, we become so focused on following best practices that we forget our real job is to be innovative. We become incapacitated by this feeling that our measurement should always be moving up and to the right, and unable or unwilling to embark on any activity we can’t ensure will nudge our measurement stats in the right direction.

Best practices are maps for us to follow to get the same results as those who went before us. In short, they are the marketing equivalent of sitting down at the restaurant and saying, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

But, here’s the thing: When we are satisfied with a best practice—when we end at best practices—we are saying that we’re satisfied with being average.

You’ve all heard them. Here are a few “best practices” that we’ve grown up with:

• 40/40/20 rule: Started by Ed Mayer, a pioneer in the direct marketing industry, the 40/40/20 rule says we should focus 40 percent to the right list (audience), 40 percent to the offer and 20 percent to everything else (format, paper, stock, graphics, etc.).
• No navigation on landing page: This best practice says that you should remove everything extraneous from your landing pages or risk your conversion rate.
• 1 to 2 percent conversion rate: This one is so ingrained that it’s even become a “rule” within Google Adwords. If you can’t maintain a higher than 1 percent click-thru rate on your text ad, your ad quality score is penalized.

And there are tons of others …

The point is not to disabuse you of these practices (although I have personal experience that the second example is definitely not always true). In fact, quite the opposite—these are best practices precisely because they have worked for many in the past. 

Do you want to be the chicken or the egg?

Who was the first marketer to discover that removing 75 percent of her email list and culling it down to just those who opted-in actually improved her marketing performance and saved money?

Almost certainly this wasn’t a best practice when she tried it. She either discovered it accidentally (happy accident) or there was a decision to test this as a theory and the marketer tried it out. Then, a case study gets written, the idea gets passed on and passed on … and ultimately becomes the rule of thumb for marketing best practices from that point forward. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Content marketing is no different. It’s a new practice we’re putting into our organizations. And, it’s a practice that doesn’t replace the channels we’re using. Rather, it’s one that ideally makes everything else we’re doing more effective. So we should build our business case and our measurement strategy with that in mind.

Say we produce high quality content and distribute it through a number of channels (blog, social web, etc.), and we notice an uptick in visitors to the site. That’s measurable but let’s be clear: higher traffic does not mean that content marketing is providing a return. It means our one, great piece of content is providing value to our existing advertising process. And, we can quantify that value based on how many more people we get into our sales process because of it. In short, this is what gives you the permission to think outside the box. Using a content marketing strategy more likely increases the ROI of other activities you’re supporting (search tactics, lead nurturing, advertising, CRM, etc.). That’s where you stretch your unique and creative strategies and test your assumptions—and create new best practices.  

Stop looking at content marketing as yet another channel. Instead, think of it as a new, comprehensive process and mindset that you integrate into your other marketing efforts.

Consider this example: At the beginning of this 2011, a B2B organization launched a new blog. It spent tons of time and effort developing a solid set of “big ideas” around which to have a discussion. It wasn’t going to be about the brand; the blog was going to offer leading-edge insights about its area of expertise, positioning the members of this company as thought leaders in the industry. The company acquired an amazing, one-word URL that summed up the exact theme of these ideas. It developed a content strategy. It put together the targeted personas. It created an entire editorial calendar. In short, this organization did everything just right.

Then, as the launch date approached, and the blog started filling with posts and content, the executive team began to second guess themselves. What started as quiet hallway conversations a few weeks before launch became a full-blown conference room debate about marketing’s best practices:

• “We can’t talk about competitors here.”
• “We should incorporate this into our corporate SEO strategy.”
• “What’s our official position on that? We need to add that into every post.”
• “We’ve never talked about that before. We have to delete that.”
• “We don’t compete well on that issue.”
• “Aren’t we helping our competition with that post?”
• “We need a lot more persuasive calls to action on this blog.”

What’s the ROI?

So, the company changed the blog. (To be plain, it was gutted.)  It deleted the “offending posts,” added a call to action for a free trial on every page and changed every mention of a competitor to a generic term.

Guess what happened? When the blog launched, it was basically an extension of the corporate marketing site—and was about as well recognized a thought leadership platform as you might think. Crickets chirped.

Too often marketers’ fear of failure in the short term stands in the way of the learning—even the breakthrough new practice—we might achieve in the longer term. In short, we’re so afraid that we might lose sales or disenfranchise a prospect that our practices stay safe, incremental—and ultimately mediocre. We get so boxed in by measurement that we have no choice but to grasp tightly to best practices and strive to be “a little bit better than last time.”

Peter Drucker says that business “only has two functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation create value, all the rest are costs.”

With all of that attention, it’s no wonder that Jason and his team of contributors draw over 100,000 page views each month from content marketing professionals like you and me.

If you’re attending, you’ll have a chance to see Jason present during the afternoon sessions on Thursday, September 8. Take about 5 minutes and watch this Skype video interview on what Jason has been up to, and what he’ll be sharing at the conference.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Please excuse the blank stare I’ll be giving you during the entire interview. It seems that Skype Recorder and I have had some small problems in our working relationship recently. You’ll notice that my side of the split screen stays frozen during the recording. Meh!  But hey,  the audio and the screen on Jason are more important anyway.

Planning template
Do you have so many ideas but aren’t sure what you should tackle first? Here’s a spreadsheet you can use to prioritize.

Content questionnaire
What do you need to cover at a content marketing kickoff? To make sure all of your bases are covered, check out this template from Debbie Williams that sets the foundation for an editorial strategy.

Buyer persona
This straightforward buyer persona template from Barbara Gago is a great way to help you document your buyer needs.

Content mapping template
Marketers talk about mapping content, but how do you do this?  Here are a  few templates from Barbara Gago that walk you through the process.

Editorial calendar
If there is one tool I can’t live without, it’s my editorial calendar. Here’s a template to help you get started.

Template for tracking keywords
Elise Redlin-Cook shows you how to research the right keywords to use in your content and SEO efforts and then provides a template to help you stay organized.

Web page template
You want your web pages to drive action, but how do you do that? Brody Dorland shares the template he uses to create effective web content.

Social media conversation calendar
Debbie Williams shares the social media conversation calendar she uses to develop content strategy for social media while making the process efficient and consistent.

Facebook engagement spreadsheet
In this popular posts, Nate Riggs outlines five ways to interpret the free data provided by Facebook Insights, and he shares the spreadsheet he uses to keep track of the data.

Sales communication template
As a content marketer, you’re producing useful content and trying to get the word out to your prospects, but does sales know what you are doing? Here’s an easy-to-use template from Dianna Huff for a monthly email that provides sales with details about the company’s marketing initiatives.

What other types of templates would help you do your job better? Let us know in the comments below!

Despite needing to be accountable for other kinds of marketing campaigns, CMOs forget to use the techniques they rely on with other forms of marketing when it comes to blogs. Why? Surveys show that the top metric for measuring the effectiveness of a blog is reader comments.

Of course, comments are a sign of activity and reader engagement. But do most CMOs take the time to read a wide array of blogs and comment on them? I doubt it–like most of their audience, they probably lurk.

The reality is that like any other marketing strategy, blogs must be aligned with your corporate objectives. And in turn, your metrics need to be directly related to determine whether you’ve achieved these goals.

To this end, here are 21 blog metrics to assess your success relative to your marketing objectives. [Note: You may also want to check out this list of content related metrics.]

Count visits and unique visitors

• Where do your visitors come from?
• Where specifically do they go on your site?

Goal: Attract your target audience.

Pageviews

Don’t only look at how many pageviews your site has in general. Instead, look at specific pages and what readers do there:

• Which pages and categories attract your readers?
• Where do they click to and where do they leave your blog? (Hopefully, you’re sending them into specific product-related pages on your website.)

Goal: Track areas of reader interest and show contribution to purchase process.

Time on site

This metric shows how engaged readers are.

• What is the average time people spend on the site?
• How much time do people spend on specific pages?

Goal: Get customers to spend a lot of time engaged with your content and brand.

RSS feeds and email lists

Measure sign-ups for your RSS feeds and emails lists to determine if the blog is helping you build an online following.

Goal: Build an audience for your content.

Brand-related metrics

This encompasses a broad spectrum of branding metrics such as brand recall, favorability, sentiment and intent to purchase. This is often tracked via surveys.

Goal: Show brand growth and/or change of perception.

Product information metrics

This includes a number of targeted promotion codes used and click-throughs to purchase or place in cart. Does assigning more information help readers make better and/or faster purchase decisions?

Goal: Increase sales (also expand cross-sell and upsell).

Call to action

Use a call-to-action and a unique promotional code to track results.

Goal: Support sales with appropriate content.

Blog-related revenues

• Track sales related to blog content.
• Link to appropriate product pages on your website.
• Upsell on post-purchase support pages.

Goal: Increase revenue generation.

Search rankings

Is your blog content helping you improve your search rankings? Use keywords to create relevant content.

Goal: Be more findable and reduce search optimization expense.

Inbound links

How many sites are linking into your blog? How influential are they?

Goal: Improve your SEO efforts.

Outbound links

How many outbound links do you have?

Goal: Get attention of experts in your field.

Intra-company links

Since links are an important element of showing what’s important, do you have links to other relevant areas of your site?

Goal: Support search optimization efforts across the organization.

Number of social media shares

Count social media shares and note which platforms readers use (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others like StumbleUpon).

Goal: Expand reach cost effectively and maximize earned media from social shares.

Video or other media downloads or views

Instead of relying only on text, liven things up with entertaining content such as video, audio, presentations and e-books.

Goal: Distribute content to broader audience and enhance your brand. Can also be used to provide product information and post-purchase support as well as to expand thought leadership.

Post-purchase support

See how many people download or read instructions  for using product.

Goals: Reduce returns, encourage repeat purchases and reduce customer service inquiries.

Number of customer questions answered

Includes number of posts and number of customer questions. Answers to these inquiries can be sourced from across your organization. Are new questions being submitted? Do their comments need further clarification?

Goal: Reduce customer complaints and customer service expense.

Reader comments and/or votes

Bear in mind that most visitors will only lurk, take in your content and take no further action. It’s important to show that you’re responsive to readers by responding to customers’ comments. (Note: Often bloggers account for half of the comments on any given blog post.)

Goal: Expand community engagement.

Community engagement

Get prospects, customers and the public to share commentary, photographs and videos of your product in context.

Goal: Enhance your content and community engagement.

Media links

If you’re creating a positioning platform, one effective metric of success is how many media companies and bloggers link into your blog as a source of information.

Goal: Get additional executive exposure.

Number of posts

How much information are you generating? It’s useful to have an editorial calendar to keep yourself on track.

Goal: Have fresh content on a regular basis.

Blog-related expenses

Track costs for your bloggers, editorial staff, technology support, design and other areas that may affect your blog.

Goal: Assess full cost of blog against other communications options.

Bear in mind that every blog doesn’t need to track each of these metrics. What’s important is to track the ones that are most important to accomplishing the business and marketing goals that your blog aims to achieve.

What blog metrics are you tracking and why? How do these relate to your marketing goals? Are there any other factors that should be added to this list? If so, please include them in the comments section below.

Although Forrester Research predicts 2011 will be the year when marketers will begin to “think outside the Facebox,” C-suite business leaders and content marketers alike can’t deny the attractiveness of establishing a presence inside the social behemoth that is now an online home to more than a half-billion people.

The reasons for building out your company’s Facebook page will depend on your unique business objectives. However, I believe a more universal standard can be found in terms of measuring the success of your efforts on Facebook.

This post outlines five ways to interpret the free data provided by Facebook Insights. We’ll also explain how to establish an engagement dashboard that displays increases or decreases in activity against established baselines.

What tool do we use to compile the data?  You may be surprised to learn that in a lot of cases a simple and cost-effective Google or Excel spreadsheet built with the right basic formulas will do the trick.

1.  Week-over-week percentage of change

For Incept’s Facebook Page (a client), we’ve found that using Insights data to track the percentage of change has provided a good lens into the results that specific types of content generate.

Because of how quickly real-time conversations occur, we found that month-over-month analysis created challenges to adjust the content strategy quickly when fan feedback indicated that change was needed.  Tracking Insights data as a percentage of week-over-week change, however, gives our content creators the agility to sustain long-term growth in all areas.

2.  Percentage of fan base growth or decline

As the saying goes, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one  hears it, did it really make a sound?”  Unfortunately, this is a situation that content marketers often find themselves in.

The most creative and community-relevant content will not be heard if there are not enough people in your target audience who “like” or follow your fan page. Today, Facebook Insights provides the following data:

• New likes
• Lifetime likes

By simply tracking the percentage of new likes against lifetime likes, it becomes much easier to determine your fan base’s average rate of increase or decrease over time.  You can also track the growth of your fan base building efforts during the course of your campaign by measuring the number of fans at the start of your efforts compared to the most recent weekly number of fans.

3.  Percentage of active fans against percentage of hidden fans

Moving back to the trees in the forest analogy, adding fans to your Facebook page who simply never return, or in the worst case, hide your page activity from their wall, will not help you reach your objectives. For this reason, it’s important to consider the baseline percentage approach in this metric as well.

To develop your own tracking dashboard, simply look at the following comparisons:

• Percentage of increase or decrease of active fans against the previous week
• Percentage of increase or decrease of hidden fans against the previous week
• The number of active fans against the number of total fans, and
• The numberof hidden fans against the number of total fans.

By establishing these baselines, you can begin to track the average percentage of activity versus hidden content among your fan base.  Ideally, you will want to maintain a higher percentage of fans who are participating on your page over those fans who choose to hide your page content.

4.  Fan base geo-location

More companies are targeting their Facebook page efforts locally or even regionally.  However, for content marketers focused on recruiting new talent or attracting retail shoppers, building a base of fans who do not live near their business will not yield a positive return for the time and work invested.

Facebook Insights provides a breakdown of the raw number of fans added based on the top 10 countries and cities they come from and the language they speak. These numbers can be positioned as weekly percentage increases or decreases as well.  This provides your content marketing team with actionable data to target your content to specific areas of importance.

5. Likes, comments and wall posts scorecards

Another approach worth testing is the amount of time it takes a fan to produce one of the various forms of activity on your Facebook fan page. By assigning a numeric value where the lowest number is applied to the activity that takes the least time, you can develop a scorecard total that will give you an apples-to-apples comparison.

Here are some examples:

• Likes on wall posts  (least amount of time committed by a fan) = 1 point
• Comments on wall posts (moderate amount of time committed by a fan) = 3 points
• Fan posts on your wall (greatest amount of time committed by a fan) = 5 points

Every week, you can count the total number of occurrences of each content type and tabulate the total score.  This enables  you to track the increases or decreases of the scores over time.

Your homework

As a short homework assignment, I challenge you to develop your own Facebook engagement spreadsheet and  fill it with your data. Spend the rest of January and February plugging in your weekly numbers from Insights and answer these questions:

1. Is the activity on your page increasing parallel to the growth of your fan base?
2. Are you maintaining more page activity than content hides on a consistent basis?
3. Where is the strongest concentration of your fan base geographically,  and is it where it should be?