Vice President Kim Ratcliff was recently interviewed by ONN’s Mike Kallmeyer on the topic of social media. She set the “View from the Top,” highlighting Werth’s counsel to clients to guide their social media marketing investment.
See the clip here, by clicking on “Paul Werth” in the video viewer.
In three words, it’s about your Total Internet Presence, or TIP. This post kicks off a series on the seven elements of Total Internet Presence, a process we apply to make your digital brand more exciting, visible, transparent, accessible and competitive.
Today’s post is about the element of measurability — the yardstick for your online presence. There are some very sophisticated tools for measuring your “worth” on the Web, and most often we refer these as Web analytics.
What are Web analytics?
The Web Analytics Association defines Web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”
That sounds very academic, doesn’t it? Bottom line, Web analytics provide answers to a couple of fundamental questions:
How did visitors find my website?
What do visitors do once they reach my website?
Why measure?
There’s an old saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Taking that a bit further, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Some specific benefits of using Web analytics are:
Allowing you to determine if your investment in website visit drivers such as advertising, SEO and social media is paying off. For example, is the company Facebook page really driving visits to the website?
Providing historical benchmarking. For example, are visits increasing or decreasing?
What to measure?
All of the data in the world are useless if you haven’t established some specific metrics (i.e., measurements of success). Do you know if you’re winning or losing?
Some of the most common website metrics – and the data used to determine if they’re being met – are:
Increase site traffic:
Total visits
Unique visitors
Improve site visibility:
Traffic sources (i.e., search engines and other websites sending visitors to your site)
Search engine rankings
Improve Site Engagement:
Average visits per unique visitor
Average page views per visit
Site bounce rate
Return visitors
Increase Conversions:
White paper downloads
Contact forms submitted
How do you measure up?
Drop me a note here if you want to look into assessing your company or organization’s measurability. We can discuss the analytics that will best meet your unique needs.
“Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.”
You will no longer need to imagine a world where you turn on the TV and content is displayed based on your preferences. This is now a place where YouTube, network and cable TV converge, and your website can stream all of them with user-generated comments — in real time!
This announcement got me excited about the possibilities for advertising and content. No doubt that Google will incorporate AdWords, but this will bring interesting ways to distribute brand content. Integrating the Web browser into TV will further user control on how to find, interact with and share content.
As the Internet continues to open up traditionally closed media and channels become more integrated, marketers will need to enhance their strategic approach. Telling a brand’s story that engages an audience will continue to get more complex — because we are creating the medium and the message.
What about your marketing approach today? Is your brand positioned to embrace the convergence of a digital world? What possibilities do you see in the new TV?
I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch CNN without reading the scroll at the bottom of the screen. I’ll listen to what’s being said, but for some reason, I can’t stop focusing on that scroll.
Why? First, people just love to read headlines. I admit, I’m not a huge fan of reading books, my attention span just won’t let me last that long. But put a magazine in front of me or e-mail me a quick news link, and most likely, I’m gonna read it. Second, people are naturally visual. They like to look at something and create their own story in their head. Everyone has a story, or at least likes to imagine one.
That’s why kinetic type is the new “it thing” in advertising. We use type to illustrate a script, create cool motion graphics and literally bring the words to life. The moving type creates energy and excitement, and with all that, who wouldn’t want to buy the product?
The other benefit is that the message is being delivered in two, sometimes three ways at the same time. The graphics are spelling out the script word-for-word, and the words are animating to represent their meaning. Sometimes, a voice-over reads the entire script. Talk about hitting you over the head. The message is undoubtedly being delivered — loud and clear.
The kinetic approach is really taking off. You see it everywhere. There’s some good, some great and some…not so great. In cases of the “not so great,” the creators really lacked a creative direction. With technology at our fingertips, and stock imagery and footage so readily available, sometimes creativy is dictated by what’s available out there on the Web, and not by what should ultimately be custom-created specifically to deliver the appropriate message in a style that is consistent throughout the entire piece to hold it together.
Even though kinetic is a new approach to delivering brand messages, it still needs to be true to brand standards. Today advertisers are looking for cost-effective ways of delivering messages as quickly and precisely as possible. Kinetic is one answer to that question. Couple kinetic with viral video, and you’ve got yourself a campaign.
Werth has a talented team of creative professionals on staff, specializing in motion graphics, editing, shooting and delivering your advertising message on time and on budget. We understand how to deliver strategic branding and can help to determine whether kinetic is the best tool to help you get there. Give me a call at 614.224.8114 or e-mail me at kwaldron@paulwerth.com, and let’s talk about your next brand opportunity.
Today’s news media are a far cry from what my mother experienced in the Walter Cronkite-era of my youth. Social media invigorate our communications, broaden our networks and make content-sharing much more immediate.
How will our communications possibilities be transformed by the mainstreaming of social media this year? Here are my thoughts:
People will continue to gravitate toward news that is shareable. We are social beings, and there’s power in using our social networks to share news in real time. On Sunday mornings, I curl up with my newsreader and share content with friends separated by time and space. Big news organizations realize this and have made the ShareIt icon ubiquitous, because news shared in context takes on greater meaning. There are more news stories out there and more in-depth discussion as a result of sharing content.
News publishing that encourages us to be the correspondent isn’t just more engaging – it has more impact for the news audience.This interactive map from The New York Times’ site is a good example. The before-after impacts of the Haiti earthquake are palpable. It’s clear that we like to share the news with our friends, and we like it even more when it’s combined with visuals that “take us to the news.”
Action-oriented news can make a difference. Recent fundraising for Haiti relief efforts and geo-targeting police abuses in Iran give us practical ways to use Twitter for human benefit. When news becomes meaningful information that people care enough to do something about, it makes a measurable difference.
Simply reading a two-dimensional paper at the kitchen table in the morning like my mother used to do is no longer enough. We must be able to experience the news through our senses, in multiple dimensions – along with friends on the other side of the world.
The kitchen table “newspaper” experience just got personal, global and substantive. And, because new media are breaking down communications barriers, even my mother is tapping into the possibilities. She recently joined Facebook.
If you are marveling at the new media mix and relishing the possibilities, drop me a line at kratcliff@paulwerth.com, or comment here. I look forward to reading your thoughts – and starting the dialogue.
Thanks to those who attended the “Balancing Legal and Communication Perspectives on Social Media” workshop from Squire, Sanders & Dempsey L.L.P. and Paul Werth Associates on October 20, 2009.
We hope you enjoyed hearing perspectives from both fronts on how social media impacts our workplace and our brands.
The presenters, including myself; Susan DiMickele, a partner at Squire Sanders; Traci Martinez, an associate at Squire Sanders; and Kim Ratcliff, a vice president at Werth, sat down to provide an overview of the insights shared during this complimentary workshop.
On October 20, Paul Werth Associates is pleased to partner with the Columbus office of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey on a presentation discussing how social media impacts brand reputation and how important it is for the communications and legal teams to coordinate efforts. This pre-registration only event will take place 3-7 pm close to the OSU campus.
The presenters, including myself; Susan DiMickele, a partner at Squire Sanders; Traci Martinez, an associate at Squire Sanders; and Kim Ratcliff, a vice president at Werth, recently sat down to provide a sneak peak of the insights to be shared during this complimentary workshop.
If you’re interested in registering, click here or please contact Adla Blackwell at (614) 365.2319.
Inexperienced “experts” in the social media world don’t understand that it needs to serve a clear purpose and be measured. The social media frenzy is now at the stage where companies aren’t taking so-called experts at their word. Companies are seeking substance—and experience. But are they getting it?
Werth has noticed that rising above the frenzy are some well-positioned strategic thoughts, like Peter Shankman’s recent blog post. But some are focused more on the purely social aspects of social media and represent themselves from an overly casual point-of-view, possible juvenile and often not aligned with corporate culture that seeks results (translation: not all fun and games) for the investment.
Here’s the rub:
Companies that put inexperienced professionals (admittedly power users of social media, but not communications or marketing experts) in the driver’s seat with their social media run the risk of damaging their reputations.
People are panicked to get a social media presence because it’s seen as the next silver bullet. As professional marketers and communicators, we all need to recognize one important and timeless fact:
Social media is—with deference to Tony the Tiger—simply “an important part of a balanced marketing breakfast.” I’m probably dating myself, but readers out there who get the reference are the fastest adopters of social media. According to Nielsen, FaceBook alone has more than 200 million active users with the fastest growing age group adults 35 and over.
Thinking like Tony, social media should be used as an important part of a total program to help achieve marketing goals. On its own, social media can be just like breakfast cereal–an addictive snack easily gobbled down by the handful throughout the day, or something served once daily or weekly with milk, OJ and some banana slices on top.
How can you tell if you are really getting expertise or just meaningless chatter behind your social media effort? Nothing beats a plan that is executed within corporate norms with respect for social media authenticity—while demonstrating results. As you are looking for experts, ask about experience, the strategy behind the program and most importantly, what business results it will generate.
Join us for an informed and results-oriented conversation on social media. Over the next few weeks my colleagues and I will be posting on successes we’re seeing with social media and sharing some amazing results, starting with a Werth client that reached more than 50 percent of its campaign goal in one day with a social media campaign.
If I were asking Tony the Tiger, I’m sure he’d say it’s “Grrrrrrrreat!”
Future posting: Using social media to rise above industry reputation challenges.
