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.
In today’s media world, social media savvy is essential. Why does it matter for businesses small, medium and large? Consider these staggering statistics:
Facebook now has more than 400 million profiles where people spend more than 500 billion minutes per month.
Twitter reports 55 million tweets … per day.
Among Americans, six in 10 find their news through both online and offline sources (Pew Research Center).
Social media isn’t just for teenagers. More than half of visitors to social networking sites are from the 35-64 age group (Nielsen).
Social media success is an art and a science. While some guidelines and best practices exist, the rules are still being written. Werth’s tips will help you to get started without missing a beat.
Social Media Tips
Start Slow
Set up a Twitter or Facebook account for yourself as a “sandbox.” You will be more comfortable “playing” with social media for yourself before you start using them for your business. Start posting and commenting on others’ posts. Make sure to listen before you jump into the conversation.
Establish your personal business presence on LinkedIn if you do not already have one. This will help you to explore the more “serious” side of social media. Follow the LinkedIn guidelines for making your profile 100 percent complete. Join a few groups and listen in on the conversation. Consider commenting once you are comfortable with the group.
Explore the potential of StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg to help you bookmark Web content of interest to you and your business. Once you begin recommending sources of information, you can begin to influence your potential audience. Getting comfortable with this type of sharing now will make it easier for you to leverage it down the road.
Get It Right
Once you get your feet wet in the social landscape, you can begin to take steps to establish your company’s presence.
Set up a page on Facebook for your business. Facebook makes it very easy for companies to use the page functionality to meet their unique needs. Follow the steps for building your page, and you’ll be surprised how quick it is. Every business should have a page – even if it uses no other social media options. Get started here.
Generate content that speaks to your customers. Coupons? Giveaways? Contests? Don’t ignore the potential of gimmicks to get customer attention and keep it. The more you share photos and videos, the more your audience will be attracted to your narrative content. Will you be all business, or will you have a sense of humor? Be sure to establish,reinforce and refine your voice.
Get blog-worthy. Smart businesses understand the benefits of blogging for their bottom line. Set up a blogging calendar for yourself, with topics and dates for publishing posts. Research keywords that will attract visitors to your blog and communicate your value proposition.
Conversation comes from shared content. Sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is infectious. It breeds conversations, which bring about more sharing and commenting. Social networking involves publishing your own generated content as well as retweeting or sharing posts from others.
Investigate social media management tools like HootSuite, HubSpot and Tweetdeck. A single social media account for your company will take about 10 hours of your time per week. Once you are using multiple social media channels, for yourself individually and for your business, social media management dashboards will be your best friends. You can post simultaneously to multiple accounts, manage multiple users of your accounts and schedule posts in advance.
Know the rules of the social mediasphere. Learn and respect social media etiquette. If you post something, be prepared to have a conversation about it. Be online enough to have a presence – at least once a day. Once you are up and running, you should be posting several times per day on each channel.It’s important to be yourself. Never post or comment anonymously.
Be everywhere. Digital awareness means social networking and Web pages that are viewable on all common browsers. Also, at a minimum, plan for mobile views (via PDAs such as mobile phones, iPhones and Blackberries) of your Web page. This also means that your offline channels are still being leveraged, based upon how you can best reach your targets.
Appreciate that visibility means vulnerability. Social media can create crisis, and they also can solve it. Werth wants its clients to be aware of the possibilities and the pitfalls inherent in social media, to improve their overall communications. Avoid controversial conversations via social media and stay true to your brand to steer clear of crisis.
Need Help?
Is your social media and overall digital approach making a real impact?
Do you know how to promote your social presence and grow it?
We can help! Contact Chief Interactive Officer Bryan Huber at 614-224-8114 or bhuber@paulwerth.com.
News or noise? That’s the question facing journalists and those who need accurate reporting …which would be all of us … today. The greatest shifts in standard reporting practices since yellow journalism are accelerating, several recent surveys show.
A great surge among reporters using social media tools … blogs, videos, podcasts and Twitter … has taken place. The latest Survey of Media in the Wired World found that almost 70 percent of journalists use social media, up by 28 percentage points since 2008. Nearly 80 percent of journalists said bloggers are important opinion-shapers, and 91 percent thought social media actually enhanced journalism.
Is that just Putting on a Happy Face? Maybe. Other surveys show journalists are deeply concerned about their profession. The disappearance of gatekeepers (i.e., editors) who monitor objectivity and check facts is not such a good thing. Neither are layoffs, which are frequent among working journalists. Those who are left have much larger workloads, smaller traditional news spaces and many demands to produce content for multiple platforms. Of course, social media have opened up many new sources and given journalists a chance to actually have two-way discussions with their readers and viewers.
It’s no surprise that a recent survey showed most journalists find that public relations firms are more important than ever to their work. Public relations professionals, often former reporters themselves, can help working journalists find good ideas for stories, provide accurate relevant information, and locate experts and others who are good, solid sources. Working together, we can make sure legitimate reporting will be heard over all the noise online and in traditional media. And that’s good news.
What are your thoughts about this shift? Contact me by commenting here, or e-mail me at ktwinem@paulwerth.com.
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.
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.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – As a new mom, Paul Werth Associates employee Caroline Cofer Golon searched for way to connect with likeminded peers online while caring for her infant daughter at home.
She found it in her cat.
“When people talk about ‘social media,’ sometimes they don’t fully understand its power,” said Golon, a senior account supervisor for the Columbus-based public relations, public affairs and marketing firm. “My experience is living proof that you can make an impact harnessing the popular community-building tools available online.”
Since February, Golon has raised more than $18,000 for animal rescues across the U.S. – and nearly $250,000 of earned media coverage – by posting online updates from her cat Romeo.
“It started as a challenge with a coworker: Could I get 1,000 Twitter users to follow my cat’s updates?” Golon said. “I decided to try offering a donation of 5 cents to The Humane Society for every follower. Not only did it work, it led to other creative ideas that are channeling donations to worthy animal cause organizations.”
Animal philanthropy is important to Golon because Romeo and her family’s other cat Pugsley were adopted from The Forgotten Persian cat rescue organization in Marysville. Romeo has become a symbol for pet advocates within the online community, attracting nearly 6,000 Twitter followers to date and fans who follow him on Facebook and via his blog, www.romeothecat.com.
Leading pet businesses recognize the power of social media icons like Romeo and sponsor Golon’s efforts through cash and product donations. Feline Pine All-Natural Cat Litter, FURminator deShedding Tools, Wellness Pet Food, Clean+Green Pet Cleaners, Iams and Petco have all joined in helping raise awareness of Romeo’s rescue causes.
“It has been exciting and extremely rewarding to not only build Romeo into his own social media brand to help support worthy causes, but also to learn effective strategies and tactics in online networking that I can use on the job,” Golon said.
“Social media is not ‘free’ – I spend several hours a week regularly updating Romeo’s posts and interacting with his community – but it is another communications platform we have in our arsenal,” she said. “I have been able to apply what I have learned on behalf of our clients, and the support of Romeo by my Werth colleagues has helped spark many ideas that have enhanced and expanded the capabilities of our social media service as a firm.”
About Paul Werth Associates
Founded in 1963, Paul Werth Associates is a full-service public relations, marketing and public affairs firm counseling clients throughout the United States. The firm has offices in Columbus, Ohio and Washington, D.C.
Paul Werth Associates has previously received nine Silver Anvils, which is the highest level of recognition in the public relations industry. The Silver Anvil Award recognizes complete programs incorporating sound research, planning, execution and evaluation. They must meet the highest standards of performance in the profession.
