I recently spoke with Laural Hobbes of Advanced Military Education about how American Military University uses social media. Here’s a link to the article:
Tag: Social Media
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If you missed my presentation on social media analytics in Georgetown last week, fret none my fine analytic colleagues… I will be appearing at the System Alliance Digital 360 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, March 4. My first session at 11:10 AM is titled, “Making Smarter Social Media Decisions Using Analytics” and I’ll be covering some simple reports that have powerful data on measuring your social media campaigns using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. Later that afternoon, I’ll be participating in a panel on “Best Practices for Managing Web Content”.
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Thanks again to everyone who braved the DC traffic and wind chill to join me in Georgetown for DC Social Media Week and my presentation, “Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics”. For those of you who weren’t able to catch the “show”, here’s the video:
Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics from APUS on Vimeo.
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If you are involved in social media management that it’s important that you regularly report on your successes (and failures). But, that doesn’t mean simply running reports from Google Analytics or Facebook Insights and forwarding spreadsheets and PDFs to executives. You have to use the data to “tell a story” and that involves more work than “print to PDF”. Once you have the data behind your success or failure, it’s important to wrap it into a story that provides context. For example, don’t provide someone with the GA report on visits from social media platforms without explaining to the end user what the data means and the conclusions you’ve reached. Similarly, if you had a success social media campaign, but the ROO (return on your business objectives) wasn’t necessarily easy to quantify because it involves brand equity or goodwill, it may be better to produce a case study. Here are my tips for a successful case study:
- Keep it short! I suggest less than one page. Execs don’t have enough time to read their emails, so they sure aren’t going to read a 5000 word beast of a case study. Short = good. The shorter the case study the higher it will most likely be read and shared.
- Be specific, but don’t worry about the nitty gritty. This is a high level overview of something you did. If you get stuck, see #1 above.
- If the case study had a long threaded conversation, just provide the highlights. You can include a screen shot of the thread as an addendum if your audience wants more details.
- Structure
- 2-3 sentence intro (who did what and why it matters)
- 250 word body (the details of what happened)
- 2-3 sentence conclusion (further explaining the value this generated for the business)
Here is an actual case study we published based upon a win we had at American Public University System back in 2010. We still share it to this day to help communicate why we do things the way we do. And we produce new case studies every quarter to help tell / share our story.
Here’s a template that you can download to get started. Feel free to share and use this as necessary. I’d love a shout out in the footer as the creator (Created by Dan Soschin for American Public University System http://www.apus.edu). Please give credit where credit is due.
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I just got back from spending an afternoon in Georgetown presenting “Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics” to a group of about 250 social media enthusiasts at the PowerHouse. Everyone was great and I really enjoyed the presentation experience. It helps to have a great, captive audience and a good venue. I hope everyone found the information that I presented useful.
Over the next two days I will post a sample case study, the slide deck and the video of the presentation. I’ll also tweet out links.
I will also work to reply to everyone’s LinkedIn messages and Tweets as soon as I can.
Thanks again for making the presentation great!
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Have you heard of Social Media Week? If not, check it out here: http://socialmediaweek.org/
This February, Social Media Week will take place in 10 cities:
- Copenhagen
- Hamburg
- Lagos
- Miami
- Milan
- New York
- Paris
- Singapore
- Washington DC
- Tokyo (TBD)
How does it work? It’s a collection of events sponsored by a wide variety of companies and organizations throughout each city, bound by the common theme of social media.
Last year I spoke on the ROI of social media to a standing-room-only crowd in Manassas, VA. This year, I will be presenting the following session:
Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics
Leveraging Facebook EdgeRank and Google Analytics to Drive a Return on Business ObjectivesSo you’re adding social media to your game plan for your organization, moving it from an afterthought to front-and-center. You’ve even got a staff member ready to roll up their sleeves and manage your social media strategy for the organization (and that person might be you!) But now what? How do you decide which campaigns are working and which ones are not? In this session, attendees will learn how to leverage Facebook Insights, Facebook EdgeRank and Google Analytics (all free tools) to measure campaign ROI (return on investment) and ROO (return on objectives).
While I’m still working on the details of the venue, I do know it will be somewhere in the DC metro area. I hope to have a venue locked down by 1/21/13. So check back to the event page early next week for more details.
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I spend a lot of time working with departments at the University to help them attain value from social media; and I spend a lot of time traveling around the country to share best practices for measuring and reporting on social media. I throw around a lot of terms like “ROI” and “ROO” and “EdgeRank”. But, what it all comes down to is understanding first what your objective is, and then how to apply social media to attain the objective. Sounds easy right? Well, for a little Monday night humor from our friends at TheOnion.com, here’s why social media can get a bad rap:
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The Wall Street Journal reports that, “The local government in the nation’s capital is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a startup to gather comments on Twitter, Facebook and other online message boards as well as the government’s own website. The data help form a letter grade for the bureaucracies that handle drivers licenses, building permits and the like.”
I’m not too surprised about this, and find that its a bit sooner than I would have thought. The idea of using social media to listen to your customers and then improve your products and services is not a new concept. It’s certainly our flagship missing at American Public University System – where we use social media to make sure our student experience is exceptional. But we’re known for being a social media savvy organization.
So it’s surprising to hear that traditionally conservative and innovation-lacking government agencies would have social media on their radar. But as we have seen in the last 24 months, public safety organizations have turned to social media to distribute important news alerts, and non-profits rely on it to engage with their constituencies. So, it only makes sense that folks who have been leveraging social media have migrated to some of these agencies; or through professional networks the agencies have realized social media can be a great tool for customer service.
The article goes on to discuss how the agencies have reacted to complaints – moving customer service staff who don’t deliver positive customer experiences to other positions where they don’t have to interact with the public. While humorous, this will go a long way to holding employees at government agencies more accountable for their actions; and perhaps will motivate under-performing individuals to step up their game and help redefine agencies like the DMV.
Read the full article here (subscription to the WSJ may be required):
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If you’ve read my posts about handling negative buzz, or even attended one of my presentations in San Francisco, Boston, Las Vegas or Washington, DC., then you’ve probably heard me reference the Air Force’s social media response assessment chart. Recently I had my own social media team at American Public University System make some updates to the chart. I’ve embedded it below. Feel free to download and use.
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Tomorrow (Thursday, October 25), I will be joining the Social Media Strategies Summit hosted by the good folks at GSMI, in Boston, MA (go Bo-Sox!).
Here’s the overview:
Social media – When to Respond to a Negative Post and How to Triage/ Escalate in your OrgANIZATION
You’ve got tools to monitor social media, a 20-something spiked-hair communities manager, and even a CEO who knows how to use Twitter. But then it happens: someone, somewhere says something negative about your company online and suddenly the world around you comes to a screeching halt. I will walk the session attendees through real case studies of how to monitor for, triage, and address negative buzz.
But you no longer own your brand. Ownership is split between what your customers say and how accessible that content is on Google. So your processes and how you interact with customers will affect future business opportunities more than marketing collateral or paid search ads.
You’ll come away with:
- How to monitor
- Tools (free and paid) for monitoring
- Processes for monitoring, triage and escalation
- Review of a case study
If you cannot make it; or if you are attending; and you would like a copy of the presentation materials, including a sample case study and a great flow chart for triage and escalation of social media issues, please send me a Tweet!
Dan Soschin 