This presentation served as a the foundation for a Webinar on January 20, 2010, by Spring Creek Group for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) member base on the topic, "Social Media Marketing: Real Analytics, Real Results!" The focus of the Webinar was on how to integrate 3rd party and licensed analytics technology tools in order to track, evaluate, and optimize promotional marketing campaigns using track-able links within the social media channel. While not every marketer should necessarily be considering the social media channel as a performance marketing or direct-response opportunity, for sophisticated marketers who *do* wish to better track clicks, site referrals, and conversion success this presentation will provide a helpful starting point to learn and research this opportunity more fully.

1. WOMMA Webinar Social Media Marketing: Real Analytics, Real Results! Clay McDaniel & Xavier Jimenez, Presenting January 20, 2010

2. Agenda Introductions… Context + Goals… Section 1: Listening is just not enough Section 2: Accessible and Actionable Analytics tools Section 3: What is worth measuring Section 4: Content that drives sales Section 5: Case Studies QnA + Wrap-Up WOMMA Webinar 2

3. Introduction Clay McDaniel Principal & Co-Founder, Spring Creek Group Seattle, Washington Fly-fisherman, dad, Sounders supporter, sunny bike commuter Xavier Jimenez Principal + Analytics Practice Head, Spring Creek Group Seattle, Washington Rugby coach, dad, chili pepper enthusiast 3 WOMMA Webinar

4. About Spring Creek Group The largest Social Media Marketing firm in the Pacific Northwest. We have Strategic Experts, Program Execution experience, Teams able to provide 24/7 coverage, and scale Our expertise is specialized in 3 Practice Areas: Social Media Brand Analytics & Research Social Media Planning and Strategy Social Engagement, Community & Interactive Content Management 4 WOMMA Webinar

5. Social Media scales! Risk management was the key factor driving social media measurement decisions in 2009, performance optimization will drive 2010. Fortune 500 brands and mom-n-pop’s already know how to measure social media, marketers in the middle are now playing catch up. “The 30 second spot is being replaced by the 30 second review, tweet, post, …” - Erik Qualman (Author Socialnomics) 5 WOMMA Webinar

6. Goals for today’s webinar Discuss how to move beyond just using social media to create buzz Review the metrics that matter for getting people to buy via social media Share proven best practices to transform your social media programs from a brand-building exercise into a sales-building channel. 6 WOMMA Webinar

7. Section 1: Listening is Not Enough… 7 WOMMA Webinar

8. Moving beyond buzz monitoring Don’t stop at simply measuring and managing buzz Use active listening programs to better understand the customer lifecycle Leverage tools, people and process to add social media as direct marketing channel 8 WOMMA Webinar

9. Our data shows… 9 WOMMA Webinar Our clients Social Media presence is not limited to a post or tweet This presence is distributed across the web and evolves in real time This presence can be broken down measured…and managed.

10. Our POV: Let your data drive Brand, Product and Community management 10 WOMMA Webinar We use most of the “Top Shelf” tools available Tools are only a small percentage of the equation People and process are what make data actionable

11. Section 2: Actionable Analytics Tools 11 WOMMA Webinar

12. Use tools to monitor buzz, to test content, and to track engagement and referrals. Goal = strengthen the relationship by testing campaign specific content and tracking outcomes Identify the type of content that is most valuable to your audience Benchmark channel/platform/media specific conversion metrics Leverage results to build a better picture of your online customer 12 WOMMA Webinar

13. Google Analytics Free or Paid? Free Where? www.google.com/analytics Key Info + What It Does: Tracks SEO/SEM click-stream and website visitor and behavior data of over time. Advanced segmentation and custom reports are configurable to track social media. Ability to set goals and track ROI. 13 WOMMA Webinar xxxxxxxxxxxx

14. Omniture Free or Paid? Paid Where? www.Omniture.com Key Info + What It Does: API’s allows configuration of SiteCatalyst to receive twitter API and map it to success events to track conversions and influential's. Create a facebook object and modify omniture code to use API Key and Secret Key from Facebook and you can track fans and pull these numbers into your shared dashboards. 14 WOMMA Webinar

15. Bit.ly Free or Paid? Free Where? www.bit.ly.com Key Info + What It Does: Bit.ly provides a service that takes long URLs and squeezes it into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. It shows you the content of the tweet It tracks the last 20 url for click activity 15 WOMMA Webinar Turns this URL.. http://darnhotpeppers.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/michelle-obama-adds-chile-peppers-to-the-organic-garden-at-the-white-house/ Into this URL … http://bit.ly/2Wv0H

16. GetClicky Free or Paid? Both Where? www.getclicky.com Key Info + What It Does: Clicky is a web analysis tool that tracks detail for every visitor to your site. Stats show "actions per visit" by user, allows you to set goals, tracks most active visitors and actions from social media. Has integrated twitter and URL shorter data and “Official” wordpress plugin. 16 WOMMA Webinar

17. Optify 17 WOMMA Webinar Free or Paid? Paid Where? www.optify.net Key Info + What It Does: Demand Generation analytics Tracks visits, referring source and score leads and visits to further qualify details about activities when a lead fills out a form on your website. Create and manage twitter campaigns SalesForce integration

18. Section 3: What’s worth measuring? 18 WOMMA Webinar

19. Research – Deploy active listening tools to understand the hearts and minds of your customers, clients or guests Hypothesize – Extract insight from the results Track – Employ web analytics best practices Test – Develop Metrics and KPI’s Re-Test/Optimize – Learn from your results and evolve 19 WOMMA Webinar S.M.A.R.T. content testing

20. 20 WOMMA Webinar Example Objective = Identify Top Blogs based on volume Goal = Identify Key metrics that can be used to evaluate engagement opportunity Research finds that many of the top blog sites where discussions of your product appear happen to be mommy blogs. 1 2 1 3 2 3

21. 21 WOMMA Webinar Example Research shows that mothers have been sharing information about your chemical-free sunscreen products and conversation is highly focused on “flavors”. Hypothesize that a highly focused and product specific outreach campaign, on the top 20 mommy blogs, promoting your products may find success in this community.

22. 22 WOMMA Webinar xxxxxxxxxxxx Example Configure URL shortener’s and web analytics tools to track the “pass-along” and conversion of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings etc. Determine which content and what source is driving the most desired behaviors. Compare earned media cost per action to paid media.

24. Display Buys

26. Ex. create a Twitter promotion such as:

27. Identify top Re-tweeters

28. Track CTR

29. Identify top LP’s

30. Compare cost per action to paid mediaMoms: Get 20% off the only truly chemical-free sunscreen this week only. http://bit.ly/yourtrackingcodehere

31. Section 4: Publishing Content that Drives Engagement, Referral, and Sales 25 WOMMA Webinar

32. Recent research from Razorfish found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of "friending" a brand for over a third of social networking users and 44% of Twitter users. 79% of women say using social networks to research products and services is important to them, while 64% said the same thing about finding discounts, according to research from ShesConnected.com. Send out too many promotions and your followers will feel “marketed at”— but not to be too stingy either, just give them good deals and help them feel rewarded for being loyal to your brand. 26 WOMMA Webinar People want deals

33. Build promotions based on research For example…15%-off your whole order today. Once it’s over, track how many people clicked on the promotion and completed a sale (classic click-through and conversion metrics). Continue to measure buzz, monitor conversations, and measure pass-along of the promotion using your social media analytics tools. 27 WOMMA Webinar

34. Perform iterative testing You might find that everyone loved your 15%-off promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that many people complained that shipping costs were too high. Action: in your next promotion, offer free shipping. 28 WOMMA Webinar

35. Incorporate real-time feedback One of your new products is generating buzz, but that people are making value based comments such as “can’t wait to buy this product, but I’m waiting to see if the price drops”. Incorporate that info into your testing plan. Action: seed a targeted, one-day only offer of 20%-off that’s exclusive to Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Remember unlike paid media buys, you don’t have to spend months planning and budgeting for social media promotions. Just do it! 29 WOMMA Webinar

36. Section 5: Case Studies 30 WOMMA Webinar

38. Twitter user base = ~200k

39. The dell social media started by “lurking” and “poking” for several months@DellOutlet has around 1.6 million followers, and Tweets out deals to these folks on a regular basis. Each dell tweeter uses the @NameatDell company thumbprint and also posts an authentic photo of his or herself.

41. 65% of sales from Twitter

43. Over 1800 twitter followers and 2600 facebook fans.

44. The blog sees about 120,000 visits per month and drives a majority of custom cake orders.

45. PCB began measuring and managing blog performance using Google Analytics by placing an emphasis on traffic, initially this worked, but they quickly reached a saturation point where high traffic started contributing to a deluge of “information seekers”.

46. PCB didn’t have the capacity to handle this deluge and realized that the “more traffic the better” mantra needed to be refined.

48. Built a great blog, Twitter account, and a bunch of videos on YouTube.

50. 311B Occidental Ave South Suite 200 Seattle, WA 98104 206.453.1120 | www.SpringCreekGroup.com http://www.facebook.com/SpringCreekGroup …or Join / Follow / Read at… http://www.twitter.com/SpringCreekGrp http://www.SpringCreekGroup.com/blog

51. Appendix: Webinar Questions (& Answers) 37 WOMMA Webinar

52. QnA (our best effort at follow-up) Q: Do you recommend using Twitter over FB for a social media outreach? If for no other reason, it can be measured? A: We recommend letting the data speak – assess the volume of relevant customer engagement and help/support opportunities in each environment first, by doing some basic searches and tracking over a short time period how much volume there is in each place, how relevant the volume is, etc. This should be a customer-needs and data-driven decision, more so than an intuitive one. Q: Is a social media marketing effort always measured by traffic to a company's web site? Are there other ways to measure ROI if it is not traffic to a web site? Oh, and I don't mean ""number of followers,"" which can be bogus. How about if a brand client wants to create a brand awareness to drive sales to a brick-and-mortar shop for instance. A: Traffic is still a key metric that all managers should measure, it is rarely used in itself as a Key Performance Indicator or a as means to determine ROI. We recommend measuring the change in traffic over time and whether the ratio of “organic traffic” changes in concert with or in association w/ sustained social media marketing activities. So, yes the change in traffic patterns of any social media effort should always be measured and compared to other channels. In many cases, though, we have seen clients and brands focus their social media marketing efforts on achieving greater brand awareness, customer advocacy and content ‘pass-along’, or total Share-of-Voice online. For businesses with significant offline presence or sales conversion models that don’t necessarily run through an e-commerce enabled website, these could be the most important and highly-correlated factors aligned with business success in the long-run --- and by consequence, these organizations might wish to focus more on these metrics than site traffic or online sales conversion / CPA numbers. While the primary – more narrow – focus of our Webinar today was on measurement and management of social media marketing program initiatives intended specifically to drive online sales or lead conversion, there are a great many other opportunities for brand awareness, affinity, and customer engagement via the social media channel which are also potentially valuable to implement. 38 WOMMA Webinar

53. Q: Is there a recommendation of what percentage of traditional (print and online) marketing dollars should be moved to SM marketing? A: Can we answer 100% and not sound biased?  No, we thought not… To be honest, our perspective is that every dollar of marketing spend – whether online or offline – had ought to be managed and measured as if it were a long-term investment. Which is to say, managed with similar impact and return-on-investment standards across all of your marketing channels, as much as is possible. If you and your organization can apply the same discipline for measuring long-term impact, benefit, or return to ALL of your major marketing investments, no matter what the channel, you will over time be able to throttle all of your key marketing spend categories up or down based upon an apples-to-apples comparison and evaluation of what mix of spend is yielding the best overall long-term return. Q: If I show slide No 21 to a client with only 9 post and 68 comments as the Top, they are going to say that is a really small number. I have used Radian6 and gotten similar results and those numbers turn off clients. It seems to confirm to them that SM is not such a big audience for their particular product. What do you say to a client that says this? A: We, too, have gotten then raised eyebrows and the sigh that suggests, “C’mon, there’s no real impact there compared to my performance marketing programs online and my mass-media advertising offline… Should we really be doing this social media outreach and influencer engagement stuff?” Our short answer to this tends to focus on two key considerations: Relevance – which is typically MUCH higher for audiences addressed via social media programs vs typical paid media investments, because they are all about context; and, Reach – which is using the traffic or Unique User #’s to ‘weight’ the expected impressions and actual reach of your Outreach and Engagement programs across all of your key sites or platforms. 39 WOMMA Webinar

54. Q: How can you differentiate traffic coming from social media site, e.g., facebook, the brand's page versus individuals' pages posting the link to the brand website. I thought that social media sites have no follow tags. A: The tactic that we have found to be most effective is one which relies upon the manager / administrator of your key Brand/Fan Page or branded Twitter account using specially-constructed URL links back to your own domain which include pre-defined Source (“src=“) or Campaign/Channel variables. Then, these pre-constructed URL’s can be shortened manually using a registered Bit.ly account, for instance, to compress them to shorter and more link-drop-friendly URL’s (which then resolve to the original tagged site URL links when clicked). So, for example, you might manage a site at www.foo.com. If you are running Google Analytics, you could pre-define two unique Source variables – one for Facebook links you place on your Page and Group, another for links you place on your branded Twitter account tweets and @ replies. Then, you would construct unique link URL’s back to your site including these unique Source variables. Finally, you would then login to Bit.ly and shorten each unique URL (WITH it’s unique Source variable) to shorter unique URL’s, such as: www.bit.ly/Facebook and www.bit.ly/Twitter . Once you’ve placed these links into each respective environment on pages or tweets or posts you control, all future clicks on these links by visitors will resolve to the longer unique URL’s with dedicated Source (or similar) variables appended to the site URL, which then allows the javascript on your site which powers your site analytics software to ‘know’ – or recognize – that the visitor has arrived in to your site from that specific location. All you need to do is then search within your site analytics solution for that particular Source code variable to specifically see all of the traffic (and their down-stream actions, such as site page interaction or even sales!) that those links you placed in that environment have yielded. This is a powerful way to tightly integrate your proactive social media marketing and customer support initiatives with your website analytics reporting. [And, this tactic can be used anywhere online where you – rather than someone else – controls the construction and placement of links.] 40 WOMMA Webinar

55. Q: I'm sure there are many of us that have limited time and budget to monitor social media, what are the most important things to measure? Many of the things they are suggesting seem very time consuming. A: Volume, engagement and sentiment. These are the three key metrics that can help anyone manage social media. Volume - Track volume of mentions of your brand, product or other pre-identified keywords and how these mentions change over time. Star w/ a free tool like Techrigy sm2 and as you get more comfortable w/ the data consider setting a budget of $500/month to begin to collect more specific data on an ongoing basis. Engagement – a key engagement metric that is easy to track is #comments/post [“on-topic” Comments/blog posts or “on-topic” replies/forum post.] Try to identify a benchmark for your brand/product or industry by identifying the top 10 blogs for your specific strategic focus areas and use a social media monitoring tool like Techrigy SM2 or Radian6 to automate the process of collecting this engagement data for you. By spending just a few hours a week compiling a list of engagements you will be able to see whether people are talking more or less about your brand over time, and whether they are engaged with the topics that are being discussed about your brand. Sentiment – using some of the free tools out there on the web, and your top blogger or forum or twitter lists, take a few hours a week or month to track the % of rants and raves about your brand or products or topic areas of interest. Watch to see whether the % of positive mentions for a given keyword is going up or down. If you track volume and sentiment and track data on 3 channels (blogs, forums and twitter), then you have a valueable metric called a “vector” that can be used to communicate the velocity of a given brand or message. Ex of the velocity of a brand could be V=100 mentions/day, positive. Having two metrics and tracking velocity rather than just the volume trend alone (speed), is a very powerful tool for determining whether or not to take action. 41 WOMMA Webinar

56. Q: Question for speakers: With so much data available, what are the key metrics (maybe top 5) that we should be looking at? And how do you set benchmarks? Monitor for a few months? A: See the prior answer to question on prior page for our simplest, most straight-forward answer to this question. In terms of benchmarks, we typically look at historical volume and other key metric averages on a monthly-total basis for 3-5 key competitors, and we typically start with at least 3 months of historical data if we can gather it from the technology tools / platforms we are using. If we cannot get any historical information to establish key metric benchmarks, then we like to get at least 4-6 weeks of data in hand and ensure trust-worthiness before starting to draw conclusions about how “our” brand or initiatives are measuring up – both in absolute and relative terms, vs. competitors or other comparables. Hope that helps put a little more detail on that point. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO ATTENDED THE WEBINAR LIVE, AND THANKS AS WELL TO ALL WHO POSED GREAT QUESTIONS. 42 WOMMA Webinar