Honesty in Social Media Marketing: a Refreshing Change

Yesterday I attended the Burlington Social Media Breakfast.  The guest speaker, Adrian Ho of Zeus Jones, gave an interesting talk, challenging many truism about social media.

What I found most interesting, though, was after his presentation when the floor was opened for a question-and-answer session.  In particular, one audience member asked Ho to provide a social media solution that would help a small business with no budget and no time to implement it. In response, Ho simply stated that he wasn’t the person to ask. 

Again, he didn’t have the answer and he admitted it.

His candor was really refreshing because when posed with similar questions, so many people in the social media space go to great lengths showing that with minimal investment, anyone can succeed in social media. They cite predictable examples like Zappos or Dell, showing that social media success is as simple as setting up a Facebook page and responding to questions on Twitter.

Don’t believe me? Try Google “social media solutions” and you’ll be met with over 93 million results from people claiming to have simple, turnkey solutions to solve your business’s woes through social media.

Ho, in contrast, didn’t do this. Instead he said that it was more important to start by identifying the value you provide for your customer and amplify it. If you can’t create value, social media tools are useless. That’s an honest answer and much harder to tell a potential client than saying you can solve all their problems with a single magic bullet.

Indeed, this focused, honest approach is undoubtedly part of the reason he admits to rejecting 90% of the new business opportunities that comes his way. Ironically, it is also the reason he will continue to make educated, honest, and ultimately successful moves in the social media space.

Measuring Engagement: Quality over Quantity

I read this on emarketer.com today:

“Marketers are looking closely at measures of engagement. Respondents considered time spent on a site to be the most important performance metric, followed by Unique Page Views.”

From this chart, we see that Senior Marketers deem Time on Site the most important metric to determine Engagement. At first this seems intuitive, if someone stays around your site, they must be Engaged, but that’s not the complete story. Engagement is qualitative, while Time Spent on Site is quantitative.  (Credit to this post by Avinash Kaushik for the inspiration).

For example, I recently was interested in determining the number of active iPhone users in the United States. Initially, my google search led me to AdMob, where I spent 16 minutes on their blog trying to find my desired information. I didn’t find it and left the site.

Next, I went on Wikipedia and quickly found the answer to my query within 2 minutes.

From the information on emarketer, it seeems that most Senior Officals see this:

• Time on Site: AdMob = 16 minutes

• Time on Site: Wikipedia = 2 minutes

• Time on AdMob was greater than Time on Wikipedia.

• Therefore, there was greater engagement with AdMob.

This is false. I had a high engagement on Wikipedia becuase I found what I was looking for, and low engagement on AdMob because I shifted through irrelevant data then left.

We can see then, that engagement (qualitative) cannot be completely explained through time on site (quantitative).

The question is begged then, how can we measure Engagement.  There are a number of ways this can be done, many of them outlined in Web Analytics 2.0.

1. Exit Surveys: When users leave your site, hit them with a quick survey using 4Q asking them about the quality of their visit. Keep it short and use this data combine with time on site to determine how engaged your visitor was.
2. Email Surveys: If someone joined your mailing list, shoot them an email asking about their experience with the site.
3. Phone Calls: Seems old-fashioned, but if they gave you their number, use it. Conduct a quick survey asking how the site visit went, what could be improved, and what was good.
4. User Testing: A number of sites exist, like usertesting.com that allow you view video and hear feedback about how your site is working. For a fairly nominal fee, you can get great information on user engagement.

Armed with these tactics you can help senior marketers understand how to effectively gauge engagement and make your site more able to achieve its goals.