You can find the webinar slides on Slideshare and the video and transcription below. Thanks again to Alison Carlman and Michael DeLong for an hour full of great tips and fascinating case studies!

Jill Carlson: Good afternoon or good morning wherever you are. My name is Jill Carlson. I’m the Inbound Marketing Manager at Argyle Social and thanks for joining us for this social nonprofit. We’re thrilled to have two very skilled professionals with us co-hosting today. Welcome, Alison Carlman, the Unmarketing Manager for GlobalGiving.

Alison Carlman: Thank you.

Jill: Welcome to Michael DeLong, the Senior Manager of Online Community and Social Media at TechSoup Global. Hi, Michael.

Michael Delong: Hi.

Jill: You can go ahead and find all of our Twitter handles below our names. Today’s hash tag is going to be #socialNGO. The details, really quickly, some logistics: I’m going to lead questions and answers at the end of the call so go ahead and send those throughout the presentation. Also, if you’d like to save them until the end it’s up to you. We have someone monitoring the stream here. If you could tag your tweets with #socialNGO we’ll be sure to catch that. We’re definitely recording this and we’ll be sending out a follow-up email to everyone who’s been registered with the recording and the slides so you can share that far and wide or check it out at a later time.

Before we get started I just wanted to do three 15-second commercials. Like I said, I work for Argyle Social. We’re a social media management software company. We power your social media strategy. We do have special non-profit rates so if you’re at all interested in managing your different social properties with a really powerful and intuitive tool, visit us at ArgyleSocial.com. Alison from GlobalGiving is also here.

Alison: I just want to double-check. I don’t actually see the slides changing. Does anyone else?

Michael: I don’t either.

Jill: Are you serious? Okay. That is good to know. Let’s go ahead. Yes, I absolutely do see that. We are stuck on the first slide.

Alison: Well, I can go ahead and talk. I don’t need a picture. I’ll get started. This is Alison from GlobalGiving. I’m the unmarketing manager at GlobalGiving. GlobalGiving is a online platform for philanthropy. We help nonprofits of all sizes from all around the world connect to donors of all sizes all around the world.

So that means everything from a $10 “text to give” donors to million-dollar corporate partners. We handle all the customer service and donation processing for our non-profit partners, but we also do regular training and one-on-one support for online fundraising strategy development, a lot of which involves social media.

Jill: Excellent. That was perfect timing because I do believe you can see me now. Is that right?

Alison: Yes, we can.

Michael: Yes.

Jill: Excellent. So there we are. We’re back up and running. Thank you, Alison. That was perfectly concise. The GlobalGiving site is absolutely beautiful and there’s so much information so please do a deep dive and check them out. Michael, tell us a little about TechSoup.

Michael: Yes, hi. I’m Michael Delong. I’m a Senior Manager of Online Community and Social Media for TechSoup Global. TechSoup Global is a capacity-building non-profit. We’re working towards a time when every non-profit and NGO on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. We do this through a variety of ways which include donated technology products, educational resources and community. What I do is oversee a vibrant community, which is both offline and online, through a variety of channels including social media, discussion forums and on the ground events.

Jill: Excellent. Actually my first run-in with TechSoup was about a year and a half ago when I was working with Room to Read and I participated in your digital storytelling project, which we’re going to go into a deep dive today. It’s so great to have both of you here. Thanks for joining us.

Great. Today what we’re going to go ahead and talk about is number one, non-profits have a very tough time with time and resources and they’re very limited. We’re going to talk about making the most of limited time and resources in social media. We’re going to talk about how you figure out what content is right to share with your audience, how you balance calls to action with educational content and, lastly, we’re going to talk about how TechSoup and GlobalGiving have done a fantastic job of integrating social media into their already existing marketing, fundraising and other strategies. At the very end we’ll take Q&A.

First, let’s talk about working with limited time and resources. I think when we start thinking about all the different networks out there, it’s really important to figure out where your audience is and how they want to interact with you. Alison, how did you guys at GlobalGiving first decide where you needed to be?

Alison: We primarily work on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram right now. We basically just tested out where most of our audience is and where they’re already having conversations. We developed a bit of a strategy for each of them differently. Would you like me to go into that? Or is that a good answer there?

Jill: I think that’s a great answer. This was actually a slide that we had for our niche network webinar that we had because people go to Facebook for completely different reasons than they go to Instagram, Pinterest or Tumblr. You guys have such a rich, visual content library at GlobalGiving that I think you work across Instagram and Pinterest very well, as well as all the calls to action on Facebook. I think you guys do all of these very well. Clearly, something like Foursquare might not make sense for GlobalGiving.

Alison: Right.

Jill: Absolutely. I think a huge takeaway here is that niche networks are becoming increasingly popular. But just because they’re popular doesn’t justify investment. You really need to make sure that your target audience, whether that’s folks that you’re fundraising from or folks that you’re trying to help or serve are actually active on that network. I wanted to share GlobalGiving’s Pinterest page because, first of all, I love the Earth-changing adorability. Also, you guys use Pinterest for discovery. Can you explain about how that works?

Alison: Pinterest, for us, we started it out as an experiment. We said, “How is this going to work for us?” We built a couple goals in there saying, “We’d love to see if Pinterest is going to drive new traffic to our site,” but we also just think it makes sense for us to be there because the target market for Pinterest is women ages 18 to 35 who are interested in pretty things. That happens to be our same demographic at GlobalGiving. That works out for us well. We set up some metrics to see if people are coming to our site. Are people donating based on clicking on some of the pins? The answer has been “not really.”

However, we found that actually Pinterest, while it was more work at the beginning to set up some of the boards, is actually low-lift for us now so we just use it basically as a landing board. When we need to put an image somewhere or when we find a great image on our site we think people would enjoy, we pin it to our boards. So we spend maybe 30 minutes to an hour a week on it. But it’s a way that people who maybe wouldn’t otherwise know about GlobalGiving and have a chance to see such beautiful imagery might find us from there. They might learn to like our brand a little bit more because they think we’re cool for being on Pinterest.

Jill: Right. Especially if you’re just spending that much time after the initial outlay of time and resources, it seems that it’s pretty low maintenance. Is that right?

Alison: Yeah. It is. It’s a great tool for us, too. Because sometimes you have content that doesn’t live anywhere else on the internet but you want to link it.

Jill: Absolutely. Michael, I know you guys work with a lot of partners. When Pinterest first came out, people rushed to it. It was the hottest new thing. Are you seeing folks rushing in without strategies or possibly wasting time or resources on networks where maybe they don’t need to be?

Michael: Speaking of ourselves personally, we’re very interested in Pinterest but we didn’t have a strategy meeting about that and it was when we were in the deep crunch time for our digital storytelling challenge which, in some ways, did have a lot of potential with Pinterest. But we decided to shelve that for the time being until we were able to sit down and figure out, as Alison said, what our key metrics would be and what our strategy would be.

We didn’t have the time to do it right and to do it well, so we decided to put that off until we actually had the time to approach it in that way. That was the point I really wanted to make there that just because a network exists, if you don’t have the time to do it right and do it well, it might be better to wait on that and just focus on the networks you’re on and using well.

Jill: Absolutely.

Alison: I think that’s good advice.

Jill: Instead of thinking, “We’ll do Pinterest in addition to…”, I think it should be “Pinterest instead of…” and really recognizing that your resources can be finite, especially time and human capital. Alison, you said that your main platform is Facebook and then Twitter and you guys do a great job of posting relevant content on your Facebook page. I wanted to dive in a tiny little bit and go over EdgeRank and how you contemplate EdgeRank when you’re posting on your Facebook page.

We won’t spend too much time talking about it, but that is the beautiful algorithm in front of you that is designed to show you the content you like and when you want to see it. We’re going to go ahead and replace all those beautiful letters in that formula. All it means is affinity times time times time decay equals your EdgeRank.

If folks have interacted with your content before, they have a higher affinity. If you post a video or a photo, it has a higher rate versus just a plain word status update. Time decay, there are varying degrees of what people think is the half-life of a post, but people post on average one or two times a day. I believe that’s true for you guys over at TechSoup. Is that right, Michael?

Michael: That’s correct. We really try not to go over that because we’ve noticed that if we do go over two posts a day the number of likes and comments go down and the number of unfollows or blocks goes up.

Jill: Yeah. Absolutely. I forget the number, but essentially, folks aren’t coming back to your page after they like it. So you really, absolutely have to reach your fans in their news feed. You guys are doing an excellent job of doing that. Alison and I love this example. What are we looking at here?

Alison: We’ve actually spend a lot of time thinking about how to best take advantage of EdgeRank. We have this love-hate relationship with it because I would love to use Facebook to share really important news about the important work that our partners do all over the ground. But sometimes it turns out that our Facebook followers aren’t always interested in that deep, heavy stuff. This is an example from last week that just makes me laugh. We’ve been experimenting with contests. We posted this picture of a nose. It’s kind of obvious it’s a giant camel nose. We said “Good luck. Guess what this is. Can you guess?” We had 60 people in a row guess camel. It was so bizarre because you would think that after 43 people had guessed camel, someone might not think “maybe I should put my guess into the hat, too” but people just loved it.

It was just so funny because even after, on the right, you can see “Oh, you’re right! We told you it is indeed a camel” and people kept guessing and people really engaged with that post and so that post actually was seen by 25% of our audience on Facebook, which is kind of discouraging because I’d rather them see something really important. But, now we have that higher affinity with some of them that next time we post something important more of them will see it. You have to work with what works in each medium. We do a lot more visuals and a lot more photos on Facebook working with EdgeRank and not as much heavy educational content that we might do on Twitter.

Jill: Absolutely. I think the point you made about how your affinity increased with every single person who liked it. You also had, what, 24 people who liked it as well as all those comments? So you have all those touch points which increase your affinity with every single one of those people. Next time you do post some content you want in front of their eyes, it’s actually going to surface which is fantastic. I also like this example because when we spoke yesterday, you said, “It’s not rocket science. It’s just would you click it?” I think it’s important for folks to wear their user hat instead of their work hat or nonprofit hat. Essentially, would you click on this if you were looking at Facebook and scrolling through it?

Alison: I can’t say honestly that I would have said camel again.

Jill: You don’t think you would have been number 63 or 62? That is pretty funny people kept commenting. I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the brand new promoted posts which are brand new to Facebook and it is the opportunity to get your content in front of the right audience. It’s very similar to the Twitter promoted tweets platform model. We definitely use it here at Argyle.

That short link at the bottom takes you to a fantastic post on SocialFresh. You can start to see that you can more or less purchase higher EdgeRank based on different price points. That’s a new change to Facebook and I’ll be curious to see how it changes folks’ strategy over time.

Alison: I would say, we’re going to be experimenting with that, too and our number one thing is to make sure that whatever you’re promoting is actually interesting content because if it isn’t and you’re paying to promote stuff that nobody really wants to read anyway, then you’re only going to do damage to your brand.

Jill: Yeah, and you’re paying for that.

Alison: Yes. And you’ve lost 20 bucks.

Jill: You’re out 20 bucks and a lot of followers. Michael, I would love for you to talk about TechSoup on Facebook because I know you guys, like GlobalGiving, you guys are at the epicenter of this huge web of partners. You often have to decide when and how to post and who to say yes and no to. I would love it if you could dive into that.

Michael: Sure. We have 47 donor partners, 39 global partners and a number of other initiatives, such as Guide Star International, Net Squared and NGO Source. What this amounts to for us is a really packed amount of social media content. The place where we really tend to fall short on, like a lot of nonprofits, is time, but also using these social media properties as real estate.

Earlier, we were talking about that there are different ratios that people use. The 20-40-40 rule, the 20-80 rule, the 5-3-2 rule and that sort of thing and that becomes really difficult when you have so many partners and so many initiatives because if only 20% is going to be about your own organization, all of those partners and all of those initiatives count towards that 20%. It really becomes a balancing act of how to negotiate that.

One of the things we do at TechSoup is we convene a weekly editorial board meeting. We meet with the marketing team, the content team, the product donation team and a number of other teams across the organization to make sure that we’re aligning on messages and themes and we brainstorm all different ways that we can cross-promote each other’s work.

Jill: I think that’s definitely a challenge that a lot of nonprofits face. This is something we talked about. We had a webinar about a month ago with universities and higher education institutions and they expressed a lot of the same challenges. That is, back in the day, your website and your homepage used to be the place to post your most important content. If you wanted it to be seen, you’d put it on your homepage. If you had to say no to something, eventually it might end up on Facebook.

It’s completely opposite now where Facebook, Twitter and all your social media properties are your prime real estate and you need to defend them from internal challenges and external challenges. These are some of the ones we talked about with the universities. I was curious if either of you ever face any kinds of pressures from the inside when you have so many partners?

Michael: Certainly. One of the things I can speak to here is the fact that I feel that Twitter is very different from Facebook in that Twitter loves content. You can push tons of content out onto Twitter. In fact, I think it’s more likely that someone would unfollow you on Twitter for not posting enough rather than posting too much, which is the opposite of Facebook. For a lot of people, a lot of partners and internal stakeholders, Facebook is what they think of when they think of social media. If they’ve asked you to promote it and you’ve tweeted about it 20 times, they look at the Facebook page and say “Well, you haven’t promoted my thing.” You have, but Facebook is the thing they immediately associate with social media. There’s internal training and teaching and advocacy that you have to do to show people what the different channels are and how they work.

Alison: I think a great tool for that is Facebook Insights. If you can come up with an example of some things you’ve had to post begrudgingly and show how poorly they do, and you just say, “Look, only 3% of people engaged with this content. It’s killing our brand.” I think that really helps. Everyone likes to see numbers and nobody wants to be promoting stuff that nobody likes.

Jill: Absolutely. Nobody wants to be hurting the cause. How about this last challenge? Can you appeal for more donations again? I know you probably have different funding models. I imagine that’s one people face all the time. I know when I see in my own news feed, friends consistently asking for pledges for marathons and such. How do you guys coordinate with either your development team of your fundraising team to make sure that everything is synced up? Alison, that might be more relevant to what you all do.

Alison: Yeah. I kind of am that person that actually is driving the donations to the site. Fortunately, I get to battle internally with that and I don’t have a lot of internal pressure to ask for donations. But we do have pressure from all of our partners to promote their projects which are on our site. We’ve actually come up with a reward system for how we rate partners. The ones who perform well and report well are more likely to get promoted on our social media.

Jill: I like that.

Michael: That’s really interesting.

Jill: Meritocracy. I like it.

Michael: I can speak to one of the ways. As you’ve said, we have a very different sort of funding model. It’s almost more of a revenue model. With our product donation program, one of the ways I’ve dealt with this is to find creative ways to wrap the recommendations for those particular product donations into a tech tip. That way, it’s content and a promotion at the same time.

Jill: I like that. I’m guessing that resonates and it’s a little more stickier content for folks. Is that right?

Michael: Yeah. It gives them something useful. It gives them a takeaway.

Jill: Absolutely. It was funny. I think it was Zack Barnett, director of web communications at the University of Oregon. He said, “I don’t ever find ways to say no. I find creative ways to say yes.” It’s like a boring online newsletter saying “Hey, can you link to this,” he tries to find the one story in it and primes it with a call to action or a question so it actually performs on the channel.

Another challenge folks face, this is with every brand that’s on social media, are the external challenges, which is misinformation posted on your page, a PR crisis or also the negativity or obscenities. Lots of those things can be solved with terms of service or filters and alerts. Also, so long as you have your social media actually rolled into your crisis communications plan or existing marketing plans. Is that something you both have at your organizations?

Alison: It’s something that we’re working on developing as it happens. Sometimes the crisis happens in traditional media and sometimes it happens on the social media itself. I think your solutions there are very similar to what we have. If somebody addresses us on that platform we usually like to address the problem publicly as well on that platform. We usually respond within the same medium. If they email you, email them back. If they post on Facebook, post on Facebook back. If it escalates from there we try to take everything offline because usually it’s not appropriate for social media.

Jill: Absolutely. I love that. We love that here at Argyle. We call it symmetry of response and it’s really important. You’re tweeting at US Airways and no one gets back to you and all that. It’s important.

Michael: One of our favorites here at TechSoup, it’s an oldie but goodie, is turning naysayers into yaysayers. We actually find that we do that quite a bit because our social media does act often as a form of customer service. When people have issues we’re accessibly responsive, polite and helpful and sometimes there’s people who initially lodged a complaint who end up becoming your biggest fan or advocate because they were so impressed with the way you responded to them.

Alison: I think that’s great.

Jill: You have a chance to turn them around. Alison, you guys do some pretty amazing things on Facebook by connecting your different organizations to one another. Can you tell us about that?

Alison: A couple years ago we started these Facebook groups. Groups of nonprofits who were on the site that are participating in a challenge, for example. We realized that sometimes they could answer each other’s questions better than we could or more quickly than we could because they’re on the other side of the globe or that they would have insight to share with each other.

We’re all about building better feedback groups on the site and through all the different channels we use so our Facebook groups are private groups for project leaders who are on our site. They share tips with each other, either about online fundraising, which is what GlobalGiving is helping them with, but also with stuff that’s not exactly that related but it’s a network for people to share that have something in common. It’s been great for us and it’s also helped with our customer service stuff, as well.

Jill: I had to crop this. There was a much longer thread. This was a conversation that went back and forth between the person asking the question and multiple folks helping this person. I was impressed that it’s really working in that forum. It’s actually working.

Alison: We are, too. All the time. We get so excited to see people helping each other that they don’t know and they have better ideas than what we could come up with. So it’s great.

Jill: Is that lady holding foxes in that picture? Do you see that?

Alison: It’s very possible. We do have a fennec fox project on our site.

Jill: Oh, wow. I think the takeaway there is that your time-strapped and resource-strapped so make sure you connect them to one another because they can help each other. Lots of times they can do it more quickly and more efficiently than you can because if you’ve got two folks in Australia and Indonesia together and they’re both awake and checking Facebook at the same time.

Let’s go ahead and shift gears a little bit and talk about how you view your content. I love this next example. Number one, because it was the first way I got to know TechSoup, but also because it has just grown tremendously and really taken off. Michael, can you tell us about TS Digs, what you guys call your digital storytelling challenge?

Michael: The digital storytelling challenge is an annual campaign. We designed this with the idea that creating a compelling story is one of the most valuable skills for nonprofit, library or other social benefit organizations can have today. This helps nonprofits in terms of marketing, fundraising or even clarifying their own brand mission for themselves. We built a campaign around the spirit of friendly competition with technology prizes and expert judges. We built a curriculum for learning how to build, shoot, write, edit and share a digital story. We accomplished this through a series of webinars, tweet chats, an interactive online talk show and our discussion forums.

We really wanted the campaign to be cross-platform, both in order to reach the different members of our community where they are, but we also wanted to encourage folks to try different channels that they might not actually be using at the time. We created the hash tag, #TSdigs, and that sort of ties the campaign together.

The campaign has a number of different social media components. One I really want to highlight is the social sharing component of the contest. The week after submissions closed, we opened up community voting for a special audience choice award. This year, we were actually giving away an iPad, courtesy of our sponsor. The community voting, it’s largely based on the organization’s ability to get the word out about their digital story.

So we shift the educational focus from the writing, shooting and editing to social sharing. We’re teaching nonprofits and other social benefit organizations how to build their own campaign around using their digital story to spread the word about themselves through their newsletter and social media. So this becomes such a strong focus because what we realized is that even the best digital story isn’t going to do a lot of good if nobody sees it.

Jill: Yeah. What I love about this is you’re asking folks for a pretty serious time commitment here, but you’re asking them to sit down and create some real value for their own organizations. You give them so many different places to participate. That’s what I love about this challenge because you guys provide so many entry points, that all different skill levels and all different platforms and mediums for the audience to participate. I think that’s why you’re seeing this really take off.

You provided these beautiful screenshots of the first place video and the first place photo of this year. I think the thing I love about this competition is that it really shines a spotlight on how great a job you guys are doing in connecting people to one another. You’re sharing the spotlight with other charities and nonprofits, but in doing so, you’re really proving your own value as an organization. When you guys first envisioned this, did you ever expect it to be as big as it is now?

Michael: I’m sure that we hoped. I’ve just been with TechSoup a year, so I’ve just been through one digital storytelling challenge. I know when it started, there were only two people on our team and our team has actually grown quite a bit, as well. I believe when it started, social media wasn’t really happening the way it’s happening now. A lot of what our team was doing was focused on our online community and second life and our other online community in our discussion forums. So as social media has grown, we’ve continued to add more social media components to the campaign and the campaign itself has then seen growth.

Jill: You guys also have the live even that comes along with it and you have folks dialing in from Romania and all over the world. I just think you guys do such a great job of sharing the spotlight with multiple causes. To show folks how much it’s grown in terms of how many submissions you have, how many votes you had, look at the vote increase. It’s really taken off. Especially this page. I love TS Digs. I think it’s a fun way for nonprofits to create their own value and to own their own stories. Also, there’s some great prizes. Thanks for sharing the case study, Michael.

Michael: Of course.

Jill: Alison, I’m really excited about this next one. When we first spoke about this, you were talking about integrating online and offline and how you incorporate social media into it. Can you tell us about the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund you guys started?

Alison: Sure. A little bit of background: a couple years ago, we sort of had a shift in our organization away from a marketing approach to an unmarketing approach. For us, that meant not doing so much traditional PR and writing press releases and media relations sending things out to the masses. Instead, we’re really focusing on social media engaging in conversations. That happened a couple years ago. Then a year ago, when the Japan earthquake and tsunami hit, we were one of the first people to set up a relief fund and got that out on Twitter right away, and the text to give number out right away. Actually, traditional media picked that up on Twitter and put it on television. Our social media actually drove traditional media. A year later now, we’ve become the tenth largest donor to Japan after the earthquake through these ten to twenty dollar small donations and then corporate matching donations to Japan.

That was our internal social media success story. We’re saying “It really works if you’ve built this audience, then you’re ready and poised when the time is right.” The story with us is that a year after the disaster, our president and co-founder went to Japan to visit the people who had benefited from the fund that GlobalGiving had sent. We decided we wanted to figure out a way to engage the people again because they’ve been getting updates and stories and photos about how their money was used but we wanted to give them a chance to reach out again, especially since we had somebody meeting beneficiaries face to face.

We asked people through email, text messages and on Facebook to leave a message for someone in Japan who had been a survivor of the earthquake. It was actually really beautiful. We were shocked at how many people wrote these really touching messages for people. We actually printed those out in English and had some interns translate them into Japanese for us. We folded hundreds of paper cranes in our office on our lunch hours and put them into these cards. So you can see the stack of cards there. That’s me holding one of the cards. These are all Facebook messages that became paper messages that we sent with our president to Japan.

Then she hand-delivered them to people who had benefited from the fund. These are people in Japan who got to receive these messages. It was just a real beautiful way for us to continue to engage people who had given to us a long time ago and probably forgot about it, but also to bridge the relationship between some of the people who wouldn’t have otherwise known that there were actually so many people out there who had a lot of beautiful things to say to them.

Jill: I just love this story. These cranes are just beautiful. When we first talked about this, I thought about are people just writing “Our thoughts are with you?” Lots of these messages are very in depth. You guys have done an amazing job of connecting both your online and offline activity.

If folks want to learn more about the whole history, you have two different stories on the creation and delivery of the paper cranes. Man, you guys post through YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr and you incorporate the SMS giving. These stories are really beautiful. I encourage anyone who’s on the webinar to make a mental note to go visit the stories later. The great thing is that the content then lives on so folks can go discover the GlobalGiving blog or discover your Pinterest page based on everything you’ve already linked to in Storify. Do you guys use Storify?

Alison: Yeah. Storify is a great tool. Go ahead.

Jill: I was just going to ask if you use it and if you encourage your partner organizations to use it at all to capture it. It’s hard to capture the nonstop stream of the firehouse of social media content but this is a great way to solidify it and hold it in time.

Alison: I just started using it to show other people in the organization that there were conversations that were interesting that were happening and it was easier than cutting and pasting into an email. We just create a quick Storify and email that to my boss or whoever just so that it was a great summary and then it became also a bigger tool because it has its own sort of following.

Jill: Absolutely. You guys have done a fantastic job of showcasing that beautiful story. Thanks for sharing that, too.

Alison: Thank you.

Jill: We’re going to go in and talk about how when you integrate all of these different platforms, you need to figure out whether or not where you’re posting where your audience is and if you’re reaching the right people. These are just some questions that we think lots of folks should ask as they get into social media and the different platforms. Alison, you’ve been collecting lots of different data on the social media metrics on the networks that you guys have been active on. You have been very generous in sharing how you measure your success. Can you walk us through how you determine whether or not you’re successful on Facebook or Twitter?

Alison: Sure. This is my little metrics post that I just typed up yesterday. I’ve been at GlobalGiving for about a year and I kind of came up with a system to measure what I’m doing every day so I know whether something is successful and I should do it again or if I should stop doing something. I measure both our Facebook and Twitter posts in four different ways. First is applause rate. How many people liked the post content itself enough to engage with it. So on Facebook and Facebook Insights there’s a metric called lifetime engaged users, so that’s the number that I track for Facebook for the applause rate. On Twitter that’s the number of people who click on a URL or on a post inside a tweet.

Then there’s conversation rate. So, I also am curious about how many people are further engaging after clicking. They’re replying or doing something. On Facebook I measure that through the metric that Facebook calls “People talking about this.” Then there’s also the virality number that they have. Then on Twitter, I measure that through counting @ replies and mentions. I don’t actually sit and count these. I use tools to count them for me, like Argyle Social.

Then another one is amplification rate. Because people are engaging it, how many people are now further seeing the content. On Facebook, that’s the weekly total reach number in Facebook Insights. On Twitter, that’s the number of retweets.

I would say all three of those are return on engagement numbers. The final one I would say is return on investment. We track donations that come that are driven by our social properties.

Jill: Absolutely. For anyone who’s a little confused about PTAT or lifetime engaged users or what any of those mean, we did a webinar with Jeff Widman of PageLever and he went through all of this in great detail. If you go to http.://ar.gy/FB101, there’s kind of a little cheat sheet that you can have when you look through Insights. Do you use this information to kind of benchmark what is an average post, an above average post, a below average post then?

Alison: Yes. I do this on a quarterly basis where I sit and do the numbers for the whole quarter, but then I come up with averages for last quarter so I can say today when I post something on Twitter, I know what the average number of retweets of a good post would get. I then can benchmark on a post by post basis “Oh, that one was good. That one was not good” because Argyle Social tells me on a minute-by-minute basis of how many people have clicked on a post, I can see right away that it was good and maybe I should retweet it later in the day or modify it and do it again. Or it was bad and I should figure out what went wrong with that. I do have some benchmark numbers for all of these. I redo them every quarter and they’re just off the top of my head. I know if 4,000 people saw a post on Facebook then it was better than average.

Jill: Wow. That’s great. Michael, I’m guess this might look a little bit different, especially ROI for TechSoup because you guys do have different revenue models. Is this something you guys are also looking to implement, almost like a scorecard or report card?

Michael: Yeah. We have an entirely separate analytics department. I don’t get my hands as dirty with this kind of stuff, although I’d love to. We do work closely with the analytics department so we do have different things that we’re tracking on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. We put Google Analytics tracking codes for anything that points to the types of site, so we do a monthly report on how our social media efforts are driving traffic to the site and how that compares to the way the newsletter and other avenues are driving traffic to the site.

In terms of our life, for us, that would be the way that social media efforts are effecting the product donation program. That’s another report we work with the analytics department on pooling on a monthly basis. I’m fairly new to the job, so I love hearing this stuff that Alison is talking about because this is the program that I’ve been brought on to build. As we talked about yesterday, I loved hearing that it took her almost a full year to really refine the process. I know I’ve been in this seat for about two months and I feel like I’m at just the right place now building these systems.

Right now, we’re tracking more of campaigns on a one-off basis. TS Digs, obviously, we track very closely. We have another campaign called Donate Your Brain, which is a campaign that we use to get people’s tech questions answered and to connect them with experts and with each other to cross-
pollinate our discussion forums with social media. We look at the way that campaign drives traffic and also qualitatively, how quickly and how well questions get answered.

Jill: That’s great. Alison, do you guys use campaigns, as well?

Alison: Yes, we do, actually. Everything I post, I put into a bucket so I can see how one campaign is performing against the other.

Jill: Do you do that based on projects, you do that based on content, or a mix of both?

Alison: I do it on the content bucket. So, I have a shameless self-promotion campaign, then I have partners or thought leadership or things like that. What I’m really interested in comparing is the actual content of the post itself.

Jill: Okay. Great. To see what’s out-performing the other posts?

Alison: Yes.

Jill: Great. Did you come up with the applause, conversation, amplification? Those are your own rates, is that correct?

Alison: I did a lot of hunting, so I’m sure I pulled all of that from different sources somewhere.

Jill: I love that. I love it.

Alison: It’s all from Beth Kanter and her web of interesting posts on her blog.

Jill: Her blog is fantastic. You mentioned here the clicks per post. These are the two drums we like to beat at Argyle, measuring clicks per post and clicks per follower because it can tell you if content resonates. That second bullet is one that we get asked nearly every single day. What time should I post? What day should I post. People are kind of obsessed with making sure they’re optimizing exactly when they post and I think the question there is whether or not time of day impacts your engagement. But to be able to do that, you need to be looking at your clicks per post to see what’s resonating and what kind of variables you can account for.

The other thing we like to look at is clicks per follower because lots of folks are really obsesses with the “We need 10,000 followers. We need 1,000,000 likes.” But it’s important to see the quality of those followers and fans and to see whether or not your performance is increasing or decreasing. If you’ve got multiple handles or pages, how they’re performing against each other. Then, how you stack up to other organizations. So, if you want to read a nice little blog post on that, there’s a short link to that as well.

You guys have both talked about how it’s important to define success. It’s going to be different for every single organization. It’s going to be different for GlobalGiving and the Red Cross and Leukemia and Lymphoma and TechSoup. All the different organizations as well as University of Oregon and higher education institutions. It’s important to set those benchmarks for your own company or organization and reiterate. As we know, Facebook changes things pretty often. Twitter is changing things more quickly as well. The rules of the game are consistently changing. Do you have to revisit what you’re looking at, Alison, based on what Facebook Insight allows you to have insight into?

Alison: Yeah. Absolutely. I did this whole thing in November of last year and everything changed on Facebook and I had to start all over again. Several hours of Christmas break wasted, but it was a learning process.

Jill: This is great because we have about 12 minutes for Q&A. If folks have any questions, go ahead and hash tag them with #socialNGO. Again, we have Alison Carlman here from GlobalGiving and Michael Delong from TechSoup. I’m here from Argyle Social so please send in your questions. I’ve got these three or four here already. Michael, this one’s for you. When you talked about meeting with the management team to make sure everything was synced across channels, how did that first start? How did you get the management team on board to meet about what’s being posted on social media?

Michael: Right. Well, I was very luck to have come into an organization where that editorial system was already put into place. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for that. But fortunately, I didn’t have to do that hard work to make that happen. I work with a very terrific senior marketing manager named Lara Franklin and she really put that into place. I do a lot of meetings every week and it’s consistently the one that I look forward to actually attending. I can’t take credit for that, but I’m so grateful for it.

Jill: I know that’s a challenge for folks to get by at the c-level.

Michael: You’ll have to do a whole other webinar with Lara some other time.

Jill: Yeah. How to make the case for social media. This one is for either or both of you. Are your chief executive CEOs or executive directors active on social media? If so, is there a policy or a manual for them to follow?

Alison: For us, yes, they are. I think that was a huge reason we had the shift away from marketing to unmarketing is because they were using it and understood it, as well. So a lot of people on staff use social media and communicate in that way. I do think that helps. I do understand it can be so hard if they don’t because I’ve also come from organizations where it was the opposite.

Jill: Your executive director, I’m guessing, tweets? Is that right?

Alison: She does tweet, yeah, and is on Facebook. Then we have a Facebook group for staff and alumni, too, that she’s also very involved in, which I think if great. Then everybody understands, too, what they’re asking when they ask us to post stuff going back to those earlier “protect your properties” conversations.

Jill: Absolutely. Michael, I’m guessing the folks at TechSoup are pretty active?

Michael: Yes. We have three co-CEOs and all of them are on Twitter and Facebook and active, too, to varying degrees. In terms of policy, we do have social media guidelines that we created. They’re probably a bit out of date and could use some sprucing up at this point, but we’ve really found that most of the people here really do understand social media almost in a native sort of way. And, so, the policies really act sort of as a loose guideline. We’ve often used them less for our own use and more for when other organizations turn to us and say, “We’re writing social media policies. What kind of resources are out there?” We share ours with them, but we haven’t really found that people internally need to turn to it as much.

Jill: Great. Alison, this one is for you. Someone is saying you said that Twitter is for thought-heavy content more than Facebook, which seems a little bit counter-intuitive, given the 140 characters. Can you elaborate?

Alison: Yeah. I think because you can do hash tags and you can target people with certain topic information, we use Twitter a lot more to share links to news articles, which just wouldn’t go over very well on Facebook. Facebook is so visual, EdgeRank rewards you for using videos and photos, that if you’re sharing a news article that doesn’t have that same visual appeal, it just doesn’t work as well in Facebook. So you can actually have more conversations that are targeted about certain topics on Twitter and, like Michael was saying, if it doesn’t apply to people they just pass it by, where on Facebook, you actually hurt yourself when it doesn’t to people and they don’t engage.

Michael: I’ll add to it. I think on Twitter, people really expect almost every tweet, obviously there are some conversations back and forth, but a majority of tweets, people expect to have a link out to other content anyway. I think that’s a big part of why Twitter is a place for news dissemination.

Jill: Yeah. If folks just leave status updates without a link, that’s just looked down upon a little bit. Someone’s asking what’s the best way to combine all the metrics that were back on that slide? So what’s the best way to combine all the metrics? Do you do it manually through Excel? Any tips on how to combine these?

Alison: It depends on what your dashboard is looking like. If you’re someone who’s asking how often you check in on it and how do you see it all, but Facebook Insights does that for you. They create these graphs and so does Argyle. You have the graphs on there, so everyone’s metrics might be different. These are what I’ve decided were my key ones. If you don’t feel like you have the time to go through and figure it out, what Facebook and Argyle provide just out of the box are really helpful. You can see trends change over time and things like that. On a day-to-day basis, when I’m comparing if it was a good tweet or bad tweet, I just look at one thing: I look at clicks.

Jill: Okay.

Alison: Then the same thing for Facebook. I look at reach.

Jill: Okay. Great. This is a great question and I’m glad someone brought it up. Any of the face speakers, what tools are best for those of us who don’t have the budget for Argyle Social? Before I let you guys answer that, I do want to stress that we do have very competitive and special rates for nonprofits. They’re actually pretty new rates. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us because we’re always willing to be helpful. I know, Michael, you and I have spoken a little bit about this. You guys are not an Argyle Social client, so can you go ahead and tell us what you use?

Michael: I am actually a big spreadsheet fan. It does get to be cumbersome. It’s very manual, but you can pull these insights from different places and you can look at things like Topsy or Twitalizer. The Facebook Insights, the clicks on Bitly, which is the link shortener we use. Now we’re actually moving over to Owly. At any rate, I compile these all on spreadsheets which is how I get an overview of them. Two of the tools that I really find indispensable, although it’s less for measurement, this is what you and I were talking about earlier, are NetFlyers and HootSuite. Which I really use as listening dashboards.

For any nonprofits that are getting into social media or doing social media already and are strapped for time, it’s really a great way. So much of social media is listening and we haven’t necessarily talked about listening today. But a big chunk of your time on social media should be spent listening. These dashboards, especially for an organization like ours where we have so many initiatives and partners, it really cuts down on the amount of time it takes to look at all of that information from a high-
level view.

Jill: It’s difficult to keep your eyes on your feet, but also on the horizon in terms of staying in the stream every single day and also taking these metrics and looking at them in aggregate. I think these success metrics that Alison has here are just an awesome benchmark to start, for sure.

Alison: I would just echo that. I think if you didn’t have anybody for anything, I think the Facebook Insights and either Tweet Deck and HootSuite and Bitly, you can do a lot with those. Everything else, there’s a random tool that does one thing. If you’ve got the time or if you have an intern who wants to build a dashboard using seven different measurement tools, you could also do that.

Jill: Chances are it will begin with a TW, right? I’m really glad that you brought up budget because someone is asking what is your suggested social media budget for a nonprofit? Or do you recommend sticking with free resources? Alison, you kind of addressed that just now, saying piecing it together. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Alison: Other than Argyle Social, which is a tool I use everyday, we don’t have a budget besides my salary. I think you can do it without. It obviously takes a lot of staff time, so that needs to be considered part of your budget, but apart from that, I don’t think you need to be spending a lot of money. If you do spend money, make sure it is on something you use every day and it is really helpful for whatever your work is.

Jill: Absolutely. I totally lost my train of thought. This is exactly it: Alison, social media is just one part of your job. It’s not your entire job. So when you’re talking about your salary, it is clear that you’re the unmarketing manager, so your responsibilities extend far beyond that as well, is that correct?

Alison: Yeah. I do all communications and marketing or PR-related things. Then I have a colleague, so we’re a two-person unmarketing team. My colleague does a lot of our social media stuff as well as customer service. We really see, as Michael was saying earlier, a lot of our customer service as an extension of our unmarketing strategy.

Jill: That’s great. I think, let’s see here, it looks like folks have some tool-specific questions in terms of opinions, but that is something we could have an entire other webinar on. I will hold that for now. Thank you so much, Alison and Michael. This has been so much fun talking about the success you guys have had in social media and I really look forward to following GlobalGiving and TechSoup. I’m big fans of both of your organizations and I can’t wait to follow you into the future on all these different platforms. Thank you so much for your time today.

Alison: Thanks for having us. It’s been really interesting.

Michael: Thank you. I had a great time.

Jill: Good. Me, too. We’ll be sending out a follow up email with slides and a blog post and everything that you can share far and wide. I just want to say thank you one last time. Thanks, Alison and thanks, Michael.

Michael: Bye.

Alison: Bye.

Jill: Bye.

While .docs, .baby, .you, and .wow might be hotly contested battles between giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, there are other phrases that landed between 8 and 13 applications per domain. Do you think you could pick out the Top 11 Most Requested Domains?

Choices: .love .music .dog .sale .shop .you .book .blog .style .app .movie .cloud .mom .design .art .news .llc .home .free .vip .law .tech .inc .now .hotel .web .poker .ltd .site .education

Tweet your answers to us at @ArgyleSocial. We’ll be sharing the answers via Twitter with the hashtag #Top11TLD at 4PM (EST) today!

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes to us courtesy of eMarketer and Satmetrix. In a survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C companies, 47% of B2B companies did not track or follow up on brand mentions on social media at all.

That means nearly half of B2B companies are either using the push method of content delivery (and not listening), or are ignoring social as a viable marketing channel all together. I was shocked that the number was so high.

For the 53% of B2B companies that do follow and track social mentions, 56% count only the comments and followers. That’s the extent of their social media measurement – counting comments and followers. Wow.

Do either of these stats surprise you? Are these numbers worrisome?

If you haven’t subscribed to the Social Pros podcast already, check it out at Convince and Convert or find us on iTunes!

Jill @ Argyle.

——

Argyle Social today announced two significant enhancements to its social media marketing platform. The new products – the Social Signals API and Argyle for Salesforce.com – enable community managers and social professionals to integrate social data across marketing channels and business systems.

“When it comes to enterprise marketing maturity, social media is light years behind other channels like email, search, and display,” Argyle Social CEO Eric Boggs said. “As a result, marketers operate in a dangerous blind spot – they don’t understand how their social media investments map to key business outputs.”

“We believe that the cross-channel integration enabled by our new products will drive the next wave of social business innovation,” Boggs added.

Social Signals API

Argyle’s Social Signals API maps activity data like social interactions, short URL clicks, shares and website conversions to individual contact records and social profiles. This powerful social data feed augments customer intelligence and enriches cross-channel marketing programs.

“The days of fragmented social data and swivel-chair integrations are over. The days of social business automation are here,” Boggs said. “Our Social Signals API provides a contact-centric data feed to augment CRM, email marketing and customer service systems with social data. As a result, marketing executives can run smarter marketing programs and make socially-informed business decisions.”

Argyle for Salesforce.com

Argyle also announced a plug-and-play Salesforce.com integration – the first of many products to be built on its Social Signals API.

“Argyle for Salesforce is a revolutionary step forward for the B2B community manager,” Boggs said.  “We expect to announce integrations with additional CRM and email marketing systems in the very near future.”

Argyle’s Salesforce.com integration maps social activity data directly into Salesforce Lead and Contact records and highlights the community manager’s role as a sales enabler and revenue accelerator.

Customer Quote

“By tying directly into the CRM, Argyle surfaces which leads, opportunities, and sales have had social touchpoints in ways that you can’t with other tools like Google Analytics that stop once the customer leaves your website,” said Argyle customer Christopher Penn, Director of Inbound Marketing at email marketing software provider WhatCounts.

“More social data in the sales funnel gives sales and marketing teams the ability to follow up with prospective customers via social channels,” Penn added.

If you’ve ever wondered how to harness the negative-leaning energy of online communities for good, how to target your Facebook ads so folks click them on purpose, or how you should actually be measuring the success of your social media marketing, watch and listen to the webinar below. If you’re more of a visual learner, the entire webinar is transcribed below.

Thanks again to Jason Falls for an hour full of fascinating case stories and hilarious antics.

Eric: All right. Hello everybody. My name is Eric Boggs. Welcome to today’s show. Jason, you there? Hello, Jason Falls?

Jason: I’m here. Sorry.

Eric: No problem. Welcome, ladies and gents to No BS Social Media. Joining me on the call is the uncanny Mr. Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer.

Jason: I’ve been called worse.

Eric: He requires no introduction. My name is Eric. I’m the CEO at Argyle Social. We develop social media marketing software. You can learn more about us at ArgyleSocial.com. We’re going to spend the next 40 to 45 minutes or so talking about social media and talking about bullshit, of which Jason is one of the finest peddlers I know.

Jason: No dude, I’m the peddler of the no bullshit, not the bullshit.

Eric: Oh, I get it now. I get it. Jason wrote the book No BS Social Media, which is really, really good. We’ve done a number of webcasts with Jason. We’ve hosted him to give a talk down here in Durham, North Carolina at Argyle headquarters. I’ve seen him give talks around the country, so we are super-stoked to get some of his time today on the webcast.

A few housekeeping notes. We’re going to do Q&A at the end of the call, so feel free to send your questions in via the chat. You can go to meeting or you can tweet your questions with the hashtag ‘nobull.’ I think there was a little bit of outside chatter on the hashtag, but that’s okay, we’ll drop them out.
We’re recording the show, so we’ll send a follow-up email probably later this week, maybe early next week, depending on how quickly we can button it up. We’ll send it to everyone that registered, so you can forward it to your friends and colleagues and anyone else that may be interested in taking a look.

Before we get too deep into the show, a couple of quick commercials. The first one comes from me. The second one comes from Jason. I wanted to remind everyone of the Social Pros podcast, which is a podcast I do every week with Jay Baer of Convince & Convert, who is also a very good friend of Mr. Falls. Jason’s been a guest on our show. He was on a couple weeks ago and talked about cloud and secret government conspiracies and all sorts of interesting things. The concept of Social Pros is interviewing real people doing real work in social media. You can see some of the brands we’ve featured and some of the people featured there. Check us out at ar.gy/podcast or on the iTunes store.

I’ll let Jason do the next quickie commercial. He’s got lots of really cool events coming up.

Jason: Sure. I was a guest on Social Pros obviously to bring down the quality of the guests on that. Even it out a little bit and make it more realistic.

Yeah, so Explore, it’s Social Media Explorer’s signature event. Our next one is in Minneapolis, August 16 through the 17th. Portland and Irvine, Portland, Oregon and Irvine, California, are coming up as well. We want you to check those events out.
You can go to the website GoToExplorer.co and register for Minneapolis if you’d like. We’ll have registrations for Portland and Irvine up there at some point.

We’ve got a really unique approach. We dive into social media marketing from a 200, 300 level and above. It’s not a lot of 101 stuff. We bring brands and experts to the table throughout the day and speakers. A lot of fun, and so we’d love to see you there.

Eric: Yeah, Argyle sponsored Nashville. We’re sponsoring Minneapolis. Nashville was a ton of fun. I can only imagine that Minneapolis will be just as much fun.

Jason: Yeah. Jay Baer, by the way, will be our opening keynote in Minneapolis. We’re going to have some fun. We have a fireside chat that’s like our lunchtime thing where I interview someone. For Minneapolis, I have somehow talked Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian, into being our fireside chat guy. Bob has been a skeptic, critic and naysayer of social media over the years, so that’s going to be a fun 30 minutes.

Eric: Awesome. May their battle become legend. That’d be cool to see.

Jason: Good deal.

Eric: Let’s jump into the show. The stuff we’re going to talk through today is a modified version of some content that I’ve seen Jason deliver. It includes some thoughts that we’ve been working on here at Argyle.
We do a lot of these webcasts that are data driven and scientific and study-based. This one is going to be more of a radio talk show rant. I’m here to tell you that there is no one better in the business at the radio talk show rant than Jason.

We’re going to talk about debunking some social media myths, which Jason’s book, No Bullshit Social Media, is all about. I’ll kick us off, Jason, with the social media kumbaya chant that we’ve all heard so many times. That is that to be successful in social media, you’ve just got to be human. You’ve just got to be approachable. What do you have to say about that?

Jason: First of all, I would say that’s a really nice best practice. I would say that you definitely need to pay attention to that sort of philosophy. There’s a lot that you can do in marketing in general and a lot you can do in social media marketing where you can automate things, where you can absolutely just flat-out advertise. We’re going to talk about an example of that here in a second.
There’s a lot of that traditional world that all the social media evangelists have been bashing for the last 10 years. There’s a lot of that traditional world that you can still do and be successful. Advertising still works. Certain social advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn and so on work as well.

I know there’s the big kerfuffle recently over GM pulling their Facebook ads and sticking with all the free stuff. That’s one example. I actually heard somebody in an ad agency tell me last week that they were probably not going to do Facebook advertising anymore because GM pulled their advertising. My response was, “You’re an idiot.” If you develop your social advertising campaign well, targeted at your audience with the right messaging, etc., it actually can be successful.

One thing that I think gets a lot of people up in arms, especially the social media purists, I have a lot of arguments with Scott Stratton about this a lot, is automation.

I automate probably 50% of my tweets. I actually use Argyle Social for that. Eric’s not paying me to say that. I actually do use Argyle Social. I do. I actually will sit down for 30, 45 minutes every morning and find the really good articles from the day, all the blog posts and websites that I like to read, and I will queue them up in Argyle Social’s Hopper feature to share throughout the day in a timed chain, a drip campaign if you will.

It appears as if Jason Falls is on Twitter all day sharing all this free content, when in actuality I’m doing a webinar with Eric, I’m in meetings, and I’m doing client work. It allows me to have a presence on Twitter and supply really, really good content to my audience without having to camp out on Twitter all day.

Eric: This argument there Jason is you’re not being human, you’re not being approachable, it’s just unnatural to do that.

Jason: Right. That’s what the purists would say. To them, I say, “Au contraire.” Throughout the day, I will take five and ten minutes between meetings and phone calls and whatnot and I’ll go look at my Twitter stream. If anybody has asked a question, or if they said, “Jason, you’re a moron,” or, “Hey, that link didn’t work,” or something like that, I’ll fix it or I’ll respond or I’ll call them a name back or whatever I need to do. I’m there. I’m responsive. The intent, I think, is what you have to think about. If your intent is to automate everything and never respond, yeah, I’d say you probably aren’t going to be really successful in the social world. If your intent is to just be generous with what you share, make relevant offers to relevant audience members at relevant times, but then also be responsive and so on and so forth, then you don’t have to be human all the time.

Eric: Let’s dig into this a little bit. I know you’ve got a great story that features someone that’s really close to you.

Jason: Yeah.

Eric: It relates to this idea of you have to take that next step beyond just being human. Sometimes you’ve got to sell a little bit. At least you’ve got listening a little bit. Talk us through this. This is the story of your mom.

Jason: Yeah, that’s my mom. That’s Sarah George. She’s in Pikeville, Kentucky, little small town, 7,000 people or so, nestled in the mountains of Appalachia where the Hatfields and McCoys are from. I’m born and bred and raised hillbilly redneck.
That’s my mom. A couple of years ago for Christmas, she asked for a remote car starter. For those of you who live in warm climates, you probably don’t know what that is. If you don’t, think of the Volkswagen Darth Vader commercial where the little kid’s standing outside waving at the Volkswagen and the dad pushes the remote button and the car starts running. That’s what a remote car starter is.

In the winter months they’re very handy because you don’t want to go out, sit in a cold car and freeze your butt off. My mom wanted one. You can buy them and have them installed in any model car, really. She wanted one for Christmas. Being the dutiful son I sent her a check and told her not to call until Thanksgiving.

She’s got this money to go get the remote car starter, and this time last year, back in 2010 I guess, so I guess it was two years ago. . . No, it was 2011. January 2011. She is sitting in her little home office getting ready for work, and she realizes it’s 15 degrees outside. She’s like, “Man, I haven’t installed the remote car starter yet. That sucks.” Before she goes to work, she checks her Facebook page and she sees a post from the next gentleman you’ll see. His name’s Greg Tackett.

Greg Tackett also lives in Pikeville, Kentucky. He and my mom are acquaintances. They don’t know each other really well, but it’s a small town. People there generally will friend each other on Facebook whether they know them very well or not. Greg actually runs a car audio/video customization shop in Pikeville. He posted that morning on Facebook, on his personal Facebook thread, not his brand page like the purists tell you that you have to post the commercial messages over there. He posts on his personal Facebook thread, “Stay warm with your remote car starter this week at Greg’s Custom Audio Video Car Stereo.”

Now, all the social media purists, if they were dead, they would have rolled over in their graves, but they’re mostly not dead. They’d be up in arms and say, “Oh, you spammer, bad person you.”
How do you think my mom responded? My mom responded with, “Can I make an appointment for Thursday?” If you go back and look at that one thread that Greg posted on his personal Facebook page in the news stream of all of his friends, there were like 12, 13, 14 people that said, “Damn, I want one of those.”

He posted a relevant message, “I’ve got remote car starters,” to a relevant audience, people who were in the 15-degree weather in and around Pikeville, Kentucky, at a relevant time, in the morning when they’re cold, they don’t want to go out and freeze their ass off starting the car, at a relevant time and in a relevant place, in Pikeville, Kentucky where it’s cold.

He hit the relevancy bull’s eye. Time, place, audience, message. If you go back and look and add up all the totals from the people who said they were going to come in and get remote car starters, he probably made about $4,000 off that one Facebook post.

If you want to tell me that you can’t advertise on your personal Facebook page or you can’t leverage your personal social networks to be successful in business and so on and so forth, I’m going to call bullshit on that because Greg proves us absolutely wrong or proves the purists wrong on that. He did it and did it well.

Eric: Yeah. That’s one of many, many stories that come from small local businesses like Greg’s and also big organizations that ask for the sale. I guess when you think about the premise of starting this thread is, “Hey man, you’ve just got to be human and be social.” I think there is a lot of truth to that, but you’ve got to drive business and you’ve got to ask for the sale. This is a great story that illustrates that.

Jason: Absolutely. I think what a lot of people in the echo chamber of the social media marketing world don’t remember and don’t understand is 97% of the businesses in the United States are small businesses.
The people that don’t live on either coast or don’t live in Silicon Valley or Austin or Boston are actual, real people who have real jobs and real expectations and interact with advertising and still watch television and so on and so forth.

They see advertisements and/or messages from people like Greg Tackett and realize, “Hey, that guy sells something that I might need. It’s okay for him to remind me from time to time that he sells that because at some point I’m going to want it. When I want it, I’m going to go buy it from him because I trust him and I know him.”

Obviously, Greg has to walk that balancing act of not being too spammy. People in Pikeville, Kentucky, this small town, they know Greg, they probably went to school with him, they probably know his parents, they understand he’s got a wife and kids to feed, and they know that he’s just trying to make sure that they know he’s got remote car starters.
The next example that we’ve got for you is even better. You’ve just got to engage. You have to join the conversation. Well, here’s an example of someone who called me when I found out I was writing this book called “No Bullshit Social Media.”

If he had an iPhone he probably cracked the screen dialing the number so hard. He was so excited to talk to me. He said, “Jason, I don’t have time to join the conversation. I don’t have time to engage.” This guy’s name is Jim Olenbush. He’s a realtor at Cantera Real Estate in Austin, Texas.

He said, “I don’t have time for any of this. I have time to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s sell houses because I’ve got to put food on the table for my family.” Jim’s a smart guy and he knows that these social channels offer opportunities to reach audiences in unique ways that he had not been able to do before.

Here’s another great advertising example. Jim sells houses, right? He gets up in the morning and he reads the Austin Statesman. He reads a story one day of a 500-person company relocating to Austin, Texas. He says, “Okay, I’m going to use social media to market to this group.”

Remember, the purists say you have to join the conversation. Jim goes to Facebook. He doesn’t go to Facebook to play Farmville. He goes to Facebook to take out an ad for real estate in Austin, Texas. He targets that ad at people who work at that 500-person company. That night, when they log into Facebook and they’re telling all their friends, “Hey, my company is relocating to Austin. I may have to move,” what do they see? Ads for houses in Austin, Texas.
He didn’t give me success metrics from that particular campaign, although he did confirm that he sold several houses to employees of that company. He did give me one really important success metric to a similar campaign. Same scenario, wakes up in the morning, reads the paper. Drug violence in Mexico is forcing affluent families to immigrate to the United States.

He goes to Facebook not to play Mafia Wars. He goes to Facebook to take out an ad for affluent housing in and around Austin, Texas. He targets that ad at people who make a certain level of income or more, who live in and around Monterrey and Mexico City. Facebook’s big in Mexico too.

He sold several houses using that campaign. He spent $400 on that ad campaign. The first house he sold in that ad campaign, he sold for $1.1 million. I don’t know what you know about a real estate agent’s commission off of a sale of a house, but the commission of a sale on a $1.1 million house is a butt load more than $400.

He never joined the conversation. He never posted a Facebook status update. He never said, “I sell houses,” on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else. He just took out an ad and reached a social audience in a unique way because the network provided that ability to hyper-target.

For those people who say you have to join the conversation to use social media in the market, you have to engage your audience, again, we say that’s bullshit.

Eric: The commission, 3% of a $1.1 million transaction is $33,000.

Jason: Yeah. That’s a little bit more than $400. That return on investment. . .

Eric: That’s an 83X return.

Jason: Yeah.

Eric: I’ll take me some of that. That’s a really cool example. This guy doesn’t work in a marketing department, he doesn’t work in a big organization, but he was really clever and really thought strategically about how he can leverage these social tools to move the needle for his business.
I don’t know that people really, truly understand the opportunities out there with social advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook. It is so hyper-targeted, it’s unbelievable.

Jason: Somebody told me the other day social advertising only works if you use it to give crap away. To that person I was like, “No. Maybe that’s the only thing you’ve been able to do to get it to work. If that’s the case, I would suggest you hire a better copywriter or you hire a better art director.”
If you have a compelling image and a compelling headline, social advertising appears on the page just like other advertising. Granted, 100% of the people that see the ad are not going to click on it. Some people are conditioned to not look at ads. I don’t look at ads.

I’m an ad guy. I’ve worked at ad agencies before. I love the advertising business and I think advertising can be really, really compelling and fascinating. I subscribe to like six magazines every month. I look through magazines on a regular basis. I promise you I’ve never laid eyes on a print ad. I’ve never looked at one.
When I’m reading a magazine, I’m purposefully looking for the editorial content. I don’t look at ads. I really don’t. I probably go past ones that have scantily clad people in them. Our brains, our human, animal brains are wired to look at naked skin. That’s why sex sells.
You see even for a man or a woman in a bathing suit, our human brain says, “Hey look at that.” I even skip over those, even ads with those. I just don’t look at them.

Eric: Oh now, Jason, be honest.

Jason: If I’m going to look at that I buy different types of magazines.

Eric: Fair enough.

Jason: All right. We’re getting really off-color here.

Eric: Fair enough. There was another comment I was going to make, but I lost my train of thought when you brought up booby magazines.

Jason: I didn’t bring up booby magazines. I just said different types of magazines.

Eric: Let’s go to our third example. This is the same tone of engaging and joining the conversation. The realtor case study, this guy made no attempt whatsoever to join a conversation or engage with fans or followers. He just got really clever about using social advertising as a business play.
Tell us the story about the Fiskateers. This is a fascinating story of a niche company.

Jason: Yeah. There are two case studies here. The one case study is the naysayer thing is you can’t measure the ROI of social media because Fiskateers did. I’ll tell you a little bit about that.
Really quick, let me give you the first case study. The first case study is a word-of-mouth marketing case study. Fiskars is a scissor company. They make crafting scissors. In 2006, I think it was, they worked with Brains on Fire, which is an agency down in Greenville, South Carolina, a word-of-mouth marketing agency. Very good folks.
They basically said, “Hey, we want to find a way to engage our audience online and cultivate a group of ambassadors and loyalists who we can tap into for lots of different things, not only selling more products, but helping spread the word about our products, etc. etc.”
They did all this research and they realized at the time that there were all these forums and message boards about scrapbooking and crafting. That’s going to be your hyper-scissor user, or hyper-user of scissor.

Eric: Power users.

Jason: Power users, exactly. These are the people who are going to pay a little extra for a really nice pair of scissors. That’s the point. That’s what Fiskars produces.
They looked at all the online options back then and they realized that the world of scrapbooking in 2006 was mean. You would log onto these message boards and people would post images of their scrapbooks or their designs or whatever, and the comments thread would be like, “That’s ugly. You can’t cut straight. You’re a bitch.” It was incredible. The scrapbooking world had gone gangsta apparently back in 2006.

What was interesting though is that Brains on Fire and Fiskars looked at this and realized this is an opportunity. This a market need. What scrapbookers need is a safe haven. They need a place to go where there are rules against being an asshole.

They created the Fiskateers, which is an invitation-only crafting ambassadors’ website. You have to be invited to it, so there’s accountability. You have to put your name and your email address and all that stuff in there. The community holds you to a higher standard there. You can’t be mean. If somebody posts something and you don’t like it, you’re supposed to just ignore it or whatever.

What the people do there is they share their ideas, their designs, their pictures and so on and so forth. They have this wonderful, vibrant community of people who just love arts and crafts and scrapbooking and so on and so forth.
It’s a branded environment. It’s a Fiskars environment. They did not pull these people into the community to sell them scissors, although certainly they do offer them products and services within this community. What they do is they use Fiskateers as a place to get insight into how their consumers use their products and what they think of new product features. It’s a research and development function for the company.
The first case study is building the community, finding a market need and filling that need, and having a word-of-mouth marketing community. By the way, the success numbers, I think their six- month goal for this community was to have 2,500 members. They exceeded their six-month goal in 24 hours.

Eric: Oh, wow.

Jason: They opened the door and, because there was such a market need for this safe haven, it exploded. There are over 8,000 members now. They’re probably creeping up on 9,000 at this point. They’ve got this community of people who love scrapbooking and who use their products and give them really good product feedback.

The R&D case study here is their research and development department within their own building in Wisconsin used to have white meat paper on the windows. They wouldn’t let their own internal people see what the R&D team was doing.
Now, the R&D team sends prototypes of new products to members of this community and says to them, “Film yourself cutting with these scissors and tell us what you think about it. Don’t send it back to us. Post it in the community so everybody can see it.”

They basically have used this as a cultivation mechanism to get feedback from their audience. They started looking at how much money did we spend on R&D in 2005? How much money do we spend on it now? Then they also realized when they started to do PR outreach for new products and services and trade magazines, which I didn’t even know there were scrapbooking trade mags, but I guess there are.

Eric: Of course there are.

Jason: When they started to do that outreach, they realized all the people they were reaching out to were members of the community. They realized, “Wait a minute. We’re spending all this money, time, energy and PR. We don’t have to anymore because they’re all here.” I wouldn’t recommend cutting out your PR budget to most brands, but in this scenario it worked out for them.

They started looking at how much money did they used to spend on PR and now how much money do we spend on it? What they did is they put pencil to paper, and they figured out that year after year, the Fiskateers community has an over 500% return on investment for the company. They’ve measured it to the actual dollar sign. They won’t give me the actual dollar sign, but they said it’s about a 500% return on investment every year.

What they spend on the community versus what they get back in not only selling products and services on the website, but money they save on PR expenditures, money they save on R&D expenditures, and certainly new products that they sell because of that R&D. They’re able to calculate all that.

There are a lot of people out there that say, “You can’t measure the ROI of social media. It’s all touchy-feely. It’s about building relationships. You can’t measure that.” Of course, to that we say, that’s bullshit.

Eric: Indeed.

Jason: There’s your last bull picture I think.

Eric: It is. These are really nice photos.
A couple thoughts popped into my head. One, you talked about people being really mean versus people being really nice. There was a great video interview on Slate.com today with an executive from Tumblr.
Tumblr is an enormous website, but they don’t have nearly the troll and flaming problem that a site like YouTube does because Tumblr imposes some identity restrictions. It’s more difficult to be anonymous.
This Fiskars story aligns to that in that when you ask your customers to be a part of the community and they represent their true selves, you can alleviate a lot of the risk associated with that, at least in terms of people being nasty or mean about things.
The other thing that came to mind was we talked about engaging in conversations and trying to be plugged in. That only matters if you’re plugged into the right ones.

This Fiskars study is an amazing example of that because they aggregated their most important constituency. They got them in one big, virtual room and now they’re hanging out. It sounds like the R&D guys are just pinging them with questions and sending them stuff. This is a conversation that’s definitely worth engaging in because it’s all the right people.

Jason: Yeah. Fiskars obviously have some other presences on social media. They have a Twitter account. It’s not a highly engaging Twitter account. I think they have a Facebook page. Again, not an overly impressive corporate case study of a Facebook page, although I’m sure it serves a purpose for them.
It’s because they focused their energy on where they get the most return out of it, which is this private network that they’ve built for their followers. They don’t really need to be on Twitter. They are and I’m sure that serves a purpose, but they don’t really need all these mass social networks and mass exposure. The really important people are really close to them already.

Eric: Somebody tweeted something that scrapbooking is enormously competitive and women will hurt you over paper flowers.

Jason: This is why I don’t hang around women with scissors.

Eric: Yeah, man. Don’t go to Michael’s on a Saturday morning. It’s like competitive yardsalers, I guess.

Jason: My wife runs a stich ‘n’ bitch group in Louisville, which if you’re not familiar with stitch ‘n’ bitch, it’s when people get together and sew, needlepoint, quilt, and whatever the hell else they do in those things. It’s like scrapbooking only with yarn. When they’re doing their crocheting and stuff, they have needles. When my wife hosts these stich ‘n’ bitch things at our house every now and then, I block out time to go sit at the bar or something. I don’t want to be at the house with women with needles. That’s scary.

Eric: Certainly you are not a party in those conversations.

Jason: I’m not. The point is they stitch, they crochet, they needlepoint, whatever they do and they bitch about their husbands, or at least that’s what my wife says. I’m sure she has plenty to bitch about.

Eric: Those are three really good examples of the purist kumbaya statements that really need to be grounded in business, grounded in reality. These stories that you’ve given, Jason, are really good examples of that.
It imposes the theme that we’ve thought up for this conversation. Social media is magical and mysterious and it’s done great things for so many people and so many businesses, but it only really works when it’s grounded in goals, it’s grounded in business objectives, and it’s grounded in measurement.
I know that you’ve devised these key social media business drivers. Can you very quickly talk about how you map these, what these mean in terms of the social media marketer? Then we can separately talk about how they map to some sort of measurement.

Jason: Sure. These are the seven business drivers. Eric Decker is my co-author of “No Bullshit Social Media.” He and I map these out. Essentially, if you’re sitting down to come up with a strategic plan for social media marketing, these are the seven choices you have for the goals.
In my mind, goals are very broad based. My goal for social media marketing might be to enhance my brand or make more people aware of it. It might be to build community, it might be to drive sales or leads, etc. The strategic planning process, to me, after the goals is to get down to the objective level, which is where you get really specific.
For communications objectives, you need a deadline, a target audience, and an expected level of attainment. You write out objective statements which might sound something like, “We want to drive $50,000 in sales from Facebook by the end of the year.” Your target audience is people on Facebook, your deadline is the end of the year, and your expected level of attainment is $50,000.

From there, you develop strategies and tactics that then ladder up and accomplish those things. When you’re sitting down to do your strategic planning, these are the seven major goals, these are the seven major business drivers, that social media can push for your business.

I think enhancing your branding and awareness is the first one. I think probably a quick example of that would be… I think most people know what that is. You just want to make more people aware of what you’re doing. I think that’s what a lot of large brands use social media for.

Coca-Cola doesn’t sell cans of product on Twitter. They want to engage their audience to make sure Coca- Cola’s top of mind when you are going out to lunch and you’re going to select whatever beverage you want to select.
Protecting your reputation actually has two applications here. Number one, you can find people talking about you and inject yourself into conversation hoping to mitigate the bad or amplifying the good to make sure that the online status of you and your company is positive.There’s also the technological side of that, where social media now has so much more impact on search engine results that if you’re not doing the right thing in both search engine optimization, SEO, and social media, you may not be ranking number one for the search terms. You deserve to rank number one. You need to protect your search reputation as well.

I think everybody knows what public relations is. PR’s got a number of fingers, media relations being the one that’s most popular. The great thing about social media tools like blogging and social networks and YouTube and so on and so forth is it gives us the opportunity to be our own media outlets and take the traditional media out of the equation. We can talk directly to our audiences if we do it in compelling ways.
Building community. Like the Fiskateers example, you can use social media marketing to build a community of advocates that you can bring very, very close to the vest for your company and communicate directly with them, use them to advocate and so on and so forth.

Customer service, I think everybody understands the Comcasts, the Dells, the Southwest Airlines of the world that monitor online conversations, looking for people who are complaining about their product or service and saying, “How can I help?”
I think customer service is where I almost always recommend to companies and clients. You’ve got to start there. If people are talking about you online and they’re really pissed off that you’ve done something wrong or they didn’t have good service at your store, then you don’t want to let that snowball, get out of hand on the web.

Facilitating R&D. Again, that Fiskars example is another example that crosses over into that area. You can actually ask your customers what they want out of your product or service, what they think about new features, etc., and get intelligence without having to spend a ton of money on market research.

Driving sales and leads is the one that everybody wants to talk about. That’s the obvious one. I’d like to put this in social media context though. If you sell products online, which not everybody does, but if you do, then you want to be able to set up tracking codes and whatnot using tools like Argyle Social that allow you to say, “Okay, we got this many visitors from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or our blog that purchased products. Therefore, those outreach efforts are driving X amount of revenue.”

You can actually see a dollar sign return on your social media activity. If you don’t sell products online, then you need to plug in some sort of online lead generation mechanism so that you can do the same exact thing.
For instance, Argyle Social, I use your software as an example. If you’re selling software and you need a mechanism online like a white paper or, hey, like this webinar, where people have to register and drop their name and their email address so you can then input them into your marketing funnel and your lead generation system.

Mathematically, you can look back and say, “It takes us 1,000 leads to get 100 qualified prospects to get 10 customers.” You can go back and put a number on what is a lead worth? If you do a lead generation tool like this and use those URL tracking devices and whatnot, you can go back in and say, “Every time we get someone to register for this webinar, that’s worth $1.57 to us. We’ve done the math and we know that eventually that’s going to lead to 10 customers.”

Eric: You’re preaching to the choir, man. That’s something that we have seen work very well for us at Argyle and for our customers. The key with a lot of these… We’ve skipped ahead a little bit. We’ve got these seven concepts that you can use to anchor your social media programs to some sort of business objective.
These seven concepts you can map to some sort of financial outcome at some point. Following this thread on driving sales leads and driving revenue, it’s often indirect. When you invest money in search advertising, people search for Fiskars scissors. I’m looking for them. Oh, here’s an ad for them. I’m going to click on this ad and then I’m going to buy. It’s a very clean, intent harvesting transaction. Social does not work that way. It’s an intent generating, an intent cultivating channel.

A lot of the outcomes that you’re driving with any of these seven strategies are often going to be second and third degree. It’s going to take time for them to develop. It’s not always a very clear measurement path.

Jason: True. When it comes to that question though of ROI, I challenge that question a little bit because I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. Partly because of what you’re saying, that there are several generations of method that have to happen before you can really know comprehensively what social media does for your business.
I want you to look at these seven business drivers for a second. Here’s what I know about ROI. As one of our listeners here pointed out and tweeted a minute ago when you were doing your quick math. I’m not a math person, but here’s what I can tell you about ROI.

It’s an accounting metric, a financial metric, and it takes two numbers, how much money you made and how much money you spent, and it plugs them into an equation. In order to get ROI, you have to know how much money you made and you have to know how much money you spent.

You take how much money you made and you subtract how much money you spent, and you divide that by how much money you spent and get a percentage. If it’s over 100, you have positive ROI. If it’s under 100, you didn’t make as much as you spent. That’s what I know about ROI.

Now I want you to look at the seven business drivers here and tell me which ones of these are measured in money. In order to know your ROI, you have to have two numbers. How much money you spent, which you can measure really easily. Then you also have to know how much money you made.

My argument on the question of what is your ROI, what’s the ROI of social media, if your goal is to enhance the awareness of your company for your product and your service, do you measure that in dollars and cents?
Think about it this way. If I’m in a meeting and the CEO of the company says, “Hey, Jason, tell me the status of the branding and awareness project,” don’t I sound stupid if I say, “$57,000?” The goal is not money. The goal is awareness.

What you have to do is you have to map your results, your measurements to your goals. If your goal is to protect your reputation, you don’t measure your reputation in dollars and cents.
Now certainly there are going to be lines that blur a little bit. Protecting your reputation is ranking well in search results. If you rank well in search results, you can map revenue from people who click on them and come through and buy. There’s a little bit of cross-pollination, yes.

Eric: I think it comes down to a resource question a lot of times. Look at a company like Fiskars that has resources. They have people. Presumably those people are pretty smart. You even mentioned the value of the community that they built. They can wrap a number around that.
It’s exactly like you described. It’s like, “Well, our community gives us this, which gives us this, which gives us this thing that’s a number.’ It is often two or three steps removed.

I agree and disagree with what you’re saying a little bit. I think smaller organizations need to focus on very simple, trackable, repeatable programs and metrics. For larger organizations, that have resources and people, I would challenge you to try to map all of these to some sort of, at least approximate, figure for dollars.

Jason: Sure. Absolutely. If you’ve got those resources, especially if you’ve got that Milton inside your company that’s just an anal retentive spreadsheet crazy person that can sit down and connect those dots, go for it. Hell, if you could measure it instantly, go for it.

The practical nature of our world though is that most organizations aren’t that robust or don’t have Milton the red stapler guy who can do that for you. You have to be practical, which is why I say instead of asking the question of what is the ROI of social media since only a couple of these… Facilitating R&D can be measured in dollars and cents because you can put a new product in the marketplace and measure your sales. Sales and leads obviously are measured in dollars and cents.

The rest of those top five are measured really in, what I would call, intangible ways. I think the question you need to ask, instead of asking what’s the ROI of social media, is what do I get in return? What you get in return might be better search engine results, lower cost per lead, more online media coverage, and all these things you see here on your screen. Faster response times, better customer satisfaction scores. Those are all beneficial to your company. Those all mean something to your company. You want all of those things. They’re not measured in money. Fair?

Eric: I think that’s fair. That definitely is the No BS approach.

Jason: Believe me, the cool thing about that question too though is that. . . We’re going to get to the tree-huggers and hippies thing in a second. The question about that return, what do I get in return, is money is still included. You can still measure money as a return, but you’ve got to think about all those other things too, because they might be what you’re trying to get.
Here’s the hippie and tree-huggers spiel. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t mean this in a derogatory manner. Eric Decker and I consider ourselves to be social media hippies and tree-huggers.

Eric: I think anybody that’s on this webcast to some degree is a little bit of…

Jason: What we mean by that is I believe in those philosophical tendencies that as a best practice, not as a rule, as a best practice, you should be human. You should engage. You should join in the conversation. You need to hold hands in a circle around the campfire and sing kumbaya with the customers. You need to build relationships.
Those are all good things to do, but you can’t do those alone. If you do those alone, you’re a hippie and a tree-hugger in the social media world sense. You’re not worried about measurement, you’re not worried about driving business, and you’re not worried about planning things strategically. You’ve got to do both.

I’m a hippie and a tree-hugger philosophically, but I’m a businessperson from a practical nature. You’ve got to combine those two. That’s what the no bullshit line of social media is. Let’s hug all the trees we want. There’s nothing wrong with that. I want to do that, but we also have to measure this. We also have to show return. We also have to account for what we’re doing in this space and get something out of it.

I like Jay Baer’s line for companies. “We have to stop doing social, we have to start being social.” You do need to have conversations with your customers. You do need to sit at a table without an agenda with your community and be responsive and participatory and so on and so forth.

Doing this, becoming a social entity, you start to hear that phrase social business. “Are you a social business?” As we use social media marketing and as we become more accustomed to balancing the hippie and the tree-hugger side of things and the business side of things, we start to evolve into a social business whether we know it or not.

Here’s my definition of the social business. Let me show you Pikeville, Kentucky, which is my hometown. End where we started. This is where my mom lives. This is Main Street looking from the city park, if you care.
I grew up here. When I lived here with my family, I lived there until I was 18 years old. We didn’t buy our cars from GM or Chevy. We didn’t buy clothes from JCPenney or Target. We didn’t buy insurance from Progressive, Geico, Allstate, or State Farm. We didn’t bank with PNC, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America.

We bought our clothes from Jerry. We bought our cars from Terry. We bought our insurance from Sharon. We banked with Danny. Those four people that I dealt with and my family dealt with sat within four rows of my family at the Pikeville United Methodist Church, which is that brick building on your left.

That’s what being a social business is. You’re not a brand, a logo, a company. You’re sitting at the table, in the pew, or at the cocktail event with the other people who are your customers and you are being social with them. You’re a part of the community. You’re an equal player in that. You’re a stakeholder.
That means you give and you take. You participate and you listen. That’s what ultimately being a social business is. If we can all think of our businesses in that context, then we won’t just be social and media marketing people. We’ll be social businesspeople.

Eric: That’s a really cool story. It makes me think about the friends that I’ve made and the networks I’ve built over the past few years in the social media space. All these people worked for organizations or they worked for agencies or clients. I never really think of where they work. I always think of the person.
That, to me, is like another manifestation of what you’ve described. You’re not thinking about buying a Chevy. You’re thinking about going to see Terry at the car lot.

Jason: Exactly. I bought a Volkswagen Jetta three or four years ago, almost four years ago now. Bought a Volkswagen Jetta. I did not buy it. . . I thought about this a second ago so I could spit it out now. I bought it from a place called Bachman Volkswagen here in Louisville. I don’t think of it in that context. I bought it from Joe Thompson. Joe’s my dealer. He’s the guy who sells me my car. That’s a great example. He’s a car salesman, which car salesmen get a lot of crap from people in the sales world, but Joe…
I’m in a test drive in a Volkswagen Jetta. Joe’s saying, “Here’s what I like about the Toyota Camry. Here’s what I like about the Honda Civic. Here’s how this compares to the Ford Fusion.” He’s giving me this assessment of all the cars I’m thinking about buying. I’m thinking, “I don’t even care if I like the Jetta more. I like him.” He hit it out of the park for me. I love my Jetta too, by the way.

Eric: That’s cool.
We’ve got about 12 minutes. Before we start getting swept away with lots of really good questions, I want to thank you, Jason, for taking the time to do this. This is a great conversation as always.
The stories that you’ve got around your personal experience growing up in this social business microcosm of Pikeville, Kentucky and some of the customers that you work with is very, very cool and, I think, applicable for big businesses and small businesses.

Jason: Thank you. Glad to do it, man. Any time.

Eric: All right. If you’ve got questions, tweet them up. Hashtag will be “nobull,” #nobull.
One of the first questions comes from an Argyle customer named Alison Carlman. Alison works for Global Giving. Little mini-plug for the next webcast we’re doing in a couple weeks, she’s going to be joining us for a non-profit webcast May 31st. If you’re a non-profit person, we’re doing a broadcast specifically about non-profit stuff next week. We’ll tell you all about it.

She asked this thoughtful question about traditional marketing as it relates to social media. I presume that she’s thinking around ad buys and community building. You can either take forever and try to build a community, you can just throw money at it with advertising, or you can throw money at an agency to build your network. Is that a trade-off that you see or is there a balance there?

Jason: I do think there is a balance. Again, I believe advertising does work. If you want to reach 50,000 people with a message by Monday, take out a TV ad. Don’t Twitter unless you already have that network built in.
I think advertising does work. I think it supplements social media in a great way. I love the fact that there are lots of companies out there on TV, print, outdoor using Facebook and the Twitter logo, saying, “Follow us on Twitter,” or, “Like us on Facebook.”
The problem with most of these organizations is they’re not telling me why. Why should I? What am I going to get out of it? What’s in it for me? If you can use advertising to compel people… Hey, we want to build 10,000 people on our Facebook page, then let’s take out some ads and let’s reach out to the mass audiences the way we know how. Let’s say, “Hey, we’re doing really cool stuff on Facebook. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what you can get out of it. We would love for you to like us there.” You’re going to get a bigger audience faster that way than you are nurturing it along in the social area only.

The danger zone in the area where I think people get a little sideways is when they throw money to an agency or one of these social media tools. I mean that in the sense that they are platforms, but tools in the sense that they’re just a tool, like people being tools, right?

There are some tools out there, both human and technology, that say, “Give me $10,000 and I’ll get you 100,000 Twitter followers.” Anybody who’s selling a number of followers or fans is using some sort of gaming the system technique or fabricated method to just get you the numbers.

They’re not getting you quality, they’re getting you quantity. It’s much smarter to focus on your own advertising and your own audiences and say, “Hey, we would like you to come over and join us on Facebook as well because we’re doing something cool there,” than it is to just collect people.

I can promise you that most of the people that have a high volume of Twitter followers, especially in the marketing space, have somehow gamed the system, and 30,000, 40,000 of them are spam accounts that are just follow back accounts and they don’t actually mean anything.

That’s something that I’ve never done. I’ve never been interested in it. I don’t want 100,000 followers. I want 25,000 really good followers. Be careful there.

Eric: Yeah. @ShawnGraham, when we were talking about hippies and tree- huggers, said he was hula hooping and eating granola.

Jason: Nice. I bet he knows how much he spent on the damn granola, so he’s smart.

Eric: He is a smart guy. He’s a smart guy.
Matthew from CroatianSports.com wants to know what’s the worst social experience you’ve ever had. Probably shouldn’t name names, but off the top of your head.

Jason: I’m going to assume he meant social media experience, because the worst social experience I ever had goes back to junior high and I’m not repeating that story.

The worst social media experience I ever had, I think the one thing that comes to mind for me, and I’m not going to mention the names because it’s a little unfair and I think I was a little unfair to them back in the day.
A couple of years ago, the bank that I was using for my business, I was having some real problems with their corporate policies and how small businesses were treated. My local people here in Louisville were doing a really good job of trying to help me, but they were getting some crap from the corporate people that I didn’t really approve of and think was cool.

Being a social media guy, I reached out publicly and said, “Hey, can you guys help out?” Crickets. No response. This was early on in the social media world. Not a lot of banks had policies. They weren’t really responsive so on and so forth. I think I was a little unfair to them publicly by basically complaining about the fact that they didn’t really care about their social customers.
They did, but they just didn’t have the mechanisms and the policies in place to feel good about reaching out in a public way. I think they’ve gotten a lot better since then. It was a really, really bad experience. It was early on in the space, and so in all fairness to the bank I won’t mention who they were.

It was just an example of a business that was based on policy and legal concerns and whatnot that was just ignoring the online [inaudible 53:02 to 53:05] situation, not as a social media person, a marketer or a blogger or a guru or a whatever the hell you want to call me.
I was looking at it was this company was hurting my business. I was dissatisfied and they didn’t respond. They lost my business.

Eric: Several more questions. Let’s see how many of these we can answer. In your opinion, how important is offline to social success?

Jason: It’s critical. I can promise you right now without me going to conferences, reaching out, shaking hands, meeting people in person, I would have about a tenth of the followers that I have on Twitter. I would have one one-hundredth of the influence that I have in the space. Everything I’ve done has been grip and grin in real life.

Eric: I’ll actually add to that sentiment. Over the past several months, I’ve become much more willing to hop on a plane.

Jason: Yeah. It’s not just the personal branding side of things too. It’s for your company as well. If you are dropping the ball when people walk in the store or when people interact with you in real life, you can have the greatest Twitter account in the world, you’re still going to suck.

Eric: Here’s another question. Terms of service, platforms, modes of doing business, this world of social media changes really, really quickly. Does this ultimately mean that all brands are going to have to have an agency or have to have a full-time, powerhouse social team?

Jason: I don’t want to say all because I just don’t know that there’s ever going to be an all or nothing approach. I think there’s always going to be businesses that just don’t need social, especially when you get into really, really small businesses. The guy who cuts my grass? He doesn’t need social.

The way he acquires customers, when he started cutting my grass, three of my neighbors asked him if he would cut theirs. I’m like, “Here’s your Facebook strategy, dumbass. Go cut somebody’s yard for free.” That’s how you do it for him. As he scales, obviously that changes. I wouldn’t say all or nothing. I think for bigger businesses, medium to large businesses, you’re probably almost always going to need, yes, some sort of social presence, some sort of person within the company that’s keeping a mindful eye on these networks and how people use them and the policies that change.

Eric and I were going back and forth on Twitter this morning about how Twitter’s changed their privacy policy, and now third party publishing is not allowed. I can’t post through a third party application like Argyle Social and have it say, “via Social Media Explorer.” It has to say via whatever the third party tool is, which is BS and I hope Twitter changes that.
Somebody’s got to be staying on top of that for your company, absolutely, if you’re a medium to large company.

Eric: You just answered this a little bit. For tips about breaking through on social in industries that have little to no users, I think the example is thermal valves. I think you maybe just answered that a little bit with the guy that cuts the grass.

Jason: Yeah. Sometimes you don’t need to, but if you see potential there, then the great news is that the first person through the door is going to be the biggest. Some industries out there that you’re looking to become Mr. or Ms. Social in is going to need their, for lack of a better term, Chris Brogan, right? They’re going to need the pioneer that takes that industry into social. Be that. Make that your personal brand and see what you can build.

Eric: We talked a lot about B to C. Any quick thoughts about B2B myths or B2B truths from your experience?

Jason: I think the biggest thing for me, and I’ve had some B2B marketers tell me that this is a naïve way of looking at it. I don’t know that I agree with them, because I’ve used this philosophy with a couple B2B clients and it’s worked.
My attitude on B2B and the myth that I found out there on B2B is that B2B’s different. I don’t think it is different. You do not buy or sell to or from a logo or a building or a company. You buy or sell to or from another human being, the purchasing officer.

Your goal then in social is to be social with purchasing officers or CFOs, or whoever the person in those B2B organizations are that actually sell something or buy something. You’ve got to find where people like that are.
It’s better to finding your target audience, not necessarily saying, “Oh, I have to market differently.” Ultimately, you’re selling to a person. It’s P2P marketing, not B2B marketing.

Eric: It’s 1:58. I know people probably have to get rolling to their 2:00s. Last question for you, Jason. What is your scrapbooking strategy?

Jason: My scrapbooking strategy? At present, I have a personal blog and I use Instagram a lot. How about that?

Eric: Fair enough. No scissors involved, no bitchy, catty, can’t cut in a straight line stuff?

Jason: No, man. I am a big fan of other people’s art and I will never criticize that. I am not going to call you an evil bitch for not cutting straight.

Eric: Awesome. Let’s close on that. Jason, I really appreciate your time, man. This is a ton of fun. There was some good stuff in here. Everybody, thanks for tuning in. We’re going to package this up and send you a follow-up email with the deck and the recording in the very near future.
We’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks, Jason.

Jason: Thank you. Thank you all.

New and Improved Post Report—Now with Facebook Insights!

Data-driven marketers are gleaning information from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and their trusty Argyle Social reports. We’ve cut out one more step for you by pulling Facebook Insights into Argyle. Now, you can see the reach, viral impressions, people talking about this, as well as like and comments per post. Check out the screen shots below to see the beautiful rendering of Insights data in a clean, pretty Argyle fashion.

Want to know what posts are generating the most buzz on Twitter? The new post report also will help you there, too. It shows interaction metrics for all Twitter posts so you can easily see what posts generated the most conversation. It also presents that conversation history to you in-line so that you can see exactly what responses a particular post generated.

Track Your Social Shares

Social media marketers are forever chasing the answer to the eternal question “How is social moving the needle for my business?”. Argyle Social now helps you answer that question even better with our new social shares feature.

There are two primary types of social activity: things you post, and things other people post about you. Argyle has always done a great job tracking the performance and the impact of things you post. But we’re now also tracking things that other people post about you via the share buttons on your website and blog.

This will give marketers a more holistic view of the value that social media is creating. Every link shared via an Argyle share button will track a share count, as well as the number of clicks and conversions that these shares have generated.

Do you know how much value your advocates are creating for you?

Google+ Integration

In your engage tab, along with keeping up with all the latest conversations about your brand, search terms, and competitors, you can now import the news feed from Google Plus pages. Whether you’re a full G+ convert, slowly trying it out, or just getting started, this new integration will make sure you’re keeping up with chatter on G+.

Previously, many people had noticed insights delayed an average of 48 hours, spurring the creation of http://whyisfacebookinsightsnotworking.com/ by PageLever co-founders Jeff Widman and David Turner. Though real-time insights’ imminent release was announced in February, it’s now a reality.

Real-time data empowers brands to track content on a minute-by-minute basis. Why can that be powerful? Here are a few reasons we can think of:

1. The feedback loop is finally in real-time. These enhanced metrics will allow brands to be more nimble, change direction if needed, and ride organic waves of popularity before they end.
2. By tracking PTAT, brands can see what content has virality and shareability and replicate it. This will help brands more fully understand the oft-confused new metric, and in doing so, find more ways to optimize content.
3. The frame of reference for campaigns has just become much narrower. Rather than declaring “We received 290 Likes in 1 day”, marketers can now pinpoint the exact growth and decline of posts by the minute. That impressive campaign is even more so if 1 day shrinks to 13 hours!

We’ll go into more detail about what this means, how you can measure your impact in real-time, and more during next Tuesday’s Facebook Insights 201 webinar with Jeff Widman. Join us.

It turns out that social visitors to your company’s website are, on average, much more engaged than the average visitor. In particular, paid marketing on Facebook shows some truly off-the-charts conversion rates.

Let me just say: wow. Something is clearly working. In the world of email and PPC campaigns, conversion rates of 10-20% are generally considered pretty good. These conversion rates, hovering around 50%, are nigh or unheard of. Whether this is because of social proof points displayed along with Facebook ads, extreme demographic targeting capabilities, or some other Facebook magic conversion/fairy dust, the results speak for themselves.

These results seem to validate Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s claim that, “68 percent more people are likely to remember seeing the ad with their friend’s name … [and they are] 300 percent more likely to purchase.” It’s no wonder Sandberg describes Facebook’s ad targeting as “the elusive goal we’ve been searching for, for a long time; making your customers your marketers.”

Another set of fun facts from the report was a behavioral breakdown of consumers based on social media activity. It turns out that…

• People who use social media in general are more likely than the average online adult to: fly Virgin Atlantic airlines, eat at Chipotle, shop at Payless Shoe Source, snack on Terra Chips, own an iPhone, visit Starbucks, and drive a Saab.
• Those who visit professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are more likely to: fly United Airlines, eat at The Cheesecake Factory, shop at Nordstrom, own an iPhone, stay at Hilton hotels, and shop at Whole Foods.
• Those who visit photo sharing sites are more likely than the average online adult to: shop at Whole Foods, use Burt’s Bees, shop at Payless Shoe Source, buy Huggies, shop at Forever 21, and shop at Hobby Lobby stores.
• Those who visit video sharing site are more likely than the average to: eat at Long John Silver’s, drink Capri Sun, wear Puma sneakers, shop at Family Dollar Store, use AT&T, and use Downy sheets.

Do any of these findings surprise you?

1. What’s the best part about being a leap baby? It’s an instant ice-breaker when I first meet people. Also, it gives me a pretty amazing excuse to celebrate in an over-the-top kind of way every four years.




2. What’s the best present you’ve ever received for your birthday? My last birthday, when I turned six, a bunch of my best friends and I went to Vegas! I’d tell you more… but you know the rules. Then, my dad came out when all my friends left, and we did our father-daughter thing, hiking and exploring, but best of all going skydiving! That’s right, they let a 50+ year-old and a six-year-old jump out of a plane. The whole week was worth not having another birthday until…. now!




3. Does your birthday even appear on Facebook? How does that work? Facebook came to my college the spring of my Sophomore year, so it wasn’t until the following year when I was turning 21 (aka no bday) that I noticed that my birthday was listed as “upcoming”. But it wasn’t on February 28th or on March 1st in the “Today’s Birthdays” box. Needless to say, this was not going to fly. I emailed Facebook, and they were such a small operation back then that an actual person replied to my message that they hadn’t considered leap babies on non-leap years yet, and so would change the birthday box to include us in years to come! So, I can’t be completely sure that I was the one to change Facebook’s leap day policy…but I’m not going to stop saying it until they send me a cease and desist letter.




4. You’ve done so much for a six year-old. What will you do now that you’re seven? Seven’s the big leagues. I’m going to learn how to write in cursive. I’m hoping to take the training wheels off my bike… really though, my birthday is a great marker in my life. When I turned four (16) in high school my girl friends and I went on a beach weekend. Five (20) was in college, and I went to my favorite cousin’s wedding and a sorority cocktail party. Six (24) was in Washington, DC and I took that infamous trip to Vegas. Now I’m seven (28) and I’m living in Raleigh, NC taking a surprise trip to ____ with my mom (she’s only told me to pack a swimsuit!). So, when I turn eight (32!!) a LOT could have changed in my life, so seven’s going to be a big year(s) for me! I’m determined to make it lucky number seven… and I’m seriously going to practice my cursive.

Do you know any leap babies or leaplings? If so, wish them Happy Birthday from the Argylers!

How do you think this might change in the next six months? Let us know in the comments.