Just Heather
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Blog Indiana Day 1: Moving from Twitter to Real Deals
Aug 13, 2009 | Filed Under: Making Connections

Live Blogging Session #5

Pat East Hanapin Marketing

How To:

Step 1 – follow the right people.

Step2 – engage and interact with them

Step3 – take it offline

What qualifies as a deal?

Anything that dramatically moves the business forward:

Anything that directly generates revenue

Anything that indirectly generates revenue and is just one step away from generating revenue

Anything newsworthy and/or helps grow business

Follow the right people

Choose your area of expertise; informs your target audience—follow people in that area.

Use Twitter search for keywords and locations

Follow people you know and people you want to know.

Engage and Interact

Be valuable: don’t think “what are you doing,” think “what would people find interesting?”

Respond to @mentions

Don’t worry about seeing every single tweet that passes by – if you are following enough people in a niche someone will retweet the important stuff.

Be specific. Just because they’re following doesn’t mean they’re listening. Stay at least 75% on-topic.

Take it offline

Contact them – meet for coffee, meet for lunch, meet at a conference

Pick and choose targets – select those you have interacted with before on Twitter

Reverse the process and take it online – follow people you meet on Twitter

Tactics for More Influence

Influence is more than quantity, it’s quality

Follow the people your friends follow

Add to the conversation: Tweet about what others are talking about (don’t just repeat or RT, add your own thoughts)

TwitTemperature.com measures how much you’re talking about things that are hot topics

Start a conversation: Tweet what others aren’t talking about but should be

Make people think

Always follow those you’ve met offline

Keep your eyes open

Follow local people

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Blog Indiana Day #1: The Long Tail of the Social Web
Aug 13, 2009 | Filed Under: Making Connections

Live Blogging Session #3

Brad Ward, Blue Fuego
Based on The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Oh, boy. I’m not sure I can do this one justice. Lots of graphs & charts. Taking notes probably won’t help me grasp it all in an hour. Clearly, I should have read the book first. Maybe if I understood The Long Tail, I could better learn how it relates to the Social Web. We shall see.

Not everyone tweets, but that won’t matter if you use Twitter API. They don’t have to find you and follow you to see the content on your page.

Even if you aren’t serving a large audience with some of your pages, it is important to get content to the people when they need it.

User Generated Content
Conversation is in the Long Tail—conversation is user generated. Comments give people a reason to come back and participate. As participation increases, so does content and engagement.

90% of the people who read your content are just lurkers. 9% will participate occasionally. 1% is brand loyal and engaged.

1% is the Gold Standard—if 1% of your fans comment/like your content, you are doing an amazing job.

Brand Generated Content
Build the Foundation—Your Website (navigation, content, etc)

“It’s not about what you think the customers want or want the customers to want. It’s about creating anassembing a collection of tools that captures the attention of people who truly care” ~Seth Godin

Choose your weapons—collection of tools: email, YouTube, forums, blog, Facebook
Facebook:
Watch backend analytics for unsubscribed fans as well as interactions
58.4% of pages open to a tab other than the wall; pages that open to the wall averaged 57.63% growth vs 23.78% growth.

Drawing in user generated content to use as on-site content (YouTube, tweet streams, etc)

Social Web Callouts: Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc buttons

Secrets of the Long Tail
PHCC: Patience (it takes time to build your brand/niche), Hustle (get involved in commenting), Content, lose Control (you don’t own the content)

Think and, not or—Facebook and MySpace, not either or

Listen to the conversation; participate in the conversation; host the conversation

Be prepared for what’s coming.

Own it. Own your presence. Watch what’s being said about you and your competitors.

Have a ‘Max Strategy’ (Take whatever you are doing and do it to the max; “…since the marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.” ~Erich Schmidt

Research and Repeat. Make sure the things you are doing are effective and that you’re serving the user in the right way.

Disclaimer: Today is my first attempt at live blogging. I needed to take notes and this seemed like the best idea, given the topic. These are my raw notes as they happen. I’ll come back later to fix obvious typos and errors, but if I decide to expand on anything I heard, it would be in a separate post. To quote my girls, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

Read the comments.
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Blog Indiana Day #1: The Math Behind Your Blog
Aug 13, 2009 | Filed Under: Making Connections

Live Blogging Session #2

Mike Seidle, Pro Blog Service

Why the Numbers Matter
You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

Three Blog Types:
Ad supported—makes money for selling ads, affiliates or pay per click
Business blog—blog generates leads or sales
Other— everyone else

Numbers Everyone Needs to Know
Visitors—number of people who visit the site.
Uniques or Unique Visitors—does not count repeat visitors
Page Views—number of actual pages viewed
Bounce Rate—Number of people are “one and done”
Top Pages—content that gets the most traffic
Referrers—who sends your site traffic
Keywords—what words are being used to find your website

Knowing your top content helps you know what people are interested in so you can create content they want.

Analytics Tools
Log Analyzers—track requests to your web server
(Analog, AWSats, SmarterStats, Webalyzer, Urchin, WebTrends, Click Tracks, etc)
Script Based—track when script or pixel are accessed *more accurate data*
(Google Analytics, Yahoo Analyitics, Omniture, WebTrends, Click Tracks)

Mike Recommends
If you have mad money, Radian6+Webtrends.
If you don’t:
Yahoo Anaytics + time
Yahoo is real time. Google is not.
Real time matters if you start getting lots of traffic.

It’s important to use something that is screening out bot traffic.

Ad Supported Blogs
What You Need to Know
Page Views—by author, topic, day of week
Impressions—how many ad views your site shows
CTR—ad clickthrough rate
CPM—price per thousand impressions
EPC—what you make on average when someone clicks on an ad
Comparative Rankings
Compete, Alexa, Nielson NetRatings

Use numbers to set prices and make your blog appealing to advertisers.
Advertisers will use comparative ranking sites to

EPC = Advertising Income / Ad Clicks (try calculating by author or topic)
Proj. Income = (Proj PV/1000) (CPM) or Proj. PV x CTR x EPC
ROI = 1 – Cost/(Income-Cost)

Business Blogs
Goal is leads or sales.

What You Need to Know
Top Pages
Conversion Rate—number of people who turn into leads or sales (don’t edit – include everything)
CPA – Cost per action: what it costs to get a lead or sale
ROI – the bottom line is what really matters
*Use a contact form so you know which leads found you through your blog.

What Business Blogs Do Not Need to Know
Conversation Rate
Conversation Depth
Authority
*It’s all about leads generated so the engagement & authority is irrelevant.

The idea of a business’s blog enhancing the brand value is bogus if the leads/sales generated aren’t increased.

Okay, this is the point where I realize that I’m not a business blog and I no longer care. Here is where I started playing on Facebook and Twitter and forgot to take notes. It’s also where my uber late night and early morning caught up with me. I’m eating Milk Duds and trying not to think of lunch. My bad.

Other Blogs
What You Need to Know
The usual: PV, UPV, Bounce Rate, etc
Conversation Rate—how many comments you get per post
Conversation Depth—Do you get big or little comments?
Authority—how important is your blog?

Authority
What makes a blog credible—the people in your audience
The right audience—depends on the blog
Finding your authority
1. Social Media Authority—focus is on influence (values links, conversations and aggregates like Technorati, Radian 6-Style, Google Centric)
2. Traffic—focus is on readers & numbers

Secret to Gaining Influence:
Write blog articles others will blog about
Make friends with other bloggers so you will talk about one another’s posts on your blogs
Use outrage. It works.

There’s no differentiation between good authority or bad authority.

The power of Radian-6: It exposes relationships. It’s expensive but worth it!

This is my first attempt at live blogging. I need to take notes and this seemed like the best idea, given the topic. These are my raw notes as they happen. I’ll come back later to fix obvious typos and errors, but if I decide to expand on anything I heard, it would be in a separate post. To quote my girls, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

Read the comments.