twitter – Page 2 – Marketing Technology and Analytics

September 29, 2009January 4, 2010

Measure clicks and ROI from Twitter posts

A week ago I was a co-speaker at a C2 Five Dollar Friday event. One of the last items I touched upon was how to measure traffic that comes from Twitter and other social media posts. I promised the group that I’d document the process.

Note: Get news on my expanded web design ROI workshops, to be held by C2 in Milwaukee and Madison.

Twitter As A Channel for Sales

It wasn’t too long ago that there were no definitive examples of strong positive ROI from Twitter. Since then several high-profile companies have publicized their successes. You might have read a recent account of how, according to Forbes and other sources, a division of Dell Computing has earned over $3 million from sales generated from its Twitter posts.

Here’s how your business can accurately measure direct sales — or track sales leads — generated by this powerful communication channel. All you need is a free Google Analytics (GA) account and the following new GA profiles (a special thanks to eConsultancy for their terrific post on this topic in May):

1.) Track all clicks from Twitter and major Twitter agents

a.) Add a new profile in Google Analytics

Name this new profile something like Twitter Traffic. If you’re creating this profile significantly later than the rest your Google Analytics set-up, you can add a date to the profile name. That will help you know how far back in time your results reach. In this case I haven’t:

Continue reading “Measure clicks and ROI from Twitter posts”

June 10, 2009June 10, 2009

Is datamining Twitter conversations worth it?

What started with a piece by David Berkowitz on MediaPost (registration required), onÂ Ten Ways To Decide If Your Business Should Tweet, has turned into an interesting conversation about using Twitter to support a brand, and especially about measuring those efforts. This conversation has been primarily through this lengthy post from earlier today by Marshall Sponder.

Marshall makes some excellent points (he’s not @WebMetricsGuru for nothing!), including this one: “Social Media isnâ€™t really designed, at this time, to analyze Acquisition or Retention – but Web Analytics, is — and I maintain this is one of the strongest arguments to merge the two, in a formal way, rather than in an informal way.”

Datamining and CRM

How do you begin merging these data in a “formal” way? Tools are emerging to allow for the mining of conversations, and linking them where possible to a CRM database. Here’s Marshall’s take on this process:

David Berkowitz talks about Target Audiences, but youâ€™d first have to figure out what your Target Audience is for your Brand or for a particular product or promotion of your Brand – then do CRM datamining using house database lists, or the Social Media CRM outreach to collect names and classify them according to Target Audience Segmentation — best done with data analytics.Â Â Let’s say, that for the purposes of this post, my article on Entrepreneur.com on Learn to Measure Your Web Presence using Unbound Technology or Rapleaf, is the way to go.

If you’re a mom-and-pop shop, you’d do nothing as elaborate, more just Twitter research, much as Iâ€™ve shown above, but if you’re Zappos, or Dell, well â€¦ thatâ€™s another story — the story I tell in Learn to Measure Your Web Presence and others, like it.

Of course, a big brand can make a lot of money whereas the mom and pop shop, probably wonâ€™t — so a big brand can afford to spend a lot of money on data mining — and itâ€™s well worth doing because of the potential money and value that can come from it.

Scarcity of Resources

The biggest constraint in doing this sort of work isn’t technology. It’s time. Even properly guided, the process takes many people-hours, and that is a resource in short supply for most businesses today. I see a major challenge in the linkage between prospects / customers and Twitter profiles. (Ack!, I can hear you yell. Yet another datapoint to capture in our CRM databases: The client’s Twitter handle!)

But it is becoming clear that this is an area where a business should focus some of its energies — assuming the business passes David Berkowitz’s Ten Ways test.

Years ago, Don E. Schultz co-wrote Measuring Brand Communication ROI. In this marketing chestnut, he and his co-authors built a surprisingly relevant model for tracking spending and estimated returns for each brand communication (How old is this book? The included Excel file was loaded on a 5.25″ magnetic diskette). A huge category — and ROI black hole — was customer service.

Twitter is a communication channel more than a marketing tactic, and this channel has more to do with customer satisfaction and brand education than driving sales. It’s another touchpoint and nothing more.

But like email and other important touchpoints, it should be measured. Conversations like the one taking place today will help determine how this measurement takes place and to what end.

May 27, 2009May 27, 2009

Watching Twitter sell things like pizza and beer

Most online marketers recognize Twitter’s power to connect people. This virtual network is great for many B2B marketing types. In some ways Twitter — and microblogging in general — is the new Power To Get In. But what about driving consumer business? And here I’m not talking about ephemeral branding. I’m talking about getting people to your business with money in hand.

Last night I got a few answers.

Among other marketing innovators, I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Woelfle, owner of Blatz Liquor. He was co-hosting a Tweetup in collaboration with JSOnline.com. He contends microblogging has produced tangible results.

Last month Journal Sentinel business writer Tannette Elie (@Telie) cited Woelfle as saying that Facebook is responsible for 10% of his sales. This, he explained, was primarily through the soft-sell of publicizing wine- and beer-tasting events.

One tenth of a “bricks-and-mortar” retailer’s business attributed to Facebook? It seemed a lofty claim, but when I asked Joe earlier today if he would revise that estimate, he said only to throw his newest tactic — Twitter — into that mix.

The wall-to-wall turnout at the event last night certainly suggested that Twitter was powerful at something. But what? Skeptics would say you could use plenty of other methods to spread the word about a free event at a beer, wine and liquor store — one that included plenty of liberally-poured product samples!

Time will tell how effective @BlatzLiquor‘s Twitter efforts are at growing real sales and loyalty. But in the meantime, someone else at the Tweetup has a Twitter-fueled business already road-tested by other entrepreneurs.

Korean BBQ Tacos and Pizza By The Slice

Scott Baitinger is co-owner of Streetza Pizza (@StreetzaPizza). I was excited about connecting with him for two reasons:

His business just had its official launch this Memorial Day weekend and I was eager to find out how it went
Scott’s business is a glimpse at a promising future for retail — for everyone from food vendors to dry cleaners to banks

Streetza’s business model uses Twitter to tell hungry customers where its truck will be parked next. It even polls followers on questions such as future locations and product offerings. I wrote about this business model — this promising taste of the Web 3.0 world — last week. It was in a SOHOBizTube article. In that piece, I cited the wildly successful Zogi BBQ, a Los Angeles purveyor of “Korean tacos” that informs its tens of thousands of Twitter followers (@KogiBBQ) where it will be next.

As odd as it sounds, these customer-centric Tweets are truly a taste of things to come.

That’s because the next meaningful digital innovations won’t provide consumers with cooler web sites and more content. They will be mobile applications that provide exactly the content we crave, talking to us when we are physically in a place to scratch the itch.

The future of the web is about place. And like Kogi, Streetza Pizza, in sleepy little Milwaukee, will be leading us there one slice at a time.

April 1, 2009

Prediction: The best Twitter ploys of 2009 will involve physical events

Twitter is approaching a critical mass in users, and they’re a mobile bunch. These two factors, substantiated in a recent Pew Internet and American Life report, make 2009 the year when place-based events finally get a strong boost from Twitter.

A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life project shed some light on the typical U.S. Twitter user. This person is more “mobile” than the norm: “As a group they are much more likely to be using wireless technologies — laptops, handhelds and cell phones — for internet access, or cell phones for text messaging,” according to the report.

Here are a few other highlights:

Twitter users are young. Their median age is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, a Facebook user is 26 and a LinkedIn user is 40.7
Most likely because of this comparative youth, Twitter users are slightly more racially and ethnically diverse than is the full US population “Younger Americans are a more ethnically and racially diverse group than is the full population,” according to the report.
Users of Twitter are reaching a critical mass: 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.

What this means for marketers is that they can begin seeing real benefits from crowdsourcing their place-based events, even with less tech-savvy users. Expect to see more messages like this one in the months to come: “Come see us at [event name] today. Bring [related object or clipping] and receive a free [premium]. Please re-Tweet!”