Mar 9th, 2010 |
“Awesome. We have 716 visits this month, and 4 people just retweeted us.”
“How much more revenue are we going to see from this as a result?”
“I have no idea. But someone liked our Facebook status.”
If this snippet of conversation hit a little too close to home, this is the blog post for you:
Diving into social media is a great idea if you know how to swim around. But what’s the point of blogging and tweeting and updating statuses and adding connections if you can’t measure the ROI?
Sean Power and Alistair Croll of Watching Websites are here to help analyze your social media strategy with their Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Intensive, “Applied Communilytics.” Sean recently spoke to us about communilytics (a mashup of “community” and “analytics”) to preview the content you’ll find in his Intensive.
(You can also check out his post-Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 interview with an attendee.)
Kaitlin: Successful businesses base most important decisions on cold hard numbers. But when it comes to social media, many companies haven’t yet applied this wisdom to their efforts. Instead they casually throw up a Facebook Fan Page or tweet about a product. If you were given the chance to scare someone straight and preach why analytics is important (how convenient - you have that chance right now), what case study would you cite to show what horrors can happen when you don’t pay attention to Communilytics?
Sean: I’m not sure I’d like to explicitly call out a company that failed to mitigate an issue in its social media efforts (like the Motrin Mom fiasco, for example), but rather concentrate on all the good that can happen when you actually do listen and react. Late last month, the gay clothing and lifestyle company Fabulis had their Citibank accounts frozen because someone at Citi had reviewed the Fabulis blog and erroneously marked it as porn. Though this could’ve resulted in a massive PR nightmare for Citi, the company was quick to respond to the incident, revise their policies and issue a letter of apology to Fabulis – doing so transparently and openly. The first step to communilytics is listening, and Citi’s listening efforts allowed them to mitigate a potential brand disaster.
As Jessica notes in her session description, multicultural communities now account for more than 30% of the U.S. population with spending power of approximately $2 trillion. If your company wants to reach these audiences, you can start learning how to by reading on:
But beyond posting news stories, Topix encourages its users to comment and report on stories going on in their own neighborhood. Due to this focus on community, Topix receives over 30,000 comments a day, most of which are focused on the local level.
So starting with 
