Community Breakfast September - Social Media ROI - Notes



Hosted by UserVoice

These are the notes from the September Community Breakfast. The attendees voted that the topic be "Social Media ROI".

Attendees

Clayton Bryan

Dong Liu

Evan Hamilton

Jenna Langer

Maria Ogneva

Sarah Manley

Tim Bartel

Goals
Goals have to be where you start with any sort of analytics or reporting. There's too much data out there to report it all - once you know your goals, the important data falls out.

What are the goals of community management?

 * 1) Getting followers - which really means getting your content shared - which really means getting clickthroughs - which really means gaining new customers
 * 2) Customer retention (keeping people using your service)
 * 3) Customer feedback/research
 * 4) Evangelism (again, gaining new customers)

How can we measure these?
New Customers
 * There's no great way to track from tweet to signup, especially since evangelism means people won't be using your tracking urls
 * To a certain extent you can use special landing pages, mainly when doing a campaign. You could also have the sign-up link from your blog be a special URL.


 * Coupon codes also work, as people like to save


 * You could ASK people when they sign up where they heard about you. Not hard numbers, but gives you a % and trending.


 * Tools like Woopra and Chartbeat provide better flow tracking than Google Analytics

Retaining Customers

 * Best (only?) metric is your internal metric of people cancelling accounts/not using them
 * Nutshell Mail provides great follower trending data (Attensity is similar but really designed for Enterprise companies)


 * For prominent customers (or any, really) try going to their blogs/Twitter/etc to see why they say they left. This qualitative data should accompany the quantitative of the last bullets

Random notes:


 * OneForty has some cool Twitter tools


 * Ken Burbary has a wiki of social media monitoring tools


 * Maria has done experiments with reaching out as yourself vs the company and the former has been more successful. General agreement on this point.


 * Most folks have found the most success joining conversations around their space by not mentioning their product or doing so at a high level. Eventually this pays off.


 * Clayton mentioned digging Rework by Jason Fried


 * Jenna mentioned digging the Buzz Out Loud podcast