I was unable to go to the Measurement.ie conference 2 weeks ago due to flu and Cormac Moore of The Potato, who won the ticket in the blog competition, has kindly sent me a guest blog post based on his thoughts on the conference.
4 Things I Learned From Measurement.ie
Last week I won a ticket to the Measurement.ie seminar, which was looking all things to do with measuring online activity and success. (Huge thanks to Lorna for the ticket.)
The day was excellent. I personally came away with a lot more than I thought I would and have already seen a 60% increase in Facebook likes since the seminar.
Having looked through my notes, there were 4 key areas for me that were the most important and hopefully they’ll help you too.
1: Stop Littering With Your Social Media
Dena Walker, asked whether you were doing anything meaningful with social media or just adding to the digital landfill? An interesting question!
She made some excellent points about just “looking busy” with your social media. TMany businesses work hard building their numbers of likes
and shares, with no real link to business objectives.
She commented that people can get sucked into a short term mindset and forget about ensuring that their social media improves their overall business objectives.
She urged people to use social media to improve their business’s bottom line. Evaluation and measurement is a key part of that too. I think that’s good
advice.
You can see Dena’s slides here.
2: Work Back From the End to Know Where To Start
A theme that was hammered home by all the speakers, was using social media to move towards your key business objectives and track them every step of the way.
Erica Buckley, from Edelmen, made the point that when she is working on a campaign, that she starts with the end goals of the business or campaign and works back from that. Ascertain what the goals of your compaign are and establish why they are the goals.
Question the objectives to make sure you and /or your team are clear on what it is you’re doing and what. Why are you trying to increase traffic/likes/shares? What’s so important about them?
Figure out the end game and work backwards, figuring out the steps in-between to get you there. Common sense advice!
3. Use Social Media to Listen To What People Are Saying
This was something I found very useful since the seminar. Listen to what people are saying about your brand, competitors and your industry online, then go out and talk to them.
Social media lets you actively listen. I’ve been using Twitter Search and some the simple keyword search tools in Hootsuite to keep an eye on discussions around my site and have found this to be an excellent opportunity to engage with people.
It has also helped me to see the success of a recent article and I’ll be honest, I enjoyed seeing people talk about it and rate it! It provides the positive reinforcement we sometimes need.
4: Condescending Corporate Brand Page Says No
John Morton, the man responsible to getting Rage Against The Machine to number 1 at Xmas ahead of the XFactor single, gave one of the most enjoyable talks I have ever attended.
The Condescending Corporate Brand Page on Facebook highlights ‘what not to do on Facebook’ by showing examples.
His main point was to urge businesses not to use their fans as just numbers and metrics and don’t get them to like/comment/share to save a dying pigeon!
What I got from that talk, was understand your fans and speak to them in a tone they’ll respect and relate to. Being personal and human, even if it is a brand page, may work far better than a cold emotionless corporate voice.
There were tons of great ideas and all the speakers gave a lot of very good information. I’d definitely recommend it, as the information learned can be applied to your website and social media efforts immediately.
The seminar, in essence, was about knowing your objectives clearly and knowing how to measure them, so that you can improve or change what you’re doing to become a smarter player in your market.
Since the seminar, my likes have gone up by 60% and I doubled my site’s traffic (All that in less than a week). I can’t claim it is all due to what I learned at the seminar, but it certainly helped a lot.
So, thumbs up from me and thanks again to Lorna for offering up her ticket to be won!
Cormac
photo credit: ☂☁ miriam ☁☂ via photopin cc
