If you read the blog on Friday, you’ll know that I attended the sold-out Blog Potomac - billed as an unconference (see…there I am wearing the shirt). I’d never attended an unconference before, but I knew that it meant that there’d be a little more audience participation.  Which is kind of fitting, when you’re doing a conference about social media.

The majority of the speakers spoke for 10 – 15 minutes about their background, specialties, and involvement in social media.  Then, each session was turned over to the floor for Q&A. As you would have seen from the sessions I wrote up on Friday, this meant that there were lots of questions, and in some cases unpredictability about the direction of that particular session. For example, the last session of the day on ethics, actually ended up with a floor discussion on the legality of content scraping.

All in all, I’d have to say that the conference was well put together by Debbie Weil and Geoff Livingston.  It was just the right size, the venue was great.  The only problem was that usual conference bugbear – poor wifi (if you were following my liveblogging, you’ll have noticed that it ceased after the 3rd session, with the other sessions going live later in the day).

(Note to self: While being smug in congratulating yourself for bringing a spare battery to get through the day, make sure that both are fully charged the night before).

One problem that I can see for BlogPotomac next year, is that we’ll have to see how well it scales when the audience size ratchets up, which I’m sure it will.

The final presenter of the unconference was Kami Huyse of MyPrPro who jumped right into the engagement part of the conference.  After a brief discussion on where she was coming from on the topic of ethics, she jumped right in with an example of a flog (fake blog), asking the audience how ethical they felt that particular style of engagement was.

After a long and interesting discussion throughout the theater, the common consensus was that it wasn’t ethical.  And they just make you look stupid when you get found out, which you more likely than not will. That’s not to say that some people didn’t come down on the side of the floggers, because some did, but that was only one or two in the audience.

The real takeaway from the discussion that Kami led was that blogging is not a sales channel, and companies (especially the marketing departments) should stop viewing it as such.

The penultimate speaker at the unconference was KD Paine, who I had the pleasure of sitting next to at the dinner the previous evening and conversing about the topic of her presentation today – measurement and value.

The value of measurement is finding out what works and what doesn’t.
How do you know what social tool to use? Measurement. Find out what the impact is. You need to be absolutely clear abouut what the Return is before you can calculate your ROI. Know exactly what you’re trying to measure before you measure it.

1. Figure out your goal(s)
2. Figure out your audience
3. What are the metrics that you want to report on?
4. What are you benchmarking against?
5. Don’t count eyeballs – measure engagement / leads. What is the value to you?  Are you being positioned the way you want to be positioned?  What is the conversation?
6. So what?  Analyze the information, explain why data shows what it shows. Then determine whether it’s working or not, and whether you should keep it going or not.

Q. How do you measure success?
A. Know the value of your customers / average transaction / members / ideas / etc.

Q. How long do you give before measuring impact?
A. Measure before you start (baseline). Most things have an immediate hit (most comments are in after 3 days), but she monitors for 14 just in case. Quarterly benchmarks don’t really tell you much, you really need to measure for another 3 months to compare. A better way is to use comparative measurement to see how you stand in your industry.

Q. How do you know when a blog needs to change or end?
A. Look at comments per post. 12-13 is average engagements, 35 is highly engaged. Also look at your traffic to see whether you have any traction. State Farm had a blog that had no comments, so they discontinued it. They relaunched a year later and instead of measuring comments, they instead measured employee morale and saw a nice increase

The next presentation was billed as the ‘after lunch keynote’ and was delivered by Frank Gruber, who is AOL’s social media & web product development expert. The topic of this presentation was how he parlayed a blogging hobby into a fun social media job with AOL, and the fun ’shiny objects’ or social media tools that he likes to play with.

3 years ago he started his blog – Somewhat Frank. After attending an SEO conference he was convinced that he wanted to start a blog. So he did, the same week that TechCrunch started up, which got him talking to Michael Arrington eventually he started writing for Techcrunch. AOL found him through the articles that he wrote for Techcrunch. He worked on the myaol product, part of which involved bringing in bloggers to evaluate the product and provide feedback. He’s now working in the people network – Bebo, Gooey, ICQ, AIM, which is basically their social network.

Products that he loves and uses every day – ‘Shiny objects’

• Twitter
• Summize
• Tumblr
• Friendfeed
• SocialThing
• TubeMogul - Pushes videos out to multiple platforms at once
• Viddler
• Mixx
• Digg
• Delicious
• Stumbleupon
• Shareaholic - FF plugin
• Typepad
• Wordpress
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Evernote
• Filterbox
• awayfind
• Basecamp
• Legit

Shiny Objects that he likes, but uses less frequently

• Tripit
• Dopplr

Q. How do you find out about all the ’shiny objects’?
A. People recommend things to him through his existing ’shiny objects’. His role involves keeping his finger on the pulse of social media, so he also goes out looking for new toys to play with that may be useful for AOL in the long run. Generally they find their way to him.

Q. How sustainable are these social media tools?
A. People can only concentrate their efforts on so many tools at one time (given the list above Frank can obviously concentrate more than most!).

Q. How do you cope with the fact that blogging is now a multimedia effort?
A. Frank started a vlog because of that fact. He feels that people have to ‘pick your poison’.

Q. How do you feel about pay per post style businesses?
A. He’d tested it out, and feels that as long as the person is transparent about the fact that they are paid to write about a product then it’s fine.

Q. What ’shiny object’ would you create if money was no object
A. If he could have clearance, it would be something to do with pictures or video

Q. How would you recommend a firm use these shiny toys to enhance their PR?
A. Pick a selection of tools, have community managers who are passionate about the tools.

Q. How do you reach the people who don’t know about the ’shiny toys’?
A. People have different social circles expanding out from friends and family.

Q. What are the keys to success for startups?
A. Create your own market, or find a market that’s not currently serviced.

The next presenter was Jeremy Pepper from Boingo with a talk about how Strategy fits into your social media decisions.

Why should you use social media? Don’t just do it. You need to have the strategy in place to determine what you’re going to do with it.

You need to engage with people who are enthusiastic about your company / product / topic. First you need to engage your internal audience in order to get buy-in at all levels.

Q. Coming from an internal perspective how do I wrestle control of content from marketing?
A. Internal education is vitally important to get the conversation on your side. Find out what people are talking about with regard to your company, and get marketing to understand that there needs to be a conversation from your side too. Don’t ignore sites with active communities such as Yelp!

Q. How does social media fit into our marketing and communications platform
A. Creating groups allows our customers to interact, and therefore help each other to connect. There are so many tools out there right now, you need to pick the right tools for your company, it may be that blogs aren’t the right tool for you to use. Investigate and formulate your strategy.

Q. How do you pitch to a blogger?
A. First identify the bloggers, and the influencers. Don’t assume that because someone has 5,000 ‘friends’ on a social network that they are influencers. If they don’t respond, don’t spam.

Q. Using these tools you’re becoming a content creator rather than pushing out stories to other media, your thoughts?
A. The web has always been about communication, we’ve always been content producers and publishers, the difference is just in the distribution of the content. We’re trying now to push out stories with less spin and less buzzwords, but the difference is that we now interact with the customers.

The next speaker is Maggie Fox (she’s the one at the lectern in the picture, Josh Hallett of BlogOrlando is the one at the microphone), the CEO of the Social Media Group, with a discussion on the latest trends in traditional social media marketing

Listen -

• Who do you need to talk to?
• What are they saying,?
• What are your business objectives?
• here are they saying it?
• How can you join the conversation?

This is not a campaign, this is a long term engagement / commitment. Once you have generated the community, you need to think about how you recognize and harness this community. Don’t let it die.

Q. How do you measure your success?

A. Look at site traffic, do you have 1% site engagement? How vocal is he community?

Q. What works well internally social media wise?

A. IBM uses social media well internally, with high levels of employee engagement. Internal blogs totally flatten the dialog, there’s more equality / less intimidation communicating with executives.

Q. What’s the carrot to get internal people to engage?

A. They have to want to do it, and be good at making content. Micro-blogging may or may not be a solution, as while the content levels are smaller, the engagement levels may be greater.

Q. Twitter or FriendFeed?

A. Maggie says she likes both, which draws groans from the audience and shouts of “Coke or Pepsi”. She likes the aggregation of FriendFeed, but doesn’t like the fact that it’s not as personal (plus you can’t block people from viewing your FriendFeed feed)

Q. If a community is left to die, can anyone take it over?

A. Disney had a proto-social network – Disney’s Magic Kingdom – for over 10 a couple of years. They just announced 3 weeks ago that it would be shut down. Communities should be allowed to continue if they can be self sustaining. Don’t necessarily think of them as communities, they may be better thought of as movements.

Q. How do you teach a client that Reputation Management is important?

A. It depends on the kind of strategy that you want to have. Do you want to respond to everything or just the influencers? Most companies need to only care about those influencers. She uses Radiant 6

Q. What about sites like Seth Godin’s where there are no comments?

A. Comments should be moderated with a clear comment policy. Comments are the best way to engage on a blog.

Q. How can you launch a campaign using twitter?

A. 2 different twitter strategies – Twitterbot – just pushing stories out, no need to really answer responses. Secondly the personal response, where a real person engages with others.

Q. How would you use Facebook?

A. Examine to determine whether your target audience is there in the first place. The challenge is that it’s a walled garden, you can’t get data about Facebook outside Facebook.

Q. A digital marketing agency without a blog asked what they should blog about…

A. If you’re selling something you’re not doing yourself, you’re going to have challenges if informed clients do some investigation.

Q. How have you best been able to educate executives?

A. Walk in and do a presentation at the C level as soon as possible when beginning an engagement, otherwise education takes up a lot more time down the road. It also helps to gain champions on the executive team. Lunch and Learn sessions work great to spread the knowledge around the organization.

Washington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers was next up with a presentation on the symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media.

He started out with a quote from Steve Ballmer talking about how in 10 years traditional media will be dead (the quote was much longer, but I can only type so fast, but that was the takeaway from the quote). Not great news for a print based business such as the Washington Post…

The Washington Post has really started to move into social media, reaching out to the young people (interns) to get ideas as to what they can do. They have facebook apps, 60 topic specific blogs (including the obituary blog), widgets, etc. Dan runs the local business blog, and is manages the blog along the following lines.

1. Stick to your topic. People will find it if the content is great.
2. Trying to find ways to engage the audience (more than email). – the post 200, where they list the top 200 companies in the area used to just be a list, now they’re putting together sites for the companies, trying to build communities for the Post 200.
3. How can the Washington Post data be used and spread? Their mission is to inform, so they want their data to be used wherever it can.

Q. Will the Washington Post ever become a non-profit org?

A. The St. Petersburg Times follows that model, and the Post has thought about it. Motivations and incentives are different in a non-profit world, but if it’s what it takes to keep the media alive then it may be the way to go.

Q. Does ad revenue from blogs come anywhere close to the ad revenue from the paper?

A. No, but online revenue is growing, while the newspaper is decreasing. One of the interesting items is that the paper mostly targets ads from local businesses, whereas the blog brings in national ad dollars.

Q. Are your blogs more fact checked than the average blog?

A. All blogs must be read by a second person, they are edited and fact checked, but it’s still not as rigorous as articles for the newspaper.

Q. Who moderates your comments? What’s your approval rate?

A. The post took a huge risk by having open comments. There are a few people on staff that are in charge of moderating comments. Real time moderation doesn’t really happen, so it may be several hours before comments are approved. But comments are important as they’re a great way to engage the community.

Q. What role do you see blogs taking in the Election?

A. Blogs have allowed for distributing newspaper style information in a fast manner. He has noticed that about 2 months before an election blogs jump up that talk about local issues, these bloggers then become candidates, so blogs appear to be a really great way to test the waters on issues.

Q. What challenges do you have integrating the blogsin a newspaper environment?

A. Editing is very important for both, the blogs are Washington Post entities, so they can damage the overall brand. There has to be trust that the blogs are as factual as possible.

Q. Will you have some kind of tagging options / comment ranking / profiles for people to tag so that they could look for specific topics on the blogs?

A. This is something that needs to happen, there is some experimentation going on with discussion groups – building out commenter profiles – but it’s not there yet. Gene Weingarten has one of these groups that’s thriving, but it depends on the level of involvement of the moderators.

Q. What are ways that bloggers can get more involved with your stories / participate with your sites?

A. We’re fighting an internal guerilla war. He’s here to try to get ideas from bloggers. He’d like to be able to give more recognition (links) out to bloggers, but it may just not happen. He’s had discussions as to how to get local bloggers to work with the post. They know that they’ve not done enough to engage the local blogginng community, but they’re going to work on it.

Q. With the Washington Post newsroom getting smaller, and the blogging side growing, how has that impacted sources going to the blog rather than to the newspaper.

A. The staff phone list used to fit on legal size paper in micro type, the new list is 2/3 of that size in large type with plenty of whitespace. He’s now talking to more sources and doing more writing than ever before, but it’s not necessarily at the same depth. He starts the day by going out to the web based PR sources.
If you’re going to pitch to him, he needs to know why it needs to be acted on right now, otherwise it’ll be put aside and forgotten about.

The opening keynote of the Blog Potomac ‘unconference’ is from Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager and Chief Blogger of Direct2Dell.

Michael Dell came and said that the blog had to be live in 3 weeks. Lionel was in tech support, so he had the knowledge of customer experiences, and was asked to create and manage the blog (he had never blogged before). First challenge – monitoring the blogosphere – looked at brand monitoring tools such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics, didn’t provide what they needed, so they moved to just customized technorati searches and spreadsheets. Next challenge was pulling a team together to support the blog. The biggest issue to address was poor customer support in teh US – 50% of chatter was negative. Dell looked at the blog as working with issues with tens or hundreds of customers rather than working individually with each client. Customers want to be engaged with a real person, not a corporation. Injecting personality into the blog helped the blog to grow and engage with Dell customers. This then led to IdeaStorm, their community based Dell improvement suggestion tool.

The current phase is mirco-blogging – Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed – anywhere that you can have a conversation, wherever your customers are.

In the early days the blogging team was a small part of the communications department, it has grown substantially since then, working on all different kinds of social media sites.

Going forward, Dell is looking at a way to blend different socal media elements together to get the non-high end tech savy users (the mainstream audience) to engage more customers and get more of a picture of what it is that their wider customer base wants.

Q&A

Q. What’s the current level of conversational blogging that Dell does?

A. 3-400 emails per day, full days of blogging, personal twitter accounts, corporate twitter accounts, comment responses. It’s a full time job, that has to be looked at every day, at every hour of the day. Dell clients are all over the world, so conversations can happen at any time.

Q. How and to what extent do the EU members respond to Dell?

A. Dell doesn’t yet have EU specific blogs, but they’re currently in the process of creating those. They know that it’ll work as they do interact with people from the UK on the US blog. An example given was when an issue was found with the Vostro keyboard in the UK, which they were able to identify and sort out. (I’m typing on a Vostro now, but a US Vostro, so I guess I’m ok).

Q. How do you work with Dell’s Legal department?

A. Anything safety related goes through legal, same with any comparison / competitive products, and anything that’s obviously legal related. Beyond that it’s a judgment call, each of the blogs has a specific owner that works with Lionel to address any of the legal concerns. Having the initial meeting with legal helped to set those initial expectations.

Q. What’s your primary success metric?

A. The number one benefit is that interacting with the customers on this level really helps to change perceptions in a positive manner. Transparency is vital to this process, admit your mistake, and thank your customers for identifying issues, interacting with you, or heck just for being a Dell customer. Dell still has 20% of negative comments, but social media has been the primary factor in dropping that from the initial 50%.

Q. Where are you going next?

A. Blog outreach and forum teams have been combined, they’re now targeting products rather than being model focused i.e. laptops rather than Vostro.

Q. When selling this to your senior leadership, how do you set expectations?

A. For Dell the great thing was that Michael Dell pushed for this, so there was executive support, however there’s been some resistance at the middle management level. What they try to do is explain it from a basic blogging perspective explain that there are going to be negative issues raised, and responses are going to need to be made. Those expectations have to be set and understood. The blog launched July 10th, the exploding laptop issue was posted 3 days later. Within minutes of that he had phone calls and people walking into his cubicle asking why he’d done that.

Q. How are you increasing your reach beyond the social media savvy people?

A. We were silo’d when we launched, with forums in one area, blogs in another. Now everything’s going to be integrated on a topic oriented basis. It’s still being mapped out, but is the way they’re going.

Today marks the start of the first Blog Potomac conference, which claims to be the premier social media marketing event in the DC area. Given the list of speakers, it looks like that claim should hold up.

Last night was the VIP and speakers dinner in Clarendon, which I somehow managed to sneak into. Rohit Bhargava, the author of the recent book “Personality Not Included” gave out copies of his bood. And, then he performed a social experiment where he has everyone write out what they would do if they had a second copy of the book. The suggestions were mixed up and handed out around the table. As roughly 1/2 of the people at the dinner already had the book, they committed to following through with whatever the suggestion was. Some of those included — “Giving them to charity, along with 3 hours of consulting time,” “Leave it on the metro,” or “Give it to the most clueless person in first class on your next flight,” etc.

Assuming the connections hold up, and my batteries last out; I’m planning on blogging as much as I can of the conference, so stay tuned to this site.

Are you just beginning to get your feet wet in the world of Web analytics and have decided to try out Google Analytics or another analytics packages on your site?  Well, I would imagine you’re probably feeling a bit overwhelmed. You are not alone as the vast amount of data you now have can be a daunting task to fully understand. There are a number of resources that are available for you to help you get up to speed. One of which is a series of videos that Google has uploaded to YouTube under the Google Conversion University Playlist.

That should help give you some of the basics on Web analytics.  There are, however, many issues that you may not even be aware of such as an incorrect implementation of your analytics package that is preventing you from collecting accurate data.  This is the case with virtually every new client that I’ve gone in and looked at how their Web analytics package was implemented.  An analytics audit is a great way to find out if your Web analytics package has been implemented properly and correct the issues that are discovered.

Once you have accurate data, then what do you do with it?  If you watch some of the Google Conversion University videos you’ll have a basic knowledge, but if you want to learn more check out our customized Web analytics training programs that we offer.  And if you don’t have the time to really dig into your analytics data – then, our Web analytics consulting services may be of interest to you.   

The worst you can do is “implement” a Web analytics package and then pretend to understand the data.  That will not get you anywhere.  If you’re not prepared or don’t have the time to fully understand Web analytics, then make sure you at least you have someone on your side that can guide you through the vast amount of data.