On Friday I gave a presentation in Chicago, at Loyola University, on social media and compliance. We covered many topics dear to the hearts of those who participate in social media and would prefer not to go to jail due to SEC or HIIPA violations. Left to other presenters was the topic of social media’s importance in today’s marketplace.

It’s just as well that I left the topic out. Since most of the attendees were bloggers themselves (yes, more than half of them — I counted hands!), covering the importance of social media would have been preaching to the converted. But recent research, by GroupM and comScore, helps remind us all that some of the strongest reasons to engage in social media aren’t readily apparent.

The study showed that people using search engines who also use social media are “more engaged consumers” and “more likely to be looking for places to buy and brands to consider.”

The research found that consumers using social media are “1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to the average internet user.”
Here are more findings from the study:

Consumers exposed to influenced social and paid search exhibit 223% heavier search behavior than consumers exposed to paid alone

Fifty percent of social media-exposed searchers search daily for product terms, compared to 33% of non-exposed searchers

And finally, this is the finding that I thought was most revealing: “In organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who have been exposed to a brand’s social marketing campaign are 24 times more likely to click on organic links leading to the advertiser’s site than the average user seeing a brand’s paid search ad alone.”

How much do you spend on paid search ads? This finding suggests to me that whatever you invest in pay-per-click advertising, you can reduce that cost or improve its reach by combining it with a well-planned social media engagement.

Great post-presentation feedback

After the presentation I met a ton of the audience members through Twitter. This is a group who really understands how social media can extend the value of a presentation! One participant, David Kamerer, had a great suggestion for a way to improve my compliance presentation. He suggested I add some content on the CANN-SPAM email marketing law. Thanks, @DavidKamerer, and the other folks attending the talk. I had a blast!

You’d think it would be impossible to get those who haven’t signed up for Twitter to get hooked on the immediacy and community of “tweeting.” You’d be wrong.

Just now I wanted to watch the statistics while I had the USA – Canada Olympic Gold Hockey Game on the television. I logged into the official Winter Olympics site. I found paydirt — and a surprising real-time Facebook status feed. You can click the image for one that’s easier to read:

What struck me about the Facebook feed is I didn’t have to log in. Since I already had Facebook loaded in another browser window, it immediately gave me the opportunity to add my own two cents to the cheering / jeering session. I didn’t, but I did find the flow of other people’s comments to be a fun addition to my solo enjoyment of the game.

I’ve written before about how Facebook is a perfect set of social media training wheels for the newbie. This is more evidence.

Today was my first day as a HarQen team member. Although my title is Director of Client Services, I’ll be wearing many hats. What, you haven’t heard of HarQen yet? You can be excused. During its young life, the members of this lean start-up have built from scratch a set of web-based services in an entirely new category: Voice Asset Management (VAM). It is ambitious in the extreme — and leaves little time for a focused PR effort.

That’s one place where I come in. I’ll be wearing many hats here, but two are social media “ambassador” and PR leader. I’ll be helping HarQen clients share their stories about these astounding services. Chief among those offerings is VoiceScreener, a way to vastly improve the quality and speed of hiring.

I know from personal experience the value of the VoiceScreener VAM system. (Yes, VAM. There’s that acronym again. Here’s another for you: VaaA, which stands for Voice as an Asset.)

In a previous life I was the defacto recruiter for the digital marketing team I led. One of the most grueling searches was when I was looking to hire a truly stellar project manager. VoiceScreener would have helped me, by inviting the dozens of applicants to answer a few guided questions over the phone — all at their convenience, talking to an automated “interviewer.” Answers are turned into the voice assets that can be quickly reviewed, sorted and forwarded — all as easily as processing emails.

One VoiceScreener client brags that the application dramatically accelerates the preliminary phone interview process. He contends it literally doubles the odds that any given applicant is going to be hired. He’s with a large recruiting firm, where twice as many high-quality applicants means, over time, twice as much revenue for him and his company.

Follow me and you’ll likely hear him tell you about it. All I’ll be doing is providing the megaphone.

I’ll be posting fewer entries here, at DigitalSolid, as I focus on the blog at VoiceScreener. I hope you follow me over there. The category of VAM is about to heat up and I’d love to share my experiences in this exciting new adventure.

Kudos to photographer Matt Mason for providing these photos. Click to see the gallery

A question about using social media arose this morning — one that I only had time to half-answer. I was on a panel at a Milwaukee Social Media Breakfast (#SMBmke). The question (to paraphrase): “I don’t sell a sexy product. I’m a business that sells to other businesses something that they need. But they don’t necessarily blog about it or tweet about it. Can social media support my goal of lead generation?” I said yes. Below is the second half of my answer.

I did mention The Long Tail. Click through that link to learn what that is. And if you do, think about that link. Jeff Jarvis coined the phrase link economy. Chris Anderson coined the phrase the long tail. I propose a new coinage: the hashtag economy.

The long tail is the book, and the concept, about how niche markets find what they need in a world this isn’t hindered by the economics of brick-and-mortar. There are no carrying costs associated with iTunes offering one more song that just happens to be obscure. Their inventory is limited only by digital storage costs and the bandwidth necessary to deliver the song when someone buys it.

The link economy uses this free, or nearly free, paradigm. It cost me nothing to create the link that pointed readers to an explanation of The Long Tail. The link led to Wikipedia. There again, the power of almost-free. This crowd-sourced encyclopedia saw the most minuscule of incremental costs to provide you with that definition.

The upshot is this. Since we are rewarded nearly every time we click on a link, we do it more often. That generates something that very often can be monetized: Significant volumes of traffic.

Smart businesses — such as the publishers of Wired Magazine and Anderson’s book — leverage this link economy to sell more books. And they leverage The Long Tail Phenomenon in the very sale of a book about the long tail; Anderson’s book might never have become a best-seller if it hadn’t been offered in a virtual bookstore like Amazon first. His readers might have simply been just too darned “niche” to persuade bricks-and-mortar book stores to stock it in their shelves.

Scott Baitinger, co-owner of Streetza Pizza, and I were talking about niche marketing earlier this week. I complimented him on his use of Twitter Hashtags to find a narrow group and to market to them. That narrow group is @FitMKE. Scott has been peddling his pizzas to this group by tweeting to them with the #FitMKE hashtag.

Analog broadcast channels (those based on radio / television wave frequencies) are valuable enough that they are regulated by the government. There are rules about what businesses must do to earn their right to be there (e.g., public service announcements and public-oriented programming). Things that are scarce have value, and these channels are no exception. A recent auction of analog broadcast channels garnered bids in the many millions of dollars.

Twitter handles are not limited by the spectrum of a radio or television broadcast frequency. If I auctioned off my Twitter handle, I would get zero bids. Why? Everyone who knows anything about Twitter knows you can create accounts limited only by the nearly infinite combinations of letters and numbers.

This makes Twitter a spectrum of a nearly infinite number of nearly-free channels. It draws lots of people because it is so cheap and teeming with variety. It uses both the long tail and the link economy.

Increasingly, Twitter is also spawning communities of likeminded people around hashtags. One example of #SMBmke. Another, ironically, is #MKElikemind (another breakfast group — here’s the info on my blog). Scott, and @StreetzPizza, found #fitMKE to be a channel to narrow-cast his offer of healthy pizzas (and also indulgent pizzas, since — hey — you have to be getting fit to enjoy life, don’t you?).

The Hashtag Economy is one way smart marketers are finding their niche audience within the cacauphony of other channels. They’re tuning in, conversing, and doing business there.

Here’s a challenge, especially for my friends (old and new) who attended this morning’s breakfast: What hashtag conversations have you been a part of? And how have they improved your life and work? More important: What business relationships have formed from them?

Related posts:

• Measure clicks and ROI from Twitter posts
• Watching Twitter sell things like pizza and beer
• As long as you’re stuck in traffic, can we talk?

Also mentioned:

• Social Media Experts Are Poets, Software Developers Are Novelists

Photo credit: Matt Mason, photographer

Originally scheduled for December, the Social Media Breakfast panel discussion, Social Media Guru: Snake Oil Salesman or Expert?, will take place on Thursday, January 21, at The Moct. I’ll be one of the four panelists. The other panelists, and other details, are as follows (this information was originally posted last month):

Matthew Olson @_Signalfire_ – Owner and Creative Director of Signalfire, LLC

Sue Spaight @SueSpaight – VP of Account Management and Digital Strategy at Meyer & Wallis

Kim Nielson @Knmu – Communications Project Manager at University School of Milwaukee

Here are the details:

January 21, 2010 – 7:30 am to 9:30 am

The Moct – 240 E. Pittsburgh Ave., Milwaukee, Wisconsin

WiFi and Light Breakfast Provided

Twitter Hashtag: #SMBMke

It promises to be a spirited discussion on a timely topic. I look forward to seeing you there!

Start the new year right by resolving to better track the return on investment (ROI) of your web site. I’ve been hard at work with Milwaukee’s C2, planning my upcoming digital ROI workshops in Milwaukee and Madison. Here is the information as it is posted on the C2 site:

These half-day seminars are designed to expand your understanding and broaden your capabilities and confidence. You’ll work smarter, faster, stronger!

Each 3-hour seminar will be offered in Milwaukee and Madison.

Please click the date to register

Digital Content Development and Delivery That Maximizes ROI

Presented by Jeff Larche, Digital Solid

Measurement, benchmarking, comparative analysis and revision of content to best generate desired results can be a complex series of steps, each with its own challenges.  Jeff will show participants best practices for workflow management around digital content development and delivery that will maximize your return on your investment of time and resources.

Milwaukee: Tuesday, March 9

Madison: Tuesday, March 23

Realizing Results Demands Real Measurement: AIDA

Presented by Jeff Larche, Digital Solid

Jeff takes a deep dive into web page analytics to show participants specific measurement tools/methodologies designed to measure the sales cycle effectiveness of each page using metrics around AIDA: Attention, Interest, Decision and Action.

Milwaukee: Tuesday, April 13

Madison: Tuesday, April 27

These workshops are unique in the area and are reasonably priced, so they should fill up fast. I suggest you register right away.

They should also be a lot of fun. I hope to see you there!

Eleven months  to the day after David Pogue of the New York Times posted on being a newbie in the “Twitterverse,” I think his piece is still one of the best introductions to the platform. Here’s a sample:

I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, “Hasn’t this project been tried before?”

Everyone looked blankly at each other.

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.

The fellow judge had just harnessed the wisdom of his followers in real time. No e-mail, chat, Web page, phone call or FedEx package could have achieved the same thing.

I was reminded of this again over lunch yesterday, when I was chatting with a couple of really smart tech types. My lunch companions were very Pogue-like in their misgivings about Twitter. One was even leery of Facebook. Both made points that sounded familiar to me.

I acknowledged that when Twitter first came out, I was the same way. This post from 30 months ago is an example of my ambivalence toward Twitter. I have since seen it work as a valuable way to connect and learn, for both me and many of my clients. Some business has come out of it as well.

I’m sold on Twitter. Besotted in fact. (See for yourself, at @TheLarch)

But its success could be fleeting. Twitter is white hot right now, but flash fires often burn out just as quickly.

Maybe I should revise my oath of undying love. Instead, how’s this? I’m sold on the emerging social dance called ambient awareness, a concept explained eloquently in this Clive Thompson article.

Pack up your coconuts and see the world

Ambient awareness is bigger than Twitter, and even bigger than Facebook (now at 350 million users worldwide). It’s like the coconut shells in the arms of an octopus. For those who didn’t see that story, here’s the gist: Biologists diving off the coasts of Indonesia have discovered a species of octopus that has evolved to use a novel tool. Scientific American describes the discovery:

The octopuses were found to occupy empty seashells, discarded coconut shell halves or manmade objects, and on several dives, the researchers saw them carrying coconut shell halves below their body and swimming away with them.

Sometimes, an octopus would carry two shell halves and then put them together to form a shelter, the scientists said…

“Using tools is something we think is very special about humans, but it also exists in other animal groups we’ve never considered before, a low life form, a relative of a snail. These octopuses, they’re not simple animals.”

I learned about that story through — what else? — Twitter. This platform, and the ambient awareness it harnesses, is literally a new tool for helping those who put it to use. It helps us work, play and generally be the social creatures that we are.

Truthiness indeed. The occasion is Milwaukee’s next Social Media Breakfast, on Thursday, December 10. This just in: The snow storm has led to the cancellation of that breakfast meeting. The updated information is here, and the discussion will be on January 21, 2010. I’ll be one of four panelists discussing, Your Typical Social Media Consultant: Snake Oil Salesman or Expert? It reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s hilarious pairings of contradictory messages.

Me? I plan to open remarks by pronouncing that, on average, only one-out-of-four “social media experts” is really worth listening to — and since that’s all I have to say on the matter, everyone can go home.

Or maybe I won’t. You just have to attend to find out. Joining me will be the following:

Matthew Olson @_Signalfire_ – Owner and Creative Director of Signalfire, LLC

Sue Spaight @SueSpaight – VP of Account Management and Digital Strategy at Meyer & Wallis

Kim Nielson @Knmu – Communications Project Manager at University School of Milwaukee

Here are the details:

December 10, 2009 – 7:30 am to 9:30 am
The Moct – 240 E. Pittsburgh Ave., Milwaukee, Wisconsin
WiFi and Light Breakfast Provided

Twitter Hashtag: #SMBMke

Register today!

This afternoon I gave a presentation on business blogging, as part of SOHObiztube.com’s The Draft, an all-day social media workshop.

The last part of the presentation was on my favorite tools for monitoring conversations, as well as the conversions that a business blog initiates. Here’s the list:

Google Analytics — This is still my favorite way to monitor all blog activity. It is fairly easy to configure, it provides a great way to measure conversation (Google calls them “Goals”) and offers benchmarking with other blogs. Price: Free

Technorati — This site provides simply but helpful ways to track the growth of your site, by comparing its “popularity” to others and showing all backlinks (also known as “pingbacks” to your blog from others. Price: Free

CrazyEgg — This is new to me, and admittedly untried. But I like their visualization tools. The one below is a heatmap showing likelihood to click (not to be mistaken for an eye-scanning heatmap). Price: Plans vary in cost

Feedburner — This service, which was acquired two years ago by Google, is an industry favorite for monitoring how many people subscribe to you. It even has a badge, showing the number of subscribers you currently have. If you are reading this near the day it was published, you’ll see that the current theme of my blog displays the badge near the top of the righthand column of every page. (As of this morning, I had 365 subscribers. Thank you one-and-all!) Price: Free

There. That’s my list. What’s yours?

I had a great time talking to the group today, and invited them to post their questions about business blogging here in the comments section. I’m also inviting all of you to let me know what your favorite blog measurement tools are. I’m especially curious if you’ve used the CrazyEgg product line-up. If so, what do you think of it?

Related posts:

• How to determine the ROI of traffic driven to your blog from Twitter posts
• How to extend the impact of your events through blogging and other social media
• Why social media followers won’t be your marketing panacea (Malcolm Gladwell was wrong!)

The joke is grim but makes its point. Two hunters are relaxing around the campfire before heading to their tents for the night. An angry grizzly bear charges out of the woods at them. One of hunters leaps up and immediately begins running away, still in his bare feet. The other takes a moment to step into his boots. The first one yells over his shoulder: “You’re wasting time! Don’t you know that even with those boots you can’t outrun a grizzly?” The other replies, as he begins making up lost ground: “I don’t have to outrun the grizzly. All I have to do is outrun you!”

In this same “whatever it takes” spirit, many small- and mid-sized businesses are strapping on a new pair of shoes. Their new shoes are social media, most notably Twitter. It’s a logical calculation for businesses that are newer and more agile. Or so it seems, from reading the results of this recent research by BIA/Kelsey.  Here are a few highlights of the survey:

Social media by SMBs is more prevalent among younger businesses. The percentage of SMBs by age of business currently using Twitter for promotion is as follows:

• 16 percent of SMBs in business three years or less
• 11 percent of SMBs in business four to six years
• 6 percent of SMBs in business seven to 10 years
• 2 percent of SMBs in business 11-plus years

There is considerable thought and effort needed to use a channel like this properly, but for those that adopt this two-way communications channel effectively, it could help them outmaneuver more entrenched competitors.

It’s definitely making the competitive foot races more interesting.

Related posts:

• Is datamining Twitter conversations worth it?
• Watching Twitter sell things like pizza and beer
• Prediction: The best Twitter ploys of 2009 will involve physical events

Everyone involved in technology and marketing has had this conversation: They’re in a social setting, and the subject comes up about how technology is crafting messages to match consumer behavior. Someone pipes in, “Oh, like in Minority Report? That’s so wrong!” Although Gmail’s ads are customized based on the content of email messages, I’ve noticed that few object to that practice. Instead, they’ll complain about the ads appearing in Facebook — ads that clearly are using information users have given the network about themselves.

It’s a Catch 22 for online marketers. In order to boost response rates, we need to know more about the people viewing our ads. This work of behavioral targeting sounds like a win/win: “We’ll only provide you with the ads that you will likely care about.” But in practice, consumers get spooked.I’m reminded of direct response research done years ago. It was a survey to find out how people like to be hit up for contributions to non-profit causes.

Here’s how consumers responded:

1. Least favorite: Personal asks
2. 2nd Least: Telemarketing calls
3. 3rd Least: Direct mail

What researchers at the time found telling was the direct correlation that existed between disliking a method of asking for donations and its effectiveness in getting them. In other words, personal asks — your sister-in-law selling Girl Scout cookies for her daughter — are most effective in terms of closing rates. The closing rates of telemarketing (back when this was a more viable medium for fund raising) were nearly as good. And a distant third in terms of effectiveness was direct mail.

So what’s really going on here? The accepted theory is this: We all have limited money to contribute to causes, and we would prefer to put off making decisions about where that money should go. Therefore, the most effective ways of forcing a decision are the least preferred.

Similarly, we love DVRs, because they allow us to zoom past commercials. They give us a way to avoid participating in commerce. They can’t touch us because we’re averting our eyes.

Behavioral targeting, if done properly, presents ads that also touch us. Thus, we look for reasons to hate the practice. Privacy is as good a reason as any and better than most!

So what’s the solution?

I do think that attitudes are slowly changing, and this change will eliminate privacy concerns as a reason to hate behavioral targeting.

Here’s an example. Consumers using social media are getting more comfortable with the various personas that they present on networks. They’ll show their “all-business” persona on LinkedIn, and their more casual facade on Facebook. Both are true depictions of the user, but they’re single facets of a full personality. Context determines how consumers behave on these sites. They are becoming accustomed to being watched by friends and business associates.

Reading Online Body Language

These same consumers are seeing how they can watch their friends right back. They are learning to “read” a friend’s feelings and preferences, based on online behavior. Consumers are getting accustomed to the online equivalent of body language. Or maybe that’s too strong a word. We’re all quite conscious of what we’re conveying, and body language implies unconscious action. Maybe what we’re doing on social media is more akin to a Kabuki dance.

Reading these dances is what marketers behind behavioral targeting are learning at a mass level, and turning into surprisingly accurate algorithms. But when it’s done by machines, in the service of a sale, many consumers still insist it’s “so wrong.”

Perhaps not forever.

To predict how people will react in the future — especially in areas such as privacy — I try to look at real world analogies. It’s not hard to imagine a web site as similar to a retail store. A while ago I wrote about how stores are analyzing shoppers using arrays of cameras. One system, called PRISM, is finding some unexpected insights into shopper preferences and behaviors. Shoppers aren’t getting freaked out. The prime reason: Most are oblivious to the surveillance.

But what if the people behind the cameras sprung up from their chairs and raced into the aisles, to say things like, “I saw you were looking at those lawn rakes. Can we interest you in some yard waste trash bags as well?” There would probably be lost sales, at the very least!

In the online world there are intercepts like this, but they are automated. This automated “intercept” is something people will become more accustomed to over time, as a generation weaned on social media, and used to their online movements being watched, comes into the majority. They will be able to understand that their behavior is being measured by machines as well as their online friends. They’ll realize there is no man behind the online ad “curtain” … just a predictive model.

Blurring The Lens To Reduce The Creep Factor

Another trend that will help the acceptance of behavioral targeting is a move toward more explicit boundaries. For instance, I expect an eventual backlash to camera surveillance such as PRISM. But before this reaction can take hold, the boundaries of store monitoring will likely improve. This improvement in technology will, for once, be toward discreetly blurring the “analytical lens” — instead of making it sharper.

Radio tomographic imaging is a new way to study store traffic. It uses arrays of extremely inexpensive radio transmitters and receivers, placed around buildings, to display people moving within. Below is a demonstration of the technology.

The benefits of this technology over cameras, at least to marketers, is cost — both in equipment and the labor of monitoring. Because people become moving “blobs” of color, it’s easier for computers to analyze traffic patterns and behaviors. Less can sometimes be more. Combine this information with RFID signals and you have a way to track a shopping basket all the way to check-out.

Imagine how this could be used:

Before he leaves that store, a consumer might someday pass an “intelligent end cap.” This smart store display knows — based on radio tomographic imagery, enhanced by RFID data sent to it — when to light up. The end cap would know the consumer has a yard rake, and offers him the trash bags he forgot to add to his list.

This hypothetical consumer will probably be grateful, since he really did need the bags for his yard project. And after all, he was just a blob of color moving through the store.

Ironically, this is the level of detail being used for most online behavioral targeting. This is the “privacy invasion” that is causing such a fuss on Facebook and elsewhere.

Over time, consumers will become more comfortable with behavioral targeting’s perceived betrayal of privacy.

That will leave only one valid objection the technique: They just don’t want to buy more stuff.