Manu Ginobili Catches a Bat During a Spurs Basketball Game

You need to see this!!!

 

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Found a great article from Mashable.com    If you haven’t seen their site, go to http://www.mashable.com  – great stuff!

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Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

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ROI Reality Check

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Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation (below), before you proceed with this post.

 

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

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Defining Clear Goals

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As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

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Metrics Tools

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Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.

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Sentiment Analysis

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Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.

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Social Media Product Suites

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These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.

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Making the Data Usable

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This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

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What do you think?

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What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media? Let us know!

10 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

Found a good blog post from David Cancel.  If you like this post, try his blog at www.DavidCancel.com

These are the 10 books that I believe every entrepreneur should read:

1. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law – LLC vs C-corp vs S-Corp? Founder’s vesting? Liquidation Preferences? Equity vs Debt financing? This book will educate you enough to be able to answer these and many other important questions.
2. Bootstrapping Your Business – From the founder of RightNow.  The amazing story of how a geographically-challenged (Montana) entrepreneur built a world class business.
3. Purple Cow – Dead simple premise, the key to marketing is to build something remarkable.
4. The Art of the Start – The Art of Pitching, Marketing and Funding your Startup.
5. The Innovator’s Dilemma – If your startup beats all the odds and becomes hugely successful prepare yourself for the innovator’s dilemma, cannibalize your product before someone else does.
6. The E-Myth Revisited - How-to create a business not a job.
7. Permission Marketing - The greatest marketing asset your startup can build is the permission to  market to your customers and prospects.
8. Growing a Business – Sincere advice for creating a company culture that your team and customers will love.
9. The Cluetrain Manifesto – Successful marketing is a conversation.
10. Bottom-up Marketing - Pure bottoms-up execution. Marketing tactics to grow your business.

And please don’t build your website without reading these books:

1. Always Be Testing
2. Designing for the Social Web
3. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
4. Don’t Make Me Think
5. Call to Action

Do you have any favorites that I’ve missed?

How You Can Use Foreclosures to Stengthen Your Retirement Plan

Yes, you can take advantage of possibly the greatest time to buy real estate – EVER to beef up your retirement plans.

Check out the video below:

Click Here for More Information How You Can Easily Purchase Foreclosures with Retirement Funds or Just as a Great Investment

Are You Being “Nickel and Dimed” to Death??? I Bet You Are!

I ran across this video that shows a few of the tricks of the trade. By the way, debit cards are a HUGE source of income for banks – they use a “courtesy overdraft” by allowing charges that should be declined to go through – wait until you see how much that “courtesy” costs you!!!

 

Click on the picture to see What I'm Talking About!!!

How to Use Your Mobile Phone for Internet Access on Your Laptop

Want to know how you can use your mobile phone to get your laptop connect to the internet?   for FREE???

Watch the video below!

The Beginners Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog

Here’s A GREAT article I found on Lifehacker.com.   They have some really great articles – Hope you enjoy – good stuff!!

http://www.lifehackercom

Gina Trapani, 9:00 AM on Wed Sep 23 2009, 6,713 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

What You’re In For

With all the hype around cloud computing and no-configuration-required hosted services, you don’t hear about the joys of running great software on your own server very much. The fact is, if you’re just a casual user who doesn’t know if you’ll stick to blogging over the long haul, or if you don’t want to spend a little time maintaining WordPress, you should sign up for a hosted blog at WordPress.com or Blogger or TypePad. (Also, this tutorial is not for you.)

But if you’re willing to keep WordPress updated religiously, you get access to a whole world of WP plug-ins that add features to your site, the opportunity to create and tweak custom WordPress themes, and a huge sense of accomplishment. In version 2.8 and greater, keeping your installation up-to-date is a matter of clicking a link when you get notified to do so.

Everything you need to know about installing WordPress is right here. Got it up and running? Let’s get to customizing.

Initial configuration

The first thing you want to do on your WordPress blog is set up a new author with administrative access. Don’t use the default “admin” user to write your posts; create your custom username and give it admin privileges. Then, log out of WordPress and back in as your new username. For security reasons, some folks like to delete the admin user completely (as some WordPress attacks have used it to do bad things to your blog). Once you’ve got your administrative account working, add other authors to the list of users who might be posting to your blog.

Now it’s time to cruise through WP’s settings area and configure things just how you like ‘em. First, set up your post permalinks to look prettier for both humans and search bots. WordPress’ default post permalink looks like http://example.com/?p=123. Instead, under Settings>Permalinks, select something like http://example.com/2009/09/welcome-to-my-blog.

Next up, configure how you want comments to work on your blog. Under Settings>Discussion, you can enable comments and set other advanced options, like whether or not users have to be logged into your site to comment, or if comments should automatically close on posts after a certain number of days, if user avatars show up, or what words in a comment should automatically mark it as spam.

Speaking of, spam comments is a ridiculously epic problem across the internet for all blogs, so how you set up comments will mean the difference between miserable hours spent gardening V14gRa and “check out my sexy webcam!!” comments or not. Coming from Lifehacker’s “must register to post here” model, I checked off “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” If you don’t want to put up the registration hurdle in front of your commenters, make sure you install the Akisment spam-killing plug-in (more on that below).

Must-have plug-ins

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. The plug-ins that you use will depend on how you want your site to work and look, but here are a few that every WP user can benefit from. When you’re logged into WordPress, click on Plugins, and search for the name of the plug-in you want to install (which you can do without involving your FTP client). Here are some of my picks:

WordPress Database Backup (Backup): Running your own server and database means that if things go wrong, it’s up to you to have a backup. This plug-in can email a full backup of your WordPress database on a schedule to an address you specify. I’ve had great success building my WordPress site locally with the backup this plug-in created; however, the other resident WP expert here on staff, The How-To Geek, recommends using the old-school cron job for "mysqldump -uUser -pPassword databasename > filename.bak" approach. No matter how you do it, to make sure you’re backing up both your blog’s database and files. It’s worth consulting with your blog hosting provider about the best way for you to do this, too.

FD Feedburner Plug-in (Feeds): Google-owned FeedBurner is a must-use for anyone who publishes RSS feeds, like your blog does. FeedBurner saves you bandwidth costs by hosting your blog’s feed and offers statistics about how many people are reading it; this plug-in will redirect your blog’s feed to FeedBurner for you.

WordPress.com Stats (Stats): See what posts are most popular using this up-to-the-minute statistics plug-in, right inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress.com stats doesn’t count visits to your own blog, and unlike the richer Google Analytics service, there’s no day-long delay to see what’s happening on your site. To run this plug-in, you have to get a WordPress.com API key (it’s free) and enter it into the plug-in’s settings.

Search Meter (Stats): If you have a search box on your site, you’ll want Search Meter, a plug-in which shows you what readers are looking for and finding (or not) on your site. Search meter also offers widgets you can add to your site which shows readers what other readers are searching for.

WP SuperCache (Optimization): The first time a highly-trafficked site like Digg links to your blog, you’ll wish you had installed this plug-in, which maintains high-speed, database-call free “cached” copies of your WordPress pages on your server. Your site will run faster and won’t buckle under the strain of a lot of traffic if you’re caching it with this excellent plug-in.

Akismet (Comments Spam killer): Because comment spam can get so bad, WordPress now ships with the Akismet spam filtering plug-in. Since I’m requiring user registration to leave comments on my WordPress blog, I don’t have any experience with how good Akismet is (and haven’t had any spam at all), but word on the street is it’s absolutely essential for sites with open comments. Like WordPress.com stats, Akismet requires a WordPress.com API key.

Finally, to make your site as accessible to Google and other web search engines as possible, a few Search Engine Optimization SEO plug-ins help. I use All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.

Make Your WordPress Theme Yours

If you’ve got HTML and CSS chops, you can make your WordPress theme sing your tune. (For advanced stuff, some PHP skills come in handy, too.) First you want to start with a base theme. WordPress’ default theme is ok, but if you google “free WordPress themes” or take note of what themes sites you like already use, you’ll find an insane number of gorgeous and eye-catching site layouts. Picking your theme is one of the most fun (and most time-consuming, if it’s tough to make a decision) parts of setting up WordPress, but it’s worth it.

Once you’ve installed the theme you want by downloading the .zip file and putting it in your WordPress themes folder, you can dig into the CSS and markup and make it your own. WordPress offers a theme editor in its interface which lets you update files on the fly. While this is convenient, it’s also dangerous if you hit the wrong key, save the file, and don’t have a backup. My recommendation is to set up WordPress and your theme of choice on your own computer, edit it in your favorite text editor, and upload it to your live server when it’s perfect. I started my WordPress blog with Lucian Marin’s Journalist theme, and made it mine by adding color to the header and tweaking how comments look.

If you’ve got patience and custom HTML you want to turn into a brand new WordPress theme, copy the default theme’s files into a new folder and get to hacking. The WordPress Codex is an invaluable resource for both starter reading and reference as you go. That is, when you get to the part where you’re thinking “WTF is wp_list_comments?”, Google it and you’ll find the function reference at the codex. It took me a full weekend of pretty intense theming work to get my first custom theme done and ready to go live, so give yourself some time, and most importantly, have fun with it. Here are some tips and links from my Twitter followers on creating a custom WordPress theme.

Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My!

The easiest way to customize your WordPress blog without digging into code or your FTP client is to do so with widgets. The latest versions of WordPress offer drag-and-drop custom modules you can add to and remove from your blog. When you’re logged into WordPress’ admin interface, under Appearance, click on “Widgets” to see what’s available and add and remove what you want on your site’s sidebar (or top bar or bottom bar, depending on where your theme puts it).

Advanced trickery

Here’s a few more tips for advanced WordPress hackers who want to troubleshoot or try even more customization:

• Use multiple custom sidebars: WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. (For example, the sidebar that shows up on a post page can look different than the one on the front page.
• Troubleshoot slowness and other problems with Firebug: Every web developer knows that the Firebug Firefox extension is absolutely essential when developing any site, and it’s true for WordPress, too. When my WP site went down because of multiple background 404’s doing resource-sucking searches, Firebug revealed the problem and so I knew how to fix it.
• Use tags to display content differently: You can use conditional tags to display different types of content on your blog in different ways, like a short link or big photograph. I use has_tag to display “quick links” with smaller inline headlines on my front page by assigning the tag “brief.”
• Set up a “staging” server: Once your blog’s up and running and live, you don’t want to make huge changes to it with the whole world watching. Set up WordPress on your local computer, hack away on your theme and/or plug-ins, then upload your changes when they’re complete and ready.

This post only scratches the surface of WordPress customization possibilities. The good news is WordPress’ open nature and huge community means that you can find the answer to almost any WP question hitting up Google—or in worst case, asking the forums. Special thanks to the author of this CSS Tricks post who also writes the excellent Digging into WordPress, which I referenced for this post.

So what did I miss? What are your favorite WordPress tricks, hacks, themes, plug-ins, security measures, and widgets? Shout ‘em out in the comments.

Hollywood Speaks Out to Help Health Insurance Companies

Public Service Announce as found on www.funnyordie.com

Check this out – you’ll be glad you did!!!   An “endoresement” for big insurance companies???   You be the judge.

Will Ferrell and Friends "support" insurance companies

  

Critics Slam New “Leno Show”

I personally don’t care what the critics say – I’ve always like Jay Leno and enjoyed his show.  

Leave a comment – did you like the show or not???    Are we seeing the future of TV or will it be the biggest flop for NBC ever???

The Jay Leno Show Premiered Monday, September 14th

Click on the Picture to See the Entire First Episode

TWITTER FEVER: 5 Red Hot Twitter Trends to Track

Another Great Article from Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable

Make sure you check out Mashable.com – they have some really great articles!!

Enjoy!!!!!

Though summer is fast approaching its end, and temperatures may soon get chillier, Twitter is hotter than ever.

In the past, we’ve walked you through Twitter related trends to keep on your radar. We’ve talked about real-time search engines, verified accounts, Twitter giveaways, sponsored tweets, Twitter chat, Twitter payment systems, petitions geared towards the 140 character types, video sharing, OAuth concerns, and big brand missteps on the service.

But Twitter(), by its nature, can be very ephemeral. Just like styles that are in one minute and out the next, so too do Twitter trends evolve over time. That’s why we have a whole new batch of Twitter trends that are currently red hot.

We’ll show you why your Twitter thermometer should be set to map geolocation, prepared for yet another Twitter app to shut its doors, unsurprised to find the demand for content analysis growing, poised for another shocking Twitter policy, and ready to see Twitter on the big screen.

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1. Location-Aware Tweets

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Just a few weeks ago Twitter announced an upcoming set of features and APIs that will make the service location-aware. Once you opt-in, your longitude and latitude will be associated with your tweets.

Location-aware tweets are a monumental development for Twitter and could position it as THE location-based social network, because each tweet will be like a check-in at your location. The volume of data around locations, places, and tweets will be incredibly powerful.

We’ve identified 5 Twitter geolocation features that we want, most of which we think will shape the way Twitter data is aggregated forever. The wait for location-aware tweets shouldn’t be much longer as the developer preview is already out in the wild. In the meantime, you can check out GeoMeme, Schmap.com, and Tweetmondo, for a preview of Twitter apps already toying with Twitter and location.

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2. Twitter Apps Folding

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Just because Twitter applications are relatively easy to build doesn’t mean they’re simple to monetize. In fact, we’ve seen a deluge of Twitter apps invade the Twittersphere, making our Twitter-holic lives easier with iPhone apps, apps to manage multiple accounts, and a myriad of desktop apps. Let’s face it, Twitter apps are practically in excess.

Sure Tweetdeck was able to raise money, but most Twitter apps won’t find the same fate. Case in point, a very successful Twitter app developer and maker of 11 apps — two of which are extremely popular — is ready to close up shop. The apps are currently for sale, and their destiny has yet to be determined.

Another good case study is Tr.im. The URL shortener owes its very existence to the need for tiny URLs in tweets, and yet found it impossible to monetize. So Tr.im decided to shut down, slam Twitter in the process, and saw a huge panic over the potential for lost links. Bit.ly offered to swoop in to the rescue, but Tr.im wasn’t having it. They eventually decided to open up shop again, and ultimately went open source with Nambu renouncing ownership.

If successful and functional Twitter apps are having a hard time making a mint, we’re pretty sure the lesser known and less useful ones aren’t doing so well either. You can expect more of these sad tales in the months ahead.

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3. Twitter Content Analysis

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As Twitter matures, so too does the audience who uses it. Now more than ever social brands need to demonstrate more than just Twitter ROI, which means they’re going to be demanding more than quantitative data.

Now that we’ve figured out how to follow trending topics and chart the rise of follower counts, we all want more. We want to find the influencers on Twitter, get down and dirty with sentiment analysis, and really understand what the Twittersphere is saying in their tweets.

Enterprise level Twitter analysis tools are certainly out there. There’s Techrigy, Omniture, and Neilsen products, however most of them have tacked Twitter analytics on as an after-the-fact tweet stats measurement extra. But Twitter is no longer the afterthought, it’s hit prime time status.

We’ve already talked about the different qualitative Twitter content and sentiment analysis tools on the market, and we love that Twitter behavioral and sentiment analysis, along with opinion tracking, is here. But now that these tools have arrived, you can expect heightened competition between toolsets to arise, and even more demand from consumers and professionals hoping to understand what’s being said on Twitter.

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4. Twitter Policies

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If the relationship between sports and social media has taught us anything, it’s that Twitter is feared. The medium can be used to share bite size news to a public audience practically in real-time, and that can be scary for all types of businesses.

The Marines can’t tweet on the military’s network, the Associated Press has a super strict social media policy that prohibits employees from tweeting their political views, and the Wall Street Journal tells their staff that “business and pleasure should not be mixed” on Twitter.

Twitter has also already forced the hand of ESPN, the NFL, the SEC, and the US Open, all of whom have created social media policies with brazen Twitter clauses. It’s just the beginning. Especially since we know that there’s already been a 20% increase in companies blocking social media sites.

There’s nothing wrong with having Twitter policies, in fact, we have some great tips to keep in mind should you be writing a social media policy for your company. But hopefully we’ll see reason prevail as it pertains to Twitter guidelines in the future. For now, though, you can expect Twitter to be enemy number one in many social media policies.

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5. A Twitter Star is Born

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Once upon a time Twitter was for the tech set, the geeks, and the IRL socially inept. Today Twitter is mainstream, and definitely in demand when it comes to mobile phone accessibility.

Want a little proof? Just turn on your TV. Twitter is making the rounds in some major ad campaigns. In fact, Twitter is fast becoming the overbooked celebrity who has a cameo in everything, and it’s not about to change any time soon.

For starters, there’s the Sprint Now Network spot with the cutesy Twitter stats, Best Buy’s been pimping their Twelpforce in adverts, and Twitter even makes a very brief appearance in a SoBe Lifewater commercial.

But our all time favorite happens to be the Verizon ad with the Twittering dad. Yep, Verizon gets Twitter (we tweet that we’re sitting on the patio too), and they get that updating Twitter is becoming important to more mobile phone customers, especially since Apple’s iPhone has a gazillion Twitter apps, and is currently only available to AT&T customers.

Of course commercial work is just the beginning really. You can take our word for it that Twitter will move on to bigger and better cameos on the small and big screens. It’s just their celebrity destiny.

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More Twitter resources from Mashable:

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- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
- HOW TO: Find a Job on Twitter
- HOW TO: Do Good on Twitter
- 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter

Thermometer image courtesy of iStockphoto(), jimd_stock; warning sign photo from hugosimmelink, on Flickr().