A few months ago, I shared one of those ubiquitous eMarketer charts showing how marketing execs measure the effectiveness of social media. Today, I ran across a new chart showing the top metrics marketers are using for online engagement.

An article in the new Fast Company explains that there is typically little, if any, accountability demanded of social media. And it’s interesting, in terms of actual prospects coming to your site, that the top metric most marketers are using is click-throughs, which shows you the dependence of marketing pros on paid search. While we understand the utility (and handy reporting) of PPC, we’d like to see lead gen and ROI as equally important.

After all, when you’re paying for clicks, and reporting click-throughs without disclosing bounce rates and time on the site, there’s very little real accountability. Since traffic is a direct effect of site optimization, we’re very glad to see that in the #2 position…because marketing drives traffic, and search marketing does it at less expense than any other medium.

We’re increasingly seeing this request from clients, which is to be expected when they’re spending hard cash on soft marketing. This eMarketer table shows the change in the expectations of CMOs from 2010 to 2011 (original source was Austin’s original Bazaarvoice and their CMO Club Survey).

The most interesting change is the DOUBLING of the expectation that increased conversions are a reasonable measure of SMM effectiveness. In B2B marketing, there’s a tripling of the use of increased channel sales as a measure. It’ll be interesting to see how their marketing departments connect cause and effect on those sales!

To put all this in the proper context, consider this pull quote from the published results of the CMO Club Survey: “However, standard ROI metrics proved difficult to measure for many social efforts; only 40% of CMOs surveyed in 2011 successfully tracked ROI on their social initiatives.” Not saying it can’t be done, but it ain’t easy.

The B2B Technology Marketing Blog posted results of a B2B Marketing poll conducted via their LinkedIn group.  Things like: Integration of social media into lead gen programs; Focus on content marketing, lead quality, sales enablement, pull/inbound marketing tactics, etc.   No gigantic surprises, but predictions are always fun and B2B Marketing Trends seem worth a read to me.

Here’s an interesting little table (you go, eMarketer!) on how Internet users share information…how they publish or share. I saw a tweet yesterday that 71% of all tweets are ignored (meaning a 71% drop in Twitter’s imaginary market value, I guess), but it’s fascinating to look at demographic penetration and see what’s really happening. Too bad some other social media weren’t called out, like LinkedIn. Even with all the news and buzz, we can’t get enough data on actual user behavior to inform our clients’ business decisions.

Thought you marketers might be interested in a little research on how people are using all the tools of the social media trade: email, Twitter, etc. Despite all the buzz, only 4% of internet users are not only doing email, but also are Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

Thanks to the folks at eMarketer for another perceptive perspective.

I’m in charge of coming up with B2B social media marketing strategies for our clients, then helping get the content that makes them work through the process of development and implementation. That means I do a lot of research and exploration to find out what lies in that lovely matrix of customer interest and market opportunity. What I do is all about possibility. It’s about sorting out the puzzle pieces and making something cohesive from them (which I love doing).

My research takes me outside of the things that are my immediate domain because I need to have an understanding of what the client does already and how it’s working, what they’re not doing, and where the opportunities are. There tends to be a pile of “other stuff” that isn’t what we’re contracted to do. If there’s something that really needs attention, we’ll point it out and can help you get it taken care of or refer you to someone who can.

Sometimes, I wish that it was my job to help deal with this pile of “other stuff” that could be done as part of the web marketing strategy. It can be hard to curtail scope creep when you’re really excited about finding a huge, untapped opportunity for a client. You might be wondering how people missed these big opportunities in their own business. They’re often not the most obvious or trendy ways to solve the problem. Or maybe they solve the problem in an unexpected way. What they almost always are is the second right answer.

A Facebook page or Twitter stream might not yield big results for your company. You might not have the time or strategy to market it, maintain interest, and fill it with useful content. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to have some social media in place. Would answering common troubleshooting questions regarding your product or software on tech forums make users less frustrated and inspire brand loyalty? Is checking your reviews on Google, Yahoo!, and Yelp part of your routine? What about responding to customers that had a less than ideal experience?

If you’re intimidated or unable to build and maintain some of the bigger efforts that would boost your company’s web marketing strategy, I challenge you to sit down and think of a dozen things you could do that are second right ideas. Just because they weren’t the first right idea doesn’t make them any less right!

Seems like all our clients are asking the same question these days. They pay us to give them helpful answers, but hey, it’s a Saturday and I have a little free time (because I don’t have Tweetdeck turned on!). My apologies to the Bard:

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler to spend your work hours on Twitter
Following news of outrageous behavior and misfortune,
Or to take to your keyboard and get back to work,
And by un-following, end them. To work, or to tweet
No more; and by an unsubscription to say we end
The dull conceit and the thousand unnatural shocks
The web is heir to — ’tis a mental nirvana
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die to Twitter;
To sleep, perchance to work. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep or work, to what purpose our time,
When we have logged off this persistent stranger,
Freedom must give us pause. There’s the disrespect
That makes calamity of online life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The anonymous poster, the proud arrogant insult,
The pain of willful misunderstanding, manners’ decay,
The insolence of contempt and the spurning
Of patient merit and reasoned conversation,
When we ourselves can our own quiet make
With a blank monitor? who would follow the chatter,
To linkshrink and retweet instead of work,
But that the dread of being laid off,
The unpaid, inactive state from which
No coworker returns, strengthens the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of…

I just listened to a recording of John Jantsch with Duct Tape Marketing, interviewing Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. They covered a LOT of interesting topics related to small businesses and our current economic environment, including why Godin doesn’t Twitter! Godin is a believer in being the best in the world at a few things, rather than being average at a bunch of things. I was multitasking while listening (being average at a bunch of things), and I still got a great deal out of the interview. Seth’s final request of the audience was to “just start” — so, I am hereby just starting by blogging about it! Tell me what YOU are going to start.

I’ll be chairing a panel on Metrics and Measurement at Interactive Austin 2009, and tasked the panel (Ian Strain-Seymour of Apogee Search, Pam O’Neal of BreakingPoint, Michael Wilson of Small World Labs, and Andy Meadows of BudURL fame and Live Oak 360) with coming up with questions we think people will be interested in. We’ve got a couple of search marketing gurus, a couple of guys with companies wrapped around social media marketing, and Pam’s a B2B social media maven, with some great success stories and real-world experience to share.

Please take a few minutes and complete this questionnaire on the topics, focus and specific questions YOU would like to have answered. We will be a much more focused, relevant panel if we can get your input. Hope to see you at IA09!

Click Here to take survey

Ran an interesting little experiment last week, testing the marketing effectiveness of promoting a new free SEO Web Design Tips PDF. Patrick’s blog post was too good not to use as link bait, but as you probably know, you can’t track the downloads of a PDF with on-page analytics tracking code.

However, link shrinking software CAN give you these metrics. Using a $4 account at BudURL, I created two shortened URLs, /SEOWebDesign and /SEOWebDesignTips. Then, I used LinkedIn’s News feature in all the groups I belong to, and sent out an announcement with a link to the new freebie. At the same time, I tweeted the news, using the shorter of the two URLs…at 140 characters, it’s not exactly a press release. I have about 100 followers, and I expected it would get retweeted, hopefully by some of the more popular Twitizens. However, in retrospect, I realized I should have specifically asked that people retweet.

The results? In a week, 271 page visits via LinkedIn, 2 via Twitter. Our site traffic was up 17% for the week, so all-in-all, a decent promotion. I’ll try retweeting the tweet this week with a specific retweet request, and see what we get.

I don’t think I’m any more well-known on the marketing groups on LinkedIn than among my Twitter peeps, but it’s certainly true that the audience self-selected in LinkedIn groups is better targeted. When you think about social media, don’t forget that you still need affinity, interest and motivation to see results…and, that if you measure your results, you can learn a lot about where you should be spending your time.