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

We did this video last summer on the basics of social media marketing. Recently, a client got enthused about doing social media, but had no idea where to begin. Another client has no idea what social media is, or why it’s important to their search marketing success. We get prospects, clients and friends asking us very basic questions: Should I be using Facebook? How much time does social media take? How long before I see results? These are real concerns, and you should have a good idea how you WANT to use social media before you start creating Facebook pages for your company, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts and all the rest. Take a quick (3 minute) trip to Search Camp and get some ideas:

Click To Play

I often think about how to get messages to the B2B market on behalf of our clients.  Typical ‘networking’ and ‘lead-generation’ groups I’ve been involved with rarely had B2B participants.  I don’t know if you’d ever see a C-Level executive delivering their “elevator pitch” at your typical BNI meeting. I think B2B decision makers are so entrenched in their day-to-day jobs that they have no time or patience for networking, much less social media outlets.

Then, I stumbled upon “New research: B2B buyers have a very high social participation” on the Groundswell blog site. Groundswell is a book written by two Forrester Research analysts.  Their research shows that 91% of technology decision makers are watching videos and participating in (if only just reading) blogs and other social media outlets.  So, we’ll keep recommending social media strategies to our B2B clients.  I, for one, will feel just a little bit more comfortable doing so with some research statistics under my belt that validate the necessity.

What do you other B2B marketers think?  Are you encouraging your B2B clients to have a blog? post videos? Tweet away the hours?

In the world of being meticulous, it’s important to make good choices about what to ignore.  Sometimes my most important list is the one reminding me of things I’m NOT working on right now.  I’ll cop to employing skepticism as a way to avoid exploring new social media tools / destinations / designations.  Hey, you try being meticulous and getting through a day without skepticism.

But folks, I gotta say it – people talking to each other about big choices, like, say, business-to-business purchases  – pretty much that’s here to stay.  And nowadays people do a lot of that talking online.  Just think of “online social marketing” as a big new trade show all your competitors and prospects have been invited to.  It’s happening every day, all day.  It’s easier to get to than any other trade show – cheaper, too.  Heck, it’s indexed so you don’t even need to carry around a map and schedule.

Now, it may be conducted in a dialect you are just learning to speak, but you know what?  It’s the dialect everyone under 30 grew up speaking.   It may not always be Facebook and Twitter and forums and expert blogs and RSS and user reviews, but the top is propped open on this one – prospects are expecting an online presence more and more every year.

…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “define” social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trend” that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

I happened across an interesting article from Sean Carton with the Clickz Network. It’s titled, “Why Social Marketing Nirvana Escapes our Reach.” Sean talks about the not-so-distant past where businesses were hot to set up “portals.” Portals were sure to keep people coming back … keep them staying on YOUR site … keep them from looking elsewhere for things like news, sports, stock prices, etc. Fortunately, the corporate portal goals have died (and Sean explains why). Unfortunately, the push for the must-have portal sites has become a push for must-have social networking sites. Or, so it seems.

It’s not prudent to create a social networking site just because some businesses are doing it, or because some experts say you have to have one. Your site might do just dandy by only providing customers the information they need to make a purchase decision and the ability to find/buy your products. Of course, you must optimize your site so those customers can find you, but you don’t necessarily have to create a new social “neighborhood” to get – or keep – their attention.

RefreshWeb staffers know an awful lot about social media and we do believe there are benefits to social networks – where appropriate. We’re also good business people and would advise against putting the time, effort and money into something that isn’t strategically important for your business. Are you feeling pressure (from your company or the media) to jump on the newest Internet bandwagon?

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.

My son has mastered the cable remote, which means he’s no longer a captive to Boomerang. Suddenly he can take himself to the rest of the kid’s channels…and be doused in their calculated and scheming heaps of commercials for a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness a friend taught us about “What’s The Lie?” About 15 seconds in to a commercial for sneakers, my son shouts “The lie is that those shoes can make you jump as tall as a building and have cartoons coming out of your feet!” The next one is easy – after a couple seconds he says “The lie is that having that will make a lot of cool-looking kids want to hang out with you.”

The third commercial is for markers made to mix a pair of colors when they write…he has some first-hand data here. “That they work after the first time – that’s the lie,” he says as wryly as a child can be wry. The next up is a public service announcement against kid’s smoking. “No lie in this one, right mom? What’s it called again, a PSA?”

What turns out to be the last commercial in this set is for a boxed set of radio hits from the 70’s. A tough one…My candidate for the lie is that the offered price is a bargain, but what comes through visually is more an assertion that dancing to this music will make you happy…and, well, that’s true.

Here at the office, we more and more frequently are in dialogue about how to assess ROI for the not-quite-so-analytics-friendly tactics - like articles and press releases and blogging, for instance - in our quiver as part of a really thorough web marketing campaign. The ROI here – it has to be about trust, right?

The return on investing the time and resources to educate, inform, inspire, and interact with your customers is that they become invested in your relationship. (Yes, there are benefits that translate into something you can show on a graph or include in a report) The point of these tactics that aren’t exactly marketing isn’t about ROI in the way that PPC advertising campaign management is. The return on that is calculable, downloadable directly from the service in a variety of file formats.

The return on actually sitting down and interacting, on giving away information that helps and enriches your customers, that’s the kind of return you can’t show a direct correlation in a quarterly report. But it is the difference between loving and loathing in a lot of cases. If you go in saying you’re interacting and real, but the whole thing is about ROI and selling, your customers will spot the lie faster than my son can tell you breakfast cereal won’t make you friends with cartoon leprechauns.

Following up on the mention yesterday on the failed interview session Sarah Lacy had with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, here is a play-by-play from CNet. Just so you get an idea of how Tweets work (Twitter posts), here is a screen capture on Tweets about Tom Parish’s panel at SXSW:

I can feel the 60 cycle background hum from SXSW Interactive, with every blogger, pundit and SEM bandit in the interactive world downtown twitting and liveblogging. RefreshWeb’s social marketing maven Tom Parish’s session on social media marketing metrics is covered in Wired’s blog, from the perspective of Meebo chatters sniping away during the session. Learning about the how and why of metrics on social media would take my undivided attention, and I would probably be taking notes on my shiny new MacBook Pro instead of passing notes in the back of the class, but that’s me. I’m at work sending proposals and depositing checks, and the crew is sitting in panels…when they aren’t offsite showing off Austin’s finest bartenders.

From the Wired post: Here at SXSW this year, Meebo-sponsored chat rooms are a major part of the panel-going experience. They provide live feedback on panelists’ performance with all the decorum and kindness you associate with blog comments. Or, in the words of nancy: “Chat room snobbery: high; chat room maturity: low. chat room dorkiness: (through) the roof.”

The big news today is the audience mutiny against Sarah Lacy’s bumbling interview with Mark Zuckerberg, “who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site.” For a penetrating analysis of whassup with the whippersnappers and what it means to marketers, read Thomas Myer’s post: “These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.”