I have the coolest job in the world.

Seriously.

As co-host of Comet Radio, I get to talk to some of my biggest heroes in the profession. George Wright, VP of Marketing and Sales for Blendtec, is one of those heroes.

If you haven’t seen Will it Blend? before now, you may be living under a rock.

It is one of the best (and my favorite) examples of what makes social media so powerful for brands – resulting in direct and measurable business results.

Described by Entrepreneur.com as one of the 13 best marketing ideas of all time, George Wright’s Will it Blend? viral marketing campaign has changed the face and the future of online marketing. Seen by more than 400 million people on the Internet and reported on by traditional media outlets like the Today Show, the Tonight Show, the History Channel and The Big Idea, Will it Blend? continues to deliver unprecedented corporate awareness through social media channels.  This new form of marketing has delivered a 700 percent increase in sales for Blendtec, a small Utah based blender manufacturer, with an initial investment of $50.

But here’s the kicker: George will be a keynote presenter at the upcoming PR + Social Media Summit co-hosted by Comet with Marquette University on April 8th. And he has a few surprises in store for that event. You won’t want to miss it. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

Billed as a PRSA Master Class, the Social Media Measurement: Establishing ROI presentation did not disappoint. This presentation was absolutely bursting at the seams with nuggets and valuable insights, if you can type or write quickly enough to get them all down. This stands in stark contrast to many introductory-level social media talks that often claim to offer more than the most obvious of observations, yet fail to deliver. If guilty of anything, Katie Paine was guilty of fire hosery — sharing so much good information that the time allotted simply wasn’t enough to take it all in. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.)

Katie opened her talk with a slide containing nearly 15 bulleted proof points demonstrating the shift away from advertising and toward social media, yet the sophistication of measurement and proof hasn’t caught up in the marketplace. She cited data from several studies and sources, each building a more persuasive argument that measurement of ROI as we know it must change.

Here are what I consider the top four nuggets from the presentation.

Nugget #1: It’s about engagement, not number of eyeballs.
In building her argument, she came right out and stated that the days of public relations agencies using AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) to prove ROI are dead. While this has likely been true for a long time, the advertising platforms of yesterday are ceasing to exist and are no longer reaching the intended audiences, rendering them ineffective.

I’d take the argument a step further to say that AVE was never relevant to public relations, but rather the use of AVE by public relations professionals was an attempt to relate value of completely unrelated activities — to somehow borrow legitimacy bestowed upon advertising and apply it to public relations in an effort to argue for more comparable budgets.

Nugget #2: So how do you measure engagement?
So here’s where Ms. Paine dug down into the really meaty content of her presentation. She made the point that, as in all ROI measurement scenarios, you must first agree on a definition of your intended outcomes. Many people today are looking at online activities and measuring the wrong things. Counting the number of Facebook Fans or number of Twitter followers is more of the same: counting eyeballs. These numbers give you no indication of your impact upon your audience. Are they commenting? Are they sharing your content on your behalf? Are they endorsing or recommending? Are they contributing their own content to your online properties?

To measure impact, you should be measuring the indicators that your message is getting through to your audience. And when Ms. Paine says measuring these things, she means actually counting them. It’s not that complex, but it takes time. If you want to measure the quality of a relationship over time, take a baseline measurement of level/quality of interaction before you begin your efforts (many ways to measure relationships accurately) and compare results afterward. That’s measurement. Not a guess. Not an observation. A measurement.

Nugget # 3: How to actually measure ROI for social media.
What’s your “R”? What return — or response — are you wanting to impact? Increase in Web visits? Encourage coupon pass-alongs? Elicit product endorsements? Increase in online sales? In each case, the metric must be relevant to the intended return/response.

What’s your “I”? What investment have you made or will you make? These should include personnel, agency compensation, senior staff time and opportunity cost, among others.

Once you’ve defined your measurables, it’s simple. Measure those things and do the math.

Nugget #4: How do you increase engagement?
Since engagement is an important part of what is being measured in social media, consider how you encourage interaction. Katie defined a comprehensive set of 27 different types of conversations that can take place online, yet the research she shared showed that a very small subset of those 27 actually elicit responses and engagement. This small subset that elicited the most responses and engagement included: asking a question, sharing research, offering an opinion, expressing dissatisfaction and sharing personal information.

Lesson: Online engagement can be easily impacted by shifting how you present the information you share to include these types of conversation-starters more often.

Overall, the presentation offered in-depth insights into the structure of the argument for redefining what to measure, and how to measure success within social media. There’s a reason more people aren’t doing it correctly — it takes a shift in paradigms from what we have been conditioned to measure in marketing and public relations. New media requires new thinking. And new thinking requires enlightenment.

Her slides are posted here on slideshare.net

This blog post can also be found here, on the PRSA ComPRehension blog.

While it’s true that most social media sites offer measurability and trackability in ways that offline marketing efforts wished they could, it’s not always easy to stay on top of all the various content and its viral spread. Enter, stage left: Shoutlet, Sway’s Web 2.0 marketing platform. It’s been a long time since Al and I have gotten this jazzed about a social media tool. One of the biggest challenges companies face with social media is measurability and proving ROI. Shoutlet manages content distribution and tracks everywhere it goes from there, all from one place. It’s a social media marketer’s dream.

Shoutlet’s promotional material can speak for itself:

Shoutlet is a comprehensive social media marketing tool that combines the most popular Web 2.0 formats into one easy-to-use application. Users create, distribute, and track e-mail, video, RSS, SMS (mobile messaging), podcasting, and widgets through one simple, web-based application.

What’s even more interesting than life with Shoutlet is Jason’s take on where social media is going next. So while many are running like crazy to stay on top of what’s already out there, he’s working on what’s coming up next.

We’ll talk with Jason about what he’s learned through his interactions with clients on the topic of social media and we’ll dig in to get his predictions for what we should anticipate next in the world of online marketing.

We hope you’ll join us for the show. As usual, we welcome your thoughts, comments and questions before, during and after the show. We’ll be taking your questions/comments live on Twitter during the show. Tweet them to @alkrueger and/or @sarameaney.

You can read the posts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the Prequel.

I suppose the inspiration for the topic came from personal experience, having been the boss on the client side of things and wanting to do a good job of vetting great ideas from the team before championing them, and having had bosses at points in my career who didn’t always get it when I went to them with new and (what I believed to be) innovative ideas. From an agency perspective, it’s important to keep in mind that clients also need to be able to make the case for social media internally in order to achieve support from their bosses, company executives and/or board of directors.

Sometimes, the timing just isn’t right for a new initiative. Sometimes, the boss just isn’t going to get it no matter how well you prepare for the conversation. Sometimes, there just isn’t the budget to pull it off. And sometimes even the best idea isn’t approvable. But in the end, it comes down to putting things in terms of what matters most to the boss(es): the bottom line. Return on investment.

When it comes to contemplating any new approach or strategy, a smart boss is going to test the idea – and your preparedness to defend the idea – before agreeing to support it or dedicate resources to it. So hopefully this ongoing discussion will help us all keep in mind that we’re all working toward the same end game – a solid, relevant, strategic approach to social media.

Please tune in to join the discussion. We encourage you to share your own experiences with this particular challenge and would love to hear from you before, during or after the show with your comments and questions.

As always, we will be taking live questions via Twitter: @alkrueger or @sarameaney

So why should you and your organization leverage social media to build your business? Big question. To get closer to an answer, let’s start with how social media differs from more traditional marketing methods such as trade shows, direct mail, print advertising and cold calling.

The difference between social media marketing and traditional media marketing is a bit like the difference between talking with people at a business conference and talking to yourself in the mirror. At the conference you’re going to engage in discussions and gain fresh perspectives from new contacts. The person in the mirror will agree with everything you say, whether you’re right or wrong and whether you have all the facts or not. Very little is gained in the latter exchange. That’s not to say that daily self-affirmations aren’t valuable; Jack Handey and his Deep Thoughts serve a purpose. They simply don’t accomplish the same things as conversations with other people do.

The recent social media boom has changed the way people seek and consume information in a huge way. Yesterday, my business partner, Al Krueger, and I hosted Brian Halligan and Mike Volpe of Hubspot on the Comet Branding Radio Show.

Those guys really know their stuff and shared a lot of insights into the many benefits of what they call Inbound Marketing, or marketing tactics that focus on helping companies get found on the Internet by their target customers and convert those leads to sales. AS they explain it, inbound marketing takes place largely through search engines, social media and the blogosphere.

Some of the insights the Hubspot guys shared make a very compelling argument for social media. My jaw nearly hit the floor when they shared that inbound marketing strategies were shown to result in a 61% lower cost per lead than outbound (or traditional media) marketing. Talk about an ROI argument! Your boss is gonna eat it up!

People of all ages are turning to Web-based resources to gather information relevant to virtually every aspect of their lives. The Internet is also changing how people interact with each other and with the products and services they want and need. It only makes sense that you get into the game.

I’m not delusional. I’m painfully aware that convincing senior management to approve your plan is not always going to be easy. But to get you started, here is a list of strategic reasons why you should include social media in your marketing mix. You’ll help your case a bit if you do your homework and compile some supporting materials and examples of each of the following as they pertain to your company and your industry.

1. Social media is very measurable. Even more so than some traditional media marketing. So much so that it’s possible to adjust and improve upon your approach based on nearly real-time response rates. And many interactions can be tracked all the way from initial touchpoint to close of a sale. It doesn’t get any better than that.

2. Social media is flexible and customizable. Your brand can take on as many customer touchpoints as your company is able to manage effectively. Social media is useful for multiple people within an organization, not just marketing and PR. Product managers, customer service, senior executives and junior staff can all play a strategic part.

3. It’s possible to deploy many social media-based strategies for *less money and better results (*Hubspot) than traditional media strategies.

4. Social media allows you to expand your customer base and establish deeper connections with your existing customers, increasing loyalty and building an army of brand ambassadors. This is accomplished through the use of personality and storytelling in lieu of hard-selling and one-way information pushes.

5. Your competition may already be using social media, shaping the industry discussion or possibly even telling your story for you- in a way you would not necessarily appreciate.

6. Your employees are already using social media, maybe even on your behalf, without your oversight or knowledge. It is possible to leverage their knowledge, their personal and professional networks and their savvy to increase your company’s reach in a positive way. Just ask any Zappos.com employee. Nuff said.

7. Your customers are definitely online and many are actively using social media, searching for information and support. They need someone to give it to them. Add value to their search, and they’ll become advocates, not just customers.

We believe that people prefer to interact with other people, rather than with faceless brands and companies. True, a strong brand can offer the promise of certain human traits or aspirations, attributed to the brand by both advocates and critics. But only a select few brands have been successful at establishing a sustainable, personal connection with their audiences. Social media makes this possible in ways other media forms only wish they could. You just have to be ready to share your brand’s story in an engaging way and listen + respond to what people have to say about it.

In an upcoming post, I’ll explore some of the questions you can ask of yourself and your organization to determine whether you’re really ready to take on social media as well as the steps to take to prepare for the best possible outcomes. Stay tuned.

Guest Blogger,  Sara Meaney, Partner | Left Brain of Comet Branding.

This isn’t a “Social Media for Idiots” post or one that is designed to make fun of clueless bosses. There’s already enough material to cover both of these topics quite well.

When preparing to talk about a social media strategy for your organization, think about things from your boss’s perspective. What outcomes would make her (and you) look like a rock star? Focus on addressing those. It will take some effort to create a case for your specific organization, but it will pay off.
As a reference point, keep this equation in mind:

Little Money + Low Boss Time Commitment + High Return on Investment = Good Place to Start.

Here are several strategic points to consider when building your case:
•    Focus on the strategic reasons WHY to use social media instead of the tactical HOW to use it. It’s easy to get sucked into HOW to use Twitter, for example, but that isn’t really going to help your strategic argument. You can always schedule another time to give a HOW tutorial.
•    Research the demographics and user trends of the social media channels you intend to recommend. Show her user demographics that will appeal to your company’s needs.
•    Take time to figure out who is talking about your company or product in the social media space and where, when and why the conversations are happening. If you can demonstrate the conversation is happening without you, it strengthens your plea to get involved.
•    If NO ONE appears to be talking about you, but they’re talking about your competitors, the same argument applies. It’s also possible that your industry or product doesn’t yet have an active community online, possibly because it doesn’t yet have a host or a home. You can be the first to give it to them. Game on.
•    Show how your competitors are using it successfully or otherwise. That’ll increase the importance of discussion very quickly. Build an arsenal of examples of well-done Facebook pages, Twitter personas, and brands in your space that are leading the way. Just make sure you’ve thought about what you might do to differentiate from and/or improve upon what’s there.
•    Make sure you translate the outcomes to the business objectives of most interest to your department and your organization as a whole. Demonstrate the anticipated tangible business outcomes your boss can expect from a successful effort – and how you’ll report on them. Show the correlation between the effort/cost associated with engaging in building a social media presence and community with your brand or product in a meaningful and measurable way: number of new business leads, increased Web traffic, measurable uptick in brand awareness in target demographic, improved search engine rankings, trackability of click-throughs, etc.
•    Remember to discuss the timeline to the payoff. It helps if your boss knows how long she’ll have to wait before she can claim responsibility for your brilliance.

With careful planning and thoughtful research, you can convince even the staunchest doubters to give social media a try. In these days of tight budgets and lean staff, it would be a lost opportunity to NOT take a closer look at how social media could benefit your business. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as you wave the flag for social media in your organization.