Oracle on Social Listening Analytics
Have you heard the wise saying, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason: what we hear is always at least twice as important as what we say”? Listening, truly understanding what others are saying, has become such a rarity in today’s world. Consumers are constantly bombarded with hyperactive, in your face media; desperate to grab their ever-shrinking, yet coveted attention span. As a brand, rather than force the majority to hit the metaphoric mute button, wouldn’t you rather figure out how to play the perfect tune for your various audiences? If this is your company’s pursuit, then I suggest you (literally) listen up.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Social listening analytics was a new idea for us and we like it.
Curagami Customer Hunt on LinkedIn
Curagami is half app development company and half search marketing agency. We've helped e-commerce and B2B relationship sellers create content, strategies and tactics to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.
We manage content, social media and strategy for 2 to 4 customers a year. We currently have one possibly two openings. We say one possibly two because we never know how much time a client will need to achieve their online marketing goals.
If you need help or know someone who does use our Curagami Customer Hunt form at the bottom of this post to share your story:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curagami-customer-hunt-martin-marty-smith
Buffer's Social Failure / Watershed
Last wee Buffer wrote about losing 40% of their "social traffic". While key metrics such as conversion rates or the value of the lost traffic weren't included their panic was unmistakeable.
Never panic may be the hardest lesson my team and I learned during my 7 year tenure as Director of Ecommerce for a multimillion dollar website. We didn't start that way.
We started as frightened and panic stricken as Buffer. We learned the hard way how little panic matters. The web is MATH and GAMBLING. Sometimes the math turns FOR you and sometimes against.
@Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com makes great points in her LInkedIn post (linked along with my comment with a jump link on Make Buffer's Social Failure Your Success (http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/buffer-failure-your-success.png ). One of my favorite points, and one overlooked by the Buffer team, is LOOK TO THYSELF.
Cendrine points to a harsh new truth - the world is FASTER, LEANER and more VISUAL than before. She notes how poorly Buffer has tuned their content to our new mobile, social and gamified world. Brilliant point well made (as usual form a favorite #mustfollow curator),
My point is Buffer ISN'T asking the right questions in the right way. They assume they want their traffic back, but they don't explain what if any deeper meaning their traffic has to their WHY - the reason they exist, the reason users love them. I point out that if traffic goes down but conversions go UP life is good since Buffer would be paying less for more subscribers.
The abject terror in Buffer's post would seem to indicate conversions are off too. As I noted in my original post, conversions are a TRAILING indicator and so unlikely to be off nearly as much as their traffic. Another way of saying that is losing some of their "social traffic" is nothing but net (good).
If I were part of Buffer's team we would be exploring Cendrine's important point - has our content and so our brand lost touch with our customers? What do we stand for? Why do our customers love us? Why might a new generation of customer love us?
None of those questions seem to be on Buffer's agenda. Instead they are on a "traffic hunt", a mistake so many make since meaningless metrics such as followers, traffic and likes abound. As I point out in our Curagami post - NO METRIC MEANS ANYTHING ON IT's OWN. Every metric is TIED to some other metric.
We tied traffic to money. Our $ by visitor was a great way to VALUE traffic in a meaningful way. When traffic went up or down money per visitor usually trailed. If traffic was down 40% money per visitor was probably down 15% or 20%. Eventually those lines cross or reach zero and you don't want that (lol).
Best way to avoid having your metrics reach zero is to avoid PANIC (it doesn't help and can distract), test, create a new plan, seek input and ask for help. Buffer is doing some of those, but they are using community tactics in a pedantic way - telling instead of showing, asking for help but not curating responses, not handing their keys over to the kids (their community).
So they started GREAT but have slipped back into the solipsism virus that effects so many web marketers. Cendrine's brilliant point about the TYPE of content being created is getting more of an airing on my blogs and social than Buffers (not good).
What about you? Are you experiencing "social traffic decline"? Have you stopped using tools like Buffer recently? Why? What do you think Buffer can do to recover?
Share your answers here, in comments on the Curagami post or email martin(at)Curagami.com and we will curate your thoughts in with a link back. Thanks, Marty
Disrupt Or Die
Sorry you are too late. You won't be able to win the tactical warfare my team and I did. Your ability to create meaningful differentiation with tactics is over. So BURN YOUR WEBSITE DOWN.
Not literally, but we need to SHOCK Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) into an important realization - it's BLUE OCEANS or ELSE. Why bother putting up a 4 page site no one will care about, share, link, like love or think about ever again after they've visited once.
Instead of wasting your TIMEM and TREASURE why not BLOW UP what you think you should be doing, discover blue oceans and create lasting competitive advantage. Costs are the SAME, but one has the shelf life of a May Fly why the other may just provide the ROI needed to do the next cool thing.
You know were we would VOTE and if you are going to miss Exinent's Ecommerce Meetup in the Triangle of North Carolina tonight you can play catch up with our Haiku Deck.
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/marketing/the-new-ecommerce-meetup/ ;
Ecommerce is changing fast. This Scenttrail Marketing post shares and explains 30 "must master" to win ecommerce strategies and tatics.
Want to provide some great unboxing experience for your customers, but don't know where to start? Learn the basics on transforming a package into a gift.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
We think mobile + social makes the "unboxing experience" one of the hidden blue oceans of ecommerce. Why don't more ecom sites have galleries of videos and pictures of people sharing their "unboxing experience". Answer: most online retailers think their job is to sell stuff. Not so much these social / mobile days.
Now our jobs revolve around creating sustainable online communities and finding ways for your customers to share unboxing is like Christmas morning over and over. Why wouldn't you want to SHARE your customers' joy at their unboxing?
Oh, btw, better make sure your unboxing experience over delivers (so ASK for help from your best customers if needed to make your unboxing better).
Social & Mobile Ecommerce
Ecommerce is being transformed by social and mobile. The implications for merchants are VAST. How your Ecommerce site creates conversations and digitally listens will determine its value. No matter how social your online store it isn't social enough for the immediate future.This Haiku Deck can help your site do things like:
* Create conversations that lower costs and increase profits.
* Build an online community.
* Learn to listen "digitally".
* Scale your store to the next level.
* Create an engine that mines User Generated Content.
Can your store be too social? Not so much as it turns out.
Designing Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
Added artist Sara Havey's magical knitting gnome to the fastest "views" Haiku Deck I've ever created (300+ in 24 hours) because it is a perfect example of the New Ecommerce's crowdsourcing and DIY future.
The deck is divided into three sections:
* Current Ecommerce Best Practices.
* Rise of the Social / Mobile Web & Social Shopping.
* Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing and DIY.
Is it possible to create tomorrow's ecommerce website TODAY? Is Sara's gnome knitting? You bet!
New Ecommerce Marty (@scenttrail) Note
I love this post sharing tips from a handful of ecommerce experts. I might fall into that category too after a 7 year tenure during which teams I managed made over $30M in online sales.
Our AOV (Average Order Value) was never more than $62 so hundreds of thousand of transaction. When I was hired the site's sales were below a million. When I left annual sales were over $6M.
Those times weren't EASY either, but they are were in comparison to now. Now ecommerce is complicated by:
* Increased competition.
* Muddled channel marketing ROI strategies.
* Social Media.
* Mobile.
* New SEO.
Add all of those new pressures together, all discussed multiple times in the linked post, and the inescapable conclusion is "easy" is OVER in ecommerce.
We asked experts from different regions of the digital marketing and
eCommerce world this question:
“What can an eCommerce store do to leverage social media to generate
traffic and create new or recurring sales?
The response we received was amazing. 43 experts gave us 75 different tips
on leveraging social media to sell more, and we're sharing them all with
you.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Social media and commerce don't have to be an oxymoron.
Peg Corwin's insight: Learn how web design can affect your brain when you see these:
- Testimonials
- Endorsements
- Social media shares
- Social media widgets
- Trust seals
- Numbers of Happy Customers
- Most Popular Best Seller
- Studies and Stats
- As Seen in Press Mentions
- Reviews
- Plans and Pricing Pages
- Limited Supply
- Early Bird Registration, Countdown Clocks
- Trial periods, free samples
- Colors and action It's fascinating. Click for details and examples.
Quote: "Remember, 100% of your target audience has brains. B2B or B2C, lead generation, or ecommerce, it doesn’t matter. Keep those brains in mind in your marketing. And as consumers, we should be aware of how marketers are taking advantage of our own biases."
If you like this scoop, please consider a thumbs up or share.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Love "neuromarketing" and of the tactics Peg mentions I've used:
* Testimonials. & Endorsements.
* Social Media.
* Trust Seals.
* Counters and thermometers (numbers of happy customers).
* Best Sellers (one of my favs).
* As Seen In mentions (loved it when Oprah got anywhere near our stuff).
* REVIEWS (very important).
* Plans and pricing (or shipping) page especially at holidays.
* Limited supply and EXCLUSIVE. * Deadlines, free trail, gifts with purchase.
So great list and Scoop by @Peg Corwin.
Scale Is The Game & Amazon is WINNING
The web game is different than bricks and mortar. On the Internet scale is what matters. Doubt that? Look at Amazon's amazingly quick catch-up on social media marketing. From laggards to Kings:
* 22M Facebook Likes.
* 1M Twitter Followers. * Traffic Rank #5 (US where lower is better). * 1M inbound links.
* 38M pages in Google.
Amazon doesn't care if it makes money on a particular product because they know scale creates money. Soon they will make more money from their web services than from selling goods.
Amazon had to build a vast network of warehouses and servers. Once that network was built it presented a new revenue opportunity - Amazon web services. Amazon knows they don't find that new pot of gold without their aggressive actions on merchandising and creation of their partner network.
Amazon also knows the people who make the real money in a gold rush are the merchants supplying the shovels and tools. The shovel and tool business is always good as long as merchants are smart enough to know when one thing is almost over in order to move on to the next.
Unfortunately for all Amazon, largely thanks to the Wall Street roots, seems adroit at knowing when to pivot, twist and what dance will be next. Bezos' Wall Street thinking where everything is an arbitrage and you diversify your portfolio, act fast and think long term has helped the company to rule the web.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Set Social Expectations & Then BEAT THEM
Michael Jordan knew how to set expectations and then beat them. I was lucky enough to see him play several playoff games and the superstar could will his game to another level.
There are no secrets on the court or in business today. When Michael Jordan took over a game it was clear what was going on and THAT is what must have made playing against him maddening.
Michael Jordan's Nissan car dealership in Durham could learn a lesson in social media marketing from their namesake. The car dealership recently underwent an extensive renovation that must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the innovations was a much better waiting room with worktables and away from the damn TV. I pulled up next to an AC outlet during my last stay and worked while my car's oil was being changed.
Michael Jordan's Nissan installed a window from the shinny new workroom out to the garage. Great idea, but a loaded gun too (much like social media). Once you show me a window on to your world all things become theater.
The experience of watching my car leave the garage and then NOT to be called to transact the $50 oil change for twenty minutes when I was in a hurry to get to work was frustrating (despite being able to use their Wi-Fi and do work). The window CREATED AN EXPECTATION.
Think of your social media efforts as creating an expectation too. If your company or brand is on social media your customers and supporters have an expectation that you will keep them informed (provide a window into your thinking and actions) and include them in some meaningful way in your process.
"Include in some meaningful way" can mean responding to questions or @yourtwitter notes to forming special teams and requesting feedback from your social channel. Social media is a CONVERSATION and those who listen more than they speak and care more than they don't are using social media marketing to kick the stuffing out of competitors who don't get it.
I asked to see the service manager and he told me he was down three people and offered a free oil change next time. Good (not great) response. The great response would have been to ask me a question and elicit the feedback I'm writing here.
The great response to customer dissatisfaction is to FIND the kernel of the discontent and then learn from it to improve. The manager, so caught up in his own problems, missed a chance to excel like the man whose name is on the building :)
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Common Ecom SEO Mistakes
It is easy to take one step forward and two back with your online store's SEO. Here are 5 common mistakes to avoid.
5 Common E-Commerce SEO Mistakes
1. Poor Titles. 2. Slow Pages.
3. No UNIQUE titles across all pages.
4. No use of Canonical URLS to prevent dupe content. 5. Poor keyword density in navigation.
Titles and H1s matter a lot in these post Panda and Penguin days, so research them. Always start with who is winning top positions now. Also remember you must use a tool like Mike's Keyword Checker to know the absolute position of your pages or your competitors on a keyword phrase due to the Google float.
If you have video or large graphics give some thought to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs are TRICKY, so treat them with care and try to keep your pages LIGHT in code and graphics. CDNs cache your images and so can speed up your page loads, but nothing can help dense, heavy pages with lots of code and multiple layers of Javascript.
Titles MUST be unique. You can use business rules to generate titles, but make sure those rules NEVER create the same title over and over. Remember 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your pages, so you don't have to get 1M page titles perfect. Make sure the pages that MATTER have great titles and you should be fine.
Canonical URLS identify MASTER pages, the pages you want in Google and OTHER pages that shouldn't be included. Duplicating content from outside or inside your site can cause penalties and damage so use canonical urls to stay in Google's good graces (btw it is VERY easy to duplicate content without meaning to spam, so BE CAREFUL).
If your navigation says, "Services" you are nuts. Do you want your website to rank for "services" or Internet Marketing, Email Marketing and SEO? Use keywords in your nav because your nav sits in <a href LINK> tags the most.
DON'T use keywords that aren't appropriate for the category or pages, but be sure KEYWORDS are in your nav
If your business marketing plan doesn't include social media strategies, you're already dead in the water. Why? Because more of your customers are using
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Dead In The Water
Dead in the water indeed since your competitors are out there creating wiht social media, learning what works and building a following. Good luck catching up fast.
NOTHING happens all that fast in social media. You can create great campaigns that boost your social media 10x, but natural growth is SLOW and STEADY.
This means your social media strategy will need to DISRUPT to win and create trust at the same time. Those two ideas can be mutually exclusive so make sure to JUMP IN NOW or double your efforts now.
Rememer if you are not the lead sleddog the view is always the same :).
A key concept in Taoist philosophy, “Yin and Yang” (“shadow and light”) describes forces that are opposites, yet complementary. Social media and search can be described as the Yin and Yang of inbound marketing.
They are opposites:
* social media is powered by people's conversations.
* search engines are powered by machine algorithms.
They are also complementary.
When content links are shared on social media, search engines leverage those social signals to determine search rankings. When search engines drive traffic to content visitors may share that content with their social networks expanding the content's social reach.
Here’s an infographic to illustrate how social media and search are part of the same soul.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Opposite yet complimentary should be a familiar concept to Internet marketers. We must hold opposites but complimentary values such as:
* Increase conversion while decreasing traffic. * Increase sales while decreasing acquisition costs. * Create LESS content that does MORE. * Increase relevance while decreasing your team's work. This last bullet speaks to the contrasting world of ecommerce. How do you increase relevance even as you reduce your team’s input (and so costs)? User Generated Content (UGC) is always the answer to that question (lol).
Great graphic here on the natural contrasting compliments in content marketing.
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