Today at the sold out SoCon10 I am giving the presentation you see below entitled "Measuring Social Media ROI: An ATDC Case Study."
The genesis of the presentation is twofold. First and foremost in the summer of 2009 there was a lot of talk about how you could not or should not measure the return of your social media efforts. I do not believe either to be the case. Second, Stephen Fleming become the acting director of ATDC and decided we were going to change strategic direction. He announced this at a Monday staff meeting and wanted it implemented in seven days. That time frame pretty much limited our marketing efforts to online and we exclusively relaunched via social media This provided a great opportunity to demonstrate that social media ROI could be calculated and how to go about doing it.
I have been involved in the Internet industry a long time. Much much longer than most people reading this ever heard of Netscape. Much much longer than most people reading this have been online.
Well a long time ago in a place far far away the evil empire with its death star logo known as AT&T came into the Internet access market and dropped prices by 40%, wiping out the profit margins for the startup where I was working at the time.
One of our strategies for fixing this problem was to create what we called incremental revenue. Revenue from things other than access. And we dreamed up all kinds of services that we could upsell our customer base on. And being good little marketers we toted this ideas into a room with M&M's and a one way mirror so that we could watch our customers reaction to our brilliant ideas.
Within minutes our plans were dashed. One participant pretty quickly declared "I can find it for free at..." to a quick discussion and nodding of heads. This was repeated over and over again. It has been repeated over and over again in every research project that I have been involved in on the subject. People don't want to pay for content on the Internet because they believe, they know, they can find it somewhere for free.
I bring this up as the fact that Newsday has garnered a total to 35 subscribers to its paywall service in the last 90 days. Nine thousand dollars in revenue on a web property that cost $4 million (an ungodly sum) to redesign and relaunch.
People will not pay for Internet content that they can find for free elsewhere. Trying to get them to do so is foolish.
Social publishing is an interesting area of the Internet these days. By social publishing I am referring to web sites where users can post their original documents and share them with the world. These documents can then be commented on, downloaded, embedded, indexed, ranked, and shared by others. The services are typically integrated with the big three of social media so that with an engaged audience the documents can get fairly broad distribution. Two of the more well known social publishing services are SlideShare and Scribd.
A couple of years ago I waded into social publishing on SlideShare. I uploaded a presentation on the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition Work. To my surprise the rather ordinary deck garnered hundreds of views. I then put my BarCamp presentation "That's What You Twittered." This much more interesting deck has over 1,000 views. All in all my the presentations I have uploaded to SlideShare have garnered over 8,000 views.
Well during the last makeover of FoG I decided to make some changes to the about section. Specifically I wanted to change the way my formal bio and resume were presented, primarily to make them more of online reputation management devices. Through Marta Kagen's SlideShare presentation, What The F**K is Social Media I had come across her personal site. She had her bio and resume on Scribd. I liked it, it seemed to rank well, so I decided to do the same. It worked. The resume consistently ranks as a top search engine result and has been viewed a thousand times in the last year.
So last Fall when we were doing a major overhaul of atdc.org to fit the organization's new strategic direction, Blake Perdue uploaded eight of ATDC's resource documents to Scribd. Our primary objective is doing so was brand building, to make more people in the startup community more aware of ATDC and the type of things it does. Those documents have had nearly 30,000 reads in just over five months. These reads are being driven by Google search results. The docs are top results on the search phrases executive summary template and positioning statement among others. Strong stuff that is helping to build the brand of ATDC as a leading technology accelerator. We are currently in the process of tweaking the docs a bit to determine how to best use them as online reputation management tools as well.
These experiences demonstrate that social publishing is an effective tool that can work well for both individuals and organizations. You should make it a part of your online marketing mix.
I am working with a small are a small seed funded start-up out of Georgia Tech's College of Computing that is investigating an approach to take advantage of
modern, large scale, multi-touch displays. They are looking to hire a
small number of programmers to help develop an innovative
multi-touch document visualization and interaction system.
Right now, they are interested in hiring on an approximately 3 month
contract basis, although they may be interested in extending that if
circumstances allow.
Required:
* Two to three years of professional development experience.
* Two to three years experience with .NET and C#.
* Extensive experience with object oriented software engineering, design patterns, and the software design life-cycle.
* Extensive experience with Windows Presentation Foundation.
* Comfortable with basic linear algebra.
* User Interface development experience.
* Strong experience with collaborative development.
* Proactive and independent worker.
* Although you can work from home, you should be in the Atlanta area.
Desirable:
* Experience with computer graphics development.
* Multi-touch development.
* Expertise with text/document layout and rendering.
The software project is in an early iteration and
has recently been tested thoroughly with potential users. The results
of the evaluation pointed to numerous modifications and additions that
must be made to the software--so we are interested in hiring someone to
help us re-architect and significantly add to this application.
Currently, the system is entirely client-side, written in C#, and
largely built on WPF.
Multi-touch is pretty hot at the moment. This could be a really fun project. If you are interested contact me and I will get you connected with the company.
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The topic of the night was developing a marketing plan. That is a really challenging task to undertake for a new venture. Too many unkowns. Unkowns that are best solved via the customer development process. Regardless it is a business plan competition. They have to write something. Hopefully the audience walked away with some good thoughts on how to write a rational well thought out marketing plan that will help them in the competition and move their business along. More importantly I hope they got the message to get out of the classroom and go talk to customers.
Going to try a new thing for FoG in 2010. Sponsorships. Going to leap not creep. Only accepting sponsors that fit what FoG is all about. The cost to be featured on FoG is as follows:
Size
Time
Cost
125 ×125
3 months
$1,500
125 ×125
6 months
$2,250
125 ×125
12 months
$3,000
In addition to the ad unit the sponsor will have the opportunity to submit one approved guest post per quarter. Approved as in has to have meaningful content for the audience. Not spammy.
Why sponsor FoG?
To get exposure to a large network of entrepreneurs, startup companies, and leaders in the Georgia technology community.
What are FoG's statistics? I don't watch this stuff closely but it looks something like this:
About 5,000 unique visitors a month
Conversation index of .45.
Not big, but engaged. I venture to say the largest and most engaged independent blog focused on entrepreneurship and marketing in Atlanta. Perhaps the Southeast.
If you have an interest in sponsoring FoG you can contact me here.
I'll be darned of I know. But I am going to make my way out to the Ashford Club on Thursday night to hear Fred Sturgis of HIG, Mike Elliott of Noro-Moseley, Nelson Chu of Kinetic Ventures, David Sung of ATDC, Tuff Yen of Seraph Group, and Said Mohammadioun of Tech Operators discuss where the investment opportunities lie at the Wireless Technology Forum meeting. This panel pretty much includes every VC firm in Atlanta. Come on out and learn directly from the guys that are writing checks.
I hate writing appraisals. I like giving them, and believe that the best way to do so is through day to day conversations. I mean if an employee is surprised by what is in a performance review, it really is the fault of the manager. But I hate writing them.
Regardless, as we enter the new year the performance review season is upon us. As I am doing a self appraisal. One of my objectives is to update and implement the ATDC's marketing plan, manage the ATDC's web properties, and write at least a dozen blog articles. Here's how I did.
A new marketing plan was implemented. The new plan focused almost exclusively on online marketing and the use of social media. Evidence of the success of this plan can be seen in traffic to ATDC web properties. Unique visitors grew 38% to 79,950 from 57,741. Page view growth was even more dramatic, increasing to 283,128 from 149,715 an 89% growth rate. Moreover this traffic generated 478 inquiries for ATDC services versus 231 such requests in the previous year.
The change in ATDC strategy required intense focus on managing ATDC Web properties. A new web site to support ATDC's new strategic direction was launched in seven days and three more versions have rolled out since then. I personally wrote 44 blog articles.
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The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person or entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
