How To Embrace Web 2.0 - Part 4 - Monitor And Learn As You Go

Evaluating social marketing is different than just counting Web site usage or circulation numbers. You want to measure how well your social marketing is doing at engaging the public via social media. And you should measure both the amount and the intensity of the engagement.

Obviously, if you have succeeded at suggestions in my previous posts, such as Be Remarkable, and you have needed to increase your hosting package to accommodate 5 million viewers since your message went viral, then it would be fair to evaluate your efforts as WORKING!

However, social marketing can be very subtle in showing results, and in some cases you will find that the volume of traffic is not what increases. In fact, the QUALITY of the people visiting your site may be where you find significant differences. This is because the very nature of social marketing involves a kind of “recommendation service”.  Your users are actually referring you customers, and for that reason you may find sales increasing, without any traffic increase at all.

Here are some examples of what you need to monitor:

• How many blog readers do you have?
• How many comments are posted by how many different visitors?
• How many people mention your site/product on their blogs, and how often? • Are search engine results predominantly positive or negative?
• Is your content bookmarked in social bookmarking sites?
• How many friends and contacts do you have on your profile in social networking sites?
• How many comments or vote entries are you receiving?
• How many visitors contribute content to your site (videos, photos, documents, wiki entries)?

Try to think in terms of increasing the answers to the above questions rather than just increasing traffic. This may be as simple as ending your blogs with words such as –

“I hope you found this helpful. Kindly [digg, stumble, propel] this site for me, and I will keep producing informative blogs for you in the future”.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with asking for a vote of confidence.  Also, finish each blog and ask a couple of friends or colleagues to post a comment that you respond to. Not a wishy washy, “I liked this article”, comment.  Something more challenging – posing a question or even a little conflict. You then swiftly answer that question, re-instating yourself as an expert on your subject.

This can often ‘pepper’ your post and set it up for several comments and votes.

So on that note… before I go today…

“I hope you found this helpful. Kindly [digg, stumble, propel] this site for me, and I will keep producing informative blogs for you in the future”.

Wink Wink!