Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

I’m getting cranky about how some folks misuse the acronym ROI (Return on Investment) particularly with regard to the ROI of social media and bloggers.

ROI is a mathematical formula, with results usually expressed as a percentage.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Here it is in its simplest form:

(Return – Investment)
________________
Investment

You cannot determine ROI until you have data for the Return (results) part of the equation, and you must also accurately track the many things that go into your Investment. There’s money, but there’s also time, number of staff members required, etc.

To measure the ROI of, say, a blogger outreach program, you must have:

1) Predetermined goals for your investment of time, money and effort, and….

2) Predetermined metrics (KPIs or Key Performance Indicators) that you’re going to use to measure whether or not you are reaching those goals.

If you do not have all that, then any tossed-off mention of “ROI” is, well, mostly horse manure (see illustrative image above in case there’s any confusion or misunderstanding.)

This is lazy business thinking, and it’s also often a smoke screen for not setting sensible, clear goals ahead of social media efforts, and then digging through the data without twisting it to make it say what you’d like it to say.

ROI = “Really Outrageously Ignorant”

It’s also a way for some who do not understand the social web to sound like they’re making tough, practical business decisions when in fact they don’t know much about this new online and mobile world of ours, but are loathe to let anyone know of their ignorance.

When someone asks me an unfocused question like, “What’s the ROI of one of your travel blog posts?” I immediately know that they do not know what the hell they’re talking about.

If instead, for example, you tell me that you want the content from a blogger fam tour or press trip to your destination to:

—->>  Achieve a goal of increased interest in your destination, measured by….

—->>  KPI #1 of “X” amount of increased traffic (over a previously measured baseline) to a specific website landing page that you’ve set up with analytics beforehand and told the bloggers the URL, and ….

—->>  KPI #2 of “X” amount of conversions from that landing page traffic; conversions defined as, say, downloads of your tourism brochure or signups for your email newsletter….

THEN we can talk sensibly and accurately about the ROI of my blog posts and other online publishing, and whether bloggers are worth your time and effort.

How are you handling the often-thorny ROI issue? Let’s talk in the comments below!

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Each spring I do a “snapshot in time” webinar for the AWC (Association for Women in Communications – I’m on the AWC National Board of Directors) about technology trends for communicators. It also includes a quick wrap-up of trends I noticed at that year’s South by Southwest Interactive tech conference.

Key items for 2012 include the power of images (social photography like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting,) social business, integrating social media, data/measurement/ROI and three of the Interactive Award winners who are doing interesting things.

Look for the hyperlinks within many of the slides, to take you to some of the items mentioned.

Here is the direct link to my tech trends 2012 slide deck on SlideShare, and I’ve embedded the webinar slides below as well.

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Fourth and final post in a series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The right question is not, “How do we get more Twitter followers?” or “How do we get more Like-ers/fans on Facebook?”

The right question is, “What do we want to DO with our followers and fans?”

Counting heads is fun – we’re all guilty of it, including me – but unless those people are helping you achieve stated objective(s) for your organization or business, you’re fooling yourself that anything is accomplished by totting up raw numbers.

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  As you gather more supporters in 2012, have plans for what you want to do for them, and what they could do for you.

—->>  On your blog – do you want readers to sign up to get your posts by email or RSS?  Take a hard look at whether you have made that signup process as simple as possible, including on a mobile device.

—->>  It’s Facebook Page 101:   make sure that people can sign up for your email newsletter right there on your Page.  On our Tourism Currents Facebook Page, we use a tab and a short signup form via our MailChimp email service.

Are you trying to build your own list, or are you busy building Mark Zuckerberg’s list?  Use Facebook for your own business success!

—->>  On Twitter, periodically let followers know how to sign up for your email updates.  Note: Send them directly to your signup page – don’t dump them onto your homepage and hope they find it.

—->>  What are you doing with your email newsletter list?  What’s your point to cranking it out? WHY should people open up their already-overloaded IN boxes to you?  Ask yourself those tough questions….often.

Back to numbers:  if you suddenly picked up 1000 more fans or followers, what would you DO with them that you couldn’t do already, right now?

My own 2012 plan for the fans and followers of this blog

Since I’m asking you about your plans for your platforms, here are mine for Sheila’s Guide:

1)  Lead the tourism industry away from a somewhat silo’d focus on social media, and toward a more general incorporation of social communications as simply “how we do things.”  It’s like email – nobody has an Email Department, do they?  It’s time for social media to stop being new or special.

2)  Support the growth of my Tourism Currents business with Becky McCray.  We’ve set a performance goal that we’ve agreed to meet by our 3rd anniversary in business (September 2012) or we’re going to radically overhaul what we offer.

3)  Support my work as a professional speaker on tourism and social media.

4)  Support the marketing of my upcoming book, The Elastic Waist Entrepreneur.

Thanks so much for your support, and hope to see many more of you in person in 2012.

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Everyone from a newbie travel blogger to an experienced destination marketing organization has confessed to me that the only thing they pay attention to on Facebook is how to get more followers and bigger numbers.

When I ask what they are even doing on Facebook – what are their business goals for their Facebook business Page – they really don’t know.

Hint: bigger numbers for their own sake is NOT a worthy goal, especially on a site where you own nothing, zilch, nada (Mark Zuckerberg owns it all.)

Just because something is a free social communication service doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require thought and effort to be successful….in fact, they all do, which is why social media is not really “free” except in monetary terms.  Done well, it is hard work.

What are your goals for your Facebook Page?

How do you capture data that you can control, like a supporter’s email address?

Since Facebook is a job, it deserves to be treated seriously, with metrics and goals and all that serious stuff.

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I was working with a tourism-related client recently about incorporating more video into their website and destination marketing.

That inspired me to dig around in the Insights (analytics) section of the YouTube channel for another small CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) that I’ve worked with in the past, to see what sort of information I could glean.

Here’s what I found – perhaps it will help you with your own tourism videos.

**  Views average 35 – 40 a day. We started seeing solid jumps in viewership as soon as we began posting consistently. Ranking on page one in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for desired keywords in YouTube Search took about 2 months, because we needed 3 -4 videos to really crank it and we released them slowly.

**  Viewership is 64% male, largest viewership is people aged 45 – 54.  There are a mix of people, but the top viewers are not younger people, contrary to video-watcher stereotypes.

**  Most people find this CVB’s videos with YouTube’s search engine, or they click around on the channel page, or they come over to our stuff from related videos.  The VAST majority, though, across all videos, find them with YouTube Search.  I was surprised by how low plain ol’ Google search ranked as a way that people find our stuff, even with the importance of video to universal search.

**  We do see people click and watch videos from the CVB homepage (where they rotate) but not a whole lot.  On a few videos, they watched it more times on the homepage than on the CVB Facebook Page (where they are also posted) which rather surprises me, but then again a Facebook video may get buried quickly whereas it rotates up to the homepage more than once.

**  The most popular video so far is an interview tied to a niche sport that held a training camp in town. The fan base is small but very enthusiastic, plus the featured team won a big tournament after the camp, which increased interest.

More data on this popular video:

—>  Most of its views, like the others, come from YouTube Search. I’d researched specific keywords for that sport and added more as I saw them being used in search strings, which paid off in making the video easier for people to find.

—>  25% of the viewers of that video watched it on a mobile device.

—>  It was embedded elsewhere but most views other than on the YouTube channel came from when we put it on the CVB Facebook Page (it helped that we tagged people in it plus the sport’s governing body.)  The second largest number of off-channel views came from embedding it in a guest post that I wrote for a sports information and networking site.  The third largest number of off-channel views came from people watching it in a post in a Ning group related to the sport.

Takeaways for you?

Have a plan going in that makes sense for your market, produce consistently and as often as possible, optimize your video for SEO, don’t discount the value of niche groups for spreading the word, make sure it looks good on a mobile device and allow the video to be embedded in places other than your YouTube channel.

Have you seen any interesting data from tourism video that you’ve done? Let me know in the comments – thanks!

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