I held my last talk ever on the 28th of September (except for the case that Dialogkonferansen calls me up again). I won’t do any more conferences as I feel so sick before I go on stage. I am nervous about a day and a half before, and I put ridiculous pressure on myself to perform. That’s why I simply cannot stand it.

Also, I put some crazy effort into my presentations with practice and preparations. That takes a lot of time for virtually “free work”.

Now to the presentation that I did hold.

First off I wanted to talk about viral campaigns and how to generate traffic through them. I talked about my 5 C’s for viral marketing (book still not out … doh…) and I discussed how one could start the analysis by answering the question of where the problem really is. Do we have enough links? Do we have enough traffic? Do we convert well? Do we get customers to come back? etc.

I went on into talking about K-factor and marketing driven viral campaigns vs. organically driven viral campaigns. We discussed that it is not only the nominal number of views/hits/visitors that explains if a video or page has gone viral. It is the shape of the slope and the second derivative of the slope that gives you a good alert for if you are running a viral campaign or if it will die.

Please look through the presentation below and comment if you want me to explain anything.

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When Thierry Henry scored his hands goal against Ireland in the World Cup qualifiers, everyone claimed that the assistant ref should have seen the incident as he “according to the graphics” had clear sight of the debacle. As everyone could tell from the graphics, the ref DID see, infact, was looking straight at the incident. But he didn’t blow his whistle. He didn’t call the attention of the field ref and he intentionally sent France, rather than Ireland, to the World Cup. According to the graphics.

The matter of the fact was that the graphics didn’t tell the truth at all. The ref actually had his view blocked by several players, and had no chance in hell to see the incident. There was thus something missing in the graphic, which was there in reality. Something which the journalists neglected, as it was so much more fun to talk about the graphic.

Similar is the nature of social media and consultants active in the field. A lot of diagrams out there that look great. They tell us what we want to see, convered with compelling arguments that sound logical. In fact, most of them are bullshit. Although good looking, and seemingly accurate in their analysis the diagrams, just like the graphics from the World Cup qualifier, lack the one important aspect which would make them relevant – they do not cohere with reality.

In reality, social media is not fast, it is not like a grilling party and it is not the most suitable forum for creating lasting relationships with your customers. The success stories I have seen, and the selling practices I have engaged in, so far, that have been truly successful, are all connected with direct call to action and sales cycles. They have completely lacked the remarkable content, nor have they focused on transparency.

What they have focused on is product, delivery and keeping promises. Old and sound business ideals. Conversion has come about when there has been a clear scent throughout the campaign, where call to action haven’t been fuzzed out and where the offer has had a social element to it (ie. get your friends in on it…) and a great offer (…and get it cheaper). Surely there are situations where you can see customer service being enhanced and improved through social media. But the dialogue is not so much about fantastic writings, images or other content. The dialogue focus on products. That’s where the conversion takes place.

And just as any good SEO would focus on the converting keywords, a good social media guru should focus on the converting discussions. There is simply too much buzz out there to focus on the latent laughter being created from investments based on bringing joy to the world.

The recipe is quite simple. Great product, plus promises kept, means online business. And whilst the focus is placed in what tool to chose and what campaign to make viral, the most important part of communicating what you actually can deliver is lost. Instead of focusing on what the core of your offering is, you focus on how you can make it spark like gold. That’s what our/MY industry has fed you with. They/I have told you that you should focus on long term projects that take aim at being the hub of resources used when discussing your vertical in online channels.

But you have no chance. The social web is not open. It is closed in networks. And although you make the best campaign in the world, that is shared between users like mad, they will not care when it comes to the decision of making the purchase if they cannot find dialogue about your products and offering online. What do they get when they get it from you? That’s the story you should be promoting. That’s the dialogue you should be listening in on. That’s the content you should be assembling rather than trying to explain it yourself.

It should be common knowledge nowadays that user reviews increase conversion rates in most verticals. Testimonials do as well. Do you show UGC on your website? (if you don’t know what UGC stands for you really should be unemployed). If you don’t have it, well then you should be unemployed as well. REally… I am sick and tired of all the bs. All the long term mofo’s talking crap out there. Social media is not about making money tomorrow. It is about making money today.

At least for businesses it is.

Yes. When we as users roam facebook profiles, stalking hot and ugly friends of ours, we do not want to sell or buy. But when we do want to sell or buy, we are in no mood to listen on a story about someone’s CSR profile. We want to get the goods and get out of there. What’s between us and our purchase is if the product we are aiming at is really what we want. That’s when social media matters for business.

Now some of you go – but but but… I could put this building on fire… – but just like Newman in office space you will get sent to the basement. You ask yourself, but what about PR-crises, what about Branding? Well, if you don’t say anything other than what you do, then PR will be a breeze. If you sell good products that you deliver with a promise you can fulfill, then you will have all the brand equity you need. Just look at Apple. They are complete assholes. But we still love their products cause they are what they are. We create forums we give Apple-sounding names. We call our children iChild and we take the haul of shit just to stay clear of the blue screen of death the PC so handsomely delivers to our screen every now and then.

The discussion about social media is distorted. We need to put it back on track. We need to start talking about how to identify a buyers behavior, how to include scent when users share information through links, we need to understand how to take charge of information architecture on external platforms and we need to CRM the living shit out of all the data we can get out of it. That’s how we make money NOW and not in the future.

So stop pissing me off with retarded Keynote slides with crazy looking megaphone people on them. X that shit out and start exploring, researching and sharing how to do “the deed” for real.

Or to quote a successful Swedish entrepreneur… “..the only KPI I pay notice to in social media is money out…”

The graphics can tell you a very neat story. But does it correlate with the data you see on your back end? If not, then it is probably not true. So please stop pretending that it is. Question it, question me!! We need to be questioned, and I feel beefed up to handle the heat. How about you mr/mrs social media expert… are you up for it?

//Jesper

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I went to the SEM conference last week and held two talks. This is the second one I held. It might not seem like this presentation is about analytics at all, but it really is… I promise. The thing is that I feel that too many presentations on analysis and metrics are about data and not how to use the data.

A different approach to an web analysis talk

This presentation takes a different approach. Here I focus on the problem at hand and suggest a method you can use to solve the problem. I suggest you simply use a monitoring tool to know where to start looking for relevant traffic, that can use co-citation analysis to find out where to get links from, you build on relationships with authority people rather than authority pages to get great links. Who is an authority has a lot more to do with how much traffic they generate to you than how many followers or fans they have. This can be found by analyzing usernames (which can be found with a small tweak on your sharing buttons and facebook connect).

I further suggest you use auto generated e-mail win backs for those users who do not want to convert into buyers. Lure them in with free sign up offers, white papers and digital tokens. Then win them over by persuading them over a series of e-mail campaigns. Then use the data to better present your USPs depending upon what source they came from.

Last but not least, you need to check out what Amazon has done with their Facebook implementation. They rock so hard I get hard. That’s only one of many solutions to get users to buy more when they have bought something or are about to buy something in your store. The billing relationship this builds is greater than anything else when it comes to ecommerce as it builds a trust between you and the buyer.

Amazon example – I love them

Think about it. Amazon can be pretty safe recommending complimentary products that other users say they like. Especially if that “liking” person has a good relationship with you to begin with. If you would happen not to like the book, you would blame your friend rather than Amazon for telling you about the friends recommendation. Splendid!!

Anyhow. Here is the presentation. I didn’t know what to call it so I gave it a very “bajsnödig” (as we say in Sweden – yes use Google Translate if you have too) title as I have started to understand I shouldn’t under sell and over deliver anymore. I should tell it as it is instead.

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I had a talk at searchmeet about the foundation of conversion theory a couple of weeks ago. Basically I say that we need to meet the user where they enter the website, not only based on what page they enter but through what source they enter. Then we need to take into consideration in what mindset the users are entering the website with.

Finally my talk at the search meet conference was published on YouTube. Sadly, the last part of the talk was not posted and I will update this post if it is. I would however like to put this out here in the blog as it was a very fun talk to do and it has some strong points although the final remarks and conclusion isn’t in there.

//Jesper

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Here is an extremely helpful tool I have completely missed out on so far in Google Analytics. Annotations is one of those things that makes your stats understandable and shareable within your organization. We cannot see similar functionality in other tools out there and Google are currently really pushing to become the number one in Analytics online.

The functionality is there but are the customers?

To really stem the iron, they probably have to start charging for their services. I suppose that’s the only way to get on with huge organizations that are used to pay a lot of money for things that can be easily obtained for free. On a less sarcastic note, Google really has to do something about data ownership. Corporations need to know that they own their data, and that they can choose whether or not they share this data with Google.

User Case of Google Analytics Annotations

So, the working process with Annotations would probably be that you have a shared corporate account for your Google Analytics. An analyst within the organization or a consultant monitors the activity, sets up a dashboard and makes notes. A marketeer goes into the tool and adds an annotation the day they launch a campaign, the analyst tracks the campaign and determines success events with regards to the overall business goals. The CEO can at any time enter his or her dashboard and follow the market activity as it evolves.

The marketeer gets instant feedback and can adapt to what is happening, the analyst gets an explanation to variations in the metrics and the CEO will be able to follow it all from his or her computer screen. Simple, effective and co-operative. Nice in other words.

//Jesper