Social Media Club | Atlanta

The last few months have been slow ones for Social Media Club Atlanta. Between false starts and the holidays we haven’t had a get together since September. And we apologize for this.

We hope to make this up in 2010 with more frequent meetings — both large and small — and by broadening the involvement of those interested in helping make SMC ATL a more robust and educational experience.

Some of our 2009 meeting highlights included informative panel discussions on how non-profits and financial businesses have incorporated social media into their organizations, challenging roundtables on Social Media ROI, and networking meet ups featuring a cross-section of Atlanta’s tech, business, and student community.

We are always looking for volunteers to help with our programming, editorial, membership, and leadership. So if you have an interest in social media and its role within a variety of enterprises and/or our larger culture, please feel free to reach out to Gerard Babitts (gerard@gerardbabitts.com) or Kristin Parrish (kristin.parrish@ogilvypr.com) and let us know about your interest. We’d love to have you be involved.

Looking forward to a more “social” Social Media Club Atlanta in 2010!

Events Volunteer

As part of Social Media Club’s Reality Check series, RealPlayer SP sponsored our September event and demoed their new player’s social and portability features. Check out the video for highlights from their demo at our meeting.

Events RealPlayer SP, Video

Photo Credit: Plastic Girl

A great crowd of old and new friends joined Social Media Club Atlanta at Sandy Spring’s 5 Seasons for our September 17th “Social Analytics: Measuring the Relationship between Brands and Consumers” event. Panelists Jim Anderson of Vitrue, Jim Snyder of Net/Net Analytics, and David Vanderpoel of North Highland and moderator Peter Fasano shared their insight and experience in the measurement of social media metrics, analytics, and ROI.

The ability to measure and analyze hard data and metrics has been one of the significant appeals of digital marketing and advertising. Impressions, time spent, conversion rates, geo-targeting, visitors, and path analysis are just a few of the valuable metrics used by marketers to justify their investment and measure their ROI.

Unfortunately, since social media is a work-in-progress medium this measurement is a little trickier. The consensus from the panelists was that first and foremost there can be no meaningful social media measurement without first setting goals, valuations on engagement, and reasoning for involvement in social media. Once these are established it is a matter of testing and mining multiple analytics solutions and triangulating the data into conclusions and reports that reveal ROI.

For David Vanderpoel the process includes focusing on the efficiencies of assorted social media platforms. Discrete and branded URLs, offers tied directly to social media, testing, and departmental budget offsets are ways to begin showing correlations between social media and business goals. In their interest in putting a value on engagement, Jim Anderson and Vitrue have developed a proprietary algorithmic technology to measure online conversation — The Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI). Vitrue’s SMI provides a snapshot in time that takes into account a multitude of sharing, engagement, authenticity, influencer, mention, and meta data. And at Net-Net Analytics, Jim Snyder works with clients to incorporate existing measurement tools like Google Analytics and Omniture to test and measure referrer data to arrive at ROI.

Sometimes the ROI can be simple. The cost-offset of initiating a long-term social media engagement versus running an out-of-home one-month billboard can be significant and can show direct impressions-based ROI that favors social media. Likewise, the seemingly inane focus on a brand’s number of Facebook fans can be justified by looking at the fans not as bragging right notches in a bedpost but rather as a group of people that has given you permission to market to them.  A healthy number of people raising their hands to receive appropriate marketing messaging is valuable and worthy of activation when the time calls for it.

So keep the faith.  While the metrics and ROI aren’t as easy to pull as other disciplines, with the right approach, testing, and innovative triangulation social media ROI can be within reach.

A special thank you to RealPlayer SP for their generous sponsorship of this month’s event and for sending Real’s Lacy Kemp to discuss and demo the social and portable features of their new player.

Analytics, Events Engagement, RealPlayer SP, Social Media ROI, Testing, Triangulation

This month’s event is sponsored by

*** To register, please go to SMC Atlanta’s Eventbrite page ***

Join Social Media Club Atlanta on Thursday, September 17 at 5 Seasons at the Prado for “Social Analytics: Measuring the Relationship between Brands and Consumers” — part three of our three-part “Social Media Love Affair” Series.

If your organization has invested in social media, it is time to begin identifying the parameters for tracking, measuring and reporting the activity. In this discussion, we’ll hear from panelists Jim Anderson of Vitrue, David Vanderpoel of North Highland Consulting, and Jim Snyder of Net-Net Analytics as they talk about social analytics and the latest approaches and tools for helping their clients measure social media initiatives.

Topics Include:

Establishing Goals & Objectives

• What should or should not be measured in Social Media?
• What is and is not Social Media ROI?
• Do your customers/consumers want to be tracked?

Finding the Right Tools & Methods

• What can existing web metrics platforms do / not do?
• What SM specific platforms exist that can be integrated with existing web analytics?

Interpreting the Data into Meaningful Numbers

• Examples of SM scorecards – what are the most important metrics? Who’s doing it well?
• Do social media numbers always tell the real relationship story?

Future of Social Analytics

• What should organizations be looking for?
• What does the integration of social with the rest of digital and traditional look like?

Special thanks to RealPlayer SP for their sponsorship of this month’s event. Launched in July 2009, RealPlayer SP is an application that allows you to download video from multiple web sources and then remix and replay it on the portable video player of your choice. Click here to download and check out the player.

PANELIST BIOS:

Jim Snyder – Web Analytics Specialist at Net-Net Analytics
Jim Snyder has over 12 years of experience in web analytics and content and online marketing positions at top sites including CNN.com, Weather.com, and research institutions Yale University and Georgia Tech. Jim has the unique combination of web analytics and content strategy along with hands-on experience in web software and database development.

Jim Anderson – Chief Product Officer at Vitrue
Jim Anderson has nearly 20 years of experience and a successful track record of leading development teams to collaborate with sales, marketing, and other constituents to deliver successful consumer applications. At Vitrue, he guides the com

David Vanderpoel – Principal at North Highland
David works in North Highland’s Strategy and Marketing practice and leads their Social Media team. In his role, David has advised several of the world’s biggest brands on social media strategy, mobile strategy, and precision marketing. While North Highland doesn’t cite clients by name, much of David’s recent work is in the public domain; including high-profile apps and pages in Facebook, extensive campaigns in Second Life and YouTube, and Emmy-nominated work with EepyBird.

Events RealPlayer SP, ROI, Social Analytics, Social Measurement

Last week’s SMC ATL June meeting was an interesting one. In Brand + Consumers: Dating and Mating in the Social Arena — part one of our three-part “The Social Media Love Affair” summer series — the focus was less on great, new social media innovation and more on the real-world applications and interactions at larger brands.

ING’s Digital Advertising Director Jon Caddell gave an honest perspective on both the difficulty and challenges of implementing social media at a large, reserved company. Jon’s essential message was that in organizations that are slow-to-adapt and focused very heavily on traditional ROI metrics, the best strategy is to go in small and deliver ROI value that is already understood and embraced by the company.

In Jon’s case, it was his decision to marry a social media campaign to accepted and tested targeted advertising initiatives with LinkedIn and Facebook that allowed ING to enter social media on their own terms and at their own pace. By utilizing data-driven engagement ads that tapped into social media user profiles and by offering up value to the consumer (a popular retirement calculator application), ING was able to subtly introduce their brand into the social media conversation and deliver ROI that was significantly higher than a traditional banner-only campaign.

L-R Jon Caddell (ING), Michelle Batten (SMCATL), Diane DeSeta (SMCATL), Dan Greenfield (SMCATL)

Jon was able to deliver great advertising impressions AND also backdoor his brand into social media by working closely with his analytics team to adjust KPIs and show greater ROI than a standard banner run. His ROI success has allowed Jon to demonstrate internal proof of concept to senior management and allow ING to inch further along into opening up the brand to a larger social media engagement. A real world lesson for many big brand marketing folk looking for ways to move the social media needle in cautious organization.

Advertising, Events Facebook, Finance, ING, KPI, LinkedIn, ROI