It’s been a full year now since we started our blog. During the past year, we have hopefully provided you all with some great insights into the digital marketing world that we here at Serengeti Communications spend so much of our time in.

For this post, I’ll share some of the stats and trends from our first year. Visits and Unique Visitors have fluctuated some, but they both have a nice upward trend.

1. 10 Public Speaking Tips
2. 8 Tips for Blogging Inspiration
3. Google Grants Enforces Spending Cap Policy
4. SES Chicago 07 - Dealing With Difficult Clients
5. Google Grants Application Process for Nonprofits
6. Cutting Edge Linking Tactics - SMX London
7. Is it Teal or Turquoise? Avoiding Design Pitfalls
8. SES London 2008 Interview - Piers Stobbs
9. Sprint, Social Networks and a Bad Reputation
10. Social Media Marketing Campaign Process

The top 5 sources of traffic during our first year were:

1. Stumbleupon.com
2. Google
3. Direct/No Referrer
4. Searchengineland.com
5. Yahoo

If you break the top posts down by source it reveals how most of the top posts made it into the top 10. The reason goes back to Simon, our social media expert, and what posts get stumbled. The top 10 posts that stumbleupon.com drove traffic to were:

1. 10 Public Speaking Tips
2. 8 Tips for Blogging Inspiration
3. Google Grants Enforces Spending Cap Policy
4. Is it Teal or Turquoise? Avoiding Design Pitfalls
5. Sprint, Social Networks and a Bad Reputation
6. SES Chicago 07 - Dealing with Difficult Clients
7. Facebook can Destroy Your Future
8. SES London 2008 Interview - Piers Stobbs
9. Cutting Edge Linking Tactics
10. 20 Steps to Driving Nonprofits into Web 2.0

Seven of the top 10 posts for the year were also part of the top 10 posts from stumbleupon.com.

Looking at the top 10 posts that Google referred visitors to reveals what posts ranked well organically. These varied considerably from the top 10 overall posts and the top 10 from stumbleupon.com. There were:

1. How to Measure Brand Awareness
2. Measuring Conversions
3. Social Media Marketing Campaign Process
4. Steps to Create a Successful Campiagn
5. Integrating Marketing Efforts for Your Nonprofit Social Media Plan
6. Google Grants Application Process for Nonprofits
7. 6 PR Disasters from Late 2006 to the Present
8. Googles New Youtube Program for Nonprofits
9. PayPal Pushes Nonprofit Program
10. SES Chicago 07 - Dealing with Difficult Clients

Comparing the top posts from various sources gives us great insights into what resonates with our audience and how best to expand our reach. The coming year should continue to see an upward trend for our key metrics as we are able to expand our reach with posts that hopefully, our readers enjoy.

As we grow as a company, so to will our list of blog contributors who will provide their own perspective on our industry The coming year should be filled with new insights and helpful tips to help guide you through the vast digital landscape. So, thanks for reading our blog and we look forward to what lies ahead in the coming year.

Warning:  This post is a bit of a rant.

My daughter came across the term “Brand Slut” in The Little Hiptionary (a Bangin’ Pocket Reference for Kewl Peeps Everywhere) and remarked “Oh Mom, this is so you.”

Now, I’ve actually heard that term (being in marketing).  It refers to someone who displays loyalty to no single brand. I never really thought of myself as a Brand Slut but as I pondered this, I realized that my daughter was right.

I love handbags, but I’ve got equal numbers of Coach, Kate Spade and Dooney and Burke in my closet.  I will try any and every new fitness product.  (In fact, I have an entire closet dedicated to fitness wear, shoes, bike tools, various shapes and sizes of fuel belts, water bottles, gel containers, wetsuits, swim caps, etc. I peeked into the closet as I thought about this: No brand consistency; none whatsoever.)  I’m not even loyal to a particular tri bike (very unusual among triathletes) or a specific brand of running shoes. 

I tried and tried to think of a brand I’ve been loyal to.  There are brands I like (Starbucks coffee for example), but none that I would go too far out of my way for (if it is raining, I’m hitting the Mcdonalds drive-through). 

The only brand I can remember being an evangelist for was an infant formula that stopped my colicky baby from crying (full disclosure: one of our clients sells a similar product, although not the one that I used).  I actually baked cookies and Fed Ex’d them to the CEO.

Perhaps, being in marketing for so long has made me marketing-immune.  And yet, who ISN’T marketing-weary these days? Consumers are saying “NO MAS” en masse these days – something that marketers still don’t seem to be grasping.  In fact, there is ample evidence that marketers are still living (for the most part) on Planet Fantasy when it comes to their understanding of consumers.  Take this lead-in to a recent Marketing Prof’s article:

“Just as sports teams have fans, brands have evangelists. And just as each fan feels a sense of ownership in the team, a brand evangelist has that same sense of ownership in the brand. That sense of ownership gives brand evangelists a powerful incentive to see the brand succeed.”

Reality check: Consumers don’t care so much about the *success* of your brand.  Even if they love your brand enough to create a YouTube video or drive around the country to visit every single store you own or bake cookies for the CEO, they do not care about — and, in fact, are blissfully unaware of — how much product you are selling (unless of course the brand is failing so miserably that it goes away, which would be a bad thing for someone who likes the product). 

When I told my friends about the infant formula I loved, I didn’t do it because I wanted the formula company to succeed.  I did it to help my friends, who were also young mothers.  We had a pact to share information and resources as a way of supporting EACH OTHER – not a particular brand. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that there is no such thing as a brand evangelist – far from it. Even Brand Sluts like me will likely find a brand or two to be totally loyal to (and evangelize for) at least once in their lifetimes.

But marketers will never find the holy grail of brand evangelism (much less “create” evangelists) if they continue to drink their own Kool Aid about what drives consumers (hint: it has nothing to do with YOU and everything to do with THEM).  In fact, if Marketing doesn’t change its ways fundamentally (and by this I mean continuing to talk without listening, continuing to interrupt, annoy and even mislead consumers), I predict we may end up creating more Brand Sluts than Brand Evangelists.

Word-of-mouth traffic can be some of the best, most qualified visitors to your site. But, how do you actually know if you are getting traffic from word-of-mouth? PPC and SEO efforts are easy to track because you can segment out traffic based on the specific referrers or entry pages (PPC). You have to be a bit creative to find the word-of-mouth traffic.

1. Check out your direct traffic (no referrer). These visitors either knew your URL and typed it directly into the browser (or they had your site bookmarked). As your brand becomes part of more and more conversations, the number of visitors who will know your URL will increase.

2. Check out your branded keyword traffic. This is the same concept as the direct traffic.  Only for those visitors who cannot remember your URL, the most likely place they’ll look for you is on one of the top search engines. Word-of-mouth conversations about your brand will result in more traffic from the search engines by visitors searching on terms related to your brand.

3. Check out the blogs - free tools (http://blogsearch.google.com). You can enter specific dates to see if the number of postings is increasing month to month. You can set up a Google Alert to periodically receive this information.

4. Check out the blogs and other conversations - paid tools (www.trackur.com). As many companies understand just how crucial it is to know what people are saying about their brand, tools like Trackur are becoming very popular. You can proactively see the conversations about your brand (and your competition) just by logging in.

5. Ask your customers. This is perhaps the most obvious and the most overlooked way to find out if people are talking about you. Talk to your customers. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you customers have to say about your brand. Encouraging and rewarding feedback is a great way to grow loyal customers who will be happy to say positive things about your brand to their friends.

If you read the blog on Friday, you’ll know that I attended the sold-out Blog Potomac - billed as an unconference (see…there I am wearing the shirt). I’d never attended an unconference before, but I knew that it meant that there’d be a little more audience participation.  Which is kind of fitting, when you’re doing a conference about social media.

The majority of the speakers spoke for 10 - 15 minutes about their background, specialties, and involvement in social media.  Then, each session was turned over to the floor for Q&A. As you would have seen from the sessions I wrote up on Friday, this meant that there were lots of questions, and in some cases unpredictability about the direction of that particular session. For example, the last session of the day on ethics, actually ended up with a floor discussion on the legality of content scraping.

All in all, I’d have to say that the conference was well put together by Debbie Weil and Geoff Livingston.  It was just the right size, the venue was great.  The only problem was that usual conference bugbear - poor wifi (if you were following my liveblogging, you’ll have noticed that it ceased after the 3rd session, with the other sessions going live later in the day).

(Note to self: While being smug in congratulating yourself for bringing a spare battery to get through the day, make sure that both are fully charged the night before).

One problem that I can see for BlogPotomac next year, is that we’ll have to see how well it scales when the audience size ratchets up, which I’m sure it will.

The final presenter of the unconference was Kami Huyse of MyPrPro who jumped right into the engagement part of the conference.  After a brief discussion on where she was coming from on the topic of ethics, she jumped right in with an example of a flog (fake blog), asking the audience how ethical they felt that particular style of engagement was.

After a long and interesting discussion throughout the theater, the common consensus was that it wasn’t ethical.  And they just make you look stupid when you get found out, which you more likely than not will. That’s not to say that some people didn’t come down on the side of the floggers, because some did, but that was only one or two in the audience.

The real takeaway from the discussion that Kami led was that blogging is not a sales channel, and companies (especially the marketing departments) should stop viewing it as such.

The penultimate speaker at the unconference was KD Paine, who I had the pleasure of sitting next to at the dinner the previous evening and conversing about the topic of her presentation today - measurement and value.

The value of measurement is finding out what works and what doesn’t.
How do you know what social tool to use? Measurement. Find out what the impact is. You need to be absolutely clear abouut what the Return is before you can calculate your ROI. Know exactly what you’re trying to measure before you measure it.

1. Figure out your goal(s)
2. Figure out your audience
3. What are the metrics that you want to report on?
4. What are you benchmarking against?
5. Don’t count eyeballs - measure engagement / leads. What is the value to you?  Are you being positioned the way you want to be positioned?  What is the conversation?
6. So what?  Analyze the information, explain why data shows what it shows. Then determine whether it’s working or not, and whether you should keep it going or not.

Q. How do you measure success?
A. Know the value of your customers / average transaction / members / ideas / etc.

Q. How long do you give before measuring impact?
A. Measure before you start (baseline). Most things have an immediate hit (most comments are in after 3 days), but she monitors for 14 just in case. Quarterly benchmarks don’t really tell you much, you really need to measure for another 3 months to compare. A better way is to use comparative measurement to see how you stand in your industry.

Q. How do you know when a blog needs to change or end?
A. Look at comments per post. 12-13 is average engagements, 35 is highly engaged. Also look at your traffic to see whether you have any traction. State Farm had a blog that had no comments, so they discontinued it. They relaunched a year later and instead of measuring comments, they instead measured employee morale and saw a nice increase

The next presentation was billed as the ‘after lunch keynote’ and was delivered by Frank Gruber, who is AOL’s social media & web product development expert. The topic of this presentation was how he parlayed a blogging hobby into a fun social media job with AOL, and the fun ’shiny objects’ or social media tools that he likes to play with.

3 years ago he started his blog - Somewhat Frank. After attending an SEO conference he was convinced that he wanted to start a blog. So he did, the same week that TechCrunch started up, which got him talking to Michael Arrington eventually he started writing for Techcrunch. AOL found him through the articles that he wrote for Techcrunch. He worked on the myaol product, part of which involved bringing in bloggers to evaluate the product and provide feedback. He’s now working in the people network - Bebo, Gooey, ICQ, AIM, which is basically their social network.

Products that he loves and uses every day - ‘Shiny objects’

• Twitter
• Summize
• Tumblr
• Friendfeed
• SocialThing
• TubeMogul - Pushes videos out to multiple platforms at once
• Viddler
• Mixx
• Digg
• Delicious
• Stumbleupon
• Shareaholic - FF plugin
• Typepad
• Wordpress
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Evernote
• Filterbox
• awayfind
• Basecamp
• Legit

Shiny Objects that he likes, but uses less frequently

• Tripit
• Dopplr

Q. How do you find out about all the ’shiny objects’?
A. People recommend things to him through his existing ’shiny objects’. His role involves keeping his finger on the pulse of social media, so he also goes out looking for new toys to play with that may be useful for AOL in the long run. Generally they find their way to him.

Q. How sustainable are these social media tools?
A. People can only concentrate their efforts on so many tools at one time (given the list above Frank can obviously concentrate more than most!).

Q. How do you cope with the fact that blogging is now a multimedia effort?
A. Frank started a vlog because of that fact. He feels that people have to ‘pick your poison’.

Q. How do you feel about pay per post style businesses?
A. He’d tested it out, and feels that as long as the person is transparent about the fact that they are paid to write about a product then it’s fine.

Q. What ’shiny object’ would you create if money was no object
A. If he could have clearance, it would be something to do with pictures or video

Q. How would you recommend a firm use these shiny toys to enhance their PR?
A. Pick a selection of tools, have community managers who are passionate about the tools.

Q. How do you reach the people who don’t know about the ’shiny toys’?
A. People have different social circles expanding out from friends and family.

Q. What are the keys to success for startups?
A. Create your own market, or find a market that’s not currently serviced.

The next presenter was Jeremy Pepper from Boingo with a talk about how Strategy fits into your social media decisions.

Why should you use social media? Don’t just do it. You need to have the strategy in place to determine what you’re going to do with it.

You need to engage with people who are enthusiastic about your company / product / topic. First you need to engage your internal audience in order to get buy-in at all levels.

Q. Coming from an internal perspective how do I wrestle control of content from marketing?
A. Internal education is vitally important to get the conversation on your side. Find out what people are talking about with regard to your company, and get marketing to understand that there needs to be a conversation from your side too. Don’t ignore sites with active communities such as Yelp!

Q. How does social media fit into our marketing and communications platform
A. Creating groups allows our customers to interact, and therefore help each other to connect. There are so many tools out there right now, you need to pick the right tools for your company, it may be that blogs aren’t the right tool for you to use. Investigate and formulate your strategy.

Q. How do you pitch to a blogger?
A. First identify the bloggers, and the influencers. Don’t assume that because someone has 5,000 ‘friends’ on a social network that they are influencers. If they don’t respond, don’t spam.

Q. Using these tools you’re becoming a content creator rather than pushing out stories to other media, your thoughts?
A. The web has always been about communication, we’ve always been content producers and publishers, the difference is just in the distribution of the content. We’re trying now to push out stories with less spin and less buzzwords, but the difference is that we now interact with the customers.

The next speaker is Maggie Fox (she’s the one at the lectern in the picture, Josh Hallett of BlogOrlando is the one at the microphone), the CEO of the Social Media Group, with a discussion on the latest trends in traditional social media marketing

Listen -

• Who do you need to talk to?
• What are they saying,?
• What are your business objectives?
• here are they saying it?
• How can you join the conversation?

This is not a campaign, this is a long term engagement / commitment. Once you have generated the community, you need to think about how you recognize and harness this community. Don’t let it die.

Q. How do you measure your success?

A. Look at site traffic, do you have 1% site engagement? How vocal is he community?

Q. What works well internally social media wise?

A. IBM uses social media well internally, with high levels of employee engagement. Internal blogs totally flatten the dialog, there’s more equality / less intimidation communicating with executives.

Q. What’s the carrot to get internal people to engage?

A. They have to want to do it, and be good at making content. Micro-blogging may or may not be a solution, as while the content levels are smaller, the engagement levels may be greater.

Q. Twitter or FriendFeed?

A. Maggie says she likes both, which draws groans from the audience and shouts of “Coke or Pepsi”. She likes the aggregation of FriendFeed, but doesn’t like the fact that it’s not as personal (plus you can’t block people from viewing your FriendFeed feed)

Q. If a community is left to die, can anyone take it over?

A. Disney had a proto-social network - Disney’s Magic Kingdom - for over 10 a couple of years. They just announced 3 weeks ago that it would be shut down. Communities should be allowed to continue if they can be self sustaining. Don’t necessarily think of them as communities, they may be better thought of as movements.

Q. How do you teach a client that Reputation Management is important?

A. It depends on the kind of strategy that you want to have. Do you want to respond to everything or just the influencers? Most companies need to only care about those influencers. She uses Radiant 6

Q. What about sites like Seth Godin’s where there are no comments?

A. Comments should be moderated with a clear comment policy. Comments are the best way to engage on a blog.

Q. How can you launch a campaign using twitter?

A. 2 different twitter strategies - Twitterbot - just pushing stories out, no need to really answer responses. Secondly the personal response, where a real person engages with others.

Q. How would you use Facebook?

A. Examine to determine whether your target audience is there in the first place. The challenge is that it’s a walled garden, you can’t get data about Facebook outside Facebook.

Q. A digital marketing agency without a blog asked what they should blog about…

A. If you’re selling something you’re not doing yourself, you’re going to have challenges if informed clients do some investigation.

Q. How have you best been able to educate executives?

A. Walk in and do a presentation at the C level as soon as possible when beginning an engagement, otherwise education takes up a lot more time down the road. It also helps to gain champions on the executive team. Lunch and Learn sessions work great to spread the knowledge around the organization.

Washington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers was next up with a presentation on the symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media.

He started out with a quote from Steve Ballmer talking about how in 10 years traditional media will be dead (the quote was much longer, but I can only type so fast, but that was the takeaway from the quote). Not great news for a print based business such as the Washington Post…

The Washington Post has really started to move into social media, reaching out to the young people (interns) to get ideas as to what they can do. They have facebook apps, 60 topic specific blogs (including the obituary blog), widgets, etc. Dan runs the local business blog, and is manages the blog along the following lines.

1. Stick to your topic. People will find it if the content is great.
2. Trying to find ways to engage the audience (more than email). - the post 200, where they list the top 200 companies in the area used to just be a list, now they’re putting together sites for the companies, trying to build communities for the Post 200.
3. How can the Washington Post data be used and spread? Their mission is to inform, so they want their data to be used wherever it can.

Q. Will the Washington Post ever become a non-profit org?

A. The St. Petersburg Times follows that model, and the Post has thought about it. Motivations and incentives are different in a non-profit world, but if it’s what it takes to keep the media alive then it may be the way to go.

Q. Does ad revenue from blogs come anywhere close to the ad revenue from the paper?

A. No, but online revenue is growing, while the newspaper is decreasing. One of the interesting items is that the paper mostly targets ads from local businesses, whereas the blog brings in national ad dollars.

Q. Are your blogs more fact checked than the average blog?

A. All blogs must be read by a second person, they are edited and fact checked, but it’s still not as rigorous as articles for the newspaper.

Q. Who moderates your comments? What’s your approval rate?

A. The post took a huge risk by having open comments. There are a few people on staff that are in charge of moderating comments. Real time moderation doesn’t really happen, so it may be several hours before comments are approved. But comments are important as they’re a great way to engage the community.

Q. What role do you see blogs taking in the Election?

A. Blogs have allowed for distributing newspaper style information in a fast manner. He has noticed that about 2 months before an election blogs jump up that talk about local issues, these bloggers then become candidates, so blogs appear to be a really great way to test the waters on issues.

Q. What challenges do you have integrating the blogsin a newspaper environment?

A. Editing is very important for both, the blogs are Washington Post entities, so they can damage the overall brand. There has to be trust that the blogs are as factual as possible.

Q. Will you have some kind of tagging options / comment ranking / profiles for people to tag so that they could look for specific topics on the blogs?

A. This is something that needs to happen, there is some experimentation going on with discussion groups - building out commenter profiles - but it’s not there yet. Gene Weingarten has one of these groups that’s thriving, but it depends on the level of involvement of the moderators.

Q. What are ways that bloggers can get more involved with your stories / participate with your sites?

A. We’re fighting an internal guerilla war. He’s here to try to get ideas from bloggers. He’d like to be able to give more recognition (links) out to bloggers, but it may just not happen. He’s had discussions as to how to get local bloggers to work with the post. They know that they’ve not done enough to engage the local blogginng community, but they’re going to work on it.

Q. With the Washington Post newsroom getting smaller, and the blogging side growing, how has that impacted sources going to the blog rather than to the newspaper.

A. The staff phone list used to fit on legal size paper in micro type, the new list is 2/3 of that size in large type with plenty of whitespace. He’s now talking to more sources and doing more writing than ever before, but it’s not necessarily at the same depth. He starts the day by going out to the web based PR sources.
If you’re going to pitch to him, he needs to know why it needs to be acted on right now, otherwise it’ll be put aside and forgotten about.