I touched base with Mr. Dalal and he invited me to speak to the class of professionals for about 15 minutes.  I was quite impressed with my initial review of the site from a design, layout, and usability factor; however, there were a few areas of improvement in regards to adding language translations, a countdown clock, social media and good real-time tracking metrics.  Little did we know that 15 minutes would turn into 1 hour and 45 minutes of intense engaging conservation in regards to putting together an executable social media strategy, including a real-time metrics tracking system.   So what did we come up with?

Visting Nature University, you’ll see that one of the first eye-catching points on the page is the “Nature University Contest” banner ad.  While the contest is the crux of the class’ semester, one of the main goals is learning to effectively utilize social media to drive contest entries and overall traffic to the Nature University website.  One of the major steps to effectively utlizing any tool or strategy is defining an overall goal or call-to-action, and conversion metrics to measure that call-to-action.

So drive more people to the site for the contest, easy right?  How?  Well, one way is just using the latest and greatest social media tools.  All we have to do is just sign up and blast everyone about the contest.  Yah, that’s what we’ll do: use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Email blasts, word of mouth, and any other idea that comes to mind.  Great, we’ll all work to do “those good things” and check the metrics report every week, and we’ll have nothing but success, right?

Truthfully, as a marketing and technology consultant of 10 years, I wish this is how successful strategies worked in the ‘real world’: smooth and easy, turn-key style.  But as the class knew and we discussed in depth, strategies rarely work out under such assumptions.   If not, then how the class pressed me, ”…then how do we effectively use social media to get more contest entries and just increased site traffic period?”

So now,  down to business and the real meat of this post.  When using social media tools to drive effective results whether for a contest, a whitepaper or resource, or increased site traffic/visibility, I recommend the following:

1. Establish A Call-To-Action. Plain and simple: What is the overall goal, or what do you look to achieve?  Some of the best and most effective strategies I’ve deployed always, always, always have a call-to-action. In short, a call-to-action is offering a user a value-add service or product that will move the user from being an unindentified visitor to an indentified lead by collecting their name, phone, and email.  Which is more valuable, someone you know or don’t know?  In this case, the class offers a contest and the call-to-action is signing up for a chance to win 3 different gift certificates of various value.
2. Determine Your Metrics. Most of the time, not always, clients are in the dark in regards to metrics just due to the nature of the Internet and hearing common terms such as website hits, visitors, page views and whatever else the hot term is.  While those metrics are good, to determine true effectiveness, you need one metric: conversion.  Think of conversion as how much you are willing to pay for someone to visit your site versus paying for someone to visit your site and perform your call-to-action.  Typically the first is lower and the latter is higher, and most are shooting for the first rather due to lower cost than understanding the value of the higher-cost latter.  Accepting the latter, the fact is facing the reality of one paying a moderate price for a converting user.  No matter what type of tool you use, always use conversion metrics that you are able to assign unique codes to and track via a database so you know their place of origin.   This will help you to understand what marketing techniques/tactics are working and how well.  In addition, this will help you to truly determine the first and latter conversions, more importantly latter, which most small businesses fail to  identify all together.  In this case, the class was solely relying on Google Analytics for basic metrics and no “true” conversion metrics for the different marketing tools they were utilizing to spread the word about the contest.  Use Google as a comparison, but not a sole metrics baseline.

3. Focus on Relationships and not the “Number” of Relationships. One of the hardest lessons to teach is not focusing on how many people a person knows, but truly “who” the person knows.  I would take a person who has 50 nurtured, consistent relationships over a person who has 500 acquaintance-type relationships for the sake of saying they are connected.  Which holds more value?  True credibility exists in being able to truly connect beyond knowing a person’s name by association.  In this case, the class will use small, yet various relationships from a number of social media networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, and ole’ word of mouth).

4. Engage Your Audience, Don’t Sell! One the most valuable business decisions I’ve made was not to sell my clients or anyone seeking information.  For one, it takes a lot of time, which I’m usually short on, and people will shut down on you.  No one wants to be sold, plain and simple.  So engage your audience, and listen and address their needs.A great example and shameless plug for my company is our recent 37″ TV HDTV GIVEAWAY: www.wearesafeandsound.com/sweepstakes/index.php?sad=abcom (Psst, notice the ?sad-abcom.  I’m tracking ).  Before I did the contest I utilized my Facebook status to ask people what they would love to win.  I offered 5 choices and then sat back, tracked, and watched results.  The results: TV.  Easy enough… I engaged the audience to find out what “they wanted”, and now I give it to them with boundaries to help grow my site.  No bait and switch, just honest communications and credibility.

   People love to talk with and not be talked at, so no matter if the tool is LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Ning or any other tool, “engage” and invite people to participate with no strings attached. In this case, the class will focus on using various engagement techniques and tactics that are simple, honest in nature and approach to engage their audience (i.e. emailed questions, invites, and social media status updates).

5. An enabled and empowered Champion. It is quite intriguing how most persons can follow the first four steps but blow when it comes to getting others involved or “championing” their cause.  There is nothing in the world like being able to engage an audience, and then not enable or empower the audience to execute.  I’ve met and worked with many small and medium business owners that dropped the ball when it comes to enabling and empowering “Champions” to go and advocate their products/services.  Simply put, Champions believe and don’t need to be sold or engaged.  They simply need the “rules of engagement” or in plain terms, a set of boundaries to promote your services by.  In the case of the class, they choose to allow users to use any social media or marketing technique they want; however, everyone must drive traffic to the contest site.   The class elected to keep things plain and simple: give their Champions enabled badges of empowerment and stepping back.  Just sit back and review metrics, and jump in when needed. That’s all… Less of you, and more of them!

What I speak of is truly not rocket science, rather it is something that is quite common, and can be found in any daycare center or preschool.  Yeap, that easy… a matter of learning how to effectively approach, value, nuture, engage, and empower your relationships to be a win-win in all you do.  Until the next post, happy metrics tracking!