Are you showing up or are you making an impact?

You can enter a room full of people and be completely invisible. Translated to online marketing that will be like setting up a static website and leave it there to act as a digital business card and that my friends, it’s soooo ten years ago.

The truth is that a company is having an impact either way, intended or unintended, even by being absent. Can you measure impact? Today I’m rolling out the 4th installment of the series “Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence” and we’ll discuss exactly that, impact.

Oh, and… I promise not to use the word “Viral”.

Managing Impact [The 4-Step Formula]

Step 1: Show Up

Because at least you get a chance to create, express or even to redeem yourself. By not showing up you already run with better changes to have a negative impact. You have no control.

Step 2: What’s needed in the space?

Listen and you will understand what your network [community or tribe] needs. Can you solve a problem? Can you create something remarkable right in that moment?

Step 3: Follow that urge

There is an instinct, it’s perfect in form and timing, commit to take action on it. Can you be wrong? of course you can!

Step 4: Be responsible for your impact

Stay! wait for the reaction. Take all the glory or be present to take the heat and run your “Damage Control” strategy.

So What Are We Measuring Again?

Some of the things you should look at when analyzing social media impact are:

• Is whatever you or your company creates being shared? how much? and where?
• Is social media helping you or your company have an impact? Are people coming to your site because of it?
• What’s the sentiment when people mention you?
• Who is mentioning your brand?

Reach

First, lets see if your content is shared, how much and where. You can very easily create a table on a spreadsheet and visualize by piece of content you create, something similar to what we did in “Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 2]: Content Performance“.

Is Social Media Driving Traffic To Your Site?

Why traffic? Because that is direct impact you create. Social media does not convert, it is an attraction tool. You don’t close a sale on Twitter but I can either click on your link… or not.

Go to your Google Analytics > Traffic Sources to gather the numbers coming from social networks, bookmarking sites, Twitter, etc.

Tweets, Retweets and Click-Throughs

They are not the same thing, a person that follows a link to the site doesn’t necessarily tweets or retweets. They are all important if you are trying to measure the impact on the information you share, even when you are sharing content from other sources.

The one thing I will strongly suggest in order to get consistent data in one place is to use one short url service and stick to it. Bit.ly is probably your best bet to track click-throughs. In the following image I’m showing you results for the post 7 Examples Of Kick-Ass Personal Branding, which I posted just 2 days ago. It shows that there were 122 clicks so far on the url I created, however, there are 718 clicks on urls created by others.

I will get my Retweets from other sources but right here you can also see that there were 19 “shares” and 13 “likes” on Facebook, 17 comments and 0 shares on Friendfeed as well as the regional stats.

When it comes to Retweets, compare different sources, see how in this case Topsy and Tweetmeme don’t match…

This is not unusual by the way.

Not All Mentions Are Created Equally

Sentiment

According to the tools, your impact can be positive, negative or neutral. I think there is no such thing as “neutral”, sure, we can count a tweet that has not clear positive or negative content as neutral but if a person is retweeting you, that’s positive. If somebody said you have a “killer” product, that is kick-ass positive, unless you live in 1956…

Not having impact at all is not neutral, that’s negative.

You have many options to measure sentiment, depending of your needs, there are paid services or there are free ones (Read: 6 Tools For Twitter Sentiment Tracking), those are the free ones.

Influence

I’ll give you an example of influence and how it can dramatically affect the outcome. This image shows a tweet from Blair Semenoff (Flipbooks) sharing a post from SocialMouths (7 Ways To Stay Connected To Facebook). There are 2 important elements here, Blair gets retweeted like there’s no tomorrow so this resulted on multiple layers of RT’s…

The other thing is that SocialMouths is not mentioned on the tweet, this means that while all this activity is awesome, it is invisible to you. In order to have access to this kind of data you need a service like UberVu. Look at the next image displaying all the tweets about this post, do you see the name SocialMouths?

Find ways to get shared and retweeted by influential people in your niche because not all mentions are worth the same. Can you get your post featured on HolyKaw? what blogs or sites are relevant in your industry that can feature you?

Final Thought

Creating a positive impact is easier when there is transparency and honesty, for yourself or the company. When you have those elements, negative impact is also easier to deal with. Establish the metrics and the tools you need but don’t forget that you decide what is considered positive and what is negative.

Now It’s Your Turn…

How do you measure impact? what tools or metrics are you using? Or more importantly, are you aware of your impact and if so, is it intended or unintended? Share your thoughts in the comments sections.

Happy impacting (I guess…)

If You Missed The Previous Posts

• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 1]: The Hub
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 2]: Content Performance
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 3]: Your Network
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 4]: Impact (You are here)
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 5]: Dashboard On A Spreadsheet (Coming Soon)

Enter our 1st. contest of 2010 and win a blog in exchange of a simple Tweet. Seriously.

But… aren’t there like a million free themes available everywhere? This is not a theme, this is your Ready-To-Rock, unique and fully-loaded blog.

So get all the details right here…

What Does “Fully-Loaded” Mean Anyways?

While it has a very simple design, this blog is loaded with all the tools you need. Here are the specs. Besides changing the logo and your pic, you get:

• It’s built over Thesis Workframe so the license is included (your welcome…)
• Your social profiles are linked to the blog and displayed on the sidebar
• Sharing options: Tweetmeme button and ShareThis System
• Disqus Commenting System (the default is just weak sauce)
• FeedBurner RSS & Email subscriptions
• Social feeds (Twitter and Facebook)
• I’ll setup and configure Google Analytics (I’m not kidding)

Seriously… Just A Tweet?

Yes, all you need to do is:

1. Follow @SocialMouths on Twitter and…
2. Tweet this message exactly as it reads here (just copy and paste and you’ll be good):

“Follow @socialmouths and Retweet to WIN the FREE Fully-Loaded Blog contest – http://bit.ly/ceS384“

Important: Do not change the URL. The tweet must be exactly like that.

How Is The Winner Announced?

The last day to enter is Monday February 22nd and the winner will be announced on a post at SocialMouths on Friday February 26th. Don’t forget.

Just Making Clear That…

• I’ll be cool and work with you to get setup, but this offer doesn’t include customer service, customization or tech support. You can hire me for a couple of hours if you like.
• You need to have a domain and a hosting package, if you don’t I suggest you get everything from GoDaddy.
• This is WordPress self-hosted version.
• I’ll leave everything ready so you can input your content. I do NOT put in the content for you.

You still here? Go Tweet…

Share

I’m not talking about turning your blog into an iPhone application but rather making it more friendly for the iPhone browser. In other words, when a user is visiting your blog from the device.

This is done for WordPress blogs with a very simple and free plugin called WPTouch (created by Brave New Code) that you can install and configure yourself in just a few minutes. There is nothing else to it, you do everything from your WordPress dashboard.

You can also download the plugin here.

If you are looking into having an actual application built out of your blog, there are services like MotherApp or iSites that can do that for less than $100/year.

I’m sharing some images here so you can get a better idea of how it looks and works. The first image shows the homepage (left) and how it actually looks like an app. To the right is the post, it displays all images and… yes, the tweetmeme button works!

Yes, this is all happening in the browser. Other features that are very useful are the access to the RSS and the menus, in the next image (right), I’m showing how “Categories” are displayed.

The commenting system, Disqus in this case, is fully functional.

Final Thought

What is the point of all this? We are moving into making ourselves available in different forms, if you can turn your blog into a more user-friendly format for your readers AND for free… why not?

Share your thoughts.

Share

Having a blog is only step one if you are trying to provide any kind of content. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote the post 5 Social Tools To Help You Spread Your Awesomeness Outside Your Site in which I talked about coming out to spread your content and generate some traffic back to your site. This week we’ll go over some tools to implement inside.

The objectives of implementing these tools are:

• Build a better user experience.
• Promote user interaction, after all, a blog is a conversation platform.
• Make it easy for your visitor to share and promote your content.
• Make you look like a real pro.

So here is the list of tools, they are all fairly easy to install:

1. Facebook and Twitter Sharing Buttons

While you want to provide the possibility to share to a wide variety of networks, it has been proven that displaying individual buttons for the two most popular sites increases the chances of getting your content shared. Also, if you have been active on Facebook and Twitter and other sites, you have already experienced that most of your traffic is coming from these two sites.

Facebook provides its own code to install directly into your content and while Twitter doesn’t provide its own, you can use Tweetmeme, which is the one you have probably seen already in the majority of sites.

2. Sharing To The Rest Of The Web

Of course Facebook and Twitter are not the only sites and your visitor very well can move in other circles, make it easy for them to share your content to any network. Applications such as ShareThis or AddThis make very easy to implement, usually through a plugin that you can install from your dashboard and a little configuration.

Look for a service that can give a little more, in this case, both services provide analytics.

3. “Follow Me” Links

Another very common practice and a great way to stay connected to your tribe when they are not on your site. If a new visitor likes your content, he/she would most likely love to network with you in other places. Make it very visible on your site and include only the main ones, if you have profiles in 15 different networks it can get a little confusing.

4. Commenting Systems

Commenting systems are a great way to take the conversation to the next level. Services like Disqus or IntenseDebate are now very popular and their installation is as easy as creating a profile and adding a plugin on your blog dashboard. The main feature is that they take the conversation out of your blog into common places making it easier for your visitor to keep the interaction flowing instead of being just a single comment that they can otherwise forget.

Another great tool in this field is Echo, integrating activity from different social networks.

5. Facebook Widgets

Leverage form the most popular network in the planet. Facebook now allows you to display different widgets inside your blog. These widgets include commenting boxes, fan page badges, live streams, fan boxes and, in case you didn’t know, you can now connect your Facebook status to update your Twitter.

6. Promote Inside Navigation

One of the things bloggers usually watch is their “Bounce Rate”, visitors that come in, read one article and surf away from your site. A great way of engaging the reader into navigating your blog a little more before he/she leaves is by promoting related articles. LinkWithin is a plugin that inserts links with images to other content inside your blog at the bottom of each post.

Your visitor mostly likely go for a couple of more clicks if he/she enjoyed your article and is presented with similar stories.

7. Crowdsourcing

If you use your blog to promote a product or a service, social media allows you to give your customers a voice. Crowdsourcing is a fairly new concept that allows a community to become part of the development process by sharing their ideas, feedback and even voting for the best ideas on how to make your services better.

If you are concerned about having a complaint made public think about this, social media is about honesty and transparency, and there is nothing better that solving a problem in front of everybody…

UserVoice lets you create a forum where your customer can express that feedback and easily integrate it into your site.

8. Polls

Another way to provide different kind of content and engage your reader to participate. PollDaddy is a free and very user-friendly service you can use to configure any kind of poll and generates the code to just grab and dump right into your content. The truth is that people love expressing themselves and finding out what others think about the same topic.

Create a post that features a poll or display one to your blog’s sidebar.

9. Social Toolbars

You have probably seen them at the bottom of a blog, they not only add sharing capabilities to networking sites but can also integrate external tools such as your Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter feed come live in your site. Great examples of these bars are Gigya and Wibiya, both free and made available through simple plugins you can install directly from your blog’s dashboard.

Another popular toolbar is Meebo, which integrates instant messaging right on your site. Just be careful and make sure these services are not making your site too slow to annoy your readers.

10. Use Of Other Media

User other forms of media when possible, video for example has proven to be an excellent way to engage the user. Other ways are to use clever photography or even add podcasting to your site. Blogging platforms have made it very easy to add these types of files to your content and you can probably add some rich content with just a couple of clicks.

Don’t limit yourself to text, give your visitor a more visual experience.

Final Thought

Content will always be king, focus first on providing value through it. Having the latest technology will not compensate for not having it.