Web 2.0 Exposed – The Future Of Your Business Is Open

Posted on 14. May, 2010 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs, Featured, Marketing & Sales, Social Media

On Tuesday April 20^th I received this awesome email from Sarah Milstein, TechWeb’s General Manager and Co-Chair for Web 2.0 Expo in response to an email pitch I wrote a month earlier:

“Congratulations, Natalie. We’re giving you a full scholarship to Web 2. Expo SF, May 3 – 6 (http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2010)! We received 100 applications in just a few days. Most of them were really strong, making it hard to decide on just ten winners…”

I was thrilled, valued at over $2,000 it was a treat to head off to San Francisco to attend this event as a social media evangelist and, as I’ve discovered, a slightly geeky tech enthusiast.

Co-produced by O’Reilly Media, Inc. and UBM TechWeb this four day conference showcased the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web.

I took a lot of notes, attended many workshops and was inspired by some excellent keynote speakers who showed the future of the web, the latest technologies and trends and innovations.

What follows is my attempt to summarize the key takeaways for you and your business on these key areas, I hope it’s valuable.

Below is more of the strategy and how to. I’ll be following up with a further post on thought leadership and innovations because there’s just too much to fit in!

Social Media Marketing and Strategy

Applied Communilytics

Social media is a leveling fact for small businesses. Measure continuously. Learn from what people like. It’s all measureable. It’s also scalable, what works for Dell can work for you.

Matthew Langie from Cy Catalyst discussed using Social Media for the following:

1. Brand monitoring and performance
2. Customer service (real time i.e using Twitter)
3. Competitor analysis and monitoring
4. Channel Optimisation (i.e Dell using Twitter with refurbished products) is it YouTube for you?

Erin Hunter from Comscore stated that if you’re tracking both:

1. Input side: Evangelizing the size and quality of your audience so you can track the money and;
2. Output side: The result/ outcome measure (customer bought something) then you’re doing a good job of monetizing your business.

In terms of  measuring your ROI of your online efforts with social media, even the experts admit that there’s no `turn-key’ solution and that by using a variety of analytics tools you’ll find a system that suits your business needs.

Social Media Metrics

Dave McLure, renowned Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur has developed Startup Metrics for Pirates out of frustration from the lack of metrics he witnessed when working at PayPal.

He believes that Social Media Platforms are great distribution platforms and for acquiring customers – doesn’t mean you can monetize them.

Social Media has dramatically reduced costs on development and distribution and that measuring is crucial, yet completing the loop seems to be the biggest organizational dysfunction. Use the data you’ve collected to assess your product market fit, the right target market or any feature issues.

In terms of Social Media metrics if you’ve got more than 5 variables you’re worrying about, that’s probably too many.

You may not need to change anything about your product, it might need to be better targeted to the appropriate market. It’s all about finding your `Product Market Fit’.

Analytic Tools
Many names were thrown around and I’m pleased to say I’ve used or experimented with many of them. But here’s the key ones you may want to check out for yourself

• Basic web analytics (Google Analytics, etc.)
• Split testing tools (Google Web Optimizer, Genetify)
• Heatmap tracking (CrazyEgg, ClickTale)
• Customer feedback applications (UserVoice, GetSatisfaction)
• Survey tools (Wufoo.com, Survey.io, SurveyMonkey.com)
• Mailing list software (MailChimp, CampaignMonitor)
• Event tracking analytics (Mixpanel, Nuconomy)

Sean at Akoha and Alistair at Bit Current had the following to say:

Vendor Relationship Management is reversing the marketing focus with Press Releases dying a horrible, long-overdue death – unless it starts a conversation (which you should use your blog for) and `Pay per change of opinion’, when measured is the new version of the Pay Per View model

Communities are the new CRM where every interaction is a ticket, belonging to a user (offer a 5% reduction if they use their Twitter handle for example)

The privacy elephant is becoming hugely important – the kind of data that’s available on you whether you like it or not will exist forever so be mindful of what you put out there for generations to come to see.

Drill down and drill up: Put out message> Monitor spread > Respond & relate > Track outcomes> Vary & Experiment

The Spending Gap: Internet ad spending was 12.6% in 2009 but still huge amount spent on print media despite how much time is spent on the internet! This will be changing as it’s way cheaper to advertise online and make it targeted and customized.

Community monitoring will follow analytics so you can see how your followers, fans etc and placement all affect your bigger picture not just analytics anymore. It’s whether your Press Release hit the front webpage of Digg etc.

Using Search Successfully – Life without Google

Top publishers are using the best of search and social – however referrals from social are better than search.
Google is not sticky – i.e NYTs gets 30% of traffic to site via Google but at the same time 30% goes back to Google.

The key is to use sharing and engagement features to make this traffic stay around. So rather than allowing people to then Google something they saw on your site, use applications that allows search to come to the page in your site that they’re already on.

Key trends to note are that:

• Email is still the most engaging tool for content sharing on the web!
• For news content it’s Twitter all the way
• For non-news content Facebook is best to drive traffic to your site
• Facebook works better for encouraging more time spent on your site
• Digg is driving very qualified and targeted users but lower than 12-24 months ago.

It was interesting to note that for the Wall Street Journal Twitter traffic is 3-4 times more valuable than Facebook tand that visitors from the site stay longer and go into more depth. Opinion is added to it.

Thought Leadership in SEO

Ran Fishkin talked about Social Media Traffic and that popular content makes it out there which turns into links which leads to get Search Engine rankings and this leads to highly qualified paying customers.

To get this it’s all about brand awareness, authority and being likeable – like Tom Hanks so that people go out of their way for you. Finally it’s all about Social Proof. We take our queues from fellow humans as I wrote about here.

• Choose a format to share your knowledge –WordPress, Twitter, Posterous and put the content in the same place.
• Establish a high quality bar for your work and go and do the things critical to building community.
• Find the thought leaders to emulate, stay humble, meet face to face where possible
• Don’t over promote yourself and be patient – it takes time.

The Art of Search Engine Optimisation

Stephen Spencer talked about the new label being bandied about `Social Media Optimisation’ and that you want the traffic to your personal or company site that turns into links. How?

• Consult the top 100 list on Digg (http://socialblade.com/digg)
• Use StumbleUpon send to function in the SU toolbar
• Use as many tags on your YouTube videos as possible, run a contest to submit videos
• Be creative but unpolished with video
• Build up your friends on MySpace (apparently it’s not dead yet)
• Add the `Like’ widget to your website or blog sidebar
• Distribute information to every social site by Ping.FM (my advice on this is be selective on using this tool)
• Add your email to your LinkedIn professional headline so people can contact you directly
• Put multiple word tags in your Flickr photos surrounded by “ marks and geo tag your photo
• Use social link sites with juice which include Propello, MyBlogLog and Technorati

Real World Lessons on how to grow your Facebook Fan (Like) Page

I was excited to see Victoria Ransom, CEO of WildFire Interactive (and fellow Kiwi) as one of the panelists speaking on building grassroots engagement through Facebook.

The panel discussed finding the right signal to noise ration in sharing content, how much and what types and offered these tips and tricks:

• Get a fancy news feed by getting in the Facebook algorithm by getting people to like your updates and comment on each post.
• Craft great status updates for more views, for e.g `We’re excited about our launch, if you are too then `Like’ this
• Ask for yes/ no answers on your page and then track your impressions per post
• Put links in to your status via Bit.ly URL shortener as opposed to using the Facebook link – it’s like a customized message so it hits the newsfeed
• Use polls to learn from your audience
• Target your status updates to country where applicable rather than to `All’
• Get people to share photos on your site (or do what CityMax have recently in their cool competition)
• Depending on your business consider using a livestream of video exclusive just to fans
• Use a landing tab and change up your content on it – so initially the tab drives to them becoming a `Like’ and the second page is to drive them to your website for example

In my next post I want to talk about Charlene Li’s amazing talk on Open Leadership and summarise the key note speakers who were talking about the cutting edge trends and innovations.

Top tip check out my Flickr photos from the event as I snapped away some of the key slides that were most important. Plus I’ll be posting short videos from key speakers to my YouTube channel so subscribe for updates.

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Tags: How to gain Facebook Fans, Lean Startup, Open Leadership, Search Enging Optimisation, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Optimisation, Web 2.0 Expo