I was asked by an acquaintance at a doterati meeting a few weeks ago how to prove value for a social media campaign that had already been completed and for which the usual tracking that I’d recommend wasn’t in place. It took a moment to devise a way to show the value that a social media campaign had created for a brand, but I ended up with these 7 steps. As a firm believer in “working smart” instead of “working hard”, have edited that email a bit and now present you with 7 Steps to Demonstrating the Value of Social Media:

1. Look at all of the bit.ly links that were spread through social media. This will show how many hits each link has gotten, and even how many hits a day (which is probably more granular than you need).
2. Total up all the hits on each of the pages individually that the social media campaigns have linked to.
3. Then, go to Google’s Sktool (hey, I didn’t name it) and put the URL of each page that social media directed people to (like the organization’s homepage, for example). Google is going to do its best to guess what kind of advertising keywords that page  should be associated with.
4. Pick a few that are actually relevant (Google’s best guess is often laughably wrong).
5. Normalize the price per click (as in sum up all of the prices that are associated with relevant keywords and then divide by the number of relevant keywords) to derive the (approximate) value of each click that page would have cost via PPC advertising.
6. Multiply the normalized value by the number of clicks that social media brought to that page, and there you go! Now you know the value of the clicks that your social media campaign brought you on that page.
7. Repeat for each page that got an appreciable number of clicks. If you have 40 pages that all got 3 clicks, just take the sktool pricing from your organization’s homepage and use it as a rough for all of the pages whose click rate was so low that it’s not worth figuring individually.

Bonus Tip: If you take screen caps of the Google Sktool pricing while you’re working, you can generate a nifty “cost benefit analysis” report with hard numbers that no one can argue with when you give a presentation and show just how much social media saved your organization.

This is just one way to demonstrate value of a social media campaign (and a rough one at that), but for someone who’s just getting started and wants to be able to show the higher-ups why they should invest some more time in social media, it makes a very compelling argument. Got any questions on this? Leave me a comment or email me and I’ll be happy to answer.

Today I was sent an email newsletter from a buddy and was halfway through writing up a few tips for him when I realized, “Hey, this would make an excellent blog post!”

Illustrated with posts from the excellent Campaign Monitor Gallery, here are 5 Ways to Make Your Email Newsletter Pop:

1. K.I.S.S. (Not the band, that is): People live fast lives today. In an era where people would rather tweet than email, you need to make sure that your newsletter is short, sweet, and simple. So Keep It Sweet and Simple, buddy, and hone your email down to 800 words. Or less, preferably. If you’re running long, make a blog post out of it and link to the post in your email.
2. K.I.S.S. (The band, that is):  I’m not necessarily a fan of metal, but you have to give the KISS guys credit: they know how to make a visual punch. Design your newsletter so that it wows your readers visually–keeping in mind that it needs to succeed without images, since most email clients default to “images off”.
3. Don’t Start in the Middle: Anyone who’s taken creative writing knows that in modern lit, you’re supposed to start in media res when you begin writing. In email writing, don’t. Pick a subject line that sums the whole thrust of your newsletter up from start to finish. Don’t try a cute line or one that’s obliquely referring to something your reader may remember from a year ago: put value for the reader in the subject line and they’ll read on from there.
4. Hi, My Name Is: If you have the personal information of the subscriber (which you should if you’ve collected the information legitimately), put it in your newsletter, somewhere in the subject or in the first 8 lines of text, or else the work that you put into getting that info is all for naught.
5. Higher. Faster. Better: The higher a link is on your email, the better it will perform, on average. So, the most important links in your email? Yeah, put them up near the top of the page.  Your sales button, or the link to the main article that you’re promoting that month or…well, whatever it is…aim higher for faster and better results. What, you thought I was going to make a joke that tied into the Olympics?

There are actually about 20 best practices tips I could load in here, but then it would hardly be a “Quick Tips” article, would it?  More tips later, then!