Released in mid–2010, Social Media Metrics provides insight into techniques for measuring and optimizing the social dimension of marketing investments. The book is applicable to emerging businesses with limited budgets as well as larger companies with diversified marketing and analytic staff.

The author addresses technology options while exploring the process for determining the metrics appropriate for the situation. The book concludes with a perspective on the future of web analytics – specifically a flip of the current B2C model to one managed and controlled by consumers, in effect C2B. Sterne provides guidance on organization change and professional development. He also provides a valuable Appendix that includes a wide range of references and sources for further pursuit, as well as sources of definitions and standards are subject to on-going development.

The Appendix and plethora of other references scattered throughout the book more than justify the modest cost of the book.

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Released in mid-2010, the book provides understandable technical content and concepts along with coaching and advise to readers seeking career advancement and impact within small and large enterprises. The book emphasizes and highlights techniques for data-driven insight and promotes analytic creativity and gathering of insights.

The wealth of examples and low or no-cost tools cover challenging topics such as on and off-line campaigns analysis, multi-channel attribution, and latent conversion. The book concludes with tactics on how to create a data driven culture within your organization.

This book is relevant to any small or large company seeking to act smarter in their marketing, sales, search, and social media initiatives. It includes a CD with podcasts, videos, and PowerPoint presentations reinforcing the topics addressed in the text.

Click here to buy this book through ActSeed’s Marketplace – hosted by Amazon.com (…and at same price as you’ll find on the regular Amazon site, too!)

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Monique Reece is a creative subject matter expert, and her integration of social media as a component of market development is current and relevant. Her presentation of the PRAISE methodology is easy to understand, explain, and implement across the organization.

You can purchase it from ActSeed’s Amazon Store now (Kindle version also available) by clicking here.

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Selling a new product or service when representing a new, largely unknown entity (as most of us do when starting a new company) is definitely challenging, and properly supporting your products and services is critical. Understanding how to position your wares against entrenched competitors with brand recognition and often a large war chest of marketing funds isn’t easy, but those of us who figure out how to get – and keep – sales traction, can appreciate the importance of disciplined sales and support even when our company is in its most nascent stage of existence.

Greenberg outlines the concept and mechanics of social media-enabled CRM – “sCRM” – as a complement to traditional CRM systems. Edition Four includes a great deal of new content to address the impacts and potential for an expanded view of engagement in customer relationships. It also includes a detailed and current landscape of traditional and new vendors in a wide range of customer-related categories. This book is valuable to anyone seeking a strategic, yet practical view on managing and benefiting from the transition. Relevant to start-ups seeking to craft their customer service plans or seeking to enter the market for sCRM products.

                                 – from “Pitching Hacks” introduction

I’ll try to be as concise in my post as the book is in guiding you toward successful fund raising.

Nivi and Naval have a storied career with startups, both as fund-raising entrepreneurs and as investors, not to mention facilitators for other entrepreneurs and investors.

I’ve authored more business presentations, projections and plans than I’ve read about how others do it. But I’ve read a few books, and “Pitching Hacks” is the most concise, the most pragmatic and the most useful.

If you are about to “walk the fundraising gauntlet” – even if you’ve lived on Sand Hill Road before – read this book. For the first-time entrepreneur, it’s a gold nugget of guidance. For the seasoned startup veteran, it’s a superb refresher.

As authors Nivi and Naval say: “Investors don’t invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses.“

To buy this incredibly affordable book (<$19), go to the Amazon-powered ActSeed Marketplace (or if you prefer, go directly to Amazon)!

If you’re one of the rare companies that doesn’t even need a computer, read no further.  On second thought, how are you reading this in the first place?  For the rest of us business owners who need a little or a lot of IT to get our job done, I found a great book.

Leslie Knight recently published a book called “Navigating the IT Minefield“.  It’s a very readable font size – 11 chapters and 150 pages of useful information for us small business owners who want a framework to address our technology needs and keep us from getting swindled by consultants.  It’s not full of jargon.  It’s full of useful and well-organized information. It’s not available in stores or Amazon as of this post, but you can find it here.

How about this scenario:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where.”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
While this is actually an excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it could be a conversation between a small business owner and an IT consultant (with the last statement likely being what the consultant is thinking, not saying out loud).

Leslie’s 19 years of IT experience (Amoco and Gartner Group) is just part of where the value of this book is derived. Her work in management consulting and involvement in “CEO Space” helps her relate to the rest of us who aren’t IT gurus.

What is the value of a fire extinguisher?  That somewhat depends upon if you use it, but investing in a fire extinguisher is no different than investing a couple of hours reading Leslie’s book and having it handy for reference.

I’m not paid to promote Leslie’s book, nor is ActSeed an affiliate marketer of this book.  It’s just a book I definitely believe is worth a few of your shekels.

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We entrepreneurs are always looking to extend our reach into our targeted audience with the most frugal budget, especially in our most nascent stage.  Reality: very few of us reach the national morning shows or become blessed by Oprah without some help; only few of us even achieve our goals as an effective guest on a local affiliate morning show without a little help and grooming.  But how much budget can we afford without some certainty that our choice to help shape and shepherd our public relations strategy achieves the goals we set?

While few professionals can afford to work on 100% contingency, many are starting to drastically reduce their base retainer and make it up by delivering solid value to clients.  At the very least, a PR professional that lives by this model signals their confidence in bringing you material value.

I invited David Oates of San Diego’s Stalwart Communications public relations firm to give us his professional pitch on “Pay for Performance PR”.  He lives it every day with his clients and he certainly welcomes your comments here or directly to him (his email is at the bottom of this article).  So now, “sans plus de cérémonie” (without further ado)…

Entrepreneurs: When choosing PR Firms, think results, not retainers!

By David B. Oates, APR

Companies of all shapes and sizes are demanding that their marketing budget be measurable as well as profitable, and generate adequate returns on the investment made. So why is it that many PR professionals and agencies still resist client efforts to align their fees to a business metric, opting instead to use the traditional – and largely academic – ad equivalency index?

Instead, entrepreneurs should demand that their PR firm embraces performance-based rate structures, as the ability to measure results is now much more cost-effective and readily accessible. This model aligns a majority of client fees to actual results, such as pinpoint article placement, speaking opportunities, industry award recognition and customer/partner/investor lead generation.

Think and Act Strategically

When choosing a PR agency along these lines, companies must look to see if its principals – first and foremost – think less like a Marketing or PR person and more like business managers who thoroughly understand their client’s business and competitive landscape. Communication practitioners should be able to clearly comprehend how their client’s executive team and board of directors measure success. While sales will undoubtedly reign supreme, other aspects of the business will retain significant value, such as:

• Profit margins,
• Distribution and technology partner agreements,
• Investor (private or public) interest,
• Rate of customer acquisition,
• Strategic product roadmap,
• Average sale price per customer and so on.

Agencies will fail to realize true success if their evaluation differs from – or worst case, contradicts – the criteria of their client.

How Performance-Based PR Revenue Models Work

Under a performance-based model, a PR firm should charge a small amount of a client’s budget to a monthly program fee in return for offering that company unlimited hours of work. This eliminates the potential for agencies to be perceived as “nickel-ing and dime-ing” clients for time spent on non-valued items. The remaining budget should then be structured in performance fees where clients pay only as results occur. Some examples include:

• Articles placed, tiered by size, circulation and demographics,
• Speaking opportunities secured,
• Industry awards secured,
• Qualified customer, partner, investor leads brought into the pipeline,
• Web traffic increase and subsequent conversion rates,
• Unsolicited PR opportunities secured,
• Brand value/perception audit increases with targeted audiences

The benefits of performance-based revenue models are numerous and mutual for the PR agency and the client:

• Performance metrics/expectations are outlined and agreed upon in full between
• the agency and the client before an agreement is executed, since it will determine
• how and for what an agency gets paid.
• The business risk is shared between both parties. The agency doesn’t make its
• money unless it can produce.
• The ROI is embedded in the fee structure.
• Client satisfaction and understanding increases.
• Client retention increases.
• Client turnover/churn decreases.
• Client referral rate increases.

Performance-based PR fee models also apply to all aspects of public relations and marketing – and not just media relations as some would believe. It’s all about setting measurable goals and aligning fees accordingly. Some examples include:

Crisis Communications

Agencies can tie their fee structure to their effectiveness in meeting those goals, such as where and when those key messages were portrayed in a broadcast or print story and how many resonated with key stakeholders. PR firms could also measure their effectiveness by how long the crisis lasted when compared to other similar events.

Internal Communications

An organization can most certainly look at internal communications for its value in improving employee retention and recruitment rates. The reduction in employee churn and increase in productivity are indeed quantifiable and mission-critical elements in any organization. PR agencies need to recognize this and align their fees accordingly.

Counsel to Execs

Oftentimes, PR professionals offer such counsel to ensure executives can either solidify key messages and/or effectively convey them to their stakeholders and media. PR agencies should create benchmarks as to the capabilities of an organization before and after such counsel and measure the improvements over a period of time. Firms may also find that this program’s benefits extend beyond corporate communications to the marketing product management, sales/customer service and investor relations departments.

More and more clients today are asking their PR firms to share the burden of generating results. As a result, this sharing model will drive performance-based revenue models to evolve as the industry standard for the next decade. The underlying question to all of this is whether one believes PR efforts can be measured and benchmarks can be set. To that, I answer with an overwhelming yes.

###

About the Author: David Oates, APR, is the President of Stalwart Communications Inc., (www.stalwartcom.com) a San Diego-based marketing and public relations firm. He also runs a social media site, PayonPerformance (http://payonperformance.com), to engage business leaders in discussion on this business model. David can be reached at david@stalwartcom.com.

Technorati is one of the leading blog search engines – and much more.  Participating in the Technorati community will increase your blog’s visibility and help you reach people who would benefit from viewing your information.

This quick post is for those of us new to the world of blogging.  Experts already know this and us neophytes can find this recommendation in a thousand other posts.  Make it 1001, I guess – never too many places to share a good recommendation, I say.

It takes merely a few minutes.

What To Do:

1. Go to Technorati – 1 second
2. Join and set up your profile information – 90 seconds or maybe a bit more if you upload your photo, which you should
3. Claim your blog (give them the link) – 5 seconds
4. Prove you actually “own” your blog by adding a unique string of characters that Technorati provides (called a “Claim Token”) to a new post on your blog – a string that looks something like 9FMYCJBKRNYX – 30 seconds
5. Click the “Verify Claim Token” button in your Technorati account.
6. Wait for Technorati to do the rest.

Any good “Technorati-optimizing” tips you might add?  Comments are welcome!

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Before Jing – a nifty product from a Michigan company called TechSmith - I was using the “Prnt Scrn” button to capture the entire screen and customizing the view with annotations and cropping in PowerPoint or Adobe Photoshop Elements (the limit of my graphics capabilities) before pasting into the email.  Time required: LOTS more than 30 seconds.

Now, I have a small sun at the top of my screen that I can click, which enables me to “draw” a rectangle on my screen.  In this screen, I can either capture a still image or even start a video capture that pulls whatever occurs within that drawn screen area.  Using my microphone, I can also comment on what is occurring on the screen, and I can even send the captured video segment directly to my YouTube channel or save it as an mp4.

When developing and debugging ActSeed’s community platform with a development team located in the US, Spain and India, we used Jing extensively to rapidly and clearly capture issues that needed modifying.  We’re going to use Jing with one of its sister products (Camtasia) to create ActSeed video tutorials. 

In summary, it’s worth your time to check out this clever tool.  They offer an image capture version for free and the version that captures video (”Pro”) is only $15.   If you don’t know me yet, I’m a big fan of paying for value, so I purchased the $15 version and think the price might even be a tad low for the value received.  If you’re using a similar tool called Snagit, then you’re already familiar with this type of tool and guess what?  Jing and Snagit are both siblings of the same parent company (TechSmith)!

You can download the free or Pro version of Jing here.

Disclaimer: Jing didn’t give me a free download.  They didn’t pay me to say nice things.  I pay my own way, but want to share this cool tool with other entrepreneurs and business people.  We’re generally all the same – lots of needs, short on time and limited resources, so it’s nice to share a way to leverage our common reality with a tool like Jing!

Do you have a story to share about how you use Jing?  I’d like to hear it, so please leave a comment if you can.

 Do you have another cool tool or service that you think we should highlight?  Please tell me!

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Tom thought it might be too remedial for me, but that it might be good for the members of ActSeed’s community who may be new to the application of social media in business. Tom was right to think I’d enjoy this book, but not as correct when thinking it was too remedial.

Trust Agents is an important read for both novice and seasoned business people.

This book articulates the key constructs of how we must interact with our customers and our peers in a very new way, thanks to how social media has started to bring us into a “community” instead of a “network”.

We’ve posted this book in ActSeed’s marketplace, which is powered by Amazon.com, so you can purchase the book in either hard copy or e-book/Kindle format.  Buy this book and read it in your spare time. It’s an easy read and a valuable one. I’ll get you started with one of the conclusions: “Be helpful.”

…and that’s what I hope to do here by recommending Trust Agents.