Via Go-Globe.com

Via OnlineSchools.org

From Spinback / Buddy Media

from Get Satisfaction

We’ll compare your most recent 24 hours of activity to the last 30 days. This gives you a clear picture of how your current efforts are shaping up compared to the last 30 days. We’ll also tell you your popular items over the last week and show you where your visitors are coming from.

Now you can keep your finger on the pulse of your social syndication with an easy-to-digest view of your key content distribution stats. To check out your dlvr.it dashboard, log into your dlvr.it account, and go to Stats > Dashboard.

To experience the full power of dlvr.it’s stats dashboard you’ll need to be using dlvr.it’s url shortener to shorten your links. If you’re a bit.ly user, don’t despair! We are beta testing a service to import your bit.ly click stats into dlvr.it. If you are interested in participating in the pilot program fill out the form below.

dlvr.it’s social demographics service tells you a rich story about your loyal users, and helps you understand who is reading your content. For each of your social networks, dlvr.it provides a demographic profile of your audience, including percentage composition by Gender, Age, Income, Education, Ethnicity and Children in Household. We also compare your audience composition to the internet average – and deliver a clear picture of how your audience stacks up to the internet at-large.

This new service delivers actionable data for media sellers, marketers and agencies.

Media Sellers: Guides social publishing efforts and provides comprehensive understanding to better represent your properties to advertisers.

Marketers: Gain valuable insight into the audience segments most engaged with your brand and offers and their impact on the conversion funnel.

Agencies: Make more effective media planning decisions and improve media efficiency to attract look-a-like audiences.

As part of our pilot program, we’re making social demographics available to a limited number of large and medium-sized Web publishers and Media Agencies, including Reuters, WebMd and Brafton.

We look forward to growing this service and making it more widely available. If you’re interested in dlvr.it’s social demographics, we’d love to hear from you — please fill out the form below, or contact demographics@dlvr.it and provide us with the email associated with your dlvr.it account.

If you don’t already have a dlvr.it account, you can get one here.

There’s no need to abandon search, display, and email just yet. Here’s how social media can complement traditional digital tactics and boost ROI in a few short months.

Social media is now the norm. Everywhere we turn, a high-ranking businessperson, blog, or magazine is pressuring us to replace traditional, “outdated” marketing methods with cutting-edge social media techniques. And without question, there is a lot to be said for social media’s brief yet transformative history. But if you’re like most marketers, you likely use some combination of search, display, and email marketing. These mediums have fueled your business with sales and leads for years. Is it not a bit hasty to suggest that we all ditch these proven mechanisms in favor of Facebook pages and Twitter feeds?

There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Your paid media and earned media can work together to boost ROI when you leverage the connection between the two. Following is a realistic, three-month action plan that outlines how “traditional” online media can be combined with social media.

Month 1: Mine your social networks to uncover your next ad campaign

While many consumers are quick to criticize traditional online techniques, these criticisms tend to be misplaced. The problem of course is not that search, display, or email are bad ways to reach your audience. Instead, problems occur when the content of these messages is bland or un-targeted.

Too many advertisements reflect what someone assumed customers wanted to see rather than what they really wanted to see. It is here that social media can breathe new life into the traditional online marketing mediums. If you already have an actively maintained Facebook page or Twitter feed, it’s time to mine them for valuable nuggets of customer input. One way to think about social media is a live focus group that produces true feelings about your brand. Your own Twitter account is a treasure trove of valuable data that can be turned into a successful ad campaign.

Twitter’s Treasure Trove of Data
• How your customers and prospects voted on polls
• Frequently asked questions (other than those you’ve answered elsewhere)
• Recurring complaints or grievances
• Extremely positive or negative things said about your products or brand
• Experiences (good or bad) customers have had with competitors
• Content prospects shared, retweeted, Liked, clicked, listened to, watched or commented on

The goal at this stage is taking you out of the echo chamber of your own marketing department. Whatever theories you have about your customers will likely differ from what social media says those customers truly think and feel about you. Pay special attention to what content was retweeted, clicked, Liked and shared the most. We’ll be using this data in Month two.

Month 1 summary:
Your marketing budget is limited. Therefore, your ads must express the most powerful, attention-getting statement of value you can possibly produce. What better place to find out what this is than the candid remarks of your own customers?

Month 2: Craft a content marketing strategy

Content is the catalyst for building a relationship with prospects in a social media world. Content transcends websites, social networks and formats. Direct marketing instructor [http://www.perrymarshall.com] Perry Marshall captured the benefit of well-executed content marketing when he said:

“Nobody who ever bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Therefore, you should sell with information about holes.”

Just as nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill, it’s likely that nobody who buys your product wanted your product. What they actually wanted was whatever tangible benefit(s) your product gives them. The way to sell more products, therefore, is to lead with information that empathizes and connects with the underlying reasons people want what you sell. Pure advertising (whether banners or search marketing) can rarely do this as well as a blog post, article or tutorial can. Most prospects are, by nature, far more skeptical of messages that contain overt sales pitches.

An article, on the other hand, bypasses this resistance by putting information first and selling second. By the time your content is read, the prospect will already have seen that you understand their problems because you applied what you learned from your current customers by studying their social media interactions. As a direct result, prospects are more likely to see your product as a genuine fit for them than they would have been if you immediately asked for their order. Marshall, for example, sells a marketing course with the help of an empathetic article called [http://www.perrymarshall.com/marketing/m19/] “People Are Cynical.”

Remember to include a call-to-action on your content landing page too, whether that is a newsletter subscription, webinar or whitepaper sign-up, or even a product offer. You might be surprised by the conversion rate.

How to turn content into new customers
Step 1. Understand what content your current customers respond to .
Step 2. Create a dynamically updating content widget of the good stuff.
Step 3. Do a media buy. Distribute your widget on one of the various widget networks or exchanges.
Step 4. Implement a remarketing pixel on your content landing pages. Preferably, create multiple segments across your content for more precise targeting (we’ll use this in month three).

How to monitor response:
• Be certain your blog (or content landing page) includes your analytics tool.
• Determine which metrics to track and focus on (suggestions: pages per visit, newsletter or RSS subscribers, comments, time on site) Advice: keep it simple.
• Establish a schedule for periodically reviewing response data

Month 2 summary:
Month two is focused on building a relationship with prospects. What works with your current customers can be used to attract new ones. Use your current audience’s social media click and engagement behavior to help craft a content marketing campaign to attract new prospects.

Month 3: Remarket to prospects with display ads

Finally, head back to the drawing board and remarket to these same prospects and customers using your new, social media-enhanced understanding of what they think, feel, and desire.

Once a prospect has engaged with your brand — whether by reading your blog, subscribing to your newsletter or following you on Twitter — ask for the sale. Present them with display ads by remarketing to them. Because a prospect has been engaging with your content, they are familiar with your brand, and you will see a higher lift.

When drafting up your next search ad creative or email, you want to correct the difference between what your old ads say and what current customers actually believe. Use the data you learned from month one to create new search or display ads. At this point in the process, you should know what makes potential clients click.

Use your scheduled response review times to meaningfully reflect on how your current ads could be improved. Naturally, you’ll want to give each ad enough time to accumulate meaningful response (do not assume that a new ad is a failure based on one day). That said, your goal is to repeatedly hit the market with new and relevant content in order to remarket to your hot prospects and proven buyers. Fortunately, because you segmented them by their language, actions, and buying patterns, you can craft unique ads targeted to each group instead of showing one generic ad to everyone.

Putting it all together
While this is an ongoing process, a sharp marketer or consultant could ideally put this approach into action within three months. Conceptually, it resembles an inverted pyramid model more than the traditional sales funnel most of us are accustomed to. Instead of rushing to move people through the sales process, you gather social responses first and use them to shape the funnel through which prospects will ultimately pass.

Truly harmonizing your traditional and social content efforts is an iterative process. You need to systematically monitor response, interact with prospects and segment them based on what you discover.

Summary:

Month 1: Use your existing customer interaction data on your social networks to create more effective search/display campaigns.
Month 2: Repurpose the content your customers like to attract new prospects.
Month 3: Leverage remarketing tools and the ad exchanges to turn social media visitors/prospects into customers using display ads.

Establish a Digital Center – Branded Blog

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The key to building a vast social graph for your brand is to consistently generate useful or entertaining content that people will want to read and spread around. This is best accomplished by establishing a blog that puts such content into circulation around the social networks and establishes your digital center. Rather than going for the low hanging fruit and engaging in gratuitous self-promotion, your blog should strive to publish original and helpful content that readers will seek out and enjoy looking through.

As you begin to build a base of loyal readers, you should start noticing a snowballing effect in your traffic such that growth picks up speed with each group of new readers on your blog. This is likely because the biggest fans of your blog are independently seeding your links around their Facebook and Twitter accounts. As more and more readers do this, they will attract new readers who themselves may attract new readers, and so on. This type of reader promotion should remain an integral part of your strategy as it has the potential to reach further than your promotional efforts could ever hope.

The Importance Of Links

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There are two distinct types of links that are crucial to the proliferation of your blog: inbound and outbound links. Inbound links, also known as “back links,” occur when another blogger posts a link to your content somewhere on his or her blog. Attracting a high number of quality inbound links ensures that your blog ranks high in search engine results. Blogging resource Blogthority.com reports that the Google engine actually ranks inbound links by their relevance and authority. This means that a single link from a credible source (such as a top technology blog) can boost your page higher in the results than could several links from un-established sources.

Outbound links are established when you link to other blogs and websites in your published content. This strategy is often employed to attract inbound links from the sites you source on your blog. Often, the blog you link to will take notice of your outbound link, and if they find your content to be relevant and non-spammy, they might return the favor by linking back to you.

Building Content That Is “Share Friendly.”

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As we mentioned earlier, encouraging reader promotion is an essential part of building your social graph. Ensuring that your blog publishes high quality, useful content is a great first step, however for total optimization you must ensure that your content is “share friendly.” Twitter and Facebook repost buttons can be easily added to your articles, and having them present in every piece makes it simple for readers who enjoy your articles to repost them to their social accounts. Look at ShareThis for an easy-to-add sharing tool for your blog. As your content circulates throughout the social web, it begins to create buzz, drive new readers, and encourage further reposting. These buttons also record the number of times your content has been reposted, allowing you to gauge what sort of content generates the most sharing, and optimize future efforts to that end.

Another key ingredient in share friendly content is ensuring that it is formatted appropriately for reposting on Facebook. When your readers paste a link to your article on their Facebook account, a small excerpt from your piece will show alongside the title of the article. By performing test runs on an account before publishing, you can optimize this short preview to be so enticing that the people who see it will feel compelled to click the link and read the rest of the content on your blog. (Dlvr.it can help with this cross posting and proper formating).

Harness the Power of Social News

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Social news websites (such as Digg and Reddit) give blogs the power to show their content to a vast audience of readers free of charge. However there is a catch: there is no editor to impress. Instead, readers have the power to make your article popular or hide it from ever being seen. Social news is so-called because each story starts out with an equal chance of making the front page, and as readers prune trough the new submissions they have the option to bump your story up if they find that it offers useful, original, and entertaining content. Conversely, if you post junk to a social news site it will be voted down by the site’s community. The more positive votes your story receives, the closer it comes to the front page and the more new readers see it. This is an effective strategy for driving new, enthusiastic traffic to your blog and to get your content reposted.

Promotion Through Your Own Social Channels

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Now that you have optimized your content to spread like wildfire through the accounts of your most dedicated readers, time has come to do your own social promotion and expand your graph further. Establish a presence on Twitter and Facebook and encourage readers of your blog to friend and follow you on these mediums. You can use these services to post links to your new articles and promote the content of your blog.

This kind of promotion does two things. First, it establishes a lasting link between the reader and your brand. Rather than having to remember to check out your blog for updates, news of new content will be broadcast to them every time you announce it. Secondly, the fact that this person has shown interest in your profile will spread to the newsfeeds of their friends who may curiously check out your account to see what their friend is reading. Some of these people will decide they would like to receive updates from you as well and will add your page, thus building you a host of new readers.

Make Use Of Google’s Social Graphing API

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In recognition of the importance of the social web, Google has released a Social Graphing API that can be of great utility to brands. The API allows developers to create unique applications that analyze the dynamics of the links between people on different social networks. Google claims that the API “makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.”

In a video provided by Google to explain the potential uses of the API, the narrator describes a feature that could be extremely helpful to those working to expand their social graph. Because of its ability to analyze public links and look for connections between networks, the API allows developers to find people they know on one network elsewhere in the social web.

Imagine that you have amassed two thousand fans on Facebook. Chances are, a good number of these people have Twitter accounts, but unless you intent to hunt through every individual profile looking for links, you could never hope find them all yourself. Using the Google Social Graphing API, you could create an application that scans the profiles of your Facebook fans and identifies what are called “me links” (links a person makes to other accounts they own) to Twitter. Such information can be utilized to build a strong following on Twitter, expose more people to your content, and increase the chances that your blog will continue to be circulated.