Full Sail University has been a well known design and art school for some time, more than 30 years, mostly in the areas of music, film, design and gaming. In the last couple years we’ve expanded to offering degrees in such areas as Entertainment Business (including a Sports Management elective track), Internet Marketing and Education Media Design. So how have these fit into the Full Sail family of education offerings? All these degrees include elements of using media in creative ways to solve problems and objectives. They teach people how to take the creative aspects of their personality and use tools to instruct, persuade and deliver messages. Full Sail University is really about teaching creative problem solving, whether it’s related to production, design, business, marketing or instruction. That’s why we are the University for Creative Minds.

I mean to say this in the kindest sense, both to marketers and Social Media itself. Social Media has changed everything. It’s given us a channel that provides immediate and unfiltered observation and communication with our target audiences. Heck, it’s blown apart the concept of “target audiences” as we know it. We no longer have to conjure up archetypes from our imaginations to give a face to those demographic homogenies that we use to target our campaigns. We merely have to “follow” someone to learn how a typical customer ticks, their likes and dislikes, their hopes and their fears…  We can get feedback and answer questions in a direct way that contact forms and one way copy never could. It only makes sense that we direct resources and time into these new arenas.

But, like any good crack addict, some become hooked. First it’s just a couple times a week. Then it’s an hour a day (just a little social media after lunch to get in touch with our customers, man…) Pretty soon you are shoving aside the time you spent optimizing your paid search accounts, traditional SEO activities and even detailed analysis of traffic and A-B testing of your content. But, you don’t mind, because it “feels” so good. When the executive board of your company asks for you to give them the ROI and performance data on these new efforts you can only throw up the peace sign and say, “How can you hang a price on the love and outreach we are experiencing with our customers, man. That’s like, bringing me down, man.”

Then they fire your hippy ass.

So, we all know there is something potentially valuable to be gained from engaging your customers in Social Media platforms. Why do you have to resign yourself to not being able to assign real value to it? Heck, you should DEMAND it of yourself, especially if you are devoting a second of time away from other marketing pursuits. You wouldn’t stand for your paid search or display advertising efforts to continue without knowing impressions, clicks, and conversions down to a very small margin of error. You should require as much from your Social Media campaigns as well. I guarantee you those who cut the checks and approve the budgets will. So, sober up and dust off those books you bought about metrics and analytics and get back to business.

I don’t believe in intangibles when it comes to marketing. Intangibles are just tangibles that you haven’t taken the time and effort to apply a measurement scheme to yet. The best way to tackle this is to make your Social Media metrics analogous to your other campaigns’ metrics.

Impressions

You monitor how often you ads are viewed don’t you? Well, then do the same for how often your brand comes up in discussion. Make online conversations = impressions. With Social Media you get the extra added benefit of being able to measure your impressions in terms of varying contexts. By that I mean, positive, negative or neutral, etc… Are people bashing you on a forum thread? 1 negative impression. Did someone post a blog about a great experience with your staff? 1 positive impression. Find a tweet where someone asked a general question about your product? 1 neutral impression. Feel free to make the impression categories as simple or complex as you like. Count every post in a thread or the whole thread. Classify impressions as questions, answers, praise and criticism. Whatever it makes sense for you to count is fine, the important thing is that you are counting.

Clicks

This is probably the easiest one to do. Virtually any analytics package out there is going to provide you with referring page data. Simply give any of those impressions you counted a “click” if your site received traffic as a result of that online conversation.

Congratulations, you now have a click-through-rate for that blog post or thread. Not only that, you can now see CTR on negative vs. positive impressions. You can report a CTR on Twitter traffic in relation to how many brand mentions you had. All of the sudden you are able to see a relative value of scaling efforts in one Social Media platform over another in terms of driving traffic, not just current sheer volumes.

Conversions

To me this is the most important piece to the puzzle.  You have to know the bottom line or it’s all just fun and games. Pulling a conversion metric out of that “fuzzy cloud” of Social Media is where you can impress the boss (or your bank account) and gain true support for ramping up Social Media efforts.

You’re going to need to use some kind of analytics package that tracks conversion or goal data.  The easiest option might be to use Google Analytics with it’s built in goal metrics. It may take some work tagging your lead forms, or cart receipt pages, but be sure to use the full depth of what your analytics package provides.  If you are e-commerce based, then try to gather total order value. If lead generation, then make sure to gather the type of lead (if you collect multiple interests.)

Once done (and really, you should already being doing this if you do any paid advertising) you’ll know what platforms and types of conversations convert at what rates. These numbers should truly define where you priorities get placed, both among your Social Media initiatives and in relation to your overall marketing strategy.

Cost Per Action and ROI

Social Media is free, so your Cost Per Action is $0 and the ROI is infinite!

WRONG!

Thinking like that is how Social Media efforts get hamstrung and tossed onto the plate of an already busy person, doomed to never be scaled up. Take the time spent on Social Media and multiply it by the implementer’s hourly rate, or their entire salary if you have dedicated personnel. Are you going to Social Media conferences, spending money at “Tweet-Ups”, or buying books to learn new strategies? Count it all up, and don’t be scared you are going to blow that “marketing freebie” image of Social Media. It’s much worse to report a $0 CPA and then ask for budget money than it is to provide a real an accurate accounting of what it costs to manage your efforts right. If you don’t get an accurate CPA and ROI down now, you are going to run into big problems when you try to scale your efforts up and run into budget shortages.

Analysis

Okay, so that may all be pretty much a no-brainer for most marketers. You know how to do all that.  But, are you doing it? Are you keeping a spreadsheet or database of those data points broken down by each month, week or day? Are you graphing out the changes in impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions and conversion rates over time? Are you comparing that graph with the timeline of your Social Media activities? If not, get to it! You need to know the impact of what you are doing and take informed deliberate actions based off your data.

So now that you have all this data gathered, you simply factor in Social Media platforms into your marketing mix and optimize like any other source you are using. Examine your data points and see if creating or engaging in existing conversations about your brand drives more clicks, or even improves your CTR. Learn what types of activity you initiate give you a better conversion rate. Find well performing scenarios and work to scale them up to maximize your potential in those instances.

Compare these efforts to other things like paid search networks, and display placements, and then prioritize your efforts based on what the numbers tell you are the most productive and have the best ROI. You may learn that spending half your day chasing down detractors or answering questions on blogs yields considerably less sales than using that time developing ad campaigns. Or, you may find that your audience converts ten fold when you interact.  the numbers may tell you hiring a staffer full time to man that effort would increase business 20% while raising your overall ROI.

Conclusion

The point is, let the numbers tell their story and be prepared to respond appropriately, even if you don’t like it. Sure, it may be more fun to make a Facebook app than adjust bids in AdWords, but you have a job to do. Always be sure to measure what you market and don’t let the glitz and glam of Social Media turn you into a junkie. Network responsibly!

Terry Howard is the Internet Marketing Strategist for Full Sail University, which offers an Online Bachelors in Internet Marketing and an Online Masters in Internet Marketing.

Try this fun little experiment:  Find a picture that is tagged as “New York”, that is the whole phrase and not smooshed together like “NewYork” or separated like 2 tags “New” and “York”.  Now search that user’s photostream  for tags only and use “new york” as the query (but drop the quotes.)  You’ll find that particular photo does not show.  It will however, if you use the quotes or search for “newyork”. This is because Flickr’s tagging system considers a tag entered using quotes to make it a nice looking phrase as nothing more than a vanity display for the phrase squished together without the spaces.

As a result when a user searches a phrase without quotes they will only find your photo if it is tagged with the words individually and not grouped into a phrase. So if you want your picture to show for the search query of “new york” (again minus the quotes) then you would have to tag your photo as “new” and “york” separately.

Upon closer inspection of the page I find a couple other customers have made use of the “ask a question” feature to pose the same query “What’s up with the $60 stars?” The questions were unanswered, the price remained incorrect, 3 weeks after the original poster, and 2 weeks after the second.

This is a great example of why if you are going to use “Web 2.0″ style features like customer interaction, you HAVE to support it. In this case supporting it means actually paying attention to the customer interaction on your own site.  Here people are asking direct questions and for nearly 3 weeks, nothing has been done. That is way too long for a 600% pricing error to go uncorrected, much less in light of that multiple customers have actively reached out using the tools you provided them to help you in this case.

When I look at the module that the other customers are using to ask questions, I see it gives ME, another customer, the option to answer the question. At this point, I think I have to assume that is what they intend, have other customers answer the questions and the vendor will just flat out ignore them.

That’s a complete failure to seize the opportunity here to not continue to lose sales due to a basic data entry error. How much money was lost due to people being turned away by this pricing issue?  I guarantee you it was a heck of a lot more than it would have cost for someone to spend the time to look at customers’ questions!

The degree themselves focus on core topics such as Social Media Optimization, Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Marketing at the Bachelor level, and Internet Public Relations, Internet Consumer Behavior and Web Metrics and Analysis at the Master’s level, among other items.

Since I am, in fact, involved in the Internet Marketing for Full Sail University, I feel of course I need to make that clear, but I also feel that it gives me a unique insight on the degrees.  When our academic teams began writing these degrees they asked myself and other players in our marketing department what are some things an internet marketer needs to know.  I think I ended up delivering them a list of 2 pages of of 10 pt type topics, ranging from specifics like server headers to broader topics like PPC management and marketing campaign budgeting. Every topic I could pour out of my brain was included in the final curriculum plus some.  These guys got these degrees right, and you will learn a well rounded marketing education that puts you on the cutting edge of effective techniques.  I think the important thing to understand is these are not solely SEO degrees or PPC degrees. These are internet marketing degrees, they teach the core fundamentals about marketing and how they relate to online advertising and new media marketing. There are definitely some specifics on techniques for SEO, PPC and the like, and Full Sail is uniquely experienced in adapting curriculum, even mid-course, to the changing industries they provide education in. If you think internet marketing is a moving target technology wise, try game design or web design, in which Full Sail University also manages to keep students current.

Definitely go check out these internet marketing degrees whether you are a young buck out there looking to legitimize your career path or give focus and direction by learning marketing fundamentals, or you are a traditional marketing maven who needs to learn how to grab hold of the new media out there to drive your campaigns to new heights.

Frankenbits

Full Sail is an incredible place to work and if you have some basic experience with PPC or even just have dipped your toe in the water and have a real desire to jump head long into this growing area of marketing, send us your resume!

CPC = Cost-Per-Click
CPA = Cost-Per-Acquisition (we call this CPL, Cost-Per-Lead, for our purposes, in any case it’s the cost per “conversion”, but CPC is already taken!)

CPC is just the average paid for traffic, or clicks on your ad, irregardless of what they do after that
CPA/CPL is a measure of how much you had to pay before you get a lead or sale (on the average)

The conversion rate of your CPC gives you a CPL. So like say you are bidding $1.00 for a term. That term got clicked 100 times and it just happened to be $1.00 everytime (for arguments sake). The average CPC was $1, but your overall spend was $100. Let’s say 5 out of those 100 clicks bought something. You had a conversion rate of 5%, and your CPA was $100 (your overall spend) divided by 5 (your total orders), which gives you a CPA of $20. You literally had to pay $20 (averaged) to gain 5 orders.

Your ROI now is something you can only really determine in short order for immediate sales type conversions. Leads could in theory be quantified as an ROI but we’d have to take our average revenue generated by a successfully cultivated lead, divide that by the conversion rate of our leads (how many leads become customers) and get an average value for each lead. We could then use that as our “conversion value” in an ROI equation, which is:

ROI = net revenue / costs x 100%

So in our above example you have 5 orders (or leads), let’s say they were for $400 a piece (or for every 5 leads 1 will become a customer that nets $2000, making your average lead value $400) . Those 5 orders/leads brought in $2000. Now we spent $100 to earn that $2000, so our net revenue from the campaign was $1900 (gross – costs). Now take that net, divide it by the cost again, which gives you 19, which means your campaign was effective by a factor of 19, or more commonly represented as a percentage (x100%) which gives you an ROI of 1900%.

You could then take that number and use it for projections. Given all factors the same we might could expect that plugging in $2000 at a ROI of 1900% would yield $38,000 ($2000 x 1900%.)

So I jumped right on board when I read the initial launch press release. But I find myself having to just stop going to the site and try it again in maybe 3 months or so. After realizing that mine and everyone else’s initial activity has been nothing more than pointing out the endless myriad of bugs, missing critical features, design flaws and on and on, I just have to ask myself: Why am I bothering?

It’s a great alpha, but you guys opened this site up before you bothered to even implement relevant title tags, RSS feeds, or even basic cross browser testing for CSS issues. This should never have been launched in this state and presented to the online marketing industry of all people. You target audience should never be your beta testers.

So we can expect the FCC and the government to pull the plug on this anytime now, right? I mean, Janet Jackson shows a pasty and all hell breaks lose, but government funded youth targeted advertising can utilize the word “fuck” as the center piece of a mutli-media onslaught?