Hi Justin,

Thanks for commenting and giving your thoughts. We’re excited to hear about your speech at Conversion Conf West. Good luck and let us know if there’s anything that we can provide for your talk.

cheers,

craig.

What I’d like to hear more about is tools and metrics others are using to measure the success of their social strategy. For instance, what steps are being taken to track the profile of your fan base, e.g. the percentage of your fans that own your products or where they came from (facebook coupon promotion, a fan’s recommendation, email campaign, etc…).

100 fans with 10 friends each is 1000 potential exposures, but what is the actual value in terms of bottom line? How many of your posts/tweets are being recommended or retweeted and what is the avg value? I once worked with a social marketing agency whose metric for success was the percentage increase in fans/followers month over month. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy.

Also, I imagine that it’s not a very difficult decision for companies like Coca Cola and Starbucks to simply reallocate marketing $ from the millions they are spending on traditional, offline marketing activities taht are primarily faith based initiatives. The decision to shift time and/or marketing $ isn’t as simple for those with only a fraction of the budget as the aforementioned brand namees when you take into consideration the cost of apps and services needed for a successful strategy.

I’ve looked into Webtrends, the analytics tools offered by Involver, and I’ve also read about using Google Analytics for pages/apps created in FBML. What other options are there?

Perhaps a good follow-up topic for this is blog is, “How does analytics and business intelligence play into your social strategy?”

-Eugene

I am actually speaking on a similar topic at the Conversion Conference West in March. Look for a reference to some of your work (probably in the form of a blog post or within my presentation)! I really think you have hit the nail on the head with your focus on social media, especially with the introduction of your advanced ecommerce system within Facebook.

Thanks Lyle. Humanizing the customer experience is probably even more important for large companies since they often fall into the “who’s responsibility is that” category. Smaller businesses often have people making it happen who take charge and show their personality naturally.

I personally love how Camfrog handles this:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/Camfrog

All they do is add one word to make the post “in character”. Check them out.

cheers,

craig.

I really think that humanizing the customer experience is a big boost for small businesses that can now compete in this arena more effectively with the larger corporations.

Again, great blog!