Like it, Tweet It, Pin it -- You decide

Facebook®,  Twitter®, Pinterest® and LinkedIn® are just a few places that you can engage with your members in the social media space.  The true value of being present in these spaces is hard to measure their true return on investment.  Check out a few ways that your association can start tracking your ROI today:

Google Analytics this provides you tools to track how members engage with your association’s website. When you set up your account, you indicate what page you’d like to track.  You can track items like: paid, organic, local, social, etc.  One of my former association clients did a “heat map” showing where they received the most traffic, thereby justifying their premium home page real estate.  In fact, the heat map, showed that their section of the website (career center) was the most viewed and visited page.  This built the business case for both a redesign of this section as well as increasing the prominence on other highly viewed pages. 

bitly makes your link both trackable and searchable.  This allows you to tweet shorter statuses on your association’s twitter account, as well as determine, who is out there listening to you.  This feature also allows you to customize your shortened URL so you can include keywords that you want to appear in search results.  The more you can track the more you can show the value of time(hopefully) well spent. 

Tweet Deck the largest advantage of this feature is the ability to schedule your tweets.  I usually open this up in the morning and after I check email I start crawling the web for stories about things I find interesting.  This could be anything from membership growth strategies, database best practices, interesting stories in the business world, as well as other things.  I spend about 30 minutes every morning finding these stories and then sharing them with the world via twitter. 

Klout helps you understand what the association’s sphere of influence is and how it’s changed.  The interesting thing is you can see who influences you, if you weren’t aware before.  I have a few go to’s in terms of blogs that I follow.  They are:

•  Katya’s Non-Profit Blog
•  Kindergarten Mind
•  Beth’s Blog
• ASAE’s Acronym
•  Harvard Business Review Blogs

With so many different ways to engage with your members out there, I think it’s important for someone to share what they’ve learned.  There may be easier ways to do it, but this is what I have learned.  Hope you find it helpful!

The thin line of synergy

Fox and Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp has become an expert at synergistic marketing. Why? They are genius at implanting cross promotional opportunities. They are one of the "Media Giant Oligopolies" who maintain control over the media.

What does this mean for you? When you turn on one or more the following television stations there is a high degree of chance that you will see a promotion for a program on one of the other stations. This allows for low cost promotion of their programming, while filling their adverstising space.

Something that I have been noticiing is that there is more and more product placement on numerous paid cable television channels. The first example comes from Cablevision's AMC. Their slogan is "Stories Matter." However, they have been increasingly blurring the line between their programming and their commercial advertisements. They have had a number of ads for Contacts.com that mirror the program "Mad Men." This show details the lives of powerful advertising executives when advertising was born. It makes the viewer question as to whether or not AMC is trying to reinvent the way that advertisers gear their commercials.

The second example, is HBO's Entourage that follows the "superstar" Vinnie Chase and his posse's lives around. In the most recent season, Turtle gets a gig for promoting Avion tequilla and he gets his superstar friend to tweet about it, and also give it a soft endorsement. In this plot arc, the owner of the company is afraid that he will lose his company to Mark Cuban a wealthy business man. After the episodes aired, it came out that the creator of the show had this company written into the storyline to help out a friend's company. The company did not pay a dime for the promotion, and the story. Benevolence? You decide.

As a marketer, I appreciate the new and innovative ways that people are utilizing television programming to promote products and services. However, as a consumer, I am mildly irriated that I can't escape the messages, even when I want to shut down my brain. If I shut down my brain, I may just fall victim to the product placement....