Links worth a click #5

There have been some really interesting reads online.

Here is my pick from the last week, we 24 June 2011.

SOCIAL MEDIA:  Mashable offered up an interesting ‘Behind the Scenes’ on 8 Innovative Social Media Campaigns. My personal favourite is The Voice because it is a new take on reality contest TV and was perfect for social media.

B2B: I particularly liked the advice on keeping your mind on ‘next action’ as a driver on what and how to present in Social Media B2B’s post on How to Create Great B2B Presentations

FACEBOOK: Australia’s finest, Jeff Bullas has pulled together an overview of 5 creative Facebook pages. I was initially surprised in scrolling through to find games, movies, cars and lingerie, but hey it is Facebook!

SEO COPY: The ever useful Marketing Profs site published a handy little guide on writing with SEO in mind. Their Five Tips for Writing Content That Keeps Pace With B2B Searches included titbits such as staying aware and staying relevant.

BLOGGING: If you need to get your CEO on board with your social media thinking, here is a useful post designed to get them involved in the blog side of things.

Now, a three way tie for content of the week:

EBOOKS: First off Hubspot’s How to Write and Launch an Ebook That Generates Leads. Staggeringly useful.

INFOGRAPHICS: Secondly, a must try: Infographics are all the rage right now if you have a dataset you want to present in an innovative way. Here are 5 tools to help turn data into infographics.

WEBSITES: Finally, from Econsultancy, and just to make most of you feel your age, just look at how some of the UK’s top e-commerce sites have changed in the past five years (or in some cases not changed).

Hope you see something you like. More next week.

Links worth a click #4

Here’s my pick of the best click worthy content from the last week.

First from Hubspot, a piece positioned as a startup’s social media starter list but actually useful to companies at various sizes and points on their development trajectory.

Next  if you’re moving your PR online and targeting influential bloggers and writers online, heed the warnings in this piece offering 6 Ways to Guarantee Your PR Pitch to B2B Bloggers Will Be Deleted.

Interesting stats released by com.score and reported on by Mashable this week suggested that social networking accounts for 1 of every 6 minutes spent online. I’m just surprised that 1/ people still use MySpace and 2/ people think it is even fair comparing it with Facebook.

Lots of companies are entering the social media space. Most are cautious, some write guidelines and implement policies to steer safely through. It’s ultimately becomes a case of how brave or conservative, and how empowered you want your staff to be. Here is an interesting Econsultancy read looking at whether all your staff need be engaging in social media?

Did you twang the Les Paul guitar strings on Google’s recent doodle? If you did you contributed to $268m in lost productivity, claims Search Engine Journal.

A random, and finally and just for sheer ‘awesome-ness’ here is a behind the scenes featurette from the new Transformers 3 movie, focusing on the birdman footage shot above Chicago.

Q: What have you been reading? Share your links in the comments.

Links worth a click #3

Worthwhile clickable content from over the last seven days.

An interesting piece on the Social Media B2B blog discussed the importance of goals and objectives in B2B social media 

I stumbled across a great piece from Social Media Examiner which I think is essential reading for anyone writing or considering writing / managing a blog project. Their Ultimate bloggers guide to blogging with search in mind outlines a step by step approach to ensuring your blog is search friendly and will deliver targeted traffic.

If you’re a fan of Linked in and keen to find content to curate either through your status updates, group interaction or indeed further afield on your blog or Twitter account, consider this How to Use LinkedIn Today to Find Popular Content blog post.

And whether you are a Facebook marketer or not, consider looking at this aAstonishingly useful list: 75 of the Best B2B Facebook Marketing Tips.

MarketingProfs wrote an interesting piece on How to Present Analytics to Your Leadership Team. Also useful in selling to clients and customers I suspect too.

Finally, if you do any kind of writing for a living, this piece from ProBlogger which talked about a superior writing method might make a difference.

Image: Caught Offside

Are you using the right web analytics model?

I have been inspired to share some of the content I picked up at Technology for Marketing & Advertising, 2010.

This blog reflects on the Econsultancy seminar on web analytics. More can be found at www.econsultancy.com.

If you are into evaluation, (and my blog statistics suggest most visitors are), you need to start providing credible reports on return on digital marketing investment. Attribution models help allocate lead generation and customer conversion to specific activities but model used can give a very different report.

There can be massive differences in what your website statistics and advertising statistics tell you. That’s because there are natural drop offs between people clicking an ad, opening an email, clicking a link to your site (the ad stat) and staying on your site long enough to register as a session (website stats). It can be down to simple things like realising they have gone to the wrong or irrelevant site, the home page taking too long to download or a loss of internet connection.

At a deeper level though, understanding how to attribute the success for a conversion is gaining importance in internet marketing. There are essentially three different strategies which can be employed to help give you a view on web traffic. These are commonly referred to as ‘last click’, ‘conversion’ & ‘weighted’.

Last click is the most common and easiest to monitor as it attributes credit for the conversion on the last click. So if an email is sent which results in 20% clickthrough to site, the email takes the credit. The major drawback in this model however is that it fails to take into account any other touchpoints, which inevitably provides a false impression of what works.

Conversion isolates a click and offers a thread so is ideal for affiliate enterprises. It does however provide the greatest risk of duplication and double counting as there is no guarantee that the clickthrough ends in a sale.

A weighted approach tries to allocate credit to all aspects of campaign but is obviously the hardest to manage. Dell and other direct marketing giants pioneered the concept of dedicated landing pages to help allocate traffic to specific channels and activities. Other sites bluntly ask how you arrived at the site.

I think the key thing for most businesses is simply to start monitoring where your traffic is coming from. If you are not, start monitoring your clicks, traffic and conversion today. If you already are, perhaps this post has given you some food for thought on exactly what you are monitoring.

Image from willscullypower WordPress blog