Social Media; your next digital communications channel.
Kia ora all! I’m officially back in business at Leftfield Interactive! Awhile back I wrote a post highlighting my man crush on Rob Fyfe and the way Air NZ had a great PR win! Since then it’s been eirily quiet, and that’s mostly due to the fact that a) I went to watch the All Whites kick football butt, and b) we’ve been super duper busy!
One of the reasons we’ve been really busy has been social media. Social media is one of the main reasons I joined Leftfield Interactive, that and the fact that I get to wear the Panda Hat of AWESOMENESS each time I have a moment of brilliance. Social media seems to be a bit of a buzz term at the moment, you hear phrases like “I’ll tweet you” or “come like us on Facebook” and “don’t forget to check in each time you come”, but for some people it just doesn’t make sense!
So that is my goal today, to give you a basic outline of social media and why you and your business should seriously consider this as one of your digital communication channels.
To start with I thought instead of me trying to explain social media, I’d provide you with this SlideShare presentation which sums it up brilliantly!
The world of communications has been flipped on its head by social media. In the past the communications process was very much one-way traffic. An organisation would send their message to the relevant communication channels like print and television, and then they would send your message onto your consumers. Social media provides the first communication channel that is thoroughly 2-way, but to such an extent that it is like having conversations with your customers all the time.
The way social media achieves this 2-way communication is by providing very clear and easy to use feedback opportunities for your customers. When you send a message to your Facebook fan base, or those following your corporate Twitter account, they are all able to respond very quickly and efficiently. The implications of this are huge.
Firstly it means that your customers will respond to your latest promotions instantly, good or bad. No longer can the bad feedback you get from individuals be handled quietly and out of the light of the mainstream, it’s right there for everyone to read! Secondly, it means that your customers can initiate the communications process, not just you! Your customer might have a bad experience, and instead of complaining during the experience, whining to their friends, or never using you again, they can complain to you directly and in the most public of ways. So, are you scared or inspired?
As with anything in life how you choose to react to circumstances determine’s how those circumstances will affect you. This new form of communicating should inspire you because there has never been a greater level of public accountability for an organisation than this. Imagine a client complaining about you on Twitter to their 5000 followers. Then imagine a customer service recovery process that see’s the whole process acted out in front of their 5000 followers, and it ending positively. You’ve turned around a frustrated client, and their network of 5000 people who could have been influenced negatively without you even realizing.
At Leftfield Interactive everything we do is because we believe people are the most inspired, relational creatures there are. We believe in helping them communicate better. We believe in always helping them to improve. The way we do this is through well thought through experiences that are clear, innovative, and successful. We just happen to use digital channels and tools like social media, websites, email, online advertising, TXT, and viral campaigns to achieve their goals.
If you’d like to discuss how you could incorporate social media as a digital communications channel for your organisation then please get in touch.
Setting up Google Analytics for Success
Gidday I’m Charles, I’ve been with leftfield since April 2010 and I recently passed the Google Analytics Qualified Individual exam. You can check out my qualification here.
When I tell people I’m a Google Analytics Qualified Individual the response is often “google what?” So if you’re not familiar with it, Google Analytics is an excellent tool for getting data on how people use your website. Which helps on the journey to improving your online presence.
You can check it out here: www.google.com/analytics/
My observation is that most GA accounts only ever use one profile which doesn’t really give the site owner a lot of information about how the site is being used. With a small bit of setup the data Google Analytics collects could be a lot more useful – I’m going to tell you how.
Google Analytics Profiles - what they are good for?
Every Google Analytics account starts with one profile by default and you can add more – up to 50. Profiles are great for helping to capture your data in a way that makes sense for you. You can use profiles to capture subsets of data, like only certain data such as a subdomain or area of a website, or to manipulate it to make more sense for human eyes.
Profiles also allow you to share specific data with others. For instance you might have a website with a blog and shopping cart. You want to share all you website data with someone except your shopping cart data. You can create a profile to capture only the data you want to share, then share only that profile with them. This is handy if you want someone to have access to your data of a specific kind.
What you cant do is manipulate the data in profiles later. So if you set up analytics today then in a few months time add a profile to capture data from your members section (or even change an existing profile) then the changes wont be made to the historical data already captured.
Everyone should have two profiles, yes everyone!
Every analytics account should have at least two profiles. One Raw data profile which has no changes made to it. The second is a cleaned data profile which has filters applied, to make the data, well, cleaner. Which makes the quality of the data better, and it easier to work with. So when you come to making some analysis or what is happening you have the best trends and data available.
Master Raw
Preferably this would be the original profile from when you GA account was first opened. This acts as a profile which you can check other profiles against to make sure they are collecting data correctly.
At Leftfield, we usually rename the profile some thing like “AA – Raw data – DO NOT TOUCH”. If anyone else has access to your account, then we hope they’ll get the message.
Master Clean
The master Clean profile is similar to the raw data profile, except that a couple of filters are added to make the data clean and easier to report on. Cleaning the data as I’m about to show below is straight forward and not as scary as you might be thinking.
Create a new profile
To create a new profile, click create a new profile in the accounts settings view. You then want to create a new profile for an existing domain, and ensure that the right domain is selected if you have more than one. Once it is created some tips for setting up all your profiles correctly are ensuring:
1) that site search is enabled, and
2)that the default page is defined
These are both found in the Main Website Profile Information section of the Profile settings page. Enabling site search adds more reporting features to your profiles, even if you don’t have an internal site search, it’s an easy set and for get change. If you ever get a search feature in it will save you a bunch of hassel. Also ensuring that the default page is defined e.g. index.php or index.html, tells Google Analytics that pages example.com and example.com/index.html are the same page. So it combines their data together neatly.
Two filters that are easy to create
Filter 1 – Move all URIs to lowercase
Why?
Google Analytics usually relies on the string of characters in the address bar to track your pages. There are other ways Google Analytics does it’s job but I’m not going to get into that now. For the most part, the address of the URL is what we are looking. The part of the URL that comes after your domain name is called a URI. URI’s can be in lowercase or uppercase, have random capitals etc and all end up on the same page. A simple example would be google.com/analytics and google.com/Analytics. The address is slightly different but you end up in the same place. Google Analytics however records them as different pages. So the result is that the reports in analytics end up multiple versions of URIs to the same page. Essentially making it a mission to work out what’s going on.
So how would you fix this? by including a filter to your Master cleaned profile. Then regardless what someone enters into the address bar or how a link is setup it plays nice in the profile’s reports and they are counted as the same page.
How?
You can make new filters through the filter manager, or on the settings page of a profile. This is how to create new a new custom filter. Take a look at the image below. When you get to the filter page, you want to enter these details into the filter, then name it how you like, and hit save – your first filter has been made! See, not that hard is it.
Filter 2 – Only include traffic to your domain
Why
Because you only want to track traffic that comes to your domain, right? Not everyone else’s. A common scenario is to for a development company to be doing work on your site. The developer gets a copy of you site and they set up a test/staging site for you to check. They include all the same code from your live site which includes your Google Analytics code. Everytime the developer, or you, visit the testing site you are calling the Google Analytics code and this creates a pageview in your reports. So you want to strip this out and an easy way to do it is to only accept data that has you host name in it which is something like yourdomain.com, not the visits from the test site, thedeveloper.com
How
Again go to create a new custom filter and enter the information as below. Put your own domain name in place of leftfieldinteractive.com, and remember to place a \ infront of the fullstop (Because they are regex characters – you don’t need to know why right now).
What is important to note are the backslashes in the filter pattern field. These are really important. Without getting into too much detail, symbols such as . / * etc have special meanings in Google Analytics, which are really useful. But it means you have to remember to escape their actions by by using \ (backslash), when you want the ordinary meaning.
This is only the beginning of what you can do with Google Analytics. There are more filters and profiles that can be added. This might not be exactly what everyone else thinks but it’s worked for us time and time again. From here you can move on with confidence that you are collecting all the raw data you will need for checking against, and you have a cleaned up set of data that will be useful for gaining insight to improve your site.
Don’t get mad; get even.
Aloha from the new recruit. My names Rich and I’m pretty much a carbon copy of Hayden, apart from the fact that he’s the boss, and I’m not. Oh, and that he plays rugby, where as I play football (also known as “soccer” for the Americans out there). Today I thought I’d start with a fairly interesting topic, how to get even in a very professional way.
At some point in our personal or professional lives, we have a person or an organization that for some reason doesn’t like us, doesn’t listen to us, and talks a whole load of rubbish about us. So how does one rectify the situation? Well as I tell the kids I coach “don’t get mad, get even…win on the scoreboard”. One company that did this recently was Air New Zealand.
Air New Zealand is a large organization, with a terrific CEO, and a good track record of communicating with the media. However when The Listener recently published a column about how Air New Zealand’s potential merger with Virgin Blue would mean a reduction in service, and Rob Fyfe was absolutely ropable.
Before I go on I think I need to highlight one thing, this blog will be highly biased as Rob Fyfe is one of my business hero’s, and some would say my admiration for him has lead to a “man crush”. And yes Hayden, I’m man crushing on someone else.
Back to the Air New Zealand case study. Rob Fyfye and his team took an alternative approach to handling this situation. They released a media statement that can be read here. They then followed it up with this video posted here and here. Make a cup of tea, have a look, and then lets have a chat.
Ready…? OK. Anyone else feel like giving Rob Fyfye and Air New Zealand a big high five? He followed my approach to winning; he didn’t get mad, he got even, and he got even on the scoreboard. By taking this very humbling approach of using someone who spoke sign language to communicate a message to an organization unfortunately named The Listner Rob and his team went to town on these guys, without saying anything bad about them. Remarks such as “…if you’d just called Rob” makes Rob Fyfye seem a whole lot more accessible, as well as down to earth. It takes what was an article destroying Air New Zealand’s credibility as a quality airliner, and turns it on it’s head by saying “we’re a quality airline run by New Zealand’s 2nd favourite dad (because who can claim 1st better than John Key?) and you didn’t listen to us, which means you’re not credible”.
Air New Zealand is a large organization with a big reputation at stake and a big budget set aside for keeping that reputationin tact. So what about small to medium size organizations with a limited operating budget, let alone marketing budget? You still apply the same principle, you don’t get mad, you get even on the score board.
Hopefully as an SME you don’t have a national rag (see, Air New Zealand’s response has destroyed The Listener’s reputation in my mind) bearing down on you and completely lying about you or your company. However what if it’s a supplier claiming you’ve not paid your bills? Or how about a customer sulking that the job you did wasn’t up to standard? This is where you use social media to communicate your rebuttal cheaply and effectively.
At LFI we’re all about helping you get even on the scoreboard. If you’ve got some situations you need to work through, get in touch, I’d love to chat with you about them to see how we can partner with you, and ultimately stand on the sideline with you as you get even on the scoreboard.
Richard Boyd is an Account Manager for Leftfield Interactive. For further information please contact Richard on +64 (021) 807 000 or email richard@leftfieldinteractive.com
Building a company with Social Media
A nice little guide for anyone who is thinking about using Social Media for their company or business. This isn’t the most comprehensive guide but it should give you an idea of where to put your effort when planning use of the different Social Media channels.
Original image by Elliance Inc
