Gray Dudek

KPI, or key performance indicator, is a measure of your success.

Question is, how do you measure success?

A lot of people point to stats like increased web views and time on site, or even a boost in the number of social mentions coming your way.

Guess what? More website visitors is not a sign of ROI. Neither are retweets or the number of YouTube views on your channel. But that doesn’t mean all your progress on the social nets isn’t an indicator of success. Confused? Let’s start at the beginning:

See? Your return is whatever is left over once you reconcile the cost of your investment from the gains received. The cool thing is that you can correlate social media with profits. The way we do this is by running several stats over one another. Here’s a visual of what I mean:

First we establish that the graph covers data collected after we began using social media channels, like a blog, Twitter and YouTube. Let’s assume the graphic of the man/woman symbol represents visits to your online store, and the dollar sign represents online sales. This is a very simple example, but by running the graphs over one another it appears social media activity encourages an increase in sales.

*Of course, we will rely on multiple streams of data, including Google Analytics and conversion tracking.

Now let’s add another stat into the mix: brick and mortar sales:

The arrows represent sales at physical locations — and they’re flat. By running the data onto a single graph we can notice trends, including the one in our example: Our social media efforts have influenced online sales but failed to establish any meaningful difference at retail locations.

Why Does This Matter?

Analyzing the concrete benefits of social media engagement is important, because if you’re a company — even more so if you are a sole proprietor — time spent on social requires resources, and those ain’t free.

We analyze KPI to determine what makes our business grow.

Now to be sure, this isn’t something you can verify after two weeks. Stick with your efforts and analyze them over the long term. What you should notice by comparing one stat at a time — website visits, time on site, social mentions — with increases in sales and cashflow is what specific KPI is most directly related to profit.

Do positive mentions lead to more sales? Or are growing blog views more directly related to business growth? You’ll have to find out for yourself. But even if you simply track overall web activity and sales/profits, you’re on the right track to spotting relevant trends.

Ask your social media team how to set up tests like this — it’s an up and coming best practice for socially engaged businesses.

(thanks to Social Media Commando Joe Mescher for this content)

This is actual proof and evidence that being a Geek is now uber cool.

It’s been a long time coming but I am officially now PROUD to be geeking out, having a geek sesh, being geeky, etc as it’s sub-zero cool…

Superb spoof by Grasshopper.comfor their virtual phone system for  Entrepreneurs.

Watch, enjoy and geek-out on the production quality!

Less than a week after the introduction of the iPad, Apple plans to share details on “the future of iPhone OS” at a press event this Thursday, where the company is widely expected to lift the wraps off version 4.0 of Apple’s mobile operating system, which will add new functionality to current iPod touch, iPhone and iPad devices. The event will also shed light on what you can expect from Apple’s next-generation iPhone handset. Although Apple has sold a large number of devices running the iPhone OS — an estimated 40 million iPhones, more than 20 million iPod touches and now 300,000 iPads — there’s always room for improvement in the operating system. Here’s a short list of what to expect (including what I’d like to see!) from iPhone OS 4.0.

Multitasking

The ability to run more than one third-party application at a given time has long been a user request from the masses. The iPhone OS of today is capable of multitasking because the feature is currently supported on some native Apple applications – listening to music in the iPod app while web surfing or checking mail is a good example. So while the OS supports multiple apps running concurrently, it imposes limits to help ensure a positive experience with core functionality. But as some consumers look to the iPad as a potential laptop replacement, multitasking with non-Apple software titles is desirable (not everyone, of course, but for certain people). My own blogging activities would be far easier on the iPad if I could multitask to get web links and edit pictures while creating posts, for example. And I wouldn’t be surprised if only the iPad gains a multitasking function — or one that’s considered less constrained than on an iPhone.

Higher resolution

Let’s face it: The iPhone’s HVGA display was nice back in 2007, but it’s a little dated now. Many new handsets at the same price point offer generous 800×480 (or better) displays over the iPhone’s 480×320 screen. Look for iPhone 4.0 to support higher resolutions for the next-generation devices expected in a few months. This could help iPad owners as well. iPhone apps do work on the iPad today, but the pixel doubling of lower-resolution software makes apps look blocky and blurry.

Support for a second camera

Surely, the camera in the next iPhone will be bumped higher than the current 3-megapixel sensor. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a second, front-facing camera for video chatting in iPhone OS 4.0 — it’s a feature we’ve been calling for since late last year. Perhaps it would be similar to iChat’s video offering on a Mac. We could even see third-party apps take advantage of such a change, although Apple may not allow access to such hardware for non-native apps.

A unified inbox

While I like to keep my work and personal lives separate most of the time, the one place I want them together is in my email. iPhone 4.0 should be bringing us a unified inbox so we don’t have to tap, tap, tap our way from one mailbox to another. Perhaps, like the once-missing copy-and-paste feature, Apple is still developing an elegant solution to the problem.

Enhanced voice-to-text features

Google added this highly useful function to Android 2.1 and it ought to be a staple in any modern smartphone. Apple added Voice Control in version 3 of the iPhone OS, but it’s limited by comparison — all you can use it for is to call a contact or control your iPod. Google’s implementation integrates throughout the operating system, making it easy to search the web, create a text message or even compose an email simply by speaking. Such a function could give Apple more insight to what iPhone OS users are searching for on the web — and would support a rumored Apple move into the search market.

Music in the clouds

iPhone 4.0 could be the first time we see the benefit of Apple’s LaLa purchase, which took place in December of last year. As I said in a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required) just days before the deal, if Apple doesn’t offer iTunes streaming over the web, others like Amazon could easily jump in the game. Consumers don’t mind carrying their music around, but storing content in the cloud offers nearly limitless capacity to hold media. And if Apple decides this isn’t a feature for the iPhone OS, I’ll just keep doing what I do today — store and stream my music with a cloud storage service like SugarSync or another provider.

( source for features – Kevin C. Tofel )

So the Tories decided to aggrgate all the links to the sites where Gordon Brown had potential had ‘dealings’ that were supposed to be of a back-handed nature.

Nice idea, but not thought through.

Launched at the weekend on Facebook and Twitter, the site – claimed to have cost $15,000 – was intended to engage voters who could earn “points” for reading a speech by Michael Gove, the shadow education minister, or bombarding Charlie Whelan, the ex-Labour spin doctor now working for Unite, with hectoring tweets.

It worked, up to a point: it certainly engaged voters.

Unfortunately, many of them weren’t Conservative voters.

And it seems that the team behind the Tories’ site hadn’t learned the lesson of the Daily Telegraph, which last April saw its site peppered with swearing and insults aimed at its owners, the Barclay Brothers, when it automatically republished any tweet containing the text “#budget”. (”Telegraph wankers #budget Didn’t work” being one of the more polite.) So history repeated itself – for a change, both times as farce – after Twitter users quickly spotted that any tweet containing “#cashgordon” would be reused immediately on the site, regardless of whether it agreed with the Conservative view or not.

So what was the impact on the conversation volume surrounding this?

It’s clear to see from the above how quickly the trend kicked-up. Analysing the Tweets that were driving this spike using Social Radar we were able to see that the hockey-stick was not due to the kind of posts that the Tories were really after.

Porn, profanity and Rick Astley were the main contributors towards this!

So what was the sentiment towards the campaign?

Quite easy to see that although the volume of converation increased dramatically the negative conversation went up also.

The topics that were being ‘discussed’ were:

So what have the Conservatives said about the campaign? How did they spin this one?

“So it looks like some people took the fun a bit too far and hacked #CashGordon. Full service will resume very shortly …”

A bit of fun they say? Campaigning against their nearest rival using Digital is meant to be a bit of fun? I am pretty sure that if the site would have worked out how they wanted it to this ‘bit of fun’ would have turned into a ‘major triumph for the people’ or some such political spin-mastery…

And poor old  Gordon Thompson in Nova Scotia, @CashGordon – he had to change his Twitter bio as people were coming to his Twitter feed to find out what was going on…

2/10 Tory Party – must try harder…