Last night Racepoint Group hosted an event about social media and its return on investment (ROI). As social media continues to become a larger focal point in public relations and marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand how to articulate it’s value to clients.
Last night’s event centered around a panel discussion with three social media experts: Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Group, Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing for HubSpot.
After Larry Weber’s opening remarks, Qualman shared how he first dipped his toe into the digital space by sending a company-wide email instead of the standard hard copy memo. View his story here:
Volpe was up next and shared with the group the origins of his marketing career and the way tracking and reporting on ROI is evolving. Watch him provide tips here:
The evening was full of tremendous ideas and recommendations. The five big takeaways from the panel were:
1) Social media is not about technology. It’s about human interaction. It’s about sharing information and making connections. People who are intimidated by the technology aspect of engaging in social media should not view the applications as a hurdle. It’s simply the current mechanism to maintain relationships and reach out to new people.
2) When it comes to tracking social media, its important to focus not only on the quantitative (number of followers, number of re-postings) but also the qualitative. We need to take into account engagement and tone. Qualman said, “If social media is so trackable, we should just have robots running things. The human element is necessary here.”
3) Everyone and anyone can be a content creator, a publisher, a media property. As we shift away from traditional print and broadcast media, both we and our clients have the opportunity to get innovative and create and distribute our own content. Additionally, content creation should not be isolated to the PR and marketing staff. Volpe shared that, “50% of HubSpot employees have written posts for the HubSpot blog.”
4) Although much of PR and marketing is based in the written word, we need to start thinking more visually. We need to tell stories through pictures and videos. We need to make our content more authentic and dynamic.
5) On a personal level, Volpe stated, “The new resume is what comes up in Google when I type in your name.” As digital and social media continue to play an increasingly vital role in our PR and marketing efforts, we too have a digital and social persona, and that is now what employers are most interested in.
Thank you to Erik Qualman and Mike Volpe for joining us at Racepoint Group last night and providing such pragmatic, realistic, useful and inspiring guidance on the social media ROI frontier. Be sure to follow @equalman and @mvolpe on Twitter for real time updates on their social media adventures. You can also view all the live commentary during the event with the #smroi hashtag here.
At least it seems to have happened to Rolling Stone. It could be a DNS server issue as Mashable notes, but it does look very similar to the generic hosting service page you get when your site in unpaid.
The site is now updated to an error message, but still no content. Being down for the full day won’t help with Web traffic for the magazine’s Website, which has steadily decreased over the last six months.
At 37, Josh Tyrangiel has quickly worked his way up the journalistic ranks. Today, he becomes the first editor of the Bloomberg-run BusinessWeek. Most recently serving as editor of TIME.com and deputy managing editor of TIME , he was thought to be by many as the heir apparent to Richard Stengel.
The move shouldn’t come as a total shocker given that Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg’ chief content officer, formerly looked over Tyrangiel’s work as editor-in-chief of Time Inc. We’ve also heard that Jim Kelly, TIME’s former managing editor has been sitting in on the Bloomberg editorial meetings with other former TIME Inc. staff.
Given Tyrangiel’s success with TIME.com, he recently worked with Peter Ha in launching Techland and also boosted the Web site’s traffic to what some expect will be 1.8 billion page views this year, the move is also a show of support for John Byrne who has been driving BusinessWeek.com’s growth and was retained by Bloomberg. Tyrangiel made TIME.com a top consumer, multimedia portal: tying text, audio, pictures and video together with an integrated approach. One of BusinessWeek.com’s top revenue drivers in the past has been ad-supported slides shows – which will likely increase 10-fold (while becoming more interactive) under Tyrangiel’s watch. And judging by the video embedded above, he articulated this approach to his managers and “troops” in a way that resonated.
In addition, if Bloomberg’s goal is to reach a broader consumer audience, beyond Wall Street, with the magazine – Tyrangiel’s non-business background will come into play. He’s a music-critic at heart (not an economist or someone with a Wall Street background), who sat down with music luminaries such as Bono and Kanye West for cover stories, during his time at Rolling Stone.
One of Tyrangiel’s first challenges will be assessing if he can save Business Exchange, BusinessWeek’s information-sharing, social network. According to previous reports, the company has sunk $16 million into the site over the last two years, while drawing only 1.5 million page views on average per month and bringing in $600,000 in revenue last year.
One of its latest digital moves is a weekly online video series, which it is dubbing “Tea with The Economist.” Like every step the Economist has made in moving carefully into digital waters, the series is very true to the The Economist brand.
“The 10-15 minute videos are conducted by The Economist reporters and editors around the globe who pour tea and query their subjects.”
However, the The Economist isn’t attempting to turn this into an online version of Charlie Rose’s two-way conversations. In fact, true to the anonymity that the The Economist maintains for their bylines, the reporters are never shown on camera or identified.
