If you printed Twitter:
• It would cover 350 MILLION sheets of paper which is 37X more the number of pages used in Bills introduced to US Congress since 1955.

If you printed Twitter:
• The paper would weigh 3.5 MILLION pounds- the equivalent of 82 school busses loaded with 84 kids
If you printed Twitter:
• 7 Billion tweets are composed of approximately 104,860,000,000 words which is the equivalent of approximately 133,000 copies of the King James version of the Bible.

If you printed Twitter:
• And spent every workday doing nothing but reading tweets, it would take 2912 years to finish.

If you printed Twitter:
• All the pages of your printing, laid end to end, would stretch 60, 763 miles; equivalent to 2.5 times around the globe.

If you printed Twitter:
• It would cost you $24,500,000 using an average ink jet printer with only black ink. To add the Twitter blue, that total jumps up to $55,606,250.

If you printed Twitter:
• Keeping up with only 26 Million Tweets a day would require 30 Inkjet printers working around the clock to print over 1,300,000 pages daily.

Are you sitting down?
The facts and figures you just read are from 2010. It is now 2011 and those numbers are increasing exponentially EVERY DAY! How big is Twitter? Try it and see.

Today I attended a great conversation about Social Media, hosted by Howell Marketing and the Memphis Daily News, that was aptly titled “Joining the Conversation.”

There was a great keynote from Dave Chase of Altus Alliance (and formerly of Microsoft), and the panel was comprised of notable names from FedEx and Pinnacle Airlines, among others.

I was struck by something that Doug Shockey, COO of Pinnacle, mentioned when answering a question from the audience about how to plan a successful social media strategy. His comment echoed one that I’ve heard often from people in business who are trying to wrap their head around this new channel: you have to create a sustainable platform for using social media.

I couldn’t help but think about how the opposite is true. Social media is changing so quickly that finding a sustainable model for using some of these channels would be an exercise in futility. This whole online conversation is accelerating and spiraling upward, so I would almost advocate that a truly sustainable model for marketing on the social web should not be your goal at all. At least, not in the sense of using one particular service or network.

The cost of getting involved with social media is so low (free in most cases, with the only cost being your labor, or the cost of your agency) that you don’t have to worry about a long term commitment to one platform or another.

So what if Twitter isn’t sustainable as a marketing platform? It’s a powerful platform now, but what about if they start charging $9.95 per month? “How many people do you think will continue to use it then?” as Ken Woody from Innova, a Memphis VC company that invests in medical and life sciences start-ups, said today.

My Take-away from the panel

At first, what I took away from this conversation about the online conversation made me feel like I got stuck with a crappy gift from a dirty Santa party. I should have learned something valuable from these smart guys in marketing and business, right? Well maybe I did- I just didn’t realize it at first. The realization that planning your social media strategy to death can be fatal is pretty interesting, once I started thinking through it.

Don’t get me wrong here- before we even think about launching a social media campaign for one of our clients, we always define the goals and objectives. But beyond that- you just have to dive in and watch the conversation unfold. Why? Because it is conversational. You don’t script every personal conversation you have, so why would you try to do so for the online conversation?

I spoke with a long-time friend at the event who works for a Fortune 1000 organization in their PR/Communications department. She’s been urging them to get a social media strategy in place and at least join the conversation. But that idea gets mired in the corporate red tape, so nothing happens since they can’t iron out a corporate-wide communications plan for all their brands. Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder what that organization’s competitors are doing. Are they being just as cautious, or has my friend’s company missed the boat?

Social Media represents a new marketing channel, so the first one out of the gate will likely reap the lion’s share of the reward. Marketing 101 says to be where your customers are, and your competitors aren’t. There is an opportunity now that hasn’t existed for decades, simply because mass media has always held all the keys and guarded all the doors.

Don’t over-think your social media strategy;  define your objectives, and jump into the conversation. Be transparent, produce good content, and follow the 12:1 rule of putting in more than you get out, and you’ll be just fine. Trust me- I’m on Twitter, so that means I’m a social media guru!

If you think about it, when the chips are down and things aren’t going well, most people/companies/organizations return to what has worked well in the past. That is just how we’re wired; most of us will pull back and hunker-down with our tried-and-true methods until things start to look up.

There are some things that you need to consider about this approach if you plan to continue to grow your business through online marketing during this difficult time, because online marketing isn’t the same as the marketing you may have done in the past. You cannot take the strategies and tactics of traditional marketing and apply it to how you participate on the Internet and expect to see solid results.

Old media was designed to sell ads. That’s how you and I got access to TV programming and cheaper newspapers- because advertisers paid the freight. That is how the Internet started out and, in many ways, advertisers still pay part of the note for sites/services/features that we enjoy for free. The difference is that, in the online world, the Internet doesn’t care because marketers no longer get to interrupt and try to command our attention, insisting that we see their message. Similarly, advertisers have lost the ability to carefully control what we know about their brand and what it stands for – we have such proliferation of information available that we can quickly and easily find out about a brand’s stance on issues of importance to us.

This is one of the main concepts that we try to talk to people about with regard to Social Media Marketing: brands need to fundamentally change their posture in order to succeed in this new marketing environment. It’s no longer about pushing a one-way message; instead, it is about providing relevant content and creating a natural draw for that information with your targets. It’s about listening to your customers’ interests and sending them information they’ll value and care about. It’s no longer about your brand and what you do, it is about what you can do for your prospects and customers.

There has to be a wake up call for marketers because the online world is becoming the primary media for reaching our target markets. According to a study released today by Pew Research, the Internet has overtaken newspapers as the primary source for news, but you must remember that the same rules do not apply to online marketing. As a marketer, you need to give up on the idea of pushing what you sell as a one-way message and embrace more direct communication with your targets, and focus on creating relationships and joining in the conversations that are already taking place online- conversations that involved you and your brand. You need to be a part of those conversations, so the time to engage is now.

I’m not an economic or financial expert, but I do know that they are doing an amazing amount of artificial manipulation of our economy, and all of that is going to eventually turn things around for this country. The U.S. is the biggest business in the world, it is not going to tank; we’re just going to have to ride it out for a little while until things start to turn back around. That being said, why would you sit and wait to start securing your place within this new marketing space? With such a small window to secure your position on the forefront as an communicator with your prospects and customers, can you afford to wait until this official recession is over?

Measurability and Search Engine Marketing: what you need to know about measuring the effectiveness of your efforts.

How do you justify the value of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? This is a question that we constantly have to answer to business owner to justify the value of hiring an Internet marketing firm. Since SEM is a long-term strategy for returns that depends on consistency and accumulation, establishing that return on Investment can be difficult. Here are a few suggestions on how to best integrate web analytics data with other tools to prove the value of SEM.

The key is your analytics software
The key to measurability is that it be as detailed and as comprehensive as possible, and that is one of the most compelling arguments for how powerful Internet marketing can be. There are many great analytics packages out there, and one of the best just happens to be given away for free from our friends at Google – Google Analytics. With the right analytics package in place, you should be able to pull a remarkable amount of information about how people are finding and using your site, and this information is going to be critical to determining the success of your marketing program. First, we’ll look at how people are finding your site.

Understand how people find your site
Search Engine Marketing is all about making sure that people find your site instead of one of your competitor’s sites. Your analytics tool should at least be able to track the critical metrics:

• Which keywords or search terms drive traffic from organic (natural) searches?
• Which sites are referring traffic to yours?
• Which search engines are people using to get to your website?

Identify the search terms and keywords
You also need a keyword ranking tool in addition to web analytics. There are a variety of these tools available, although most of the decent tools out there are have at least some cost associated with them.

Since the foundation of any Search Engine Marketing plan is SEO, it’s recommended to optimize each web page for the few most relevant keywords, depending on the amount of content on the page. The keyword ranking tool is crucial because it’s equally as important to understand how visible your website is for these words and phrases. For example, if you’ve optimized your site for the keyword ‘website design company’, does your site show up in a top listings within the major engines when a user searches for the term ‘website design company’?

Integrate analytics with keyword tracking
Once you have a handle on your website’s keywords and search terms, its time to go a step further by comparing this data with your analytics reports. The key question is: are the keywords you’re optimizing for the words that are actually driving traffic to your website? If not, your SEO program needs to be re-focused.

It’s important to reach prospects when they are in the early stages of the buying cycle, the people who are searching for general information. Why? Once your site has achieved visibility within the general search listings, prospects have the opportunity to dig deeper and learn more about your offerings.

You must track SEM-driven conversions
When you designed your site, what was the goal? Is your site’s content designed to provide information, generate leads, or both? Often times PPC (Pay-Per-Click) landing pages are designed specifically with conversions in mind, while other pages within a corporate website are more informational and simply describe the product or solution offered. We always advocate that clearly pronounced calls-for-action be present on all of your site’s pages, because you never want someone who is eager to contact you to waste even a nanosecond searching for your contact number of form. SEO campaigns for consumer-oriented sites are typically focus on tracking orders and sales, but in the world of B2B, marketers must be able to track other types of actions (conversions) such as white paper downloads, sign-ups for virtual tours and newsletters, contact form registrations, and even phone calls.

You may wonder how you can track calls that are coming in from your website, which is crucial for certain industries where the prospect is much more likely to call than email due to the specific nature of inquiry. For example: a custom fabricators of granite counter tops and bathtubs, or a commercial real estate developer. For any industry (or site, for that matter) that intends to drive phone calls to contact your sales force, the ability to track those leads that come in from the site is crucial! Setup a unique phone number, either local or long-distance, so that you can easily run regular reports on the incoming calls. There are a variety of solutions available for this, such as services like Kall8 that will let you register numbers and setup reporting schedules for specific campaigns, and more.

Measure your link building progress and effectiveness
Are you tracking the effectiveness of your link building campaign? Cultivating links from other relevant, quality sites not only helps search engines place value on your pages, but it also helps drive targeted prospects to your website. Link building is a long-term strategy so you need to have very specific tracking for these efforts in order to justify their effectiveness. A variety of different software options are available for this as well.

If you aren’t conducting a link building campaign or, like most businesses we talk to, you have no idea how many sites are linking to yours, then try this:

• The easiest way to determine websites linking to yours is by conducting this Google search: link:www.yourwebsite.com
• To find additional sites that might be linking to yours, try: @yourwebsite.com

Now for a better picture of how people are working Again, compare this linking information to your analytics data. Are your link partners actually driving traffic to your site? Linking should always be an ongoing initiative, so use these insights to continually improve your linking initiative. If you find that one type of site is driving more traffic, or higher quality traffic, than another type — focus future link building research in this direction.

Measuring additional off-page initiatives
What about all the other off-site or off-page initiatives that make up (or should make up) your strategy? Such as:

• Social media -Measure traffic and results from your social networking profiles, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and blogs and blog sites such as Technorati.
• Video SEO -Measure traffic and results from video community websites like YouTube.
• Optimized PR -Measure results from sites where your press releases and articles are posted.
• Email campaigns – e-marketing has so many amazing features for measurability, each campaign should be carefully quantified for continual improvement.

All of your marketing efforts should be tracked, in one form or another, by your analytics package in order to properly justify the value of your online marketing efforts. And since online marketing meets all of the qualifications for S.M.A.R.T. marketing; SMART objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.

Bottom line: web analytics is the key to effectively measuring SEO success. But you have to combine your analytics data with keyword ranking reports, linking reports, and other conversion metrics in order to track improvements over time and to proactively establish the value of SEO.

We made this offer to several of the associations we have spoken to about online marketing and we’ll do the same for you! If you contact us, Valeo will provide a free Internet marketing analysis of your site as well as to integrate Google Analytics into your site for FREE! If you’re not tracking your site then you need this software, and it is 100% free to you.

Contact us now and find out more…