Making sense of social-media ROI with Olivier Blanchard
By Rob Birgfeld

Olivier Blanchard is perhaps the most sought-after expert for those looking to connect the dots between social media and return-on-investment. Not only are we lucky enough to have him on our SmartBrief on Social Media Advisory Board, Olivier is sending off the Buzz 2010 Summer Series with a serious exclamation point. Before we introduce him to the association and nonprofit world here in D.C. on Wednesday, we wanted to throw some questions at him for the greater good.

The chatter around ROI seems to be as loud as ever. What would you attribute this to? Are we at a pivotal moment for business proving value for social media activities?

The chatter around social-media ROI is as strong as ever for two reasons: The first is simply because ROI [points to] one of the most important questions an organization can ask before green-lighting a social-media program: I could spend this budget somewhere else — Why should I spend it on social media? Before any other questions can be asked, you have to start with “why.”
The second is that most social-media “experts” seem incapable of a) being able to define ROI … and b) plug social media into a [profit-and-loss statement] and actual business objectives. Most [social-media marketers], having no true management background, they simply don’t understand how to tie social-media measurement and performance to business measurement and performance. This lack of business-management experience is a major problem in a field where everyone seems to have become an “expert” overnight.

As long as these so called “experts” fail to answer the ROI question, the chatter will continue. Ironically, the question can be answered in about three minutes. All it takes is someone on the social-media side of the table who understands how to plug new communications into a business from the C-suite’s perspective.

Have you noticed a recurring point where businesses and organizations decide to get serious about applying ROI to social activities? Is it based on experience, resources allocated or both?

Every organization is different. Some want to establish upfront measurement practices that include ROI from the very start. These are organizations with a specific focus or clear goals. ROI is based on accomplishing those goals. The program won’t get the go-ahead until every “t” has been crossed.

Others don’t get around to asking about ROI until 6 to 18 months after a program has begun and budgets need to be reviewed. Trust me, when 10% of your group’s budget is being cut, you start asking hard questions. Social-media programs not clearly in support of specific business objectives had better come up with a good answer when the budget hatchet starts to come down.

Typically, companies that start by identifying ROI before a social-media budget is assigned, people [are] recruited and the project is even outlined, fare better than their counterparts.

How can those who are in the trenches, but not selling product or services themselves, best justify their social efforts/hours to their bosses and peers?

By aligning their activities and objectives with key business objectives. The fastest way to ensure that your budget is renewed or validated is to show that you play a part in making the P&L positive.

Perhaps your group saves the organization money by using social media. Customer service is an example. Media buying, reach, could show some interesting cost reductions, [with social media] increasing reach while reducing relative Cost Per Impression. Perhaps your group generates not sales but leads by using [social-media] channels in insightful ways. There are dozens upon dozens of ways to ensure that your program can be shown to contribute to either reducing costs or generating revenue. What you don’t want to be is a “cost center” alone, or worse yet, the project team that can’t articulate its value to the organization. Which happens.

By Anadi Taylor (c) 2010

Web pages and their design are laid out using HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language. HTML is comprised of ‘tags’ or elements that tell your browser what the different areas of your webpage are. You can use these elements to define paragraph areas, images and their dimensions and also font sizes, colors and styles etc. There are many HTML elements and a lot of these have varying attributes like width, height, name, etc. This article will not focus on specific HTML elements; our aim is to give you a brief overview of HTML before moving on to how it has developed into HTML 5. 

HTML came to life at the end of 1990. The original HTML, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, comprised of about 20 elements which were strongly influenced by SGML, Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (The exception to this was the hyperlink tag that allows links to be placed in web pages).

As the internet became more widespread, users demanded more functionality. This meant a huge development in browser technology and also in HTML. In fact, HTML was developed to version 4.01 before evolving into XHTML which incorporates HTML 4.01 and XML (Extensible Mark-up Language).

With HTML 5 a lot more emphasis has been put on the use of ‘Cascading style sheets’. This means HTML programmers can no longer depend on using ‘tags’ like <font> to style text with color, size, and font type. This now has to be done using ‘Cascading style sheets’ or CSS. The use of CSS means, for example, the text style on a website can be updated or changed with one small change in the CSS rather than having to update or change every <font> tag on every page. In fact, the <font> and <center> tags have been completely dropped.

A lot more importance has been placed on the use of ‘JavaScript’ and other client side programming languages that run in the visitor’s browser. This style of creating website pages is now highly encouraged. This is known as DOM scripting or ‘Document Object Model’ scripting. The DOM or ‘Document Object Model’ is a representation of how your browser structures the page you are looking at. In the browser everything is seen as an object that can be manipulated in some way by a client side scripting language such as JavaScript. A simple example of this is to have a background image with a ball moving over the top of it. In the DOM these are known as layers.

HTML 5 also introduces various new elements such as <nav>, used to define navigation areas and <footer>, used to define an area at the bottom of a page that will be used as a footer. This article will focus more on the multimedia elements <audio> and <video>. 

The HTML 5 <audio> and <video> elements are a fantastic way of standardizing audio and video over the internet. This has been a long time coming. With so many operating systems being used to browse the internet it can be hard to decide what format to use. If we encode a video as a Windows Media File (WMV) it will not play on a Mac unless that user downloads a certain player or plug-in. The same can be said for encoding a video as a QuickTime file. It will play on a Mac but not on a Windows operating system unless a player is downloaded. And now we have so many variations of Linux operating systems being used, choosing an audio or video format that will play on all visitors’ computers is a next to impossible task.

The <audio> and <video> elements in HTML 5 will make choosing multimedia formats a lot easier. We will probably use the OGG format for audio as it is completely open source and patent-free. This format is very similar to MP3, AAC, and VQF. We will probably use the H.264 format for video. This format has already been adopted by Adobe and so can be used in Flash based players. An example of this is YouTube.com. They can now provide HD video online because they have used the H.264 standard. What is interesting about this is that visitors using Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux can view YouTube.com videos without having to download a new player. All that is needed is the Flash plug-in, which is on most internet browsing computers. With the HTML 5 <video> tag we will no longer have to depend on Adobe Flash Media player to play H.264 video as a cross platform solution.

So, how will HTML 5 effect video streaming over the internet? It will make video streaming over the internet much easier as the <video> element takes away the need to know high level scripting languages such as JavaScript and Action Script 3, it will not be platform dependent and website publishers will be able to relax knowing their video content will be viewable to all their visitors.

Search engine optimization is one of most effective methods of gaining high Internet visibility, popularity, and search engine page ranking. Every business or firm or individual wants their website to feature in the top 10 in SERP but that is not always possible and depends on your organic SEO methods. Where there are organic search engine optimization methods; there are also myths that surround it.

The question is how true are these myths?

In order to understand what these organic SEO myths are, let us take a look at them:

Google sitemap: This organic SEO myth emphasizes the need for Google Sitemap. The truth is that if you have used the right SEO tools and elements to make it web crawler friendly then you will not need a Google Sitemap. It’s good to have a Google sitemap but it will not enhance your search engine page ranking in any way but organic search engine optimization definitely will.

Submission: There are several SEO experts who feel that you need to submit your website URL to different search engines.

This was a good strategy but it is not necessary anymore.

Updated Website: Some industry experts state that you should keep on updating your website content or pages for effective organic search engine optimization. While this is something that will definitely increase the crawl rate of top search engines but it will not help in increasing your rankings. Don’t change the content of your website or the design just because you feel that search engines will give you higher rank.

PPC: Pay-per-click is one of the best as well as worst internet marketing strategy.

Yes! Many people believe that it can take your website to higher ranking or bring it down. This is not true at all. Of course, if you are unable to position your PPC ad well enough with the right keywords then you will definitely lose out on several potential customers. And yes, it has nothing to do with organic SEO.

Google Guidelines: There are many people who think that their website will be banned if they don’t follow and maintain the Google guidelines. Google guidelines are not the bible and it is definitely not rocket science. In order to make organic SEO successful, you don’t really have to follow all Google guidelines.

Of course your website will get banned if you use unethical methods to make your organic search engine optimization effective like black hat methods and link farming.

Header Tags: One of the popular organic SEO myths is that you should use header tags in order to get higher search engine rankings. The truth is that the header tag will not affect your rankings in any way. In fact the title tag, meta tag and alt tags will affect your ranking.

You can definitely use <H> tags if you feel the need to use it but it is not going to affect your page rankings in any way.

Content: Here is another organic search engine optimization myth: your website copy or content should not exceed 250 words. This is definitely interesting because none of the search engine guidelines or organic SEO books have ever specified their impact on page ranking. The important thing to remember is to make your content informative, interesting and keyword optimized.