Conference Download Day #2

Here's my catch-up post from the second day of the Ragan Social Media for Communicators Conference last Friday:

The day started with a session on measuring results from social media -- something we're all trying to do to prove to our bosses it is really a worthwhile investment. A lot of interesting stats during that session:

• Only 9 percent of Internet users ready blogs daily (I'm in the minority, yeah!), while 66 percent never read any
• 55 percent of teens have profiles on social networking sites

The speaker, Angela Sinickas, said the key to measuring social media is to go beyond changing people's perceptions and attitudes -- we have to use it to get them to take action! In other words, it's OK if your blog improves people's feelings about your U, but if it encourages them to visit a specific Web site and sign up for a campus visit, it's ideal! We need to focus not just on entertaining people, but getting them to do something -- just like advertising in any other media seeks to do.

She said that for any social media effort, we should look at the following:

• Identify who should be visiting
• What do you want them to do?
• Identify key measures to reach objectives
• Measure
• Have a plan to re-adjust, if necessary

On measuring, Angela shared a couple of sites I've yet to visit, such as Ice Rocket, Xinu Results, and Compete.com. She did say it's important to put people into categories when measuring them. Remember that figure above about how only 9 percent of people read blogs regularly? Well, ask people if they regularly read blogs when you're questioning them about your school's blog. That way, it puts their answers into context, i.e. they may not read your blog, but then again, they may not read any!

Angela's formula for determining ROI on social media is:

$$ generated from social media - cost of communication = net $$ generated

net $$ generated/cost of communication = ROI

Then, I attended a session on writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is about writing text for your Web site so you naturally rank higher in search results.

The session leader Gerard Braud's main point was find the "duh" of your organization/company and use it on the Web site. The "duh" is what the average person would classify you as or search for you as. In other words, we are not a "higher education institution" to the man on the street. We are a "college."

He shared these tips for SEO writing: bold, underline, and hyperlink key words that you want to be associated with your organization (can anyone speak to this? it sounds odd that bolding something would matter to a search spider).

I also like Gerard's "Wordsmith Wednesday" idea. Each Wednesday, he blocks off 12:30-4 pm to write for the Web. He makes a commitment to it that he doesn't break. I like that -- now I have to look a few weeks ahead to a Wednesday where I don't have any meetings and start that recurring appointment.

All in all, a jam-packed conference of ideas to mull over and try.