If not yet on the bandwagon, you should be.

I’m still figuring out Business Intelligence, what is Social Business Intelligence???

Brito recently informed me that Buddymedia, with Booz & Co., just wrapped up a fantastic study reviewing the ambitions organizations have for social media.

According to the study of Fortune 100 companies, 63% have plans to integrate social media as part of their overall marketing activities with 59% increasing their spend in social media monitoring to support that integration. Social media monitoring is the increasingly common practice of leveraging technology (a web service) to track what’s going with your brand in Facebook, twitter, and other social channels. This listening is a critical step in creating intelligence but in and of itself isn’t Social Business Intelligence (SBI).

46% of those involved in the study or are investing in the technology and data to enable actionable intelligence, best practices, with 56% citing their intent to use social media not just for advertising or customer support but consumer insights and innovation. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Social Business Intelligence is the aggregate of channels and metrics that when leveraged, provide real-time, actionable insight about and to your organization. More simply put, Social Business Intelligence can tell you what’s driving adoption, the channels that matter, a tremendous depth of profile information about customers and prospects, and the no-longer elusive ROI on time spent with social media.

Referred to as The Knowledge Management Connection and the CEO of SEO, according to Forrester’s James Kobielus, SBI is unique in it’s ability to finally provide the discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis of content and communication. In a very real way, the data revealed through SBI is the holy grail of a search engine – an accurate representation of the popularity of and trends related to a business, product, service, or organization; the CEO of SEO.

How does Social Business Intelligence Work?

As suggested above, listening to chatter on social networks is only the tip of the SBI iceberg and if your organization is only trying to figure out how to listen (or only listening), you’re missing the boat.

Today organizations spend thousands on agencies and consultants to help profile and segment their leads, prospects, and consumers. They spend thousands more on services that help identify others that match those profiles in an attempt by marketers to find people more likely to convert. An element of Social Business Intelligence depends on the fact that these profiles are readily available; and, in fact, they are. No longer do organizations need to run surveys, demographic reports, and studies to profile their customers, SBI technologies do it for you in minutes at a fraction of the cost. For without that profile data, insight to social media is limited to only listening and reporting. Social marketing becomes social intelligence because we’ve moved beyond listening to an understanding of WHO engages your brand.

But it doesn’t end with who, where, and what. There is something to the business end of SBI and it is the most valuable and critical.  Having learned who supports your business, ultimately you want to know how they do so.  Are they resulting in revenue and if so how much?  Are they referring other customers and if so how?  Are they making disparaging comments that actually impact your business?  Social Business Intelligence closes thesocial marketing to conversion loop to provide insight to the ROI of everything in which your organization might be involved.

Let’s paint that picture more clearly…

Social Media & Marketing

• What: Content – tweet, post, share
• Where: Channel – twitter, email, facebook

Social Intelligence

• What
• Where
• Who: John Smith from Austin, TX who has a Klout (influence) score of 65, income of $200k, 3 kids, and works for Dell

Social Business Intelligence

• What
• Where
• Who
• How or Why: Resulting in a conversion, RSVP, donation, referral, criticism, etc.

Notice I mentioned email up there?  It’s a bit of a misnomer to think of SBI as only applying to Twitter and Facebook.  Social Business Intelligence listens to everything, helps you identify who, and provides insight to the impact those people have on your bottom line.  And yes, it’s about more than tracking the performance of your marketing through a channel, it can be leveraged to provide insight to customer service, recruiting, supply chain management, operations, and more.  Dion Hinchcliffe has pulled together an amazing list of considerations with regard to the impact and strategic use of SBI.

The point is, the fact that ONLY 56% of Fortune 100 companies intend to use social media for consumer insights and innovation is disturbing and if you aren’t in that segment, applying Social Business Intelligence across your entire organization, well, call me so I don’t invest in your future.

Most important is that the technology being developed today puts all of that information in one place. Social Business Intelligence isn’t this conceptual analytics idea but real innovations that exist right now to make it ridiculously easy to know what’s going on.  IBM has invested millions in SBI and Jeff Schick, IBM’s VP of Social Computing Software explains best why this needs your attention:

“The idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative [at IBM]… Social analytics is playing a huge role in not just making recommendations of content, people and communities, but in recommending what an organization needs do to better its financial results.”

Influencing Me

My take on the whole space is that it’s still too complicated, costly, and confusing. It took me the length of a significant post just to introduce to you the fundamentals. Call me crazy but the technology, enabled by web services in the past few years, makes it such that this intelligence should be readily available at the click of a button. For the past few months, I’ve been building just that in GroupCharger.

To first simplify the entire concept of Social Business Intelligence, we’ve developed for your organization a single stat, a GroupScore that accounts for all this data we’ve reviewed to give you a sense for how you’re doing. From one period to the next, your GroupScore will expose, simply, the impact of your time spent in email and social media while working on marketing, customer service, support, and the product experience. In a very practical fashion, GroupScore is the automation of the Net Promoter Score for your organization, distilling the impact of promoters and detractors on your bottom line. In a very tactical sense, your GroupScore makes it easy to understand if you should focus on LinkedIn or Facebook.

More than that, we’ve focused on making this intelligence inexpensive and readily available. It takes minutes to run the report and includes those customer profiles many pay so heavily today to acquire.

We’re still in the early development of this science so I welcome you to try it out and share with me your critical feedback. If praiseworthy, I don’t mind hearing that too.

No related posts.

As an industry, we’ve invented the Net Promoter Score, brand monitoring services, The Relational Ethnography Approach (ask people), technologies to scour blog comments, agents to track buzz, and an endless list of methodologies to try to get at the answer; but, each are flawed in various ways and, frankly, none provide raw numbers with which to explore the retention, engagement, and conversion rates of this coveted audience. That’s where Google Analytics comes in, and while it has flaws of it’s own (which I’ll cover), setting up this report is incredibly simple and relatively reliable as a benchmark for the impact your organization is having on the word of mouth marketing of your business.

Setting Up Google Analytics To Track WOM

Step 1: Get your hands dirty with Google Analytics’ Segments

Segments are the little secret in Google Analytics. So easily overlooked in the upper right hand corner of your reports, I’m not surprised by how few marketers realize they exist. Get to know them, Segments turn the hum-drum platform into an incredibly powerful reporting tool.

How?
Where the reports with which you’re familiar, from the left hand navigation in Analytics, get you insight to traffic source, content, goal conversion, etc., the entire data set can’t be sliced and diced. If you want to know the conversion rate of new visitors through organic search from Texas, it can’t be done. There.

Click on the drop down that defaults to All Visits next to “Advanced Segments” in the upper right and welcome to a whole new world. By default, you can slice your entire dashboard and all reports by organic search traffic, direct visits, mobile traffic, visits that convert, or a host of other options. Those default options alone give tremendous insight to important online channels and audiences on which you want to focus your attention.

Step 2: Create a new advanced segment

Further buried from view, take a look to the left side of that set of advanced segments that drop down and you’ll see a link to “Create a new advanced segment.” That’s where we’re going. I’ll wait for you….

Here, on the left, you are going to see the two distinct variables to consider. In layman’s terms dimensions are the slices to your reporting that are directly related to the user. Dimensions include things like source, browser, country of origin, content consumed, search performed, or products evaluated. Metrics, on the other hand, are the things they actually do: time spent, whether or not they converted, unique page views, and exists.

Combined with the AND / OR statements that segments use to combine these variable and the possibilities for slicing and dicing your reporting become almost endless. Truly, many other analytics platforms promote the fact that they can very closely track user groups, perhaps even tracking a single user, Google Analytics can too.

Step 3: What are the right Dimensions for measuring Word of Mouth?

Notice I referred to Dimensions and not Metrics; we want to segment, as closely as possible, the audience to our site referred by word of mouth. Those users are distinguished by their source, keyword choice, and type rather than what they do on the site. For that reason, our creation of this segment is simplified in that we can ignore the blue Metrics box.

Before I get to the variables I use, a word on how they work
Simply, you drag the Dimension or Metric you want factored to the grey dotted box that says “dimension or metric.” To the right of that, a couple drop down boxes will appear to help you define the Condition of the Value of your variable. That uses a lot of buzz words but it really is the most concise way I can come up with to explain it; essentially, condition is something like matches exactly or contains while the value is the data associated with that variable (source might be twitter.com; goal starts might be 10 or 1203). You’ll get the hang of it by just playing with it.

Traffic Sources – Keyword

The first Dimension by which we want to slice our Google Analytics reports to get a sense for word of mouth marketing is Keyword. Find Traffic Sources under Dimensions and drag Keyword from beneath there to the right.

Here’s what to evaluate for your business. Search volume to your business consists of types of keywords that we, generally, refer to as brand terms and generic terms. They are exactly what they sound like, brand terms include searches that include your brand name. By the very nature of those searches, that user MUST be familiar with your brand. So our Condition is that the Keyword Contains some concise reference to your brand. That might be “Facebook” if you are Facebook; it might simply be “Ford” if you are Ford Motor Company since Ford is the reference to the brand in that company name that depends on awareness of the brand.

We’re done. With that. Beneath that section, click ‘Add “or” statement’ because we want to identify users that visited your site through a brand term OR…

Traffic Sources – Source

Stick with the same section within Dimensions and drag Source to the right to create our second variable. Set Condition to Matches exactly and our Value to (direct).

We’ve just asked Google to identify only users that visit the site directly. They’ve typed in the domain name or had it bookmarked. Simply, they have to be aware of your brand.

Wait…. ‘they had it bookmarked?‘
Yes, that is what I said and that does mean some of those users AREN’T new. They’ve already visited the site so they can’t possibly, in this case, have been referred by word of mouth. That’s exactly right. We’re going to further segment our data to define that fact.

First, we have another source I like to include. Add another OR statement so we can get…

Traffic Sources – Twitter.com

Again from Dimensions > Traffic Sources, drag Twitter.com to the right to create our third variable. Set Condition to Matches exactly and our Value to twitter.com.

Think about the volume you receive from twitter. While you might be tweeting about your business, updates, and discounts, visits from YOUR followers, for the most part, have already visited your site. Those visits aren’t influenced by word of mouth marketing but Twitter is otherwise an incredibly viral engine. Your followers will retweet your posts while existing users and fans tweet their own updates about your business; that’s word of mouth marketing.

If we can just exclude your existing audience from the traffic referred than any visits to your site via twitter are inherently a reflection of word of mouth.

Ok Twitter makes sense, why not Facebook?
In truth, both Twitter and Facebook should be monitored but Facebook is likely diluted; by advertising you might be doing. While Facebook does result in new visits to your site through Likes, Shares, and comments on News, you probably also advertise on Facebook (or should at least try it) and that advertising is certainly not word of mouth. We CAN set up Google Analytics to account for that but I’m going to leave that for a future post as this is already getting long. Simply, if you don’t run Facebook ads, add it to your segment as we’ve done with Twitter; if you DO run Facebook ads, you should have UTM tracking in place and we’d use that to exclude that traffic.

As you’ve already reasoned, the flaw in our segment so far is that it can include existing users. That’s easily solved with the AND statement. Click the ‘Add “and” statement’ and we’ll grab what we need (be careful! It’s easy to mistakenly grab OR instead of AND).

Traffic Sources – Twitter.com

Above Traffic Sources, still within Dimensions, is a variable for Visitor. Open that up, we want to grab Visitor Type. Our Condition for Visitor Type is that the Value Does not match exactly; Returning Visitor.

Combined with the variables already chosen, we segmented our reports to include ONLY new visitors direct to the site, through a brand search, or via twitter. Essentially, those that were in some way referred to the site.

When you’re done, your screen should look like this:

At the bottom of the Create Segment screen you have to name the segment. You’ll be surprised how often you miss this and get frustrated because you can’t save the report. Before you do that, you may want to click Test Segment on the right to make sure GA is seeing the data you expect.

Step 4: Does it make sense for your business?

I thought about sub-titling this section, “Is that all? Is it really tracking word of mouth?” but decided to go the other way because, as we discussed at the start, there is no panacea for tracking word of mouth marketing. So no, this is NOT exactly what you want but let me be crystal clear; nothing is. There is no report, service, or vendor in existence that can accurately measure word of mouth. What you want, is a barometer and in that regard, this is pretty damn close. I’ve been using this segment for just about as long as it’s been technically possible and it’s more accurate than anything else I’ve explored.

The real question is, is it right for your business?

1. Is your website indexed well by Google? Failure in that regard will pretty significantly dilute what you get out of this
2. Keep in mind that the volume you see through Twitter and Facebook is affected by how much you use them and the size of your audiences there. We have defined the segment that reflects word of mouth volume BUT if you don’t use Twitter at all or you use it disproportionately more than everything else you are doing and it will misrepresent things.

That said, what you want (and really all you can get) is a barometer; a fairly accurate measure of the impact of your business (your sales organization, marketing, user experience, etc.) on word of mouth marketing. In this regard, this will give you that benchmark from which to measure and compare the impact of what you’re doing in spades.

So, where’s the flaw in this?
What we can’t yet measure (or rather plot would be more accurate) is when your traditional marketing campaigns take place. Perhaps you run TV, radio, or print advertising? When that happens, your direct traffic and branded search volume will go up (we hope).

I just revealed both the flaw in these word of mouth analytics and a significant reporting opportunity for another day…. yes, when you run traditional advertising, your direct traffic and branded search volume. Consider the possibilities

Step 5: Impress your boss

Or, get giddy with GA

Having applied the report, either from the creation screen or with that drop down we reviewed at the top, start asking all kinds of questions to help validate the data.

1. When did the redesign of your site launch?
2. Did you drop an email campaign or newsletter?
3. When did that series of blog posts start?
4. What was the impact we made to our customer service department?
5. Was there a new sales training program put in place?
6. When did our print campaign launch or change? Keep in mind that your direct traffic is only going to change when the campaign does so I don’t mind that this report can’t exclude offline advertising; when something changes, you can identify it, if nothing is changing, you are in somewhat of a baseline from which changes in the data must be affected by WOM

All of this, and, more, is easily plotted against your new dataset. Take a look. This is a simple (real) example that highlights two clear changes to the business and the impact those changes had on word of mouth marketing. In the first case, the company came out of beta; certainly cause for everyone to say in passing to a friend, “hey, did you know such-and-such is out of beta? You should check it out.”

Secondly, a popular series of blog posts were started. You can see the initial post and the impact on word of mouth, most likely at that point through twitter. More interesting is the ongoing impact those posts had for the business, as word of the posts spread.

Most marketers, and almost assuredly ALL CEOs, neglect this data. In the case of the blog posts, it might leave many questioning why you should bother creating content. Sure, you convinced the board to give you a budget to create content for SEO and now they are wondering why, with few conversions from that content, the investment is worthwhile; the answer is, word of mouth marketing. In this case, we’ve almost doubled new visits to the site; visits that would have otherwise been ignored or misunderstood as mere direct traffic or more brand searches.

More, compare segments. Grab your Word of Mouth segment and Total Visitors and see how traffic to the site through word of mouth marketing performs relative to total visits. Don’t be the least bit surprised if your conversion rate, time spent, or other metrics are significantly different.

Now ask, what do you do about it?

No related posts.

“Wow!!! It is so cool how all of your selling information transfers over. It will track your sales, your ebay and Paypal fees for you. It’s easy to manually go in and add debits and credits too. I’ve always dreaded doing my taxes each year but I’m actually looking forward to it now that I have Outright to help.” -  Vicki Conley, pictureithere

“When I first heard of Outright I thought it was too good to be true.  I am amazed that they found a way to make eBay sales accounting easy.  It used to take me four hours a week to record my sales and expenses in Quickbooks then analyze the results.  With Outright, I can click a tab and see where I am monthly and yearly all in one place.  Thank you Outright for doing the accounting for me.” – Kelley Hopper; Alfies Treasures

Existing Selling Manager subscribers can get started now. eBay sellers not yet using Selling Manager can (and should, its free) add the service here.

No related posts.

Lan Nguyen, today, outlines some great Tips for Downturn Entrepreneurs on TheStreet.com including, to name a few:

• Study the market
• Take the long view
• Recognize that a great idea is only half of it

Give the article your attention as lessons therein are invaluable.

Knowing resources are scarce, and time precious, when starting a business in such an economy, Outright.com has partnered with Network Solutions to organize a suite of resources for these Unintentional Entrepreneurs. Save time and money on your back office, eliminating the cost and hassle of bookkeeping, with Outright.com and Network Solutions will provide a free domain and business profile web page to get you online. All you have to do is get started.

Up and running, spend some time with entrepreneurs to learn from their experience, avoid the costly mistakes that you can ill afford to make, and capitalize on the efficient resources available to you. Starting in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Unintentional Entrepreneurs are getting together to help one another. In San Francisco, register now for the free event being held at Langton Labs on July 15th at 6 pm.

The tour follows entrepreneurs to BLANKSPACES in Los Angeles, on the 23rd, with registration open now, and heads east to Atlanta, New York City, and Washington D.C. Subscribe to unintentionalentrepreneur.com for details surrounding the forthcoming events. Food and drinks, on hand, take care of dinner for the evening and veteran entrepreneurs make for good conversation.

Related posts:

1. The Best Resources for Self Employed Businesses
2. The Definitive Online Marketing Conferences List

Collaborate and coordinate
Spend a few dollars a month and sign up with Google Apps to host your email address, calendar, and documents and spreadsheets with Google. Unlike a regular gmail account, Apps sets you up at your company’s domain name (that is, bob@mycompany.com) with Google calendar, chat, and address book built in. Also integrated, the accurately named, Docs, saves you money from buying Microsoft Office, putting your spreadsheets, presentations, and documents online: automatically saved and available from anywhere.

The real advantage in using Apps though is when there is more than one of you. Calendar becomes a meeting maker, chat facilitates collaboration, and files in Docs are shared across your company so everyone can access and edit important files.

Don’t worry about “social networking” or “twitter” – keep it simple and start a blog
Did you party too hard at the turn of the century and miss the change of the calendar? This is no longer 1999; businesses don’t have ‘web sites’ any more. A web site is a static, dry resource about as engaging as your listing in the yellow pages. Today, you want a blog. In this age of twitter and facebook you want an experience online that engages your customers and establishes you as an authoritative resource. Don’t worry, all the pertinent details are still available to customers through pages on your blog for your address, description of products and services, etc. It is the posts that will attract new customers and promote your talents. Spend a couple hours one night learning and setting up WordPress. I realize that, if you’ve tried a blog before with another service, you might be discouraged. Learn and use WordPress, your business will be FAR better for it.

Keep an eye on the numbers – without giving them away to do so
Have you discovered Shoeboxed yet? Perhaps so but let me go further and point you to Outright.

No, hang on… let’s start from the beginning: If you are anything like me, you have a stack of business cards and receipts filling your laptop bag, feeling neglected. Potential business languishing. Sign up for Shoeboxed and ship them off to get scanned, sorted, and returned in digital files. The contacts go into your address book (your now available Google address book)
But what of those expenses… surely there is a better way?

Automatically import them to Outright to track your income and expenses, online, with the most intuitive bookkeeping innovation available. Shoeboxed has a nominal fee, while Outright is free, so we’re saving money while making life easier.

Now, having cleaned up your expenses and related books, sign up with Freshbooks to give your revenue stream some polish. Freshbooks helps you manage blling with tools and professional looking invoices and reports. Why Freshbooks? It too is available for free and also plugs right into Outright so your books are managed end to end with no fuss.

I need help but can’t afford much!
Grab some freelancers (who themselves are probably using these tools and can help you with them). The best way to do that is not through a recruiter but web sites (hmm… not “blogs” huh?) such as Guru and oDesk. Guru is, perhaps, the best source for business support with legal, finance, marketing, and administrative folks available. You farm out the work in projects rather than as a typical consulting or contract engagement; that is, if you just want someone to set up a Google Adwords campaign or file a patent, Guru has people for you. Want help with the WordPress installation or the design of the site, your logo, or other infrastructure? Use oDesk.

Truth be told, both sites support any of the resources you might need but oDesk has a reputation with technical folks while Guru is known for others. The one exception, and it occurs to me therein that I shouldn’t have used ‘filing a patent‘ as a scenario in which you grab a legal freelance worker from Guru, is LegalZoom. LegalZoom is going to put more of the burden on you to take care of related work but as a self employed business owner, I tend to prefer keeping issue legal and financial closer to my heart.

Working from home? Create the illusion of so much more
The most turnkey solution is a Google Voice account which lets you indefinitely retain one phone number for personal and professional use, automatically routing calls to all of your phones through different voice message lines depending on the context of the call. Never miss a call; give out your one number with work related calls routed to a professional voice mail when you are unavailable to pick up from a cell or home phone. Forever: move, change jobs, get a new cell phone – you always have the same number.

Extend that professional image with a more robust virtual office through onebox. For as little as about $50 a month you get a toll-free number with extensions for a few coworkers (or services) as well as call trees, calendaring, conference calling, and more.

You might not have an office with a lobby and receptionist but you should have the next best thing.

What else…? Need IT?
I’m going to elevate our conversation just a bit and talk to slightly larger organizations. Self employed or home based business owners need not apply here; but if you have a few technical assets, you should look at Spiceworks. Combining software and hardware inventory, network and license monitoring, inventory reporting, and a helpdesk / IT portal into a free (ad supported) experience, Spiceworks is intuitive software that outsources your IT and keep that most precious of resources in your pocket.

I could keep going but if you are reading this statement, I can see that I’ve added something of value to your day, given the stamina required to keep up with my discourses to the end. Let’s not ruin that by going on and on and on, and on… and on.

If you have tips and resources of your own, please share them; especially, if you are using invaluable, intuitive tools that can make the entrepreneurs in us a little more effective.

Related posts:

1. Starting Your Business When Times Are Tough
2. On the Growth of an Internet Startup

One such technology, that which seems to lead the pack, is TubeMogul, a platform so impressive that they’ve raised capital in these questionable economic times.

TubeMogul’s analytics technology aggregates viewing data giving you access to insight on when, where, and how often videos are watched. Now, you can easily track subtle changes in videos, comparing effectiveness, popularity, and ROI for differences historically only available through other forms of online media.

An attractive solution in that regard alone, more appealing for some is their easy to use distribution model which publishes your videos to a couple dozen different sites. Best of all, you can get started for free.

TubeMogul’s Universal Upload service is used by publishers to upload their content to one or all of the major video sharing sites and social networking sites in one shot. Video publishers then use the company’s aggregated analytics to understand when, where and how often their videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with advertisers, colleagues or friends.

Of course, the long sought metric of course, is not views but click through and engagement. For those hosting video, TubeMogul’s InPlay, which is set up in any Flash video player within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance.

They have an impressive roster of clients, including CBS, Red Bull, and The Home Depot, and a sophistication for data that rivals Avinash Kaushik. My favorite discovery though? That you can get free music lessons with TubeMogul fan Walt Ribiero.

Related posts:

1. Performance Based Web Design

Is it all that bad though or it is one of those cycles that encourages consolidation, sorts out stellar companies, and drives innovation? The turn of the century saw a strikingly similar turn of events from which we can learn much. Suggesting overwhelming demand for what we do. Internet startups (which we’ll clarify as pure-play online companies) as well as tech, travel, and even automotive startups that have or need an online presence, are coming to me with greater frequency with one recurring and startling theme, “we’re growing – help us grow more efficiently and significantly.”

I’ve been asked so many times that I have to preface the remainder of this post with an apology that I just couldn’t keep this brief. I’ve been agonizing over the length this article but cognizant that the answer to such a challenge can’t be addressed with a top 5 list, tactical suggestions, or redirects to other resources. Startups, given their demand for efficiency, performance, growth, and a suite of employees passionate about the companies with which they work (all of whom are capable of wearing dozens of hats), are better positioned to thrive now given the expertise many of us can offer. But it is the combined strategy and implementation of effective online marketing that creates the synergy behind significant growth.

It seems of late that the investment community is not hesitant but patient. Like Clark Kent, bored at the Daily Planet, waiting to rip off the shroud hiding his true intention, a shroud not surprisingly created by the media, to fly in to rescue a business person in need. Now is the time to strike at market share, resources, and investment capital that one might mistakenly assume is stagnant. But in this time of Top Ramen and garden vegetables, poor ideas and slow companies fall behind those with opportunity and talent. The challenge, is surmounting them with few resources and even less of a budget. So… let’s talk:

Growing quickly and efficiently – now

What are my priorities for rapid, significant growth, with as little impact to the bottom line as possible? Exciting, is that as a marketer with a startup, your role is as closely aligned with the CEO as that of Timothy Geithner to Ben Bernanke… hmm… not the right analogy? Perhaps it is; the job that you both have in one way or another is to sell your idea, your business, and the plan. While the traditional responsibility of a marketer is leads, awareness, branding, traffic, or some derivation thereof, a startup marketing role demands strategic thinking about the direction of the business and industry, and the tactical application of a breadth of effective marketing techniques to sell the company (so to speak). You have potential investors, partners, clients, customers, and users to reach and little time or resources with which to do it. With a talented crew and unique idea, the company is going to the Oscars, your job is to make sure you are the darling of the red carpet.

Alright, I hear you, enough with the prolonged preface, what’s the advice?
(and you might be surprised… the top priority is NOT SEO).

1. Analytics. Data.
I’m not talking about market research or focus groups. Your first priority isn’t a study in customer demands or VC desires (I’m assuming though that your founder and fearless leader has already done this). No, as a marketer, your priority is to know what works. Get yourself familiar with Google Analytics. Put it on the site. Right now; I’ll wait…
Spend tomorrow, and probably the rest of the week, experiencing nothing else but the rich insight it delivers to the organization. Don’t worry about alternative platforms, you can’t afford Omniture and emerging platforms, though appealing, have yet to be vetted. Google Analytics will tell you what pages on the site have the greatest interest and retention, from where your audience is coming, what keywords result in traffic, how well paid search works, and much more.

I can’t stress this enough. Before you do anything else, get your data resources in place. If you are willy-nilly-ey (that’s a hard word to put in the right tense) trying things with twitter, search, email, social networks, lead gen, blogs… blah blah blah, you are wasting your time and, likely, the company’s chance of success as you ultimately don’t have a clue what resonates. Don’t turn to an agency or vendor for answers, don’t let your engineers and product folks deploy analytics, it is your job to know.

2. Social Marketing
(“still not SEO?” no, but let me preface this by highlighting that I’m not referring buzz worthy social marketing such as Facebook or widgets)
As a startup, you have a few near-certainties going for you: 1. You don’t have a lot of content to SEO (yet), 2. No one knows who you are, so even if you had something to optimize, 3. No one is linking to you. Optimized content that you do have, has little chance of appearing prominently. And all the hullabaloo about “link building” is a waste of resources when you should be building relationships.

The magic of the order of these priorities is that they compound on one another, creating synergy on behalf of the growth of your site. Fostering a community and the excitement about your company, your founders, and the magic being done is the best use of your time; creating awareness, building links, referrals, and support, and setting you up for significant adoption as these pieces fall in to place.

We’re not talking about widgets and viral Zombies here; critical now is that you foster two way communication with early adopters through a blog, facebook groups, LinkedIn company profiles, twitter, and heck… Yahoo Answers. Your goal is to lift the curtain to your business a little, bringing those that will support you into the club, while also acting as a member of the community; speaking outside the developments of your company to return the favor those adopters have lent to you.

An effective blog is such a difficult and yet important platform to setup and maintain that few recognize its significant potential in creating awareness and benefiting SEO. Most are familiar with blogging through Blogger or a web service which WILL FAIL to attract significant readership. If you have experience with anything other than a custom, optimized blog, forget what you have learned. Comprehensively integrating your blog with digg, twitter, facebook (heh, I just noticed the trend in lower case Web 2.0 company names), and email platforms (Yes Virginia, people still prefer email over confusing technologies like RSS) is key to fostering that two way communication in that they dynamically update the internet with your contributions to your industry. Though still relatively small, (1382% growth aside), technologies like Twitter let you communicate directly with your audience, opening the dialogue, so long as you acknowledge and support the fact that few are interested in your latest release or announcement.

Download WordPress and setup a blog. Any online marketer worth their salt should know the basics of a blog platform (not Blogger or TypePad but a real blog CMS). Don’t turn to your developers for any more than server and database. Do NOT look to a PR or ad agency to set this up. A blog is the voice of the company, your voice, the voice through which your constituents can learn, criticize, and comment. You better know full well how it works and how to maximize its potential. So long as you don’t just sell the company or give boring updates on your progress, your blog will establish who you are, what you do, and attract those most attractive of customers, early adopters. Talk about your industry, developments, players in the space, even related products and services; in the process, sprinkle in that anecdote on how business is going. If your company is revolutionizing the industry in which it resides, act like it; participate in the community and make yourself known.

Extending that comes by way of plugins and tools that dynamically update your social networks and profiles with content from the blog. Your voice, announced. Automatically feed posts and comments to twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, and the like to draw the audience into ongoing discussions and retain their interest in your business. Think outside the box on how to make this work; here’s one to get you going, comment below if you have other suggestions or get in touch.

3. Public Relations
(whoa whoa whoa… still not search??)
Ancillary to social marketing is your relationship with the broader community. The opinion of your company held by peers, partners, and, most importantly, potential investors is paramount and you need to lean on formal PR to validate and strengthen the story being told.

A good PR resource is the first best spent item line in your budget. The catch is, what = good at this stage?

In my mind there are 3 approaches to PR – I’m oversimplifying for the sake of my explanation so bear with me: Press releases, media relations, and public relations. That better known classification always runs the risk of confusing folks as technically, your media relations are key to reaching the public and time spent on public relations is better considered time with your industry.

My hope, my expectation, is that you and your CEO have relationships with the key stakeholders amongst the public: industry thought leaders, conference organizers, major Universities, and even industry corporate advisers and venture capitalists. On the other hand, if your approach to PR has simply been a series of press releases and a “Press” page on your corporate site, you are likely disappointed. The takeaway therein is that you should be doing both of those things yourself and if you are hiring someone to do them for you, let me know so I avoid investing with you. Your effort with social marketing makes YOU the voice of the company to your public and your voice should be heard directly by the industry. A press release and link from your site is as effective as putting a needle in a haystack and hoping the media is looking for it. Paying for either of those services is a waste of time; HOWEVER, money spent to retain an agency that gives you access to the media is money well spent. At this stage, your RFP for the right PR agency consists of, “who do you know?” and “how well?”

4. SEO
(ahh… thank you) *Really, you’d be surprised at how many people look at me as though I’m nuts for not saying SEO is the top priority. Let’s get in to why first:

I’ve already said this but let me reiterate; spinning cycles and resources on optimizing content that has little chance of prominent placement (this early in the game) is waste of resources. As a startup, you will benefit much more by ensuring the site is setup properly from the start, therein avoiding all the painless SEO through which companies are anguishing today. What do I mean by that? I’d posit that the majority of SEO has to do with site architecture, structure, and hierarchy. Not keyword density or content, not links. Without a properly designed site, your labor as a “Marketing SEO,” working on page copy, titles, and building links, is for naught of search engines can’t index your site.

Your job is to foster an SEO organization. Everyone in the company from BD to IT should feel SEO twinkling in their toes. At a large, established, process oriented company, this is a near impossible task. This, perhaps reveals why companies dump hundreds of thousands of dollars on agencies to “Do SEO” for them. Hogwash. Their attempts continually fail simply because the more sophisticated technical and architectural considerations are overlooked (or simply unrealized) by outside parties or those optimizing based on the top 10 lists. Your company needs to understand SEO; A company inherantly cognizant of SEO will outpace the growth of ANY other business that treats SEO as a Marketing program/campaign or something driven by 3rd parties. Success comes when Business Development fosters partnerships that create links, Engineers build websites that search engines can index, Customer Service and Sales engage your customers with relationships that extend your work with twitter, blogs, and social networks with “retweets,” sharing, positive reviews, posts of their own, referrals, and comments. Simply: Everyone optimizes; subconsciously.

Still not enough synergy to convince you to spend more time with the first priorities? Consider how they facilitate one another. Obviously, you’ve now organically built links through your outreach, added content to your site through the blogs, and stirred up some buzz in the process, but your efforts pay off much more substantially through lesser known benefits. The dynamic updates we enabled seed new search channels which deliver to users immediate and timely results. After all, Google results are nice but when someone wants to know what’s going on right now, someone more likely to convert, you want to have built an innovative marketing organization that proactively grabs their attention with less effort and expense on your part.

5. Paid Marketing (arbitrage)
Can’t afford it, not worth our attention, we have no money to spend, that doesn’t work for us… the list of closed minds rambles on and on. Think again (even if your response is “we can’t afford it… now“. With analytics in place you have the science and perspective to effectively manage a performance based marketing spend. Arbitrage. Profitable, or at least acceptable, paid growth.

Foremost, make sure Google Analytics is set up completely and effectively, with funnels, goals, and values, to properly evaluate the quality of traffic to the site. You MUST set cost per acquisition (CPA) metrics against those goals. How much are you willing to spend to acquire 1 new customer? The values set are values you are comfortable paying to acquire that new user be it through conversion, consumption, registration, or mere time spent. No one can tell you what’s right for your business so don’t look to industry benchmarks or competitor metrics – the one question that best reveals a flaw in someone’s logic is the query for “average conversion rate” – Your metric might be $.07, $.70, or $7.00. Your CPA is dependent on your financial model, business priorities, site performance, awareness and relative recognition, brand strength, and a host of other factors unique to your business.

Start small, with paid search and Adwords, there is no harm in spending a few hundred dollars a month to test the waters. Keep it simple, with less than 50 keywords; manageable enough that you can run a minimum of 5 ads per keyword – you aren’t branding here – your objective is to identify keywords and calls-to-action which efficiently drive demand for your business. Monitor them closely. If they don’t perform in 24 hours, lower your bids, change ad copy, or shut them down and move on.

As you catch on to the basics in search, turn more to Analytics to ensure performance against your CPA numbers and increase your sophistication by valuing more than one action (both a registration AND page views per visit are worth something). Basic arbitrage is really this simple: If the performance of keywords exceed your ROI expectations, increase the bid and budget, growing your search marketing channel and spend in such a way that your CEO will be pleased, investors ecstatic, and board astounded by your brilliance.

As we wrap up, let me point out again the importance of the order in which I’ve presented these priorities. You should not spend dollar one on marketing through email, banners, radio, print, SEM, or any other channel until you can track performance, have fostered your industry to create some awareness, and understand how arbitrage works so that you don’t waste the precious capital with which your company is working.

“email, banners, radio, print” …??
That’s right, arbitrage has just as much application to other marketing activities as it does within its best known use case (that is, paid search). Having learned the science and mastered analytics, spread your budget to email, ads, and other channels. Start with the same model: keep it simple, trying 1-2 at a time, but run more than one ad type so you can figure out what resonates with the audience within each channel. That said, a key differentiation is that you have to make sure you set up tracking codes in Google for each campaign, link, and ad type. Be as specific, granular, as possible so you can quickly identify quickly what works and what needs to be abandoned. Google does this automatically with keywords so we didn’t overlook such tracking, it was already in place. Rinse and repeat. over and over… and over….

Now look back on how much we’ve spent and the ROI therein. You’ve designed an Marketing organization with little to no additional resources and few dollars spent. Your SEO is inherent to the business and benefits from industry, peer, and media support. Ad dollars spent drive traffic that pays off with more than just feet in the door. And you have a clue what works so that you can keep that crank turning.

This is what I do for a living. If I can help you do the same, let me know.

Related posts:

1. The Best Resources for Self Employed Businesses
2. In SF next week? Come Chat with Lorna Li and myself
3. Building an Effective Paid Search Program