A consultant and speaker, Jim Sterne focuses on measuring the value of the web to create and strengthen customer relationships. Sterne's seven books include Social Media Metrics. Sterne produces the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and is the founding president of the Web Analytics Association.
  • 0 comments 469 reads
    Posted on 2012-03-23

    Klout says I’m a Klout Addict because I have visited Klout only seven times. And they want me to believe anything else they have to say after that? 

    Image

    Woo Hoo.

    Klout says I have a score of 49, that I am a specialist and influence 2,000 regarding 13 topics. Top of the list? Analytics. OK, good. But #4 is the New York Times. If 2,000 people look to me for information about the NY Times, the world is going to Hell in a hand basket much faster than previously projected.

    Klout says I am influenced by a bunch of people, some of whom I don’t recognize at all. 

    I’ve been added to 25 Lists, my Amplification score is 13 and I’ve received 100 +K’s. This feels a lot like when the doctor tells me my cholesterol numbers, “Is that OK?”...

  • 0 comments 6,982 reads
    Posted on 2011-01-11

    Social media is a growing plethora of ways and means of letting people share pictures, videos, opinions and more online. Social media has become so popular because it makes it easier for humans to communicate. The telegraph, the telephone, and fax machines were the precursors and people found a way to turn these one-to-one communication technologies into many-to-many interaction tools.

    The Internet has always been a social medium, putting the power of narrowcast and broadcast into the hands of the individual. Email became discussion lists. Personal websites became blogs. Messaging with pictures to whole groups of people became popular with Facebook. Texting was quickly adopted for those with cell phones and Twitter turned texting into a broadcast medium. Flickr and YouTube filled in the need to share photos and videos.

    With the advent of more ubiquitous access to the Internet via smart phones, social media is the natural progression of communication capabilities and...

  • 5 comments 5,267 reads
    Posted on 2010-09-22

    Marketing in the world of social media is about engaging your customers and non-customers. In a broad sense, it closely relates to branding, PR, sales, and customer support. In short, you have to create relevant and compelling content so that you can attract attention; no matter what kind of activities you want to engage customers with in your next steps. You want your customers to talk with you – by leaving message, posting on your blog, following your company tweets, etc.

    Figure 1: Touch-point Experience across the Customer Lifecycle - EngagingFigure 1: Touch-point Experience across the Customer Lifecycle - Engaging

    I love to write about social media...

  • 0 comments 1,188 reads
    Posted on 2010-07-19

    When somebody walks into my office with a spreadsheet, a chart, or a graph in their hand, my first response is to duck. In my gut, I think they’re coming after me…with evidence of where I screwed up.

    When the offending reports are laid before me, my fear triggers defensive shields and I mentally prepare (in nanoseconds) for battle. Blood rushes to my cerebrum and I’m poised to find fault with the underlying data that would find fault with my performance. It doesn’t matter if the poor person on the other side of the desk is there to discuss optimal parking lot striping, I’m ready to dig into the numbers and do my best to understand the means, modes, and standard derivations thrust upon me. The ensuing conversation is not at all what was planned or hoped for.

    In their book, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” Chip and Dan Heath describe this issue with enough...

  • 1 comments 1,240 reads
    Posted on 2010-07-14

    In the beginning, the IT department created the Web server and the server log. And darkness was upon the face of the marketing department.

    And the spirit of the home page moved upon the face of the marketing department and the marketing department said, “Let there be reports.” And the marketing department saw the reports. And it was good

    And the marketing department divided the hits from the visits and called the hits pageviews, and the visits they called sessions. And the marketing department said, “Let the reports be gathered together unto one place, and let the PowerPoint graphs appear that we may know the full power and glory of our Web site.” And it was so.

    Or so they thought.

    For over a span of time the statistics poured forth, the results were displayed, and kaleidoscopic charts were abundant, resplendent in their brilliance and reassuring in that all lines proceeded in their inexorable elevation up and to the right. And the marketing department...

  • 0 comments 5,759 reads
    Posted on 2010-06-10

    Bob Thompson interviews digital marketing thought leader Jim Sterne about his new book, Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.

  • 0 comments 1,719 reads
    Posted on 2010-05-29

    Do people respond better to an offer that promises lower price, higher quality or instant delivery? Yes they do. And that’s why we all need segmentation.

    When it comes to segmenting customers by behavior, Bernard Berelson pretty much nailed it in his “Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings” (1964) where he said:

    • Some do and some don’t.
    • The differences aren’t that great.
    • It’s more complicated than that.

    Granted, people fit nicely into specific categories and any categories will be more appropriate for some markets than for your goods or services. But segmentation is the key to success and here’s another lock it can open: Media mix.

    You want to use all the data you can get your hands on to validate your ads and make them more memorable, your links more clickable, your landing pages more actionable and your Net Promoter Scores higher. You also want to tie sales results to marketing spend so you can figure out what...

  • 2 comments 4,887 reads
    Posted on 2007-11-05

    In the old days, we measured how quickly our web servers were serving. Speeds and feeds were what it was all about because our visitors were sipping our content through tiny 14.4 kilobit-per-second data straws. We needed to do anything we could to keep them from permanently collapsing their cheeks.

    But then came web analytics, and we could start measuring what people actually did on our web sites. How many pages did they see? How long did they stay? How often did they come back? If these are the things you're measuring—the only things you're measuring—then your perspective has improved but only to 56 kilobits per second. You're going to have to live up to a higher standard to work in a broadband world.

    You should know how many visitors come to your web site and how often. You should be able to point to a chart on the wall that indicates the general health of your site. But your role as a web site doctor goes deeper than that.

    ...
  • 0 comments 4,112 reads
    Posted on 2007-09-20

    It started with, "How many hits?" Nobody knew what a hit was, but it sounded cool. It was the Internet and on the Internet, all things were cool. We all assumed it had something to do with how many people looked at our website.

    But soon, people asked just what we were talking about and the truth came out. Each graphic on a page registers it's own hit to the server log, making the measuring of hits something utterly useless. We're still trying to find the individual to credit for turning hits into an acronym for How Idiots Track Success. We needed another measuring stick.

    Pageviews were the best gauge available for determining popularity, or consumption, or success of a website. Obviously, the more pageviews the better. But, of course, pageviews are fickle. Was that a thousand people looking at one page or one person looking at a thousand pages?

    So, naturally, people wanted to know how many people were coming to the site on a given day or month or hour. A bit...

  • 2 comments 2,965 reads
    Posted on 2007-07-30

    One day, somebody in the IT department downloaded a web server and created the company's first website. Eighteen months later, the marketing department discovered the Web and realized that the company and its products had been presented online by the IT department. The result was shock, horror, and an immediate coup d'état.

    Soon, however, the marketing department came back to the IT department looking for help. "What's happening on our website?" they asked.

    "What do you want to know?" came the reply.

    "What can you tell us?"

    "What do you need?"

    'What do you have?"

    The only means we had to measure out websites was log files. Clickthroughs and pageviews became the coins of the realm. They were thought to represent the number of people visiting the site and the amount of interest those people had in the content on the site. Since then, the ways measure whether your website is doing a good job have grown by leaps and bounds.

    Let's begin...