Jim Sterne

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 - Engaging

I love to write about social media...

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...

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...

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...