Measuring Success – Really Goode Campaign KPI
This will probably be one of the last posts I write pertaining to Murphy-Goode. They are getting plenty of publicity now from mainstream media and I think that my family, friends and readers have heard enough about my MG campaign. Besides, I need to concentrate on what I’ll write for my 500-word essay should I make it to the top 50.
I think it’s important, however, to be able to measure the success of my own campaign and see how my call-to-actions have generated attention for the winery, more blog post views and votes for my video. As someone who wrote software for tracking and reporting the effectiveness of marketing campaigns at a very large telecommunications company, I know a few things about measuring success. I’ve been tracking some key metrics since I first posted my video and here’s a chart showing them on a timeline along with key events and announcements.
My Analysis
Looking at the chart, you can see how some announcements generated more action than others. Facebook is effective for me because I have a very close community of friends and family on that platform. I generally reserve Facebook for people I have met in person and that means these people have more of a personal connection to me than many of the people that follow me on Twitter. As a result, when I ask friends on Facebook to help me with something, I know they will be there for me.
Same thing for LinkedIn. Most of the people on LinkedIn, I know through work, past and present. Asking them to help me land a job hits home for a lot of them, since they too are looking for work. There’s also the expectation for reciprical help when the time comes for them to ask a favor of you.
But the biggest bang for the buck comes from good old fashioned one-on-one networking. The kind I do when I go to wine events such as the Seattle Wine Awards and hand out my business card to people asking them to help me out by voting for me. Industry people and social media people seemed eager to help me. Maybe because I’m a wine blogger or maybe I’m just a really nice guy. 😉 Most of the social media people at wine events are also networking so they go out of their way to vote for me multiple times with all their email addresses.
Most wineries and wine industry people in Washington don’t know too much about social media and use the Internet only on the periphery. I’m always eager to share my viewpoint on it and how they should approach it. A few wineries have embraced it, but many are just waiting and seeing how everything pans out. For them, I recommend they at least establish their name on the major sites should they decide to jump into the social media pool later on.
Strangely, the announcements I thought would create more buzz, weren’t as effective as I hoped. A secondary announcement to family and friends who aren’t socially networked proved to be fairly ineffective. A later announcement to co-workers generated a lot of traffic to my video but didn’t increase my votes substantially. Of course, I’m assuming that people voted right away and clicked on the link in the confirmation email immediately.
I recently learned that many of my co-workers and friends didn’t fully understand the voting process and later found the confirmation email in their junk mail folder. Unlike my network on Facebook and LinkedIn, I didn’t send out detailed instructions on how to vote, which was a mistake. Therefore, some of the later votes I received could have been delayed from an earlier event. It’s hard to know for sure since bit.ly only records hits to the video and not hits to the confirmation page.
This campaign has been a great learning process and I found out many things about my own networks and my influence. I plan to use this knowledge along with my other skills for MG or any winery I consult, to help them improve or establish their own social media campaigns.
That’s a really interesting analysis of the effectiveness of the networks you belong to. And extremely interesting, that in the end, it was the one-on-one connection with “real” people that seemed to help you the most in garnering votes. I would have been interested to see how, if at all, you announcing the video on twitter affected your votes. I seem to have a decent bit of luck when I post things on twitter.
My guess is that I had not established enough of a relationship with people on twitter to really be effective on that platform. Strangely enough, I’m not really a people person, but I can turn it on when the need arises. The real one-on-one connections are something I learned after I married my wife who has an enormous family. I was forced to become social and to be honest, even though it drains me of my energy, I enjoy it.
Even for me, the results of this social media campaign have been truly surprising and enlightening.
Hi Eric,
Nice post.
Everyone is working to figure out the social media space from large global agencies like WPP Group to small wine makers who “get it”. We all know Gary Vaynerchuk has killed it in the wine space working a good “hook” with his tasting rocks, Skittles, etc. and the naturally social – wine space.
For our little experiment with the Seattle Wine Awards, we signed up about 30 new winery Twitter accounts, added 568 followers, with 450+ Tweets using our official hash tag #seawineawards all in about four weeks. We did appreciate that you made it down to the event and added a fine blog post.
I have been to a ton of these social media events, but see a big hole in the analytics space. The whole game is to understand what works and what does not work – then you may optimize and create strong relationships.
The exception was Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit http://www.inboundmarketing.com in S.F. this spring. They had a ton of companies like Radian6 , etc. presenting. These are good companies but their wares are out of the reach of small companies. There are effective ways to create almost an entire social media platform with out paying for the big guy’s fees if you have a little RSS knowledge and time.
We will see more at tomorrow night’s WTIA Social Media Event. Hope to see you there and good luck with the Goode wine competition. I see that they have created a huge buzz for a little bit of cash. Smart marketing.
Best, Tim Reha
Seattle Wine Awards
Tim,
Thanks for stopping by again and adding some valuable info to the discussion. I believe I own you an apology for calling you out on twitter. Sorry for that misunderstanding. You’ve certainly made up for my first impression of you with all the responses to my posts. Much appreciated.
One of the issues with SM that many fail to look at is measuring the results of any campaign. Companies who don’t take the time and/or don’t use the proper tools to measure the effectiveness of their social media presence won’t know what works, what doesn’t work, nor how to leverage the most effective platforms. In vying for the Murphy-Goode job, I wanted to know how my actions translated into results in the form of new followers and votes on my video. I think these numbers show a clear correlation.
In the short length of time I had to organize my MG campaign, I was only able to utilize a few of the social media platforms currently available, along with good old-fashioned meet and greet, to help improve my standing as well as generate more buzz about the Murphy-Goode winery. There are lots of available platforms to help promote wine, along with tools to make your own platform if you can’t find the right niche, many that I didn’t have time to investigate. The fact that there are even more companies creating the tools to leverage SM says that all this excitement about this technology will not be a flash-in-the-pan. Exciting to be sure and I’m glad that we can be part of it.
If I didn’t have a prior commitment for this evening, I would have really enjoyed attending the WTIA event. Have fun tonight and be sure to share any new discoveries.
Cheers,
Eric