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Net Tuesday December 2010 slides: Measuring Success with Google Analytics – which traffic sources are more likely to convert?

Thanks to everyone who came out to our December Net Tuesday meetup. December is a busy month!

Here’s my slides from the “Measuring Success with Google Analytics – which traffic sources are more likely to convert?” presentation.

Measuring Success with Google Analytics – which traffic sources are more likely to convert?

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING UNPLUGGED at SFU WOODWARDS — Sat. Jan 29, 2011

I’m tickled to be one of the speakers at Social Media Marketing Unplugged. You should come!

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(One-Day Conference – Master Real-World Social Media Marketing with 6 Top Practitioners)

If growing a successful business and marketing campaign is your goal for the new year, then this conference is not to be missed.

Find out more at http://www.socialmediaunplugged.ca

(Members of Net Tuesday Meetup receive an extra $20 off  – Use Promo Code nettue when registering.)

The growth of your business depends on how effective you are at marketing yourself, your products and your services. Traditionally, marketing has been an expensive endeavor that favours businesses with large marketing budgets, but that is no longer the case in the new social media economy. Small businesses with low to zero marketing budgets can effectively reach their target customers by leveraging the power of social media tools — Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blogs, etc —  and compete on the same level with the big boys.

It’s no longer about how big your marketing budget is, but, rather, how well you are at utilizing social media tools to strategically construct effective marketing campaigns that translate into engaging customers and sales.

At the upcoming conference, Social Media Marketing Unplugged, conducted by 6 top social media marketing practitioners, you will gain the know-how, through real-world examples and case studies, to take your business and marketing campaign to new heights.  Limited Seating.Register Early to Avoid Disappointment!

Media Marketing Unplugged

A One-Day Conference Focusing on the How-To’s of Social Media Marketing

SFU Woodward’s, Vancouver

Saturday, January 29, 2011

9:00 am – 5:30 pm

Website: http://www.socialmediaunplugged.ca

Contact us: info@sociamediaunplugged.ca

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About:

Conducted by industry experts, at this one-day conference,

not only that you will learn how to effectively leverage the

power of social media tools for marketing, but also real

world examples and case-studies on how successful social

media marketing campaigns are developed, strategized and

implemented.

You will come away with a clear road map of knowledge &

techniques to plan, develop and execute effective social

media marketing campaigns.

Visit our website & watch a video on the power of social media.

Speakers:

For more information about the speakers, visit our website.

Topics:

  • Why social media marketing
  • Building trust and customer relations
  • Planning and developing social media marketing strategies
  • Implementing effective social media marketing strategies
  • Social media for social change
  • Measuring and determining your ROI
  • Social media advertising
  • Monetizing social media
  • Social media and mobile marketing
  • Case studies

Limited Seating. Register Early to Avoid Disappointment!

Early Registration is on now! Register Now and Save!

http://www.socialmediaunplugged.ca

Net Tuesday December – Group buying and Google Analytics Goals

Hey Net Tuesday-ers,

I’m thrilled to announce that the December Net Tuesday will feature a panel on group buying sites (like Groupon) and a case study demonstrating the use of conversion tracking in Google Analytics. It’s gonna be awesome, so please RSVP.

Date: Tuesday, December 7
Doors: 5:30pm
Duration: 6:00 – 7:30pm
Venue:  W2 Storyeum, 151 W Cordova

RSVP on Facebook or Meetup

Group buying and deals panel

You’ve probably heard about Groupon, the daily deal site that offers discounts if a minimum number of purchase commitments are made. They’ve already got 18 million subscribers and are continuing to grow rapidly. But did you know that Groupon evolved out of  the social-change focused online community The Point?

  • How can nonprofits and social entrepreneurs make use of Groupon and Groupon-like sites?
  • What’s the best way to structure the deal?
  • Is it right for you and your organization?

Join panelists Annalea Krebs of ethicalDeal and Chris Mathieson of the Vancouver Police Museum as they share their experiences from both the business and client sides of the relationship.

Case study: Conversion tracking with Google Analytics goals

Eli van der Giessen rips apart the David Suzuki Foundation’s recent action alert and uses it as a case study to demonstrate how to use Google Analytics goal-tracking and link tagging to measure which traffic sources are most useful. Which group is more likely to complete an action? Email subscribers or Facebook Like-ers?

Our Sponsor:

A special thanks to our venue sponsor W2 Community Media Arts Society.

Our panelists:

Chris Mathieson is the Executive Director of the Vancouver Police Museum, a self-funded charity that has seen incredible growth (from 3000 to 25,000 visitors a year) over the last five years, partly by being unafraid to take small risks in social media and other emerging technologies.

A few additional notes from Chris:

“- We’ve offered two Groupons since they launched in the Vancouver, one for museum admission and one for our “Sins of the City” walking tour. Both offers were very carefully crafted to benefit us while minimizing our risks, something some companies don’t seem to be doing. Both were significant successes for us, but only because we were thoughtful about what we were doing. (We hope…)”

Annalea Krebs is a passionate social entrepreneur whose vision and energy to build a brighter, more sustainable future inspires those around her. She believes that business can be a powerful force for change, and loves companies that are built to make the world better. For Annalea, ethicalDeal is an opportunity to introduce more people to sustainable businesses, products & services.

Prior to founding ethicalDeal, Annalea managed the sales, marketing and community relations for various social enterprises and green businesses including: TheChange.com, Values-Based Business Network, Organic Islands Festival & Sustainability Expo, ICE Promotions and the Canadian Social Entrepreneurship Foundation. Annalea holds a degree in Commerce from Royal Roads University, a Diploma of Technology from BCIT and is a graduate of Leadership Vancouver.

Net Tuesday November – online video notes

W2 Community Media ArtsThanks to everyone for coming out and making the panel work (all those hard questions!) A special shout-out goes to W2 Community Media Arts Society, who provided the venue.

Special thanks to panelists:

There’s been an interesting discussion on Pull Focus’ Meatless Mondays video on the Meetup.com page. And you can watch the original “Meathead” video on Youtube.

Resources and presentation slides:

Subtitling:

Videos examples from event:

Free audio resources:

Other cool resources:

Links via Miraj Khaled

Other than youtube grants, projects with feature length video ideas may benefit from the examples &
grant/awards at the Skoll foundation & Participant Media

A youtube success story: one-man’s video journey to change the world

New ways to learn & collaborate:

The Slides:

Net Tuesday Vancouver – November 2010 video

Net Tuesday November – online video for nonprofits

My grandpappy always used to tell me to “go where the audience is.” (Well, not really, but he should have! Because it’s great advice.) That’s why most nonprofits joined Myspace, and then abandoned Myspace for Facebook when their supporters made the same move.

TV gets smashed by the internet

So, we use paper mailings, email, webpages, social media, public events…. we go where the people are. And increasingly nonprofits’ current and potential supporters are watching video online. So let’s go there too, because the latest research suggests that 50% of internet users are watching online video at least once a week and 32% of all internet traffic is already video (with that figure expected to double by 2013.)

Net Tuesday November 2010: online video for non-profits

Date: Tuesday, November 2
Time: doors at 5:30pm, Starts at 6:00pm, and finishes at 7:30pm
Location: W2 Storyeum, 151 west Cordova
Special features: amplified audio and adequate seating for all!

RSVP on Facebook or Meetup

Featuring:

  1. A 30-minute overview of the Youtube grants for nonprofits program, plus a demonstration of some fun features like captioning and translation, annotations and call-to-action overlays.
  2. A 1-hour panel with seasoned experts working in the field who will address the hows and whys of video for nonprofit. How can video help advance your mission? Is it worth your time? Where can you find help in creating a video? How do you promote your video? What makes a “viral video”?

Panelists include:

RSVP on Facebook or Meetup

A special thanks goes to our sponsor, W2 Creative Media Arts Society, who provided the venue.

More stuff you should know:

  • The David Suzuki Foundation is hiring a Senior Marketing Coordinator to lead our direct mail and online fundraising. If you or someone you know would be a good fit please apply ASAP.
  • Jason Mogus and Lauren Bacon are presenting “Are you web ready?” for nonprofit leaders on November 9. It promises to be fabulous. I’ll be there, and you should too. RSVP now.
  • FreshMedia is hosting Remixology 3 on November 6. The Topic is “The future of media”
  • Communicopia is looking for a new office-mate. Looking for a new office? Check it out.

Proposed Net Tuesday – Nonprofits and video

I’m plotting a topic for the Net Tuesday November meetup, and Ben Johnson suggested “video.”

What do you think? Are you interested in this topic? And do you know of any Vancouver nonprofits who are going interesting work with video? Please let me know in the comments or by emailing eli@vandergiessen.ca

Potential items to be presented and discussed:

  1. Youtube grants for nonprofits
  2. Youtube captioning and translation
  3. How to convert to actions using your videos (annotations, call-to-action overlays, sign-up forms)
  4. How to recruit video production assistance (volunteers, interns, etc)
  5. How can video help advance the mission, and is it worth the time? Examples from fundraising, advocacy, education.

A-B testing in an email campaign

September’s Net Tuesday brought up a lot of questions about best practices for email campaigning.

Long or short subject lines? One ask or newsletter style? Weekly or monthly? Text or HTML layouts?

Now I may not be a grizzled old veteran yet, but I’ve already seen that “best practices” for one organization may not necessarily be the optimal strategy for everyone else. So, you have two choices when developing your email campaigns:

  1. you can guess
  2. you can test

I suggest test! It’s fast and easy with most email service providers.

Example using Mailchimp (but almost any major service will do)

NOTE: this was not a statistically valid experiment because of the small size of the test group. I did this as a test of Mailchimp’s functionality and to show how easy it is to setup an A/B test.

I setup an A/B test on the from field of a recent invitation to the Vancouver Net Tuesday group (instructions). The test sent the two variants of the email to a random 30% of the total list, and then after 24 hours automatically sent the winning variant of the email (based on open and clickthru rates) to the rest of the mailing list.

  • Group A: NetSquared Camp
  • Group B: Eli from Net Tuesday

And here’s the stats on the test. In this case “Group B” won with the more personal “Eli from Net Tuesday” from line.

As the French say, “et voilà!”

Proposed Net Tuesday – Nonprofits and video

I’m plotting a topic for the Net Tuesday November meetup, and Ben Johnson suggested “video.”

What do you think? Are you interested in this topic? And do you know of any Vancouver nonprofits who are doing interesting work with video? Please let me know in the comments or by emailing eli@vandergiessen.ca

Potential items to be presented and discussed:

  1. Youtube grants for nonprofits
  2. Youtube captioning and translation
  3. How to convert to actions using your videos (annotations, call-to-action overlays, sign-up forms)
  4. How to recruit video production assistance (volunteers, interns, etc)
  5. How can video help advance the mission, and is it worth the time? Examples from fundraising, advocacy, education.

Net Tuesday September notes: email service providers for nonprofits

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Net Tuesday September event focusing on email marketing and fundraising. Your insightful questions were what made it all possible. Well, the awesome audience AND the panelists (Duncan Owen, Shannon Daud, and Ben Johnson.) Thanks all for making me look good!

There won’t be a Net Tuesday in October, but we’ll be back in November. In the meantime, you can relive the summer’s NetSquared Camp unconference with Russell Bennett’s great video.

What I learned this month:

  • Panels are a great format for Net Tuesday events. They have lots of energy and help bring the audience into the discussion because they support Q&As really well.
  • I need to bring in a mic and speakers for all future events. Struggling to hear the presenters sucks.
  • Name tags aren’t solving the “no mingling” problem. I need to bring in food AND assign people to start up discussions before the events.

Email campaigning service providers:

The panel didn’t have time to go deeply into their favorite tools for setting up and distributing email campaigns, but here’s the URLs for the tools mentioned.

For more see Seattle nonprofit consultants Groundwire’s great overview of email service providers with a focus on integration with Salesforce.com.