BusinessWeek on the growing demand for social media directors

Last week's BusinessWeek covers corporate America's "rush" to hire social media directors:

Across the country, companies like Petco are going through a two-step process. First, they scramble to hire social media officers. Second, they figure out what it is, exactly, that social media officers do. Blending departments—promotion and marketing, customer service and support—and requiring the ability to be shameless boosters while maintaining a light, self-aware tone, the job category is experiencing a boomlet as companies try to keep up with the new media world. The chief social media officer may be supplanting the chief branding officer as the zaniest human resource innovation in memory.

These articles always make me cringe a bit, but you can't blame big companies for wanting to be active in this space. Towards the end of the piece the topic of metrics comes up:

Metrics used to evaluate success in corporate social media might include: number of Tweets; number of re-Tweets (a Twitter message that's resent by a follower); instances of "customer recovery," in which an irate civilian is successfully mollified; an increase in the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers; and the number of photos of your product that have been posted online.

What about website visits from Facebook and Twitter activity? Or leads or sales? Those seem much more relevant than number of Tweets.

NY Times on Trial and Error with AdWords and SEO

You worked hard to launch a new PPC campaign, picking the right keywords and creating brilliant copy--only to see no results. We've all encountered online marketing challenges such as this and it can be incredibly frustrating.

This is the topic explored by Adriana Gardella in her recent post "Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O" for the NYTimes.com's small business-focused blog, You're The Boss. Gardella chronicles the experience of Catherine Hill, owner of an online retailer of women's plus size fashion.

Hill ran an AdWords campaign and ended up incurring a monthly loss of over $10,000 because while her site was getting a lot of traffic from AdWords, the visits were not resulting in sales. Sound familiar? Lack of conversion is a sign that you need to play around with different keywords, copy and bids. And even then you still may ultimately conclude, as Hill did, that AdWords is simply not a good fit for your business.

The takeaway here is that, in most cases, not all online marketing techniques will work for a business. And the only way to find out which approaches are worthwhile is through trial and error. But too many people feel "locked" into a marketing strategy and are reluctant to make changes once they've implemented it.

Hill learned through trial and error that the key to her website's success lay in quality content and social media outreach. Maintaining a Facebook page allowed her to share style tips for plus-size women, updates about upcoming sales and more with her customer base. Setting up a Facebook page was free and quickly proved to be much more effective in attracting qualified buyers than the email list rental that Hill was previously paying big bucks for.

So, don't be afraid to admit that an AdWords campaign or other marketing activity you tried didn't work; take what you learned and build upon it. That's what Hill did and ended up growing sales by over 50% from the previous year--while spending approximately $14,000 less on marketing.