value of a Facebook Fan? $$$ 0r reach?

Everywhere I look I am reading articles, whitepapers and blog posts about this million dollar question, what is the value of a Facebook Fan?. The only thing all these sources have in common is that there is no conclusive answer.

I am not sure about the value of even measuring it in terms of a dollar value. Many people are so focused on the “next sale” that they forget to attribute value to the life time customer, loyalty, or to a fans ability to share and spread your message. Of course, if they buy your product that great, but if they ALSO get others to buy it, that’s awesome.

At Diageo I have worked with one of our agencies on putting together a “social tracker”. The starting point of building this tracker was centred around the fact that we know that consumers who are more engaged with our brands, are more likely to purchase our brands. This is underpinned by the Syncapse Study: “The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”.

 Putting an immediate dollar value on a fan was hard. Instead, we focused on how engaged people are with our content and we attribute different values to different types of engagement. This is because not all engagements are equal to us. This simply means we have visualised that someone posting a comment is more valuable to us than someone who watches a video.

 Instead of putting a dollar value on a Facebook-head, I think it might be more valuable to taka e PR angle to this and ask yourself how much earned media value you acquired as a result of your social activities. Your social assets are powerful tools in spreading the word for you about your product and brand. As a result , I think it worth measuring how well your message is spreading. This, however, is  an equally difficult task. How much earned media did we get? For Twitter and YouTube you could use a CPM value to come up with a number. For Facebook it is a little bit harder as CPM is difficult to ascertain. Even so, whilst the earned media value number is more of an art than a science. I feel as a trend line, it is giving great visibility on how well our message is spreading.

Related articles

• Paid, Earned, Owned & Shared Media – What’s Your Online Marketing Media Mix? (toprankblog.com)
• The $1m question: What is the value of a Facebook Fan? – ADMA Blog

Too technical for me

Technical Ceiling

I came up to my technical ceiling a few weeks ago when I was analysing some google analytics data for cookandkitchen.com.au

The top exit page was one called xd_receiver.htm. I was puzzled. The page did not exist on my site and yet the data was telling me that this was where most people left from. My mantra about helping clients with Google Analytics is “actionable insights”. What on earth was actionable about this? What conclusion was I supposed to draw from this and how could I keep people from running away?

A quick google search told me that it had something to do with some JavaScript being called from Facebook.  xd stands for “Cross Domain”. [blank face] Right, this is my my technical ability ended. Now what? Our webdeveloper advised me I could safely ignore it. But that did not sit right with me. So I set out to get in contact with both Facebook and Google to iron this one out.

What do you know! I got a reply from Facebook and a “call from Google” or a “Call from God” as cookandkitchen founder James Wright likes to call it. God is gonna give me  buzz back but Facebook also had a good explanation as to why this page appears in the first place.

So, for techies this might mean something:

“xd_receiver.htm is part of the old JavaScript SDK for Facebook connect.  This file allows one to load FB Javascript from a server and have it call Facebook’s servers.

This file is required as JavaScript’s security model only allows javascript to call methods on the server the javascript was loaded from. To get around this we have the developer put the xd_receiver.htm file on their server which then allows the Javascript to make calls to the Facebook servers rather than just to the developers servers.” (thanks Facebook)

I understand this is part of the old mechanism for Facebook Connect. We clearly need to upgrade to “login with Facebook”. That is actionable. My mantra. But I am still puzzled why this page comes up as an exit page, but “God” is gonna sort that one out.

Related articles

• A Solution To The Facebook fb_xd_fragment Problem (searchengineland.com)
• A Call from God (Eatwright.net)

Image via CrunchBase

Biggest Blgging Mistake

I do a lot of digital consultancy work where I talk to people about their current digital assets and how to best use them. These digital assets could be be websites, blogs, social media channels, email newsletter to name a few. I just want to share with you the biggest blogging mistake I continually come across which is quite easily avoided – not owning your blogging URL

Own your Blog URL

Your blog is a marketing asset and many people use a blogging tool to set up a blog, like blogspot or typepad. Great tools and software, for sure. But if it can at all be avoided, don’t use them. (see below) You end up with a blog URL like this;

• www.yourname.blogspot.com

When you blog you will create valuable content which people will link to by sharing or referring to your blog. It’s these links that make your blog powerful and instead of driving traffic to your own web or blog asset, you are driving people to a URL that is not yours.

So, do yourself a big favour and when you start a blog, set one up that is linked to your OWN website. The URL would look something like this:

• www.blog.yourwebsite.com or
• www.yourwebsite.com/blog

Image via Wikipedia

You can achieve this by using the blogging software like WordPress or Joomla for example. It’s worth spending the time to install it, or if you are not technical, to pay someone to do it for you. Don’t let another URL profit from the hard work you are putting into your blog.

You don’t own your URL?

Of course, that is a different story. You may not be in a position to add a blog to your website. Many franchisees are in this positio for example. They are limited by the sub standard websites their franchisors provide. In that instance, a tool like blogspot could well be your only option. As I said above, they are great tools and very easy to use. But I would only recommend them as a 2nd option.