Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post.  These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar

Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:

• 230 million active monthly users
• 8x user growth over the last 12 months (compared to Facebooks 2.5x growth over same time period)
• $450mil+ in estimated yearly revenues
• an absurd $5bln valuation

How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:

1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product

At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies

Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:

- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)

- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)

- Share this page on your news stream

- They again remind you right at the start of the game:

Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience.  In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.

2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital

Zynga doesn’t want you to just invite your friends to play, they want to enable you to do favors for your friends.  Mark Pincus’  (Zynga’s CEO) describes his goal’s in Wired:

One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?

While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling.  It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:

Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).

3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first

Don’t assume that your product is “the one.”  Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data.  I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:

Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.

If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration

This is echo’d by others at Zynga:

Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”

So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it

That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)

Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… sweet bejeezus.

4. “Ghetto” test

You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.

In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).

All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).

The guys at Aardvark (another product I love) call this Wizard of Oz testing.

5. Kill products that aren’t performing

Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do.  Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.

We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)

6. Create unexpected moments of delight

Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs.  If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.

One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).

7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy

The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer.  If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.

• “Zynga has integrated a special invite system that lets you immediately invite all of your FarmVille-playing friends to join you [on Frontierville].”
• They also have a banner at the top of their games calling out the rest of their properties:

Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.

8. Maximize Trends

Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time.  Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google.  Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.

Certainly Zynga has it’s flaws: their games are boring, repetitive, compulsive and shallow and they’ve made shady deals to generate revenue.  But it’s undeniable that they’ve experienced enormous success due to the viral nature of their products.  Anything else I’ve missed in terms of reasons for Zyngas growth?  Lemme know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
2. 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World
3. Want to be a billion dollar company? Get 28mil users

We are overloaded with information.  During the course of my day I email, tweet, comment, post, chat, message, buzz, check in, call, sms, mms, bbm and sometimes (if I’m really lucky) actually talk to people.  We are moving towards an ever increasing flood of content (much of it automated) and it’s only gettin’ worse.  One day soon everything will tweet.

It’s not the the sheer quantity of information that’s the problem (faster flow of information will only help people achieve more), it’s how we send and receive it:

• Sending: How do I send out information so that it reaches it’s intended audience only.  In the upcoming era of persistent, public online identity, how do I can still share my green-beer, toga party pictures with my friends and make sure potential clients don’t see it?  Additionally, I want to publicize my boring social media posts without spamming my friends who I know really, really don’t care.
• Receiving: With all this content around how do I make sure that that important stuff gets to me FAST, while the stuff that matters stays buried (until I get really bored or have lots of time to look through it).

The idea that’s been bouncin’ around my head tries to address the second point… enter: sign.al.

I have a dream… that one day my phone will ring when my buddy is callin’ me up to go grab a beer, while calls from vodafone bill collectors stay silent.  That my blackberry will only flash in meetings only when really really important stuff happens (like the Mets scoring a winning run).  That one day, we’ll be able to ignore the tens, hundereds or thousands of messages that don’t matter, and focus our attentions on the ones that do. Here’s how sign.al would work

• You give it all your account information (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc…)
• It starts off like any aggregator (Seesmic for instance), showing you a timeline of emails, facebook messages, tweets, yadda yadda:

• Aright, now’s where it starts getting cool… after a little while, it moves away from a timeline view, to a priority view.  It starts guessing knowing what you are most likely gonna want to read and respond to and starts moving those to the top.  This shift is already happening (FB news feed vs time line, Mozilla Raindrop, Xobni for Bberry)
• Sign.al can know what’s important by:
  • Frequency – How regularly you read and respond to individuals
  • Speed – Of your read/response
  • Popularity – The number of comments, retweets, likes, and mentions
  • Proximity – Number of shared connections
  • Medium – @mentions more weightage the email cc’s?
  • Geolocation – Are messages from Mumbai and NYC more important to me?
  • Time of day – Are certain types of messages more important at a certain time?
  • Content – Am I more likely to be interested in content about the Jets regardless of where, when, how it’s getting to me? (yes)
  • Recency – Moving away from this but still a factor
• Phase 2 – Phone app
  • Incorporating voice and SMS into the mix of content to prioritize
  • Different types of notifications instead of timeline: ring for an important sms, vibrate for a somewhat important @mention, silent for a newsletter.
• Phase 3 – Setting status (implicitly?): In a meeting, driving, out to lunch, available – Based on this reduce/amplify notification methods.  If I’m sitting at the airport bored and normally my phone vibrates for an important tweet, now ring.
• Phase 4 – Anticipate – Based on where I am, the type of message, who I’m connecting with, the medium, the format etc… start anticipating how I may respond to them (in a totally not creepy big brotherish way)

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution’s what matters.  Take this idea, build it, I’ll use it and be happy (just be forewarned you need to legal operations in Albania to actually register the sign.al domain name :p ).

quick update: my buddy Aditya actually wants to make this happen… check out his blog for more info.

Related posts:

1. Steal this Product Idea #2
2. Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability

• Why/How do B2B companies engage in social media?
• What should companies listen to on the social web and how?
• What type of content should your company be generating?
• What is social search and how does it effect marketing?
• What are first steps businesses can take to start participating in the social web?

My main points are as follows:

• Social media can be used to achieve many of your business objectives (generating awareness, capturing leads, sales, recruitment, etc…).
• The main opportunity for social media in B2B organizations is establishing yourself as a thought leader.
• Create content that appeals to a wider audience then just your current customers.
• Become a destination for anyone looking to learn more about the industry.
• We’re moving away from static search toward recommendations.
• It is critical to have conversations going on about your company.

Video and Slides below:

Related posts:

1. Eating our own Dogfood in Marketing 2.0 Class
2. Intro to Social Media Videos
3. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Google still dominates the most lucrative percentage of marketing dollars spent on the web:

But recently they seem scared. Google is a one trick pony, with the Adwords serving as their main source of revenue. They’ve tried over and over to replicat it’s success but have failed miserably with Youtube, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Lively, Orkut and Wave. I visited Google’s New York offices in Jan 2007. The most memorable moment (besides the organic salmon burgers in the cafeteria) was when one of the engineers said that Google was the only site in the world, whose goal was to minimize time spent on it. At the time I was blown away – “Give the people what they want.”

Fast forward to today – for most searches related to products, services or experiential recommendations – Google fails:

People no longer trust the anonymous, SEO optimized, affiliate marketing driven, possibly automated, blog post. The next web is built on relationship driven, public, recommendations. Google’s biggest threat is not another search engine, but a change to the underlying way that people search. Enter Facebook and Twitter. I no longer search for news, it finds me (goodbye RSS).  It’s no surprise Google has made numerous plays at Twitter and FB has changed it’s whole strategy because of Twitter. They are all fighting for the same role, to be the underlying real-time, social operating system on the web.

Eyeballs and CPM ads are finally being replaced by microtransactions and quantified actions. Subscriptions are the new black. G used to be the gateway to the web.  Now, more sites are reporting an increasing trend of quality traffic from Twitter and FB.  The top brass at Google knows that social is critical.

Purchasing Aardvark is a brilliant (third or fourth) play into the social arena. With Buzz just released, Google now has a captive audience of 176mil (in Gmail) to test, position and improve social search (before it’s too late).  People don’t want to be sold to, but will gladly buy products based on recommendations by people they trust.  The line between advertising and content is blurring.  The key is being able to monitize recommendations (companies would gladly pay 2% of a product’s price for a sale).

What will be interesting to see is if either Facebook, Twitter or Google is able to do it alone (doubtful – but maybe FB), whether some big-time M&A will happen (Goog buys Twitter), or whether they will be forced to open up to each other, each find their respective niches, and continue to compete on the fringe (likely).   What do you think, with Buzz + Aardvark will they be able to achieve monetizable, real-time, social search before FB and Twitter?

Related posts:

1. Google’s Biggest Competitor isn’t another Search Engine
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?

There are a number of questions which Google fails to answer:

• “where’s the best bagel in new york?”
• “what’s a cheap, clean, centrally located hotel in bangkok”
• “which DSLR camera should I buy?”

In the cases above, you’re most likely to get SEO-optimized aggregator/review site whose primary motivation is affiliate sales.  And forget about finding anything usable to:

• “what’s everyone up to this weekend?”
• “should I get a tattoo?”
• “is business school right for me”

Increasingly, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for these types of questions:

Aardvark is another really nice product that tries to answer these experiential/recommendation type of questions.  It’s easy to use (via a chat bot) and gets quick and solid responses.  The same question got me three responses within 10 min (here’s two):

• (From Rakesh R./24/M/Arlington,US, Re: **cameras**
  go for canon 50D with a kit lens to start with . Your body is excellent but lens is OK types. u can always improve on ur lens whne u know what u needhttp://vark.com/z/b41bf (Amazon: Canon EOS 50D)
• (From Sam A./M/Dubai,UnitedArabEmirates, Re: **cameras**
  Well the best bet would be to start looking at the more popular brands:
  Canon and Nikon. Some people also swear by Olympus and Leica (the latter
  being seriously expensive), and even Sony. I’d stay away from Sony because
  cameras is not their real bread and butter (though I have read some good
  reviews regarding their Alpha series). Now I wouldn’t recommend sticking to
  the popular brands because they’re better or provide the best value for
  money, but rather for things beyond that: availability of accessories,
  lenses, repair options, etc. I personally just purchased a Canon D7 and it’s
  a really great camera. Though a little on the pricey side, it provides great
  value for money. Things like high continuous shooting rate, HD video, etc.
  This site helps you actually buy one: http://reviews.cnet.com/dslr-buying-guide/

  This website will be really helpful in doing some comparisons: http://snapsort.com/
  Enjoy!

Imagine if I could aggregate this data, slice and dice according to my tastes (i.e. 2nd degree relationships within NYC who have bought a camera in the last 6 weeks), compare prices and actually buy this thing from a single application?  This is a game changer that could be a devastating blow to Google SEM and forever change the way we buy products and services (though Google’s smart and they’re workin’ on it) . Facebook ::nudge nudge wink wink:: I’m lookin’ at you…

My favorite quote from the excellent video by @equalman (posted below) is:

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us

Increasingly though, it’s not just individuals who will be turning to social tools to answer tough questions:

There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.

It’s Twitter.

~ MIT Sloan

Social data from Facebook, Twitter and the like combined with traditional CRMs will allow you to keep track of buzz, transactions and brand loyalty/sentiment, letting you answer questions like:

• What are people saying about my product right now?
• How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
• Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing customers?
• Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
• Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
• What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
• What product features do my (potential) customers want?
• Where is my next potential biggest growth market?
• What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

Social CRM is totally hot right now and an important trend to watch this year:

Everyone’s talking… are you listening?

Related posts:

1. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
2. The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search
3. Game Changer: Why Google bought Aardvark for $50 million

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1. B2B Social Media Marketing
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability

Video:

The videos from the actual lecture didn’t come out to well (you can see them here and here).  Below is the same session I gave to our team internally:

Slides:

Course Outline:

Prior Reading:

• Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.
• India Digital Outlook Report 2009
• Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal
• Introduction to Google Adwords (video – 15min)

Introduction
iTunes Case Study – You are the marketing manager responsible for launching the iTunes Store in India
- What are your objectives?
- How do you go about achieving those objectives?
Goals:
- Discuss branding vs. performance objectives
- Discuss differences between online and offline marketing (targeting, measurement, reach)
- Discuss the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy)
- Review options for online advertising in relationship to the funnel
Review terminology:
- Impression, CPM, CPC, CPA/L/S, Goal, Conversion, CTR

Methods of Online Advertising
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Google Adwords Example
- How does Google determine which ads to display to users? Keyword, bid, location, quality score / relevance (clickthrough)
- Why are the bulk of most ad budgets allocated to SEM http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/social-media-marketing-growth/#mb – intent
Ads on Social Networks – Facebook Ads
- Targeting based on demographics
Ad networks – Right Media Exchange
- What is the advantage of purchasing an ad on an network rather then directly on a site itself – Non-premium, performance based, auction, reach
Affiliate Sales – Amazon
- Description of the affiliate model
Email Marketing – Email Brain
- Review analytics for email marketing
- Discuss limitations on reach

Revisit iTunes Case Study
How can you determine effectiveness of online marketing campaigns?
- Demonstrate eCPM / eCPA calcualtions
- Link online marketing metrics to sales

Ask students to come up with a marketing plan
- Split class into branding vs. performance
- Determine goals and budget allocation based on historical results

Measurement and Course Correction
Demonstrate Google Analytics
- Show ecommerce analytics
- Glean insights, create hypothesis based on analytics data (i.e. per visit value of certain states are high, let’s see if additional marketing – online or offline – will help us generate more sale with less spend)
Course Correction
- 3 slides for creative, source and keyword performance
- Discuss actively managing campaigns and getting rid of underperforming ads, sources, keywords

Related posts:

1. Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?
2. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
3. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Business models on the web are undergoing a massive transformation. Originally mimicking the print industry (advertising revenues based on circulation numbers), we are now only beginning to explore real value adding, revenue generating opportunities which leverage the real-time, social, location-aware, collaborative nature of the web. While there are companies who are strategically concerned with building a profitable enterprise from the getgo (like 37signals, Zynga), there are many others who are concerned with building great products, attracting a huge user base and figuring out the home-run revenue streams later (most notably: Google, FB, Twitter).

There’s a ton of factors that come into play when choosing which route to take (do you have money? can you take the risk? are there obvious monetization opportunities now? by forgoing these are you putting yourself in a better position to capitalize on larger opportunities down the road?), but let’s assume for a sec you are in the user base game. How many user’s do you need to actually make some money. Here’s some back of the envelope stats (please take these with a grain of salt, some numbers here are estimates):

Some Observations:

• There’s a big difference between market cap, investment round valuation and acquisition price, for the purposes of this exercise I combined them. There’s also a difference between registered users, active users, monthly unique visitors, etc… I needed someway to make comparisons, I’m smushing stuff up to draw comparisons.
• I should probably add a few more companies like Skype, Paypal, eBay, Amazon, etc… to make this less search and social network focused.
• Google crushes it $12/user/year damn dude…
• YouTube founders are extremely lucky to get that kind of exit
• Valuations and revenues don’t seem to be related (surprise)
• Across all these companies the average revenue per user is: $2.87 and average valuation per user is: $35.62. Want to be a billion dollar company? You’ll need approximately 28mil users (I’m kidding… sort of)

What do you think? Is it better to play the userbase game or find ways to monetize immediately? Any way to make the above numbers more accurate? Any other conclusions you can draw from this data? Would love to hear from you…

Resources used:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/10/Top_50_US_Internet_Sites
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/annuals.cfm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/boom-twitter-more-than-doubles-unique-visitors-to-93-million-in-march/
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html
http://www.investorplace.com/experts/douglas_mcintyre/articles/twitter-facebook-myspace-value.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=283
http://mashable.com/2008/01/16/snap-interactive/
http://247wallst.com/2007/02/16/googles_revenue/

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1. Billion Dollar Business Idea
2. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
3. Game Changer: Why Google bought Aardvark for $50 million

In the past few months I’ve found that my newsfeed has less relevant information, mostly from people I don’t care about.  I’m big on Twitter, the updates I get are personal, social and professional.  I’m able to learn new stuff about the web world, keep up with my favorite artists and (to a lesser degree) connect with friends.  The updates in my Facebook feed are largely spammy quiz results from girls I went to middle school with (Sorry Laura, I don’t care what Twilight character you most resemble).   Maybe I should only accept real friend requests, maybe not.

Now it seems like FB is trying to compete with Twitter head on, by making status updates public and adding real-time search.  Personally I think this is a terrible idea.  I use Facebook and Twitter for different reasons.  Facebook can differentiate itself by being the place I go to stay up with my “real” friends, plan events and share photos.  Create more useful communication applications (like video and group chat), give me better ways to share my photos and videos (like embedding slideshows) and cut down spam by 90%.  There are huge opportunities for Facebook in location based services as well.

I understand that Facebook needs to make money, and sees real-time as a huge opportunity, but they should focus on Facebook connect (already 10k+ sites using it).  Want profit?  Spread your tendrils across the web, become the universal ID then the defacto payment system for the web.  Create an app store (I’d pay 99 cents for Mafia Wars) and allow microtransactions (25 cents for some more poker chips).

Don’t be Twitter, that’s not why we came to you in the first place…

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3. Steal this Product Idea: Sign.al

• Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
• Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
• Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

• Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
• Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
• RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
• Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

• Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
• Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
• Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
• Retweets – Twitter Search
• Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

• Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
• Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
• Duration – The length of time spent on the site
• Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

• Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
• YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
• Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Related posts:

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2. Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
3. B2B Social Media Marketing