Social Media Metrics for NonProfits - Facebook

It would appear that the only engagement lift this nonprofit association gets is when posts are promoted for recruitment or to get members and non-members to participate in an activity, and by promoted, I mean to say that we have to pay Facebook a scaled nominal fee each time we want to promote an event. The worthwhile metrics aren't tied to views, reach or engagements; but rather followers who become active, paid members; and subsequently those who renew their membership status year-over-year.

When I joined this professional association group at the start of the year, we had just over 1,500 followers. We now have roughly 1,890 followers; though no real data to benchmark how we are gaining or losing followers, e.g., as a result of event or new membership promotions.

Facebook's default report dashboard

Facebook's default report dashboard for latest posts

The table for engagement by latest posts pretty much tell you what common sense tells you. Compared to the total reach (number of followers), the individual posts have practically no traction with our members. And, the only times when we show some measure of reach is when we pay to promote certain event posts.

One thing to watch out for is how your whole community page or association page is setup on Facebook, because in the above example with the latest posts, you might be the administrator and manage access; but you won't have any access to detailed reports if you didn't setup the promotion yourself. Now, tell me Facebook, how is that sane?

A typical reporting error in Facebook. It begs the question,
why can't all admins see the same reports?

iOS 7: The Cool Things About This Update

Aside from the Gmail app crashing totally and rendering my unproductivity even higher, I can say that the rest of the embellishments that made it into this version of the user interface are more than just eye candy. In no particular order, here are the ones that caught my eyes:

• Yahoo! Weather. If you have this native app configured to show different cities, there is now animation tied to whatever is going on in those cities. Beijing, for example was foggy, and fog drifted across the screen. The same is true for night vs day, or cloudy (clouds drifting), and when the rains come back to the Pacific Northwest, droplets of rain will probably be washing the augmented reality screen. A big plus: moon phases, sunrise and sunset times are in.
• Clock. Before, you might have thought that this was a static display; and now a red seconds needle also shows.
• Compass. The compass itself got a facelift, which looks prettier than the basic compass it used to look like. If you swipe the screen, you get a digital level which can be used if laying the smartphone flat on a table, or on its side for say, hanging a painting.
• Camera. You can take stills, video, or panoramic -and- select the image type (e.g., monochrome, noir, instant, fade, chrome, etc) from the same camera window. No more fiddling with embedded menus. Yay!
• Calendar. Before, it looked pretty much like blocks and arrows, right? Now you can scroll through the calendar year or quickly look at past or future years. It is a slight improvement; though I liked the simplicity of the older calendar feature.

iOS 7: Things You Should Know About this Update

If you are a Gmail app user and you update to the current version, you may notice a few things. Like, Gmail ceasing to work. Much of my day was spent like this:

Delete. Reinstall. Delete. Purge cache. Reboot. Reinstall. Delete app. Delete acct instance within native mail app. Reinstall. Add gmail acct back to native mail app.

I found out a lot about the new features. I mean really, who has time to read Apple release notes? I spent a lot of time looking at the settings and turning all the new things "off". 

Is offering a discount enough?

"Your mystery offer is waiting <checkmark symbol> it out". That was in my inbox this morning from Shutterfly. Thank goodness Google Mail rendered the symbol correctly; though I wonder how many customers got the question mark instead for that special character insertion. I would think that I am already a customer since I made a purchase earlier in the year and while Shutterfly might have marketing automation capabilities, whoever is managing how content is delivered to customers and prospects is doing it from a batch and blast perspective; which is okay if your company fits one of the following scenarios:

• a consumer products oriented company with a high churn rate
• customers respond better to discounts because you've conditioned them to expect it
• your company is a market share leader in its industry, and you simply don't care about losing existing customers
• your CEO dictates the marketing plan
• your products are more of a commodity than a premium brand

Before and after purchasing from Shutterfly, I'd always gotten promotional emails and like most consumer emails they are spammy...meaning I get more than four per month. And to top that, all the discounts have been in the 40% to 50% range or free products (e.g., 12 free thank you cards, free photo magnet, free photo book, etc.). It makes me think that their loss-leader costs are minimal.

Take this Shutterfly email as an example. What do you see?

Shutterfly promo email from 2013-08-22

If you saw in the email preview screen that you only got up to 40% off for buying something from Shutterfly, you might just be in the 90% who would see just that. However, if you were really tuned into promotional offers, you'd see that it's up to 40% in addition to existing sale prices. Which did you see, the former or the latter response? If you saw the former, chances are you deleted the email since it didn't look any different than any other Shutterfly promotion. If you saw the latter, it might take you a second glance to see if you really saw the right offer and perhaps that is enough for you to click through. 

If this is a totally new offer (as in, this product pricing scenario has not been used with new customers), the offer needs to be called out in a color other than black text on construction yellow. The italicized black text is still more of the same. This is a callout for the "on top of sale prices" to be in a different color. It's hard to tell though if such an offer would really impact Shutterfly's media plan without having the production data. And, it is just one offer campaign out of dozens that Shutterfly runs each calendar quarter.

Brand Marketing: Naked Juice

Acquisitions between food/beverage companies happen largely without public knowledge. What companies like PepsiCo (Naked Juice) and Coca Cola (Odwalla) excel at is marketing, advertising and distribution. If you think you were fooled by the Naked juice brand, don't be. The product first launched in 1983 by the Naked Juice company. After PepsiCo's acquisition of them in 2007 is when product composition radically changed to meet the demand for mass distribution and consumption. It may have been cost prohibitive to sustain the founding mission of Naked Juice. However, that's not to suggest that there has been a slowdown in how the products are marketed and branded. In fact, packaging redesign is credited with propelling Naked Juice to become a nationally-recognized brand for all natural fruit smoothies that anyone can buy at the grocery store.

A recent $9 million fine for improperly labeling their juice products as "all natural" is a mere slap on the wrist since the brand portfolio was worth more than $150 M by product sales at the time of acquisition. The only thing to be learned here is that PepsiCo (and others like them) will adjust marketing content on their product portfolios to say less of what government regulations expect for product packaging and more of what consumers respond to. Is dropping the words "all natural" really going to influence how PepsiCo produces these juice products? Not likely.

What will happen to a juice product that can no longer claim nor brand itself as "natural"? The week's tweets are filled with chatter about the out-of-court settlement by PepsiCo about the Naked Juice portfolio. Food/beverage companies in similar situations have largely come out of such lawsuits mostly unscathed by public opinion. "All Natural" becomes "with natural ingredients". 

Read more?
FTC's Guidelines/Laws Regarding Truth in Advertising
Shook, Hardy, & Bacon LLP's Food and Beverage Litigation Update [PDF]

Google Feature: Lookup Calories in Wine

I'm sure this set of features has a name for it other than a Google search index feature; but I thought it was pretty neat to see. Besides instantaneous information on earthquakes, currency exchange rates, and basic math formulas, did you know that you can lookup how many calories in a 5 oz glass of cabernet sauvignon too?

Nutritional Information on Wine using Google Search

This is what comes up with the basic query of "wine calories"; but when you add more qualifiers to the search box, the standard output of search listings just shows. So, no nutritional display for queries like "white wine calories" vs "red wine calories". There's a mix of types of red wines in the caloric drop-down box; plus a general entry for "wine" which isn't terribly descriptive nor helpful. But, that said, who is really going to drink 5 oz of wine at dinner? A typical dinner with wine will run you at least 400-500 calories per meal. Hope you are adding in extra exercise to burn off those additional sugar calories.

New and Vastly Improved Google Maps

Looks like Google engineers have been busy adding some interesting features to how directional maps are served up. Besides the usual car, transit, and walking routes, there is now a route for bikes which takes you between cities on surface streets. A good feature to have in bike friendly neighborhoods like Portland, Minneapolis, or Boulder.

The addition of clickable icons on a street map is nice to have. If I had to guess, I'd say that the companies, parks, bus stops that appear on the map are from existing data points that users either put in themselves (like adding a company's office or HQ to the map) or Google was able to bulk upload to their data universe. The fantastic feature here is being able to pinpoint a company's location within a complex of buildings, like at a mall. The example below is of the Bellevue Square Mall in Bellevue WA.

2013-06-23, Bellevue Square Mall Snapshot

2013-06-23, a pretty clean list of driving suggestions

The biggest quirk I can see is when the map engine tries to give a solution to a transit route that makes no sense. If you don't start with a transit center as a starting point, you could get transit routes that take up to 8 hours. The custom date/time setting for a future route is a bit clunkier than what was there before with a separate popup for it. Transit to Everett is not an option with wait times and in-transit time being up to 1.5 hours each way; who has that kind of luxury? It is still faster by fossil-fuel-burning car, though mostly because it would be a reverse traffic commute.

Ugh. Most of the time, you see, is from walking!
I am not going to walk 2.8 miles a day when it is
25 degrees out and sleeting.

Electric Mirror, used in this example, is a topic for a different post. The company manufactures Vive(tm), which is a Bluetooth-enabled TV mirror (a mirror when not in use, a television that fits in the space of a mirror; how neat is that??) Their global HQ is in Everett and I am just using their location in this example.

I wonder if hills are taken into consideration for walking directions. The walking route is impractical in this scenario.

2013-06-23, Walking directions from Bothell to Everett