I’m constantly talking to marketers about webinar best practices and increasingly, they are turning to social media as an outlet to help them drive more registrants, more attendance, and more engagement from their online events.

Marketers are always looking for the next best way to create buzz around their product and their brand with the right audience.  There are so many promotional outlets in which to market your content, especially on the internet; webinars tend to bubble to the top due to the likelihood of a lower investment and higher ROI.  Over the past few years, many companies have put significant effort into building their following through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  Each of these has a different flavor of audiences, including what topics are relevant and which will resonate. Despite the differences, these channels can be a great way to promote your upcoming webinar.

The first step is using social media to get the word out about your upcoming event. After coming up with a catchy title, interesting content, and engaging speakers, you have to get people to care…and then, register!  Posting your event to your company’s various networks gets you there, partly; but allowing your registrants to post to their networks snowballs your efforts even further.

The next step, and probably even more important than the first: tracking the effectiveness of each social media outlet! Which site gets you the most traction, the most bang for your buck?  And, even more so, do you have a few ‘power users’ that are consistently promoting your events, and bringing in a significant number of registrants? If so, you probably want to keep inviting these types of people to your events!

So the moral of the story? Keep up with social networking, yours and your followers…it pays off!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

Compiling the right social data can be difficult. What the executive team needs to see in order to understand the health of their brand is quite different than what the optimizer who is running campaigns wants to see. Some metrics will be more beneficial to one business/brand/job role than another. Not all benchmarks are the same. So therein lies the challenge – what do I need to measure and how can I make sure that it actually resonates with the right group of people when called upon for reports?

Justin Kistner, Director of Social Products at Webtrends and Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal will be covering this topic on Wednesday’s webinar, “The Right Social Metrics for YOUR Business.”

Most of us probably realize by now that dropping terms like status updates, followers, retweets, doesn’t necessarily capture the attention of the CEO; those types of metrics are not giving them the information they are looking for. So here a few items that might just peak their interest a bit more and provide them with the insight that helps you justify why you’ve put forth the effort to not only maintain, but expand your company’s influence in the ever broadening sphere of social:

Take off your shoes -

Yes – that’s what I said. Your shoes – your marketing shoes. And, put on the shoes of your executive director. They tend to think a little differently about social media measurement, so in turn, you might consider this also when reporting to them on the ROI of your programs. Use terminology that THEY will understand – leave out the jargon. Think 20,000-foot view and bottom line results. Daily metrics don’t matter as much as sales do.  How is your time and effort in this area affecting that? That’s what they’re looking for – align your benchmarks with these types of items.

Embody the Mindset of Thomas the Train -

I think I CAN, I think I CAN, I think I CAN. Point being – pick three metrics that you CAN measure and report on those. Maybe its closed sales that started with a tweet or a Facebook comment that you’ve tracked, maybe its cost-savings from implementing a tool that now helps measure some of your social metrics instead of tedious hours of spreadsheet work. Whatever you CAN measure, glean your information from that. Although “influence” sounds great to us in marketing, there’s not a dollar amount you can associate with it to really bring home your point with the executive team.

“You Betta Recognize” -

Recognize what? Recognize what you’re currently working with in regards to reporting systems and see how they can all tie into your case for social. How do your CRM and your marketing automation platform help you leverage your social reach? For example, both Saleforce.com and Eloqua have application “marketplaces” with numerous social plugins that can supplement your current campaign efforts. This is where you bring up COST SAVINGS to the board. Look at what we already have, look at how I am using it, and look at how I can report back to you on items X,Y, and Z with numbers and/or percentages that make sense. You want executive buy-in? Let them know that you’re not just blowing money on new-fangled tools to measure something they don’t necessarily see value in quite yet anyway – help them recognize what you’re doing with what you already have.

What roadblocks have you run up against when reporting to your executive team on your social strategy? Leave us some feedback! And we hope you can join us on Wednesday, Nov.16, for the webinar to learn more about what you need to measure, how to measure it, how to report on those metrics, and how to determine what is good versus bad for your type of company.

Yes, you.  Your analytics.

Do any of these sound familiar to you?

• Spending a few hours each week populating an Excel spreadsheet with numbers you painstakingly gather from twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other sources?
• Drowning in too much data and too many experts trying to get you to do too many things?
• Depending upon Facebook’s web-based insights to measure the impact across all your pages– locations, products, causes, or whatever entities? Unless you’re a small business, your presence is not just on multiple social channels, but multiple Facebook pages, whether you’re aware of them or not.
• Being asked the value of a fan and not being able to defend the answer. Or measuring your social power vs just how many fans you have versus someone else.
• Having one place to track your website analytics (such as a Google Analytics), but then trying to tie in the impact of everything else online and offline into a single, simple, automated dashboard.
• Having a lot of fans, but not able to determine which ones, by name, are your top fans– then rewarding them for being so?

If so, then you need to come to “The Right Social Metrics for YOUR Business”, coming up in 2 weeks. Mark your calendars.  Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal and Justin Kistner of Webtrends share tactics for brands, small businesses, non-profits, direct marketers, and everyone in-between.

Today’s guest post was contributed by Dennis Yu, chief executive officer, BlitzLocal. BlitzLocal provides clients with every tool necessary to run a profitable internet marketing campaign. From engineering to analytics, they help you grow your business and generate more revenue. They are also a customer and partner of ReadyTalk.

Frost and Sullivan’s GIL (Growth, Innovation, Leadership) conference takes place next week in San Jose and is focused on connecting executives and engaging on topics that foster innovation, shape corporate strategy and help companies and individuals prepare for the future.

On Monday, I’ll be joining Melanie Turek of Frost and Sullivan and several other smart people for a discussion on Using Social Media to Get Closer to Your Customers. This is a topic that I’m extremely passionate about because I believe the best way to communicate with someone is to use the channels they prefer. Let customers contact you their way — not yours.

Social media is quickly becoming a favorite channel for customer communication. ReadyTalk staffs several official Twitter handles plus another two dozen handles used by employees to support communication efforts. You can find us on Twitter here:

@ReadyTalk – the latest news and updates from ReadyTalk. Plus, a ton of webinar tips and industry news.

@RTWebSem – Demand generation manager, Simone Verhulst, shares upcoming webinars and tons of knowledge. She’s got entertaining content to share.

@ReadyTalkGeeks – Find out what ReadyTalk’s engineers are hard at work on. Topics often include trends, AGILE, Scrum, Java and beer.

@ReadyTalkCare – ReadyTalk’s customer care team is standing by to answer customer questions and provide guidance.

Of course, ReadyTalk is also on Facebook. We don’t get a lot of customer support questions on Facebook but have found it to be a good venue to share best practices and tips with customers.

If you’re going to be at GIL next week, please be sure to say hello or share below;  I’d love to hear how your company is using social media to engage customers.

As the marketing communications and PR manager, Bo gets to wear many hats (but her favorite is a race car helmet). When she isn’t tackling branding, messaging, social media and collateral, she enjoys skiing with her husband, running with her dog and playing board games with friends. You can find her on Twitter @bo_knows_.

This month on the Webinar Series, we were privileged to welcome one of one of the leading consultants in social engagement and online reputation management, Craig Agranoff.  He has worked with many Internet start-ups and founded the tech blog sCommerce.com and Rev2.org.  Craig is the author of two books: Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management and most recently, Checked-In: How To Use Gowalla, Foursquare and Other Geo-Location Applications For Fun and Profit.

The topic of the webinar addressed the topic of location-based marketing through mobile devices. There were a number of great takeaways that came out of the content, plus a few that we weren’t able to fit into the sixty minute time slot. I wanted to pass along some of those items, but be sure to go back and check out the recording for the full rundown.

• The latest study by Pew Research says that 72 percent of American adults use their mobile phones for text messaging (that number jumps to 87% for teens).
• The average e-mail open rate hovers around 15% while the average SMS open rate is close to 90%.
• The foursquare business development team recently wrote a post sharing various example of how participating companies are truly cashing in on the platform to cultivate customer loyalty and continual drive traffic to their establishments. One that stands out – Starbucks has seen a 50% increase in check-ins at its locations simply by running a $1 off incentive – 50 %! That’s pretty impressive even for Starbucks who is already the most checked in retailer on the foursquare platform.
• Foursquare has over 5.6 million venues listed, receives over 1 million check-ins a week, and gets 13k new users a day!  Gowalla comes in at just over 1.4 million venues and 1,370 newcomers each day.

So, what’s my point? Look at these numbers and the potential reach of those that are in the different networks. Word spreads fast among communities and simple incentives can encourage people that may not be your typical customer or consumer to explore new territory. People use location-based applications for numerous reasons.  Some use it to find people, some to get badges or points, but many use them specifically for special offers/coupons and local tips. Think of it as a way to track someone’s personal history of places, then get creative and capitalize on their behaviors.

Has your company started using mobile marketing to reach customers? What have your successes been? What are the pitfalls? Share your thoughts below.

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and currently fills the role of Programs Coordinator and  manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.