The Wall Street Journal recently posted an interactive infographic on tracking methods of top websites as part of their “What They Know” series. The infographic is very interesting and contains a lot of information about the number and types of cookies and beacons used on websites to track information about visitors. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t go into enough detail about what information is captured and what this information is used for. With statements like, “Marketers are spying on Internet users,” misunderstandings are being perpetuated as to what marketers actually do and what personal information is tracked via online interactions. With all the information on cookies and beacons, even I was starting to feel like the work I do might be akin to tracking someone’s every move via an alien implant. But this isn’t true.

I am a marketer, and I am not spying on you. Since I believe that more people should become familiar with internet technologies and with web analytics, allow me to continue the Wall Street Journal’s discussion and fill in a few more details.

Are You Being Profiled by Web Analytics Tools?

More often than not, the “you” that is being tracked online is an anonymous number, not a name. While there may be some instances where the data I have is tied to a personally-identifying piece of information like a name or an email address, most often, you are about as anthropomorthic as SNFD17438DJ89.

But it’s been determined that anonymous data really isn’t anonymous…sort of. Researchers have determined that patterns and behaviors are unique enough that individuals can be picked out of anonymous data, in general. However, while I may be able to isolate profiles for individual visitors to my website, you’re still a number. I can’t miraculously conjure up names and personal details for everyone who visits my site.

Finally, there’s a lot of information that exists online about who you are, what you like, and what your browsing habits are. If I have access to any of this information about you, chances are good that it’s divided up amongst several tools. There is no secret profile about you that includes your name, age, email address, every website you’ve ever visited, and every action you’ve ever taken on my site. If I wanted to create a comprehensive profile of you, I would need to ask you.

This is what I do know about you.

Your Personal Details

There are several ways I can get personally identifying details about you through my website. If you create an account on the site, submit a form, or in some way send in your information, it will be stored in a database. This is how the website remembers your username, password, and any details specific to your account. The tools that I’m using and their level of sophistication determine whether or not I can match your personal details up with other information about you, like when you came to my site and what pages you visited.

Your Name: If you’ve created an account, submitted a form, made a purchase, or left a comment, I probably have a record of your name or username.

Your Email: Just like your name, if you’ve submitted your email address somewhere on my website, I probably have a record of it.

Your Phone Number: I really don’t care about your phone number unless it’s needed for customer service purposes or it’s related to the product or service I’m offering.

Your Birthday or Your Age: By knowing your age, I can start to make more accurate assumptions about the types of people visiting my website. However, I recognize that if I ask for details like your birthday or your age, there’s a good chance that many people won’t complete my form or sign up for an account on my site. I probably won’t ask you for these because I’d rather get more people to sign up than to know the ages of a few people. However, some sites will ask for a birth date and send out coupons or gifts on their customers’ birthdays. Depending on what you’re signing up for, some sites will require this info to accurately give quotes for things like insurance.

Your Social Security Number: There’s really no reason I need your SSN and no reason you should provide it unless you’re completing information for something that may require a credit check or proof of identity, like signing up for a phone contract or buying insurance.

Your Browsing Behaviors On My Website

I have cookies and tracking pixels installed on my site that give me information on how people use my site. I can see information like which pages you visited, how long you spent on each page, and what links you clicked on. However, at this point “you” is probably an anonymous ID number. I’m more interested in looking at trends and segments of visitors with shared similarities than trying to spy on you personally. However, if I know that Bob Smith from Nevada uses a Windows PC and reported a problem on the About page at 9:30 Monday morning, I might be able to dig into the information and isolate a browsing profile that is likely his. The more I know about Bob, the greater the chance that I can then determine that he visited my site three times that morning, uses Internet Explorer 7 on a PC running Windows XP, and lives in Reno.

Your Geographic Details

When you visit my site, information about your IP address and your internet service provider is recorded. Many times, this will pinpoint you to the Country, State, and City that you live in, although it’s not always 100% accurate.

Your Computer Device Details

Are you visiting my site from a PC or Mac? An iPhone or an Xbox? Whatever device you’re using is recorded, along with information like what operating system it’s running, what browser you’re visiting from, and how big your monitor screen is. This is how we adjust the design of the website to make sure it looks good for as many of our visitors as possible. If we see we’re getting a lot of visitors from mobile devices like Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids, we ‘ll use this information when deciding whether we should make a mobile version of the website.

Your Social Media Profiles

If I already have your name and email address, there are services I can use to gather information about what social networks you belong to. Do you have an account on MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr? I might be able to determine this if your accounts on these sites are listed under the same email address I have for you. In addition, I can gather information from your profiles that you’ve marked as viewable by the public.

I may be able to use information from your social profiles to determine your age, gender, and interests. However, I’m less concerned about you as an individual and more concerned with general segments that define my customers. I use this information to determine what kind of marketing campaigns might be successful, what types of products or services would be best for my customers, and which social networks my company should invest the most time on.

Your Purchases

If you bought something from my site, I can access all the details of your order. I can also access the details of your behavior on my site that surrounded that purchase, like what other products you looked at, what items you added to your cart but didn’t buy, and how many times you came to my site before you made a purchase.

With this information about you, I’ll try to make sure that the emails you get are related to topics or products that are more personally relevant to you. The next time you visit my site, you might see products recommended to you that are items you’ve looked at but didn’t buy, accessories for things you did buy, or interesting products purchased by people with actions similar to yours. I don’t have enough time to personally pick out these recommendations for you; algorithms make the choices here.

The Products or Articles You May Prefer on My Site

I can make inferences about what your interests are based on what categories and subcategories you visit on my site, how long you spend on different pages, and what products or articles you look at, purchase, or share with friends. The only way for me to actually know what you like and dislike is to ask you. However, the closer I get to figuring out what interests and motivates visitors to my site, the better I can make the site experience for them.

The Products or Articles You May Prefer on Other Sites

I probably don’t know this about you. While there are companies out there who could potentially provide me with this information for my customers or website visitors, it’s not something I’m tracking.

Your Demographic Details

It’s pretty difficult for me to gather other specific details about you as a person relying just on what’s gathered by my website.

Your Gender: I probably don’t know this, although I might be able to make a guess based on your name, your purchasing behavior, or by looking at your social media profiles.
Your Income: I also probably don’t know your income unless I specifically requested the information on a form. However, I might be able to access research that says my products or services appeal more to people with a certain income level.
Your Occupation: Again, I can make guesses about your occupation based on the type of website I have, but unless you’ve specifically told me your occupation, I probably don’t know it.
How Many Kids, Cats, and Guppies Live in Your Household: I have no idea.

Does that all seem like a lot of information? It is. If I have this information about one person, I also probably have the same amount of information for all the other people who visit the website. That’s a lot of data to go through, so rather than focusing on the actions and details of one specific person, I’ll spend more time breaking down the information I have about everyone into groups and segments. I might look at data from people from the same state or data from people who all bought the same product, but very rarely do I put together a comprehensive profile of just you.

If that’s not enough information, here are some other details I might access:

If I send you an email, I can probably tell where you were located, and I can track your specific actions, like if you opened it, what you clicked on, and what you later purchased after reading the email.

I can tell how you came to my site. If you searched for a specific phrase in Google, I can see that, and if you clicked on a link on another website to get here, I know which site you were on.

If you clicked on a link on my site that then took you to another site, I know which link you clicked on and what outbound site you went to.

If you clicked on one of my ads to come to the site, I know which ad you clicked on and where the ad was.

Before you lash out at the tracking used on websites, think about this:

In many cases, if you call a company or business, your phone call is tracked and recorded. Your number is saved and your location is identified. The length of the call is noted, and the sentiment of your voice might be recorded. If a phone tracking system is in place, there’s a good chance that while you’re waiting on hold, all the irate comments you make are also being recorded. This information can be used to ensure that the business has enough staff on-hand to answer calls during peak times, to make sure they don’t put people on hold too often, and to monitor that the staff are correctly answering your questions.

If you use a site’s live chat feature, your chat is recorded for tracking purposes. The person that you’re chatting with might also be able to see which webpage you’re currently on, what your IP address is, and what other pages on the site you browsed before chatting.

If you stay away from the web entirely and place an order through a catalog, all of your contact information and your purchase history can be matched with demographic information about your neighborhood, and shared with other companies who are targeting customers with similar profiles. Ever wonder why you started getting random catalogs in the mail?

This type of “spying” doesn’t only exist online. Tracking, measuring, and monitoring information is crucial to many industries. It’s how organizations make informed decisions about what to manufacturer and sell, what to air on TV and radio stations, and what civic pursuits will benefit the most people.

Who else out there is tracking things like your movements, actions, and purchases? Potentially, the US Census, your credit card company, your car, your phone, the cameras at street intersections, grocery stores with rewards cards, retail stores with video surveillance, and many others all are “spying” in some form as well.

What kind of tracking tools am I using on Flat Frog Blog? Installed on this site I have Google Analytics, Clicky, ClickTale, and Userfly. Google Analytics and Clicky are web analytics programs that tell me who visited the site, where they came from, and what pages they viewed. ClickTale generates heat maps of users’ clicks and mouse hovers, and it generates videos of your mouse actions and page movements. Userfly also shows videos of your on-page actions. All of these are free.

Images from Google Analytics Dashboard, Flowtown Dashboard, and Flickr User Ocularinvasion.

Summary: Flowtown is a new service that allows internet marketers to upload a list of emails and get back comprehensive information on their customers’ social media presence.

Segmentation and personalization make most email campaigns – and marketing campaigns in general – more effective. If you’re engaging in email marketing, you’re probably already explored options like different send times, content variations, and splitting your list up into different groups of people. Often, email marketers have some kind of tool or database for building out customer segments based on customer attributes, past behavior, and any other relevant information they’ve been able to access.

Depending on the email campaign, you may be looking at:

* Gender
* Age
* Geographic Location
* Engagement Level
* Past Purchase $$ Amount
* Time Since Most Recent Purchase
* Previously Purchased (or Favored) Product Categories
* Self-Selected Hobbies or Interests
* Customer Industry
* And Others

As social media gains a stronger footing alongside email as another customer communication channel, where does social media fit within the push marketing mix? Flowtown wants to help you integrate social media and email marketing, and insure that you gain insightful information in the process.

A Social Media Profile Data Mining Service

Flowtown is a relatively new service that gathers together information on the social profiles of your email list. The service is integrated with MailChimp, if that’s your ESP of choice, but you can also upload your list via a spreadsheet or paste in the emails. Flowtown then goes to work putting together profiles based on the email addresses. Does it violate your customers’ privacy? Not technically, since the information pulled is all publicly available on profiles if you dig enough. Flowtown cuts out the legwork by performing the data mining and compilation for you. Does it seem a little voyeuristic at first? It can. It’s surprising to realize how many profiles are being scanned to compile the information, but other online applications have also started pulling in this social profile data as well (email tools like Xobni and Threadsy come to mind).

Flowtown automatically compiles info from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Amazon, and StumbleUpon. It also adds in a Klout ranking so that you can sort by your potentially more socially engaged Twitter customers. Other networks that I’ve seen pop up within profiles include Tagged, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Times, Costco, Hi5, Pandora, Classmates.com, Care2, and Plaxo. And there are likely many more that I haven’t come across yet.

How is this helpful? You get quick stats plus detailed profile information on anyone in your email list with a public social media account.  You can use the newly-created profiles to start segmenting your users by social network, engagement level, or interests. You also gain a better understanding of your customer base. Not all of the information is accurate, as some users have a propensity to lie about things like their age on MySpace, but it will give you a starting guesstimate for your user base.

Isn’t There a Cheaper Way to Gather Data?

Flowtown is a paid service, but the plans are reasonable and are based on the size of your email list. If you’re a bare bones marketer, you could take a DIY approach and setup a new Gmail or Hotmail account, add everyone from your email list as contacts, use a service like Twitter with your new Gmail account, and choose the “Scan My Contacts” option to find friends who also have accounts. But then you’re left to make your own pretty graphs. Flowtown does offer info on your first 50 email addresses for free, so it might be more time efficient to get your profile mining fix that way instead.

What I’d Like to See in the Future

As a new company, Flowtown has made a great start at putting together a useful tool for marketers. I’d like to see the service grow to include more niche-specific networks as well. These could be incredibly useful for retailers or companies operating within certain verticals. I don’t know if they have APIs available, but I’d love to see sites like Kaboodle, ThisNext, and Stylehive added to help retailers, and sites such as Yelp and Epicurious would aid restaurants or dining establishments. I’d also like the service to include integration with location-based networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and Loopt to fill out people’s profiles.

Possible Use-Case Scenarios

The Neighborhood Cafe

A restaurant or cafe may collect comment cards or customer feedback cards as part of their efforts to insure that they are providing quality service, great food, and an inviting atmosphere. Customers can fill these out anonymously, but they can also include their email if they’d like to be entered in monthly drawings for free meals. The restaurant keeps this list of customer email addresses and also collects emails through their website from people interested in receiving monthly menus and notices on special events.

If Flowtown ever integrates with Yelp or a similar service, this will become an amazing resource for restaurants and cafes. They would be able to determine which of their customers were active Yelp reviewers and send an occasional message out to the Yelpers asking for reviews or highlighting reviews from the past month. They might also be able to dedicate a little manpower to sifting through their patrons’ Yelp profiles to see what types of restaurants they liked best and what price ranges their customers gravitate towards.

Even without a Yelp integration, the restaurant could probably make some inferences about a subset of their patrons by looking at the info gathered by Flowtown. (Note, this is only a subset. The customer who willing gives up an email address on a comment card or who signs up to receive menus via email isn’t necessary a representation of all your customers – unless, perhaps, you are a cyber cafe). From the geographic data, it may become clear that many customers are locals but a sizable chunk are tourists who visited on vacation. You may choose to send fewer emails to the out-of-towners or change your marketing message when sending to them; “Hey, next time you’re in town, we thought you’d like to know…”

Do you have a cozy cafe that encourages lingering over a good book? Do you have a segment of customers with Amazon and New York Times profiles? Maybe these are the people you want to notify first about the new sofas you’re getting or the extra magazine subscriptions you’ve just picked up. Do you have a popular lunchtime cafe in the city center or the business district? Is there are a group of your customers who appear to be locals, professionals with LinkedIn profiles, and are in their 30s – 50s? You might target this group first with announcements about lunchtime rush specials and offer them exclusive discounts on your newly formed corporate catering service.

The Niche Community Site

So you have a community site with an actively growing user base. You haven’t really put a lot of time or consideration into formal email marketing, but you do have email addresses from all your registered users. You’ve been considering adding a second login option to encourage more new users to join who might not want to create yet another account on another website. You’d like to use either an Oauth Twitter login or a Facebook Connect login as your second choice, but you’re not sure which is best.

You’ve considered sending out a rare email to your users asking which they’d prefer, but they already technically have accounts with your site. You’ve also considered just picking the choice that’s easiest to implement. With Flowtown, you can see which social networking sites your current users already have accounts with. It turns out that 70% of your current users also have Facebook accounts, but only 20% have Twitter profiles. Based on those numbers, you decide the Twitter login isn’t the best idea, and you’re more motivated to set up that Facebook fanpage for your site.

The Fun & Games Ecommerce Store

You’ve got a small ecommerce site, and you recently dove headfirst into social media. In fact, you set up sites on every social media platform you could find. Now you’re realizing that it takes time to maintain all those profiles, and you’re having a hard time connecting with cool people or potential customers in some of the social spaces. You want to do a really awesome social media scavenger hunt, and you’re setting up clues that you’ll post on all the different sites so that users can track down product prizes.

Well it turns out that organizing clues and scavenger hunts for all the social sites is also a lot of work. You decide to pare back to just a few social platforms, but you haven’t decided if you want your clues to encourage users to be active on all the networks, or if you want to offer separate clues and prizes for scavengers on each of the networks.

You take your list of orders from the last three months and upload the emails into Flowtown to find out where your most recent customers have been hanging out. You pay special attention to the habits of your biggest spenders. Do they have things in common? Could you profile them and direct some focus into acquiring more like them? You notice that your biggest spenders don’t have a lot of social media klout, but there are some customers with high klout in the next tier of spenders. Maybe they’d be more likely to spread the word about your scavenger hunt?

Based on the breakdown you get from Flowtown, it seems like your shoppers are a mixed bunch divided between MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. You start following some of your customers on Twitter that you weren’t already following. Then you sit down to start brainstorming clues for your social media scavenger hunt, all the while going through ideas about how to best contact your customers to let them know about the clues and the game.

In Summary

Flowtown looks like a great add-on tool for email marketing or social media marketing. But you will likely find it useful even if you never send a single email. If you have a list of any type that includes emails (orders, leads, users, people who’ve donated to your non-profit), you can gain insight into the online personalities of this group of people and collect useful information that may help you better target your product or service. The insights gained on the ages, genders, interests, and online haunts of your users could help direct the development of new features for your website. Or if you’re preparing to do some Facebook advertising, you may want to target people who match characteristics of your existing customers. If nothing else, you’ll gain a better idea of where to focus your social media marketing efforts. (Got a list with zero Twitter users? That might be why your “Tweet to Win” campaign didn’t go so well.)

Dear Marketers on Facebook,
You are doing a shitty job.  The Facebook ad platform has provided you with a lot of resources for sending out targeted relevant ads, and you’re making a mess of it.

Usually I’m pretty good about not paying attention to Facebook ads.  I don’t play Farmville, and I tend to ignore the “government money to go back to school” ads that pop up.  I also log into Facebook on a severely less frequent basis than I used to several years ago.  I can get Facebook updates on my phone or via Threadsy, so I don’t spend as much time actually navigating through the site.  However, over a month ago I was doodling around a little on Facebook, and I was struck by the ads that started popping up.  Not only did they get my attention, they were a little disconcerting.  Disconcerting because, as someone who has run Facebook ads for work, I know what segmenting and targeting options marketers have when setting up their ads, and I tend to assume they’ll make good use of their options.  I was surprised to see that the majority of the ads popping up on my pages related to babies and birth control.

What did I do to deserve ads hocking birth control pills and free baby bottle samples?  I’m pretty sure I didn’t list “promiscuous and pregnant” anywhere on my profile.  I used to get ads for new lesbian dating networks and t-shirts that said something like “Shane is my home girl.”  These ads never surprised me because I listed The L Word under my TV preferences.  It made sense.  Now that The L Word has wrapped, it seems I’ve been kicked over to the dark side, the land of babies and birth control.

I tweeted my surprise at the time, and then several days later I saw a story in The New York Times acknowledging the “off-key” ads that are appearing on Facebook now that businesses of all shapes and sizes have entered into the social advertising arena.

There have been numerous stories of small companies seeing great success when they started running a few highly tailored Facebook ads.  But I second the surprise of one woman referenced in the NYT article who was a bit shocked at being shown an ad for Plan B.  The article quotes Tim Hanlon, a principal at a consulting firm as saying, “When it works, it’s amazingly impactful, but when it doesn’t work, it’s not only creepy but off-putting.”

Facebook ads let the marketer select a much more specific audience than could ever be possible through a paid search platform like Google Adwords.  The marketer has the option of refining the viewers by a number of characteristics to ensure that the ad hits the best target audience; you can set an ad to be shown only to people of a specific gender and age, living in a certain area, and with stated interests.  Careful targeting and segmentation in any marketing campaign are usually good.  Highly relevant ads tend to do better and are more likely to be well-received by the viewer.  All that said, why do the ads I get suck so much?

I started taking screen shots of any ad that I thought obnoxious or irrelevant each time I logged into Facebook.  Many of the ads showed up multiple times.  Below is a random smattering of the Facebook ads I see:

Getting Married?

Ok, I’ll at least give this ad credit for taking a stab at location-targeting.  Unfortunately, while they got the right state, they didn’t get my city right.  And I’m not engaged or getting married?

Birth Control?

Planned Parenthood wants to give me free birth control.  Ok, fine.  But did I list something that makes them think I want birth control, or is every woman on Facebook over the age of 18 getting this ad?

So if I got Yaz from my free Planned Parenthood birth control, I might have needed to have my gallbladder removed.  Ugh.  I’m guessing this ad leads to something about a lawsuit.

Pregnant?

If I’m pregnant, there’s someone on Facebook who wants to talk options?

If talking to the people in the previous ad doesn’t help, I guess I can always give my baby up for adoption through this ad (if I were actually pregnant.)

Mommy to Be

I’m not a mom or a mom-to-be!  I don’t want to have fun with other moms.

Oh look, I can get free baby bottles in the mail!  Tons of free samples for babies, and tons of times I’ve seen these ads go by.

Already a Mom

Great, Gerber wants cute baby pictures.  They should probably tell that to someone with access to cute babies.

Pampers wants pictures of babies too.  If I had a baby, I would definitely send it’s picture in because the baby in this ad looks like a cross between an alien and a naked mole rat.

So if I have a kid, someone’s going to give me $10,000?  Maybe I should go find a kid…

Apparently home schooling can be overwhelming.  That’s probably why I wouldn’t home school my kids, if I had any.

A few problems here: I don’t have a kid. There’s a logo on the picture, but I can’t see what it says.  The ad copy is unclear; what exactly is this for? I don’t live in Lane County (although I know where it is).  You have to dial the area code in Oregon now, and they didn’t include it with the phone number.

Snotsucker Nosefrida nasal aspirator?  What did I possibly do wrong to deserve this ad?

If Birth Control Wasn’t Enough

Of course I get an ad for low sex drive too.

Just Bad Ads

My alma mater is Occidental College.  I’m in the Occidental network on Facebook.  I’ve been in the Occidental network since 2004.  By now, someone should know where I went to school.  I’ve never even heard of Chrichton.

Ok friend, first of all, good luck renting carpet fans over Facebook.  Second, “Wet Carpets” isn’t saying much.  And how about that period floating around?  No caps on the “we” and no period after “fans?”  Did you proof read your ad?  Also, I did a little checking for you, and if your business is really in the Boston area (I’m assuming from the phone number), you might have better results if you don’t show your ad to people who live in Oregon.

Actually, no.  I don’t need any refrigerator trucks.

Hi Spider Monkey Marketing, aside from the fact that I don’t have any reason to become your fan, your image is awfully hard to read.
Again with the bad image choices.  Does anyone look at their ads before setting them live?
I don’t even know what this is supposed to be for.
I get a ton of these “make your baby” ads.  These people might want to double check their spelling of “little.”
Not only do I NOT drive a Hummer, I think they are some of the dumbest vehicles ever unleashed on the consumer market.

What?  I don’t know what this is for or what message they’re trying to get across, but it looks like an old phone from the pre-mobile era – not exactly synonymous with independence.

Do a Better Job with Your Targeting

It isn’t that often that marketers have the opportunity to really refine their target audience and match it to their market.  So why are so many people doing a lousy job?  I have two hunches:  Perhaps Facebook is pulling a sneaky move, similar to Google, and showing ads they think might be relevant to people the marketer didn’t necessarily specify, all in the name of making more money.  If that’s the case, then they need to smarten up.

The other option is that a lot of the people out there making Facebook ads are just doing a really awful job.  Not all women in their twenties need samples of baby bottles.  Don’t suck at Facebook marketing.  Use the targeting controls to really refine your campaign audience to small select groups.  It will probably save you money and spare me some babies.

There are a lot of discussions on businesses participating in social media and how they can appropriately measure their efforts and document their successes (or failures).  How do you measure social media ROI?  Does ROI even exist for social media?  Those just stepping into the social sphere have a lot to consider.

However, regardless of whether you’re tracking retweets, followers, or video views, successful online efforts can influence people who are essentially off your radar.  Businesses who engage online have the opportunity to influence an outer layer of individuals who may be unmeasurable by any social media metrics.

The Roger Smith Hotel is a boutique hotel in New York City that engages in social media.  However, I’m not one of their Twitter followers, I’ve never seen their Flickr photos, and I have no idea if they have a Facebook page.  I’ve also never visited their hotel, and I hadn’t heard of their brand until a few months ago.  It wouldn’t matter how they measured their online reach – I’ve had little to no interaction with their online channels and I don’t represent any clicks, tweets, links, or mentions (until now).

However, they’ve reached a point online where their branding has stretched beyond their immediate control and their hotel evangelists have begun doing their marketing for them.  I know about the Roger Smith Hotel, and I found out about them online.

The Wisdom of Word of Mouth

I follow a pretty small group of people on Twitter right now, but I read what they post.  I look at their TwitPics, and I click on their links.  Even though the group is small, I would guess that half of the knowledge and new information I acquire each day can be attributed to something that I saw on Twitter.

I’ve seen the Roger Smith Hotel mentioned a couple of times in the past few months – and I saw it mentioned by different people.  I’ve read their updates, and I’ve clicked their links to the Roger Smith Life blog.  None of this came directly from the Roger Smith team.

To be fair, the Roger Smith Hotel has very little reason to seek me out or know I exist.  I live on the West Coast, so I won’t be attending any of their events in the near future; I don’t have any immediate plans in New York, so I’m not searching for hotels in the city right now.  In fact, normally if I was hunting down hotels in NYC, the Roger Smith won’t make it onto my list.  The prices are probably beyond any budget-traveler limits I’d have set, and it’s not a national chain, so it’d be easy to not notice.

However, via the powers of the Roger Smith online community, their brand has found me.  I’ve seen pictures where I recognized the Roger Smith sign, and I’ve read posts where people have mentioned meeting up with friends at Roger Smith.  It sounds like fun.

A Human Face for a Business Brand

I visited their blog and was confused.  At first, I wondered if it was really a hotel.  Where were all the articles pimping room specials and announcing how great the service is?  They’re not there.  Instead they have real pictures and real video accompanying real stories about real people.  In short, they have useful and interesting content.    And it’s not there just to get high search engine rankings or to generate links back to their website.  It’s there to humanize their company and put a personal face on their brand.

Since I’m now intrigued by their content and their persona, I begin visiting other pages and looking at their website further.  The Roger Smith Hotel doesn’t know that because I’m a dancer and choreographer, I have an interest in performance art.  But I do, so their information on the installation art space, The Lab, immediately gets my interest.  As I browse the artists and performances featured on The Lab site, the Roger Smith Hotel has not only presented me with a possible place to stay the next time I’m in NYC, but now they’ve given me another reason to want to plan a trip.

If the Roger Smith marketing team does measure social media ROI, and if I do book a room at their hotel when I’m next in NYC, there’s a good chance they won’t be able to attribute that booking directly to a social media campaign.  Maybe sometime I’ll sign up for their email or maybe I’ll check visit them on Twitter and click on a few links.  But if I don’t, have their efforts been any less of a success?  Is their use of social media unjustified?

No.  They’ve created a persona strong enough to reach people beyond the immediate scope of their own online community.  Even when it’s unmeasurable, the influence is there.

True story.  More or less.

Of course it’s usually not quite that simple either.  You probably have to consider a few other things like overhead, the cost of customer service, and the cost of putting together and managing each campaign (you might be able to assume those are constants, but you might not).  The average lifetime value of the customer could be a factor, and you might want to do a little bit of ROI predicting as well: how do things look two months from now if everything stays the same versus if your conversion rate increases?  Or decreases?

Calculating monthly costs might be more hairy at times as well too;  say, a fixed monthly cost plus an additional cost that’s a percentage of sales, and then every few months there’s a “one time” fee.

But really, who’s paying attention to any of that stuff?