Here is a transcript of the event:

Good morning. I want to welcome you all to the nature conservancy. I’m Elizabeth Ward, I’m the acting chief marketing officer for the conservancy. And we are honored to host this session of the web manager’s roundtable, I actually think this is our third time acting as hosts, so clearly this is something we like to do. For those of you who are not familiar with the nature conservancy, we are an international conservation organization, we work around the world, protecting ecologically important lands and waters for the benefit of both nature and people. We protected over 119 million acres of land around the world, some 5,000 river miles, and we have over 100 marine conservation projects in some 21 countries, and in all of the coastal US states.

We also have over one million members, donors and volunteers supporting us. With regard to our marketing strategy, we have evolved our web strategy to look beyond our web site, our primary website as our main digital asset, although we are very proud to have won two Webby awards this past year for our website. We view social media as a really integral part of our overall marketing strategy. We just think it’s so important to engage our audiences in conversation, whether that’s our new members, potential donors, or long time supporters. And measuring the effectiveness of our social media is an integral part to taking our social presences on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, etc. to the next level, and it’s one of the reasons we’re really excited about today’s topic of conversation.

Andy Ganderson [?] on our team is going to talk a lot more about the work that we do but I wanted to share a few of our successes and hopefully not steal all of her thunder. We are one of the top non-profits on Facebook Causes, we’ve raised over 300,000 dollars there to date. Our Facebook page now has over 30,000 members, which has tripled in size since last December. We have over 13,000 followers on Twitter, and are positioning ourselves there as a provider of green news. And finally, we launched in January our cool green science blog, which is an opportunity for us to highlight the expertise of our scientists in an engaging and non-wonky way. So with that, I would like to pass the floor to Julie, who, as usual, has done a fantastic job in organizing this event for the web managers round table. Thank you very much.

Just a word, some quick announcements: first, the restrooms are through the back door, and sort of that way, and if you have a cell phone please turn it off or on vibrate, and for those of you who are parked on the street, they’re pretty strict about two hour parking, so feel free to get up at any time and drop some quarters and come back in. Who’s new, for the first time, to the web managers round table? Raise your hands. That’s a pretty good showing. So keep those hands up, and how many of you, keep your hands up, if you heard about the roundtable from a colleague or some reference? Okay, now, keep your hand high if you’ve found us on the web and you contacted me. Web managers round table cannot be found on the web actually, as funny as that may sound, we are really a referral-based organization, this is a community based because you want these people to come here, so we don’t have a public registration system, those of you who are new had to somehow figure out a way how to get on the invitation list, and it hasn’t really made a dent in our numbers, it’s only really made us grow larger and stronger. So I’m actually kind of excited about it.

I also want to let you know that we’ll continue the conversation after this meeting at [inaudible location] which is just two blocks from here, and is an inexpensive Italian eatery, where we have a reserved space with some appetizers awaiting you. We should get there before noon because they’re only going to reserve our space until noon. So it’s a great place to share a pizza and a salad and carry on the conversation with our presenters and attendees. We’ve had these post-event lunches before, and they’ve really turned out to be very valuable networking experiences. Last but not least, in fact, I’d like to introduce to you our sponsors who make this very possible for these events to actually occur. Our newest sponsor is the Red Engine Digital, they’re an integrated online marketing company that has been creating strategic ROI-based online marketing campaigns for non-profits and businesses since 2001. They create and execute innovative campaigns, drive new, qualified prospects to your website, convert visitors to action, and analyze and optimize results to meet and surpass your goals. And also Liz Murphy who contacted me is working with Jim on the e-metric summit and is a long time friend, and I’m very very happy that they’ve joined our sponsor family.

Sapient is a founding sponsor of the web managers round table. They are global and interactive technology services firm that helps you compete, evolve and grow in the increasing complex marketplace. Sapient Interactive provides brand and marketing strategy, award-winning web design, development, and emerging media expertise. Sapient Consulting provides business and IT strategy, process and systems design, package implementation, custom development and outsourcing services. You can hear them every morning on NPR, I think at five o’ clock too, if any if you have heard their blurb.

Aquent is the largest creative marketing and technology firm in the country. For twenty years they have helped organizations find and hire talented professionals on a freelance contract, try-before-you-hire and permanent basis. Aquent connects over 11,000 professionals each year with opportunities at more than 3,000 organizations including 2,000 of the Fortune 500.

Rock Creek Strategic Marketing, who came to me by the way, funny story, Scott Johnson, for all the Starbucks gift cards that I give out, sent me a gift card, it said, ‘Hi, have a coffee on me.’ I was like, I got to talk to you. If you ever really want a break through the noise, you know, that’s the way to do it. They specialize in brand name integrated marketing, interactive design, new media campaigns, and search engine optimization. They use research strategy, competitive analysis, content planning, and usability’s best practices to deliver the rewarding user experience that help audiences discover and engage with your brand.

And 4c Results is the leader in online customer satisfaction measurement. Every time I get a customer survey as part of my web experience, I’m always wondering, ‘I wonder if that’s 4c’s.’ Chances are it probably is, is what I’ve come to learn. The company was designed to bring the scientific and proven methodology of the University of Michigan’s customer satisfaction index, otherwise known as the ACSI to the web, for hundred’s of clients, 4c’s results captures and analyzes the online voice of the customer data to help you increase sales, loyalty, recommendations, and your website value.

And I’m going to let Jim really talk to you about the e-metrics marketing optimizations summit that will be held on October 19^th through 23^rd, and it will be in Arlington this year. It’s going to be at the Mark’s [?] Center and basically, it has always offered marketing executives, managers, and business intelligence experts way to increase and return on their online investments. Their international conference series is recognized as the premier event for optimizing online marketing value. Held in 9 cities around the world, the next e-metric summit will be held here in Arlington.

And for those of you who have never been, it’s really wonderful, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people here who are regulars. Usually I let Jim do his own introduction; today I decided I would do it. It’s a little soapy. Jim Stern, this is a roast, is an evangelist, a zealot, a missionary, a champion analytics testing and data-driven decisions with religious fervor. You lie! He wants people to recognize that analytics are essential for a deeper understanding of customer intent, and that the understanding of intent is a precursor to providing real relevance. He is an internationally-known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and to netpreneurs. He has written five books on internet advertising, marketing, customer service, email marketing and web analytics. He is the founder and producer of the e-metrics summit, and he is the founder and chairman of the web analytics association.

Something I found on his linked in page, Jim, this is a quote, a recommendation. “Jim is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable leaders around the world. Listen to him speak, as his opinion, or flip open one of his books, and it will become immediately obvious that his stellar reputation is well-deserved.” From that, I introduce Jim Stern, and our panel.

Gosh, Julie. I love you too. I’m just really pleased to be here so that I can encourage everyone to come to the conference. Quick show of hands, how many people have been to an e-metrics conference? Excellent. And the rest of you are going to October 19 to 23, thank you, and I don’t have to say anything because she did the commercial for me. It is my pleasure to introduce our panel, and to take your questions. So I only have about a half a million questions, so I’m going to need help from you, if you’ve got questions, what I want you to think about is, not just what does it mean and where are we going, but how is what these people… what are they doing, and how can what they know help you do your job when you’re working on social media? So Amy, we’re going to start with you, because we now know what the nature conservancy is all about, but help us understand, what do you do, what is your role?

Sure, so, I’m Amy Ganderson, and my role is the Digital Marketing Manager, in our digital marketing group. And I’m in charge of a lot of our external marketing, specifically all of our social media channels, as well as paid search, natural search, content licensing and web analytics, so I think I’m in the right place.

Excellent, thanks. Jeff, help us out, the editorial projects and education, what is that, and what do you do there?

Excuse me, I have a loud voice as it is, so I don’t really need a microphone. My name is Jeff, and as Jim said, editorial projects and education is my organization. We publish Education Week, which is a fairly well-known newspaper in K-12 education, at edweek.org website, which we’re trying to go more daily than weekly with that, the print is weekly. My role there is director of online business development, which is really a catch-all title for a lot of stuff, kind of like Amy it sounds like. I’m involved with online advertising, site licensing, content licensing, web analytics, and miscellaneous other stuff. And… yeah, I think that’s enough. It certainly keeps me busy.

And they let you out of your cage long enough to…

Yeah, I sneak out sometimes.

Well done! And Rochelle, the Washington Post, we know what that is. Washington Post Digital is the same but different, so help us understand that, and what do you do there?

Washington Post Digital is essentially the online arm of the Washington Post, at washingtonpost.com, and it’s a sales brand that we use. My name is Rochelle [inaudible last name], I’m the senior director of acquisition marketing for Washington Post Digital, and I’m in charge of the team that manages all the activities to drive traffic into washingtonpost.com. That includes your traditional marketing vehicles like online media and print media, as well as paid and organic search and social media.

So, a lot to do all the way around. What we have here are content websites, publishers, and the subject matter for today is, how do you know social media is bringing traffic to you, and then the corollary for me is, is it worthwhile traffic? There was a day when we were measured, the value that we brought to the company was determined by how many people came to the home page, which was great. You put up a banner ad that says, “Free money, click here,” and everybody comes to the home page, then runs away screaming. So my first question is, before we get specifically to social media, how do you know, and Rochelle I’ll start with you, how do you know that the people who are showing up are worthy or that it’s valuable traffic? How do you determine whether it’s good traffic or not?

Well, we can look after the fact that we always use our web analytic tools and we look at our referrers, specifically for social media, to determine the quality of these people as they’re coming in to consume content. So, how many page views per visitor are we getting, what type of content are they consuming on the site, because we monetize different types of content in different ways, but by being proactive, we can also do things out in social media to drive people to those areas that make the most sense for our brand and our business. So you can be reactive and measure it after the fact that you can also be proactive and drive them to the places you want them to go.

So it’s the number of people of course is good, but page views, and then some of your content is more valuable for the organization than others monetarily?

Exactly.

Okay, so we’re going to track the traffic that’s coming in which is going to our most profitable content and clicking refresh a lot.

Hopefully not refresh. Looking at extra page views, yes.

Very good. And, Jeff? What about yours? How do you know the traffic is good? How do you determine ‘goodness’?

Similar kinds of things. We’re certainly reactive in terms of looking at things after the fact, measuring, we’re growing our sophistication though, with that. There’s been a lot of focus on traffic pure and simple. How many page views, so again, trying to grow the sophistication of, who are those people? So, segmentation, for instance, and trying to figure out who’s a high value visitor? And who are ones that are more engaged, high value visitors who are more engaged, so some of the engagement factors, as Rochelle mentioned. Page views per visit, time spent, we have article comments, so we’re trying to figure out ways to count those up. We’re not there yet with our web analytics to be able to figure out some of this stuff, but that’s the usual.

You’ve been implementing Omniture for weeks now, how come you’re not ready?

Tomorrow.

Okay, good deal. Excellent. Amy, slightly different for you because we can… we’re collecting donations, so that’s their absolute monetary metric, but surely you’re looking at value of traffic in other ways.

Mostly just to echo, we do look at it more after the fact, we tend to look at the social networks as good cluster, how is Facebook, how is Twitter, how are they trending over time, and looking at, how long are they staying on our site, I think that’s a big component, making sure they’re ingesting a lot of pages. As far as the donations, that’s a place we want to get to, but we are going to be implementing Omniture in a few months from now, so in a similar boat I think we need to take it to the next level and see what kind of content they’re taking in once they get to the site, and then where can we convert them.

Okay, so, number of people, what do they look at, do they look at more things and are they looking at our more profitable pages. Now, let’s switch over to the social media side. At one point, somebody in the organization went to a senior manager and said, ‘Hey, there’s this thing called social media, and they’re talking about us, and it’s driving traffic, and we should invest in it somehow,’ and they looked at you like you were crazy. How did that conversation go, and how did it get to where it is now? How did you convince upper management that this actually was something worth investing in?

I think one quick and easy way is to report your success, I think that’s one tactic that we do really well, that falls under the digital marketing team. So whenever we have a big win, if we hit a nice milestone on any of these networks, I think reporting up and making sure that’s spread across the organization, that’s one tactic that we definitely do. Any milestone, ten thousand fans, whatever it may be. As well as another thing I think that even in… I’ve been with the nature conservancy for about nine months, I’ve done about five different presentations on social media, so just marketing around those presentations to different groups around the organization, making sure everyone knows what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why it’s effective, I think that’s been a very integral part to just making sure everyone’s aware of it, and making sure everyone buys into it.

So it’s selling. You got to go sell. Rochelle, Washington Post, a venerable organization filled it grey-haired venerable people who don’t even have teenagers living at home. No, not you. How did you go about, how did an organization that’s so old figure this out? What was the water shed event?

It’s interesting, I’ve been with the Post for about two years now, and I have to be honest, they had a Facebook presence before I got there, so…

Did they know it?

They’re… that’s the thing. So, you have individuals who work in your organization and will say, I’m so excited about my brand and my employer that I think we should be doing these things. So they’ll go ahead and they will start to represent you within the social media space, and that’s what happens, we actually had somebody within the organization that started what we started to call the rogue facebook page, several years ago, and there was some content up there but there wasn’t a lot of momentum behind it. And so a lot of what I’ve done over the past year since I’ve taken on the social media role is try to consolidate things. There were actually already presences out there, but how do we consolidate them, how do we make sure they have a consistent brand and tone, how do we make sure that they’re actually pointing towards what our business goals are, and so, we already had a bit of a presence because of a report on what our results were from that presence, and then talked about the things we could do and the accomplishments we could have if we could just optimize what we already had out there.

Great, so Jeff, for you, don’t worry, trust us. Cool! Does that work for payment bonuses as well?

I wish.

One of the advantages we have is we’re, for this particular question, in this particular issue, is that we are a very small organization. No more than a hundred staff. Our top executives are very hands on, sometimes that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In this case it’s a good thing because they already get it. So I don’t think there was ever really a need for a selling job. The challenge I think we have at this point though is going from a… you know, we’re doing it because it’s cool, and because it drives traffic, pageviews, and getting, again, as I said earlier, more sophisticated about why we’re doing it, and how it can help us, and prioritizing. To go back to the issue of top execs, if we’re ever going to get some staffing for it, beyond a little bit here and there, obviously we’re going to have to make a case.

And that’s where we’re sitting, is that we want to invest. To get help from outside agencies, we want to hire people… it became obvious early on when doing, what, email discussion groups for instance. There has to be a person, a personality, someone who will lead the conversation. If you’re going to have your employees Tweet or blog, they have to have a personality and they have to be aligned with corporate goals, they have to be trained, this all sounds like money. So, how do we know how much money to invest in social media compared to banner advertising compared to direct mail, how is this being evaluated? I’ll throw that open to anybody.

I can speak to that. I think one of the big wins that we’ve done is just to break up the work, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve done because when I first started, I was normally the one going out there and putting out all the content, and it just wasn’t efficient. And it was also… it didn’t involve other people in different groups around the organization, so one of the things that I did was went out and got people involved. So now we have over about five different people who are doing other jobs but kind of do this on the side and now they take part in contributing content to our social media, and it’s really just an investment on time rather than another head count.

So, when I’m trying to get web analytics into an organization, I wader around with interesting data and show it to people, and the folks who say, hey that’s interesting, can you also show me this number and this number… I know I’ve got somebody who’s hooked. How do you identify the people who will be good social media-ists? How do you know, the five people…

I think they’re in the audience right now. I think, well obviously one of the natural fit would be people from our editorial staffs, we’ve got two people from our editorial team, another who is on our media relations teams, so it’s great to have exposure there.

So they’re writers already…

Yes, they’re writers already.

That means that they know how to put words together, and they like an audience.

Correct.

And… what kind of policies do you have in place to keep them from just spinning out onto their own personality?

Well I like to think of myself as the enforcer, so I think it’s good to have multiple contributors, but you need to have somebody to monitor what’s going out and when, so we use a couple of different tools. We have an editorial calendar for social media specifically, so we know when messages are going out when, and who’s responsible for it, which is I think a big key component, so we know, okay, you’re supposed to tweet today, but I don’t see it scheduled up in our queue, so then I would go out and talk to them to see what’s going on.

And Rochelle, you’ve got writers who have followers and they’re celebrities in their own minds, and Twitter is just so easy to go, oh, here’s an interesting thought about the color of my coffee, boom. Is there a policy, do you manage, do you train, do you corral, oh yes you’re a union shop now, what does that mean?

We’re trying to determine the best approach, and we’ve taken a few in the past. So we do have a lot of people, like [inaudible name], he has a ton of followers, he’s been doing his own thing for a long time. One of the things that we value as an organization is that he has a distinct voice, and he has people that follow him, and we wouldn’t want to sanitize that in any way, but at the same time we need to make sure that he’s not doing something that could damage our brand. So what we do with our bigger writers who have been out there, doing it a long time, do a good job, we just continue to work with them very collaboratively, but for the most part, they do have free reign because they do have their own personality. I think we have about fifty different Facebook pages for the different sections on the site, and so for those that are representing different editorial sections, we do try to apply a bit more rigor around how often people need to post, the tone of the post, what kinds of content need to be in that, and so that’s where we apply more of the rigor, with the rest we try to collaborate with their personalities.

Good, thank you. So I’m creeping up on my limit of the half a million questions, let me open up to the audience, we’ve got a hand up immediately and we’ve got a microphone creeping up behind you… because we all ways to hear your question.

Thanks. Rochelle, you said you try to drive traffic to the particularly good, high-value sites, can you go into a little more detail about what that is, and how you do that?

Sure. One of the ways that we make money on the site is through display advertising, and of course there is a higher concentration of advertisers and advertisers pay more in particular sections of the site. So for us it may be health or business or technology. So those are the particular sections where we would actually try to focus a lot of our content and links into the site in our social media practice. So we’re going to try to make sure that we have one health post per day or something to try to really gen up the traffic that’s going to those particular areas. Through the actual posts, the great part is that, for us, we’ve found we’ve done a lot of testing, especially with our Facebook and Twitter presences, and we’ve found that our readers luckily like health content, they like business content, and they like and respond to tech content. And so it’s a lucky correspondence for us so they actually are likely to click through the site.

Another one here.

I have a question to that, and that is, are you measuring strictly by click-throughs, or are you looking at how many comments you get, or reaction, that sort of stuff… I guess the bottom line question is how are you measuring that you like one section or another section better?

Yeah, absolutely, so we actually have applied a pretty rigorous testing program to Facebook and Twitter, where we monitor the posts that we put up every single day, the number of comments that we get on that post, and the amount of traffic that comes in to the site that day. So we do look at all of those things, and also can determine the number of pageviews that people consume once they get to the site when they click through from a social media outlet. So we’re looking at all the different elements of it.

So, I’m sorry to liberate this to death, but are they reading what they’re looking at on the Facebook page or are they actually in the newspaper?

Generally the things that we post are more teasers, we’re not going to put a full article up there.

So you’re sending them to the paper area.

Exactly.

I’m going to stop now.

Okay, then we’ll go to the left side next.

And then also as a followup to that question, are you doing it by hand, or do you have an automated kind of analytics program through Facebook at this point to kind of monitor posts and comments and be able to track that easily?

I had a wonderful German intern this summer who did a lot of that, he was fantastic, his name was Thorsten and I miss him. We don’t currently have an automated way to do that, but we did apply a lot of rigorous testing around it, and I would love to develop an automated way, and we’re definitely trying to figure that out.

We have the same software for comments on our articles on our blogs that the post uses which is Pluck, and we have not found that automated way yet either. I’m not sure it really exists, at least not in an easy way. So interns definitely help. Especially German interns. [German] So, over on this side, we’ve got the microphone coming up here.

I had a question about the calendar…

I’m sorry, when you grab the microphone, name and organization, so we know who you are.

Sure. My name is Tom with the Peace Center on Global Climate Change. So, a calendar for social media. That’s something I’m trying to develop, any suggestions on good ways to do that, and also do you find that limiting at all in terms of the spontaneity of social media that’s a benefit of it?

We use Backpack as our calendar, that’s the tool that we use. I think you can have up to six users logging in to that calendar, but for us we don’t find it that limiting, because if there’s something that comes out, we can still go ahead and put it on there, and just go back after the fact just to have a record of it, that’s really been our strategy with using the editorial calendar. Sorry, social media calendar.

And to follow through on that, do you find that you need to reign in the people who are posting, or do you need to push them to post more?

I think reign in, I’d like to say reign in. We don’t put every tweet we’re going to put out there on this calendar. It’s really just for the big stories that we want to push. Big media mentions, that kind of thing. We tweet on average about seven to ten times a day. So we’re not going to list every single tweet we do every single day, it’s really just for the big stories so everyone’s aware, we know when it’s going to launch on our website, we want to have that corresponding marketing push to go with it.

So I’m getting this mental image that the Washington Post, you’ve got a bunch of writers who are all out there doing their thing, that the nature conservancy is managing it from a corporate communications perspective, what about editorial projects for education? How are you organized?

It’s a little more like the Post, in a sense of driven more by editorial. In terms of the control issue for us, again, an advantage of being a small organization in K-12 ed is our writers and editors are very passionate and very loyal to the organization. They’re professionals, so we really haven’t had any issues with that. Not to say that there wouldn’t be in the future, or that we don’t need to be prepared for that, but it hasn’t been an issue up until now, of really any kind of worry. But the challenge though is we do have, for instance with Twitter, some official Twitter feeds, but then there are also individuals who have their own, which are not necessarily official, and it’s less a control issue than one of… trying to be consistent about what we’re tweeting, the overlap, not being too obvious about all of our editors or writers re-tweeting everything that’s on our main feed. Just make sure it makes sense, I guess.

There has to be some kind of corporate policy, in this day of such easy information flow, and people being really excited about, ‘Oh, I know something newsworthy, I’ll tweet it.’ To be able to control people so that the example that came up yesterday for me, was the news that Adobe is buying Omniture. Which was just kind of… yeah, that was my reaction. What? Huh? And I was on an airplane all day yesterday, so by the time I found out there were 200 tweets about it, but there had been 0 the day before, or the year before. This has been something that’s been in the works a long time. How do you keep people from tweeting what they should, and not tweeting what they shouldn’t? What do you do policy-wise?

We’re looking to craft a formal policy, something that we’ve been working on for over the past few months now. We’re working with legal and also a bunch of different people across the organization on developing that policy because we do get a lot of these questions. It’s not about… we got two very similar questions, one about what can I do with my own personal account to help promote the organization, and then secondly, I want to go and do this group to, as part of my job, and so those two questions come up very often so yes, we are taking the steps to develop a formal policy.

Let me go back, we saw a bunch of hands so let me go back and invite, here’s the man with the microphone.

Hi, opinion question; do you own the platform, or do you want to own the conversation? For example, I could own the conversation and be out there in the market, not on my site. Or I could own the platform where I be outside, and just drive traffic back in to me.

Are you trying to corral people to come in to your own web sphere in order to have the conversation, or do you want to go out there and just be part of the maelstrom?

For us it’s both. I mean, we do want traffic to come back to our site, like the Post, we have online ads so we can monetize our traffic that way, certainly we want to engage them on our site, find out who our high-value visitors is, the higher value, I mean ultimately it’s about revenue through advertising and subscriptions for us. But the nature is not to control. Certainly with social media, it’s a conversation. If it happens off the site, as long as we do a good job of trying to monitor, find out what’s going on, what’s being talked about, participate as much as it makes sense for us, but to know what’s going on, really, I think for us is the key.

So here is this investment question of, we want to build a platform, we want people to comment on our blog posts, we want them to comment on our articles, we want to have a conversation here, but we also want to be out there in the world so that we can monitor, participate, and drive traffic back. What’s the balance? How much money do we spend on each of these?

I think we’ve had the infrastructure in place for people to have a community on our site for a long time. That and we continue to try to improve that, so there’s… and it’s probably a different group of… well it’s actually the same people thinking about these things, so it’s really balancing on those two things. We want to continue to make the experience good on our site, but to have that conversation be deeper on our site, we need to drive new people there. And how do we do that? We go out and find them where they are. And that’s another thing we haven’t talked about yet, is just… I mean, for some businesses, your focus is more b to b, so it doesn’t necessarily make sense for you to be in the same social media places as a b to c company. You just have to think about where your audience is and build up a strong presence there. Not every company should be doing the same thing.

All right, back, let’s see, let’s go way to the back here, behind you. And then we’ll do one on your side.

Hi, Randy Ryland, Ryland Digital. Kind of a negative spin, have any of you had to deal with using social media for damage control? You know, a lot of what you’re talking about is positive messaging, but, and this might apply more to the Post more than the other two at this point, how does that filter down from the top, to scramble the jets, and how much is the social media group involved in those discussions? At what point do they get pulled in to say okay, here’s our damage control message going out into the social media community?

We need a tweet that says, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Luckily we haven’t had to deal with that yet. Honestly, we haven’t done that much from a social media perspective yet. We do have a large media vehicle, and so things that we’ve had to do damage control around we’ve actually used that more official media vehicle of the paper and the website. But that’s a very good point, and it’s probably something that we need to figure out a better approach for going forward. We’ve found that we can get really deep and interesting conversations and comments on our social media presences, but it is a little bit harder to control. And so that’s something that we… and it’s very public, so that’s something that we really have to think about the best way to approach that.

I’d say we haven’t really gotten there from pushing a message out to do that damage control ahead of time, it’s more about putting out a controversial blog post and then participating in that conversation on Facebook because a couple of people could take that conversation in a totally different direction than you had originally intended it to go. So for us if you’re putting something out there on one of our networks, the person who puts out that post is responsible for making sure the conversation goes in the right way, and if it does go in the wrong way, we have the backup information and links on our site to drive them to correct and say that it was misinterpreted.
It hasn’t been a major issue for us in that sense, one of the areas that we’ve been exploring, it’s a high priority in one way, customer service, but it’s been a lower priority in the sense that there’s just so much to do, so little time and so few resources, but customer service and using the appropriate social media vehicles to help with customer service, we’re a subscription site. We have access control, we have access control issues, so leveraging social media in the appropriate ways to help our customers and help them with their problems is definitely something that we’re very interested in.

And, over here.

Yeah, hi, Wyatt Cash with B to B Publication Government Computer News, I’m interested in, Rochelle you talked about health and business technology being big feeding areas. Can you talk a little about how you go out and look for islands of population and how you engage in a variety of groups so that you’re, aware of where those population centers are growing so that they’re aware of the posts, and I invite the others to talk about that in a similar way, so that you’re doing a more proactive job of pulling in those people, letting them know what you’re offering, and bringing them back to the site.

Sure, I mean, there are some social media vehicles that are a lot easier to do that than others, and one that I’ll highlight is linked in, and we’ve actually been discussing with them the past couple of weeks, and you already have people selecting into groups on linked in. You can do some things that are free, and you can also do some things that are paid, within that social media space to engage with those distinct audiences that are clearly really interested in particular subjects. One thing that we’ve been discussing with them recently is they have a poll product where you can actually push out a poll to a particular group or audience around a particular topic and it served as a display ad, and it’s another way to really engage with a particular audience, start to build your brand as well as traffic back to the site. So linked in is one great way to do that, especially on the b to b side.

Linked in also works well for us, at least in one instance where we have some live events, conference-style events actually happening, there’s one tomorrow and another one next week, and we did a promo on linked in, and worked with some linked in partners, other groups to promote the events, and offered a discount. We actually we able to track that we got a registrant that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, via linked in. So that was kind of a cool success. Again, it was just one, so obviously we hope to grow that, we also offered that on Twitter, and I’m not sure that we had anything there. But it’s a start, and hopefully, again, it will grow.

Let me expand the question a little bit. How are you finding out where people are talking about you specifically, and subject matter in general? That you should be part of that conversation.

German interns.

Yeah, we hire fifty German interns. No, we definitely go out to the vehicles that we know, and try to set up feeds as much as possible, Jeff brought up customer service, we actually have… our customer service director has a feed set up just using a ton of Washington Post terms, so one of the things that people have been shocked about is we are proactively responding to their complaints about their paper delivery, like when they have a problem with registration on the site, so these are different ways… I mean you can go out to the vehicles that you know. Now the question is, there are a lot of social media vehicles popping up every day, and you won’t know about all of them. This is the case where I think it does make sense to partner, and we’re not currently doing this, but it would be interesting to partner with an external agency who has a really deep expertise in these new emerging social media vehicles, so that they can do a lot of the buzz monitoring for you.

One of the things we’re piloting right now is working with our media team on using the same service that runs all of our traditional media, quantifying[?], new mentions, etc. and building out a separate branch for social media. We partner with Vocus, and right now we’re working with them on refining on what terms we want to track, and one interesting point of that is even building out more on a topic basis and seeing our competitors and based on that, for example climate change, what’s the mind[?] share between us and our competitors about people in the social media space talking about climate change. So that’s one thing we’re piloting out right now and hoping to use really as something to report up the chain in the next few months.

I have to get my mind around the fact that your competitors, we’re not talking about the oil companies. We’re talking about the other people who are trying to conserve the planet, and you’re out there competing for mind share.

I think that’s a good thing to bring up, competitors. A lot of the focus with social media is on your audience, and it’s less about ‘what are your competitors doing?’ I think that’s something that’s definitely worth keeping in mind. For us, it’s something that we haven’t focused on because a lot of this activity has been driven more by the editorial side. Very few of the business floor people are involved and I’m rather a latecomer, and I’m probably the only one, maybe there’s a handful of others, but not very deeply involved, so I do think we do need to build out our context to include our competitive set, because we don’t want to be left behind, certainly, we would rather lead it with our competitors. The good thing for us is, I think, I did a little checking over the past few days with some of them, and pat ourselves on the back that we are ahead so far with some things. So we’re happy about that. But, again, broadening that perspective beyond audience to your competitors is definitely worth doing.

I’m Sue Felvan[?] for the National Cancer Institute. Jeff, I heard you talk about the fact that you’re monitoring, you’re listening. Rochelle you’ve also referred to that, and Amy as well, so those of us that are out there trying to figure out how to do this monitoring, what tools are you using, have you found them to be successful? We’re running a pilot now with one of the well-known tools, we got, even with a controlled vocabulary, so many comments that the project manager has set aside hours and hours and hours this week just to go through them and take out the irrelevant ones before she gets into the ones she feels may be relevant. This is a real challenge. I’ve gone to a number of seminars, conferences, discussion group meetings, was just at an exchange and there was a lot of talk there too. How are we measuring these things in terms of finding tools that can actually do the job for us?

Yeah, linguistic analysis. How do we know if it’s relevant? What’s being said, is it positive or negative? Should we respond? What tools? …German interns. No, I made a joke, twit something, there’s so many of them, it’s really hard to keep up. Open API with Twitter, I mean, there’s a bazillion tools, as you said, you’re using one of the leading ones and you found that it was almost too much. Fifty German interns… I mean, I don’t think anyone’s figured this out yet. And certainly getting the help of consultants who have expertise, who can kind of weed through, is certainly a step in the right direction, one we haven’t gone to yet, we’re really more on the fifty German interns thing, so… yeah, so if we figure out this answer I’m definitely interested in hearing it as well.

Well, I think for us we use… it depends on the channel, but for Facebook it’s a lot of manual work. It’s a lot of reading through the comments, reading through, counting up the likes, etc. Categorizing what works, what doesn’t work, just to create some actionable results, so Facebook is, I guess I’d be the tool for that.

I didn’t know you were German.

For Twitter I’d say one of our things, but it’s more for our scheduling, more like a process work flow, we use Tweet Later, but it’s called Social Oomph now, I think they changed their name, but that works really well for us if you have multiple contributors because you can see what’s coming down the pipe before it gets published, and it also integrates bit.ly, so we have a bit.ly account, and we can go in and see what people are clicking on for our tweets. So I think those are the big things for Facebook and Twitter. And then I mentioned, again, from more of a listening standpoint, we’re going to move forward with Vocus, we tried exploring Radiant 6[?] as well. We’re wondering how to spell things like ‘Oomph.’

A quick question up front, what is bit.ly? It’s a URL shortener that includes tracking, and it’s bit dot ly, not dot com. I’m sorry, so the question was…

How do you spell… what’s ‘oomph’?

Social oomph, and it’s Oomph dot com.

Actually if you just search for Tweet Later, you’ll find it.

Yeah, I don’t know why they changed their name.

I’m sorry, we’re going to go one at a time, we’ve got a microphone here…

Just to ask, for your social media, especially your tweets, are you keeping those in a record somewhere, so you can sort of keep those historically and are you marking those maybe through bit.ly or are you actually putting, like if you’re using a Google Analytics or Omniture code, are you putting campaign information to sort of get that kind of level of detail?

We currently use just bit.ly right now, but once we go forward with Omniture, we’re definitely going to include campaign tracking. I don’t know if you guys want to speak more to that…

For us, campaign tracking is definitely important, and we’ll try to incorporate as much social media as we can, and the other aspect for us in terms of archiving, for us, with Twitter and Facebook as well, most of them are tweets of our editorial content. It’s less about people’s opinions, or whatever, their own personal takes, but rather in our official feeds I should say, about our articles, and getting the word out about that, because that’s where the big content is for us. So we don’t need to worry about archiving that, I guess is my point.

We’ve used both Trim, which is another URL shortener, and bit.ly in the past, and we’re actually developing our own internal URL shortener right now that should go live in the next couple weeks which will be really helpful, because one of our biggest problems has been that… we go out into our Twitter account and we’ll write about a particular article and we’ll put in a shortened URL to it, but then a personal will actually go to that article and say they want to tweet it, and what happens is it pulls in the full URL of that article into their tweet, and our URLs are usually long, so they don’t’ show up, and we can’t tie those pieces of content together, so that’s been a significant problem so we’re trying to build something internally to make those two match up so we can get a better sense of that.

I’m Gary Arlen[?] from Arlen Communications, Jim, you’re included in this, so far we’ve talked about the big three. Twitter, Facebook, linked in. There are other things in the pipeline, how do you keep track of what your audience, your constituents, may be going, what’s coming down that may be important, give us a little strategy on that, and then in addition, part two of the question is, you all talk about communities so I want to rewind to a question a few minutes ago about how do we establish communities so that teachers can talk about No Child Left Behind to each other? Any of these communities, and what monitoring do you do? I’ll give you one example that I found fascinating, out of all places the Sears website, where I was looking up an emergency generator-type product, and it had, on the site, a lot of criticism about that product, and then upselling to another product perhaps, but I’d like to know how’d you deal with monitoring what your people talk about to each other within your own environment.

A lot of it is the fifty German interns solution, although a lot of our editors and writers writers pay close attention, our web content people pay close attention. As much as they can, we are a small organization, everybody is doing three jobs, and so people do the best they can. It’s not as systematic as would be nice. Let me come back, let one of the others jump in, I lost my train of thought there.

It’s ADHD, I know. As far as the monitoring, our overall policy both on social media sites that we work with as well as on our own site, we do not take anything down unless it’s offensive against another person who’s commenting, or uses really profane language. Besides that, everything critical stays up, and that’s just because we feel like people should feel like they can have a free and fair discourse on things.

Is it all just open and free? I think part of the question was, what about a private conversation, for instance between teachers? Do you ever offer up a private conversation, a private forum, that is closed doors?

I don’t believe so. There are no closed forums that I’m aware of. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so. We do have a lot of forums, that’s the other piece I was going to mention. It’s not just about Twitter and Facebook and all that, we have discussion forums. The challenge there of course is trying to get some conversation going, so we’ll seed it as much as we can, and moderate. Some of the forums are more popular than others, obviously, it depends on the issue. Some of the article comments help to drive traffic to those forums because we’ll try to promote them. But nothing that would be close, though. So if people are going to try to converse on their own, they’re going to have to figure that out, we wouldn’t publish their email.

Or there’s an opportunity for an event, this afternoon we’re going to have a conversation about the subject, please sign up in advance, and it will be a closed environment, and that could be a special offering.

Closed, yeah. Closed among two hundred people.

Okay, so we’re now… oh, so, the next question is, what’s the next Twitter?

I don’t know, anybody know?

If I knew that I’d be a wealthy, wealthy man.

I think you just… I think it’s more about tapping your staff, who’s really into the web, and…

Especially the interns.

I think some of the best ideas come from just people I work with.

Then we wait for Oprah to do it.

I would say that, I mean, a lot of times people discover these things for their personal uses first, so you just stay in touch with the other people on staff, and they’re going to be the ones that refer you to Twine, and all those other things.

Keep your ear to the ground. I’m going to go to this side now, we’ve got… here, and then we’ll get to you.

My name is John Penn with the National Education Association, are any of you using social media as a source of user intelligence? Do you have an organizational process in place to use the feedback you’re getting in social media to drive editorial decisions to change things in your organization, Jeff you were talking about the customer service piece of it, but is there an editorial role or how have you integrated that into your more traditional website and print media?

Are you really listening?

I think we’ve made a lot of strides with that, social media has its whole tab in my very long monthly recap of analytics. Social media, I try to make it pretty prominent and I think people just across the organization really like it because I can actually quote people from those channels and having that quote really drives an issue home. One thing I’ve been trying to do is trying to actually fit the things that work best on those channels and actually categorize them. So I’ll say okay, this is a topic on photo, and it takes place in California, and try to establish trends on what works best. And I’ll do that by looking at some of the things we mentioned earlier, counting comments, likes, what are the things most people are interested about, and I’ve been doing that over the past few months now, and starting to see topics rise to the top that are influencing decision.

But are you… how do you grab those and how do you bring those subjects… is there a formal process to bring Twitter and Facebook and linked in comments to senior management to say, hey, our audience is out there talking about us?

Pretty much we report back on a monthly basis and it goes out to all marketing staff, and I will reiterate some of the top comments and some of the top callouts for that month, on monthly calls with people, I think it’s just a matter of getting in front of people’s eyeballs and bugging them with emails, presentations, whatever it may be.

So EPE, or the Post, any formal way of listening to people talking about your organization, and requesting change?

We don’t have anything formal in place, but I can tell you that everything is read and taken into account. Like I was saying, we also actually use Twitter for customer service, and we do act on those things. One of the good things that we’ve done recently is when we first really started to focus on social media, our marketing group actually did all the posting on our social media calendar, and that’s been migrated over to the editorial staff, so that they’re seeing on a daily basis how people are reacting to different kinds of content, which means that they’re either consciously or subconsciously integrating it into the types of things that they choose to write about going forward. So having them have a bit of skin in the game and seeing what’s actually happening and working I think is really helpful.

Nothing systematic for us, but I think going forward that’s something we’re definitely interested in, and not just from the standpoint of the organization as a whole, sort of reporting to senior management, but making sure that our writers and editors and anybody has access to that kind of information. Because who knows how it might be valuable to them in their job? We haven’t figured it out yet, so it’s on the horizon for us, and we are trying to, but, you know, not there yet.

I think the extreme example of that would be Dell’s idea storm, which is a website designed for if you have any ideas about Dell products, please post it, other people can comment, and everybody votes on what they think the best new feature concept is. Now I spoke with the person who’s managing that, who said, they have the same problem that web analysts have, we’ve got this great data, we take it to our product managers, some listen and some don’t. Or the quote gets so magnified that it’s from a unique forum, exactly. We’re going to do a question right up in front first.

Thanks Jim. Robert Visser[?] with Page Rank SEO, I want to know a little bit about how you’re harvesting the analytics from social media. Certainly one of the best tools or manners to go about raising your conversion rate from a standard search is to look also or more particularly at an internal search. And if somebody used x term to get to your site, and then went to the internal search, that’s that much more defined. What tools are you using, from Facebook or Myspace or Twitter, if they’re doing searches on those things, to be able to find out what’s bringing them to your profile, and then how do you get that information, if they actually click through to your site? Certainly some of that can be provided by the URL shorteners, but is there stuff beyond that, and how are you actually maximizing that?

For us, the first part of it we’re doing, which is harvesting our internal search terms from our web analytics school. And that informs our SEO as much as possible. The second part in terms of harvesting from the social media, again, we’re not there yet. I want the answer too.

We’re measuring our referrals from different sites, so we do use site catalysts[?] to do that as well, as well as use tools to manage and determine our retweets of things. But as far as search terms, used within the social media space we really have… I mean a lot of them, like Facebook, their analytics are not very strong within the site so it’s almost impossible to get that kind of information, so we haven’t found a good way to do that, but I’d love to, so…

Over here, then we’ve got one over here.

Hi, I’m Susan Askew and I’m a media consultant, and my question is more about breaking through the clutter. And in terms of measuring results, is it volume for any of you, is it message, type of message, tone, playing it straight, provocative, topic, I mean, what are you finding in terms of results, or getting the best results?

How do you get attention?

I think volume is probably the easiest thing to do. Just people like seeing that we have tons of fans or followers, those kind of stats, but now, like I mentioned earlier, we’re taking it a step further by trying to break things out by topic. I can categorize what works and what doesn’t work, because what we’re really looking for is actionable results, saying that we had tons of comments, that’s great, but we just… tons of comments on this particular topic that keeps rising to the top, that’s something we could actually work with.

Yeah, I think there’s a few components that we’ve found to be really important. One is volume, so you do have to get this critical mass of followers, and it just kind of snowballs from there. We’ve increased our Facebook by five times since the beginning of the year, and we’ve seen about a 350% increase in traffic from that. So clearly we’re getting out there and getting exposed to people. You also want to make sure that you’re relevant to the audience so you’re not just posting things that you think are important to you, you actually need to be paying attention to the feedback that you’re getting, and then you also need to be consistent. One of the things that we beg people when they say, ‘We want to do a Facebook page, around our section’, okay, but you have to actually post. It seems like a silly thing, but you have to be consistent and have a plan about how you’re actually going to staff this, who’s going to be posting, what is your general tone going to be, and you have to remain consistent with that because otherwise your audience is really disappointed in what you’re providing.

Yeah, I’m going to suggest that the nature of your question of what subject matter gets the most attention goes right back to doing an analysis of the traffic that you get. So if you’re provocative that’s great, but does it bring you the traffic that you want, or does it just bring a bunch of people that look your way for a minute than wander off? Or does it bring in people who subscribe or donate, or become members, so that’s why we need the closed loop of the analysis. We had a question here, yeah?

Yeah, my name is [inaudible] with [inaudible] My question is kind of related to what you were talking about, for the editorial calendar, have you found it more successful to post on a consistent basis, certain content, or do you get better results when you post randomly, more interesting content?

For us I think it’s better to be random, except if there’s a particular issue or conference going on in the news that we want to build out a strategy around how we’re going to distribute it, but in general I think it’s good to have a mix. You know we’re not just talking about what we’re doing on our blog, we’re talking about what the state chapters are doing, what we’re doing at headquarters, all these kinds of things, I think it’s good to have a good mix. And that’s something that, with something like the social media calendar, it’s out there, you can claim your spot. That’s sort of the way we try to run things.

I think you have to think about… what’s your site? I mean, what’s your company? What are your goals, and for the post we have a large focus on politics and breaking news, and covering the Washington area, so that’s what our content should be about. Now, if we can apply a lens to that, that’s around areas where we can monetize our site at a higher rate, than that’s fantastic. But you should provide what your audience would expect, and then… at the beginning I’ll admit we tried to put in a lot of arts and living type content, we had probably the biggest debacle that we’ve had with our social media is we had a stupid pet tricks contest, where it was, send in a video of your pet doing a stupid trick. I have never seen such anger coming from people as when we posted that. I mean, why would people get mad about that? But they did, because that’s not what our audience expects from us. And so you just want to make sure that you’re consistent with your brand and your audience.

Note to self, don’t do stupid pet tricks.

Yeah, it’s a matter of branding, and it really matters. I read the Washington Post for a reason, because it has a certain voice. I read the New Yorker because it has a certain voice. I have a level of expectation, and if I open up the Post and it looks like People magazine, I’m not happy. Okay, let’s go in front here, and then we’ll take you.

Hi, you just mentioned the arts sections, clearly you must have an audience that relates to arts. The reason why I ask that is because we have a cultural center in our organization, and they’re very… they advocate a lot of their content, and they actually are pretty successful about getting published and things like that. Where do you find that arts has a place? Is it not in social media, is it more in print, I mean, how do you decide that?

I’m sure that we actually have a user base that primarily uses our media for arts coverage. So what we need to do is find a special place for that audience, because we found it’s not the majority of the audience, so we found that we need to, and I think we have, a Facebook page around post arts and living, we need to have a Twitter account specific to that, so that the audience can opt in to the type of content that they want and respond to it in an appropriate way.

Hash tags.

Exactly.

Hash tags and promotion too. That’s another thing that’s on our to do list is doing a better job of promoting the fact that we have Twitter feeds, and not just the one official one, but several. The Facebook page, and all the other social media outlets. You build it, they will come. Not necessarily, if they don’t know how to find it. So that has been something that we need to continue to work on.

And I think a good place to start is… one thing that we’ve been doing with… taking into account we’re going to be going through a new re-design is to start with your website, make sure it’s really easy to find all of those pages, we have calls to our Facebook page, our Twitter account on every single page on our website. Just even plop it in the footer, you know. I think just having that exposure on your existing channels to leverage your new ones is a big win.

One followup.

Part of it too is a cultural change. For example, for my kids, right now they have to go on Twitter to get their homework done. So part of it is… you have to do it, it’s part of your daily routine. Another one is actually, this is how I get my news, so I subscribe because I want to do it. In the case of the corporate management, do you invite the managers to join your Twitter account, or your pages, is it something you’ll require your employees to be part of, because of their job? I mean, how do you change the cultural background on your industry?

For us I don’t think you can force it. But the good thing is that there’s a lot of people, especially the younger ones, who are very passionate about it, who are already are used to it. And who really bring that energy to get it going. And then the challenge of course is how do we made this work for our business objectives ultimately? For us, we’re still figuring that out, but forcing it probably is not the way to go.

One company that does a great job of this, I actually heard them speak at a search conference, is Zapos[?], the e-retailer. Their CEO is incredibly active on Twitter, they have a Twitter consolidation, I think it’s twitter.zapos.com, they actually do a lot of training with their staff around being good advocates and ambassadors for the brand, and they made that a huge part of their culture, so if you want to look at a company that’s doing it well, that’s one great example.

Todd?

Hi, I’m Todd Carpenter with the National Association of Realtors. You guys mentioned that you have official and nonofficial accounts, and I’m wondering if you’ve done any testing to see what’s more effective, it seems like not all fan bases are created equal, and one account might have ten thousand followers, one might have two, but those two actually listen to that person all the time

I’m up to four.

Have you guys done any testing to see what’s more effective or who converts better?

I’m not aware of any at our organization. I think the individuals who have their own accounts, obviously they’re going to know how many followers they have, I think in most of those cases it’s in the several hundreds, whereas our main feed has around twelve thousand on Twitter. It’s a good question, it’s something I hadn’t thought of, but would be worth looking at, because some of these may become more official if those people are willing.

And we really try to push for critical mass. I think having a page that doesn’t have… that’s not posting regularly, that doesn’t have staff committed to really building it up, I think that’s just another reason why we really should stay building up for critical mass around our existing channels. But one thing I think we’ve talked about even with Facebook is having that… almost building out a structure where you can have that main brand or your main page and have little ones living underneath it. That structure doesn’t really exist to my knowledge in this social networking world. And that’s something we constantly struggle with because we’ve got tons of state chapters who want to do their own Facebook pages, for volunteer efforts, or young professionals groups for all different sorts of reasons, but it’s hard to get them under our bigger umbrella, and have them part of the larger organization level.

The brute force solution to that is naming a convention.

Yes, we do that.

And you hope that they participate in them.

I just wish that they could build out something, all of them sit together in the same place.

You know, an interesting thing I saw, I think it was the Wall Street Journal’s Twitter, their main Twitter feed, the way they’d do this is, they’re not following anybody other than their own sub brand feeds. Which, I thought, that’s an interesting way of doing it. And, we haven’t implemented this, but if you’ve seen your Twitter pages, it’ll show the little icons of the people that you’re following, and so it’s a bunch of mini Wall Street Journal Twitter feeds for all their various flavors of coverage, in addition to the main one.

All right, we’re going to go over to this side now.