3 Reasons Why Expertise Costs Money

On the web, the battle rages on every time a example of paid content or expertise comes on the scene.

I’m not talking about sponsored posts or tweets – that’s a different argument that we’ll have to have another day.

I’m talking about projects like Third Tribe, or other membership-based learning communities. Or ebooks that aren’t free. Events, either live or on the web. Or time to consult, advise, speak, whatever.

There is a ton of information out on the web that’s free, and it’s given us a bit of an expectation that things we find on the internet shouldn’t cost us anything. But I just don’t understand the griping and whining that happens when someone decides to charge for their stuff.

There are three big reasons I pay for things, have charged money for my expertise and services, and think you have a right to try and do the same:

1. Experience Requires Investment

What you know didn’t get there by accident. Whether it was formal education or learning in the trenches, you paid for your education. You paid in time, in effort, perhaps in money. The stuff that’s in your head and the practical, tangible experience you’ve accumulated over the years. It all cost you something.

Employers pay for that expertise in the form of a salary. Audiences pay for books written by people who have detailed their experiences or knowledge. University tuition costs money. And you can argue all day long about how to determine the value of learning and how to filter out the good from the bad. But the fact remains that experience and knowledge can be worth money, and those that have it have reasons to put a pricetag on it.

2. Concreteness and Context are Valuable

Events cost money to produce. Curating ideas into organized information and content takes time and a certain amount of talent. Making a tangible product or executable services requires time, materials, and management. And doing the research to combine and present information or expertise through the lens of my business can be beneficial.

I’m also willing to pay for some filters to be applied, like knowing that my fellow community members have also invested money to be here, so we’ll all try and squeeze the most value from the experience and contribute in kind.

3. Mistakes Cost Money

Many times, I pay for someone’s expertise or knowledge because I’m paying for the mistakes they’ve already made. I’m buying shortcuts, to a degree. Perhaps they’ve already learned how to apply theoretical knowledge in my industry to a practical solution. Perhaps they’ve failed three times before the fourth time was a charm, and I’m getting the benefit of seeing those potential obstacles before I hit them myself.

Precedent isn’t always proof, but the value in a case study or experienced perspective is that it can help me better navigate the situation that *I* might be faced with, and benefit from someone else’s hands getting dirty first. I know that there are plenty of things I don’t know that I’ve gladly paid for so I can shorten my learning curve and add other people’s context and experience to my ideas.

Value is undoubtedly in the eye of the beholder. Only you can choose for yourself whether spending the money to learn something new is a good risk, and whether you’re likely to walk away better equipped than you were before. Sniffing out the snake oil is partially your job and the due diligence of a business weighing their potential investments. That’s been the truth since the days of hair tonic being hawked on the street in tents.

Don’t think you’re going to get your money’s worth? Don’t pay.

But just because a single endeavor might not be worth the money doesn’t mean that the idea of charging money for something is out of line.  And that means that MLM and “make money online” scams will abound – the opportunists have always existed. Bad apples don’t spoil the entire barrel.

Let’s remember that we live in a world of free enterprise, thank goodness.  And the good side: there will always be a great deal of valuable, helpful, and truly useful information, events, and people across the web that cost a few bucks to access.

We have to put filters on and do some homework. But having the opportunity to earn a living based on the knowledge you’ve built over your career and how you assemble, share, and apply it?

That’s more than okay with me.

Good People Day April 3rd: Refocusing on the Positive

You can’t deny that Gary Vaynerchuck has passion. I think it seriously just drips from him.

He’s got a video up on his site from a couple of years ago, talking about the need to highlight the good work and the good people out there. He kicked it over to me for consideration, rekindling the notion that we need to do more of this. It’s a simple message, but it matters. Here’s why.

The velocity of the web makes it so easy, fast, and inexpensive to spread information.

But the truth is that the bad stuff has always moved faster and farther (even before the web took the world by storm). It’s the whole “have to turn and look at the car wreck” thing. We thrive on controversy. Feed on others’ shortcomings. Feel empowered somehow when we sanctimoniously point out where people or businesses have gone wrong in our eyes.

I’ve felt and seen it a lot lately, and perhaps Gary was reading my mind or heard me say so. The rash of impatient, reactionary #FAIL declarations day in and day out. The social media lynch mobs. Entitlement and opportunism. Criticisms and “advice” that are not so constructive. Judgmental behavior and comments based on precious little context or information. And all of them wielded through easily accessible online channels, sometimes carelessly and without regard for the people on the other end.

I’m sure there’s some sociological or psychological pile of stuff about what makes us do that. But Gary’s trying to make sure we take time to do the opposite, and I’m glad. Because I need to put my money where my mouth is and rather than lamenting the existence of the bad stuff, I too can shift my perspective and shine a spotlight on the great examples.

There are promising organizations being built and fostered to do good with the technologies we’ve created.

There are displays of humanity, generosity, wit, humor, and smarts all over the place. I’m on the lucky end of lots of those folks, too. There are brilliant writers, helpful content creators, positive-minded businesses that are trying to improve the communities around them, whether virtual or concrete or both.

It would be really hard for me to draw up a list without excluding someone, so I’ll probably take a different approach that I’ll have to think about. But I hope you’ll mark your calendar for Good People Day on April 3rd, 2010 and do something to focus on the good people and ideas that surround you.

Whatever that means for you is great. Blog it, tweet it, podcast it, make a video. Or just pick up the phone and call someone and tell them they matter to you. I think that counts, too. If you publish it, tag it #GPD10 so folks can see it.

It sure can’t hurt to make a conscious effort to showcase the good stuff. We’ll always have more than enough evidence of the ugly side to go around.

You in?

image credit place light – flying not physically

Wiring In Social Media Measurement

Businesses that struggle the most with measuring social media are the ones that struggle with measurement, period.

Social media isn’t harder to measure than any other area of business. It’s harder to prove causality, but then again, direct and independent causality is awfully hard to prove for any singular event that impacts a sale. Sure, you can track your direct response codes all you want, but you can’t tell me definitively that the advertising you did, or the relationship that person had with Bob the Sales Guy, or the article than ran in the New York Times didn’t also have an effect on that eventual decision.

But I digress. Back to the point.

What Are You Measuring Now?

My sense is that if you’re a company that’s in a measurement frame of mind in the first place, you’ve managed to measure and quantify (or qualify) something that you’re doing. For instance:

• What’s the conversion rate of your e-newsletter subscribers to actual prospects or sales?
• What’s your resolution time on customer service calls?
• What’s the cost of having a human resources department?
• What percentage of your customers renew after the second purchase?
• How do you calculate your customer satisfaction, and what is it currently?
• What return do you get on your advertising dollars, direct or implied (and which is it)?
• How do you justify your investment in your IT department and infrastructure?
• What is your return on training materials or continuing education for your employees?

Guessing that the last two might have thrown you a bit, but these are legitimate measurements, too, aren’t they? We often term measurement as only having value when it relates to dollars in, but I’d venture to say that measuring (and justifying) dollars out is important. After all, if you know your stuff about the actual calculation of ROI, you’ll agree completely.

If, however, you don’t have an answer for anything above or anything that looks like those things, you probably need to improve the practice of your measurement to start with.

Measurement Needs Infrastructure

I’m going to put this simply. If you’re not already rigorously applying measurement (i.e. justification) standards to other areas of your business – on both the cost and revenue side – you can stop blustering about needing measurements for social media specifically. Why? Because you’re not equipped, and you don’t have a discipline of measurement upon which to build.

Measuring things properly takes, at least:

• Time: In terms of man hours to actually do the gathering of data and the further analysis of it, over a period of time that can actually provide context and account for trends and anomalies.
• Tools: The ability to capture, aggregate, and correlate the data you wish to measure, whether that’s a spreadsheet or a more complex software application.
• Humans: One metric alone means little. You need people to draw relationships and correlations between the data points that indicate progress toward the goals you’ve set. Few machines alone are capable of such insights and conclusions. Those people also need to report back their findings and offer recommendations for acting on them.

It’s staggering to see how many companies are demanding measurements and some mysterious definition of ROI for social media that can’t even tell you their conversion rate on various website properties, or the retention rate for their customers. Please stop demanding something you’re not prepared to do as a matter of business, and as a cop-out for not implementing a strategy that is unfamiliar to you.

Start With What You Know

You might think you need to develop and invent a whole new set of metrics to illustrate how social media impacts your business. Sometimes, that might be true or valuable, because there are things we can measure now that we couldn’t measure easily before. For example, I’m particularly bullish on the potential for metrics like Share of Conversation.

However, if measurement of the new stuff confounds you, start with what you know. Figure out how social media activities and participation impacts and influences the metrics you already use.

For instance, when you launch your blog, do your email newsletter subscriptions go up? If you know the average conversion rate of those subscribers (and perhaps their average value as a customer), you’ll be able to correlate the increase in your blog awareness to those subscriptions. Are they the only driver? No. Can you map the two together over time and see if they rise proportionally to demonstrate impact? Absolutely.

If your call center costs you $5 per incoming issue and you deploy a DIY YouTube help series or a Twitter team to triage in the social media realm, watch your daily call volume. Does it drop over a 30 day period in conjunction with those efforts? How much time and manpower does that Twitter team or video series cost you overall? Line up that investment against the drop in call volume by $5 per call, and see if you end up in the red or in the black.

It Doesn’t Have To Hurt

Measurement doesn’t have to be arduous and painful. It should be something you can stream into your daily or weekly processes. Remember that the goal isn’t the measurement itself, but the insights you get out of doing it. Keep it straightforward, simple, and utterly tied back to the goals you’ve set for yourself. (Start over here if you need help setting measurable objectives).

Make measurement a part of each department or function’s leadership. Put it in terms they’re familiar with. And at least to start with, measure social media against and along with the things you’re already tracking. See whether it has an impact either way.

And above all, be sure that you’re building a discipline of measurement and accountability in your business before you blame the medium itself for being immeasurable.

There’s loads of opportunity to evaluate your efforts, if it’s a mindset you’re willing to take.

Over to you. Agree? Disagree? I’m here to listen.

Social Media Ebooks You May Have Missed

Because I’m not always stellar about updating some of the other pages of my blog, I wanted to collect the ebooks I’ve written all in one place, so you can have at them if you need them, and so I have an easy place to point folks to when they ask. I’m hoping one or two are useful for you.

In the redesign of the blog (soon!) these will be better organized, but for now, here are the ones I’ve compiled in the last year or so. They’re all free, and hopefully helpful. Let me know what you think.

Getting a Foothold in Social Media

A rundown of some of the basic, fundamental elements of building a social media plan, especially directed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, but certainly consistent for companies of any size. Click here to download the PDF.

The Social Media Starter Kit

Here, we cover some of the most popular social media tools and technologies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging, as well as some productivity and supporting tools to make social media task management easier and more fluid. Click here to download the PDF.

Building a Social Media Team

If you’re considering deploying a team to tackle your social media efforts, have a look here. We’ll discuss why you might need a team, how to assemble one, roles and responsibilities, and more. The ebook includes a look inside Humana’s social media “Chamber Of Commerce” and how their interdisciplinary team is driving social media efforts at their company. Click here to download the PDF.

Social Media Time Management

If you’re struggling with information overload and how to sort your priorities in social media, this ebook will give you some practical, actionable ideas for managing the firehose. Includes some thoughts on resource allocation and time commitments for social media strategies inside a business, as well as 9 strategies for keeping the social media monster manageable. Click here to download the PDF.

Breaking A Goal Into Metrics

Earlier, I posted about creating measurable objectives, because that seemed to be a hard thing for some folks to master. It requires some work, but ultimately, it’s well worth learning how to do. And it’s pivotal to today’s subject.

I keep hearing folks all over the place struggling with how to distill appropriate metrics from the goals they set. We’re still looking for some holy grail of turn-key metrics sets – the “accepted” ones that everyone uses. But here’s the thing: standard metrics are useless unless they specifically point to the goals YOU have set.

So, instead of thinking in terms of how everyone else defines success, worry about how you do. You might be able to take some hints from the guy down the street, but his goals aren’t yours, and neither should his metrics be the same.

Here’s how you can take your goals and break them down into the indicators that can help you decide whether or not you’re making progress.

Start with the Objective

Sample Objective: Use social media to increase new subscriptions to our email newsletter via the website by 15% in the first quarter.

This objective spells out specifically what we want to do, with whom, by how much, and by when. Presuming we have some subscribers to our email newsletter already (our benchmark), a 15% increase in a three month period is also measurable and realistic (following the SMART methodology).

It also presumes that we’ve done the legwork to know that increasing our email newsletter subscribers is good for business, perhaps because we get a good percentage of leads that way, or because those leads have a high conversion rate.  If your email newsletter is new, then perhaps you’ve formulated a hypothesis that it’s a valuable strategy, either via probable precedent (other people’s success), assumptions you’ve made about your business, or an out and out experiment.

Still with me? Good. Now that you know what you’re aiming for, think through your approach.

Consider your Strategies & Tools

In this example, let’s assume you’ve done some research and listening, and you’ve decided that you’d like to build strategies that involve your corporate blog , Twitter, and your company’s Facebook fan page as touchpoints and drivers. (Selecting the strategies themselves are a point for a different discussion altogether).

What you measure regarding these strategies will depend, in great part, on what you are able to measure given the tools and resources at your disposal. In this scenario, perhaps you’re able to measure with relative ease:

• Fans on Facebook, including how many new fans sign on, and during what time period to determine growth
• Followers on Twitter, including how many you accrue during finite periods (growth rate)
• Blog visitors/traffic per day/week/month, and their sources
• Engagement and interaction with you on these channels: blog comments, @ replies, likes/comments
• Sharing of your content, retweets, wall posts, links
• Traffic to your website/email signup page that comes directly from any of these places
• Conversion rates for email signups and user paths on your website

These aren’t exhaustive, but you get the drift. Start figuring out what your tools allow you to measure. Resources like listening tools (yes, like Radian6 but you can go manual/free too with more work), Google Analytics or other web analytics programs, link shorteners like Bit.ly, and URL generators like Google’s URL builder can help you with the components you need to track your efforts thoroughly.

Map Potential Paths of Action

Now that you know what you can measure with the resources you have, time to start thinking about what actions and paths people might take to do what you want them to do. In other words, for our sample objective, people might:

• See a link to your blog post on Twitter, visit your website, then sign up for the newsletter.
• See your post on Facebook promoting your upcoming newsletter issue, like it, click the link you included, and sign up.
• Read your blog post, and see the link in your post footer that suggests your email as a resource they might like.
• Take action based on specific newsletter subscription ask with a unique link in a blog post.
• Visit your website via search or other means, discover your newsletter archives from the home page, and sign up themselves.
• Engage with conversation with your representative on Twitter, be curious about your company, click the link to your website in your Twitter bio, visit, and sign up for the newsletter.
• See a whitepaper a friend sent them from your site via ShareThis, click on a link embedded in the document that sends them to a specific landing page, perhaps that includes a direct email subscription link of its own.

Note that I’ve bolded pieces of these. Those are the trackable elements and touchpoints that you can control based on the information you push out. Some of the signups for your newsletter are bound to be incidental, meaning they’re not directly connected to an action you engineered, but are as a result of a path the website visitor took and the information they sought.

And there are going to be gaps in the trackable path sometimes. Perhaps someone saw your Facebook page and didn’t click on your link, but came back to your site later via Google and then signed up for the newsletter. Facebook was an impact point, but the actual path was search traffic to signup. So you’ll have to take elements like that into consideration and account for a margin of error.

But the more breadcrumbs you can place in people’s paths to guide them to what you want them to do, the more accurately you can measure.

Determine Indicators and Metrics

So you’ve considered what you can measure, and what people might do that lead them toward your goal. What metrics indicate success?

Look at the measurements available to you, and combine them to demonstrate either probability that people will take the desired action, or definitive evidence that they did. That’s where the gold is. It’s not the single metric in itself, but the patterns they create that count. In other words, follower stats themselves are rather useless unless you can tie them to an action that has demonstrable value – in our case, the email signup. Dig?

In our example, you might track:

• Conversions (subscriptions) via Twitter-specific links or referral traffic over a 30 day period, trended over time to watch growth.  (specific)
• Comparison of  general search traffic that results in conversions vs. traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and blog views that does  (specific)
• Conversions by referral source, comparing Twitter and Facebook (specific)
• Ratio of @ replies per month to new email subscriptions via Twitter referrals (probability)
• Ratio of Facebook fan increases per month to increases in email subscriptions overall (probability)
• Percent of blog email subscribers that also sign up for the email newsletter (specific)
• Percent increase in new blog subscribers alongside new email subscribers (probability)

See where this is going? You’ve got to examine how the data you have can point to the results you want. That’s what you measure. Pick the few that give you the most specific intelligence and results.

It doesn’t matter if the guy down the street measures that or not. Over time,  you’ll be able to tell whether or not your measurements are helping you understand progress toward your goals.

If not, you tweak them or rework them. No measurement should ever be set in stone forever and ever (though you need to stick with a few for a while, say six months rolling, before you can really make a judgment call on their effectiveness). Metrics evolve just like your strategy does until something settles.

Bonus Round: Attach Actions to Results

So when you’re reporting to your boss about the progress you’ve made toward your objectives, you should be able to analyze the indicators you’ve put forward above and draw conclusions. That’s how you put together a report, and where you make your decisions about how to maintain or amend your strategy and tactics moving forward.

Some examples:

• Of 25 new blog email subscribers this month, 5 of them also subscribed to the newsletter. That’s a ratio of 5:1, and a trend we can track moving forward to see if it maintains, drops, or stays constant.
• If we’ve determined via our sales numbers that each of our email subscribers also does an average of $200 in business with us every month, we can also say that every 5 blog subscribers has the potential to be worth $200 in monthly revenue (or $40 each) at that ratio.
• Facebook fans click on our links 10% less frequently each month than our Twitter followers do. However, we get one subscriber for every ten clicks on Twitter, whereas we get three for every 10 on Facebook.
• Landing page links embedded in our whitepapers shared via ShareThis generate less than 2% of overall website traffic. (That means they’re likely not a good source of email subscribers).
• Specific subscription drives on our blog generated a 3% increase in subscribers in one month, and the same ask on Twitter generated an increase of 6.5%.

See how we’re connecting the dots, and starting to draw some assumptions and conclusions from what we’ve tracked? You need to work the data and look at it from different angles. Measurement is really kind of a waste of time if you aren’t going to do something with what you’ve learned.

In Closing

This is work, people. Do you hear me? Work. If the steps above seem daunting or like too much effort, you’ll need to get help, suck it up, or stop complaining that social media isn’t measurable. It is. But it’s not instant.

All the Google research in the world is not going to suddenly uncover a magic set of metrics that you can just adopt and run with. You’ve got to do the methodical, careful work to spell out the goals first, then figure out what measurements will tell you whether or not you’ve reached that goal. You have to build and deploy the tracking mechanisms and tools. You need to regularly capture and export the data. You need to mash it up, correlate it, and map it over time.

So, here’s a start. You’re not going to hit a home run out of the park every time. But measuring is like laundry. The more you ignore it, the more impossible it gets to tackle.

Get to it.

image by Mykl Roventine