SEO consultant Indu Priya recently wrote a post for the site Quick Online Tips about measuring return on investment (ROI) when it comes to Twitter. While the piece was not directed at lawyers, its messages were well taken and certainly apply to our practices. As the author notes there, it is notoriously hard to measure results on new-media platforms like Twitter; to discern what works from what doesn’t. But there are a number of tools available for those who want to measure their Twitter results and extrapolate their ROI.
Obviously, to assess how close you are to your destination you must know where you’re going. Some firms have gone to the length of assemblying a marketing plan in order to set goals for themselves – but if you ask me a simple outline will do until you find out whether your aims are realistic, achievable, or economical. Consider these well-known Twitter success stories:
Dell famously uses Twitter to disseminate offers and discounts, as well as to listen in on market chatter. To guage success Dell counts the number of Twitter-based discounts redeemed by consumers, comparing those figures with the number of purchasers overall. The difference should represent the difference that Twitter makes in its customer-count.
Barack Obama’s Twitter account is the stuff of history – launched during his lightning 2008 presidential campaign, its goal was simply to touch as many people as possible and allow them to communicate with one another. Once their common Twitter friend (the Obama campaign) brought them together, the key metric measured b y the campaign was the number of posts (tweets) that were circulated (retweeted) by followers. After that the multiplier effect took over and delivered the vote.
Of course not all goals are measurable or even achievable; but most can be reached following some creative planning. In the meantime, consider these ROI measurement tools for Twitter and find more on OneForty:
From Reid Trautz, Attorney and friend to Practicehackers everywhere, comes this handy article, which begins:
Here is the short-version of what Reid is talking about:
AppBoxPro. Multi-function apps for iPhone including currency converter, date calculator, translator, etc. $0.99
Bento. Simple, powerful database. Looks like iTunes and is designed to be easy to use. Syncs to desktop. Templates for common tasks included as well. $4.99
Bump. Open the app on iPhone, select how much to share, gently bump with another iPhone, and viola – the information has been shared. $free
Documents to Go (Premium Ed.) Create, edit, and view Word, Excel and PowerPoint’s, plus view PDF’s and other formats. Essential for most every lawyer.
Dragon Dictation. Free, easy-to-use, and accurate voice-recognition on your iPhone. Quick alternative to typing e-mails, texts, tweets, or FB updates.
DropBox. File sharing service providing online storage and access from multiple devices. Get up to 2 gigs of storage for free and 50 gigs for just $10 per month
Google Mobile. Google’s mobile app does much more then find stuff, but the voice search feature is extra cool and easier than typing.
People. Free “White Pages” database and reverse phone # directory.
ScanR Business Center. (See also DocScanner and JotNot) Similar apps may cost less but ScanR is worth the price. Create PDFs using your iPhone camera or a picture.
Skype. You already know what this does. It works great on the iPhone as well as the Mac.
Talk about your rapid deployment cycles. Google Buzz only went into general release last week (web-only attached to Gmail) and there are already plans to spin it off into its own app and, now, a third-party developer brings us this desktop Buzz monitor. And a very cool one at that. All of which points to the fact that Google has really gotten the hang of identifying creative ideas, bringing ideas to users, then tweaking the product while it is in the field. Not only that, but Google knows enough to make its API freely available so that 3rd party developers can get in on the action. The result with Wave and now Buzz is that changes can be made in real time based on customer comments (not canned feedback or inputs from a few opinionated beta testers). No sir: comments made about Buzz by users of Buzz were apparently picked up by Google, examined for feasibility, and implemented within hours.
Posted via email from practice (redux)
How to do Everything in Google Buzz (Including Turn It Off) by Gina Trappani of LifeHacker fame tells you … well, everything you need to know about Google Buzz.
Dammit Trappani, leave some news for the rest of us to report.
Seriously though, nice job. J
TechnoLawyer ABA Techshowpracticehacker is using WP-Gravatar
