After listening to the song upwards of 150 times over my weekend, I finally finished it. I hope you thoroughly enjoy my cover letter.

If you would like to reach me, please send me an email at: joshuagroth(at)gmail(dot)com

To the tune of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

Yo HR, let’s kick it

Social media baby
Social media baby

Alright stop, collaborate and listen
Josh is back and trying to grab your attention
My social media campaigns grab ahold of you tightly
Engaging your consumers both daily and nightly
Is your News Feed optimized, yo I don’t know
So let’s check your Facebook Insights, it’ll show
To the extreme I rock analytics like a pro
Monitoring your keywords, and watching your influence grow
Blog, providing value that booms
I’m writing content that thoroughly consumes
Deadly, when I implement my strategy
Anything less than the best is a felony
Test it and tweak it, so your consumers engage
Tracking ROI from your custom Facebook Page
If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it
Check out ScoutLabs, while my experience resolves it

Social media baby
Social media baby
Social media baby
Social media baby

Now that this cover letter is bumpin’
Let’s discuss my experience, it’ll get you jumpin’
My strategy is to the point, no need for faking
I cook up ROI like a pound of bacon
Managing, analytics for Proctor & Gamble
An international campaign, my analysis is quick and nimble
I didn’t go crazy, I kept it simple
Developed scaleable solutions for the souped up tempo
I’m on a roll, ensuring we reach our campaign goals
Rollin’, on web two-point-oh
I’m creating strategies with character, like an aged bordeaux
I keep my projects off standby, by meticulously managing accounts like I’m trimming bonsai
Will the engagement stop? No. Sentiment scores shooting up like a pop fly
Consulting, for a non-profit
Produced a seven-figure ROI, man I nailed it
The client was ecstatic yo
Which landed me my next gig at sixteen thirty-four SW Alder Street
Headed up social media at AdPearance
Built it from the ground up, took perseverance
Organized, managing accounts of mine
Strive to go-live, always launching on time
Clients, both big and small
Driving consistent engagement on their Facebook Wall
Traffic, spiked like a touchdown
I grabbed the analytics, sales increased, all-around
Now I’m looking for a job, something concrete, real fast
Eager to join a new team and have a blast
Email-to-email your inbox must be packed
Hoping my creativity gets my resume to the top of the stack
Please send me an email, let me know what works best
So I can come in and explain why I’m more qualified than the rest
If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it
Check out ScoutLabs, while my experience resolves it

Social media baby
Social media baby
Social media baby
Social media baby

Hope you enjoyed my cover letter. Again, if you would like to reach me, please send me an email at: joshuagroth(at)gmail(dot)com

• Know your objective
• Engage your audience
• Post meaningful content
• Be transparent

Yes, these are all great tips; they’re also neglecting the integral component of any marketing campaign/function – the data. I love data. It provides validation for my decisions. It helps me know what actions prove fruitful, and which to axe. It ultimately helps my workflow become both more effective and more efficient.

Facebook provides you with some powerful data right off the bat for your Facebook Page within their Insights tab – page views, demographic break downs, engagement, etc. What you need to do is determine causation – the “why.” What I mean is, it’s great to know how many page views your Facebook Page generated in a week, but why did it increase or decrease as opposed to other weeks. Asking “why” is the most powerful thing you can do as a marketer because it helps you improve upon your campaign.

At the root of your Facebook campaign is your content. You could be posting links to events, posting Facebook-specific coupon codes, or asking questions. It’s all content your brand is producing. Different types of content will incite different types of reactions for your fan base. Some will get more “likes.” Others will get more comments. Some will fall flat on their faces and go completely ignored (sad panda). What you as a marketer need to determine is the cause for the resulting reaction from your audience.

Categorize your posts by type

Promos, links, questions, etc. The more specific the better. Once you publish the posts, track in Excel the amount of engagement each results in. Plot this over a month or two to give yourself a good baseline of information. This should shed some light on the types of posts that generate the most engagement for your brand.

Track posts by time posted

A post that goes up at 9AM on Monday morning will not necessarily result in the same type of engagement as a post that is published at 5PM on a Friday. Test similar post types against differing post times to help shed light on the optimal posting time.

Track Facebook Page views by post

Just because you receive a 300% increase in engagement, it doesn’t mean people were actually visiting your Facebook Page. I’ve seen engagement for a Facebook Page I was managing increase by 400% in a week, while observing its overall page views drop by 20% in the same time frame.

Track inbound traffic

Does engagement result in more inbound traffic to your website, landing page, or blog? Do specific types of posts generate more inbound traffic even without inciting a significant amount of engagement?

Conversion tracking

Setup goal tracking for a Facebook-specific landing page in your Google Analytics around a desired goal or conversion. This could be someone clicking a specific tab, making a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or simply clicking to send an email inquiry. Track your data to see if specific types of posts on your Facebook Page result in more conversions.

A/B test landing pages

The above tip discussed determining what content produces the highest conversion rate. You can also use inbound traffic from Facebook to test the effectiveness of landing pages. Develop several different templates for landing page around a product, promotion, or event (really anything). Send traffic to these pages from your Facebook posts to see which landing pages result in the highest conversion rates.

These are just some of my thoughts around optimizing Facebook content. What are your thoughts/tips/tricks?

*I’d like to preface that I whole-heartedly believe that Facebook will be rolling out changes to better address businesses using their platform in the future. After all, this is where they’ll make their money.*

Wall Notifications on Pages

When someone posts on personal account’s wall, I get a notification in the topline nav bar, and a subsequent email. This makes it really easy to quickly respond to people who post to my wall. However, there aren’t notifications for when someone interacts with one of the Facebook Pages I manage – which is ironic, because it is imperative that I respond to those in a timely manner.

You can trouble shoot this by linking your Page to Hootsuite, however, this is such an easy fix within Facebook’s UI, that I shouldn’t have to use a 3^rd party application to do this for me.

Community Pages

The concept behind Community Pages is great; aggregate people’s interests. However, there are many cases where there are Community Pages for brands. Why is this bad? Because businesses are dumping lots of money into developing customized Facebook Pages, hiring people to manage the content and engage their communities, and running promotions. They’re growing and engaging their audience, only to have part of their audience directed towards a Community Page – a Page that cannot be edited or managed. This is segregating their audience instead of aggregating their audience.

Editable Real Estate on Facebook Pages

Using FBML to customize tabs on Facebook Pages is great. You used to have 760 pixels (width) of space to work with. Facebook then decided to reduce that space by a third, to 520 pixels. Facebook made this announcement with no explanation, and no set implementation date (loosely stated as taking effect in early 2010). This just drastically reduced the size of creative real estate that businesses have to work with when creating customized tabs. Let’s work on giving businesses more functionality rather than reducing functionality.

Promotions

Want a headache? Read Facebook’s promotional guidelines. It makes it just about impossible for small to medium sized brands to run contests and sweepstakes on Facebook. This is a huge bummer, especially since promotions like these are an excellent way to drive traffic. While many businesses go ahead and run the promos, agencies can’t advise their clients to do so – as they will be knowingly breaking the terms of use and risk getting the business’ Page shut down.

Live Chat With Facebook Help

Issues come up. It’s a fact of life. Whether it’s something with running a Facebook ads campaign, or your account all of a sudden gets shuts down without explanation. Facebook’s current issues resolution is through the submission of a form. This is slow. Businesses need answers, fast, especially if they’re spending a good chunk of change on Facebook advertising. Why not at least utilize the Facebook chat function and connect businesses with a few customer service reps?

Business Accounts

In order to manage a Facebook Page, you must become an administrator by using your personal Facebook account. There is no way to have a business account (technically you can, but you have to forego your personal account since, according to the terms of use, you can’t have two accounts). This is a problem for businesses and agencies. If I’m an individual acting on behalf of a brand, and all my actions are through my personal account, this leaves me personally liable since this removes me from the corporate shield.

Additionally, if you can’t comment on the wall as an individual if you’re an administrator for the Page.

Exportable Analytics Reports

Facebook Insights are a great step towards in-depth analytics for understanding how fans (excuse me, ‘likers’…that just sounds horrible) are interacting with the brand. Let’s make those analytics reports exportable, at least to a .pdf. If it’s to be used for reporting purposes, it’s a hassle to have to print screen every time you want to input it into a report.

These were seven edits that jumped out to me. The list could definitely continue on. What changes to Facebook would make it a better platform for your business?

*Note, I’m submitting this for the 2010 Portland SoMe Awards for the category Best ROI (Under $500)*

This is a PowerPoint deck depicting how I helped an amazing nonprofit, Digital Wish, raise over $1.1M in Q4 of 2009 using only social media to market for them.

In 2009, I took on Digital Wish a a pro-bono client and donated my services as a social media consultant. Digital Wish is a nonprofit that helps get new technologies into classrooms. They had recently renovated their website and forged a partnership with Flip. For every Flip video camera that was purchased through Digital Wish, Flip would donate one. Pretty sweet. The only issue was, they had no way to promote this new partnership. That’s where I came in.

I created a social media strategy that utilized multiple social platforms, leveraged their existing registered member base, and encouraged user generated content from visitors.

After implementing the strategy, Digital Wish saw:

• A Q4 ROI of $1.1M
• Increased their user registrations by 469%
• Increased their website traffic 1000%

Factors contributing to the success:

• Partnership with Flip
• Social media campaign to market the partnership with Flip
• New website design

The below PowerPoint depicts the situation, strategy, and outcome of the social media marketing campaign.

Please enjoy!

No, this is not an April Fools’ joke…you read the title correctly. During my weekly live Twitter Chat (#u30pro) we were discussing what qualities employers look for in a candidate in order to bring them in for an interview. I voiced that you first need to get the attention of the HR department (personally, I know that my employer receives upwards of 500 resumes per posting). In this economy, you either need to know someone, or find a way to get your resume and cover letter to the top of the stack.

After 6 months of looking for consistent, full-time work, I changed my application strategy. For more creative positions at agencies, I rewrote my cover letter…to the tune of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song.

It worked. I received the below response:

“Josh, based on your cover letter, we have decided to bring you in for an interview. ..The initial interview does not last more than 30 minutes and you will be expected to follow up your hit with a remix of Summertime and Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

After all was said and done, I got the job. I hope that the below cover letter can inspire some of you in your quest for employment.

To the tune of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song:

Now this is a story all about how,
This cover letter got flipped, turned upside down,
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there,
I’ll tell you why I’m the best candidate, and how nobody can compare.

In Portland, Oregon born and raised,
On the interwebs is where I spend most of my days,
Blogging, tweeting, relaxing all cool,
A graduate of the U of O Honors Biz School.

When a couple of non-profits, who were up to some good,
Needed a social media guy, to increase brand awareness in the neighborhood,
With a marketing consulting background, I said “don’t be scared,”
I then produced an ROI of $1 million in three months, “AMAZING!” they declared.

I was looking for a full-time job, when it suddenly became clear,
I saw a posting at AdPearance, the position was perfect as it would appear,
If anything, I could tell that this company was rare,
A job anywhere else just wouldn’t compare.

I finished up with this cover letter around 7 or 8, and I yelled to my roomie,
“Yo homes, catch you later!”

But that’s enough of this rhyme, I must bid you adieu,
If you think this was something, just wait until you bring me in for an interview.

-Josh Groth

So, I’ve imported the entire blog over from my Blogspot domain, and given it a fresh new look and feel. I’m not sold yet on the theme, so it may be changing frequently.

Welp, that about covers it.

Cheers,

Josh

Social media has never been about the number of followers you have. It’s about the relationship and interaction you have with your followers. However, According to AdAge, Australian based uSocial.net is trying to convince you otherwise.

USocial is already famous for selling votes on such popular social bookmarking websites as Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. They also sell Twitter followers ($87 for 1000, $147 for 2500, all the way up to $3479 for 100,000).

Adage reports that uSocial is now selling Facebook friends…yes, you can buy “friendship” now.

What I find most interesting, is that uSocial attempts to put a value around each follower. According to uSocial:

Traditional ROI

(Net Profit / Total Investment) x 100

BNET.com gives the example: If net profit is $30 and the total invested is $250, the Return on Investment is:

30 / 250 = 0.12 × 100 = 12%

Social Media ROI

(Net Profit directly related to social media / Total Investment in Social Media) x 100 = Social Media ROI

OR

(Net Profit directly related to social media) / (# of followers) = Net Profit per Follower

Social Media ROI and USocial

Where uSocial goes wrong, is that they are confusing subjective or potential ROI with actualized ROI. Olivier Blanchard of The BrandBuilder eloquently explains: “If I’m going to invest money in, I want to get money out. Currency is not variable.” The ‘R’ in ROI is based off of a monetary value. If a company is going to invest money into their social media marketing strategy (their ‘I”), then they need to see a monetary return (the R). The return cannot be based off of potential or subjective numbers. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have, how many fans you have, or how many sales you think will directly correlate to your social media marketing efforts. The only thing that matters is your actualized return – money you have already gotten back on your investment. A financial investment demands a financial return. (For a great vid on ROI check out The BrandBuilder’s video here).

Let’s take a closer look at that social media ROI equation. Let’s say that you purchase 1000 “friends” for $1000 from USocial. These “friends” aren’t actually doing anything. They aren’t passing along your message. They aren’t interacting with your brand. They are just a number, therefore you will never see an actualized return from them. Given that $1000 investment in “friends” from uSocial and knowing that you will never see an actualized return from them, the ROI equation looks like this:

$0 / ($1000) x 100 = $0 Social Media ROI

$0 / 1000 friends = $0/friend (not $1/month like USocial boasts)

Until buying followers or friends from uSocial actually realizes a monetary return, it is completely worthless. When buying from uSocial, all you are getting is a number, not an actual customer or relationship.

What are your thoughts around buying followers and friends through uSocial and its implication on your ROI?

–Now Let Me Clear My Throat—

Josh Groth

CNN is a little bit different. They decided to make themselves more relevant to Gen Y by creating new segments. Not a bad idea – in theory. Content that is pertinent to Gen Y should attract Gen Y viewers…right?

The problem does not pertain to the content, but in the branding of the segment. They decided to name the segment after what they perceived to be trendy Gen Y slang. They then have their Gen X and Baby Boomer news anchors painfully using this slang in the segments. The whole thing just comes off unbelievably forced.

The segments are seemingly satirically named: Just Sayin’, Are you kidding me?, and What The…?

The result (besides losing entirely too much credibility in the process) is that CNN gets put on blast by perhaps the most influential and popular news anchor in the eyes of Gen Y, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

Stewart has some excellent jabs at CNN’s “Slangtastic new strategy,” asserting that “they report the news like I talked…when I was a 12 year-old girl.” While some claim that all press is good press, I can only imagine that CNN lost even more credibility in the eyes of Gen Y after Stewart was done with them.

What should CNN have done differently? How about speak to and engage Gen Y intelligently! It should be natural; no need to force it. We may be younger as a generation than their news anchors, but that doesn’t mean we’re unintelligent. There are ways to cover news pieces that are relevant to Gen Y without demeaning us in the process. Just Sayin’ CNN…

–Now let me clear my throat–
Josh Groth

Last week, Mashable published an article that seemed to get everyone’s underwear in a bunch – Stats Confirm it: Teens Don’t Tweet. They cited a recent Nielsen report that shows that only 16 percent of Twitter users are under 25. Later that same day, one of my favorite editors over at Mashable, Ben Parr ( @benparr ) came out with a very interesting piece titled Why Teens Don’t Tweet. This took a closer look at the numbers and tried to add reason to them. If you haven’t read his post, you should. It’s very well written. Below I’ve put some of my thoughts around Gen Y and twitter. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the subject as well!

1. Perceived Value vs. Actual Value (the status update)

Twitter is a social network, therefore it must be like all social networks. Wrong. I’ve heard this a lot from my non-tweeting Gen Y peers. Just because Facebook and Twitter both have a place where you can update your status, it doesn’t mean that they are used in the same ways or even for the same reasons. I have seen a decent amount of my peers get on Twitter expecting it to be like Facebook, only to not really “get it” and close their accounts.

2. Snowball

Like any other hit new thing, at some point it’ll reach a tipping point and go viral. There will always be the first movers, but the masses begin their adoption when the they see the majority of the peers following suit. While other demographics have snowballed with Twitter use, the under 25 segment hasn’t. But who ever said that every demographic adopts things at the same pace? It could simply mean that there haven’t been enough movers in that segment to instigate the viral affect yet…

3. Push vs. Pull

Twitter is best utilized as a means for accessing news/articles in real time (pulling) and pushing content to others, not for finding what all of your friends are currently up to (especially if most of your friends aren’t on Twitter). If you’re following several hundred to several thousand people, trying to keep tabs on all of your friends updates will prove difficult as their tweets will get lost among the tweets of all the other news agencies, celebs, and randoms that you’re following as well – that is, unless you’re utilizing a client like TweetDeck.

4. The Friend Zone

If teens are mainly using social media to connect with their friends, then Twitter is not the most efficient means of doing so, Facebook is. If all of your close friends are already communicating in one area, why move them all over to another social media site unless it has some amazing value-add (might I remind that Facebook is launching real-time search functionality as well…)?

5. The LinkedIn Syndrome

My observation is that Twitter is a lot like LinkedIn: it is great for people trying to build a professional network, or substantiate themselves as subject matter experts on something. Which is why both struggle to attract teens. Why do teens need to build a professional network? Their network consists of their friends and little more. So what is the value-add for a teen to join?

What are your thoughts on the subject?

–Now Let Me Clear My Throat–

Josh Groth