Patrick Willemarck: How Social Media Marketers Can Convert Attention Into Action, a good post from Brian Solis

Good To see that even in advanced countries In ter of social media what marketer miss are people who CAN help them building business cases. Conversing is One thing. Being on Facebook is another one. But how do you create value? Read the post or give a try @ dialog solutions ;-)

-->How Social Media Marketers Can Convert Attention Into Action

Brian Solis is the author of Engage, and a leading authority in digital branding and marketing. Connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

According to a recent report, while upwards of 70% of businesses are said to operate under a formalized social media strategy, many plans don’t include measurable goals. Gimmicks, viral videos, and creative campaigns aside, social media marketers must learn to introduce “clicks to action” and outcomes that steer consumer experiences toward desirable results.

Engagement through conversation is a start, but reaching people where their attention is focused and compelling them to take an action is powerful. Clearly defined objectives and milestones, combined with a little conversion science, will increase the value of engagement and drive desired outcomes.

Conversion Science: Actions Speak Louder Than “Likes”

As social networks are rooted in conversations and connections, denizens are open to the idea of business participation as long as they do so authentically and transparently. Talk is cheap however, and actions speak louder than words. As such, the opportunity to convert attention into impact is largely untapped. Many of the celebrated examples in commercial social media have yet to define what it is that they hope to accomplish and measure beyond conversations, views, comments, RTs, Likes, and the population of their “tribe.”

Once attention is captivated, the real question is, what are you going to do with it?

The answer is to introduce a “call to action” in new media to generate intentional outcomes. This is why conversion science is at the heart of the best digital campaigns today, as well as those that improve over time.

Conversion science is essentially the study of converting impressions into actions and how to then improve engagement and conversion rates over time. It’s through the introduction of conversion events that we can measure reactions. As such, the ever-elusive ROI in social media is not only measurable, it is perfectible. This is why conversion science is critical to success.

In order to convert attention into desirable outcomes, we must:

Create programs with an “end” in mind. What do you want to cause, change, inspire, sell, build, or organize?
Introduce conversion opportunities through existing and emerging touchpoints.
Learn where campaigns or click paths break down.
Measure performance.

Conversion science isn’t new. It’s how the best web professionals in search, e-commerce, design, analytics, advertising, and direct marketing achieve astounding results. Through the study of conversions and corresponding behavior, we learn to introduce meaningful and relevant initiatives each and every time.

Adapting on the Fly

The real-time nature of discovery, interaction, and sharing is influenced by many factors. How these factors impact the performance of the campaign is revealed only through study and experimentation, even while it’s underway.

This fine tuning improves the:

Definition of the actions we wish to trigger
Mechanisms to capture activity
Systems and channels we use to attract attention
Focus and caliber of the individuals who help us carry our intent and value across relevant social graphs
Relevance of the social objects we create and distribute online

For example, I was part of a team that lead a widely publicized campaign to raise the visibility of an important cause. Our goal was to raise awareness and donations, and by standard numbers alone, the campaign was deemed a huge success. The team however, took the cause to heart and felt that based on the number of total conversations and participants, the resulting donations could and should improve.

Conversion science was then employed to analyze the activity of those introduced to the program and what eventually led to donations or abandonment. We learned that while every facet of the campaign led to desirable actions, the click path from tweet to payment was far too cumbersome for the real-time web. It was easier to retweet and “Like” than it was to donate.

Fine tuning the words, click paths, and specifics of the intended outcomes allowed us to focus on awareness and donations separately. As a result, friction was removed, payment was simplified to appease the social web, and awareness and donations increased exponentially.

Data is a Fountain of Inspiration for Social Marketers

Conversion science fosters creativity and innovation through analysis and adaptation. Social media programs that are data driven are inspired by insight, not guesswork, and as such, will outperform any program driven only by great ideas. Analyzing, ideating, researching, and learning create a virtuous digital cycle that benefits business performance.

Perhaps one of the most profound benefits of introducing science and data into the mix is that they consist of the language spoken by the decision makers that greenlight our programs. Information can be presented in such a way that merits support and justifies larger budgets over time — just like everything else we do in business.

It is this marriage of data, analysis and creativity that saves time and energy in the design of social campaigns. As attention is scarce, conversion science helps us tell our story in a way that is consumable, shareable and actionable. As Elvis Presley once famously sang, “a little less conversation, a little more action.”

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