This post from TechCrunch a few months ago sums up my opinion nicely. I think this is a great idea in theory. Best Buy gets a massive online PR boost from publicizing its help desk questions. Customers seem to be receiving responses quickly, and all of this is put out on display for all Web users to see.

Given Twitter’s increasing impact on SEO standings, all of these brand-name keywords are being associated with Best Buy’s inbound links. (There’s another one for you, Best Buy. =) There’s really no negativity here for Best Buy, although their vendors may not appreciate dirty laundry about their products being made public. Or, maybe they view it as a benefit to correct problems at the manufacturing source.

My main question, as you may have guessed, is what is the ROI of all this? Well, the cash outlay for starting a Twitter account. Then all that is required is an MIS system to relay customer requests to an available “Twelper.” Incremental costs seem minimal.

Ideas for how Best Buy is measuring ROI:

• Online sales can be directly measured from inbound links Twitter sends to the Best Buy site. A Twelper could suggest a new USB hub for a user who’s run out of ports, and then said user buys it from the site. In addition, this also creates interesting online coupon opportunities.
• The greatest benefit may be to Best Buy’s online reputation score. Since consumers know they can go to Twelpforce for free help or to reference a problem they may be having, the company will receive a public relations boost. But, will someone buy a similar item at Wal-Mart and then use Twelpforce to receive help on it? The online reputation boost may help Best Buy increase sales with the loyalty play.

Jeremy Garland
Twitter ROI

I saw this story on NECN recently. The company manufactures a special type of fencing used for tennis courts, horse paddocks and protecting gardens from pesky critters looking to eat your crops. Since Duncan started writing a blog about what customers can do with his product – appropriately titled “The Fence Post” – his sales leads have increased over 800%!

Duncan has done three really smart things with this blog:

1) He writes about ways customers can use his product, which is a very effective soft-sell technique.
2) He positions himself as a thought leader on a particular niche subject. This establishes trust between potential customers and Louis Page Inc., i.e., “if they know this much about fencing, I’m willing to bet they sell a quality product.”
3) He has established a direct line of communication with current and potential customers. This line allows him to answer questions and showcase the potential of his company’s products.

Don’t get fenced in by limiting thoughts – the more specific your product, the better your blog is likely to perform.

Jeremy Garland
Don’t Fence Me In

Jeremy Garland
Marketing ROI Home Schooler

While I was somewhat devastated that this information was not from one of the fundamental figures of my youth, it’s still a good and humorous presentation.  It discusses the fundamentals:

• Different metrics are important to different people
• Establishing objectives at the outset is crucial
• Many tools are available for measuring social media ROI

It’s a great primer for anyone not familiar with how to measure ROI of social media. One thing it doesn’t talk about in-depth (at least from the slides) is measuring a monetary ROI. I am still hunting for case studies and tools which do that.

I found this post from last year’s PRSA conference at the Top Rank Online Marketing Blog. Here are a couple of good examples of how applying best practices for optimizing press releases for search pays off:

Symettricom, a developer of extremely niche technology chips, optimized a release around an admittedly unpopular, but extremely relevant keyword with a corresponding link to a form page.  Predictably, only 8 inquiries were seen.  Unpredictably, one of these leads accounted for $200 million. (Author addendum: This also speaks to the importance of not neglecting the long tail of search.)

Southwest Airlines had previously only optimized releases around corporate nickname “Southwest”.  Upon optimizing for “Southwest Airlines”, and implementing tracking pages, they were able to account for approximately 2.5 million in ticket sales.

Most press release wire services have SEO optimization built in, but it still pays to know press release SEO fundamentals. MarketWire has great SEO implementation tools built into its interface, and one of hte benefits is that it posts your release onine permanently in a library.

For suggested methods of what and how to measure ROI from organic search – to which press releases contribute -  Dan Nedelko has the following suggested metrics and ROI calculations:

A Total Amount of Search Traffic
B Total Amount of Converting Search
C Conversion Rate from Search
C Life Time Value of a Conversion (is it CPA or LTV)
D Converting Terms (focus on these)

Determine total Search Traffic = 1000
Determine the Converting Search Ratio: B/A (10/100) = 0.10
Use the Total Converting Search Numbers = 100
Determine the value of the Conversion: C = $200

Planning out your goals before optimizing your releases will help you determine how successful your optimized press releases meet your campaign’s marketing goals.

Since my initial logo for this blog has stacks of c-notes in the upper right hand corner, I thought a post on how best to make money off a blog was appropriate. After all, as much as I love trading the natural rays of the sun and actual human interaction for the artificial tan I’m getting from the light from my computer screen, it would be nice to have an income stream (or even a trickle) from sharing my thoughts on Marketing ROI.

Copyblogger has a couple of encouraging posts on this topic. Here is a post about smart monetization of your blog from Brian Clark that doesn’t involve third-party services such as AdSense.  I also enjoyed Sonia Simones’ related post of Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging – her response to a question at a seminar she gave recently was “Guess I’ll give it all back then.”

Here’s a statistic I’d like to overcome from the Centre for Excellence on Media Practice (CEMP) in the UK:

In a recent study, it emerged that 68% [of] marketers are unable to establish the ROI of their campaigns.

Blech.

I was inspired to start this blog not only by my experiences and depressing statistic outlined above, but also from some of my measurement heroes:

• Scott Sigler’s “Does It Sell Stuff?” blog
• KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog – the woman who showed me there was hope for PR measurement
• Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Ninja (anytime you can couple martial arts with math, I’m in. My life goal is to be an ROI expert with mad self-defense skills as well.)

On this blog, I specifically want to outline case studies where companies actually calculated an ROI of a marketing campaign, and what tools they used to do that. Also, I want to explore non-monetary ROI measurement techniques like online relationship measurement for non-cash goals.