It’s been a busy month for Alan. Off to his fourth conference or speaking engagement in three weeks, Alan is in Las Vegas this week, speaking at Pubcon about how to measure success in social media engagements.
If social media credibility could be measured by the mile, Alan would be a serious 1%’er. In the past three weeks, he’s traveled from in San Francisco to the show in Dublin Ireland and this week, to .

On Thursday, Alan is part of the panel with Tom Critchlow. Moderated by Mark Knowles, the session starts at 10:15 in Salon E.  Later that afternoon, Alan will be holding a book signing for his first book, “”.

Over the past few weeks, Alan has distilled his thoughts on the analytics of social media down to three important points he hope people take away from the sessions he’s spoken on:

1. Social Media is a tool and each social media profile rests on a platform built with specific marketing tools. We need to measure is the success of Social Marketing across a number of platforms. Stop grouping the myriad of social media platform into one bundle. To be socially successful, you need to measure the importance and success of each platform in your social marketing efforts differently.
2. Don’t rely on scoring tools such as Klout, PeerIndex, Twitalyzer, etc… to compare youre score to anyone else’s. Scoring tools can be used to measure how well you are doing in achieving your goals using different collections of social media platforms they attempt to score.
3. People have been social since the earliest days of humanity. Methods of measuring social success started shortly thereafter. Stop trying to reinvent methods of measurement and take a look back in history to apply time tested methods of measuring social success. (Hint: It’s simply a larger community.

Here’s an analogy. 100 years ago, a hammer looked very much like a hammer looks today but think about how a hammer looked 1000 years ago and 5000 years ago. The look has changed but the function hasn’t. Hammers continue to drive nails into wood and shape metal into elegant and functional form, as hammers have always done. The analogy describes how everyone needs to look at their set of social marketing tools, define the goals and objectives and then measure how many nails are driven using an elegant profile as a platform. In the end, it’s simply a hammer. Hammers follow the rules of physics. Social media follows rules first set by our ancestors and refined by every generation since.

If you or anyone you know needs to wrap their minds around social media marketing or need a speaker at your next function, please contact .

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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Posted in Alan K'necht by Jim Hedger 1 Comment