Social Media Analytics is an ever-evolving practice. Here is a quick presentation on how Raidious handles analytics on a cross platform basis for socialized media (one point we make here – social media is a misnomer, it’s all social). It’s all about understanding how to grow and engage an audience with content, regardless of the platform – social or otherwise.

If your company is asking questions like . . . how do we measure the impact of social media? What is the ROI? What metrics should I be paying attention to in which platforms?

We have some answers for you. Please contact us any time, and we’ll be happy to have one of our strategists do an analysis of your current efforts.

Raidious is hosting an open call for content correspondents. Our company continues to grow, and we need talented correspondents with broadcast journalism and social media experience.

Can you answer YES to all of these questions?

• Are you able to work independently with care?
• Are you patient and skillful with detail work?
• Fully adhering to well-defined processes to produce high quality results?
• Do you enjoy a steady pace, open environment requiring attention to detail?

If you can, then we have the position for you!

We are Raidious and we are an interactive marketing and communications company. We are purpose-built to produce content and manage dialogue for our clients brands. We have a casual, open work environment.

We have a position to join our team as a Content Correspondent. You will be responsible for delivering high quality content for Raidious clients. This content will be executed on time and on strategy at the direction of the Account Producer and Head of Publishing. This position will work out of our downtown Indianapolis, Indiana office.

Successful candidates will bring the following:

• Bachelor degree
• Minimum 1 year experience
• Strong writing skills
• Proficiency with web publishing tools
• Proficiency with image editing
• Ability to work a flexible schedule
• Ability to work independently
• Attention to detail
• Video editing a plus

Here is what you can expect in return as a Content Correspondent:

• Competitive hourly wage
• Business mileage and business expense reimbursement
• Opportunity to work for a successful, growing, casual company that rewards strong performance

If you are ready for the challenge and reward of our position, please fill out the form below.

Raidious has engaged ADVISA Hiring to identify the top candidates for this position. Per their request, please direct all communications about this position to the address above. As we will be communicating with you through this and other advisausa.com and advisahiring.com e-mail addresses, please be sure to take the necessary steps, such as adding this address to your address book, to avoid having correspondence caught in your e-mail filters.

Ruby at The Acropolis in Athens, Greece

Watch out! our team is growing AGAIN!! We are thrilled to have two new additions to our engagement team this month, Ruby Kohler & Jennifer Love. Ruby Kohler will be joining Raidious as a Social Media Specialist, and Jennifer Love will be our newest engagement intern!

Ruby is a Bloomington, IN native and recent graduate of the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism. Her enthusiasm and positivity are truly contagious. Ruby is an avid runner and enjoys swimming in her spare time. She most recently worked as a Marketing Director for Agency 7, where she managed public relations and social media for the Bloomington chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Jennifer & Her Husky, Iggy

Jennifer graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Communications & Public Relations. She brings to us her passion for writing, creativity, and a strong work ethic. A natural born leader and philanthropist, Jennifer conducted a PR campaign for the West Lafayette Recycling Company.

We are excited to have Ruby & Jennifer on board and look forward to working with them!

Follow them on Twitter:

• Ruby Kohler
• Jennifer Love

Email marketing is changing fast.

At a jam-packed webinar last week, Raidious partnered with our friends at Delivra to shed some light on some of the top email marketing trends we have been seeing with our clients. If you were not able to attend the webinar, no worries – we recorded it so you can watch it at your leisure. Just click on the image below to see the webinar, or grab the slides!

Here are some of the trends we covered:

• Multiplatform
• Outside Outlook
• Email Anywhere
• Mobile Expansion
• Versioned Design
• Subject Line Trends
• Audience First
• Hub & Spoke Infrastructure
• Measuring Content
• Measuring Engagement
• Measuring Conversion
• Measuring Amplification
• Real Time Relevancy
• Multiplatform Correlations
• Email Content Strategy

For more detail on these email trends (or just to relive the magic), here is the full recording:

Lots of great questions from the audience are captured in the webinar, but not on the slide deck.

We had a fantastic time with all of the folks from Delivra, and got to see their awesome new office space. Megan Glover from Delivra and PJ Gindling from Raidious did a ton of work to get this prepared. Thanks to you both!

Also, thanks to Neil Berman, CEO Delivra, who was awesome to work with. Most importantly, thanks to everyone who attended or signed up! If you have more questions about Email Marketing or Content Strategy, please feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to help!

Related articles

• Spotlight: Email Marketing with Delivra (marketingtechblog.com)
• Welcome Email Marketing Blog Sponsor Delivra! (marketingtechblog.com)
• Same Email Marketing Pains…10 Years Later. (marketingtechblog.com)
• Use Mobile to Acquire Email Subscribers (marketingtechblog.com)

Let’s face it… you are likely over capacity.

The online landscape has changed and so has the way we all do business today. If you are a marketer, you’re probably getting requests from the executive level DEMANDING that you get your multi-channel strategy together ASAP. To them, this is a reasonable request. But to you, the already stretched thin marketing director with a 3-4 person team, this request has just put a major kink in the marketing strategy you finalized a month ago! How do you scale your team to meet the demand?

The problem with the request is the misunderstanding of what it takes to run a multi-channel campaign. In the eyes of the “boss” it is as simple as setting up a few tools, slapping a logo on it, and letting the masses fill your pages with comments about how they love your brand….but you as a marketer know better. Oh, and by the way, there is no more budget. It’s ok though, because Facebook and Twitter are free… right?

If only it were that simple.

The questions going through your head are most likely

• Who is going to do all of this work?
• When we are at capacity, how will we scale?
• Where am I going to get all of this content?
• When will we find time to tackle this?
• What will our strategy look like?
• What will we write about?

If you are in this spot and feeling completely overwhelmed by this monstrous stack of tasks that have unknowingly been placed on your desk, you are not alone. But don’t fret, there are options. This scenario is the exact reason Raidious exists. In short, we can do all of this work for you.

We are structured and staffed to alleviate the capacity problem for your brand. Today there are many companies out there that can help you identify your strategy but few who will actually do the work for you. It sounds great in theory but it doesn’t solve the problem. You need doers. You need humans. We all know that the only resource for content is PEOPLE. But not just any people. You need professionals who understand how to write content. But it doesn’t stop there. You need people who can write content for the web, in the voice of your brand, in real time, in a way that marries your brand to your consumer, to the world. These people are not interns, junior level marketers, or friends of a friend who is good at Facebook.

It’s not rocket science. It is the simple truth. Employ the right people or partners to just “do the work” and you will look like a rock star to that executive team by growing your audience and bottom line. No sweat, no worries, just proper management…it is just that simple.

There seems to be a common misconception when it comes to the subject of analytics. Many marketers see this as “the boring stuff”. Not nearly as fun or sexy as making content and managing engagement initiatives. Unfortunately this kind of thinking can allow you to lose your audience. It’s a science experiment, folks. You have to experiment and measure results or you’ll never understand how your content is affecting your audience.

I understand that I’m one of  few individuals that actually enjoy spending the majority of my day elbow-deep in charts and graphs and spreadsheets – and as hard as it is for me to accept this, not everybody has their monthly bounce rate metric memorized. For some, analytics reports are confusing and many don’t understand how they connect to business objectives. These folks almost seem to dread analytics discussions (“Is this meeting over yet so I can get back to what I was doing?”). However, it never fails to save the conversation when I explain to them that this data is simply their audience telling them exactly what they think.

Most companies would kill to be able to ask every single customer and potential customer what they want. Analytics is simply a window into that world. Looking at audience data month over month, year over year can paint a rich, detailed picture of what content connects with an audience, when they are most receptive to that content, how much content they want from different sources, and even how long they want to spend reading it. It’s all there.

All web analytics is the study of the effectiveness of content. Let me repeat that a different way:

Every online measurement is a measurement of how effective your content is – not how effective your platform is.

Without content there is no reason to engage, and thus no audience to analyze. However – content without analysis is like driving blind. Sure, you’re moving forward, but wouldn’t it be nice to know where you’re going, and how to get there? And if anyone else is coming along?

Spending just a little time each month with your analytics can allow you to fully grasp the effect of your content on your audience, and to be able to hear what your audience is telling you through their browsers. Despite all the technical jargon, it’s not any more complicated than that. Take a look. Who knows, maybe you’ll get as excited about declining bounce rates as much as I do!

Raidious can help with analytics for social media, email, websites, and more – contact us today and we’ll tell you exactly what your audience wants you to know.

Related articles

• 5 Vanity Metrics to Stop Measuring (And Better Alternatives) (hubspot.com)
• Measuring The Effectiveness Of Content Marketing and SEO (mediapost.com)
• 5 Things You NEED to Know About Your Website Visitors (bloggingtips.com)
• Why Your Audience Is More Important Than SEO (preciseinternetmarketing.com)

If you’re in marketing, odds are good that this week’s issue of Ad Age is sitting on your desk, in your briefcase, or in your mailbox. It’s the annual Digital Issue, a special (and  widely-read) edition of Ad Age, focusing exclusively on the fast-moving world we live in every day, known as interactive / digital / web / online marketing.

Raidious put a special message in this year’s Ad Age Digital Issue: just a little reminder for all you CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Social Media Managers, eMarketing Managers, and other digital marketing junkies. Turn to page six please. Then contact us!

Thanks for visiting our new site – we have spent the last few weeks on a redesign, courtesy of our very own Brian Conradt. We changed things up a bit from our old site, because a lot of our users were telling us they had visited the site, but still were not sure exactly what we did.

It’s understandable – we are a very different company than most marketers are used to seeing. Most advertising agencies, PR firms, and digital agencies talk a lot about technology oriented stuff like email marketing, integrated campaigns, specific platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the buzzword of the century (so far) – Social Media.

We don’t use that language because we don’t think or operate like those kinds of companies. We are a content company. We take a content-centric approach to all of those tactics. If you think about it, it’s all content. Email marketing is successful not because of the technology, but because of the content. Social media is all content (what would Twitter be without the tweets?). Websites are just places to put content. Every analytics measurement you make in online marketing is a measurement of the success of the content. Technology doesn’t integrate with offline campaigns – the content does.

So why is everybody else so focused on all the technology?

It’s glamorous. It’s sexy. It’s the new-new thing. I totally understand – everyone at Raidious has a pretty high geek factor. We love this stuff, too. But none of it works without content.

With that in mind, we built a company to solve the right problem – the problem of how to create, manage, and distribute content online for brands in a platform-agnostic manner. What happens when you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in something like MySpace, and then Facebook comes along? If you have a MySpace strategy, you’re screwed. If you have a content strategy, congratulations – you just got a brand new platform to publish your content! When your online strategy is a content-centric strategy, technology can just evolve all over the place, and it won’t matter – because no matter what the new-new thing  is or what it becomes, it will be driven by content.

We also look at social media as a content problem (which it is). We are purpose-built not just to publish content, but to monitor and moderate the dialog around it – to leverage content that other people are producing about your brand. Most importantly, we developed a culture of optimization – we measure and optimize your content to deliver ever-increasing ROI. The longer we work with you, the better your results get.

The big question is . . .  how? How do we make the content? How do we manage the dialog? How are we so different?

The answers are all here – and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, email me, and I will be happy to help. Enjoy the new site, and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments section!

Got a great email from eMarketer this morning on one of our favorite topics:

Blending Paid, Owned and Earned Media for Branding from eMarketer.

The first concept: Owned Media. It does a really good job of explaining the difference between earned media (what ad agencies do), paid media (what PR firms do) and owned media (what Raidious does). I wrote a post on this last year, and Forrester Research has covered the subject as well.

There were a couple of other topics the eMarketer research addressed as well that are important concepts. These seem to come up regularly in “shop talk” around the office.

The second concept is the concept of paying your marketing firm to accomplish an objective, rather than paying for production deliverables, like an ad or a press release. This is how we price our services at Raidious (we call them “initiatives”, not to be confused with “campaigns”). We think it’s an idea whose time has come.

The last concept is something we run into regularly (really two concepts) – direct response vs. brand oriented mindsets on the client side.

In our experience, the client-side marketing universe is divided into two camps, neither of which really understand the other very well: The Direct Marketer, usually an eCommerce / lead-driven mindset, and The Brand Marketer, someone who is more focused on what some people would call “soft” metrics, like preference, awareness, and other measurements of hearts and minds.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

We take a lot of pride in our understanding of both approaches, and our ability to deliver on objectives from either side of the equation. But, if a genie granted me three wishes, the first would be for world peace, the second for an Audi A8, and the third would be for client side marketers to reconcile these seemingly opposing points of view. They’re both valid, and valuable approaches, but as the eMarketer article points out, they work best when they work together.

Come back and visit our site in the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring all of these ideas. In the mean time, if you’d like to talk to a firm that can help with all of this (owned media, objective driven marketing, direct and brand approaches) . . . give us a call!

Great information released today from the Business Marketing Association, Marketing Profs, Junta42 and American Business Media.  We were totally not surprised to see this:

If only there were a company that was purpose built to make engaging content for brands. . .  Here is a link to the full article, very good read:

New Research: B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Trends and Budgets.