So if your goal is to get more business you’re going to have to refine it just a tad. Otherwise when you get one new customer you will have reached your goal. But what it a good measurable goal for social media marketing? That’s the heart of the matter for most folks. What does a goal look like?

Here are 9 measurable goals for social media that, if they don’t work for you, will hopefully spark something that will work:

1. 200 more followers on Facebook. This is definitely measurable simply check today and at the end of the time period and see what the change is.
2. 20 retweets a week on Twitter. This will help you figure out what really gets a lot of attention. Last week’s blog on “5 Biggest Social Media Marketing Mistakes” for example caught a lot of attention.
3. 15% more click thru’s from Social Media sites to your main web site. This is pretty easy to see how it would translate into more business.
4. 4. 20% increase in “fans” who “like” your posts on Facebook. Like #2, this will help you figure out what gets people’s attention.
5. 5. 20 check-ins a week on Foursquare (this is a great site for location based businesses like restaurants, bars or coffee shops). Again, this is easily measured and if you’re getting folks checking in, it gives you a chance to interact – give them a to do while they’re there.
6. 30 newsletter signups each month directly from Facebook. Check out FBML and learn how to add html to your page.
7. 10 sales each week from Twitter. You need to be careful about pushing the business too hard in social media but with the right plan and the right product(s) it could work well.
8. 4 leads each week generated through social media (best tracked if you create a separate landing page for social media). This is more marketing-focused but could really boost your business.
9. 15% decrease in returns because of customer outreach through social media. Took a different tack on this one to help you imagine the possibilities. It’s not necessarily directly sales related. If you’re saving costs on the backend, you’ll be more profitable.

Note that all nine of these are very measurable. Note also that these are just the goals. Once you have the goal established you need to develop the tactics you will employ to achieve your goal. What are your goals?
 

Office 2010 uses the same kind of ribbons that Office 2007 users have grown accustomed to. The new “ribbon” that you’ll find in Word 2010 is the one that 2007 should have had. It’s called file. The file ribbon gives you all the options and information about the particular file that you’re working on that you could possibly want to know.

For example, as I type this blog entry in Word 2010, when I click the file tab, I have lots of nifty choices like Open, Save, Save as, and Print but the option that is highlighted is Info. Under Info I can Set Permissions (protect the document so that only those who should see it can), Prepare for Sharing (basically let’s me easily strip hidden information that other’s shouldn’t see but that is useful to have for an in house document) and work with different Versions of the document.

I can also see useful information such as how long I’ve been editing this document, add or view the Title and any Tags, see who the creator is, and lots of other information. It is also from the file tab that I can open recent or other documents and do many of the tasks from the old File menu.

As is usually the case, the biggest change comes with Outlook. As the way people communicate continues to change, Microsoft tries to make Outlook the tool to help you do this. Outlook now has its own ribbons (for some reason Outlook 2007 didn’t get the ribbon makeover).

The newest feature here is the Quick Steps box. Basically what this box does is let you create macros or rules on what do with certain messages. Once that rule is created, you can run it by clicking the appropriate button in the Quick Steps box. I’m still experimenting with this but this feature holds potential in helping to tame the email beast.

Access has some nice new features, one that we’re taking a very close look at right now is the Project template. What is nice is that Access is now really designed from the get go to be interactive. I opened the Project template and the first thing I had to do was create a user (myself) and then log in. Then I was off to the races creating and entering information on the project.

The downside is I wanted to watch the video which required SilverLight which I had already installed which Access didn’t recognize as being installed. Still a few issues, it would appear but all in all I like this latest version and could see moving some of our folks to it even before the first service pack.

Other tools that come with the complete version of Office 2010 include OneNote (great for taking quick notes or for having a notebook on a particular task or subject) and InfoPath – the tool for forms – now comes with a Designer part and a Filler part. For business users (those with lots of computers and users), there’s also a new program called SharePoint Workspace. I’m still investigating these but they look to be pretty nifty tools for improved work flow.

The full version “Professional” retails for around $500 but as a productivity tool is well worth it.

So instead of focusing on the business of web site design, I thought I’d share this tip with you. One of the ways I have found to listen to classical is through Pandora. Simply visit www.pandora.com on your computer or even your smartphone.

You can create a channel or multiple channels. The channel I’ve been tuning in to today is Symphonic, Classical.

Creating a channel. Sounds difficult doesn’t it? Actually its incredibly simple. After the 60 second process to create an account (create a password tied to your email address), you simply type in a genre, artist or song.

That’s it.

I’ve got four channels tied to my account. One is classical and the others are more classic rock oriented. I’ve created a channel based around Bob Seger and another based on the Kiss song “Beth”. But Pandora is pretty cool because just like science has mapped out the human genome, Pandora is mapping out the music genome. They have real people listening to songs and collecting close to 400 different attributes about the music.

So when I listen to my own personal Bob Seger station, I don’t just hear Bob Seger, I hear songs related to the kind of music he plays. For example, I just heard Tom Petty playing Breakdown followed by Eric Clapton and Wonderful Tonight. Whether on my phone or on the computer I can rate the songs (either up or down) and get more information about the particular artist and song.

It’s easy to get started and then you can control how “in to it” you get. It’s free for something like 40 hours a month and after that it’s only $36 / year for unlimited listening and no ads.
 

Since I finished reading Seth Godin’s “The Dip” this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about quitting. No, I’m not quitting my business – I love what I do, but I am thinking about what tactics I’m using in business that aren’t working and determining how and what to quit.

Sounds easy right?

Think again.

It was easy for me to tell a customer not to spend time and money redesigning his site but instead to spend that same amount of time writing blogs for his site. He wants to increase visitors and getting good content out there via his blog is the best way.

But the hard part is determining what is working. I’m considering joining a new networking group. One person I spoke with said in nine years that he never got a customer from the group. But in this, his 10th year, he got two and for his line of business, that is an excellent ROI.

I’ve had a similar experience, participating for years in a group before my investment pays off. So how do you know what to quit and when? How do you know when to stay, to gut it out through the dip because the reward is so great?

Seriously. How do you know?

Share your thoughts.

What does that have to do with Internet marketing? Last week I spoke with a client who is running his own AdWords campaign and is quite frustrated because “every time I turn it on it costs me $530 every two weeks” but he’s not getting a return on his investment.

Here’s what I told him he should do:

1. Have us do an audit of his AdWords campaign. Since he’s not an expert and since he has a business to run, he doesn’t know all the ins and outs of a paid search campaign such as how to set it up for long tail search or whether it actually makes sense to have a different campaign for each city he’d like to get business from.
2. Have us do a local search campaign for his business. With the tools provided through Google Local Business Center and Bing Local Search, as well as sites like Yelp, CitySearch, BrightKite,  and Gowalla, there are many things a geographically based company can capitalize on. But it has to be done well and consistently.

While he’s still thinking it over, I’d like to tell you why he should choose one or the both of these.  Until now he’s been paralyzed with the urge to stop throwing money away. By choosing either or both of these solutions he’ll be taking a step towards recovery.

And yes we would appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my friend has he faces a long road to recovery ahead but he is making steps, small though they may seem, towards getting better.

And the beauty of it is that small changes can reap LARGE effects. Let’s say that you have a paid search campaign. You want people to rent a tuxedo from your store instead of your competitors. You can set up a paid search campaign – such as Google AdWords – to drive traffic to you site. At Google you identify when your ad will appear based on search words. So you say I want the ad to appear when people search for “prom”, “wedding”, “tux”, or “tuxedo”. Easy enough.

Not let’s say you start running this campaign and you find that for every 100 clicks (and you pay for every click) you get three tuxedo rentals. To make this a profitable venture for you, you determine that you need at least 5 rentals for every 100 clicks but you’d much prefer 10 or more.

Now that you have the traffic coming, you need to look at why more folks aren’t converting. With some of the nifty tools Google provides, you can do split testing. So you look at your landing page (the one you direct folks to from Google) and decide to keep the existing page as one version of the test. Then you make a small change – perhaps a differently worded call to action – and set that page as the second version of the test.

Next you turn on the test and then as people click through to your site, you can calculate which call to action is getting more business. Once you’ve got enough data to determine which is better, eliminate the underperformer and use the better one. If you change your conversion rate from 1% of visitors converting to customers to 2%, you’ve doubled your business. Pretty good ROI!

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

But don’t stop there.  Like my shampoo bottle says, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” If you’ve found that one call to action gets more conversions, what if there is yet another that will triple your conversions? Build another page to test. And often its not the call to action. It could be the image you use or the attention getting headline or the copy leading up to the call to action.

Since you can measure each step of the process, you can measure your ROI at every step and set yourself apart from your competition.

And that is just with Paid Search. The same holds true with Organic Search and even Social Media Marketing.