Kristy Bolsinger will speaking on Social Analytics at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’ve been in digital marketing in one form or another for nearly a decade. After finishing grad school, I pivoted away from HR and became a social strategist managing strategy through execution for multiple global brands in an ecom environment. After a handful of years doing that I moved into consulting. Initially I focused primarily on social business (engagement, social service, influencer and advocacy programs, community design and management, etc) but ultimately shifted into a customer experience world. That’s where I live mostly these days. For me the customer experience is the new perimeter of digital marketing. It encompasses so many components from awareness, to conversion, sales, support, and optimization and does it while crossing so many channels. I now work in social, communications, employee engagement, SEO, and on and on. My primary role is to be the champion of the customer internally and advocate for best in class experiences. In short. 🙂
2) How can one best tie social shares to traditional sales metrics?
That’s a great question. I think it totally depends on your business model. Some of the more popular social sites like Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram have begun integrating native shopping. That’s probably the shortest chain and easiest way to do it. People can shop right there without navigating away and you can measure those analytics from there. Beyond that, tying engagement and traffic to social sites and crafting impactful and noticeable (re: cuts above the noise) campaigns can help move the needle as well if you’re tracking the journey. Additionally, there’s something to be said for leveraging social for aggressive and integrated brand campaigns that can also lead to success.
3) What are your preferred social analytics platforms?
Google analytics and Simply Measured are right up there. Simply Measured because it so easily and readily helps measure the things that really matter in your social channels. And GA because it helps you tie that to actions taken on your site. If you can add into that known users through a CRM of some kind you’ve really got a ton of useful information about your audience that you can use to craft deep journeys for the data driven personas.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.