Acquistion: ONLY after establishing a community and dialogue with visitors, fans and followers, we introduced offers into the mix – using good ole’ coupon codes for offers and on blog properties for tracking and back-end analytics we track sales, new vs. existing customers, number of products etc.
Traffic – driving eyeballs to our properties; generate a lot of content through our blog properties as well as proactive media/blogger outreach; from the traffic we get we track clip throughs to our main website. Here is where we need more tweaking to track all the way through to the cart
Sentiment – the perception of the company out in the ether – this is possibly the one place we have the measurement process down, thx to CRT; we do a reputation audit every 6 months – looking at comments, posts and articles that mention Network Solutions and about 24 to 30 keywords associated with our PR activities as well as our products and services.
This next slide really illustrates our shift from negative to positive sentiment in the last 2 years
Being in the tech industry, specifically the shared web hosting industry, we have experienced an increase in malware and other security issues, this can take a big toll on the sentiment, which in our case, showed up in Google results big time
The key to helping minimize the negative and push down the bad results is a Quick response comment strategy, during times of crisis; as well as strategy PR and marketing activities that will generate positive information about your company from third parties – basic PR 101 right?
We did this in the form of creating a bi-annual Small business Success Index survey where we ask small businesses to rate the competitive health of the companies, we take the survey results and package them in story ideas we pitch to influential bloggers and reporters that are need of unique helpful content
Be where the influencers gather -- participate in off-line events – specifically Sahshi – where we’re meeting influential tech bloggers
Help influencers help you by finding ways to showcase their knowledge that helps your key constituencies – like the GrowSmartBiz conference, invited Smallbiz and technologists to participate on panels as well as live blog and tweet from the event
Prior to doing the initial reputation audit, we didn’t really give credence to tech bloggers; however they can have a big influence on SB tech decisions
NetSol maintain 54% positive sentiment despite the two WordPress hacking issues (April 2010, May 2010).
Negative mentions were mitigated by NetSol’s proactive commenting, especially during the hacking crisis.
NetSol’s community engagement and social activities generated organic positive mentions.
Speaking engagements, SBSI-3 and the GrowSmartBusiness conference increased positive mentions.
