2011 High Rock Marketing Summit

We’re excited to announce the date for the 3rd Annual High Rock Marketing Summit – Friday, March 11th in Hagerstown, Maryland. Our focus this year will be solely on internet marketing, including the topics of website design, mobile-friendly websites, blogging, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and more. We have also reformatted this year’s seminar into a ½ day event and lunch is included.

As always, we’ll add our own unique twist on the “typical seminar”. This year our theme this is “Internet Marketing for the Unlucky”. Please find enclosed a brochure with all the details. To register, visit www.highrockmarketingsummit.com.

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Annual FREE T-shirt Giveaway

It’s that time of year again! Each year, HIGH ROCK STUDIOS launches a FREE T-Shirt Giveaway via email and social media outlets. Last year, 200 t-shirts were given away in less than 48 hours. Some t-shirts made it as far as Indonesia and Denmark.

This year, we’ve printed 400 t-shirts (because we always like to outdo ourselves) and went with a retro theme and a bold green color. Jeremy Bohner, Art Director at High Rock Studios, did his thing and came up with another cool, hip design. We have also ordered Small, Medium, Large and X-Large by popular demand.

Hurry -- the shirts will go fast again! To place your order, go to HIGHROCKSTUDIOS.EVENTBRITE.COM. Limit (1) per person. While supplies last.

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The Making of "Hub City State of Mind"

High Rock Studios recently produced a rap video promoting Hagerstown and the Leitersburg Cinemas. As the video team here at High Rock, we’d like to tell you more about it.

We were inspired by numerous other YouTube parodies of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” (a shout-out to New York City), so decided to call ours “Hub City State of Mind”, a shout-out to our very own Hagerstown. (You might be familiar with other similar parodies of Jay-Z’s hit song, such as the Minnesota and Weston versions.) With this interesting and somewhat peculiar trend in mind, we set out to give the Hub City some proper recognition.

Our star was Spencer Jackson, a Hagerstown hip-hop artis. Spencer raps about local businesses, events, and familiar places we all know in Hagerstown, so writing lyrics for the video was easy. For the female vocalist, we recruited Melody Belotte (wife of High Rock project manager Jonathan Belotte), who sings the chorus “Make this town yours, It’s what underdog dreams are made of, There’s nothing you can’t do...”

The video was released on YouTube on New Year’s eve, and since it’s debut, we’ve gotten an overwhelming viewer response. The current view count is over 70,000! We’ve also gotten a ton of comments on YouTube, and it’s been fascinating to see the hometown pride in our city! Many comments congratulated Spencer and Melody, and we’d also like to congratulate them on a job well done. Spencer and Melody’s performances really blew us away. Even when shooting outside at night in nearly unbearable cold, our stars held it together and pulled off a fantastic performance.

What you may not know about this rap video is that it was produced in less than a week. Spencer had already written and recorded the song when High Rock president Rich Daughtridge made plans to produce the video, and we originally intended to release it sometime in January. Rich then came to us with the idea of starting 2010 with a bang by releasing the video on New Year’s eve. It made perfect sense, as New Year’s eve would be an exciting kickoff for a video like this. Suddenly we were faced with pulling together the video by our New Year’s deadline less than a week away.

We wanted to make the video as much like the original version as possible. Spencer had done a great job rewriting Jay-Z’s lyrics to give the song a Hagerstown twist, while still maintaining clever similarities to the real song. We noted the original video was comprised largely of still images of New York between video sequences of Jay-Z rapping and Alicia Keys singing the chorus, so we tried to duplicate this format as much as possible. Over the course of an afternoon, we drove around town photographing various buildings, signs, and businesses. Josh Youngbar’s wife Erin also helped out by taking additional photos the same afternoon.

Once we had all of our images, we imported them into Final Cut Pro, converted them to black and white, and placed them in the editing timeline. Our placement of still images was based on either simulating the placement of images in Jay-Z’s video, or matching Spencer’s lyrics. We tried to stay consistent with the exact timing and size of the images in the original as well.

For Spencer’s appearances in the video, we chose different locations around Hagerstown for each verse. As you can see in the video, he is standing on Jonathan Street in the first verse, downtown in Public Sqaure in the second verse, and at Leitersburg Cinemas in the third. The video in each verse consists of a combination of different angles at each location.

With all the images and video in place, Spencer and Melody’s great performances, and the original video to guide us, everything fell into place. It was a fun little project, and we noted (with some amusement) that someone in nearby Frederick, Maryland jumped on the Jay-Z bandwagon with their own attempt. (We’ll let you judge which is better!)

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The Concept of Friction on the Web

Ever have one of those mornings when nothing seems to go right? You sleep through your alarm…have to squeeze the last dribbles of shampoo from the bottle…you’re out of coffee…you hit every red light on the way to work. This is friction—the kind of obvious friction we’re all familiar with in everyday life.

Friction also exists on the web. Sometimes it’s obvious (such as not being able to get to a particular website at all), but most of the time it’s far more subtle. And that subtlety is why so few people notice it on a conscious level. On a subconscious level, though, it can wreak havoc on the experience of a visitor to your website—and keep them from returning.

Here are some real-world  examples of friction on the web:

EXAMPLE 1 - Search fields that are too short. Many search fields are so short that if you type in a long phrase or group of keywords, you can’t see all of what you typed. (This is a real pain if you change your mind and have to select and delete what you just typed.) A search field needs to be long. Long enough so the user can actually see all the words they type. Here’s the wrong and right way to do it:

WRONG: Exxon-Mobil 

RIGHT: Amazon.com 

You might think “What’s the big deal?” Well that’s my point—it’s really not a big deal (people can still use search fields that are too short). But not being able to see all of what you type adds subtle friction to your experience.

EXERCISE: Go to that Exxon-Mobil page and type “financial and operating review” into the search box. Then delete it with the mouse (you can’t use Ctrl+A to select all, because many web users don’t know that shortcut). Then type “refineries in southern Louisiana.” Get the idea? Imagine doing this over and over. It would get really annoying. That’s friction. Now look at Amazon.com's search field—it's really long. This is good. People can type a novel into that field and see it all.

EXAMPLE  2 – Infuriating dropdown menus. Dropdown (or pulldown) menus have become common on the web. They’ve been a standard feature of software applications for years, so it’s logical to use them for website navigation. But there’s a lot of friction in how people implement them. Not everyone has the hands of a surgeon and is capable of ultra-precise mouse control. (And even if you are a surgeon, ultra-precise mouse control requires more time. Which means more friction.) Here’s the wrong and right way to do it—look at the primary (horizontal) navigation in both these sites…

WRONG: Flower Pot Heaven 

RIGHT: Garden.com 

In the first example (Flower Pot Heaven), to activate the dropdown menus you have to position the mouse cursor precisely over the tiny, down-facing arrows before each label. That’s friction. (Imagine someone with shaky hands trying to hit that bullseye with the mouse.) In the second example (Garden.com), the entire label is “hot,” and activating the dropdown menus is easy.

EXAMPLE 3 – Misleading and/or confusing information. This is a black hole’s worth of friction all over the web—sites that lead you on chases around the web for something you could have gotten to quicker and easier with the right info. Here are two examples: Try looking for information on rail travel on the following sites…

WRONG: Orbitz 

RIGHT: Expedia 

On the Orbitz site, after searching the navigation a bit, you see a link along the top of the page that says “Cars and Rail.” Clicking it takes you to a page with a form where you select the radio button for “Rail.” Then a graphic appears below the form that says “Rail Travel On Orbitz” with a “Find” button…and clicking this opens a completely different website (Amtrak) in a new browser window. (Huh?) So now you’re at Amtrak’s site (going through all their online forms), and Orbitz is still there. What do you do? Do you pay through Orbitz? Does Orbitz have anything to do with Amtrak? What if you still want to rent a car after you arrive on the train? This is friction.

Expedia, on the other hand, just doesn’t go there. Go their site looking for rail travel, and you see nothing. Some might say “Well Orbitz is better because they’re covering all modes of travel.” I disagree. Expedia knows they don’t handle rail travel, so they don’t send you off on some wild chase with misleading claims like “Rail Travel on Expedia!”

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I could go on and on citing examples of friction on the web. It’s everywhere. But the most important point is this: friction does not have to be significant to damage your site users’ experiences. Friction doesn’t mean people can’ t use your site. But it usually means it will take them just a little bit longer to do what they want to do. And this is not good.

Usability tests and eye-tracking studies have shown that friction can be as small a delay of a few milliseconds. Think of it this way: if it takes someone just a half-second longer to find something on your web page than it does on a competitor’s page, you lose. Because the insidious thing about friction is that it builds up in the subconscious—like plaque on your teeth.

If there are many friction-inducing elements on your website—even if each one requires only a half-second more of effort from the user—it leaves a “bad taste” in the user’s mind. And they’ll remember that, particularly if a competitor’s site is friction free.

On the web, no matter how much we love our great designs, no matter how much work we put into our text, no matter how much money and time was spent developing the site…the ONLY thing that matters to a user is…can they do what they came to your site to do with NO friction?

So take a look at your website. And in the best Zen tradition, be aware of anything that slows you down. And I mean anything. Make a list of typical tasks people might do on your site (e.g. finding specific information). Then carefully observe how long it takes to accomplish those tasks. Get different people to try it. And for every hesitation or pause—no matter how short—make a note and analyze what caused the hesitation. Then get rid of it. The more you do this, the more you'll give your users a friction-free experience...and the more they'll want to return to your site.

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Apple’s iPad: A cool toy? Or is there more to the hype?

PREFACE: This blog entry is not intended as advertisement for Apple’s iPad. High Rock Studios is in no way connected to Apple, and we use both Macs and PCs in our work. There are other similar tablet devices in the works, most notably HP’s “Slate,” which is based on Windows 7 and will display Flash content (unlike the iPad). But the iPad is the first tablet to really make an impression on the market, hence my focus on it. All tablets will potentially have a big impact!

It’s hard not to have heard of Apple’s iPad, soon to be in the hands of countless Apple fans (the device is officially available on April 3^rd.) But the iPad appeals to more people than Apple fans. I’m a lifelong PC user, and I’m planning to buy an iPad. Why? Read on…

The iPad will push the print publishing industry farther into the digital realm than ever before. We’ve been hearing for a long time that one day print won’t exist (and many trees will be saved). It was a pipe dream for years, and then devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader started the revolution. The problem with these devices is that reading is all they’re good for.  People still balked at the clunky tablets and limited grayscale displays. They still preferred the simple lightness and comfort of paper.

Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone became phenomenally popular due to a brilliant display, a well-designed interface,  thousands of really cool games, and (most importantly) the ability to do really useful things—like level a picture on the wall, tell where the sun will be in the sky at 10:30am next Thursday, and wirelessly control other devices.

The iPad puts all these qualities into a sleek, beautiful tablet that’s a pleasure to hold. The sharp, well-lit display is as easy on the eye as any electronic device can be, and what makes it superior to previous
 e-reading devices is that it does much more than display text. It displays video, photographs, websites, plays music, and runs applications in what is arguably the best form factor of any device to date. And it even lets you turn pages. Not just “click to advance” to the next page…but literally peel the leaf from side to side, in the same smooth, slow rolling motion we use with paper. This might seem like silly eye-candy to some, but I think it’s a crucial detail for the widespread adoption of e-reading—because it’s familiar. And that’s a good thing.

What this means for the print publishing industry is now there is a device that can display (for example) an e-magazine with all the brilliance and beauty of its paper counterpart. And it’s comfortable to hold and easy to use. That’s what distinguishes reading a magazine on the iPad from reading it on your computer. Publishers will be able to offer periodicals via the web—formatted for the iPad—at reasonable prices (less than the printed version). This is huge. And people will go for it. (Even your grandmother will go for it.)

Better still, the iPad has the potential to increase sales for publishers and get more people reading their work. Here’s a perfect example: as a teenager, I loved National Geographic magazine. My mother bought me a subscription, and I couldn’t wait to get lost in those amazing photographs and stories. Now, as an adult, it’s been years since I even held a print copy of National Geographic, much less bought one. And I never go to their website, because when I’m in the mood to get lost in stories about exotic places, I don’t want to sit at my desk or have a hot, clunky laptop on my legs. But I’d be happy to pay a few dollars for the iPad version of the magazine and be able to sit on my porch on a spring morning and rediscover this great publication—without fear of accumulating 100-pound boxes of old issues.

Beyond reading, viewing photos, watching movies, playing music , and surfing the web…a question that’s being thrown around a lot is whether the iPad will have any legitimate business uses? This is a good question, because all of us business folks would love an excuse to justify getting a handful of iPads for the office. Let’s take a look at some of the potential business uses for the iPad, and preface it with this caveat: like any device, getting the best use of an iPad will depend largely on recognizing the device’s strengths and weaknesses. Too often we’re obsessed with the “One Device to Rule Them All” concept…and this just isn’t reality. We can’t maintain our yards with a single tool, and we shouldn’t expect to do business with a single device.

The Top 5 Business Uses/Reasons for an iPad

1. It’s a great presentation tool. Nothing will look as slick (nor be as convenient) as sliding an iPad from it’s case and lighting up the screen with your…umm…Powerpoint presentation. Okay, so maybe your Powerpoint show needs work, but it’ll be a lot friendlier on an iPad. And regardless of whether Powerpoint will ever exist for the iPad, you’ll likely be able to create the show on a PC and import it into Apple’s Keynote on the iPad.

2. It’s easy to pass around. How many times have you wanted to show someone a photo or diagram on your laptop, and you had to shove your laptop over to them or they had to get out of their chair and stand over your shoulder. With the iPad, no more—it’s as easy to hand off as a legal pad.

3. It will run the 150,000+ iPhone apps in Apple’s App Store. Not all of these apps will be formatted specifically for the iPad at first, but developers will be converting their iPhone apps quickly. (And you can still run them even if not formatted for the iPad—they’ll just look a little small or a little large on the iPad’s screen.) And while a lot of these apps are games, many are brilliantly-designed, functional tools. Depending on your business, this could be a big advantage. From ballistics specifications to music composition to video storyboarding to language translation, I believe some of the best, most creative software development in the world is going into App Store apps. And you’ll no longer have to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to use them—you can keep your BlackBerry and have the best of both worlds!

4. It will make working-on-the-go easier. I hate that cliché, but it’s true. Some have pointed out that you can’t do with an iPad what you can do with a laptop or desktop computer. Maybe not, but you can review documents, videos, presentations, and edit/annotate them on an iPad. I’m a writer, and I’d have no problem writing on an iPad with the addition of a physical keyboard (which you’ll easily be able to use with an iPad). The iPad will be easier to carry than a laptop, and it will be more pleasant to use for reading and reviewing than an iPhone or BlackBerry.

5. It will be a great portable reference tool. Whether you need to find information on the web or refer to business-specific documentation, the iPad’s strengths as an e-reader will make it an excellent reference tool—not just because of how it looks, but because people won’t mind hauling it around. Yes, it’s bigger and heavier than a smartphone…but it’s a heck of a lot nicer and easier to use than a laptop.

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As with any new technology, there are plenty of people smugly disparaging the iPad as a legitimate business device…but their arguments in my opinion ring hollow. The most common complaints come from corporate IT managers who dismiss the iPad because it can’t easily be locked into a hyper-controlled, secured link in the corporate network chain. But it wasn’t meant for this.

Above all, the iPad is meant to be a communications tool. Its strength is how it can convince and motivate people and compel them to action through photographs, sound, and text. For businesses that rely on good communication (and who doesn’t?), this is big.

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SEO & PPC That Pays For Itself: 7 Questions You Have to Answer

We all want more traffic, no question about it, but why? It sounds like a stupid question, but it’s one that many small and medium businesses fail to thoroughly answer. Let’s get it out of the way; NO, “To get more business/customers/clients” is not an acceptable answer. That’s like saying “Why did I start my own business? To make money of course”. To determine why you want more traffic, you have to seriously answer these 7 basic questions:

1. Who should be coming to your website?
   Identifying your target visitor can be a relatively simple procedure if you have an ecommerce site selling hardware, but can be a little trickier for business to business. This step really should be thoroughly defined, checked and redefined before even building a website. Even if you have a general idea, you need to write it down.
2. Where do those potential visitors search?
   Don’t know where to start on this one? Check your site statistics to see how people are getting to your site. Talk to employees that have direct contact with the customers. Talk to existing and potential customers/clients in person or through an email survey. Don’t have a database of your customer’s email addresses? Open a MailChimp account and start collecting them now.
3. How do they search?
   Are visitors coming to your website to research or make a purchase? Keep in mind that shoppers often use the internet to research a product or service before making the buying decision. Are they clicking on paid links or organic results? Sometimes the only way to answer this is by testing low-budget Adword campaigns. Most important, what words are they searching for? While this particular point will be researched thoroughly by an SEO/PPC professional, you can check ahead of time for yourself with free tools like Google Trends, or the Google Keyword Tool.
4. How do they browse page results?
   If you don’t have log stats or analytics on your site, immediately stop what you’re doing and get a free Google Analytics account. If you do, go through your site navigation and content sections thoroughly to see how visitors are navigating through your site. If you know where you would like them to go, and it’s not apparently where they are going, then you’ve identified an opportunity to improve your site’s usability. For more information, check out Useful Usability or read through this article on Smashing Magazine.
5. What do visitors do when they get there?
   This is a big one folks! What the heck could you possibly have to offer that these visitors would want, care about, or be able to get elsewhere? This is really only something you can answer. You know your business better than any consultant, marketing firm, or SEO guru out there, so define this or you’ll end up paying them to do it for you. What really distinguishes you from your competition? How do you that translate to your website?
   
   Brainstorm:
   
   • Are visitors coming for information that you possess?
     Inform them succinctly, but don’t be withholding -- nobody likes a tease. Convince them it’s worth giving you their name and email address in exchange for a whitepaper or article that they can download and print out. Content is king!
   • Do they want a better way to do what your company offers?
     Hit the competition where it hurts by explaining to the visitor why they need you.
   • Are the majority of your potential visitors unaware that your product exists?
     Find and educate them.
   • Do they want to buy what you’re selling?
     Remind them why in your content and especially in the titles above your content.
     
6. How will you capture leads and track results?
   This is a freebie and we touched on it before: Google Analytics. If you’re using a paid tracking service, that’s fine too, as long as you’re collecting tracking information and constantly reviewing it for opportunities to improve your conversion rates.

   
7. How much is each visitor worth?
   The most unanswered question, hands down: what’s the traffic worth? If this wasn’t the most intimidating, it would have been the first question and in all caps, but that would have scared most of you away so we’re saving it for last. While you probably can’t answer this without having a good 3-6 months of conversion tracking data, you need to start with something. If 15% of your visitors are captured in the form of leads, and 10% of them become customers/clients, and your average client/customer spends $1,500 a year on your products/services, each unique visitor is worth about $1.87. As important as it is to define this number initially, you have to CONSTANTLY monitor these numbers in an on-going basis. Luckily with robust and free tracking solutions like Google Analytics (yes, there are others, but why bother? Go with Google Analytics!), you can set trackable goals (visitor arrives, completes contact form to get to the contact confirmation page --boom -- visitor to lead) and assign values to each goal. Easy as that.*

Great, now we know the who, what, where, and how but what does that have to do with the why?

Have you thoroughly answered the 7 questions above?

I know you haven’t, but that’s okay, because who stops in the middle of a blog to do an assignment? But you’re going to sit down and answer the questions, right? Good!

Okay, enough stalling:
Why do you want more traffic to your website?
That’s a stupid question! It’s to get more business/customers/clients! HA! You should have seen the look on your face...classic.

But really -- now that you know why the traffic will come, how much you should spend getting it, and what you should expect to earn in return.

*Serious Note: We’re having fun, I like the light sarcastic approach when it comes to intimidating subjects like SEO, but this last question is the difference between knowing what your website’s doing for you and throwing money away on marketers. If you don’t know how much your traffic is worth, than what is it doing for you and why are you spending money to get it. Tracking this and correlating it to your website stats is ultimately the responsibility of the company handling your online marketing efforts, but not all of them force you to define this and if you don’t understand it, than you have no way of knowing what you’re paying for and they have no way of proving the value they’re providing you.

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Getting Your Feet Wet in Social Media Marketing

For many businesses and businesspeople the prospect of getting into social media and social networking is overwhelming. Even for veterans of web and social marketing, the ocean of social technologies can appear daunting at times. With thousands of new networks, communities, blogs and widgets hitting the Internet every day, it’s easy to feel like you’re going to drown. But, social media marketing is like other skills that can be learned.

Here are a few first steps that we recommend to help you get your feet wet:

1. Gear up.
I always do a bit research before diving into a new endeavor. There are many reliable sources online and offline that provide trending news, instruction and information on social media.

• Online publications like Mashable and MediaWeek feature the latest social media news and articles.
• There are literally millions of blogs on the Internet. There are blogs specific to social media that provide first-hand, experiential knowledge, stories and web tutorials from the beginner level basics to advanced metrics analysis and everything in between. Outside of social media, there are ones that are specific to your industry or interest. Underwater basketweaving anyone?
• Most social media sites themselves offer How To’s and Best Practices.
• If you are a more traditional learner there are a few good books that bring the fundamentals of social media offline:
• The For Dummies series has books on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube as well as Social Media and Social Media Marketing
• Groundswell by Charlene Li is an introduction the current state of social networking and what to do about it from a business perspective.
  

2. Splash around.
Before you go signing your company up for a bunch of social media accounts, start with your own personal accounts. It’s important to understand how to use the tools and controls available within various social media networks.

• Begin with social networks that are relevant to you or your line of work. That way, you’ll have more to talk about. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the dominant social networks for business professionals.
• Personalize your accounts. Many social media networks allow you to customize your public-facing pages including avatars, images and colors.
• Observe how people in the community act and communicate.
• Get to know your audience and their social media habits. If you want to know where to fish, casting your line where the fish are is always a good move. Figuring out where your audience is spending their time is not too difficult, however. Look for conversations and activity within the social networks that you can eventually participate in.
• Learn the terminology and vernacular – tweet something; poke someone; become mayor
  
• Be polite and courteous – use good manners especially if you’re representing yourself professionally.
• Social media is not all business. In fact, social media is an entertainment outlet for millions of users. So make sure you have fun.

3. Create a plan.
If you want to create a sustainable, effective social media presence you have to create a plan.“Without a plan, there's no attack. Without attack, no victory.” One Crazy Summer, 1986.

• Make sure to first focus on strategy, not tactics. Strategy is the bigger picture goal. Tactics are the tools you will implement or put in place to help you achieve that goal. Some good questions to ask yourself:
• What do I want to achieve with social media?
• How can we effectively use social media tools to reach my audience?
• How will I measure success?
• Pick a few social media networks. Determine which communities your audience is most actively engaged and gear you efforts to those environments and tools.
• Budget your time and efforts. An hour a day should cover most small social media campaigns.
• Set realistic goals. Don’t expect immediate results. Though overnight success has been known to happen online, the majority of social media efforts take time and work.
• Delegate responsibilities (unless you’re a one-person operation) among two or more people. Divvy up responsibilities – that way no one person is burdened and more people know what’s going on.
• Send a consistent message across social media networks. Everyone should follow the plan and be aware of what the goals are.
• Make sure your message is actionable in some way. Measureable actions can be used later to determine the success of your efforts.
• Use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to schedule posts. This can not only save time, but also help you track posts.

4. Dive in.
You’ve done your research, you've played around with the tools and you have a plan. Now its time to take off the floaties and start your social campaign.

• Marketing a product or service in the social web will undoubtedly fail if it’s a one-way communication. In this environment sharing, collaboration and interaction are key. Don’t just broadcast a message into the social stratosphere.
• Create content that adds value to the community. You won't attract the right followers if what you post is not relevant to their interests.
• Listen and be responsive. If someone asks a question, answer it. Encourage good comments, i.e. "Thank you for the RT." Respond to negative comments only if you can resolve the issue or put a positive tone on it, i.e. "I’m sorry you had a bad exp at our restaurant. We'd like to make it up to you. Come back & ask for our Mgr, Joe." Be careful giving things away to negative commenters. Otherwise, be prepared for a lot of complainers expecting free stuff.
• Be authentic and truthful. Building a loyal audience will require establishing trust.
• DO NOT SPAM!

5. Measure.
Numbers on may be difficult to gage when determining the effectiveness of your campaign. It may take a little digging and cross-examination to find the information you require.

• The number of subscribers, fans or followers you have are “soft" numbers. Meaning, they do not directly increase your revenues. However, they can indicate the popularity and spread of your brand, your product, your service or you. Be careful not to place too much value on quantity. These numbers can be artificially influenced. So take some time to evaluate who is following you.
• One way you can tell if your social media efforts are working is to look at the traffic reports of your website to see where people are coming from.
• If you use Google Analytics or Urchin you can set up specific “goals” to track and measure if people are taking desired actions on your site.
• Using URL-tracking services like Google's URL Builder, bit.ly or HootSuite can give you some insight on the number of clicks, date, origin (region) and user ratings of the links you post,

To the social media outsider, this can look like a vast abyss with a host of uncertain challenges, strong undercurrents and unpredictable surges, not to mention, some really odd creatures. Navigating the social web and casting your lines in the right place takes a bit of experience. And, like any venture, a measure of risk is involved. You need to put yourself out there, plan, work hard and keep focused on your goals. Success doesn’t happen easily, but for the businesses willing to take the plunge, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

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