2010 Traffic Trends: Do You Want Visibility or Control?

Somewhere in a town far away (unless you live near Prince George’s County, Maryland), I’m getting ready to transport these Christmas gifts to my cousin’s Christmas celebration.

This other part of me, though, is thinking about the New Year already, and what you need to know about the coming year.

This past year, I’ve noticed that the people who are the most resistant to social media are the folks who claim that they can’t measure their return on investment, either because the returns on investment aren’t measurable, or, more likely, because they don’t know how to measure it.

Then there’s the camp that is worried about having 100% complete control over how people see their content and what they can do with it before they will use social media. These are the folks you see mostly in larger corporations who don’t want to start a Twitter account because someone might quote or retweet their trademark tagline.

There’s no way to prevent this whether you start a Twitter or Facebook account or not. You already have less control over your content. By using social media tools and sites, you can lead the discussion and guide it, but you can’t control it. Whether or not you participate, social media has taken off to the point that ll media is social, and it seems archaic to those of us who’ve been using it all these years to even use the phrase “social media”.

These two groups are the remaining stragglers who are getting left behind.

My prediction for the next year is that the successful companies will let go of control in favor of online and offline visibility and higher profits. Those who do not will struggle to grow, if not fail.

Some things that bring great benefit in social media are untrackable until they come to fruition. How do you track a relationship that leads to a profitable venture until the venture comes about? How do you track the word of mouth that results when someone sees something on Facebook? How will you know each person told 12.8 friends, even when it results in 100 new sales overnight?

Most of your content is protected by copyright law, no matter what Facebook’s new privacy policies says – indeed they probably came up with this new wording in an attempt not to get sued for redistributing your information in the ways you’re allowing when you sign up.  How can you stop 2000 people from updating their status with your slogan or a quote from your new commercial?

Even if it’s negative, why would you want to? Now your customer service department can approach dissatisfied people one on one and solve their problems, and perhaps get those people to be just as vocal about how you 1-listened and 2- fixed their problem.

You can’t control or track everything. Stop trying and enjoy the benefits. Get in there and maximize what benefits you can.

This may sound crazy coming from a track-happy, test-crazy, traffic strategist and traffic systems engineer. But the simple truth is that there’s only so much you can track.  Sometimes the best you can do is isolate whether or not the action you are taking helped or hurt. If it helped you keep doing it, if it didn’t, you stop doing it, and keep moving.

Secondly, there’s a point at which waiting until you can track something costs you money.

For years before I began to get super success from article marketing, I wanted to be able to track where every single click from every single article came from. My theory was that if I knew exacly what to track and where the traffic was coming from, then I could just stick to those places when submitting my articles.

It sounds really intelligent in principle. But in reality, there are too many variables. So many factors go into a successful article marketing campaign. You would have to be able to track:

• time of day the article was released
• time of day where it is when the article is received
• whether or not that was the most-read day for that publication
• how timely your topic is
• how compelling your article is
• how many other solutions there are to the problem you seek to solve
• whether the resource box fit in with the article
• what else was on the page or in the ezine where your article was printed
• whether there’s a demand for your solution among the audience who read your article

If you had a good day in a publication, and all of these factors were spot on, they could all be completely different on another day in a different publication. Something as simple as the time of day the article was released could get you poor results one day, and you’d end up discounting this publication, when on another day, the publication of your article would have made you thousands of dollars.

In 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010, the author writes that two of these things are measurement of ROI (return on investment) in social media, and the desire to own your own content.

My advice would be to go in the exact opposite directions of these two trends.  Just because you can measure return on investment doesn’t mean you should obsess over it. Depending on what you’re selling, knowing you’re engaging 100 CEOs or 10,000 college kids might be good enough.

And we already own our own content. According to the US Copyright Office, anything that can be created, including the words you write, are protected from the instant they are fixed in a tangible form.

The battle for control, and the invention of tools to track results, will play themselves out next year or in the coming one. In 2010, focus your energy on increasing your level of engagement with as little unnecessary effort as possible.