Left-Brained Organization?  Show Them the Numbers

Posted by: Amy Hooker, Director of New Media Feb 23, 2009 0 Comments

I read with interest Dannielle Blumenthal’s recent post, “Getting over the fear of feedback,” and I think she brought up some fantastic points. In the post, Danielle outlined ways to effectively handle comments organizations may make to dismiss their Web, blog, and social networking initiatives.

I’d like to augment Danielle’s good suggestions with another strategy. I’ve seen it work with Fortune 500 organizations, startup businesses, and nonprofit agencies, so it would most likely work with government agencies as well. Show them the numbers. When you’re working within a left-brained, hierarchical structure, it’s difficult to affect change using right-brained, emotion-based tactics. It’s going to take numbers, stats, and other objective-measuring mechanisms to get the ball moving.

Certainly, gathering outside numbers that document the growing use of social media, the socioeconomic demographics of new Facebook users, and the cost savings that online marketing and branding provide businesses is powerful. But what’s even more powerful is to be able to provide numbers and analysis on what’s really happening on your website. And for that, you’ll need web analytics.

Web analytics does an incredible job of allowing you to segment visitors into distinct groups who share a certain set of criteria in common. Combine your online visitors and web analytics, and you have the modern-day equivalent of a focus group—without having to provide light refreshments!

Not sure where to get started with web analytics? Here are a few resources:

Analytics vendor WebTrends has a good white paper on best practices for government agencies employing web analytics. It gives especially helpful tips on dealing with tricky cookie issues.

Not sure how to quantify visitors to your social media sites, including Facebook? There are a number of new applications popping up, including Kontagent, that provide powerful analytics for social media applications.
The Web Analytics Association develops standards and best practices for the entire web analytics industry, including the public sector.

Remember, too, that using web analytics is a great way to quantify the value of your agency’s blog. Many times, marketers look only at the numbers that are immediately apparent, such as numbers of comments, to determine if their blog is successful.

But comments aren’t the only metric available to you—nor are they a reliable indicator of interest. For example, using web analytics, one of our clients was able to determine that people who read their blog were 50% more likely to sign up for the newsletter and respond to other calls to action than those who did not. If this client had relied on the number of blog comments as the only metric, they would have missed the real impact that the blog was having on their brand.

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Amy Hooker

Director of New Media

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