Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think what you’re pointing out is if you do have a more restricted area, then you do have the opportunity to optimize the time window when you send your messages.

Frank Dale: Absolutely, and make sure you’re tracking them. I know that sounds funny; that’s a basic business practice. But I think you would be stunned, certainly when you get into a position where you’re working intimately with lots and lots of marketers, by how many of them don’t actually do this. What you’ll tend to find, particularly in a mid-level enterprise – say, 100 to 1,000 employees – is that they’re adding a lot of responsibilities, but they’re not necessarily adding employees. So, these people are checking the box. They don’t have time to optimize a lot of things, which for my company is great. It means there’s an opportunity for us to do those things for them and build tools to do that. If I know that that’s case, that means that there’s  a lot of stuff that’s just getting thrown into the ether because they know that they need to tell the CMO or CEO that we have a presence on Pinterest because that’s popular right now. But they can’t tell you what it’s doing for them because they don’t have the time to track it because they’re in charge of three or four other programs.

SM: Definitely tracking is key, but at the same time, it’s not so easy to track. For instance, everything we do on Twitter is streamed through our Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Those are the three top traffic generators to our website. Having said that, there’s not a lot of granularity that the Google Analytics tool provides beyond that, so we have HootSuite providing some analytics, Google Analytics providing some analytics, and piecing all of this together is not easy at all.

FD: You’re exactly right. That’s a common complaint with most marketers. I think one of the things you’ll see, if you’re looking at social media as a growth space, it’s that measurement tracking aspect. You see a lot of companies doing small pieces particularly in that social CRM space. But what’s interesting about a lot of the pure play social media technology companies is that you have a split. You have three groups. You have the people who are the I’m-going-to-manage-your-Facebook-page-app type companies. Then you’ve got the social CRM group. And then you’ve got the listening groups. What’s interesting is you don’t see anyone doing a great job blending it, basically providing a unified tracking dashboard. There are some companies that are doing it, but if I talk to marketers, it doesn’t seem like they’re quite doing what they need them to do at this point. That’s a universal issue right now.

SM: I think you’re right. The analytics structure around social media marketing still is very inadequate, at least for small companies. Maybe for large companies there are more sophisticated tools that are more expensive, but I certainly do not see a lot for small companies that can make our lives significantly easier.

FD: I would agree. There aren’t a lot of great tools in that space yet. I think you’ll see them coming. Constant Contact’s put in a lot of effort in that area. You have companies like HubSpot that have put in a lot of effort in that area. So, I think they’re going to be on the way, but it’s just not quite there yet. And the real question, too, is, does social media necessarily make sense for your small business? For some of them, it won’t. That’s not always a popular thing to say.

SM: One of the things you said right at the beginning, I noted because that has been our marketing strategy – content marketing. Generating high-quality content is not kids’ stuff. Generating high-quality content is expensive, and it takes finesse. It takes a certain skill set, and it’s not easy for people to sustain a well-written blog for years and years. It’s just not an easy thing to do.

FD: Yes, it sounds like it’s spoken by someone who has done it.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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