Gotcha!  By simply reading this article you may have self identified yourself as one of the 40% of marketers who are experimenting with social metrics, learning which works best for you.  Or one of the 37% who struggle to find good ways to measure social activity and its impact.  This all according to a Forrester Research, Inc.  study of Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals.

Measurement is always a challenge, but it’s more of a challenge if you don’t start with clear expectations of what the social media effort is supposed to do.  Forrester suggests a good way to think about it.  They suggest creating a value chain for social media tactics or ideas.  It goes like this:

Using (specific social activity/approach)      , we help (primary audience) accomplish (target social objective) and make (specific process or goal for the audience) better as measured by     (relevant measures and metrics) which is worth (bottom-line business value)    .

This looks easy enough, and it is easy to write.  The problem is defining the bottom-line business value and sticking to your guns in holding social media accountable.

Nearly every business should require a “bottom-line business value.”  Most marketing activity is judged by its contribution to sales.  Maybe the objective is more and better leads.  More loyal customers.  You could even argue that engaging a customer in a dialog helps you understand their mindsets better.  All legitimate ways of thinking about it.

So, you dive in.  Start a Facebook page.  Put some posts up. And there’s silence.  Deafening silence.  Hello-is-there-anybody-out-there silence.  You’ve seen those pages.  Maybe you have one.

You know if you ran a traditional media campaign and nothing happened, leads dry up, sales are stagnant, awareness doesn’t change that the campaign would die a quick and brutal death.  If you sent a direct mailer that didn’t produce, you’d never send the same mailer again.

But with social media, we have a hard time holding it to the same standards of results.  Why? Is it that we fear that if we’re not doing it someone will think us not current?  Is it that we would admit that we don’t know how to get the audience to engage?  Is it that a failed social media effort wouldn’t look good on our next review?  Or is it that we can’t bear the thought that our target audience is just not that into us?

One of the biggest factors impacting Millennials is the impact of a college education and financing that education.  Study after study shows that the college graduate is likely to make a million dollars more than the non-college graduate over the course of their lifetime.

Yet this economy has millennial graduates questioning the wisdom of their decision.  Jobs are scarce and student loan payments come due every month.  A COUNTRY Financial survey noted that 31 percent of Americans have borrowed money to finance their educations. Nearly two-thirds have paid off their obligation and only 16 percent said it had a significant impact on their decision making.

Forty percent of Millennials indicate that their student loans have a significant impact on their lives, a full 24 percent difference from the general population.  This differential is either an indication of the impact of the economy on Millennial mindsets, or an indication that pain mellows with time, or both.

Millennials have been described as the coddled, everyone gets a trophy generation and maybe some of that is true.  What certainly is not true, is that this generation is being welcomed into the workforce with open checkbooks.  The economic conditions may, in the end, be more formative on attitudes and work habits of Millennials than most other factors.

They have been forced to be thrifty and conservative with their dollars.  As a result, they may look more than most generations at the true value of the things they buy.  Cheap and good brands like Jimmy John’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill are well positioned to compete for the Millennial fast food dollar.

Cheap and good poses a wholly different challenge for higher education.   The four year university must build value in the four year experience to justify the cost.  It must realize that the college experience is much more than just going to Biology 101.  It is everything involved in helping a young Millennial grow into an adult with potential, dreams and ability.  The result of that experience is the reason students paint their bodies to cheer on their team.

Marketing to the Millennial generation may be as simple as helping them reach their goals through your products and services.  This is a generation that seems to be motivated by an inner conscience  that guides how they want to live their lives.

It occurs to us that many businesses could benefit by looking at their products in the light of the Millennial priorities pointed out in the Pew Research Center graph above.

The research suggests that being a good parent is a top priority.  This would suggest marketing products in a way that would help them feel that the purchase and use of the product in some way makes them a better parent.  Serving healthy food, investing for college, being earth friendly and being safety conscious are all part of being a good parent.

Products that save time or allow Millennials to spend more time with the family match their priorities as well.  If you can combine being a good parent with having more free time to have a successful marriage, you’ve rung their bell three times.

Millennials are often characterized as being coddled, soft and entitled.  And while it’s true that when they were ten and playing soccer they all got a trophy, their priorities suggest personal sacrifice and concern for the important things in life that many of us in the older generations often forget.  When “Helping others in need” is a high priority among the generation, it is very easy to see how a company with a good record of community support could find common ground with this valuable audience.

Whether it’s parenting, the digital world or the various crises that have happened in their lifetime, Millennials are one of the most interesting and compelling audiences for marketers.

There’s an old axiom among fishermen that goes something like this, “Some lures are meant for catching fishermen and others for catching fish.”  Having grown up fishing, my tackle box is living proof of that truth.  Seems like the flashiest and most colorful lures never caught a thing while the rattiest, most beat up piece of wood with hooks has a history of catching the most and the biggest.

The real truth is all lures will catch fish if fished properly, at the right time in places where there are fish.  Social media seems to be one of those kinds of lures.  It’s the hottest, shiniest new lure out there in the marketing lake. There are a lot of people fishin’  but only a few that are catchin’.

R2integrated just published a study indicating that nearly 50% of companies using social media have no social media strategy.  That probably also explains why 65% of those reporting indicated that they hadn’t increased sales as a result of using social media.  Yet 77% said they were doing social media for lead generation.  Huh?  Fifty-four percent said that social media is integral to their business.  Whaaaaa???????

So, half don’t have a strategy, Most know what they would like it to do. It’s not doing what they would like it to do but it’s integral to their business.  In the word of Bill Cosby, “RIIIIGHT!”

Social media has caught a lot of fishermen but it hasn’t put many fish in the boat.  So as most businesses cast and crank their social media lures into a vast ocean with a few prospects swimming in it, there are a few who’ve used strategy to locate fish concentration and entice those prospects into their pond.

What is a social networking strategy?  If you think about it in purely social terms, it’s why you get invited to a dinner party.  You either supply interesting conversation…which usually means you’re don’t talk about yourself constantly because you’d be a complete bore and you’re really not that interesting.  Or, they really like your significant other.  In any case, your social media strategy should have its own shiny new lure to draw fish into your area of the lake.  Then you need to know what bait to use to get and keep them involved.  And that’s the difference between fishin’ and catchin’.

We are expecting the delivery of a couple of iPads in the next day or so.  As a result, I’ve been poking around the iPad app stores looking for some content for  the wonderful device that we anticipate receiving.  Mr. Murdoch has said that the iPad will be the savior of print media as we know it.  That’s good because I like to read my newspaper without a keyboard in front of me.

Unfortunately, when I look at the free apps for the Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Newsweek and others, I find negative reviews galore.  It seems that these publications charge nearly as much or more for the iPad edition as they do for the old school print version.  Not very green of them.

Now we understand that there’s programming involved in getting it on the iPad, but we doubt that it’s as difficult as the old cold type versions of newspapers we see in western movies.  So, why exactly are the iPad versions so expensive?

In the first place “free” is not a sustainable model. That is presuming you would like professional journalists doing their jobs being objective, investigative and unbiased.  (Hoy, that’s a whole different discussion)  So regardless of our desire for free, it can’t happen long term.  A Wall Street Journal on the iPad has every cost associated with the collection, gathering and writing of information as does the tree killing old school version that I know and love.  What it loses is the production, printing and delivery costs.  It adds a cost from Apple.

From a revenue point of view, we may be buying in-depth advertising rather than a quarter page.  So the cost of the ad will depend on what’s behind the first photo and how deep the content is that can be explored by the reader.  Hard to understand for a medium with ink under its finger nails.

It maybe even harder for internet savvy readers to understand why they should pay for content.  Enter the Drudge Tax.  The Drudge Tax is an idea floated by the FTC that would tax news aggregators like the Drudge Report for using/stealing content paid for by the traditional media and then channel some of that tax back to newspapers.  That is after the bureaucrats take their cut.  Consumerists are up in arms saying that 74% of consumers are against that tax.  Duh?  Who wants to end free?

The point is good content is not free or even cheap.  And while blogs, facebook and twitter have made us all publishers of some sort, the quality of what we collectively publish is highly suspect.  Except of course for What’s New at ZLRIGNTION which is beyond reproach.

Good content should be a competitive advantage for traditional media turned digital and it should not be free.  Nor should any Tom, Dick or Drudge be able to cheapen the value by violating copyrights of the creators of the content.  Believe me these news aggregators are making their money for doing little more than linking to traditional media outlets.

So when our iPads come in, we’ll pay for the Journal, the New York Times, Wired Magazine and all the others and hope quality journalism never dies even if its currently on life support.