Good bye lead conversion. Hello engagement conversion?

I've been invited to speak at the REAL Trends conference this summer. The topic: Measuring the effectiveness of your online efforts.

That got me thinking...if the past five years have been about visitors, leads & conversion %...what will be the success metrics we use to track ROI of online marketing over the next five years and beyond?

And so you ask, why will the next 5 be any different than the last?  

Well, if you've read my other recent posts you already know that I believe, given the amazing emergence of the Social Web (specifically Facebook - and Twitter to a lesser extent) online marketing as we know it for real estate is going through a fundamental change.  A new platform is emerging, and with it we're going to start thinking about measuring our success on that platform very differently than we did in a world of SEO and SEM driven online marketing.

Here's how it was generally done the old way (replace with your own numbers and levers which I'm sure will be different, but hopefully you get the point):

√ Get 2000 visitors to my website or blog through SEO or SEM

√ Hope 5% of those visitors convert to leads by registering across they myriad lead gen traps on my site (forms, newsletters, email alerts, etc.)

√ Try to engage that 5% hoping three turn into active clients

√ Work with those three clients and get 1 deal

The results: A 0.05% conversion of website visitors to deals and a 1% conversion percentage of leads to deals (and a massive time sink in working 99 leads that didn't close to get to one that did).

Old way, bad. New way, better...

So the question is, what is the new way and how do you proceed as the Social Web becomes dominant?  

There’s lots of chatter about how many visitors agents are getting (or not getting) to their website or blog from Social Media. Frankly I think that chatter is misdirected. Sure, traffic’s important and if you're publishing great blog content then the more people reading it the better.  But those are not going to be the elements that matter going forward in terms of how effective you are with online marketing in a social world.

Here are a few ideas about what might matter more that and get you ahead of the pack. I'd love your thoughts and feedback because I believe that together we can crack this social web ROI thing wide open!!!

·       Number of new relationships created. How many new people "Like" your business page, "Friended/Followed" you today?  Is this not the same as monitoring the growth of your prospect file or rolodex?

·       Your engagement conversion %.  What percent of the content you publish in social media (this can be a quick post/tweet, a video you did, a poll you sent out, a teaser for a blog post) gets a reaction (comment, "Like", share, retweet, etc.) as noted in my post on Edgerank, this is the type of thing that matters when it comes to getting seen in the Facebook Top News stream

·        Referral deals generated. - The reason I value Social Media as a marketing vehicle is that it is not a lead generation dynamic.  It is a referral sphere builder.  So ultimately we'll measure it on how many referrals it generated

How are you thinking about measuring the success of your Social Media efforts?

Please share your thoughts - after all, that’s what this Social thing is all about...