Nan Dawkins
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Nan Dawkins

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About Nan Dawkins

Nan Dawkins has over 25 years of communications experience touching almost every aspect of marketing, including conventional advertising, public relations, and digital. Her current company, Social Snap, focuses on social media measurement, providing marketers with a powerful social analytics platform that combines data from social channels, web analytics, and social media monitoring tools.

Nan Dawkins's latest articles

Data

My Date With Big Data

I recently closed the doors on my company, a social media analytics start-up. As soon as I dispose of my house, cars, and other major worldly possessions, I’m heading out for some extensive travel to far-away places (a mid-life gap year, if you will). And on the threshold of these major changes, I can’t help […]

Data

Is Google’s Universal Analytics A Game Changer?

Google’s Universal Analytics is now available to the public, and some have speculated that it will change the way businesses use data. But, is Universal Analytics (UA) truly a game changer? Many of the benefits promised by UA hinge on two new wrinkles in the platform: 1) the ability to get data into UA from […]

Data

Social Data Proficiency: A Key Success Driver For Agencies

As social media becomes an increasingly vital component of marketing strategies, agencies are getting more comfortable with associated social data. For example, analyzing brand mentions and sentiment data is becoming fairly common practice, even among smaller shops. But, as I’ve pointed out earlier, social listening data is just the tip of the iceberg. The variety […]

Data

The Truth About Social Media Measurement

I’ve spent over two years developing a social media measurement platform. One of the most important things I’ve learned during that time is that what counts as good and valuable measurement is unique to almost every client. While there are some commonalities between companies in similar industry verticals, my experience suggests strongly that there simply […]

Data

Selling Social Media To Senior Execs: Tips For Making The Case With Data

For many senior executives, the jury is still out on social media.  They want proof in the form of hard numbers that show business value.  Budgets aren’t likely to grow until they get it. Unfortunately, the data needed to make the case are dispersed, and analysis takes time (something social media marketers don’t often have). […]

Data

Social Media Metrics: Measuring Business Value When Sales Take Place Offline

Social media marketing can be an effective way to generate exposure among potential new customers. Done right, that exposure can be translated into engagement, interest, and eventually, a sale. Unfortunately, social media doesn’t always get the credit it deserves for that sale, especially when transactions do not take place on the web site. Here are […]

Data

7 Enemies Of Social Media Measurement

If you are serious about measuring social media, here are seven pitfalls that can lead you down the dark path to frustration and failure (and perhaps to the unemployment line): Low Hanging Fruit Basic social media metrics are readily available, easy to get and generally cheap (or free).  But if you are serious about measurement, […]

Data

Fifty Shades Of Social Media Measurement Tools

(Full Disclosure:  The author’s company sells a social media measurement product) At least once a week I run across an article or blog post about tools for measuring social media. Headlines like “5 Social Media Measurement Tools That Save Time and Money” or “Six Free Social Media Measurement Tools for B2B” have become as common […]

Data

Measuring Social Engagement: 3 Ways To Identify High Value Content

Today’s internet users are bombarded with content.  As a result, they are tuning out the noise and raising the bar on the content they choose to pay attention to. For social media marketers, this means that it is more important than ever to understand what content will resonate with target groups and which will fall […]

Data

More Facebook Insights: How To Calculate 30 Day Metrics

Facebook provides a wealth of data that can be used to calculate many useful metrics not readily available in the standard Insights report (see last month’s column for three examples).  Unfortunately, Facebook does not segment data on a monthly basis.  All Facebook data is segmented into daily, 7-day, or 28-day time periods. This means that […]

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