Howdy, y’all!

(Wait…we’re not southerners. can we really say “Howdy, y’all”…?)

Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for you in today’s Daily Carnage:

1. Awario is dropping some knowledge on how you can measure the success of your social media efforts
2.  CMO.com spilled the beans on how you can foster creativity among your employees
3. Spark’s newest ad is adorable. Watch it.

Questions? Let’s dive in…

Wild to think that “social media” wasn’t a widely-used term 10 years ago…

Today, everyone is on it to show off their travels, where they’re eating, and tagging each other in memes (we’re tagging all of you in this one (h/t to Kristen Goodin from our FB Group for sharing that one)).

But if you’re a brand, using social media has a totally different goal. All marketers and content creators want their social media efforts to be beneficial, aka create some type of ROI. The real question is, how do you calculate your social media ROI? 💭

According to Awario, there are two steps to calculating social media success:

1) Engagement Metrics
These key details (likes/favorites, shares, followers, subscribers, comments, etc.) are all trackable using the platform’s specific analytics feature. There are also outside analytics sites that you can invest in to keep track for you.

2) Performance Metrics (KPIs)
Key performance indicators are all the actions taken when a consumer leaves the social media realm. This can consist of website visits, email and website subscribers, leads, sales, and revenue.

Now it’s time to link engagement metrics with performance metrics and make them BFFs. 👯 To see if your social media plan of action is paying off, check your site’s analytics and look for:

• How much organic traffic is coming from the social pages you utilize.
• How much traffic comes from paid and sponsored social ads.
• Determine the quality of traffic from these platforms: bounce rate, time on site, and pages per visitor.

Wanna keep up discovering your social media success? 🏆 There’s a “Read Now” button for a reason…

Managing an entire team is the FARTHEST thing from easy. Especially when it comes to fostering creativity. (There’s really no “i” in “team” here.)

To stay ahead of the rest, teams need to be as innovative and creative as possible at the speed of lightning. Literally.

If you’re finding yourself in a creative rut with your team, CMO.com has already heard you and rounded up the best creative tips from fellow creative experts. (Taking notes is encouraged.)

1) Make Time For Creativity

With endless deadlines and problems to solve daily, finding time to actually sit down and be creative gets lost. Being creative takes time, so make sure to check in and assess if your teams can actually deliver on what is being asked of them.

If there are other projects outside of the day-to-day deliverables, make those available to the team, too.

• Jamie Myrold, VP of Experience Design at Adobe

2) Take A Step Back

As a leader, it’s important to talk through the expectations and guidelines before your team dives into a project. Imagine not being clear on a budget from the start of a project. Your team will be running into endless walls.

Then, take a step back and let your team run with it. Let them try new things and investigate in the guidelines you set.

• Jay Acunzo, founder of Unthinkable Media and author of “Break The Wheel”

We ran out of space, but luckily there’s still 5 more tips for you to take notes on 👇👇👇

Marketers should be pumped for voice search. Parents, on the other hand, are about to rue the day it was invented. The new generation is growing up knowing how to use smartphones by age two. Let’s think about this for a second.

When you were a kid, we bet you made silly faces. And your mom or dad’s response went something like, “If you don’t stop, your face will get stuck like that.” When we grew up we believed our parents. All the kids today have to do is say, “Hey Alexa, will my face get stuck if I make silly faces?…”

And Alexa will tell them the truth. This hilariously adorable ad is brought to you by Spark. Give it a watch👇