Tag Archives: social communications

Change is Necessary in Social Media

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There is an old adage that goes “change or die” and in today’s technology marketplace that is definitely the motto that drives much of the business practices in companies, ours included.

 

Social Media Networks Change Constantly, Rapidly

 

They have to keep up with changes with competitors, changing laws, marketplace demands and innovating technology.  It’s a good thing for you and your business although at first it can seem overwhelming to the uninitiated.  At Social Report, our social analytics tools, monitoring capabilities and discovery agents are constantly being updated and kept in sync with changes in the marketplace and to the networks we monitor.  We have had a rash of changes recently and thought we would take a break from discussing strategy and show off a bit of what’s been going on around here recently.
 
New Design!

Our website and our tool underwent a major design overhaul both for look and feel and for usability.  We love the way it looks and from your feedback so do you!  We are always open to hear more feedback so keep it coming!

One of the ways we re-engineered the tool was to rework the dashboard and here are some key changes:

 

Project Oriented Layout

Organizing your social and web properties is key. Whether you are doing it for your business or for your clients and customers, being able to manage them in logical groupings (projects) helps with reporting, clean separation of reporting data and with aforementioned ability to manage team access.

There is no limit to how many projects you can setup.

 

Team Access

 

Manage team and customer access to your projects. Setup authorized users who will be able to access the projects. Control their level of access (i.e. reports only, or campaign publishing, etc). You can finally stop sharing a single login, get others to help out with your day-to-day operation and perhaps even take a vacation!

 

White Label Management

 

White label and re-branding is now fully automated. Upload your logo, setup your domain, and customize links. This is available to all Agency and Ultimate subscribers.

 

Affiliate and Reseller Portal

 

There several great features offered in our reseller program like ability to sell our standard packages as well as ability to create your own subscription plans. Our latest version offers you full control over this as well as provides thorough reporting that enables you to track your reselling performance and earnings.

 

Exporting Data

If you are using SocialReport already you know we have some great reporting options. It is possible, however, that sometimes you may have a need to present a data in a special way. Instead of trying to build a complex web based utility that would enable you to do that, we’ve take a much simpler route. You can now download your data and build your reports utilizing the tool that does it best – Microsoft Excel!

 

Again our users have made all this possible.  We love to hear from you and we appreciate your support.  Onward and upward, my friends.

What A Good Social Media Marketer Already Knows

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There are few who are social marketers that actually love analytics. Likewise there are few who write marketing copy, status updates or builds communities using social networks that love statistics. We are social people who like being social. That’s what makes us good at social media. Social media professionals are far more expressive than analytical. However, our job as professionals demands that we be analytical as well.

 

Objectives & goals set us apart as professionals

 
The thing that separates us from the non-professionals is that we have objectives and goals and are held accountable for creating demonstrable results. We need an easy to use tool to help us to justify our time and marketing direction to our clients. We need a tool that helps us to course correct. It’s necessary to move towards our goals and objectives. SocialReport focused on finding solutions to reporting and analytics problems and helping people to succeed with their social marketing campaigns. We need a powerful but easy to use tool set to measure and monitor our online activity.

 

Social media is social. It’s about people. It’s about getting others to see a little bit of themselves in us. It’s about being friends. It’s about creating a community. It’s about converting followers into fans of our brand, product or service. It’s about being genuine and authentic. It’s a people business and as people, the majority of us are driven more by emotion than actual facts. Every good sales person knows this. How people feel about our brand is critical.

 

I can back this up by discussing more complex concepts such as cognitive linguistics, ambient awareness, managing and understanding different the types of personalities, individual communication strategies and behavioral science.

 

In the end, most of the time, people don’t know why they respond to things or what they are actually revealing through their responses. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter either. I just need to know how to create the right stimulus that people will respond to and how to create the right emotional attachments to the brand. I also want to write in a way that allows people to create mental anchors to the brand. But first, I have to give them a reason to listen and to care. That starts with me. I have to care first and I must be genuine about it.

 

Social media isn’t a megaphone

 

One-way marketing messages do not and will not work in “social” media. Conversation does. The only way to get around this, is to have an already established brand that has been running a successful traditional marketing campaign for a long number of years or a news service and even for many of those brands, they are successful in the social media space because they are responsive and conversational. There are a massive number of case studies to support this.

 

af•fin•i•ty [uh-fin-i-tee] noun

1. a natural liking for or attraction to a person, thing, idea, etc.

2. a person, thing, idea, etc., for which such a natural liking or attraction is felt.

3. relationship by marriage or by ties other than those of blood (distinguished from consanguinity).

4. inherent likeness or agreement; close resemblance or connection

 
In the end, social is a two-way and not a one-way communications device. Increasing engagement is directly proportional to increasing stimulus. What I am looking for is intensity of feeling towards the brand and increasing the intensity of conversation around the brand.

 

Be a good host

 

In many ways, services such as Twitter are like a talk show. We need to relate with our audience. That means breaking the fourth wall. Talking at people instead of talking with people is not social. It’s not networking. It’s advertising. Advertising is also good but that’s not the purpose of a Twitter account or even a Facebook page. They are PR tools and I’m acting as a spokesperson. I’m not giving a speech. I’m participating in a conversation around my brand and with my community.

 

Think about going to a party and not listening or responding to conversation. Imagine going to a party and just talking and talking and talking… Not a two-way dialog but just talking at people. Twitter and Facebook are the same way. My job is to gather a crowd. That means being witty, funny, engaging and interesting. It does not mean making pitch after pitch. That approach doesn’t work in real life. It doesn’t work online.

 

Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.

The Art of Social Media Monitoring

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Original article written by Sean Clark

This is the third in the series of “Practical Social Media”, looking in depth at how to set-up and run Social Media as part of your overall business strategy. If you have any areas you would like me to cover please let me know via the comments section below.

“Hi my name’s Chris, what do you do when you’re not hanging out with a bunch of Twitter geeks?”

And after Chris Brogan has used his favourite opening line to start a conversation at a local Social Networking meet-up he does as much as he can to keep the other guy talking so he can listen.

Two ears and one mouth, or what ever cliche you would like to use, listening is the key to getting people to trust you, like you and ultimately buy from you. Social Media is no different; before you go in shooting from the hip, peek around the saloon door first, see if you can catch the whispers in the room.

This is going to be a first real step into using Social Media as a business tool. Now it gets practical and monitor what’s going on in this space.

 

Have you done your homework?

 

In my previous post I talked about using Social Media to solve business problems; what are the ones you are trying to solve? If it is reaching a wider audience to increase sales then you want to find key influencers within your marketplace. If you are trying to establish yourself as an expert in a particular sector, to gain trust and in turn increase sales then you will be looking to help people with Social Media.

For both of these goals we use the same tools, but in slightly different ways. The first thing we try to determine is if there is an opportunity for us within Social Media for our particular business.

 

Let’s get set-up


We’re going to start with Twitter, not just because it’s my favourite tool, butbecause I think it is the easiest tool from which to see possible opportunities. It’s real-time nature means that even in the narrowest niche you are likely to see some action. There are more advanced Social Media monitoring tools which I will cover later in the series.

For the examples in this exercise I am going to be running two imaginary, but related businesses, to demonstrate how to use Twitter differently dependant on your objectives. In the first instance I am going to be a running shoe manufacturer or brand, in the second I am going to be a running shoe retailer.

We need to identify some keywords pertinent to our industry. Very much like you would when trying to optimise a web site for the search engines. In fact if you have a commercial web site you may have already done this, and can draw from that previous research. For others just select some basic words that would be used when discussing your product or service, these will help demonstrate the principles here.

For my test, example words might be: jogging, running, 10k, 5k, 5 mile, 10 mile, marathon, half-marathon, trainers, running shoes.

If you haven’t already go to Twitter.com and create yourself an account. The purpose of this account will be to listen in on conversations. We are not going to interact, therefore you don’t need to worry about user-names and profiles, feel free to make them up. You can also use an existing account if you wish, we won’t be following anyone just yet.

 

Finding influential people in your market

 

In the first trial we will be looking for influencers. The basis for this being that as a manufacturer I want to find people who may write or promote my product or brand for me.

We need to create a Twitter list to store people we may discover:

In Twitter, click on “Profile”, then “lists”, then “create a list”. Give your list a name, I will call mine “Key Influencers”, you can give it a description if you wish and make the list private if you don’t want anyone else to see it.

In the search box at the top of the page on Twitter enter your first keyword and hit return.

 

If you click on the screenshot to the left you can see the results for my search on the word “Marathon”. There are some unrelated Tweets in the results as you would expect, but amongst them are people Tweeting about Marathon running, potentially key people that may be of interest.

You can save this search by clicking the button on the top right, making it easier to return to at a later date.

 

For now scroll through the list of Tweets, click on the names of people of interest. In my example it would be people mentioning marathons in relation to running. A panel with their details will slide out; to the right of the green follow button is a silhouette of a head and shoulders, click on this, then click add to list and select your “Key Influencers” list, see screenshot below and to the left again.

 

There is no need to Follow these people at this stage if you don’t want to, you’ll be able to see all of their Tweets just by viewing the “Key Influencer”list.

Perform this search with your other keywords and repeat the process for 5-10 minutes a day for the next couple of weeks. We’ll come back and analyse the results in a future post.

 

 

Can I help you sir?

 

In the second version of our business scenario I am a retailer. This time I am looking to see if there is enough discussion around my market sector so that I stand a chance of getting myself noticed as an expert in the marketplace. Brands or manufacturers can also use this in addition to the “Key Influencer” search.

This time create a list based on the instructions above but name it “Questions”.

Using your keywords do a search on Twitter again but append a question mark, for example “running shoes ?” – without the quotes.

 

Now we have a list of people asking questions about running shoes. Add these people to your list, you can follow these people later if appropriate, but make sure to save the search.

Also, keep a list of the questions being asked as they will prove valuable in the later stages of our Social Media Strategy. Repeat this process for all of your keywords and spend the next couple of weeks checking out the results on a daily basis.

There are various ways to perform this analysis, and some of this can be done using more advanced Social Media tools or third party web sites. The aim here is to get you exposed to Twitter with a specific goal in mind, and for you to experience the potentially rich information that lays not far from the surface of Social Media.

If you have any suggestions or questions please get in touch via the comments below. Otherwise see what you can unearth for your market sector and I will be back shortly with the next step in Practical Social Media.

Original Article

Clicks, Cakes, and the Limits of Social Media ‘Science’

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Written  by Tom Webster on August 22, 2011

There is an apocryphal story in the annals of market research that I particularly love about cake mix (“apocryphal,” by the way, is Greek for “a pile of crap,” so this probably isn’t true – but I’ll tell the story anyway.) The story goes that back in the 50′s, Betty Crocker had developed its first completely one-box cake mix – just add water and bake. After some initial buzz, sales began to disappoint, so the Betty Crocker executives did a series of focus groups to suss out the problem.

Imagine tackling this problem today, using social media monitoring, or tracking clickstream behavior. Betty Crocker might observe fewer clicks to their recipe page, or perhaps fewer positive mentions. Coupon activity from register scans might decline. Positive sentiment for Duncan Hines might increase. We might learn that the best time to tweet about cakes is 10:00 am on a Sunday. Maybe we’d record an increase in the number of tweets about the poor quality of Betty Crocker’s mix.

We could take all of this online behavior – all of these tweets and clicks – and determine a few things. Some of our conclusions would be correct, while others would be off the mark. Mining this information is crucial to the lifeblood of the organization – don’t get me wrong. But bits and bytes will only ever tell you the “what.” They rarely give you the straight story on the why.

One thing I’ve learned in about 20 years of doing qualitative research – people are not as expressive about products and services as we’d like them to be. Often, we cannot clearly articulate what makes us uncomfortable, or dissatisfied, with a given product, so we fall back on the easy answers. “It doesn’t taste right.” “It costs too much.” “I don’t have enough time.” These are the first things I hear in any focus group, before Stockholm Syndrome really sets in. This is when the experienced qualitative researcher reaches into their bag of tricks, and helps the respondents along – and uncovers the real reasons behind these perceptions of quality, value and importance. These data, of course, are anecdotal until you can test these assumptions, and social media is providing us with more and more tools to do just that. But social media often gives us the easy answers – not the true answers.

Back to Betty Crocker. Unable to mine Twitter, our 1950′s executives did a series of focus groups with housewives that had tried, and ultimately rejected their cake mix. Much to their surprise, they realized that these ladies thought the cakes tasted just fine, and were pretty good values. Instead, the insight they developed over time was that the cake mixes were a little too easy. In postwar America, as their husbands worked long days, these stay-at-home moms were a little embarrassed about the fact that all they had to do to have a delicious cake on the table for their men to enjoy after work was just add water and stir. In short, they felt guilty.

This is why you now have to add an egg, or perhaps a little oil, to a cake mix. Certainly these ingredients could be incorporated into the package – we do have a little history of food science in this country. But adding these one or two ingredients made it feel like baking again, and not just assembling. These women didn’t just want cakes – they wanted to feel good.

The numbers only give you half the story – and I say this as someone who makes his living telling the stories of numbers. The operative word there, of course, is story. It’s easy to be seduced by social media data, especially by those who loudly proclaim that they have the numbers on their side. Numbers aren’t on anyone’s side. I’ve had a lifelong battle with them, trust me. Adding insights to data is more than just putting flesh on the bones of an otherwise solid skeleton. Often, you don’t know what you think you know merely by dredging tweets.

No, data without insights is just ignorance.

Link to Original article


Book review of Social Media Analytics by Marshall Sponder

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Written by Jenna Levy on marketingconversation.com August 16, 2011

McGraw-Hill just sent me its latest and greatest and asked if out of the kindness of my heart, I would take a look and review. I have to mix it up with an intelligent read every now and again and luckily Social Media Analytics- Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics fit the bill. Author Marshall Sponder brings with him a wealth of knowledge and experience with membership of the Web Analytics Association under his belt. In Social Media Analytics, his goal is to squeeze all beneficial information out of the valuable marketing tool that social media is. Four basic and important instructions:

  • Choose the best social media platform for your needs
  • Set up the right processes to achieve your goals
  • Extract the hidden meaning from all the data you collect
  • Quantify your results and determine ROI

At the end of the day, ROI is always the golden goose. Even point of sale systems (POS) are relied upon more heavily to transmit transactions via social media platforms and technologies. More and more retail outlets are even updating their cash registers to be social media savvy- which makes perfect sense, because the technology is there.

“While many people may be willing to settle for “good enough” measures and estimates of the value of a tweet or Facebook fan or friend, in the coming years businesses will desire more than “good enough” proxies for, doing calculations of ROI. They will want, and are even now asking for the hard numbers with all the data, much like a financial statement.”

-Sponder

Social Media Analytics is well-organized and interspersed with case studies to prove Sponder’s points. The case studies are relevant and well-written. A personal favorite is Integrasco and Vodafone in the UK, a campaign aiming to target the emerging claim that the mobile phone industry in the U.K. is becoming more and more notorious for poor customer service. Integrasco’s four principles of approach included listening, analyzing, acting and achieving. Over two years, Vodafone increased its online buzz share by 6 percent and made Vodafone the second-most-talked-about operator in the U.K. Through branded channels on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and its own forum, Vodafone built a strong online community and proved that social media analytics ultimately improved customer satisfaction.

Sponder also introduces a plethora of both older and newer social media software programs and platforms. One that I’ve been meaning to explore for Marketing Conversation’s benefit is Sysomos Audience, designed to link current audiences to similar Websites and then compare opposing scores in currency values. Another is Follower Wonk, which finds influencers by geolocation and exports your findings into an easy-to-use spreadsheet.

In the static that is the World Wide Web, Sponder strives to improve the “signal-to-noise ratio.” He wades through the bog known as search engine results pages and champions the combination of artificial intelligence with human interaction. Glide Intelligence was another software program that piqued my interest- using an analytics platform charged with Viterbi logic. The Viterbi analyzes all content for context and finds key data points for categories like sentiment, relevance, association and tone.

Interesting and surprising factoid I learned? Twitter users are more engaged with brands than Facebook fans are. Twitter users are more likely to purchase and to recommend individual brands. Facebook fans are more drawn by discounts and promotions, but here is even more evidence that the medium does indeed affect the message.

Props to Mr. Sponder for providing a wealth of technology and marketing related advice. If you’re looking for profiles of the top analytics tools for the next five years, I highly recommend Social Media Analytics. Be sure to carve out some time for play after though, you’re going to want to test drive about 53450883854 of the programs described.

Social Analytics Deliver the Right Messages to Right Audiences

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If you are like me and I suspect that you are, while we understand logic, we are driven by communication. We like people. We have a genuine desire to help people and solve problems. Measuring and analyzing data is necessary on a professional level. It also helps us to zero in on the right messages and to craft our presentation.

MFor those of us who would rather write, emote, capture interest and maintain attention, tracking and analyzing data is a chore. However, it is very necessary to ensure that we are moving in the right direction. Finding the right tools for people like us can be a challenge. We are looking for tools that are easy to use and descriptive. We want key data but without having to quagmire ourselves in numbers. We get the importance of data points and response but we want that data to be chunked in a way that is easy for us to assimilate and apply.

MIn other words, we want to focus on what we do best; communicate in brief bursts of status updates and we want to be effective.

Social Analytics Allows for Quick and Effective Responses

The answer to this need is a tool set that is easy to use. Analytics that are broken down into chunks of information that help us to create a cognitive awareness of our success or failure. The easier the tool is to use, the better. Time is always a factor. The right social analytics will help us to achieve our objectives with a minimal time footprint.

MNo matter our background in analytics and monitoring, what we want to is a tool-set that we can start using immediately and gain an immediate benefit from. However, as we become more familiar with the analytics and the data contained in the tool-set, we want to be able to follow that depth. Ultimately becoming the masters of response and reaction. By creating an awareness of how people are responding to our social campaign, we are able to zero in with precision and deliver higher quality message that create a higher quality of response. It’s one thing to say that our objective is to create value. It’s another to craft personally relevant messages that are directed to the right audience and in the right way.

Confessions of a Social Marketing Strategist

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Metrics and analytics for our social accounts… It can be pretty daunting. Most of us who use social are people who get and understand other people. We tend to be dynamic communicators with a deep empathy towards other people. We’ve trained ourselves to pickup on nuances in text messages encoded with emotion. Over the years, we’ve mastered our ability to hear the feelings behind the words.

MIn social, we lack most of the key cues for good communication. We’ve learned to decode messages encoded with clicks of the keyboard in the absence of body postures, voice inflection and tone. Anyone who produces content for social services knows that this is a skill. It’s a skill we’ve honed with research and practice. Digital communications can be a challenge because we cannot rely on physical or visual social cues. We have to be masters of digital words and have an ability to fill in the gaps.

Decode Digital Communications for Real Connections

MSuch people are very good at zeroing in on emotion and feeling. We have to be. It’s our trade. We’ve learned to stir emotions and get people excited about products and services through the use of our words. We are able to craft messages that get people excited and interested in our messages. We have learned how to decode comments and mentions and respond appropriately. We are masters of digital communication.

MThen there’s the other side of social communications. We are held accountable to clients and employers. We love what we do but we have to justify either our time or our billable hours. While we have a deep understanding of the emotional side of people, we are also responsible for tracking our efforts and proving that we are producing results.

MThe other part of metrics and analytics is, we have no other way to know if we are coming closer to our goals and objectives or moving further away. We are results driven. We have to monitor factors such as, reach, response, action, and conversion. It’s not all about the conversation. It’s also about justifying what we are doing and quantifying our efforts. We are held accountable.

Why Social Analytics Matter to You

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People who are charged with the responsibility of managing social media accounts on behalf of a client or employer need to measure and track our results to demonstrate that we are producing results. We need to know that we are reaching our intended target audience. We need to be mindful that we are getting the right message to the right people and be able to demonstrate that they are responding.

MWhen we log-in to a social media tool-set, we want to feel excited, empowered and in control. The right social media analytics tools will makes us feel that way from the first moment we log-in and connect our accounts.

Social Monitoring & Analytics Tools Make Us More Effective

Social media monitoring and analytics should be easy to use and understood with a minimum of time invested and a low-learning curve. We should be able to jump right in. Strong tools provide insight into the effectiveness of a social media campaign. The result is that the right tool-set allows us to measure and deliver a higher ROI to our clients and employers.

We want to set goals and objectives and measure them. We want to be able to track click-throughs, mentions, retweets, likes and comments in an almost effortless minimum amount of time. We want our social tracking and analytics software to do the work for us, allowing us to shape our content and messages with a finely-tuned precision.

MOnce we acquire that data, we can break it down, measure and adjust. Social media is an dynamic flow of information and connections. The right tools help us to manage that flow and adjust appropriately to present conditions.