Tag Archives: social media conversion tracking

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.

Social media isn’t a speech; it’s a conversation

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Social media isn’t a speech; it’s a conversation. It’s relationship-based selling unless one already has established their brand through traditional marketing. A big part of having a social media presence is being present and participating in an ongoing dialog with our audience.

 

Investigate

 

What do people want? What are their needs? In the case of SocialReport is it really monitoring and metrics? Not really. It’s higher engagement and increased affinity for the brand. Monitoring, analyzing, and metrics are a tool and a means to an end. It’s how we as marketers know if what we are doing is working. Do more of what does work and less of what doesn’t work. The only way to make incremental adjustments to our messages is to track and analyze. The real problem that requires a solution is increasing actions taken on what we post and ultimatelysales conversion and/or click-throughs (in the case of a blog property).

 

How do we increase actions taken on our status updates?

 

It’s not through one-way marketing messages. Nobody likes to be sold. Everyone likes to buy. Don’t post about the features of your product or service, post about the benefits. How can I help people? What problems can I help them to solve? What can I do for my audience. How can I make it about them and not about me?  Social media is unique in that it is a two-way communications device. Twitter and Facebookand just about every other social site’s primary functionality is as a conversational tool. (Ads and other features are secondary to the ability for people to communicate messages to oneanother.) Think about this for a moment. What do we call these groups of services? Social networking? Social media? What is it that we do? Social marketing.

 

so•cial [soh-shuh l] adjective

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable; gregarious.
3. of, pertaining to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event.
4. living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than inisolation: People are social beings.
5. of or pertaining to human society, especially as a body divided into classes according to status: social rank.

 

We use words like “social” and “community” for a reason. The online services that we use arecalled social networking services for a reason. These are not one-way communication devicesintended for marketing messages. What we are trying to accomplish is to convert followersinto actual fans and promote affinity for our brand. To borrow from Liz Strauss, we have to give people a reason to care. I find myself constantly asking the question, “Why should people care?” A lot of social media is Sales & Marketing 101: It’s not about me, it’s about them. It’s always about “them” in social media.

 

Increasing Engagement

 

The solution to increasing engagement across social networks is to be social; to engage and to interact. To provide status updates that are personally relevant and useful to both Twitter andFacebook audiences. (And most other social networking sites.) Bombarding social propertieswith marketing messages does not work. Direct selling and waging an ad campaign on a Twitter page or a Facebook page does not work. If I identify and solve a problem for people, that will work.
 
Again using SocialReport as an example; the challenge that SocialReport’s audience has is, “How do I increase my engagement, drive actions based on my status updates, increase my reach,increase my number of impressions, and increase the volume and intensity of conversationaround my brand? How do I get my brand to stick in the mind’s of my readers?” Those are the problems that need to be solved. The ancillary problem is, how do I measure if I’m solving those problems? That’s where Social Report comes in.

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

4 Steps to Instant Social Network Omnipotence

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Social Report is committed to continually adding features that will make social reporting and curating your social media efforts easier. With Social Report, you can now have a daily summary of all  your social events delivered to you encapsulated in an email. The benefit to you is that you can now access this data very simply and easily right on your smart phone.

MHow many times have we had something important to say while travelling, weren’t necessarily able to open our laptop and post status updates from our smart phone? Shouldn’t we be able to access our social reporting from the same device? With a few clicks of your mouse, you can activate a daily event summary email in your Social Report account. Your daily email notification will bring together all the relevant events across your social channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Yelp, WordPress, Digg, Bebo, Google Analytics, Foursquare and more. That’s a pretty exciting and powerful tool. Again, as simple to access as checking your email. You can scope out new followers and mentions on Twitter, new comments on your blogs, views of your videos on YouTube, web site activity analysis and much more.

 

The Daily Alert is Your Social Heart Beat

 

Quickly look at it on your mobile phone or a tablet to gain an immediate understanding of what’s happening in your or your customer’s world. You are in control. You are empowered. You have your finger on the pulse of your social activity.

MMore importantly, you can give answers on the fly when your client or boss calls to ask you how the conference is going and if you are gaining traction while away. You’ll know because you are up to date. (And BlogWorld Los Angeles is just around the corner.)

MScrolling through the daily event summary is efficient and the information you want is easily identifiable. Instead of spending an hour collecting this information daily by going into each and every network trying to figure out what’s new, quickly glancing through the daily summary report will give you an instant cognition of your social activity.  Events are organized in a simple and intuitive listing. Each social account is presented with a network specific section. You can also forward this email to others, like your customers. MHow easy is it to activate the Daily Social Report? 3 mouse clicks and 30 seconds of your time.

1. Login to Social Report.

2. In the left hand sidebar is the Settings widget, all the way at the bottom. Click that.

3. When the menu opens, click Notifications at the bottom of the list.

4. What you want is the Daily Digest, click Save and you are done.   M

The daily notification email will now provide you with a detailed summary of all events across your social channels for the previous day.   Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.

Respond, Decode with the Right Data

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For social media professionals, our job is to be responsive-able. We have to respond and do so appropriately in real time. We are responsive-able professionals. We have to be able to decode digital text and to be able to perceive the underlying feelings/emotion. Our job is to be ever presently mindful of the human condition and the emotions which drive people to react or respond.

 

Identifying Personalities & Motivations Requires Social Analytics

 

We used to have to do this effectively with very little data. We couldn’t rely on our eyes or our ears as our social streams grew.  Anyone who has managed a social account, has honed the craft of identifying myriad personalities and motivations with precision. Having a series of tools at hand, that can help us track trending topics, search streams, set-up goals and get our arms around the vast information load is an invaluable addition.

In other words, we become masters of being responsive-able. That is our craft. We connect with strangers daily in a very human way.  We try to contribute a perspective that is genuinely reflective of the brand’s personality without sacrificing the quality of the conversation. To do that, finding the right people who can benefit from our brand or service is crucial. Knowing what was said and when before jumping into the Twitter or Facebook pool is a requirement. Most importantly; reflect, think, execute, and brand. But do it with the right data and facts so it’s real, unique and measurable to your bottom line.

Have you wanted to know what people are saying in your Twitter Stream about an industry or brand?  Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.

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.