stephanie’s posterous

Getting started 1: Do you know what people are saying about you?

19th October 2009, 07:42 pm

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

In tomorrow’s post we will look at how to estabish the aims of your use of social media and how you can measure success.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The original article is here, and the list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

Recently, I was invited to give a talk to a small group of managers about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) used to measure social media (SM) campaigns.

Some of the points we discussed that evening are outlined below.

Harsh reality 1: Goals attempt to be strategic BUT…
John F. Kennedy once said: “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”

For corporate strategy, this means once employees understand it they need to put their heart into reaching the targets. Our first attempt to master this challenge resulted in failing in our first strategic objective.

Attempt 1: Reaching out to customers with the help of SM.

We learned a few months down the road that we had not spent enough time developing a strategic goal suited to us. We tried again as shown below.

Attempt 1a: SM should help improve client and potential customer engagement.

Harsh reality 2: Developing comprehensive objectives takes time
The revised objective above made more sense, but the next reality check came with having to formulate up to three KPIs that would align with our SM strategy.

For this we needed to define objectives that address these issues:

- what objectives need to be accomplished (spell it out)?

- what quantity is expected?
- what time-frame will be looked at?
- what quality level represents acceptable performance (define quality, please)?
- what kind of budget are we talking about (human resources and money)?

Considering our revised strategic objective, we specified the following:

Objective for SM: We want to improve the number and quality of blog comments we get in the next four months. We budget about fours hours to write and prepare each blog post (i.e. we post twice a week).

Sounds simple, but you have to identify what you mean by quality regarding comments. For instance, is it based on the number of words in each comment, links to posts or white papers elsewhere on the web, or something altogether different? (See also: KPI experts’ 5 secrets.)

Harsh reality 3: Did you remember your baseline?
As the above outlines, two to three KPIs or objectives must be identified and spelled out properly. But in order to monitor your KPIs, you need a baseline to start with, which is a picture of your blog and its ‘vital’ statistics at a certain point in time.

Without the Baseline you have nothing to measure against and little, if any, control of your blog project and the progress you want to make.

With the baseline you can start to compare your performance improvements over time and show how you are getting better at your job…

Reality check: Because we thought fixing other things was more important than watching trends, we did not calculate the baseline at the beginning of the project. WRONG! Trend watching loses relevance if you cannot trace things all the way back. Calculate the baseline as early and quickly as possible, and watch the trend like a hawk from the beginning.

Harsh reality 4: Using the wrong benchmark measure is expensive
According to the dictionary,

Return on Investment (ROI) is a measure of a company’s profitability, equal to a fiscal year’s income divided by equity and long-term debt; and,
ROI measures how effectively the organization is using its resources to generate a financial profit.

Some experts suggest that we link SM expenditures to how they affect sales, or improve average sale value and reduce service center costs. This is then supposed to help us measure ROI. Unfortunately, it fails.

For instance, how can one show that social media has increased sales? Dell tried to do so with its Twitter tweets about special offers. But neither they nor anybody else can show beyond a reasonable doubt that such efforts actually increased sales, rather than simply cannibalizing other channels.

Reality check: Last week I had lunch with a client who engaged me in a lively discussion about one of my blog posts he had read.

This could be one of the qualitative indicators for social media campaigns - how to measure soft ROI (check the examples from her job) that may not be part of ROI but part of the KPIs for assessing benefits attained with social media, such as gaining expert status and trust with clients.

More resources on how to measure ROI for social media:

Jeff Bullas:
8 steps to demonstrate positive return on investment for social media marketing
Don Bartholomew: Social Media ROI Part 1: Framework
Erik Qualman: Video - Social media ROI: Socialnomics – this is GREAT, it explains why ROI fails to work…

Bottom line
By New Year’s Eve we will once again have resolved to better measure our SM efforts in 2010. I suggest you start now with these pointers.

Take-aways (in random order)

1.
Use statistics to compare to traditional media: Remember, clicks seem to garner the most appreciation from the c-suite for what Social Media can give in terms of cost-benefit analysis.
2. Set 2-3 comprehensive goals for 2010: Clicks, views, sales re-tweets (RTs), lead generation and so forth – establish a baseline for December and watch the trends go in the right direction.
3. Cost-benefit analysis is required: Use quantitative as well as qualitative/soft measures. Develop KPIs that make sense and your stakeholders find relevant.

One thing we know is that measuring social media ‘buzz’ is probably about as difficult as measuring PR ‘media impressions’.

And keep Maddie Grant’s insight in mind when addressing cost-benefit issues of ROI, namely:

“I think while we’re all continuing to think a lot about this issue, it’s becoming less and less about simply proving our case to the powers that be and more and more about finding a simple, replicable system for what’s worth measuring and why.”

"Mapping categories by usage frequency and retention also provides insights into pricing models. Quadrants I and IV (the right-hand side) are better suited, on average, to subscription (if supported by the respective app storefront) and advertising-supported models. The main reason is that these apps have perceived enduring value by consumers over a long period of time, and therefore more successfully retain their user bases. For ad-supported apps, this high repeat usage translates into more ad impressions served. Categories on the left-hand side, Quadrants II and III, are better suited for one-time download fees. Those apps may provide higher immediate satisfaction to users but their content, once consumed, rapidly loses their value."

(found via @DDB_Budapest)

Great (funny) speech at Web 2.0 Expo NY 09 about the viral effects of hashtags. (via @Scobleizer)

"...marketing and product have converged. The consumer doesn´t separate the marketing experience from the product experience." Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA

Great idea for the opening of Ikea's new store in Malmo, Sweden.
Credits where credits are due:
Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors, Gothenburg
Art Director: Adam Ulvegarde
Client: IKEA
Copywriter: Robert Lund

(via Creativity Online)

One of the most commonly repeated phrases in the era of the social web is that you don’t control your own message, your customers do.

While those of us working in the social arena can cite a number of examples where this has proven to be the case, more traditional brands can be reluctant to embrace this ideology. However, some interesting new search data from 360i might convince them otherwise.

In the company’s November whitepaper, which looks at the landscape of natural search, 360i purports that a majority of social media search listings that appear for brand-related queries are created by individuals not affiliated with the brand. In fact, “77% of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook listings that appeared for brand searches were controlled by a party other than the marketer.”

Essentially what customers, fans, and detractors are posting to social media sites are dominating the brand name search experience over social media content created by the brands themselves. This data clearly creates a legitimate reason for brands to be proactive with their social media presence, as participating in the exchange about their brand should improve the quantity and quality of customer-created social media content that searchers will happen upon.

360i also recommends that brands “cross-link owned domains and social media destinations. This creates a search ecosystem that will allow PageRank, domain history and strength to permeate.”

We’ve embedded the entire whitepaper below if you’d like to further dive in to 360i’s search findings.

 

360i_SearchWhitePaper09_111709