SM2, Techrigy’s social media monitoring solution, gives you the ability to track and monitor what people are saying about your clients and their brands throughout the social media ecosystem. Blogs, wikis, embedded video (YouTube), microblogs (Twitter) and social networks are where the buzz, good and bad, originates- far before it percolates down to the traditional media. When your agency is pitching new clients (or additional work from existing clients), SM2 becomes an incredibly powerful tool for differentiating you from your competitors.
Monitoring in Real Time is the New Paradigm
- When a rumor becomes a problem in social media it may already be too late.
- When a trend creates an opportunity, social media sources are going to be the early indicators of how to respond.
- When an online conversation becomes a meme and starts to spread it can literally explode overnight, changing your clients’ world.
Social Media monitoring ensures that your agency not only knows about these trends, it ensures that you know about them first. This offers first-mover advantage for your clients, giving you both the opportunity to mitigate risk, jump on trends, and moderate just how their brands and products are being reviewed, praised or criticized across the full spectrum of social media.
What is Social Media?
One definition is that social media consists of any medium where users can generate content on the web via online tools and networks:
- Bloggers publish anything they want: Rumors about a company’s CEO? The stock gets hit instantly.
- Homegrown video can find thousands or millions of viewers overnight: Politician caught on a phone video cam doing something unusual? It’s now part of their ‘permanent record’.
- Microbloggers literally publish their every move and experience to friends and fans: Bad service in a restaurant chain? It’s out there in minutes and spreading.
- Social networks connect thousands of friends who exhibit ‘mob’ behavior: A concert by an ostensibly unknown band sells out in minutes.
That’s the power of social media. With social media monitoring via SM2 you can offer your clients instant feedback on how they and their brands are being portrayed, distributed, reviewed and perceived by real people in real time.
Demonstrating Expertise by Example
The most powerful thing you can show a potential client is something important that they don’t already know about their brand, product, service or competition.
With traditional tracking tools like search and news alerts you’re not offering anything the client can’t find on their own. These tools are universally available at no cost. While they are powerful and essential, they typically only index every few days or even weeks and their focus is on websites rather than social media platforms. As a result, the information you find has already been noted, commented on and distributed virally in social media.
SM2 doesn’t just gather the information, it helps you analyze and respond to it.
Use Social Media Monitoring Reports in Your Pitch
Preparing for an upcoming client meeting or presentation? Sign up for an SM2 Freemium Account, at no charge, and run a search based on keywords and information relevant to your client’s business:
- Brands
- People
- Products
- Competitors
- Partners
You’ll get current results in a variety of formats and from a complete sampling of the social media universe. The charts and results track sentiment (positive/negative), geographic distribution, weighting by influence and popularity and many other attributes. Within the application you can drill down to individual sources so you can enter the conversation on behalf of your client or alert them to important new influencers. All of the data is available as charts that can be copied and pasted into your presentation format.
While the Freemium Account is limited to two primary search terms (i.e. brands or company names) and 500 search results, this is usually more than enough data to demonstrate your advanced capabilities and provides a valuable real time ’snapshot’ of how social media monitoring works.
Tips for Incorporating Social Media Reports in your Presentation
The goal here is to demonstrate your expertise and whet their appetite for more information and analysis, not to serve up a full research report. The key concepts here are information and expertise. Analyze the trends in your SM2 reports and find a couple of examples of things that your client may not have been aware of. These become a slide or two each. Draw a story or situation analysis and response for each example:
- Example One: Perceived negative environmental impact of new product introduction appearing in blog posts and wikis. Response: Correct misperception and engage influential social media commentators to mitigate damage.
- Example Two: New product embraced by unexpected market sector. Response: Repurpose marketing and messaging to take advantage of emerging opportunity.
These examples position your agency as highly in tune with emerging trends and able to rapidly respond to opportunities and crises, both highly desirable traits in an agency.
Profiting with SM2 from Techrigy
SM2 offers more than just its value as a tool for developing business. The service becomes a potential profit center for your agency as you offer the ability to monitor the growing social media ecosystem across your entire client portfolio. SM2’s paid Premium versions offer flexible pricing models so you can scale your costs as you scale up your offerings. Unlike services that require six figure annual commitments, SM2 can be purchased as a subscription based on usage or via a reasonable annual rate for more intensive usage. The service is also scalable for use in any size agency from a single practitioner to a global leader.