Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

AdAge: Survey says few CMOs think they’re effectively tracking social media

This article should be viewed an indicator of an approaching tipping point in social media monitoring and marketing:

“The survey of 400 executives found that 56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth; 59% don’t compensate any employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction; and only 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve customer complaints.”

“One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said marketing should take the lead in overseeing the customer experience and satisfaction. And he said addressing deficiencies in tracking and analyzing consumer feedback and buzz may be the key way CMOs can stake a claim to leadership.”

“From our standpoint, if there’s anybody who needs to be accountable for the customer experience, it’s the CMO,” Mr. Neale-May said. “Clearly what marketing needs to do to cover a lot of ground we’ve lost in the organization is more analytics, predictive modeling, and data integration and aggregation.”

That’s exactly what SM2 was designed to do.

(From Advertising Age)

(BTW, AdAge, why do you have a splash page? Don’t you know that it kills traffic by 50%?)

SM2 from Techrigy Gets Emotional: Sentiment, Tone and Emotion in Social Media

SM2 has always had a sentiment analysis tool designed to help users track positive/negative opinion on brands across conversations in social media. This week we took the sentiment analysis to an entirely new level by adding tools that measure tone and emotion.

Tone measures the overall tone of a social media conversation on a scale from very positive to somewhat positive to neutral to somewhat negative to very negative. With this tool you can now view results sorted by these criteria and combine them with other metrics like Popularity. If you are doing reputation management, for example, you might want to focus on high Popularity sources that are very negative for your initial engagement efforts.

Emotional Tone is a different kind of look. We offer the ability to view results that show strong emotional and even physical responses:

The emotive states we cover include:

Anger, Sadness, Social, Family, Friend, Anxiety, Bio, Body, Sexual, Ingest, Achieve, Home, Money, Religious, Death and Leisure-related. For example, Ingest-related would include references to eating, drinking, dieting, etc. The chart above is from a search on Obama’s Renew America campaign done with the AD Council so it accurately has emphasis on Social and Achieve-related emotional tone. The initiative is a volunteer service so those talking about it in social media are generally very positive and interested in the social and achievement aspects of the campaign.

As we continue to add additional features we’re always interested in feedback, ideas and examples of how you are using SM2 and what would be useful to you. Just shoot a note to support at techrigy dot com.

SlideShare: Techrigy’s CEO Aaron Newman on Social Media Marketing 101

US Airforce Flow Chart: Rules of Blogger Engagement

Thanks to StrivePR…

Our tax dollars at work and they get it right (and this flow is not for blog engagement only, any user-generated content):

Wall Street Journal on Social Media/web 2.0 Marketing

They actually really get it right. Based on interviews with 30 marketers. No subscription required at the time of this posting.

There’s a sea change going on!

O’Reilly on Twitter (he really, really likes it and so do I)

Like Tim O’Reilly I was an early joiner on Twitter who initially found it useless but now find it indispensable. He pretty much covers the territory in this post.

I’d add that Twitter may become the primary B-B marketing platform in social media. As he notes, its simplicity actually makes it more powerful that feature-laden sources like LinkedIn (which I also use more and more frequently as my social network of choice).

You can follow me on Twitter @martinedic

And connect on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/martinedic

Bob Pearson, VP of Conversations and Communities at DELL

If you had any doubt about the mainstream value of social media you should watch this…

From Jeremiah Owyang:

Are Comments the Next Social Layer?

The nature of commenting in social media is itself changing the way our conversations are interconnected. This change came about as comment aggregation services made it possible to build a reputation via commenting on a wide variety of blogs. First there were the plug-in aggregators like Disqus and IntenseDebate. These systems require the blog owner to add them to their platform and the commenter to register with the aggregator. Once registered any comments made on blogs using these systems would be aggregated on the source site. You can see other comments by a person you find interesting, regardless of whether you’d ever been to the actual blog post they reference.

The next iteration is BackType which does not require the blog owner to participate via a plugin. Their unique and IMHO, brilliant approach, is to track the URL that the commenter uses as an identifier when they post a comment. Commenters need to register at BackType but once registered virtually all of their comments are captured on the Backtype site. Participants offer a Profile and can be followed a la Twitter.

The reason this interests me is that it creates an entire new social layer that connects heretofore unconnected social sources. The commenters themselves become something you follow across a variety of places. What I’ve found interesting is how this builds personal reputation and has for me at least, somewhat replaced blogging as a way of expressing my opinion. Unlike Twitter, commenting has a threaded context (the post that started the conversation) and no limits on length. It includes the discourse elements of Twitter but goes further.

As an example, when forums were the primary conversations on the early web, certain participants became notorious on the forums where they were useful, disruptive and/or annoying presences. The commenting systems take this model and move it out of a narrow forum and into the entire social media eco-system.

B-B Lead Generation in Social Media

Leads are the lifeblood of any business and generating them is the ultimate goal of any marketing. I’ve been in companies where we rented leads in bulk (total waste of money) and others where we acquired them by networking at events (good but labor-intensive). You can fish for them with SEO and PPC (better because you’ve defined intent on the part of the prospect) but you’re dependent on the search engines and the quality of your site. Finally, you can generate leads through freemium versions of your service or product. This works well if you’re marketing a professional service and you’re providing enough value for a user to trade you contact info in exchange for their freebie. This freemium model is a piece of our lead generation strategy for SM2. However you still have to get to your site to sign up. That’s where social media fits into lead generation

Adding in Return On Investment (ROI) for Social Media Lead Generation

With a tool like SM2 you could find everyone talking about the keywords associated with your product, extract their addresses and/or URLs and try blasting them with some kind of offer. This may sound good if you’re used to the old media broadcast model- but it is a really terrible idea in social media because there can easily be a backlash from participants who don’t like being spammed (which is what you’d be doing- they never asked for your offer). So how do you generate leads in social media?

Try a variation on this process:

• Use SM2 to monitor conversations that contain your keywords, then refine those keyword to more closely target sources. This helps qualify your leads.
• Look at the Author Tags cloud in SM2 to find ways social media results authors are organizing their conversations. You can find clues to additional keywords.
• Build an offering that focuses on those keywords. We offer a free version of our service, others offer discounts, white papers, webinars, etc.
• Create a landing page that focuses on your keywords and the specific interests of your prospects. This is not your home page, it is a page dedicated to gathering information in exchange for your offering. Keep it simple, don’t ask for too much, etc. We only require an email address but we ask for Name, Company, Title and Where They Heard of Us. About 50% offer this info which is high but we don’t make them do a demo or talk to a salesperson, the free version is fully functional and we have an additional goal of building an active user-community.
• Start delving into the conversations you find with SM2 and become a participant. Don’t pitch, participate: respond to relevant Tweets, comment on blogs, join networks. Be transparent about who you are (I often define my user-name as Martin Edic (Techrigy), making it clear that I’m from a company). You’re not selling here, you’re building a reputation.
• Have the link you provide in your Profile or Comments be a direct link to the landing page you built. Many will click to find out who you represent if they find you’ve added value to the conversation.
• Offer up your offer if it adds value to the conversation with a URL in your response.
• Don’t use canned responses.

I realize this sounds kind of labor intensive because it is. Many companies are hiring Community Managers to do this.

So where does the ROI come in? First, social media is exponential. Your comments and tweets may be found and read by hundreds or even thousands of readers, readers who are qualified leads, otherwise they would not be there. Second, people in social media like to spread the word so your efforts go even further. And your conversations usually don’t go away- they have a shelf life and keep on giving.

Many people in marketing are not used to valuing leads. This is incredibly important to determining ROI. A qualified lead is one for which you a minimum required amount of information. Another qualification is the source of the lead. The rented lead has a suspect source, the lead that followed a process to get to you is very well qualified. One might cost $.15, the other $150.00. You determine how much a lead is worth by working backwards. First you know how profitable an average sale is, then you determine how much of that profit you’ll expend to get that sale. You need to know how many leads turn into a sale. It might be one out of ten, in which case you need to generate ten leads to make one sale. Do the math and you can determine how much a lead is worth. Run that against the required investment to generate that lead and you’re much closer to an ROI calculation.

Buzzword creation day: Reputation Equity

There’s been a lot of discussion about reputation and reputation management in social media. It’s one of our most effective keywords in SEO/SEM and it’s a fairly recent phenomenon. However I think there is a far more important metric related to reputation, something I’m dubbing ‘Reputation Equity’. Reputation equity is the value of your reputation in the marketplace.

For those struggling to define the ROI for social media monitoring and marketing, the concept of reputation equity might be useful in showing more closely how managing your reputation can directly produce measurable affects on your company’s value. If we look at market caps, for example, that measurement of the total current value of all company stock at today’s price, we see some anomalies. Dell’s market cap today is about $33 billion while Apple’s is $110 billion. Dell has a lot more market share but the market sees Apple as nearly four times as large! A lot of this is profitability but a good share is reputation.

So aren’t we talking about brands here? Yes and no. A brand may be highly recognized but it can also become generic as it gains widespread acceptance. I’d argue that Dell, while just recognizable as Apple, is much more generic. Apple has a powerful reputation driven by an amazingly loyal group of owners and users, a group that is very active whether they are criticizing or praising the company. Dell, on the other hand, has loyal buyers but they’re otherwise not emotionally engaged with the company and it’s products. How many Dell- specific blogs are out there vs. the hundreds or thousands of Apple-focused sites?

Dell is pursuing an aggressive social media strategy but they’re hampered by this reputational issue: Boring and corporate. Apple does little or no engagement because they don’t have to: Their reputation for innovative design and usability has built an eco-system that does it for them. Most companies don’t have that option, however Seth Godin would tell you that cultivating a fanatical following might be the most powerful marketing tool available. Reputation Management is a big piece of that.

If the goal of management in most companies is increasing value to shareholders, then enhancing reputation should be an easily justifiable investment. A great reputation can help a company get through issues like those reported with recent iPhones. A boring or negative reputation can make even a minor glitch be magnified and drive value down. Social media, in both cases, is becoming a driving force in reputation management and for building reputation equity.