Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Techrigy SM2 comes of age

We are so pleased with our community’s response to our news that Alterian acquired our company, Techrigy. This past week has been exciting and we’re so appreciative that our customers and the industry uplifted our story. As a social media monitoring tool, we choose to engage with people in the same medium. That’s really important to us because we can interact with you online and also understand your needs.

In addition to using SM2 for building brand awareness, it’s the perfect tool for measuring the amount of conversations online. As I said we live & breathe this! Here are some stat’s for last week’s announcement:

• an increase of 4 times the mentions of Techrigy for the week after the announcement compared to the week before
• the number of Freemium signups increased by 10 times compared to the week before
• visits to the Techrigy.com site increased by 3 times after the announcement (stat’s from Google Analytics)

And I have to share some charts from SM2 that visually show the statistics. SM2 makes high level reporting easy!

The Daily Volume – see the spike on the day of the announcement? You guys rocked it!

Share of Voice – shows how the conversations were distributed

Here are the words that were the common themes in the conversations on July 15th and 16th. We were on Techcrunch again with reference to ‘steroids’

 

I posted my personal perspective on my blog and you can read more about the details of the acquisition here. We’re excited about the upcoming months as we integrate with Alterian and their products.

You can try the Freemium version of SM2. There are resources at Training.Techrigy.com  Let us know what you think?

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%?)

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):

SM2 Social Media Monitoring Sources Updated

SM2 is built on a constantly expanding database of all social media conversations that we refer to as our Social Media Warehouse. We started collecting, via a variety of methods, in 2007 and have what we believe is the largest database of social media conversations and associated meta-data (demographics, location, popularity, etc.). The Warehouse currently has over 1 billion records and we are adding millions daily.
The sources (which we are constantly updating and adding to) include:

• All major and minor blog platforms including WorkPress, Typepad, Live Journal, Blogger, Blogspot, Sphinn8r etc., including comments
• Any other blogs with RSS feeds, ping servers, etc.
• Any publicly available social network content including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Ning, LinkedIn and more
• Any comments and meta-data associated with user-generated rich content like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, etc.
• All public wikis
• Non-password protected boards, forums and review sites including everything from BoardReader
• Yelp
• Microblogs including Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca
• Commenting systems: Backtype, Disqus, Intense Debate

As new sources appear they are incorporated into our collection systems.

Facebook adds 20 million new users since December 10th

I thought it was my imagination- A lot of my friends have joined Facebook recently and most of us are tailend babyboomers but is this a trend? Now AllyInsider confirms my suspicions: FB is blowing away the other social networks.

Their stats:

• The site just crossed 150 million monthly active users.
• That’s more people than there are living in Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
• 50 million of those users are new since the summer.
• 20 million are new since December 10.
• 75 million use the site every single day.

These are astounding figures. What they mean is that Facebook, along with Twitter, has become a de facto global communication platform. From a marketing perspective this is fascinating, however Facebook is very closed (as it should be, IMHO) so it cannot be viewed as a media source.

SM2 collects both Twitter and Facebook, however because we only collect publicly accessible data, our ability to capture Facebook is limited to those conversations that are public. With Twitter we collect public Tweets but not Direct Messages.

One of the differentiation points for SM2 is our Social Media Warehouse. This is our grandiose database of everything social going back to 2007. We don’t just collect conversations based on our users’ searches, we collect everything. Yes, everything (I know from demos that I am required to repeat this at least three times before it sinks in ;-)). That means that if we keep this up we’re going to have an historical record, with meta data, of a huge amount of global communications going forward. The warehouse currently has over 1 billion (with a B) conversations with up to 40 fields of meta data (demographics, location, popularity, reach, URLs, etc.) for each.

If you or your clients are still on the fence about social media please look at the numbers above again. The world has changed.

Sizing the Social Media Marketing Market: How Many Brands are There?

One of the things we get asked frequently, from a business POV, is how big is the social media market? Before I tackle that elephant, let me define what the questioner is asking. We sell a tool used by social media marketers and researchers. That’s the market we’re sizing: How many potential customers are there for social media marketing vendors like Techrigy?

We know social media itself is huge and expanding like a nuclear reaction, literally. The early adopters of technology like ours tend to be agencies, particularly PR, communications and digital agencies (the ad people are still pretty far behind). So if we say there are 100,000 agencies (a made-up number) then our market seems to get capped at some fraction of that number (we won’t get all of them obviously). This is not the case because agencies don’t represent a single client or a single niche market. They represent brands, lots of brands. So the operative question is ‘How many brands are there?’ and the answer is millions.

So how big is the market for social media monitoring? Big. There millions of iterations of brands, localized versions, international variations by language and culture, sub brands like Swanson’s Chicken Broth, Swanson’s Canned Chicken, Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pies, etc., and things associated with brands like celebrities, executives, issues and influencers. It is a virtually unlimited market when you consider that all of these brands will be migrating some or all of their marketing to social media.

And this does not take into account the rapidly emerging concept of personal brands…more on that in another post!

The wave is breaking

As we start into fall and summer wanes the wave that has been building in social media is about to break and flood us all. To beat the metaphor, the flood is the realization that social media is a critically important business communication tool that isn’t going away. More and more senior marketing people are stating that social strategies are becoming mainstream marketing communications tools for brand development, PR, customer support and satisfaction, and community-building. Companies like Dell are making it central to their marketing efforts. The key word here is ‘central’. This is not a tactic to be delegated to the hinterlands, it is the next iteration of global business communications.

What does this mean?

It means that there is the beginning of a move out of the early adoption phase. In that famous bell curve detailed in Crossing the Chasm new ideas have to break out of the early adopter phase to begin growth into the mainstream. Social media started as something used by an elite few bloggers and nascent social networks created for students. In business the adoption was very slow to take root as many simply questioned the reasons for doing a corporate blog or building an online user-community.

It took some well-publicized PR disasters to wake up the first of the big mainstream businesses to dive into blogging. Dell had well-publicized customer support problems that spread around the blogosphere long before they realized they had a problem. Their response, though belated, was a real turnaround and they now are fully engaged with social media.

I suspect that the turning point is upon us based on my admittedly parochial view of things. 99% of Techrigy’s marketing is social and much of it has been taking place for the first time during this summer when our target markets are typically in vacation mode. Yet, I’m seeing a strong response that is growing as we swing back into fall work mode. Our free community users are increasingly coming to us for professional accounts and service. Agencies are building us into pitches and the brands we’re tracking are growing in stature. Our recent crossing of the half billion mark for results in our social media warehouse is another clue that there is a lot of activity out there.

May we live in interesting times…

Three months in the social

While I’ve been a participant in social media for a long time including a personal blog over three years old, I only started thinking about it as a marketing tool when I did a product launch a few years ago- and found that reaching out to relevant blogs was the most effective activity I pursued, more effective than any of the traditional PR and advertising we did at the same time. It didn’t hurt that it was a software as a service product right at the onset of web 2.0.

Fast forward a few years and social media is my primary marketing tool but in ways that have evolved considerably. When I started working with Techrigy three months ago I was still in SEM/SEO mode. That went away fast though we do use these techniques quite effectively (please don’t send me SEO analyses of our sites- we’re quite aware of where they stand). I simply dove in to start learning about the wonderful world of social media monitoring and how people were trying to use it. I intentionally use the word ‘trying’ because it rapidly became apparent that we’re all in a continuous learning curve (and will be forever I think).

Those who dropped pre-conceptions the earliest have, IMHO, become the default thought leaders. I’ve gotten so I laugh when I read about social media ‘campaigns’, products to automate pushing messages out to social media and other broadcast mentality approaches to spreading the word or effecting change in social media. This is not the model, again IMHO!

The reason we constantly see and talk to people trying to retain this model is that the available alternatives are freaking them out:

” I’m supposed to read blogs and twitter all day and add-in stuff?”

“I don’t don’t have the time or the bandwidth for that!”

“What good is this stuff? What’s the ROI?”

Etc.

With broadcast you reach millions of people, 99.999% of whom frankly don’t give a sh*t. You spend money to reach that fragment who do. With search you focus more but you’re still seeking true intent through relevant placement. A lot better.

In social media, if you do your job and participate and carefully build a reputation you become a member of the inner circle. This membership is precarious and precious but incredibly egalalitarian. An ambitious or enthusiastic intern or career-changer can join if they prove themselves and affect the positioning of their product or service in game-changing ways- because that inner circle is incredibly influential.

Why are they so powerful? Because of the network effect. It used to be said that an angry consumer would tell ten others about their negative experience while a happy one would only tell three. With social media both can reach hundreds or thousands who in turn can influence untold thousands more. So, IMHO (again), you cannot afford to ignore or minimalize social media as a marketing tool. It’s word of mouth on steroids.

That my lesson from three months of working to build awareness of a brand and product in social media. The potential is explosively more powerful than what came before.

And equally risk-laden for those venture away from 100% honesty and transparency. Why? Because it is self-regulated by those who you are marketing to. That’s another game-changing element in this new world.

Rules of Engagement V.1, social media style

The Times today has an article about Comcast’s social media monitoring and engagement guy, Frank Eliason. Frank apparently follows comments, mostly negative, and actively responds to complaints, usually surprising people in the process. The piece is a bit overly cheery but it brings out some basic points for an engagement plan:

• You have to dedicate resources, in this case a full time community manager who is practically 24/7
• They have to be empowered to make promises and successfully execute on them
• There will be negative responses to being monitored, in this case some found it creepy
• People warm up considerably when they realize a real human is listening to their rants
• This is a very time-consuming role that requires a commitment of resources

The ROI for this kind of thing is not easily quantifiable. In this case a relatively positive article in the Times seems a pretty big win on its own.