Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

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.

Using Social Media Monitoring to show ROI

Every business wants to know how engaging in social media can increase their bottom line.

There are a number of challenges in explaining the value of social media:

• How do you show a direct benefit?
• How do you show an immediate return?

Answering those two questions is challenging because we also know that:

• much education needs to take place
• customer engagement is a long term commitment, not a short-range campaign

Social Media Monitoring Provides the Answers

Does the business have competitors? of course they do!

1. My suggestion is to set up keyword searches for the brand & it’s competitors. Then there is a two step process:

Depending on the results the discussion is indicated:

• If the brand has more conversation around it, then:
  • Doesn’t the brand want to maintain their lead online?
• If a competitor has more conversations around it, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get busy & consider their strategy?
• If neither the brand or competitors have any conversations around them, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get a head start on their competition? Seth Godin suggests that whoever is first will get a lead that’s difficult to overcome.

The next question is how to show an immediate ROI.

2. Use the results from Step One you now have a benchmark. This will provide a basis for setting goals.

Using Techrigy SM2 for social media monitoring offers many ways of analyzing the conversation. It offers an efficient way to measure brand presence, brand perception, opinion & tone. And it also identifies the conversations that the brand should be engaging with.

What will provide value to the customer?

• Is it improving customer service on the web at large?
• Is it identifying the influencers & engaging with them? 
• Is it increasing sentiment around their product?
• Does the business want to gather product development information & feedback?
• Will knowing where the conversations are taking place geographically be valuable?
• Is increased brand visibility important?
• What is the brand perception?

Once you have established what will be measured then goals can be set. What percentage improvement would the business like to achieve? That provides direction for the strategy.

I would also suggest incorporating web analytics into the strategy because those will most likely increase & are generally already a part of a business plan.

3. Finally what will be the ROI? The business needs to know what value the various points in Step 2 have. Using the goals & the cost of implementing the social media strategy then the ROI can be calculated.

Examples: each customer service call is worth $8 or each new customer signup is worth $5

The exciting part is that the conversations are benchmarked before you start. So moving through the engagement, SM2 facilitates the engagement, tracks it, analyzes the conversations & offers reporting at whatever level is needed.

Imagine if you could show your client the following chart. The blue line represents the benchline of the two previous months with no social media efforts. And the red line depicts the amount of conversation in the past two months surrounding their brand & products. With the tool you can help the client translate the ROI based on the value realized from their goals.

 

After reading his article on ROI vs Value, I’m going to call out Lewis Green for his input on this.

And what do you think?

Update: I’m doing a webinar on Business Cases of Monitoring Social Media on Thurs Jan 15 at 2 pm est

More info here & sign up.

You also may be interested in: Metrics for Building Brand Online

Accelerate your social activity during a recession

Perhaps the worst thing a business or agency can do during a severe downturn is to pull back on marketing activity, even if writing the checks is exceptionally painful. The reason is something known as the ’sales cycle’. Salespeople know what this is: the average time it takes to close a sale from prospecting to a check in the mailbox. For a lot of products and services this can be quite a long process and it lengthens as money gets tight.

However, as money gets more accessible, sales cycles get shorter because there is pent-up need. This brings us to the marketing quandary. If you stop or curtail marketing activity, you cripple your ability to bounce back when the economy gets better. Your customers don’t stop thinking about buying, they just hold off until they can afford it. If you stop marketing and participating in the conversation you won’t be on their radar when they’re ready. Your sales cycle starts with marketing.

So what does this have to do with social media? Everything. Social media participation is extremely cost effective, especially if you target intent, in other words, those conversations that are fine-tuned to your product or service. Any number of keyword tracking services, including ours, can help you find that intent.

There is another compelling reason to dive headfirst into social media: Timing. We are at that proverbial tipping point where a group of ideas, tools and smart people converge and the world changes. Waiting until the economy turns upwards to embrace social media means you’ll be far behind the curve. We saw it with the belated advertising agency reaction to search marketing. They didn’t embrace this new model and a whole new style of marketing agencies took the business out from under them. This, in my view, is taking place right now with social media.

Are you on the brand-owner side but not successfully selling social media participation to upper management? It’s time to go guerilla. Start monitoring with free services like ours, tracking Twitter keywords, blogging product mentions, etc. Become a power-user and you’ll eventually get your chance to make your case. Chances are that when the realization sets in among those managers that your brand is being discussed, there will be a ‘why aren’t we doing this moment?’ And you can say, ‘actually we have been’.

It’s not just the listening side. Start building knowledge around platforms for social media interaction. Things like Ning, Yammer, WordPress. They’re free and you can learn them quickly. Again, when times get better you’ll have a jump on your competition.

Keyword Phrase Refinement in SM2: Some Basics

SM2 is a complex piece of software that accesses a large database of social media results. The key to accessing its power lies in the way you set up your keyword phrases. This is why every user of SM2, including the Freemium users, gets offered a live demo after you sign up. No folks, it’s not strictly a sales call! We understand that helping our users become power users is not only good business, it helps you take full advantage of SM2’s extensive analytics capabilities.

When setting up your initial keywords you open a new Profile, name it after a client, brand or campaign and then you are offered a keyword set-up wizard that walks you through the process of choosing your keyword phrases. You can skip the wizard and simply add them yourself which can be quicker for basic searches. Here are some tips to help you get the most relevant results with SM2:

• Avoid overly broad terms like ‘Google’. You’re going to fill up your account with irrelevant results. Instead use the AND modifier to refine your search like this: “Google” AND “search wiki” (use the quotes, spaces and caps like that). This will only bring back results that include both of those terms.
• If you are using simple keyword phrases and the AND operator, use the Basic search option. Advanced search gives the ability to use operators like NEAR, OR and combinations like: “Google” AND (”search wiki” OR “knol”).
• If you put keyword phrases on their own lines rather than using OR, each becomes a category you can use to sort results in the Reports area in SM2. This is useful for comparing trends, separating out results for a single keyword phrase, etc.
• Keyword phrases are not case sensitive
• Keywords entered in another language will bring back results in that language, however the application remains in English only at this point. Sentiment Analysis in English-only, however we are adding German and will be adding other language dictionaries in the near future.

We monitor the keywords our users are searching. So you may get an email from us suggesting changes that will bring back better results. We also provide assistance in setting up your keywords as part of the testing process for those evaluating our Professional Accounts. Just send us a note at support at…

Social Media and Twilight the movie

Today’s Times business section has an article about the movie Twilight being released this weekend. Made for $37 million by a tiny studio, this teen age vampire flick based on a best selling series is expected to gross up to $60 million in its first weekend. The story of how the tiny studio got this property caught my eye:

“When Paramount passed on making “Twilight,” Mr. Friedman heard about it. Erik Feig, Summit’s production chief, did some research and noticed an intense following online even though the book had not yet reached stratospheric status. Summit pounced, seeing a potential franchise.

The studio bought the movie rights to all four books in the series, which together have sold about 8.5 million copies in the United States and 17 million copies worldwide.”

The buzz was there on social media far before it hit the attention of the big studios.

And you wonder why we think you should be monitoring…

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!

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.

Why Social Media is a Different Marketing Paradigm

The Internet and traditional media are about information and solutions. Web sites enable both of these activities: Finding answers and associating buying decisions with those answers. Conventional push advertising, once relevance is established, can be an important aspect of the search for information and solutions. When advertising started moving to the web it had to change, to become less brand-focused and more intent-focused. However it still fit the broadcast or network model once intent and relevance were added as criteria for acceptance by users.

Social media is a completely different layer that has been added to the web, hence the web 2.0 moniker. Social media is about communication. It is an ongoing, fluid public conversation in which users exchange all kinds of information and experience, often as it takes place. This fluid nature means that attempting to take a traditional broadcast approach to advertising, even with relevance and intent, not only won’t work but can actually have a negative impact as users spread the word about what they don’t like about an ad or brand. If an ad interrupts a conversation it will make people mad.

Conventional media buying relies on reach or authority to determine where to buy ads because higher trafficked and/or respected sites will reach more users. Authority in social media is just one piece because any social media site can break a story, impugn a reputation or slam a brand experience and if the story is compelling it will get picked up and spread out, often in minutes. The challenge in social media is not to search out information, it is to monitor and listen to these conversations, identify opportunities to participate and then carefully engage. This can’t be done with an ad network or ‘push’ model.

Engagement is a new way to build a brand or reputation, a different marketing paradigm. It requires new roles for marketers (Community Managers), new means of listening and reaching out (Social media monitoring tools) and a shift in our understanding of marketing. When you engage in conversations in social media it may seem overly labor-intensive compared to launching an ad campaign. An individual effort is required to be taken seriously. The good news ids that there is an exponential effect: When you comment on a blog, connect with a Tweet or respond to a review, your response has the potential to be seen by thousands or even millions of others. As you build a reputation in social media your authority rises and your brand becomes highly valued. This is the new model emerging in marketing communications. Those who embrace it and refine it will be the market leaders of the future.

Social media measurement business models: Human Resources and Recruiting

First in a series on building business around social media monitoring and analysis:

As I talk to people all day about social media and monitoring I’m spending a lot of time thinking about business models, ways companies can use these tools to build their business. One application I have thought is the concept of a vetting service for checking out potential new hires. If you’re in HR or recruiting this could be a valuable service to add to things like background checks and drug testing. Using a service like SM2 you’d enter the candidate’s name and location(s), former employers, etc., into Sm2’s keyword set-up and then parse the results for any troubling (or exemplary) behavior. Kind of like Googling them only seeking responses from social media.

Hiring the wrong person can be very costly in terms of training time, exposure to risk, time to rehire for the position, etc. This service could save employers a lot of time and money.

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The fluid nature of Social Media

Alisa has an insightful post on how conversations in social media are streams rather than locations. This ilustrates a fundemental reason why a monitoring service like SM2 is very different from an indexing service like Google. In essence we are collecting all the information that people are assembling into streams and enabling users to follow streams as they develop- streams that include their brands and reputations. Ordinarily you could only follow a few select users or groups because of time and resource constraints. With SM2 you have a tool that helps track all the streams and analyzes their content, sources and impact in real time.

We also hold our collection effectively forever (that’s the plan) in its original instance. If you Tweet then delete that Tweet, we still have it and if you reference a keyword that one of our users is seeking we will serve up that piece of conversational history along with any available public meta-data you’ve volunteered, any associated data connected with your Tweet by others and we offer up a results page that tells our user quite a bit about you.

Social media is fluid, however SM2 is effectively taking constant snapshots of that flow and and making it possible to return to any given moment.

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