Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Techrigy Featured in Marketing Profs Case Study Collection

Today when I checked into Twitter it was aflutter with people talking about how our Techrigy Team uses Twitter. @AnnHandley was having a MarketingProfs webinar and was referring to the case study of how we use it in a B2B situation. Here’s a snapshot from my Tweetdeck.

Our team at Techrigy uses Twitter for what most people do: to connect with friends & share information. But we also use Twitter for customer service and lead generation. We’er primarily a B2B and the majority of our customers are agencies. But they’re still people. And the digital oriented people are early adopters and exploring Twitter.

Why is Twitter so effective? It’s because it’s a water cooler. People are asking what tool should they use? They’re asking what others think. Periodically people test to see if we are listening! The folks at Marketing Profs have put together a Case Study Collection on Twitter Success Stories.

How can you use Twitter for lead generation? Use some type of tool like Techrigy SM2, Tweetdeck.com, tweetbeep.com, etc to monitor your brand name, your competitors and industry terms. Engage in the conversation, build relationships and provide value. After a time you will create a community around your company and brand.

We have a couple of other blog posts for further reading:

Twitter Lead Generation with SM2 alerts

Social Media offers B2B companies new options

How do you find Twitter helpful?

Twitter activity during the Super Bowl, a visualization

This is very cool.

Twitter lead generation workflow with SM2 Alerts

I thought I’d write about how we use Twitter in conjunction with SM2’s Alerts function to generate interest, book demos and communicate with people in the social media marketing community, in other words, for lead generation.

First, we only focus our attention on Twitterers who have shown an interest in our specific business sector, social media monitoring, analysis and engagement. We don’t pitch people who haven’t identified themselves as having that interest. We did this by setting up an SM2 Profile with a set of keywords that target mentions of our business, our competitors and keywords associated with social media like ‘Brand Monitoring’, ’social media measurement’, etc. The search runs constantly. We then set up SM2 Alerts in the application. These Alerts are sent to the in-boxes of our team members as keywords are mentioned in real time. With Twitter these mentions are captured as they occur with very little lag.

When I get an Alert it often contains many duplicate results because multiple keywords are mentioned in the same Tweet, however even without dupes we get a lot of Alerts throughout the day. I go through the Alerts as do our sales team, our CEO Aaron Newman and our Community Strategist Connie Benson. We respond to questions, offer demos, etc., generally trying to add value as we respond.

Is this effective? In a word, extremely effective. We are booking many meetings daily via Twitter. It is so effective that I believe that this is the future of marketing and will replace many outdated models of lead generation including spamming email lists, broadcasting ads that have no context, cold calling etc. Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO and SEM and social media engagement are the marketing communication and sales tools of the future- and we have them today.

Why do I get duplicate results in SM2?

This is a common question and a legitimate concern- however it is inevitable that you’ll get some duplicates in your SM2 searches. Here’s why:

If you enter multiple keyword phrases in SM2 and a source like a blog post or Tweet has more than one keyword in it then SM2 will pick the source up multiple times, once for each keyword it contains. So if I’m tracking ‘Techrigy’ and ’social media monitoring’ as separate keyword phrases and a Twitter Tweet contains both, I’ll see that Tweet twice.

Reblogging and ReTweeting can also generate what look like duplicate results, however if you look at the permalink URLs in View Results you’ll see that they are different. The content is repeated, however the source is not the same. It can be useful to see these because they give you an idea how rapidly and widely a conversation is being disseminated.

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

What is Twitter? NYTime’s David Pogue explains why it is important

Pogue, in his usual usefully populous style, explains Twitter for newbies.

Money quote:

“I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.”

Social Media Marketing Models: Mischief Marketing

A couple of the lads here at Techrigy engaged in a little mischief marketing today, throwing out a teaser video that was cryptic enough that it had me wondering what it all meant. This past week Burger King put a campaign on Facebook offering a Whopper coupon in exchange for deleting ten of your friends, who would then get a note informing them that you’d dropped them for a free hamburger. Ouch!

Viral or WOM, argue the distinctions if you will, are often predicated on having a little fun. Done well they work because they provide a little respite from the daily drone. With the amazing explosion of Twitter and Facebook activity, these campaigns now have  platforms designed for generating viral exchanges, places where you don’t have to email a joke to dozens of friends (thank God that stopped), instead you can put it out there and people can decide for themselves whether they want to click. This mischief marketing is a tricky balancing act that requires total willingness to fail, or perhaps worse, to sink without a ripple. But it is also fun to do and say something about the companies behind it. Sense of humor anyone?

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.

NitTwits: MLM (multi-level marketing) people think following on Twitter is a road to riches

Here’s a rant: Someone out there has unleashed the world of MLM ‘networkers’ into Twitter and instructed them to find people with lots of followers and follow all of them. Purpose? To spam people with messages about how to become rich by joining ‘the greatest business opportunity ever’ as one of these NitTwits described his ‘business’.

Typically they are following thousands of people, have zero followers and very few Tweets. Ridiculous.

My advice? Block them from following you, otherwise they will start spamming your followers.

Using SM2 Themes to Track Conversation

Using SM2 themes is a great way to visually see a whole conversation in the social media world. I used my SM2 account to search my Twitter account (bobbo0521). It pulled back 693 results. After my search, I ran a theme to see the trends in my conversation.

We have 2 themes in SM2: Basic and Advanced. A basic theme will take popular words or terms from content, and display them as a Cloud. An advanced theme detects groupings of topics or themes. An advanced theme graph will provide insight by displaying groups of blogs clustered around common themes and the relationships between the clusters.

I prefer the basic theme, as the visual representation is more useful to me. Below is an image of my Twitter Theme.

(The bigger, bolder words appear more often than the others in my Twitter conversations)

Some of my more popular words include “blog”, “plugin” and “wordpress”. If you drilldown into the “Wordpress” term, I made a few posts complaining about wordpress issues, and asking for help. If you were a wordpress employee, this would give you the ability to see that I was having issues, and directly engage to resolve the problem.

This cloud also displays other Twitter users that I most often communicate with. The value here is not only knowing what I am saying, but who I am talking with, which would allow you to engage in a conversation with a broader spectrum of users.

For my Advanced Theme Graph I chose a search on Woopra, an up and coming web analytics tool (my twitter example above doesn’t have enough variation to really show the value of an advanced theme).

Here we see a cluster in the bottom right which contains “wordpress”, “posts”, and “plugin” keywords. Another cluster contains “blog”, “wordpress” and “site”. These two clusters are relatively close to each other, signifying that they have content that is similar.

At the top of the graph we have a small cluster with the keywords “search”, “back”, and “blog”. The distance between this and the previous two indicates that the results have little in common. Glancing over the keywords, the bottom/right of this graph seems to be mostly conversation about how Woopra works with websites. The top/left of the graph is conversation about how Woopra compares to competitors.

The value of theme graphs is visual representation of online conversation. Using a basic graph you can see the individual words that are most used in a conversation. Using an advanced graph gives the ability to view a conversation by common topics.