Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Interview with Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing, part 1

Dave Evans joined me to discuss his book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

In the first interview, Dave shares the challenges of integrating social media into an organization:

• Someone in the organization to champion social media
• Organizational dynamics
• Challenge is space is moving so fast

He also talked about a map -how the purchase funnel related to the social web

• social media connects us in many ways
• connecting the customers to various departments internally

Dave talks about how to integrate the info from the social web into the business needs. He uses the analogy of walking into a party & starting with a listening strategy.

Dave explains how you can use his book in ‘hour a day’ aspect to create their plan.There are templates available in the book & also online at ReadThis.com

This is the first in a two part series. The second part is on measurement & monitoring.

Listen to the interview here.

Part 1 Download mp3

What Differentiates Techrigy SM2 from other Social Media Monitoring Tools

This is a question that is frequently asked in demo’s and on Twitter.

What differentiates Techrigy SM2 from it’s competitors?

Techrigy is a very versatile & powerful tool. It’s a great choice for your PR, marketing, SEO, community building & brand management efforts.

Our pricing model lends itself to agencies & companies of every size.
    * Pricing is based on total search results. See screenshot below
    * We don’t charge for additional users
    * You can set up as many profiles as you’d like (ie: clients or departments). I have one customer that has 15 profiles/clients.
    * You manage the profiles & how the total search results are divided amongst the profiles

     * Our packages start at $600 for 20,000 search results (annual contracts are discounted)

Other differentiators:
     * SM2 has comprehensive analytics & charts (important for benchmarking & calculating ROI)
     * Historical data up to 17 months & ability to compare that data over that full period of time                                                                                                             * 36 fields of Demographic data including Geo-mapping sources of conversations
      * Category hierarchy - Ability to subdivide results as needed for analysis. This is a great feature that many appreciate in working with large amounts of data. 
      * Automated Sentiment, Tone & Emotive Tone (3 options)

And we have the Freemium version that allows access to the majority of the features for an unlimited length of time. It’s a great way to listen to the conversations on blogs, Twitter, wiki’s, etc in one place where the data can be analyzed.

Let us know if you have questions or would like to see a demo. Our team will be glad to help. Email us at sales@techrigy.com

Webinars on Techrigy Tuesday

Techrigy SM2 is a versatile & powerful tool. It has a multitude of ways to analyze online conversations. It also offers a full range of reporting options from high level reports down to fully actionable results.

We are going to be holding webinars on Techrigy Tuesday to help you harness that power. You will also learn how to apply it to your digital marketing & brand building efforts.

On Tuesday, March 24th we have two scheduled:

Basic Use of SM2 Tuesday, March 24, 2009 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

• Set up search terms to get the content that is relevant for you
• Learn how to slice and dice the search results for analysis
• Use charts and export your results for presentations and reports
• Register here

Advanced Use of SM2 Tuesday, March 24, 2009 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

• We’re going to cover more of our advanced and recent release features.
• Learn how to “cut to the chase” in analyzing your results!!
• We’ll bring you up to speed on our advanced features
• And new capabilities from recent releases
• Use charts and export your results for presentations and reports
• Reigster here

What topics would you like to have covered in future webinars?

Please Don’t Invite Your Friends…

Unless you really know that they want it.

These days, when you get an email, it’s less likely to be the subject line than the name of the sender that will be the PRIMARY reason why you would (or would not) read your message.

Now, think about this in the context of much of what is happening online.

Companies, websites, Facebook applications…they all make it easy for you to invite your friends or share things with them.

Just because it is easy for you to upload 500 pictures from your vacation doesn’t mean I want to see them.

And, just because it is easy for you to invite all of your friends to your new Facebook group or cause, doesn’t mean that I want to join.

If it’s relevant, sure, invite your friends, but only if you KNOW that it is relevant.

Because if it isn’t, you are taking a big risk.

As David Berkowitz blogged, “No, I Don’t Want to Join Your Group (Nor am I a Fan)”

And, if you look down below the group and cause invites that you receive on Facebook now, you’ll see the line that says “Ignore All Invites From This Friend.”

When someone clicks on that, you become like Diana, the equivalent of a Facebook spammer.

For all intents and purposes, your ‘marketing messages’ just don’t exist.

You have lost relevance.

You have lost permission.

And you don’t need me to tell you that you can’t afford to have that happen.

Tools Only Get You So Far

Tools such as Techrigy are great to have in your social media arsenal. Actually these tools are more of a necessity than a “nice to have.” However, with all the great tools out there comes a lot more interpretation of data and information. While tools such as Techrigy can help get the job done, they are ultimately not responsible for the success or failure of a social media campaign. How you interpret and act on the data is what will determine your success.

Here are a few tips that can help you make the most out of tools such as Techrigy

• If you are using a third party agency or company to run your social media campaign make sure they give you a debrief on how they are using tools such as Techrigy and what specifically they look for.

• Make sure you align your social media strategy with your marketing strategy. Techrigy gives you a lot of data and all of your interactions and community responses need give off the same “voice” from your company.

• Before you or a third party begins using a tool like Techrigy, make sure you understand all of the capabilities and possibilities. These tools are robust and can probably give you more information than you know about.

• Make sure you participate with the community. Techrigy does an excellent job of creating a community around their product, largely thanks to the help of a Connie Bensen.

• Stay up to date on new features, releases, and bug fixes. Several companies out there provide email newsletter alerts with updates, make sure you read them to understand what’s going on. You never know when that new feature you want will finally make its way into the actual product.

• Before starting off with any type of monitoring or analytics tool you have to understand your goals. This goes hand in hand with understanding your strategy. However, if your goals are to get more links and get talked about on the “big” blogs, then make sure that’s what you’re using your monitoring tool for.

I hope these 6 simple tips will make your experience using tools such as Techrigy more meaningful and more powerful. Do you have any other tips you want to share?

Knowledge, Power & Social Media

Power is the ability to act or capacity to perform or act effectively. Power is most often used to control or influence. Without a doubt, Social Media has a great deal of power! Social Media is exerting a great deal of influence over traditional marketing, advertising, and communication channels. Social Media has also given a great deal of power to the average consumer as has been demonstrated time and time again. One single individual with a single post or tweet can change an entire company’s product offering, policy, or strategy. Consumers and individuals clearly understand the power of social media and they are not afraid to use it. On the other hand businesses have not gained power from Social Media as quickly as individuals have. Why is that? It is because of knowledge.

Knowledge is defined as awareness or understanding gained through experience, observation, or study. The average consumer doesn’t need to have a great deal of knowledge to take advantage of the power of social media over businesses. All they need to know is ‘I state my case (whether it is valid or not) and if enough people hear or see it then businesses react and I win.’ This Power of Social Media is many voices (consumers) and the influence of one (business).

This formula works for consumers because it does not take much for a consumer to know what triggers a business to act. However, businesses on the other hand have to know the many triggers for the many individual consumers in order to influence them to act. For businesses there are many, many, many more data points to be collected and analyzed.

Knowledge is acquired through analyzing data. When it comes to Social Media this is called “listening”. In words that Marketing Execs and CEOs will understand, this is called Market Research, better put: Market Research on steroids. Instead of surveys or focus groups this is raw, uncensored potentially unsolicited viewpoints of real people. As you listen, you learn how to use Social Media to your advantage. Gaining power when you use what you have learned from listening.

What can you learn through listening to Social Media? Businesses can learn how to select profitable new markets to enter, create a “Blue Ocean.” Through Social Media, businesses can learn how to select and attract the customers who best match their organization. Businesses can also reduce the risk and severity of bad customer service claims. These are just a few of the many things that businesses can learn from listening to Social media. The next step is to put these learnings to use.

So to harness the power of Social Media you need to understand that many voices to become the influencer. For businesses this means that you have to get many voices to influence others that you feel are worth doing business with. To do this you must listen, learn and act. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not power. Power is the wise use of knowledge!

Techrigy + ManoByte = Power

Byte or get bitten!

Social Media offers B2B Companies New Options

Have you ever been invited to a free meal & ended up with a sales pitch? I just received one of those invites this week. The invitation said that it was a great speaker who was going to talk about ‘healthy living’. When the person who sent the invitation called for an RSVP, I asked what the product was. Sorry… not interested in Melaleuca. That’s my choice as a consumer. I really have trouble with the lack of transparency. The same rules apply to online interaction in social networks & communities. You don’t go to a party & sell products, right?

My online community work started in the B2C world. Now our focus at Techrigy is primarily B2B. It’s not much different. The advent of social media networks has offered new opportunities for B2B companies to connect with potential customers. B2B’s can now leverage their presence in social networks & communities. BUT, it has to be within the social expectations of the site/community.

How can B2B companies utilize social media?

• Be helpful & provide resources. White papers are a great way to provide high level information in your industry.
• Create a blog & provide a place for dialogue. People searching for information & your type of products will find your site.
• Join social networks and participate in them.
  • Answer questions in LinkedIn. We have people trying our Freemium due to their seeing our team answering questions on LinkedIn
  • Twitter is a  very successful lead generator for us. We monitor Twitter for people looking for our service & reach out to them. It’s done in a helpful way and is appreciated.
  • In Facebook join groups & get involved.
• Create a community for your customers
  • Join their conversations, provide assistance & help your customers succeed with their businesses

The BIG question is where should focus your resources? The web is a big place. How can you find which social media networks are right for your presence?

Social media monitoring is becoming imperative. It allows your business to easily identify & locate:

• who is talking about your products and competitors
• who your advocates are so that you can engage them
• conversations on your industry topics
• where those conversations are happening at

And after gathering that information it’s easy to join the social networking sites and participate in the conversations. If you provide helpful information people will come to trust you and relationships will develop. From there it will become natural for you to offer your services to others as a part of your presence. Again we’re using our own tool to guide our interactions online. Techrigy SM2 offers real time alerts and it makes it easy for us to engage.

Here’s a list of other B2B companies that are creatively using social media tools & communities.

• SAP Developer Community
• Autodesk communities
• Hubspot
• Intuit/ Quickbooks are doing creative campaigns for small businesses
• TechCrunch wrote about Dell using Twitter

Update: This article has some good ideas for  Using Twitter for Lead Generation

The People Behind Techrigy SM2

One of the best parts of my job is the social aspect. Last week I flew out to the home office to spend time with the Techrigy team in Rochester, NY. In case you’re not aware, I work remotely from northern Minnesota, land of the moose (I thought it was lakes, but I let the guys think that). Techrigy is a total Web 2.0 company. I totally appreciate everyone’s flexibility in working remotely with me daily online!

I always take my camera when I travel, so I can introduce you to the Techrigy guys.

Techrigy is co-founded by Aaron Newman. Aaron’s a serial entrepreneur with 2 successful startups to his credit, DBSecure and AppSecInc. Aaron is also the author of Enterprise 2.0 Implementation. He has said that I work more than he does, but I have to say that he works a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jay Mari is other co-founder. He created the engines that power SM2. Jay is always very patient with my tech questions. I’ve learned a lot about the internal workings of SM2.

Jim Schwab is our VP of Sales & Marketing. He recently joined us from Harris Interactive. He looks really serious here. (I heard some great lines out of him though, so I think he was avoiding the camera)

Ahad Kamal & Jim Reynolds are everywhere: on the phone with customers on Twitter. They rock! When I took the photo I noticed the banner & had to ask. Ahad & Jim have worked across from each other for four years (prior to Techrigy) so there was definitely a story there.

And behind every great company is an awesome tech guy. Bob Pease does it all! When I was sitting across from Bob, the lack of eye contact was a bit too much for me, so I moved his monitors apart during my time there.

Where’s my photo? Well I was behind the camera. This was taken at the meetup.

A couple of fun lines from my visit were: 1) The first morning at the office Ahad & Jim were pondering the fact that I was ‘real’ rather than ‘virtual’. Jim had the greatest line, “ ‘Connie’ is the code that Aaron wrote”. 2) When Jay came to work they told him that I arrived in a server box labeled ‘Fragile’.

Follow us on Twitter – we’re a very sociable group!

@AaronNewman

Jay Mari

@JimSchwab

@Ahad_Kamal

@JimmyRey

@Bobbo0521

@cbensen

Collecting the Conversation

Last night I was talking with Keith Burtis. He’s the Community Manager for Best Buy Remix. We frequently exchange ideas & Keith provides me with techie info.

Keith expressed his frustration & concern about how to gather & review conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. In addition we sometimes want to share quotes or provide qualitative information to our management.

It is true that the conversations on Twitter seem nebulous & lost forever. We know that we can use Search.Twitter.com to gather tweets on certain topics, but as Keith pointed out, how do you transfer that to a Word doc or spreadsheet for reporting?

This prompted me to explain how Techrigy SM2 makes that possible, but it took a quick demo to show how nice it is to search for the topic and pull in the Tweets (as well as other information). Because SM2 is built on a database, the search results can be reviewed in a number of ways. Filters allow you to look at results for a certain day or time period, or on a certain subject. And you can create subcategories. This allows you to focus on a certain topic and become really granular.

When I showed Keith that he could easily export the information by xml or xls the light bulb went on. Keith realized that SM2 could:

• extract the conversations out of the noise
• organize them into manageable categories
• ability to export the information for reporting
• import the information from SM2 into another ‘container’ to provide value back to his community

I have more coming on the last one. Keith told me about his brilliant idea today!

Getting Techcrunched: “Like Google Alerts with dual-overhead cams”

It’s been a pretty crazy day today at Techrigy world headquarters. I was greeted this morning by 1400 emails in my inbox, about ten times the usual. Turns out that that Jeff Widman over at Techcrunch had given us a nice present in the form of an extremely generous review.

Having been through this before with another company I knew what to expect but my expectations have been surpassed- thousands of new SM2 Freemium signups and inquiries from some impressive potential customers.

The downside is a temporary slow-down in the Freemium searches due to the very high traffic we’re experiencing. We expect this to be back to normal in the next 24 hours. If you just joined us thanks for your patience!