This post is a collaboration between Ken Burbary and myself. It is being cross posted here and on Ken’s blog.
Social Media Monitoring can be an overwhelming endeavor, requiring you to sift through potentially large amounts of data to separate signal from noise, all in the hope of finding key consumer/customer insights that a company can act on. The thought of getting started can be overwhelming for big brands with a broad reach. If you’ve made the decision to listen to what the market is saying about you (an easy one) and are ready to take the next step and put it into practice, then consult this guide on the 5 Ws of Listening and create a strategic listening plan first (more on this to come in a future post). Then, and only then, move on to tool selection. There are hundreds of monitoring tools in the marketplace today (In fact, Microsoft launched their own social media monitoring tool today, dubbed Looking Glass). Use the community resources available to decide which tool(s) are best for you, then move forward with the tool that has the best coverage for the media types you’re interested in, and meets the rest of your specific needs.
To make listening easier, try narrowing the focus on a subset of your business. This will make it easier to get started, and require less time and resources (typically, your mileage may vary), than trying to listen for every individual mention of your brand terms. Here are 4 specific areas that companies can focus their listening activities to do this:
Campaign Specific - focus on the conversation driven by a specific campaign. Not only the volume but more importantly the qualitative components of the conversation. Target keywords, phrases and important details contained in the messaging of your campaign, go beyond generic terms and brand mentions. This can reveal a useful dimension of consumer opinion, passion. Tropicana recently learned this when launching a new packaging design for its pure premium orange juice. By listening around this specific campaign, they learned about the uproar from passionate customers, and ultimately reversed course and reinstated the old packaging design.
Event Specific - companies invest significant time, energy and financial resources for all types of offline events. Use social media monitoring to measure and track the online conversation about an event. Integrate these the relevant conversation points with data from other channels to get a holistic view of an event’s reach, sentiment and popularity. MTV recently did this at the Video Music Awards with their Twitter Tracker.
Business Unit Specific - for large organizations, with many businesses spread across the globe, narrowing down which business units you want to monitor is an essential part in trying to lessen the resources burden of social media monitoring. How do you begin to do this if you’re tapped with listening for your company (especially if you’re “housed” in the corporate communications or marketing department)? Start thinking about the process by using these steps:
Identify your company’s strategic business units - the companies with several different business unuts surely have some idea which of those are the real revenue drivers now, and in the future. If your organization has five business units, for example, but there are two that are the real revenue engines for the company, those would likely be suspects for your listening efforts.
Identify business unit leaders that can help share the burden - one of the central points of this post that we hope you takeaway is that monitoring isn’t an effort that can be left up to just one person. There has to be a decent amount of burden shared across the organization. Business unit leaders know their individual businesses better than anyone else. Tap them not only for their expertise of the business, but for the insights they’ll be able to lend in making sure the data you provide is at its most valuable.
Determine which terms you’re going to use - anyone that’s developed a listening program before will tell you that there can be a tremendous time investment in building the keyword/phrase monitoring strategy. That includes terms, which sources to track (if you’re using less sophisticated free tools), and even which topics associated with the business unit you’d like to include. Crunching the data is important, but this stage is often overlooked to the peril of the whole project.
It goes without saying, but after you’ve done these three things, it’s time to start collecting and analyzing data. If you’re interested in seeing how other companies have narrowed listening to a specific business unit, check out this presentation from United Parcel Service (UPS) at last year’s BlogWell.
Product Specific - if you aren’t planning to monitor around a campaign, event or business unit, you can always monitor specific product and/or service sub-brand(s). The process is very similar to how you would monitor business unit conversations - identify the appropriate sub-brand expert (developer, leader, marketer, etc..), identify those at the product level that can help you share in the burden, develop your list of terms (a time-consuming process as you may already know), and ultimately gather and analyze the data. The folks at Verisign (PDF) have been doing this exact same thing (with the help of agency partners) with good success.
Every once in a while you have one of those “WOW!” moments and feel like you need to share it with as many people as you can find. Today, one of those kinds of events happened to me.
I’ve talked a little bit here, and on my other blog, Alternate Perspectives, about how important listening in the social media space can be. Not only is it a way to gather valuable intelligence on your p0tential community (if you are using social media channels externally, particularly), but it is also a valuable tool to avert crises that can flare up to ridiculous proportions because of the fluidty of content on social networks.
On Wednesday morning, I was followed by an account named @CableStinks. Now, if you are active in social networking, particularly Twitter, you’ll know that there is a heavy spam component (especially recently) that you must wade through to get to the good stuff. This account struck me as odd though. They were using the Dish Network logo, and some of its marketing copy in its bio and tweets. Normally I’d just dismiss this as idle spam, but I tweeted about it shortly after I received the follow request asking if Dish Network was aware of this account clearly ripping off their logo.
Well, apparently I raised a flag over at Dish Network’s compliance office. I received an e-mail from someone at Dish Network, and then spoke briefly with one of their compliance officers about the account. Unfortunately, I had no additional information to provide them above the fact that I was followed by this obviously fake account.
It seems pretty clear that Dish Network is monitoring social media conversations. How else would they have found me? I wanted to take the time to offer a kudos to Dish Network for monitoring online conversations and trying to put an end to this spam account. But I also wanted to offer up a cautionary tale: Don’t monitor and you might be the victim of someone misrepresenting your brand on social networks!
There’s been so much written about social media monitoring (or listening if you prefer) that you’d think we were all becoming “experts” at how to not only monitor, but setup the platform as well. If that were true I, along with several other vendors, would be out of business by now. The reality is that setting up listening platforms are hard work. Whether you’re trying to piece it together with services like Google Blog Search, TweetBeep and other free resources, or you’re using a paid service like Radian6, developing the platform so that it gathers data important to you is time consuming.
I had a conversation late last week with Geoff Knox, formerly of Dell, about the development and maintenance of listening platforms. What I don’t think people take into account is the amount of time it takes to develop the platform, but then also make sure it continues being relevant to your company. So now that you’ve decided whether or not you are going to use free or paid tools, how do you ensure that the information you’re getting is stays important over time?
1. Are you tracking the correct sources? This is specifically applicable to those of you using free tools, but you don’t want to be monitoring Twitter, for example, if you’re conversations have moved on to blogs, or forums or some other social networking site. If you’re noticing a dip in conversations on a particular social network, does that mean you might need reevaluate what sources you’re tracking? It might…
2. Are the peers still relevant? Paid services allow you to track your conversations versus those of your peers. Do the peers you are tracking still make sense? Are there others you think would present a more apples-to-apples comparison? Do you even need to continue monitoring peers (you do)?
3. Continue evaluating your sentiment rubric How you categorize articles as positive, negative or neutral (or even a more complex scale) can change over time. You may not think so, but over time your senses are dulled after reading similar conversations over-and-over again. Think about how you’re scoring articles now, and in the past. Is it the same? Are you missing stories that could be either positive or negative because you’ve become desensitized to the conversations? Consider using someone else on your team to score articles and compare notes to make sure you’re getting an accurate read.
What else? Those of you with experience in building these platforms, what else should you consider to make sure your listening platform stays relevant?
Sorry folks…I’ve been the worst kind of blogger lately…the one that doesn’t post. Anyway, I’m trying to get back up on the saddle to highlight a few things that I think you should be paying attention to. Given the amount of conversation we’ve had here, and elsewhere, about social media listening, I think this wiki might be helpful for you. Ken Burbary, of Ernst & Young, launched the wiki as a resource for people wondering about social media monitoring tools. It isn’t comprehensive, yet, but there are a lot of great options already there. Check it out if you need help picking a vendor. And be sure to swing by Ken’s blog to thank him for setting it up.
The topic of social media listening is very popular these days. The tools, the strategies, the methods are the subject of posts all around the interwebs. I was a guest on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer today talking about our process to social media listening. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Consider for a moment that you work for your friendly local widget manufacturer. You are considering whether or not you should produce an annual report this year. You begin the process by asking several questions, including:
-How do we use it?
-What information does it typically include?
-How popular is it?
-What other materials do we make available?
The fundamental question, though, is does producing a report make sense for us? And, do people still read them. My colleagues in investor relations produced a thought piece (PDF) yesterday citing some very interesting data that suggests that yes, people do read them, and yes it does make sense to produce one.
So if people are reading it, how do you get started? Well, benchmarking would be a good place to start. I’ve written here, and elsewhere about the importance of benchmarking. It should be where you begin all of your efforts whether they be developing a social media or investor relations strategy or something as tactical as producing an annual report. Here’s the problem though…XYZ widget manufacturer often feels the need to not only answer these questions but look at how companies like Dow Chemical, GE are producing their annual reports. If they are a competitor of yours, than it probably makes sense. But what do Dow Chemical, GE and local widget manufacturer have in common? Not a whole lot. So why should their annual reports? Benchmark against YOUR direct competitors. Know how YOUR end-users react to the report. Know what information YOUR readers find valuable. And, in the end, let Dow Chemical and GE be Dow Chemical and GE…
Anyway, how do you go about your annual report process? Does it begin with benchmarking?
So sue me, I’m running out of songs with Friday in the title so I have to repurpose this song from The Cure. Anyway, here are my #followfriday picks for this week.
1. Rebecca Denison - she’s another one of the many new people I’ve been exposed to via Twitter and I’ve found her curiosity about social media, and measurement to be refreshing. Follow her @rebeccadenison.
2. Dennis Walsh - there aren’t many people on Twitter sharing interesting items pertaining to investor relations, but Dennis is one of those people. He shares everything from breaking news, to best practices, to general industry trends. We need more IR pros on the social networks. You can follow him @DWalshIR.
3. Michael Russell - Michael is another one of the many helpful people on Twitter, sharing interesting insights from the world of politics, social media and emerging technologies. As an aside, Dix & Eaton has worked with Michael before with great results. You can follow him @plantrussell.
4. Dirk Shaw - Dirk always has interesting things to share about social media, but he makes this list because he and I like to talk about “nerdy” topics like sentiment scoring, measurement and the like. Check out his blog, and follow him @dirkmshaw.
5. My final #followfriday pick is a slightly different variation on the above…This one goes to the Kent State University PR program. Almost everybody I’ve met through Twitter that’s been in the program recently or is still in it raves about how it prepares students for “the real world.” Some of the people you should check out, include @BillSledzik, @csledzik, @khuntley, @StefMoore, @rebeccaodell and @jackielloyd. I know there are others I’ve connected with on Twitter from Kent so If I’ve left you off please come and tell me how much of an idiot I am!
When I started my undergraduate program at Baldwin-Wallace College I had every intention of majoring in psychology. I liked the idea of being able to help people work through issues they were having in their lives. Well, a C+ in my introduction to psychology class quickly put an end to that dream. Probably for the best anyway, especially if you know me in real-life.
At any rate, some of what I remembered (and can recall) from that course came streaming into my head over the weekend. There are just volumes of research that indicate humans have an overwhelming desire to be “social.” Much of that research suggests that interaction with other people is essential to ensure the orderly development of children, and to prevent the onset of psychiatric disorders in adults.
So enough with the psychology lesson…what does this mean for companies thinking about engaging in social media? You would think our desire to be social with one another would make social media “easier” right? Wrong. Human beings want to be social, but they want to be social with other human beings and not inanimate objects like corporations. This is why the most successful brands in social media are putting a “human” face on their interactions with stakeholders. Think Scott Monty (Ford), Frank Eliason (Comcast), Southwest Airlines, etc…These brands are successful because they have made people feel that they are talking to a real person and not a logo.
But how did they know their stakeholders wanted to be social with them on Twitter, or another social network? Ahhhhh, here is where we get back to what this blog is typically about. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’d bet a significant amount of money that these three brands did quite a bit of research before engaging stakeholders in this way. Do they want to have interactions online with us? Where do they want to interact with us? What kinds of things do they want to hear from us? Maybe after we conduct research we’ll realize that stakeholders want to be social with us offline (the horror!). All the sorts of things we should be trying to answer through research BEFORE we start our social media program.
Humans want to be social, and it’s our job as brand managers, PR directors, social media managers, etc… to figure out how we fulfill that need if we ever want to be successful using social networks.
Anyway, what do you think? Is this need to be social a stretch for social media? Interested in your opinions!
Welcome to another installment of #FollowFriday where we introduce you to people on Twitter that you may, or may not have been exposed to yet. Here are my picks for the week. If you have others we should be following, we’d love to hear about them.
1. Teresa Basich - I’ve been following Teresa for only a little while now, and I’ve been impressed with her knowledge of the subject matter (typically social media), but also her willingness to jump right in and engage. She has a natural curiosity that’s infectious, not to mention a blog that’s worth checking out as well. Follow her @TransitionalTee
2. Adam Cohen - Adam always shares quality information on Twitter, which alone doesn’t necessarily make him worth following. What makes him worth checking out is the combination of sharing quality information, writing a great blog and providing great insights into the industry. Follow him @adamcohen
3. Allan Schoenberg - In addition to being the nicest guy in show business, Allan provides great perspective into the world of social media through the B2B lens. It’s refreshing to see a B2B brand, like the CME Group, embrace the opportunities that are definitely available to them through this channel. Follow him @allanschoenberg
4. Lisa Zone - Yeah, so I’m including a colleague in my picks. Sue me! The information she shares over Twitter is always interesting. Plus, she has a blog coming soon to a theater near you. Check her out @lzone. If you can’t connect with her, chances are she and I are in the same meeting.
Anyway, these are my picks for the week. Looking forward to hearing yours!
I hope you will indulge me with this post as it is somewhat off-topic for this blog. We usually spend quite a bit of time talking about monitoring and measuring, but that isn’t what this post is going to be about, at least not entirely.
I was having a conversation yesterday with my friend, Sonny Gill about the way in which companies hire consultants or internal professionals to run social media efforts. We both agreed that often times reputation carries the day over whether or not the person can ACTUALLY do the work. Mack Collier recently wrote a post imploring companies to ignore the social media early adopters. While I agree with the crux of the post, I do think some of the things those early adopters do can be helpful for companies. However, I don’t think I’d hire them JUST because they were an early adopter. Additionally, it’s worth noting that many of these people have several thousand people following them on Twitter, or several hundred connected with them on LinkedIn, or even several hundred connected with them on Facebook. It has been said numerous times, but numbers don’t necessarily equal expertise in this space. Companies need to peel back those initial layers to see if that person or persons can really help them develop a strategy that will contribute meaningfully to their business. If that person comes to you with fluff about building communities or developing relationships, politely send them on their way, even if they have the BIG reputation.
Which brings me to my point…Many of these people do often share quality information , but in many instances they are just uber-connectors (my apologies - I can’t figure out how to create an umlaut in this template) who try and network with as many people as possible. That isn’t to say that this approach has no value, I think it does, but primarily for individuals. Fundamentally, many companies don’t care about building relationships, or networking with you, me or anyone else. They view social media as another potential channel for transactions. We may not like it, but that’s the reality. They are wondering how social media helps them attract and retain top talent, enhance an existing customer’s experience, resolve an existing customer’s issue, save on overhead and fundamentally, drive sales and revenue. Try walking into a board room and say - “we think it makes sense for you to build a Facebook page. Over the next several weeks and months, we will be focusing on building relationships and a community.” I challenge you to do that and see how many blank stares you get. If you get some people nodding, they’ll likely follow that up with, “what am I getting,” or “when will I see some benefit to sales or revenue from this effort?” Not to reference Mack Collier again, but he made this point quite well a few days ago in this post. Building communities sounds nice, but the majority of companies aren’t going to join social media to do only that. They want the payoff. If you bring them relationships and community building you might be looking for different opportunities.
So, to sum it up, the more we (the non-social media elite among us) can bring social media-related solutions that directly impact our client’s businesses, the better off we will be. Not only that, but the people that bring those types of solutions will ultimately win the day over those who have JUST a big reputation or talk about how social media helps us build relationships with our customers and employees.
Anyway, I’m hoping to hear from you. Am I off base?
