This free virtual roundtable discussion happened on Thursday, June 17th at 11:30 am - 12:30 pm. This 3rd3rsday was all about Brand Monitoring: Foundations of a Solid Social Media Strategy.
Powerful business insights are readily available to companies within the real-time chatter on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums, etc). Social media monitoring, or listening, is a critical step toward building more targeted and engaging dialogue with key targets and influencers.
There is a daunting array of tools and services that promise to help you tune in, but a shortage of good, solid advice on which ones are best and more importantly, what to do with all the information you are getting.
We will attempted to create a clear view of effective social media monitoring tools and illustrate the process of extracting concise and actionable intelligence to further your business goals.
Guest Expert: Tony Felice, Sr. Strategist, Red Door Interactive
Social media best practices/overview of key concepts Introduction to free tools and enterprise software. Choosing a listening platform. Data collection/insights
Here’s a brief overview of the aspects we’d like to cover today.
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****Currently, the growth rate of social media’s set at such a high velocity, it’s difficult for brands to keep up. We’re looking at a graph of social technographic profiles created by forrester, which breaks users down by their primary engagement in social media. The details of each of these segments is beyond the scope of this presentation, but I’d like to call your attention to the critics and spectators groups. You can tell something by the name: the critics are active on review sites, and the spectators simply consume the content. Both groups exhibited tremendous growth over 08. We’ll be interested to see how these numbers look for ’09, but estimates so far put joiners at 51% and spectators at 73%. As an example of the sheer growth and participation, consider that the number of articles on wikipedia have grown at the rate of nearly one per minute since the beginning of 2008.***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****When you look at that kind of growth alongside the fact that consumers trust their friends recommendations with 90% confidence and trust the opinions of strangers at 70% we are nearing the tipping point of influence. This graph is data from a recent Nielsen Survey which queriedover 25 thousand Internet consumers from 50 different countries. What’s really interesting to note here is that global consumers seem to trust the opinions of strangers at the same level as brand websites, but trust in brand websites is actually much lower for Internet consumers in the US, at 62%. This kind of data really drives home the importance of listening to what’s going on in this groundswell.***
Share of Voice = (brand mentions)/(brand mentions + competitor mentions)Audience Engagement = (comments + shares + reposts)/(total views)Conversation Reach = (total participants)/(total audience)Sentiment Ratio = (total positive and neutral mentions)/(total negative mentions)-Advocacy Impact = (total advocate driven conversations)/(total advocate traffic)Advocate Share = (total advocate driven conversations)/(totalconversations)Advocate Reach = (total advocate driven conversations)*(cumulative advocate social graph) Advocate Vibrancy = (number of advocates in last 30 days)/(total advocates)-Resolution Time = (aggregate time spent in resolutions)/(total issues reported)Satisfaction Score = (cumulative customer feedback score)/(total issues reported)Resolution Rate = (total issues resolved)/(total issues reported)-Topic Trends = (total mentions of topic)/(total conversations)Topic Sentiment = (sentiment around topic)/(general sentiment)Idea Impact = (topic engagement)*(topic sentiment)/(overall engagement)*(overall sentiment)
What can we monitor? Videos, Photos, Blogs - If it’s publicly available, there is a tool that can find it.Why should we monitor? There are a number of reasons beyond the obvious Identify evangelists and championscustomer service and feedbackProduct developmentCompetitive analysisThere are MANY reasons, and there are certainly people using this technology in very creative ways. ***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****We’ll want to keep in mind that it’s still an emerging field, experiencing growing pains, and no particular tool is perfect. You’ll want an understanding of your objectives so that you can make the most of your time and effort.We’ll be focused on user-generated content //It’s important to note that these tools are keyword based, and though some tools have linguistic capability, they will still only provide a cursory look into online conversations. You will only have access to information that is otherwise publicly available online.Cost-relative value //You get what you pay for (and create what you can’t)Free tools are primarily search engines //that pour through the feeds of selected social-media sites and return results for mentions of your provided keywords. They often add basic metrics to show trends and locations of relevant conversations, but some have features that streamline the exporting of data so that you can compile your own reports.Paid tools typically use more sophisticated algorithms and produce more detailed, polished reports.Some tools can integrate with analytics packages like Omniture and Google Analytics, and if your interested in capturing top-of-funnel activity as part of your strategy, these are well worth considering. The technology’s been dubbed ‘view-through’, complimenting ‘click thru’, and one vendor offering this particular type of technology is a company called ‘Tealium’. You will find a link to this product in the back of the deck, and we’ll make it available after this presentation.***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****Here’s a quick screenshot of a free, web-based tool called social mention, with an example search on the term ‘pepsi’. This is a real time platform providing very quick results from multiple sources (such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, and blogs)You can see that there are various sources to choose from in the top of the tool, and it looks a lot like traditional search results with the addition of various metrics alongside – some top keywords that occur in the results, number of authors… if you actually take it for a spin, you’ll see quite a few metrics down the left side, but as with all tools, it does take some experimentation to determine which metrics are valuable to you.Across the tools, we do see different metrics and terminology, but keywords, sources and sentiment are common threads.***
Here, we see frequency, labeled as ‘strength’***
The term ‘Passion’ is used by this tool to describe the dispersion pattern of the conversations***
And then the term Reach is used as a measure of collective influence across the contributors that were found.Brand Monitoring is one of those things that relies heavily on tools, but we want to reinforce one important point before we go any further:Always base your strategy on goals, and look at the tools as a means to that end. That is to say, focus on goals, not tools.But really, once you have solid goals in mind, you will need to evaluate the various tools so that you can find one that fits your needs and provides good, relevant results.***
Sentiment, or an indication whether the aggregate consensus is positive or negative – take note of the high proportion labeled ‘neutral’ in the graph below, we’ll touch on that a bit later.***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****The product feature matrix here is not meant to be exhaustive, in fact, new tools come online frequently, but is more to illustrate some of the key features and differences between some of the tools that are relevant. In January, Forrester did a review of several listening platforms, and a link to the PDF will be available in the resources section at the end of this deck. It is dated, but still relevant, and certainly worth a look if you are seriously considering engaging one of the top-tier companies on this matrix. Let’s go down the left and briefly look at each oneWell start with two tools, repectively, backtype and technorati, which are focused solely on blogs, if you are particularly active in the blogosphere, these are definitely tools you’d want to consider.Yes, google made the list, and while google has made great strides in terms of indexing real-time user-generated content, and will continue to do so, it is still results only, lacking the type of analytical and supplementary data that will enable effective monitoring, such as those seen in socialmention.Of the free tools, socialmention.com is certainly one of the strongest resources.Going down to the entry-level paid tools, tracker, scoutlabs and flitrbox, feature sets improve as we go down, with filtrbox being the most feature-rich at this price point. Currently, sentiment is not available through filtrbox, but they are evaluating ways to make that available in the future. The only mid-range tool on the list, Techrigy SM2 has some missing features and actually takes quite a bit of time to process in some cases. SM2 does offer a ‘freemium’ version that would still be a good place to begin your evaluation.In the higher-end tools, we see very feature-rich offerings that one would expect at these price-points, with high marks going to Radian6 for it’s ability to respond to content from within the tool, a feature shared by only one other, filtrbox. Radian6 was only noted as a ‘contender’ by Forrester in January, but there have been improvements, and its evolved into a tool that is worth a serious look.Finally, the enterprise-grade Cymfony is as a product that delivers very polished reports to those with very deep pockets. Although the tool does offer highly configurable filters and reporting, the features were marked as partial here because changes to the configuration must be made by Cymfony, and is not user-configurable. Despite these restrictions, Cymfony was rated as one of the top tools, along with BuzzMetrics, in the Q1 forrester report.***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****Perhaps it should go without saying that you will undoubtedly uncover a handful of unsavory findings. If you are already engaged with social media, you understand that it represents a dynamic shift in the way that your company communicates with it’s customer, and very likely have a contingency plan to handle troublemakers. Collect the data, then analyze. It’s easy to get caught up in a particular result that may strike a chord, but don’t get too microcosmic at this point, simply focus on collecting as much comparative data as the tools will give you, so that you can get a realistic picture from the aggregate data.The collection strategy is going to start with keywords. If you’ve recently gone through, or are going through an SEO cycle, you can use the same keyword list. If you don’t have a current keyword list (and I’d like to reinforce the need for a current list), you can use Google adwords keyword tool, which is free, or opt to go the paid route with Keyword discovery, which is also the current industry favorite. Do try and make your keyword list as broad as possible for non-brand keywords, and as inclusive as possible for branded words. Once you’ve compiled your keyword list, you can begin inputting this into the tools. Do be upfront in considering how you will store the data you collect. While many of the tools store searches and reports internally, there are a number of reasons why an analyst would want the data available outside of the tool. With the sheer number of results that an effective approach will likely produce, the data may become unwieldy in a spreadsheet, and it may be very worth your while considering a relational database. ***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****First, let’s cover an important point. Although very helpful, ‘sentiment’ is not without it’s limitations. The natural language processing, or NLP engines that evaluate sentiment have a notoriously difficult time with the slang, irony, sarcasm and idioms that pepper user-generated content. Beyond looking at how sentiment is assigned to mentions on a case by case basis, one hint to the IN accuracy that is typically seen is the proportion of mentions that are rated neutral. I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as a negative mention, and that’s a bit sensationalistic, but I do suspect that it’s difficult for a mention to be ‘neutral’. In the field of linguistics processing, that’s a punt, and engineers in the field suggest that it would be years before true linguistic analysis reaches the consumer. Consider it a suggestion, but do not rely on it’s accuracy.In using social media monitoring, our goal is ultimately to identify communities, discussions, and influencers, but also to locate challenges.Brand Challenges: A customer who’s had a negative experience can impact brands like never before. Really quick, let’s look at this statistic from facebook – 65 million active users access the site through a mobile device. These consumers can and do express their experiences immediately online. Other challenges obviously, come from competitors’ products or marketing efforts We want to look for relevant industry information //key trends, sentiment of the general consumer, and the influential personalities in your spaceTrack virality // see how fast something is spreading and track and the effectiveness of particular campaignsUse the 5 Ws as indicators to inform social media strategy.Who are your influencers? //Which websites and bloggers are mentioning your selected keywords? Which have large audiences? Obviously, these are the people you’re going to want to reach out to.What are they saying? Look for the most common words or phrases that appear alongside mentions of your selected keywords, and consider augmenting your list with them. Determine whether this instance is a positive or negative mention. Look for the activity// Do online discussions increase after your company runs a promotion or issues a press release? Clearly, this will help determine the effectiveness of those efforts at driving awareness and interest.In which online locations are your chosen keywords being mentioned? If blogs dominate the online discussion, consider participation to help shape the conversation. Maybe it’s time tostart a corporate blog (or update it, which is more often the case)Why are people talking? //What key drivers recur in the conversations online? //Perhaps there is an overwhelming sentiment toward a particular product? Do customers have a strong tendency to recommend a particular product, or even a particular usage (especially unintended usage)?***
*****CLICK IN TO SCROLL*****It's hard to deny that social media is here to stay. The first, and most important step in understanding voice of the social customer is to invest in Listening. This can be done through free or paid tools and technologies but can quickly be overwhelming if the signal to noise ratios are out of balance.Listening tools can aid marketing in brand tracking, crisis mitigation, campaign measurement, market research and customer support but all come with a cost. All listening tools are not created equal, and can cost varying amounts depending on the levels of data, insight, and strategy needed. It's also important to keep in mind that costs are not just related to the actual technological investments but need to account for the organizational structure and manpower required to pull actionable intelligence and cost savings from activity in the social channel. Currently 1 in 4 search results are for user-generated content, and if this continues to cannibalize search traffic, the brand site will probably not be the first place customers end up after searching, making brand monitoring through social media critical.And it all comes back to listening: identifying conversations that involve your brand, listening for opportunities to engage, to influence, and measuring what’s being said.Your brand is what customers think it is, and now it’s time to listen.Thank you.***
This slide contains links to any products that were mentioned in this presentation, even a few that were not.
And finally, the sources of all the citations that were made, and a handful of very relevant, pertinent links.