Social media monitoring no longer for PR and marketing alone
Social Media Monitoring is being taken more and more seriously and delivering value to more and more departments within organisations.
It is no longer the preserve of PR and Marketing.
Customer Service, R&D, Innovation and Insight leading to New Product Development are all well represented in The state of social media monitoring, a survey run by London based 90:10 Group with 99 professionals from around the world.
According to this survey, Social Media Monitoring is finally moving out of its experimental phase and claiming its place at the top table of serious, action-oriented research
Organisations attempting to understand their customers and their needs without tuning into the online conversation are missing out on an unprecedented opportunity - one their rivals are already taking advantage of.
More in this slide deck:
Our digital lifestyle has us drowning in data
Realtime video curation engine magnify.net has just released the results of their Digital Lifestyle Survey. Some of the highlights:
What keeps us busy online?
- 76.7% read email and respond on evenings and weekends
- 43.2% answer texts or emails on date/social occasion
- 57.4% never turn off their phone
- 33.0% check email in the middle of the night
- 35.2% answer work emails while with children
- 46.9% are unable to answer all email
Conclusions the report:
- The volume of raw data coming at us has increased more than 50% in the past 12 months. As more digital devices and software services proliferate, the volume of data and speed of increase will grow exponentially.
- People have reached their capacity to manage data, impacting family, friends, productivity, and even sleep. Algorithmic solutions (better spam filters, smarter search, more connected devices) will in fact expand the problem, creating more undifferentiated data.
- Human data management, shared and community filtering, and personal recommendations will fulfull individuals Digital Identity as content curators - while allowing content consumers to "surf" less, and consume curated content delivered to them by trusted sources.
Facebook: “They’re not Ads, they’re Sponsored Stories”
Facebook insists that Sponsored Stories are not Ads, but "an easy way to show each other what they like". This doesn't change the fact that Sponsored Stories are not free, and a service specifically targeted at marketing professionals willing to give their content, events or apps that extra little push it needs by buying it into their target group's News Feed.
Sponsored Stories are now possible for Pages, Posts on that Page, Likes of that Post on your Page, stories from Apps (e.g.who's been playing a particular game at least twice or for at least 10 minutes last month), Check-ins (e.g. someone checked in at one of your claimed Places), and domains (the classic "likes this article on a regular website").
Here's the overview:
More where this came from, the full Facebook Sponsored Stories Guide:
Facebook fans can be bought
On page 98 of The Conversity Model I mention a current form of black hat social media services:
I have met social media consultants who claim to be able to ‘sell’ you Facebook fans for as little as 50 eurocents per fan. This must mean that after ‘click farms’ (to click on your advertising), ‘content farms’ (to write your blog posts), there are now also ‘fan farms’ (to give you the illusion that your fan page is popular).
According to digital marketer Shiv Singh, the going rate for fan acquisition is roughly $0.60 to $1.00 per fan:
If I wanted to create the largest brand page on Facebook, I could do that quickly by just spending. I could use a large percentage of a digital media budget to buy those fans. It'll take probably two weeks but I would have the largest Facebook brand page in no time. Does it mean that I have the most popular brand online or that I'm the most social media savvy marketer out there? Of course not. It just means that I have a very large budget.
In the end, these non-organic "fans" will barely interact with the messages on your Page. And that's a shame, since Facebook's advertising solutions, if used well, can quickly scale up your fan count too.
Source:
- Will you tie bonuses to Facebook fan counts? @ goingsocialnow.com
Dan Zarella: measure your social media efforts’ ROI against the bottom line
Hubspot's social media scientist Dan Zarella in his recent blog post Need to Justify Social Media? Use Real Numbers About Real Money:
Measuring stuff like “engagement” or “reach” is great, and I recommend advanced social media users do it. But you must understand that those numbers are merely proxy metrics for what really matters: the bottom line.
Or, in other words: if it doesn't make money it doesn't make sense.
Some advice from the same blog post:
- Use coupon codes, referrer analytics, tracking tokens, special offers and landing pages. Get a baseline for how much cash social media is bringing in. If you miss a few sales here or there, that’s not a big deal. In fact if your efforts are only producing barely enough sales to be worthwhile, you’re doing something wrong. Obsessively track the up or down movement of that dollar amount.
- Don’t let customer service or PR users of social media off the hook either. Customer service on Twitter can be faster than on the phone or via email, so calculate the cost per ticket saved, and the customer loss prevented.
- For the PR folks: ask customers how they heard about you. Again, it’s about accuracy not precision here. Your work should be bringing in overwhelming numbers, so a few missed decimal places shouldn’t be the end of the world.
Social CRM: not just for Customer Relations department
Traditional CRM is based around information that companies could collect on their customers and then input into a CRM system that allows them to better target various customers.
Social CRM is a philosophy and business strategy designed to engage the customer in a mutually beneficial relationship. It's supported by social technology, business rules, workflow and processes.
Social CRM's key changes:
- CR Department
In most organisations today, the Customer Relations department will play a bigger role by taking charge of the brand's social presence, while handling customer engagement online. - Advocacy and Experience
Rather than sending passive messages to customers, incorporate them into the system as advocates. Now, there is collaboration amongst both parties to solve business problems.
More where this came from:
- The Evolution of Social CRM [infographic] at getsatisfaction.com
What tools do people use to manage their Twitter conversations?
I like the classification of different Twitter tools in Oneforty's All about social media monitoring tools infograph. I've added a few more - the ones I use most often are in bold.
- Desktop clients: Seesmic Desktop, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, Twitterrific, Echofon
- Mobile app: Twitter for iPhone, SocialScope, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Ubersocial
- Picture app: Mobypicture, Twitpic, Plixi
- Scheduling tool: CoTweet, Hootsuite, SocialOomph
- Syndication tool (feed your blog content to Twitter): Twitterfeed, Feedburner
- Analytics tool for Twitter users: Klout, Twitalyzer, Peerindex, TwitterCounter
- Analytics tool for shared links: BackTweets
- Web-based client: Twitter.com, Brizzly, Ginx, Seesmic Web
- Auto-follow tool: SocialToo, TwitterMass, Twollow
- Notification tool: Boxcar, Qwitter, Social Oomph
- URL shorteners: goo.gl, bit.ly
- Twitter account management (e.g. unfollow who doesn't follow you back): ManageFlitter
What tools do you use?
How much do people pay for social media monitoring tools?
- 54.7% pays $100/month or less
- 19.7% pays between $100 and $500/month
- 19% pays between $500 and $5,000/month
- 4.4% pays between $5,000 and $10,000/month
- 2.2% say they spend $10,000/month or more
Based on a survey collecting data from 150 U.S. social media professionals, conducted by "social business software hub" oneforty.
More where this came from: All about social media monitoring tools infograph.
How to integrate social into your corporate website
According to Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang, the evolution of integrating social into your website is getting closer to maturity.
So far, he sees websites who integrate "social" do either of these:
- Social linking e.g. by using "Follow us on Facebook" buttons. Owyang: "Companies that link away, are sending away their decade of hard earned investments getting customers to come to their website."
- Social aggregation, the process of collecting content and trusted discussion from multiple social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter or blogs. Owyang sees three ways of doing so: Basic Feeds (e.g. "What people our saying about this topic", unmoderated), Curated Aggregation (e.g. pulling in Twitter feeds to show how people are reacting to this content), and Contextual Aggregation (e.g. social sign-on with Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn).
- Social publishing: publishing all the information back out. Passive Sharing (allowing people to share or "like" whenever they feel like it), Active Sharing (encouraging people to share it by making it easy for them)
- Social Context: really personalised information based on their online behaviour and preferences. Two kinds: social content (based upon their profile), and social and contextual content (based upon the people I know and trust, e.g. Amazon recommendations).
- Seamless integration where you can't tell the difference between the social web and the corporate website. Content will just assemble based on where you are.
Hear the full story in this recorded webinar:
Secrets of Engagement: Leverage Social to Unlock User Value on Your Site from Janrain on Vimeo.
Hot on Facebook: 3 inspiring concepts and campaigns from Europe
Facebook Studio is "a place to learn, share your work, and find inspiration. [Facebook Inc] created Facebook Studio as a way to showcase how agencies and marketers can make an impact by marketing with Facebook. Here you'll find great creative ideas from around the world, as well as the resources you need to find answers and create your own campaigns."
These three are in Facebook Studio's Spotlight and popular in Europe:
Fashion Tag (Flair Magazine, Brussels, Belgium)
Tag someone’s clothes and get inspiration for your wardrobe. Women are always looking for inspiration for their wardrobe and most of the time they find this inspiration by looking at other women. This inspired women’s magazine Flair to develop the Flair Fashiontag. The Flair Fashiontag is a Facebook application: instead of tagging people, you can tag people’s clothes or accessories and ask them where they got them.
All Fashiontags are displayed in a Facebook gallery, the best are published in the weekly magazine Flair. This way there is a constant interaction between the Facebook application and the magazine itself.
What Zürich Needs (Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, Zürich, Switzerland)
A Facebook Page where Zurich’s people could post ideas on what they thought Zurich needed most. Hundreds of ideas were posted, discussed and voted for by using the like button. The 4 ideas with the most votes where then literally put into practice by our 4 candidates who took care of them and pushed them through parliament.
Thanks to great ideas from the public and our 4 dedicated candidates, Zurich will now get a free citywide WiFi network, cheaper public transportation and a FreeBayDay. Calling it “The world’s most direct democracy,” the press had its share in helping the idea to come alive. The party received an unexpected 30% of votes, making it the most successful party. On top of that, all 4 of our candidates were elected.
Make a better one yourself, then (KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland)
We wanted to finally raise positive discussion around [Museum of Contemporary Art] Kiasma. In advertising we used the real critiques from discussion forums and newspapers and added “Make a better one yourself then” slogan and invited people to upload their own art piece to a Facebook gallery where people could vote, support and comment on their favorites. The campaign was noticed well in magazines and blogs and almost 600 works were submitted during summer.