Category: InfluencerMarketingPro

InfluencerMarketingPro

The Twitter Paradox

There’s an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Twitter is a paradox that redefines that old saying to, “If it’s broke, don’t fix it, because it works.”

For all intents and purposes, Twitter shouldn’t work, yet 200 million people (and bots) have created accounts in this thriving information egosystem. Now, news no longer break, it Tweets. Celebrities use it daily to connect directly with fans and also augment their income streams. Politicians and governments use Twitter to communicate with constituents and one another. Everyday people rely on Twitter to find information and share experiences. And for those more “influential” Twitter users, connectedness pays off in the form rewards, recognition, and compensation.

Twitter has evolved into a human seismograph that channels the pulse of business, politics, entertainment, news, and culture into the mobile phones and PCs and defines of our connected society. Twitter is a public confessional where screens become the window to self-expression, validation, recognition, with each contributing to a digital form of self confidence. And it is this new assurance that guides our actions in the real world. I Tweet therefore I am…whatever I want to become.

Indeed, Twitter shouldn’t work, but it does. What started as a hybrid public messaging service meets social network, is now a flourishing information network where people connect and disconnect based on interests and fleeting moments of intellectual, sophomoric and parallel intimacy. As such, Twitter forces the evolution of social networking from social graphs to interest graphs, where people are not only connected to those they know, but also those who share their interests.

While it’s often chided for its ability to assemble and syndicate irrelevant, irresponsible, and questionable activity, Twitter excels in aligning relevance with those who understand how to filter streams to their advantage. And this is where things start to get interesting, as I don’t believe we’ve seen Twitter’s true impact on our digital and IRL culture.

Twitter’s Awareness vs. Adoption

The state of the Twitterverse is in flux. Capturing its shape, genetic makeup and direction is akin to measuring the development of a baby in a womb. It’s growing, quickly, and even though we know that a baby will arrive and grow into a human being, we never know exactly who this person will ultimately become nor can we be certain of its personality through each of the development stages.

Twitter’s challenge with awareness versus adoption has plagued the fledgling company since the beginning. One of the top Google searches for Twitter after all is “I don’t get Twitter.”

The Pew Internet & American Life Project announced in June 2011 that Twitter usage rose from 8% of US Internet users in Fall 2010 to 13% in May 2011. Representing an impressive 62% spike in adoption, many question the significance of the bump in its migration toward mainstream adoption. As eMarketer recently wrote, Twitter has a problem with Awareness vs. Usage.

Twitter’s awareness has greatly benefited from the nonstop media attention it receives due to controversial and high profile users. Citing Arbitron and Edison research, we see that 92% of consumers ages 12 and up are familiar with Twitter, but only 8% actually use it. According to this graph, Twitter has an adoption problem. In contrast, Facebook adoption ranks at 57.1% of internet users as stated by eMarketer.

As we know, numbers don’t lie. eMarketer also projects that Twitter advertising revenues will soar from $140 million in 2011 to $225 million in 2012. In contrast, the once bursting place for friends, MySpace, will generate $184 million in ad revenue this year. As such, Twitter is focusing on improving (and defining) the user experience with Jack Dorsey rejoining the fold. And the company is building a sizable sales force. But even at this moment, Twitter has a model it can sell against. Since the launch of its Promoted products line, Twitter has worked with 600 advertisers on 6,000 campaigns. Twitter’s director of revenue Adam Bain puts things into perspective for optimists and skeptics alike, “Eighty percent of those marketers come back and buy from us again.”

Now, the cost of a Promoted Trends on Twitter has jumped from $100,000 to $120,000 per day. Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets are auction-based and a self-service model is due to arrive before the end of the year. Bain suggests that Twitter provides higher engagement levels that outperform not only traditional digital advertising products, but also Facebook ads.

In an interview with ClickZ, Bain reinforced the value of Promoted Products, “Paying $4 for a follower is a pittance because the ROI is insane. Because again once they have a follower, they can keep marketing to that guy as many times as they want without worrying about where they are across the web or what kind of mindframe they’re in.”

Certainly this is no mistake, but it is something that again, wasn’t anticipated. Attention has migrated to the stream and as we’re learning, that while money doesn’t grow on trees, it does in fact grow on Tweets.

Recently Mark Suster wrote about how the future of advertising will be integrated. In his post, Suster shared work by usability guru Jakob Nielsen that shows through heat maps where our eyes are focused. Attention zeroes in on text and not the banners around it, thus introducing an era of banner blindness.

And in social media, banner blindness is equally prevalent. Facebook Ads sell against interests and people you know. Twitter sells products that appear within your line of sight – the stream, your new attention dashboard.

The Twitter Paradox is fascinating to study. I don’t believe mainstream adoption is a metric that matters to Twitter or to those who understand its benefits. Surely mass adoption is important to investors. But as a human network, we make the world a much smaller place, creating a global culture that connects people to information and events as they happen. And, through a stroke of fate or democratized serendipity, people effect how information travels and how events unfold. But at a minimum, Twitter has become an infinite well of incredible insight and intelligence and for that, it is already an indispensable service to businesses, governments, educators, and anyone who is impacted by the words and impressions of others.

Originally published on briansolis.com

June 10, 2011
In Social Media, Your Return Represents Your Investment

Sometimes the path of least resistance unwinds into a far more complicated and arduous journey than we anticipated. In times of change, taking the path less traveled is easier and far more rewarding. Such is true for social media.

I read a review about Engage once that read, “Brian Solis takes the fun out of social media.” The author’s point was that the book took an academic approach when the industry could benefit from something that focused on best practices, case studies, and actionable takeaways.

Shortly thereafter, I participated in a day-long event at a leading global consumer brand. Following my presentation, the person, a representative from a leading social network, took the stage and started her presentation by slighting the general theme of my discussion. She simply said, “Don’t over think social media. It’s supposed to be fun!”

Between the review, others like it and that on stage remark, I was starting to think that maybe I was beating the wrong drum. While I appreciate their perspective and their ideas, there are those of us who must march to the beat of our own drummer. This is why my work focuses on how to bridge the gap between customers and businesses, nothing less, nothing more. I focus on accountability, change, innovation and co-creation. It is not easy nor is it supposed to be when your mission is value, starting with the end in mind and working backwards from there.

The truth is that the customer gap existed prior to social media and successfully closing it takes more than basic conversational or content-driven strategies in Twitter, Facebook and other social network. The path to engagement is strenuous, uncharted, and anything but easy. Everything begins with understanding the magnitude of the gap and what it is that people want, are missing or could benefit from in order to bring both ends toward the middle.

No matter how hard we try, we just can’t build a customer-centric organization if we do not know what it is people value. Social media are your keys to unlocking the 5I’s of engagement to develop more informed and meaningful programs:

1. Intelligence – Learn about needs, wants, values, challenges
2. Insight – Find the “aha’s” to identify gaps
3. Ideation – Inspire new ideas for engagement, communication, new products/services, change
4. Interaction – Engage…don’t just publish, bring your mission to life
5. Influence – Influence behavior and in the process, become an influencer

Social media is as effective as its design. The ability to deliver against brand lift, ROI, or an established set of business and operational metrics and KPIs is all in the design. I believe you can not measure what it is you do not, or do not know, to value. As part of a recent study sponsored by Vocus, MarketingSherpa discovered that a majority of social media programs focused on programs that were deemed “fast and easy.” Sound familiar? Indeed, those programs that focus on social media programs that are easy are less effective than those that require a deeper investment of time, understanding and resources.

MarketingSherpa combined three questions about social marketing tactics: The effectiveness to achieve objectives, the degree of difficulty to implement each tactic, and the percentage of organizations using them. Their findings across the board is that “fast and easy” trumps effectiveness.

The tactics with the lowest degree of difficulty and corresponding level of effectiveness include…

– Social sharing buttons in email

– Social sharing buttons on web sites

– Tweeting

– Multimedia creation

– Social advertising

The balance shifts however toward potency as the degree of difficulty escalates. Here we see the following programs carry greater reward for consumers and businesses alike, but as such, you get what you pay for.

– Blogging

– Engagement in social networks

– SMO (Social Media Optimization)

– Blogger and influencer relations

Social media doesn’t have to be void of “fun.” It must offer value and usefulness to be successful.

In the end, the reality is that you get out of social media what you invest in it. But at the same time, experimenting with social media is not anything to discredit. The difference between today’s media and the the networks of yore is nothing less than the democratization of information, from creation to consumption to sharing and the equalization of influence. The marketing landscape has been reset and thus requires a shift from a casual approach to genuine leadership.

1. Start by understanding who you’re trying to reach and what it is they value

2. Design programs that meet the needs of each segment

3. Dissect the keywords and clickpaths of your desirable segments and develop a thoughtful SMO program

4. SMO is only as effective as the content and destinations its meant to enhance. Develop content and click paths that matter and deliver value on both sides of the transaction.

5. Identify the individuals and organizations that influence your markets. Learn what it is they value and develop engagement programs that offer tangible value (what’s in it for them and their audiences).

6. #Engage

Originally published on BrianSolis.com

June 1, 2011
5 Facebook Insights Metrics to Track – And Why

By now, if you work in the digital arena, you’ve most likely taken a glimpse at Facebook Insights. After all, many people have responsibility for managing online communities, like Facebook, and need to track metrics and report back to management on a semi-regular basis.

Admittedly, Facebook doesn’t offer the most comprehensive suite of data out there. In fact, some folks have figured out work-arounds to install Google Analytics on their Facebook page for more in-depth information.

But, Insights actually probably serves most brands just fine. It provides basic data that can tell you a lot about if and how you’re fairing on the platform.

My question is this: Are people just reporting likes and basic interactions? Or, are they really diving into the data, grabbing the right data and translating that into actionable intelligence for the brand?

Some are. Some aren’t.

Today, I thought we’d take a look at five key metrics I’ve found to be useful for most brands and how you can take that basic data and make it work for your organization’s marketing efforts online.

* Tab Views. Just like reviewing Google Analytics on your blog, one of the first things I always want to know is where people are going on my site. On Facebook it’s no different. Which tabs are fans viewing? Here’s where to find out.

What to do with the data: I had a client where after reviewing Insights recently, we discovered a decent amount of folks were visiting their Discussions tab. Only one problem: We didn’t have any content on that tab. This data forced us to rethink that a bit. People were expecting content in that tab–why? After some discussion around that question, we came up with a strategy I believe will help us improve engagement with “fans” and ultimately, help this client achieve its goals online.

* External referrers. What are your biggest referral sources online? For most, this will probably be either your Web site or Twitter. But, invariably, other sites will work there way in the mix, too. Why are those sites popping up? It’s your job to figure that out.

What to do with the data: This one depends on your goals. If you’re trying to drive people to your Facebook page from other channels, this is a great metric to check what’s working and what’s not. If Facebook traffic isn’t necessarily one of your top goals, it’s still worth running down those obscure Web sites that drive people to your page. Maybe it’s a site that picked up a blog post our CEO wrote a while back (maybe there’s a strategy there). Maybe it’s a single tweet a huge influencer in your industry made a week ago. Whatever the case, it pays to investigate–remember, the more informed you are with rich data points, the more effective your decision-making will become.

* Post Feedback. You’ll find this data under “Interactions” in your Page Overview section. It measures the number of “Likes” and comments made on the posts in your News Feed.

What to do with this data: Really, you’re looking for the percent increase month-over-month here. If engagement and two-way feedback are among your goals, this is a key stat to track. What’s more, don’t forget to check out the number of “Likes” and “Comments” throughout the month. Where were your spikes? Did they occur where you wanted them to occur? Did the number of “Likes” and comments on a certain post surprise you? Grab all this information here.

* Monthly Active Users. This metric represents the number of folks who have interacted with (Liked or commented) or viewed (don’t have to be fans) your page or its posts.

What to do with this data: First, look at the percentage growth or decline month-over-month–that should give you a good indication of how many people are visiting and interacting with your page compared to the last couple months. Then, look at the number against the “Lifetime Likes” number directly to the left–how does it stack up? Remember, the Monthly Active Users number doesn’t just reflect fans–it also picks up non-fans. So, again, if one of your goals is engagement, this comparison is a good one to grab–and it should be a pretty high ratio.

* Page Views. This number represents the total hits to your Facebook page–and it includes fans and non-fans (including those who aren’t logged it to Facebook). You can find it in the Users tab under “Activity.”

What to do with this data: Here’s where you can really see what days of the week people are hitting you page–and how the spikes correspond with your content. It might make sense to overlay this chart with the days you post–great way to determine which posts might be encouraging fans to click on your actual page (remember, this isn’t about News Feed views–it’s about actual Facebook page views).

What about you? What Facebook Insights metrics do you look at from month-to-month? And, more importantly, what do you do with that data?

Originally published at Communications Conversations

April 9, 2011
Social Media: More than Twitter and Facebook? Uh, yeah.

The following post is based on a discussion at the Cincinnati Social Media LinkedIn Group.

In what seems to be a race to oversimplify EVERYTHING, we’re creating misdefinitions. In many cases there’s simply (a lot) more to the story.

Social media provides the latest example. Do you know anyone with "T&F Tunnel Vision?" This unfortunate condition involves the assumption that the social media landscape starts and ends with Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve ranted about this before — more than a few times. And I’m taking this well-worn soapbox with me down to SXSW for a panel discussion I’m on with David Binkowski and Krista Neher about influencers. Simple math shows the folly in T&F Tunnel Vision and Geoff Livingston deconstructs Twitter in a recent post.

Recently I was reminded about an uber-important site for any local strategy — Yelp.

Think Local, Act Social (with Yelp)
Alex Shebar and I connected recently so I could get up to speed on his role as Yelp’s Cincinnati community manager as well as some functionality to the site of which I was unaware. I’ve used Yelp before. But until recently I had not visited frequently/regularly.

It’s safe to say I’m a minority in Cincinnati. Ohio has community managers in three cities: Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland. That’s rare and speaks to our level of activity on the site. States larger than ours have only one manager in one city.

Yelp became a bigger focus for me when looking at how small businesses are using social media. In a recent presentation, I spent more time discussing Yelp than I did Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s because small businesses stand to benefit by focusing their time and effort on Yelp.

Word of Mouth "is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions" per NM Incite. And Yelp’s community is just that. It’s tagline is "real people. real reviews." Search is the place to start to determine where your customers are talking about your brand. And these reviews can impact search results in a big way. So even if your customers aren’t hitting Yelp, they might be reading the reviews via search results.

Yelp 101
So what can businesses do to step up their Yelp presence? Alex gave me two links as the perfect examples.

** Business Owner’s Guide to Yelp: This section of the site shows you how to claim your page, respond to reviews and even buy ads. It lays it out step by step.

** Check-In Offers: This is similar to checking in on Foursquare, but focused more on easily-customized customer incentives. "It provides a measurable way to reward your most loyal customers while attracting new ones."

Based on the type of business, Yelp can be a valuable tool for building word of mouth. You should check and see where your company/your clients shake out. And if you have a great experience retail, food, drink or otherwise? Spread the word on Yelp.

As Alex noted in our conversation, "if you find yourself sitting at home complaining that there’s nothing to do, you have no excuse. There’s plenty to do. You just need a site to help you find it."

Driving Miss Social Media

Everyone wants a dependable car that gives them no problems, performs well and gets the job done. But everyone wants to be seen in the sports car that’s getting a tune up as much as it’s parking a mile from the building so no one scratches the paint job.

Did I just call Twitter a Ferrari and Yelp a Honda Accord? I’m being dramatic to make a point. But, yeah, there are popular sites and their are relevant sites. Relevant sites are different for every brand and for every customer segment. Relevance wins.

I think I just named a new line of cars. Make check payable to…

—
Full disclosure: I decided to create this post after the discussion with Alex and due to my recent focus on the site. I did not "unlock any offers" by doing so. In fact, I had to bug Alex to send me the links.

Pic for Strange Facts post – Yelp Fingerless Glove uploaded by Terre

Originally published on Strategic Public Relations

February 24, 2011
The Era of the Interest Graph

Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.

This is the era of the interest graph – the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events. Interest graphs represent a potential goldmine for brands seeking insight and inspiration to design more meaningful products and services as well as new marketing campaigns that better target potential stakeholders.

While many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors, many are simply documenting activity and mentions as a reporting function and in some cases, as part of conversational workflow. However, there’s more to Twitter intelligence than tracking conversations.

We’re now looking beyond the social graph as we move into focused networks that share more than just a relationship.

Bringing the Interest Graph to Life

To demonstrate the value of interest graphs, I worked with the team at ReSearch.ly, a unique Twitter search platform that has indexed the last three years of Tweets to instantly provide a real-time and historical analysis of activity around keywords and also the people that Tweet them.

ReSearch.ly visualizes the interest graph, and also provides the ability to search within the search to sort activity by demographics and psychographics, sentiment, bio data, profession, and the list goes on. Essentially, it’s a product that anyone can use to learn about what’s really taking place on Twitter to better understand behavior and earn greater relevance by making more informed decisions.

As an example of audience profiling or competitive intelligence, we used ReSearch.ly to review the followers of @Starbucks, one of the most celebrated brands actively using Twitter today. We started by extracting 1 million follower profiles, sorted by follower count. The results were then further filtered to include only those who published a complete profile. ReSearch.ly provides the option to then organize the resulting information any number of ways, which in this case, we sorted the accounts by bio, location, and gender.

The Interest Graph

While we are what we say in our Tweets, our bios also reveal a telling side of who we really are. In this study we reviewed the complete bios of 50,000 of the top @Starbucks followers to learn a bit more about how they present their life story as well as their interests, opinions, and preferences.

Using the ReSearch.ly Twitter index, we created a word cloud to amplify the most common words used in each of the bios of these connected social consumers. Followers tended to use expressive words that suggest sentiment runs rich in the Starbucks interest graph. Top words include:

1. Love
2. Life
3. Friends
4. Music
5. World

We can also learn a bit more about Starbucks influencers by analyzing what interests them. Looking a bit deeper into the cloud, we can see that not only do emotions rise to the top; other revealing themes also surface:

1. Family
2. People
3. Mom
4. Wife
5. Husband

This is just the beginning. The words associated with the brands demonstrate the emotional and personal connections Starbucks holds with these tastemakers. Campaigns are a direct beneficiary of such data. As we submerge ourselves one level deeper into the study, we find that this information becomes paramount when we link it to individuals through demographics and psychographics. An import footnote is that the word coffee is among the least used words in the bio, but used nonetheless.

Studying Bio’graphy

With a 50,000-person sample in a traditional research survey, it may be difficult to organize individual responses. Here, we further reviewed each of the bios to find the commonalities in how each person presents who they are in a few precious characters.

Of those, we found that…

– 42 percent expressed strong ties to family, religion, and love

– 29 percent boast special interests, which is further discernible

– 22 percent are professionals who state their current place of employment and position

– 7 percent are students

Additionally, we can extract the attributes of @Starbucks followers further to better symbolize their digital persona. Further review highlights that followers…

– Identify themselves as enthusiasts, geeks, addicts, junkies, creatives

– Define the most popular areas of interest as Music, Food, Coffee, and Fashion

– Potentially favor dogs to cats (2 – 1 as per their mentions)

– Work in either Social Media and Marketing (Note: If we were to change the scale of followers, we would open up the sample to a much broader set of professions)

– Also are still studying. Despite the lower percentage, students account for more than any single professional field

Geo Location: Where in the World is @Waldo?

Brands are more than aware that no one marketing strategy reaches and moves everyone in the same way. Beyond demographic marketing, brands must also focus on driving traffic regionally. Having access to location data isn’t new, but using Twitter as a collective stream of intelligence to identify higher and underperforming locales and associative word clouds allow teams to surface the 3 W’s of real-time geo loco marketing:

Where is negative/positive activity taking place?

Why is it leaning in that direction? And,

What can we do about it?

To give us an idea of where the top @Starbucks followers are Tweeting, we zoomed in to their point of reference. We found that top users tend to Tweet from…

1. California
2. New York
3. Texas
4. Florida
5. Washington

Combining London and UK, we find that The United Kingdom would actually join the ranks of the most often cited cities.

Grouping locations provides a holistic view that provides regional marketing metrics and also areas in need of attention.

Here we can see that the top Tweeps are located in…

– US East, 30 percent
– Non US, 27 percent
– US West, 22 percent
– US Midwest, 21 percent

Tweeting from the Gender Lines

Over the years, I’ve studied the gender makeup of social networks and have consistently found that women outnumber men in some of the most popular networks including Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, women represent the majority share with 57 percent.

Working with the team here at PeopleBrowsr and ReSearch.ly in conjunction with Klout earlier in 2010, we uncovered en masse, women are more influential than men on Twitter. In fact, the average Klout score within the general Twitter population 34 to 31 in favor of women.

Reviewing Starbucks top followers in ReSearch.ly, it comes as no surprise to see that the women are the predominant source of Tweets, 63 percent women vs. 37 percent men.

The Tweets Have It!: Introducing the Starbucks Brand Graph

The interest graph is defined by connections, but it is brought to life through self-expression. When we combine brand-centric relationships and conversations, the interest graph eventually evolves into what is essentially a brand graph. Within each brand-related graph is a group of highly connected individuals that serve as a company’s network of influence. The ReSearch.ly team extracted 50,000 of the most recent Tweets that included a mention of Starbucks. We then analyzed the connections between people and identified the top 100 individuals and the number of their followers who also mention Starbucks within the 50,000 mentions. We can then bring to light Starbucks influencers as a representation of its brand graph and influential hubs. As we can see, the difference between monitoring and gathering intelligence allows Starbucks to now identify relevant networks and introduce personalized campaigns to further spur advocacy and loyalty.

Here are the top 100 most connected people within the group mentioning Starbucks and the number of their followers also discussing Starbucks:

Accordingly, we can visualize the interest graph as connections, showing how influencers are not only interconnected, but also capable of disseminating relevant information and influencing behavior to varying degrees beyond the traditional reach of Starbucks. Social consumers and their place within the social consumer hierarchy determine reach and ultimately outcomes. Everything begins however, with recognizing who they are and what inspires or motivates them.

Conclusion

The era of analysis paralysis is officially over. Instead of just listening, companies can now study people and their interests based on what they say and do and also how they color their profiles. This goldmine of insight gives brands the potential to improve marketing, promotional and advertising campaigns to start. What we’re talking about here is the ability to personalize experiences that go beyond demographics and start to employ psychographics and behaviorgraphics – the ability to connect with groups of people by interest and how they interact.

As this practice develops, brands can also gather the intelligence necessary, and widely available, to improve products, services, and spark new waves of tweets gushing with positive sentiment. Doing so over time helps to build the social, and more relevant, business of the future while improving relationships to convert followers into stakeholders.

Originally published on BrianSolis.com

February 8, 2011
People Saying Social Media Unmeasurable Not Looking Hard Enough

People who say social media isn’t measurable aren’t looking very hard.

The truth is that there are at least 25 viable metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability, it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 critically undervalued social media success metrics.

Daily Story Feedback

Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue – which signifies nothing more than digital bumper stickering, instead track how often your fans click “like” and comment upon the status updates you post.

The more fans that click “like” and comment, the more likely your future updates are to be seen in their News Feed, dramatically increasing your actual Facebook audience.

If you’re an administrator of a Facebook fan page, you can find the Daily Story Feedback chart at http://facebook.com/insights (look in the interactions category)

Klout

Rather than paying rapt attention to the number of Twitter followers you’ve corralled, instead look at your Klout score.

Klout is an online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) and then applies some fancy algorithmic voo doo to arrive at a unified metric.

The data used to calculate Klout continues to change (they added Facebook information recently), but I have found it to be the most reliable influence tracking metric. By no means perfect, but much more illustrative than follower counts.

PostRank

One of the challenges of writing a blog is knowing how to value the wide variety of reader engagements and behaviors. Should you care more about Digg submission than about comments? Are tweets more important than Facebook shares?

PostRank Analytics solves this problem.

Free if you connect with their “influencers” outreach program, or $15/month if you do not, PostRank provides a useful, detailed blogging scoreboard, especially if you connect it with your Google Analytics account.

The best part of PostRank Analytics is the Engagement Score, which is sort of your Klout score for each blog post. The system looks at total comments, tweets, shares, etc. for each post and applies behavior points and an algorithm to determine the total score. This is a fantastic way to look at your last 25 blog posts to see what type of content you’re publishing generates the most engagement.

Share of Voice

Tracking how often your company and/or its products are mentioned on the social Web is a best practice, of course. But without also paying attention to how often your competitors are referenced, it’s difficult to determine whether the chatter about your brand is significant.

To add a reference point to your social mention tracking, create a Share of Voice report.

To do so, determine the number of times your company and its products are mentioned on the social Web in a neutral or positive context over a 30 day period. You’ll want to use Radian6, ViralHeat, Spiral 16, Sysomos, Social Mention or any of the other social listening tools for this project. Then determine how often your competitors are mentioned (neutral or positive) during the same 30 days.

Add up all mentions for the category (you + your competitors), and then divide your mentions by the total to calculate your Share of Voice – which is always a percentage. Usually, Share of Voice reports are formatted as a pie chart, so you can easily see how you fare versus your competition.

Search Volume

Perhaps more than any other marketing metric, the number of people that are searching for your brand on Google serves as a catch-all metric for market awareness.

In many ways, social media and your other marketing efforts create demand, which is then harvested via searches.

The tie between search and social media cannot be overestimated. Perhaps the best study on the subject – from GroupM in 2009 – found that consumers exposed to a brand in social media are subsequently 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand than are consumers unexposed within social media.

Use Google Insights to examine whether or not searches for your company and products are increasing over time, and if your volume is going up, and your competitors’ isn’t – double bonus!

Inbound Links

Without other sites linking to your website, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever crack the Top 10 in Google. Links are the coin of the realm in SEO, and without them all you have is a pile of carefully crafted words.

Social media is one of the best places to accrue links, because we social types are prone to link from blog posts, within blog comments, etc.

Track the number of links pointing to your website and/or blog, and examine the source of new links. How many links do you have, in comparison to your competitors? What sites are linking to them, that perhaps you could get to link to you as well?

There are several inbound link tracking services online. My favorite is Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. The free version allows you to track and report on up to 1,000 links.

If you’re looking for a magic number that automatically determines your social media prowess, you’re not going to find it. Instead, the secret to tracking social media is tying together disparate data sources, and selecting the metrics that make the most sense for your company. And those are never the obvious ones like Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Tracking social media may not always be easy and fast, but it’s absolutely, 100% doable.

Right?

Originally published on Convince and Convert

January 11, 2011
The Social Path to Organizational Transformation

Social media and marketing have become synonymous over the years. At the same time, social media is placing the customer back in customer service. Each movement represents important and overdue (r)evolutions within business, but this is just the beginning. With every step toward progress we make in social media, we uncover what’s necessary to make real headway in the progress of progress.

The future of business is social and as such, every aspect of business affected by outside activity will require a social extension. Businesses must shift from reacting to the outside in, bottom up groundswell to also leading a top down, inside out program to earn relevance, community, and authority. In order to do so, the social business will take a human touch…and internal transformation.

At the moment, it is the champion who ignites change from within. They understand how social affects business dynamics and builds support among key players to engage. Typically marketing and/or customer service run pilot programs to prove the merit of new media. From there, trials graduate to ongoing initiatives dedicated to social marketing, service or both. It starts with listening and monitoring and evolves to reactive engagement. Through strategy and creative processes, social programs eventually mature into proactive participation over time.

Everything starts with defining the voice and the persona of the brand as well as its mission and purpose for engagement. While intention counts, it is our actions and words that define outcomes. In the last mile of engagement, consumers must see beyond the personal brand tied to the representative to see the brand the individual represents. The elements of traditional branding still apply, they’re just humanized now.

When we shift from monitoring to hearing what people are saying and the context of their conversations, we discover that reactive and proactive engagement spans across the entire business. And even in the cases where participation isn’t required, there is still much opportunity to adapt products and processes based on insights gleaned from concentrations of meaningful dialogue.

Many of the social media cases that I review today and even those that I have worked on in the past, reach one audience…an audience of existing and potential customers. So, when we run a creative campaign or a personalized social customer program, we quickly realize that our audience is actually an audience with audiences who also have audiences. And, within each, are subsets of people with distinctive needs and also those who represent real world opportunities.

At any one moment, they are…

Peers
Advisors
Influencers
Decision Makers
Customers
Adversaries
Advocates

We are on the right path. We just have much to learn. In 2011 and for the next several years, social businesses will transform the organization from within. For those ready to lead tomorrow’s businesses today, we are indeed talking about organizational transformation and change management. Starting with the philosophy, culture, and reverberating throughout systems, processes, workflow, business units and the people at every step of the way, the business of business will evolve…it already is.

Originally published at BrianSolis.com. See Brian’s 2010 Series on the Social Business here.

January 2, 2011
OneRiot Moves Away From Realtime Search

OneRiot said today it is moving away from its realtime search to focus on its online advertising platform.

Since the company first launched its advertising network in January brands and media companies including Stella Artois, Sony Pictures, AOL and Time have incorporated OneRiot into their digital marketing strategies and have benefited from the company’s realtime social targeting.

“We’ve been in the market with two products that leverage the same underlying technology platform: consumer-facing realtime search and an innovative advertising product that monetizes both realtime search the wider realtime social web,” said Tobias Peggs, OneRiot’s CEO.

“Our advertising platform has taken off like a rocket – both in terms of network growth and the number of advertisers who are seeking to engage with the social influencers across that network. Going forward, we’ll be focusing all our energy on this side of the business. It’s the right business decision – focusing means we’ll move faster and deliver more in this one area. Of course, realtime search is still very important to us, but future investment will be focused on our paid-search syndication product rather than our own organic search destination site.”

OneRiot partnerships are available to marketers looking to reach social influencers across its network of Twitter and Facebook apps, mobile apps, and social networks.

October 12, 2010
Measuring Social Media Effectiveness May Have Just Gotten Easier

Everyone knows that social media provides some great opportunities for marketing, but measurement issues continue to plague businesses. You know content is being shared, but you don’t know how people who its being shared with are responding to it.

Are you content with your ability to measure social media effectiveness? Let us know.

ShareThis, which reaches 400 million people a month through social media share buttons across content all over the web, has released some new metrics for measuring social media effectiveness.

One of the metrics is its Audience Index, which lets publishers understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites (and soon against categories), find out what types of influencers your site attracts, and find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners, and engaged customers.

The other metric might be even more useful. That would be "Social Reach".

"We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics," ShareThis explains on the company blog. "Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook."

"Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis’ new share buttons that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where our buttons are installed," the company says.

ShareThis sharing & social reach data – your social equation

View more documents from ShareThis.

ShareThis shared some interesting stats regarding Social Reach with TechCrunch. For example, according to the company, Facebook accounts for 45 percent of all shared content across its network, followed by email with 34 percent, and Twitter with 12 percent.

While Facebook may get more shares from ShareThis, email appears to be more effective, as people are more likely to click on an emailed link (31 percent out of the 34 percent, compared with 36 percent out of FB’s 44 percent).

Either way, the metrics could prove to be very useful for publishers looking at optimizing their social media marketing strategies.

What tools do you use to measure social media effectiveness? Share with other WebProNews readers.

August 28, 2010
Logitech Launches Contest to Find Help Promoting Google TV Device

Logitech has started a contest to promote Google TV, the upcoming service for which Logitech is a launch partner. The contest is called "Host with the Most", and asks if "you have what it takes to be a ‘host with the most’ for Logitech Revue with Google TV?"

Logitech Revue is the company’s set-top box that will help the Google TV service launch (alongside TVs and Blu-ray players from Sony).

The contest is looking for a "social media rock star" to help promote the device. Google’s YouTube is pretty excited about it (as the device will no doubt bring a great deal more YouTube video watching to living rooms). You can read the official rules here, but YouTube Product Marketing Manager Peter Sherman sums it up nicely:

If you can prove that you are a true social influencer with a passion for the new universe of TV and video that Google TV will offer, Logitech may select you to become a Logitech host and pay you to spend time in one of their lofts in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Your mission will be to host a bunch of parties, show off the technology, and spread the word through your social circles.

Naturally, YouTube is encouraging its users to nominate themselves.

NewTeeVee looks at a new report from iSuppli, which finds that Internet TV is more popular than 3-D TV. That could mean good things for Google and all of its Google TV launch partners.

July 28, 2010
ForeSee Results Launches Social Media Measurement Tool

ForeSee Results has introduced a "Social Media Value Calculation" tool aimed at helping its clients understand the impact of their social media marketing campaigns on revenue.

"Most businesses have accepted the marketing value of social media without any real proof points," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

"We can count how many Facebook fans, how many Tweets, how many complaints, and how many people click through ads on social sites, but we haven’t had a way to calculate a tangible return on investment for social media efforts, not to mention other marketing initiatives. Now we can."

ForeSee Results uses a scientific methodology created at the University of Michigan to measure customer satisfaction and examine its impact on future behaviors. Using its proprietary methodology, ForeSee has created a way to tie influences on customer visits to a website, store or call center with what they actually spend. ForeSee says its Social Media Value Calculation tool helps businesses understand how much revenue is being influenced by social media compared with traditional advertising, marketing emails and brand awareness.

Research conducted using the Social Media Value Calculation tool indicates investments in social media vary from company to company. Some companies are spending millions in advertising their social media presence, only to find out that social media is influencing just 1 percent of all purchases.

Marketing emails have been neglected in favor of social media, and emails are influencing 32 percent of purchases. Other companies are seeing social media as a main influencer of 5-6 percent of all revenue.

"The Social Media Value Calculator tells our clients what is influencing their customers’ visits, how much those customers spend, and which marketing efforts are having the greatest return on investment," added Freed.

"Every business is going to have a different model for success, which is why it’s so critical that companies understand their customers and not allocate marketing spending based only on hunches, industry standards, or expert guidance."

June 15, 2010
Could Forums Be More Valuable to Your Brand Than Facebook/Twitter?

Social media marketing is largely about engaging with your audience, and a big part of that is knowing where your audience is. A lot of brands may find that their audience is easiest to reach through forums, which are kind of the old school social networks.

Do you use forums to engage with your audience? Tell us about it.

There’s no question that there is a lot of value to the big networks like Facebook and Twitter, but forums have always been and still are a way to jump into a topical conversation within a specific niche and engage with an audience that is heavily invested in that niche. As Li Evans of Serengeti Communications talked about with WebProNews at Search Engine Strategies last week, forums can sometimes provide more value than the big social networks, depending on your audience.

"A lot of people think forums and message boards are dead, but they’re not," she says. "They’re very powerful because they have a lot of influencers, it can reach a lot of people, and these forums rank in the search results as well."

The very nature of forums makes them good for search, because users will continue to update them with fresh posts in many cases, and add information and value, and often answer the questions users are seeking with their search queries.

Last fall Google introduced a new feature to search results, making it easier to find forum posts related to topics users search for. When forum sites have more than one relevant discussion going, Google will link to them under the main result.

As Evans pointed out, it’s a great idea to listen before you talk in a forum. Communities often have certain ways members will talk to one another, and just have things established that may not be so apparent to the "newb." She likens it to petting a shark. "It can bite you," she says. Just pay attention and get a sense of the atmosphere in a community before jumping in and embarrassing yourself. If there’s one thing most active forum participants have in common, it is that they’re vocal, and you don’t want any negative reputation issues to arise.

While forum participation may be like petting a shark, that doesn’t mean you should be afraid of it. Just get to know the shark, and become its friend. The forum sharks just may potentially be some of your best and most loyal customers.

Do you find forums to be of significant value to your brand? Discuss here.

March 31, 2010