ImpactWatch Blog

• Market Research 3.0 Is Here: Attitudes Meet Algorithms in Sentiment Analysis – Fast Company
  

We also need to look at social media as just a channel in the consumer experience mix, and Sentiment Analysis as just a market research tool that is part of a bigger research mix; in-person research and surveys for all their shortcomings offer benefits that social media research cannot duplicate. (even aside from the M&Ms and two-way mirrors!)

• There’s a Sucker Born every Minute- Esp. in Social Media Measurement – Random Acts of Data

Everyday on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc I see posts on how to measure Social Media.  Usually while reading these posts I have to resist the urge to find a knife and go on a “people who cheapen my skill set in the social media space” killing spree.  For the most part the measurement solutions proposed in these articles lack context,  double count metrics, and fail to isolate an overall measurement goal. The result is equations (usually to measure ROI or some variant of ROI) that have enough holes in them to strain the pasta for my Sunday spaghetti dinner.

• Trying to measure the ROI of social media is stupid – Recruiting Bloggers

Are these companies measuring the ROI of their employees’ telephone conversations? Emails? Faxes?

• There’s No ROI on Social Media – Sysomos Blog

The challenge when it comes to measuring social media ROI is it’s still early days for social media. As a result, there is a lot of experimenting (and spending) by companies that want to get experience and insight into what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, they are trying to create ROI models that can be used for measurement purposes.

• What makes social media measurement hard? – RMM

An activity that uses social media technologies can affect the performance of multiple business functions at the same time.

• Social Media Intelligence. We sell or else – davaidavai.com

The same mistakes that were made by the marketing industry for ages by setting up big surveys which anticipate answers we have to give in case we fail. No doubt, only few human beings want to fail. But there is a difference between a survey and the right action afterwards.

• What’s your Twitter ROI? How to measure social media payoff and One company’s ROI tally for social media – Computerworld

Now, as more companies adopt social media for business dealings, leading organizations are trying to assess the actual value of using these tools. They’re finding that while social media technologies do have business benefits, calculating the hard numbers of ROI is a difficult yet necessary step as they try to decide what actions to take next.

• Why Search Engines Aren’t Media Monitoring Tools – Media Badger

Some Social Media  consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.

-

Media Monitoring Tools Lists

38 free tools to monitor social media – Pietro Sansone

Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Amit Klein

-

Slides & Presentations

Measuring Social Media – MarketingNow Measurement

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

In “someone finally did this” news, Laura Fitton, author of Twitter for Dummies, recently launched a directory for currently available Twitter apps known as OneForty.  Fitton, whose career pretty much hinges on Twitter, is attempting to fill the gap where a formal Twitter app store might fall.

I like the site’s motto:

Twitter is confusing.
What’s the value? How do you start?
Apps make Twitter better. Find yours!

It’s true.  Twitter still confuses people, users still aren’t sure of the value, and there’s still got to be a way to make it better.  While the site still has a long way to go (at launch it listed only 1200 of an estimated 4000 apps), the idea is a good one, and I can’t wait to start messing around with it.

[Original story from the LA Times]

Nearly every week I’ve noticed someone tweeting a challenge for social media monitoring companies to respond to the tweet as quickly as possible in order to prove that they are the best and fastest social media monitoring option.

I understand the idea and that it’s kind of fun for consumers to make companies snap to attention at their every tweet. But there are a lot of problems with correlating Twitter responses to the quality of social media monitoring tools.

For starters, let’s take the premise that social media monitoring companies should be “practicing what they preach.” We do tell clients that monitoring social media is essential for tracking reputation issues and that online customer service complaints are time-sensitive.

The thing is, it’s usually necessary to mention a company’s name if you’re trying to trash their brand online. And none of the tweet tests say “Let’s see how fast ImpactWatch answers this tweet!”.

So there’s the assumption that in order to walk the walk, social media monitoring companies also have to monitor “social media monitoring,” “monitoring tools,” “listening platforms,” and any other variation (and misspelling) of industry terms imaginable.

The truth is we do monitor a lot of industry keywords. But that doesn’t mean I caught them all or that other monitoring companies are watching the same ones that I am. I watch over 50 industry keywords which result in around a thousand tweet results per day. Which is precisely the problem with the second premise – that monitoring companies need to respond to these tweet tests quickly.

We’ve already established that time-sensitive reputation issues require a company name mention – which we (and probably most companies) are reading in near real-time. But what about the other 1000 tweets per day. Do we have to read and respond to those the minute they are tweeted in order to be a good social media monitoring firm?

What if we’re a small company that focuses on customer-service and product development instead of online marketing? Do I have to respond to every single “what social media monitoring tools are you using” tweet?

No. After thinking all of this through, I decided that we don’t have to play the fastest to @reply game on Twitter just because our software monitors social media.

Then I remembered this.

Oh, the burn of publicly documented hypocrisy.

My landlord, who is a partner at a decent-sized accounting firm, had his secretary email me to ask if I paid the rent in May. That was FIVE months ago! What kind of accountant can’t even keep track of his own money? Well, maybe an accountant who would do an amazing job with mine, but why would I give him a chance if he’s not practicing his own trade?*

And so I realized that it doesn’t really matter if the quality of our monitoring tool isn’t related to how fast we read or respond to our social media coverage. It only matters that we give potential customers a reason to trust us with monitoring theirs.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

*Dear Landlord, if you’re monitoring “landlord AND accountant” or perhaps #idiot, the sink in the guest bathroom is leaking. Gracias!

Social Monitoring. Garbage In. Pretty Garbage Out – The Customer Collective

• If you’ve done a bit of of work in the digital marketing arena lately, then odds are you’re familiar with the various social monitoring tools available to help bring metrics and clarity to a chaotic stream of data. The number of options is impressive, but realize that the majority of them also share the same weakness.

Are we expecting too much from Social Media Monitoring tools ? – PhilGo20

• Social Media Monitoring platforms are not be-all end-all solutions, more of a building block of brand’s modern tool set for effective market research, marketing and customer support. They require investment both in time and money and more often than not, some support from people who have done it before and are comfortable using these particular tools.

How Does Microsoft Measure Social Media? – Marketing Today

• I did a fun podcast this morning with my friends Steve Hershberger (@sthersh), Blake Cahill (@bcahill), and Sean O’Driscoll (@seanodmvp). One of the topics we touched on was what my team measures on a regular basis to show impact. It was suggested that I go deeper into those points on my blog. So here it goes. We measure 3 things every month and deliver to execs; sentiment, volume and reach.

Expanding Our Idea of Listening in Social Media – Net Savvy Executive

• Everyone says that listening is central to social media success, but over time, we’ve fallen into a too-narrow interpretation of the metaphor. Think about it: if listening means monitoring, then we have too many words. Fortunately, they don’t need to mean the same thing. We just need to expand the way we think about listening.

Social Media ROI – Digital Strategist

• Of course, there are many more things you can attempt to measure to see if your qualitative objectives are quantitatively achieved. These measures also give you something to hang your hat on as you continue to refine your tactics to achieve those goals.

-

Media Monitoring Tools Lists/Reviews

Social Media Metrics Solutions: An overview of the options – Pointless Really

20 Tools to measure your Social Media Marketing – Marketing Bones

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and the Institute for Public Relations announced the 2nd European Summit on Measurement, will be held in Barcelona, Spain, June 16-18, 2010.

See the full release for more info.

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is working on a set of recommended metrics and approaches for evaluating public relations’ influence on key business outcomes. An outline of the draft guidelines is below.

The guidelines cover the impact of public relations programs on financial, reputational/brand equity, employees/internal and public policy goals.

PRSA intends to release a final set of standardized methods this fall, after compiling feedback from industry. Comments can be made via PRSA’s blog – comPRehension.

Michael G. Cherenson, PRSA’s 2009 Chair and CEO said of the effort:  “Our fundamental goal is to change how the industry talks about what public relations accomplishes. Instead of meaningless catch phrases, such as ‘create buzz,’ our recommended approach focuses on identifying meaningful expressions of business performance, suggesting more appropriate measurement metrics and recommending proven tools for demonstrating how those metrics were impacted.”

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Is your media measurement program vulnerable? – Fresh Ideas/Burrelles Luce

• When was the last time you audited your media measurement program? Do you “think” everything is running smoothly or do you “know” how everything is going with your program? If you aren’t conducting routine audits of Bridge to media measurement your program,  trouble could be lurking that could injure your organization.

Metrics and Numbers You Should Know if You Want to Measure Social Media ROI – Jacob Morgan

• Today, I want to cover some some metrics that companies should really pay attention to if they want to be able to understand the ROI from their social media efforts, or for that matter, any other marketing efforts that they are involved in.

How Do You Measure Your Social Efforts? – Marketing Profs with K.D. Paine

• How do you know whether your social media efforts are bearing fruit? The answer, according to Katie Paine, is to create benchmarks against which to measure your efforts. Because social media is new, it can be hard to know what to measure, and how to measure it.

How to measure your social media campaign’s impact – Daz Connell

• To measure outcomes of social advertising, organizations must balance quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. Here’s how to go about doing this.

Who’s Watching Now? – Jay Baer

• If your company doesn’t generate a lot of social media chatter, perhaps this isn’t an issue yet. But, if you’re any sort of known consumer brand, or restaurant, or tourist attraction, is it time to consider assigning social media monitoring tasks on nights and weekends?

Time, team, heart and budget in social media strategy – Richard Ingram

• Our clients or employers may think they need a social web presence – purely because they feel they have to these days. But it’s our responsibility, as part of the development of an overall content strategy, to ascertain whether they have the time, team, budget, and heart to keep up such a public publishing strategy.

Five Reasons Sentiment Analysis Won’t Ever Be Enough – Three Minds

• Why is it that the social monitoring vendors that support NLP (natural language processing) for sentiment scoring will go on and on about their 80% and up accuracy? And yet, the vendors that don’t offer NLP and opt only for human analysis will tell you that sentiment analysis can not and WILL NEVER be accurate…

Top 10 Ways to Measure a Social Media Campaign – 60 Second Marketer

• The bottom line: Social media is measurable and has proven to be a valuable tool for marketers around the globe. If you’re a marketer and you’re interested in proving the value of your next social media campaign, then the tools outlined above are for you.

-

Media Monitoring Tool Lists

13 Ways to Monitor Your Brand on Social Media: Do You Know What Is Being Said About Your Company Online? – Jeff Bullas

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/notsogoodphotography/ / CC BY 2.0

• Is social media measurement meaningless? – Research Magazine

Social media has caused a great deal of fuss in the worlds of marketing and research, but do the attempts to measure and make sense of all those friends, fans, followers, pokes, posts and retweets really amount to anything?

• ROI is About Making Money AND Strengthening Your Brand- Jacob Morgan

You invest $10k into a 3 month marketing campaign and make $20k; meaning the ROI was $10k. However, the campaign ended up damaging the brand reputation and image. So you made $10k from the campaign and lost much more (potentially millions) due to the weakening of the brand.

• Social Media Analysis and Tracking – Top Rank

Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.

• A New Metrics Era: Social Media and Qualitative Traffic - Yukai Chou

In that sense, I came up with three qualitative metrics that is important to consider when driving visitors to your site. These metrics are: Relevancy, Timing, and Trust.

• Five Ways To Measure Social Media - MediaPost

Rather than drill down into specifics, let’s take a bird’s-eye view of the types of measurements that might prove useful to the marketing professional.

• The Four I’s of Social Media Measurement - Search Engine Watch

Social media can be measured, but measuring isn’t the same for everyone. Just like there’s no cookie-cutter social media marketing strategy for companies to purchase and implement, there’s no simple off-the-shelf answer for measuring your success with your social media strategy. It can be a combination of numerous measurements, both automated and manual.

• Using Monitoring to Achieve Richer Customer Insights - The Social Enthusiast

Measurement of social media activity to determine ROI is a hot (and controversial!) topic on the web right now. You can see some examples of just how controversial it is here, here, here and here. Hat tip to Chuck Fitzpatric of ImpactWatch blog for those examples and more (and for the sound of dueling banjos that played through my head as I scanned the list of headlines).

• The Business Problems With Social Media ROI - Jacob Morgan

I’d love to have a follow up post to this on the technical problems with measuring social media ROI, so if you’d like to somehow contribute to that please let me know (since I’m not a very technical person). I’m not going to go over every single business challenge, just the major ones that I believe I true obstacles for large organizations.

• Advanced Questions that you Should be Asking your Brand Monitoring Vendor - Scout Labs

But, having thought about this and worked on the technology for nearly 3 years, I do think I have credibility in offering up a checklist of things to look for and to think about if you are choosing a social media analysis platform for your company.

• Questions of social media monitoring vendors - Ponderings and Wanderings

I started to put together a list of questions that never seem to be answered up front on sites, in demos or in the first round of sales discussions. or demos.

-

Media Monitoring Tools Lists

• Social Media Monitoring Wiki Update - Ken Burbary
  
• Top 15 Free Services To Monitor and Track Your Brand Online- To Muse
  
• 9 FREE Tools to Track OnlineConversations about your Brand- Rocky Fu
  

-

Slides and Presentations

• Listen and Learn: New Media, New Metrics – Amber Naslund

-

Read Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Tomorrow is International Bacon Day. Not just crummy National Bacon Day, but literally “Let the World Celebrate Bacon Day.” In honor of this sacred event, I am resurrecting our “study” on Bacon in social media. Enjoy your holiday! (and Labor Day too)
-

Hypothesis:

IF bacon is great THEN it will rule social media.

-

Experiment:

Bacon in the Social Media News

1. Bacon explosion – a heart-warming (burning?) recipe involving 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage. Needless to say, this innovation warranted a write up in the New York Times and won the creators quite a traffic spike – over 16k inbound links and more than 1.5 million blog visitors.

2. Bacon Salt – A weapon in the “never-ending quest to make everything taste like bacon.” Bacon Salt has profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the founders were interviewed on Oprah.

3. Bacon AK-47 – The gents at ThisIsFreakingRidiculous.com made a full scale AK-47 assault rifle…out of bacon. It’s freaking ridiculous. Other bacon effigies include the Bacon Man, Bacon Suitcase and Bacon Bra (nice try, google it yourself).

-

Bacon Blogs

There are nearly 3 million search results for Bacon in Google Blogs, 57k with Bacon in the title of the blog (both excluding results containing the word Kevin).

Some awesome blogs I discovered while “working” on this post:

- Bacon UnWrapped – A four-year-old site founded because 1) everyone loves bacon and 2) there aren’t nearly enough websites dedicated to the topic of bacon. Founder Heather Lauer has also created a bacon community and even wrote a book about bacon.

- Mr. BaconPants – Obviously the bacon blog with the best title, this repository of bacon news and reviews includes a weekly video podcast on bacon and bacon-related items.

- Bacon Today – Daily news about “sweet, sweet bacon.” The site’s uses its exclusive Smaste TM rating system for smell+taste-testing bacon-related products – a rating system that’s “as arbitrary as it is inaccurate.”

- The Bacon Show – A delicious new bacon recipe posted every day.

- Bacon Haikus – Lyrical links to bacon (news) bits.

- Royal Bacon Society – The Ultimate Resource for all things bacon – including a bacon store and bacon downloads.

-

Bacon on Social Media Sites

Twitter -

TweetVolume says there have been 1.69 million tweets containing the word bacon in the history of Twitter.

BaconTwits tracks the word bacon on Twitter while @BaconFeed aggregates the #bacon hashtag (2,950 updates so far).

Apparently 48,367 people have added themselves to the WeFollow directory under the tag “bacon” . Truly mind-boggling.

Facebook – The top 5 bacon fan pages have a fanbase of more than 650k. There are over 3,000 members in just the top 20 bacon groups.

MySpace – Bacon doesn’t have as impressive of a presence on MySpace. Or maybe it does. I was distracted by all the glitter.

Flickr – 146,763 photos have titles or descriptions that mention Bacon -Kevin, 49,511 photos are tagged with Bacon -Kevin.

YouTube – 28,600 videos refer to Bacon -Kevin.

Delicious/Digg – Bacon is gaining steam on Digg, where story volume has been steadily climbing since 2006. There are 3,662 bacon stories on Digg – 34 of which have received over 1k diggs. 16,904 bookmarks on Delicious are tagged for bacon.

-

Other Bacon bits:

- Pocket Bacon – Pretend to cook bacon whenever the mood strikes with this handy iPhone app.

- The Baconcyclopedia – The Ultimate Bacon Reference of Baconic Proportions

- Bacolicio.us – Add bacon to any website. Seriously. Do it.

Don’t think for a minute that Bacon has come to rule social media without a fight. Some PR challenges for Bacon:

- Swine Flu – The much-ignored CDC says that pork is safe, but that didn’t stop bunches* of concerned netizens from broadcasting their fear of bacon and its breathren

- Trichinosis – Bacon won’t give you #hamthrax, but being infested with worms is also pretty gross.

- Heart Disease – Bacon is fatty.

- PETA – Bacon is made of previously living animals.

- The pro-veg lobby – Bacon is meat.

-

Conclusion:

While this study is not *perfectly* scientific, I’m pretty sure that excluding all Kevins cancelled out any illegitimate Bacon mentions. And, as you can see, Bacon is kicking Sausage’s ass on Twitter. So, I’m declaring victory for bacon in social media.

*A bunch is an official social media measurement term indicating “a lot”.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Bacon vs Sausage chart via Twist.
Bacon slice photo by SuperFantastic

Chuck Hemann of Dix & Eaton has a fantastic guest post on Social Media Explorer that outlines the critical information that companies should be looking for when monitoring social media. Hemann uses his 5 point overview to help explain to PR clients how “listening” on social media should inform their social media engagement strategy – and why listening is worth the investment.

I think this is a great guideline for people to use while monitoring social media, to help them pick out and organize relevant information – a task that can seem daunting, especially for beginners.

* Who – The first W is “who is talking about you or your products.” Hemann identifies social media influencers and tracks the effect they are having on their readership. He also warns not to dismiss the opinions of average consumers. Very timely advice given that social media platforms have proved themselves as powerful mediums for the viral spread of information and opinions.

* What – The next target to track is “what are your stakeholders saying about you?” Hemann advises monitoring the type of mention and its context in order to decide how to engage the writer. He also cites the importance of determining the sentiment or bias of company mentions, and of tracking your competitors in social media. By watching competitor mentions and responses, you can learn from their successes and missteps in the medium.

* Where – This point refers to the type of source where conversations about you are happening. Whether the mention is on a blog, forum, or Twitter will inform the strategy of your response. Hemann also cautions companies to take care in trying to create or direct the conversation by creating their own blog or forum, and to make sure they have the resources to ensure their efforts are successful.

* When – Another important metric to track is the timing of company mentions. Are mentions driven by season or special events? Companies need to ensure they have the resources ready to listen and engage during busy times and be ready to stimulate conversation during lulls.

* Why – Hemann points out that the “why” of social media often cannot be answered through listening alone. He recommends primary research to determine what motivates stakeholders to talk about your company and products. If this isn’t possible, using the other “W”s can provide partial information.

Hemann goes on to emphasize that information gleaned by social media listening is valuable only for its application in a comprehensive strategy. Listening must also be an ongoing process, not a step taken before engagement then abandoned. It’s important to monitor changes to the five Ws and to modify your social media strategy accordingly.

Read Chuck’s entire post here.

-
Follow Hannah on Twitter.
Follow Chuck Hemann on Twitter.

-