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With everyone on vacation this month, there hasn’t been a lot to read. Here’s the best of August:
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photo: Mark Strozier
In a medium that changes every day, best practices from a year ago aren’t going to cut it. So it’s a good thing that new books on social media are rolling out all the time. Here are 5 to catch you up for the school year.
Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment (New Rules Social Media Series) – Jim Sterne and David Meerman Scott
While other books explain why social media is critical and how to go about participating, Social Media Metrics focuses on measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts. Success metrics in business are based on business goals where fame does not always equate to fortune… Knowing what works and what doesn’t is terrific, but only in a constant and unchanging world. Social Media Metrics is loaded with specific examples of specific metrics you can use to guide your social media marketing efforts as new means of communication.
Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web – Brian Solis
Engagement is shaped by the interpretation of its intentions. In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts… There are thousands of customers waiting to hear from you about your business and vision. It’s the minimum ante to create a vibrant and loyal online community. When you engage, you will build an authoritative social network that increases your visibility, relevance, influence, and profitability. It’s time to Engage!
Preorder these next three and they’ll arrive by the time you get through Solis & Sterne.
The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success – Lon Safko
The Social Media Bible, Second Edition (www.TSMB2.com) is the most comprehensive resource that transforms the way corporate, small business, and non-profit companies use social media to reach their desired audiences with power messages and efficiency. In this Second Edition, each of the three parts – Tactics, Tools, and Strategies – have been updated to reflect the most current social media trends.
Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization – Olivier Blanchard
No abstract available yet for this book, but Olivier is well known for his no-nonsense advice on ROI calculation. I’m sure the book will be a valuable resource for businesses that want to know exactly what they are getting out of their social media efforts.
The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business – Robert Wollan and Nick Smith
The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise.
Alternatively, you could follow David Meerman Scott around and take notes…it all ends up in a book eventually.
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photo: RLHyde
*Book abstracts via Amazon.
1. You don’t feel like a sitting duck.
One of the giant benefits of social media is the opportunity to get “out there”, you know, “with the people.” Social media coverage is an invaluable source of sentiment data so you can track consumer feelings about your product and head off any problems before they snowball. Social media monitoring means that you don’t have to wait until sales are affected to find out about changes in your market.
2. You know what you’re doing.
With solid media metrics, you will have a foundation for your marketing ideas. You can figure out what is working with your audience and do more of that. Archiving and monitoring over time provide trend data that shows where your efforts have been and helps you figure out where they should be going. If you just monitor sporadically for your one-day “push,” you won’t have a baseline to compare your initiative to and you’ll miss all the good stuff the market is trying to tell you even when you’re not bombarding it with messages.
3. You know what your competitors are doing.
With social media, it’s all out there. You can monitor your industry and competitor coverage just like you monitor your own brand. Is your competitor hiring 10 programmers all of a sudden? They’re up to something. Are dozens of tweeters complaining about your partner company’s customer service? Might be time to cut that cord. Your brand name isn’t the only one that affects your bottom line.
4. You’re not chasing back coverage.
Part of successful media monitoring is anticipating how people will talk about you. Let’s say I’m monitoring my social media coverage and I’m tracking “Hannah Del Porto” and “@handels.” Bases covered, right? Well, right up until Ben & Jerry’s releases a delicious flavor, aptly named “Hannah Banana,” in my honor.
I can’t just sit back and assume that anyone who talks about my flavor will also mention my full name or twitter handle. I have to be watching for developments related to my brand (a lot of these are internal, guys, so it’s not really a challenge) and change my keywords so the coverage comes to me instead of having to chase it down after the fact. This means I’m ready with immediate metrics and the ability to produce a report for that last minute meeting (likely about why the hell I have an ice cream named after me).
5. Your monitoring program is not an island.
A good media program costs money. You either paid for some kind of fancy software or you have an army of analysts locked in the basement wading through your media mentions. Either way, to get the most out of your investment, you have to integrate the results with your business activities. Customer service complaint via Twitter? Let your account managers in on it. Blog about 10 improvements that should be made in your industry? Forward it to product development. If you only have your PR/comm people seeing this information, you are missing out on a lot of your monitoring program’s value.
How do you know if your monitoring program is a success? Are you wringing out every drop of valuable information?
photo: visual.dichotomy
For the past week, I’ve been toying with two different recommendation systems for Twitter. The site’s own recommendation engine, “who to follow,” displays a couple of suggestions on your homepage sidebar, a “you may also like” list after you follow a user, and extensive lists of recommendations on the “twitter suggests” page.
So far, I’ve been pretty pleased with the “suggestions for you” recommendations. These are based on who my Twitter contacts are following, so it makes sense that I might be interested in users that are followed by several others in whom I have already shown an interest (=I will like people that my friends like). The “Browse interests” feature on the “Twitter Suggests” page is a bit broader. Due to the sheer number of Twitter users, it is as difficult to pick out interesting users on this list as it is with a topical search. These are also organized by follower count, so you have to wade through a lot of brands and socialebrities to discover anyone new. Like most of Twitter, features are limited and there is no way to keep track of users you have been recommended but have no interest in.
As far as the pair of sidebar recommendations, I think that’s really just a way to get you to click to the main feature. I haven’t seen any good recommendations there but it does infuriate me that I can’t right click to open the profiles in new tabs. I would probably click through to the profiles more often if I didn’t need to leave my Twitter homepage to do it.
I’ve also been checking out a service from SocialOomph ( a site that I really like for tweet scheduling) called FollowerHub. It’s a bit complicated to start but basically it’s a platform for buying visibility in the site’s search results and finding users to follow. First, you put a bid down on keywords related to your profile. When other users search for those keywords, you will appear in the results in a position relative to your bid (I think). The search function is quite well done, allowing advanced search syntax, tons of profile filters, the ability to automate search frequency and to organize users found through the search.
Searching costs 10 credits which is 10 cents. Following someone that you find on Followerhub through a search also costs 10 cents. Appearing in search results for others costs whatever you bid for that specific search, which can be as low as 1 cent. All users get 500 credits free to start. The system lets you track who you have found/who has found you through the system, as well as offering a platform for follower management in general. You can create organizational groups, take Twitter actions (follow, unfollow, block) and also add notes to user profiles, which could be very useful within the groups feature.
Now that we’ve found a bunch of new people to follow, how can we get rid of all of the old, boring ones?
I really like ManageFlitter. The service shows you which users that you are following are inactive, too active, and whether they are following you back. It would be great to be able to customize the filters (like finding users who tweet more than 10 times per day) but this at least gives you a list that you can work through to trim down your list a bit. I got rid of some users that have clearly stopped using the site, although I kept several that I hope will wander back to tweet someday.
Know any other good services for finding (or losing) Twitter users?
This week was the first meeting of the #smmeasure chat on Twitter to discuss social media monitoring and measurement. I think it takes time to build a community for these discussions (hey, that sounds like marketing advice) so with about 80 participants, #smmeasure is off to a good start.
Although it can be difficult to join week after week, I think that Twitter chats are really quite brilliant. They enable topical discussions with no travel, no tickets, no credentials. Unlike an industry conference where the few speak to the many, Twitter chats gives novices, students and consumers the ability to jump right and voice their opinions to the experts. It can often be an unparalleled opportunity to learn from people you would rarely get a chance to speak with otherwise.
I’ve enjoyed the weekly #socialmedia chat (Tuesdays, 12pm EST) for some time. The topic can be almost anything related to professional social media use and the guest moderators are usually pretty awesome. The new #smmeasure chat will be Thursdays at 12pm EST (doesn’t anyone eat lunch anymore?). There is also a bi-weekly #measurepr chat for the intersection of PR and social media which takes place every other Tuesday. Yes, also at 12pm EST.
Are there any other twitter chats that discuss social media monitoring and measurement? I still have a few lunch hours free. (SMMM, delicious!)
-Photo: Marc Smith
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Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has announced that they will be transitioning from email marketing to contacting customers almost exclusively via social media outlets. It’s an interesting decision in that major companies usually have the resources to hit consumers from all angles…so they do. I’m sure that sending updates via Facebook is cheaper than maintaining a multi-million contact email list, but I also wonder how many people will be lost in the transition.
B&J’s has 1.3 million Facebook fans. That’s a lot but likely still smaller than the email list that I’m sure has been a cultivated over a decade. And while it’s true that you can always delete a marketing email without reading it, it’s also very easy to miss FB and twitter updates if you keep your habit even remotely under control.
Apparently, customers indicated that they weren’t fans of the monthly email newsletter and preferred to be contacted via social media. I first wonder how they came to this conclusion. Were these spontaneous complaints? Did they do a poll on Facebook? Is this a case of the vocal minority on SM changing the rules for all? I hope the decision wasn’t that simple. I know my 17-year old cousin voted that she would rather be contacted via social media, but she’s not reading your updates, guys – she’s too busy texting.
This still begs the question of why the company didn’t make efforts to improve the newsletter, decrease its frequency or simply shift focus to SM if they felt customer contact was more successful through that channel. They would reach email-only customers while strengthening relationships with those who are active on SM. The real intrigue is why they didn’t take these intermediate steps and transition from the listserv gradually (or never).
So, I don’t know if hordes of people were unsubscribing from the listserv or what, but it will be interesting to see if other companies follow suit…and how this affects Free Cone Day.
Photo: Technicolor76
A few goodies for the week:
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Going back to the eavesdropping vs customer service argument from a few weeks ago, eMarketer has released some very interesting new stats on how consumers in a variety of countries actually feel about social media monitoring and outreach.
So while not all consumers are convinced that companies intend to fix their issues, a minority are actually concerned about the underlying issue of being monitored and contacted through social media. As I’ve mentioned previously, I think this is in large part a public education issue. Consumers need to better understand the levels of privacy provided by each social media outlet so they properly control the information they release in that format.
I don’t mean to let companies off the hook. There are many that are more focused on shotgun marketing than the customer service opportunity this provides. I believe this is also an educational issue and that companies will quickly learn with experience what type of customer contact is appropriate.
For now, public opinion is on our side.
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