ImpactWatch Blog

Obviously social media has been steadily growing in popularity these past few years so it’s hardly shocking that companies taking notice. But a survey of 600 companies found that 73% are using a tool to measure their social media activity and reputations. That’s pretty good.

27% of the companies admit to doing no measuring whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t monitoring (Guys? Please tell me you’re monitoring.) A little over half of the companies have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services.

Companies are also shifting resources from technology to staff. Internal staff now accounts for 53% of web analytics budget, compared to 42% last year, while technology spend has dropped 8% to 30% of total budget. Hopefully this shows that companies are finding effective tools that put the right data in the hands of employees who can act on it… and it doesn’t mean that companies need additional employees to sift through a bunch of unfiltered data (Guys? Please tell me you’re filtering).

Either way, companies are no longer shelling out for analytics that pile up without being analyzed or implemented in business planning. These numbers also show that media monitoring is being recognized as essential and included in the overall analytics budget and strategy.
-Stuff the researchers pointed out:

-) Two-thirds of companies (65%) have paid for online survey technology, while just over half (51%) have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services. Despite the increased importance of the mobile channel, only 12% of companies are paying for mobile analytics tools.

-) A quarter of companies (26%) are using multivariate testing (MVT) and optimisation tools, and this is the best-performing business tool from a return on investment perspective. Two thirds of companies (66%) using MVT report a definite bottom-line improvement to business performance.

-) Lack of budget and resources is the most significant barrier to an effective online measurement strategy, according to 57% of companies surveyed. This is now more of a problem than last year, increasing by 12% from 45% in 2009. The biggest factor cited as a barrier by agencies is still the lack of understanding by clients, although this is now less widely seen as a problem compared to last year.

Econsultancy and Lynchpin 2010 Online Measurement and Strategy Report
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Altimeter’s new study shares 18 social CRM use cases. Among the report’s insights:

• For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
• Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and Comcast Cares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now.
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

Using the list of the New York Times’ most emailed articles, University of Pennsylvania researchers have boiled down the characteristics that make news articles go viral.

You can read all about their methods, results and other science-y stuff in this PDF.

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Their findings:

* Shock and awe – Stories with a surprise or twist were popular, but awe-inspiring pieces were sure to be sent around. Researchers found that articles which made the reader appreciate the vastness or complexity of the world were by far the most shared.

* Practical makes perfect – Financial, medical and domestic stories were also popular choices to share via email. People love to send information that is useful to their friends and family. Product reviews, tips and advice, local openings and events – readers shared information that made a difference in their everyday lives.

* Mixed feelings – Articles with a positive tone were popular choices to share…but so were articles that revealed a threat or inspired fear. People love cats rescued from trees, but also want to know if there’s a burglar in the neighborhood.

* Longer and smarter – Longer articles were more popular than quickies, but this may be related to readers’ preference for in-depth coverage. Researchers were surprised at the popularity of science articles, even those with heavily technical content.

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What it means to you:

Your audience is made up of human beings. They want to learn. They want to feel things. They want to share experiences.

It’s common for businesses, especially the older and more established, to keep a distance between the inner workings of the company and their clients. There are lots of reasons for this – they think the details are boring, they want to protect proprietary info, they’re focused on doing “real work.”

Well, as Apple can tell you, there are true benefits to connecting with your audience. In addition to increasing visibility, it’s an opportunity to improve customer loyalty and – by using the tactics above – having those loyal customers share your information with others.

You don’t have to give away the secret sauce, but share some of what is going on with your business. Close a big deal recently? They will be happy for you. Have a setback or a hard decision to make? They will be sympathetic. Share tips on using your products or an in-depth explanation of a new technology.

And don’t be limited to what you’ve done so far. Want to inspire a little awe of your own? Tell customers how you envision the future of your industry or tackle a controversial topic that affects your business. If you share real information and opinions on your business, your readers will share them too.

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comScore says ‘yes’!  In a recent press release, the company released information and data about holiday e-spending in an attempt to show that social media and online purchasing is on the rise.  Earth-shattering news? No.  But interesting nonetheless.

Below is a chart of the various social media channels that respondents to their survey claimed they had used when gift researching this year.

I find it interesting that user reviews influenced purchases more than expert reviews.  Consumers obviously value recommendations from others, but the expertise level of the source doesn’t matter quite as much.  Also, don’t the numbers for Twitter seem kinda…low?  I would have expected the amount of those following a company and those influenced by a friend’s tweet to be at least a combined 10%.

The release also contains a graph showing the amount of online purchases by week leading up to New Year’s Day.  The recession doesn’t seem to be affecting online holiday shopping for 2009, although this may be due to consumers hoping that the Internet will provide them with better deals than stores.  The week beginning with Cyber Monday (November 30th) sees a huge jump in online spending, although as this Focus article explains, Cyber Monday is never the biggest online shopping day of the year.  It typically begins about a week or two later, though still on a Monday.

On June 29th and 30th the ImpactWatch team and The Bivings Group had the pleasure of attending the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. One of the tools that we built for the conference was a Twitter aggregator called Twitterslurp so that everybody could keep track of the tweets about the conference on one web page.

Dave Witzel over at the Personal Democracy Forum has a great post up analyzing all of the data Twitterslurp collected to determine which people and topics got the most buzz on Twitter during the conference. These are the top five:

• danah boyd
• Micah Sifry
• Mark Pesce
• Andrew Rasiej
• Michael Wesch

Media monitoring and analysis is what we do over here at ImpactWatch, so we decided to see how online News and Blogs stacked up against the Twitter results. They tell somewhat of a different story.

Speakers

Looking at News and Blogs published between June 29th and July 8th the clear standouts were White House CIO Vivek Kundra and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Online News 6/29 – 7/9

Kundra’s announcement about usaspending.gov, an online “IT Dashboard” where citizens can go to look up how the government is spending their tax dollars on Information Technology was reported in over 54% of main stream news sites online. Bloomberg also announced five NYC government information technology initiatives including the NYC Big Apps contest asking developers to find creative ways to mash-up New York City’s data feeds so information could be better shared with the public. He garnered 17.3% of the media attention as a result.

Blogs 6/29-7/9

Comparatively, in blog posts, Kundra and Bloomberg again dominated the coverage with a combined 55% share from bloggers. The overall results, however, were closer to the trends that Dave Witzel found in Twitter. danah boyd and her presentation on class differences on Facebook and Myspace was the third most written about in 25 different blog posts. Anthropologist Michael Wesch’s session on the evolution of the phrase “whatever” managed to make a top five appearance with 19 blog posts, a tie with PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej.

Themes

The overall topics again reflected the “Gov 2.0” initiatives by Kundra and Bloomberg, earning 53.9% of the total coverage. Other top trending topics were health care, being driven by Obama’s health care initiatives and the call for an open data format for health care data. Iran was still on a lot of people’s minds as a result of the recent elections. Again, danah boyd’s discussion of classes in social networks received a lot of press. Rounding out the top five themes was the debate over whether or not Broadband is a civil right.

Shift to Real-Time information

The following two graphs represent the volume from June 25th and the days leading up to the conference, to July 9th, nine days after the conference ended. If we take a look at the total volume of Tweets, News, and Blogs, the spikes look pretty similar, but there are two big differences that stand out.

The most obvious difference is the volume. 19324 total tweets versus 91 News articles and 194 blog posts during the same time frame. Twitter has clearly become the communication method of choice, at least at technically oriented conferences like PDF.

The other noticeable difference is when the spikes in volume occurred. The peak day for News with 41 articles and Blogs with 61 posts was the second day of the conference reflecting the coverage of the previous day’s events. Twitter however peaks on the first day of the conference with 9615 tweets and is almost as high on the second day with 7959. The audience’s value of the real-time nature of Twitter conversations is clearly evident.

Twitter Volume

For the second year in a row, non-profits have adopted social media at a faster rate than corporations or academic institutions.

A new research study, “Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities” compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007 and 2008 by the nation’s top 200 largest charities.

The study was conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm.

The study reveals that:

• 57% of charities have blogs, compared to colleges/universities at 41%, Inc 500 corporations at 39% and only 16% of Fortune 500 Co.s blogging.

• 90% of charities feel that their blog is successful.

• Use of at least one form of social media has increased from 75 to 89% of respondents.

• Usage increased for all social media tools studied: 79% of charities are using both social networking and video blogging, up 38 and 47% respectively over a year.

• 66% of charity respondents conduct online media monitoring, compared to 54% of academic institutions and 60% of the Inc 500.

• Over 80 percent feel that social media is at least “somewhat important” to their future strategy; 45 percent responded that social media is very important to their fundraising strategy.

“These organizations are demonstrating an acute, and still growing, awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives,” said Barnes. “They have found a new and exciting way to win the hearts – and maybe even the dollars – of potential donors. For volunteers and donors looking to have a conversation online about particular aspects of the charity’s mission, this increased interaction can be significant. These nonprofits are clearly learning to use social media more effectively.”

A full copy of the new research report can be downloaded from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

The Aberdeen Group’s study Brand Reputation Management: Using Online Monitoring to Protect the Company’s Crown Jewels looks at the effect of social media monitoring on brand management and groups survey respondents into 3 tiers: Best-in-class, Industry Average and Laggards.

With these three designations, the study draws a series of conclusions about what goals and processes lead to successful use of social media monitoring to protect brand reputation.

My main problem with the study is that it was fairly difficult to separate cause from effect. I outline some of those issues below.

Additionally, the study makes several points and recommendations about consumer-generated content and engaging customers, despite a strong emphasis throughout on legal issues such as fraud and trademark abuse. I agree that legal issues can arise through social media monitoring, but believe that the response process, after identification, is far different than for most other media monitoring issues. I think the study might have been improved by treating these functions separately.

Who is Best-In-Class?

The nexus of the study is the definition of their company tiers. “Aberdeen used two key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class (BIC) companies [from the other companies]…These companies experienced the following performance gains over the past 12 months.”

• 95% improved their performance in protecting their online brand reputation
• 75% experienced an increase in shareholder value

But a key conclusion of the report is that “Best-in-Class companies are nearly twice as likely as Industry Average companies and 12.5 times more likely than Laggards to experience year-over-year increases in shareholder value.”

Isn’t that part of what made them Best-in-Class in the first place? Not to mention shareholder value = money = more resources for monitoring/brand intervention.

Do companies that monitor social media increase shareholder value? Or does increasing shareholder value lead to better monitoring programs?

Why Monitor?

Another conclusion is that “40% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 24% of Laggards, see the need to protect online brand reputation as a top-three reason to deploy a social media monitoring solution.” Sadly, “protecting brand reputation” – the raison d’etre of the study – is actually at the bottom of the respondents’ list of reasons to monitor social media.

The study provides the following chart of “Top Two Pressures – All Companies”

• Build Positive Market Awareness – 45%
• Increase return on Marketing Investment – 23%
• Increase Customer Retention – 19%
• Improve Brand Advocacy – 15%
• Increase Customer Satisfaction – 13%
• Protect Brand Reputation – 11%
• Improve Market Research Capabilities – 8%

I’m not even sure what these percentages mean (it’s 134%) but any way you look at it, 11% is not impressive.

If you look at the poll from the conclusion above, the situation gets even murkier.

Best-In-Class companies were the top 20% of 275, so there were 55 of those. According to the conclusion, 22 BIC companies chose “need to protect online brand reputation” as a top 3 reason to deploy social media monitoring vs 20 Laggard companies (30% of 275). That doesn’t seem very significant.

It was also kind of confusing to draw a conclusion from a Top 3 poll and provide a visual of Top 2 responses.

Focusing Social Media Response

That Top Two Pressures chart also got me thinking about who companies are targeting with their social media response strategies. With it’s focus on “brand abuse”, the Aberdeen report is heavy with warning examples of social media shysters spreading vicious rumors about corporations or illegally using their logos.

But the pressures chart shows that companies are focused on improving customer relations, not on targeting brand threats. Maybe that’s exactly what Aberdeen is pointing to as the problem.

In any case, I started thinking about spending time “building positive market awareness” vs “protecting brand reputation”. Reaching out to customers and promoting positive information about the company, instead of tracking down and trying to alter the behavior of brand opponents.

Maybe these companies do have the answer. In social media, maybe it’s more effective to vaccine the population than to quarantine the infected.

What are Best-In-Class Companies Doing?

The study goes on to say that BICs “share several common characteristics with respect to online brand reputation management”:

• 70% have a process for acting upon insights gleaned from social media monitoring
• 70% have dedicated resources devoted to SM monitoring
• 55% deliver info concerning potential threats to brand reputation to key decision makers in real-time or within hours.

So, using the definition of a BIC, we can conclude that:

Companies that are working to improve their online reputation and have money = companies that organize and support their social media monitoring process.

That makes sense.

How do Laggards become Best-In-Class?

Aberdeen has an entire chapter on recommendations and steps for companies to improve their media monitoring and response programs. It’s a pretty good list with explanatory paragraphs for each of the suggestions.

Some of the recommendations to improve Social Media Monitoring:

• Prioritize brand threats
• Create threat alerts
• Train employees to engage customers online
• Leverage digital dashboards
• Measure performance over time
• Define best practices
• Identify/measure key influencers
• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Correlate brand protection to financial outcomes

Other Interesting Stuff from the Study:

• Social Media use is increasing: 50% of respondents are increasing investments in social media.
• Nobody’s archiving their data: 55% of BIC and less than a quarter of others have a central repository for SM data.
• Everyone’s getting help: 84% of BIC and almost half of everyone else are using Social Media Monitoring tools.
• People need benchmarks and goals: Only 60% of BIC and a quarter of the rest have defined performance metrics for their monitoring program.

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Photo courtesy of: Swamibu

In the process of leafing through my RSS reader seeking inspiration for a blog post, I came across some outstanding links relating to things we do here at ImpactWatch. If you haven’t checked out these articles, they are definitely worth a look.

Some URL’s relevant to your interests:

• Social media expert Mark Evans details his thoughts on the long-term effects of social media.
• A TechCrunch report on internet advertising and how its growth is outpacing television.
• Snippet on determining browser market share.
• Tips for spotting users with fake Twitter followings.

Just a quick look at Monday’s web offerings.

How do you know what you know? It’s a question worth asking that seldom crosses people’s minds. When it comes to media literacy, few people stop to critically analyze the sources from which their news originates. After all the prestige and organization is stripped from it, mass media boils down to a story written by a biased individual.

One of the widely recognized normative goals of journalistic media is to remain “objective” and “unbiased”, a lofty and impossible goal. Unavoidable forces such as deadlines, ownership, the author’s personal worldview, editorial influence, and story selection all contribute to media bias. What I’m trying to get at is that news isn’t always fair, and anyone with a vested interest in their publicity should be wary of their perception in the media.

Take, for example, someone recently familiar with media coverage: Sarah Palin. Without speaking to my personal favorability, what comes to mind at the mention of her name? Does the term Malibu Barbie, the popular appearances of Tina Fey, or opinions about wardrobe selection come to mind? In reality, many people were turned off by Sarah Palin. Over her campaign for vice presidency, the media chose to zoom in on certain aspects of her personal life, imagery, and political history (as is the media’s responsibility for anybody vying for a spot as prestigious as she was). Whether you felt Sarah Palin was treated fairly or unfairly is irrelevant to my point: the picture you saw was painted entirely by the media.

Some wisdom can be drawn from this. If revenue is driven by consumers, and consumers are informed by an inherently biased media, it is necessary to “maintain” public image with the public. This is nothing new. Public relations firms have been around since the days of Edward Bernays, and before that in other forms. Building relationships with the public, networking with relevant (and influential) members of the media, and responding to negative criticisms are all key qualitative elements to maintaining desired public perception.

Somewhere along the way, a little thing called the internet came along. It took some time to catch on, but it is unstoppable; a TV-killer. Please take advice from this youngster: Do not underestimate its influence. While traditional media personalities have come to terms and accepted the internet as part of their toolbox (see our newspaper study), nobody could predict the overall influence social media would have on media relations. Tweets and blogs and spaces of all varieties have popped up anywhere and everywhere I seem to be looking. For the first real time in history, a medium with virtually instantaneous feedback has become the norm. Opinions from virtually anybody have the potential to go viral.

That’s where we come in. At IW, we take care of that for you. There is simply too much noise out there to maintain relations the way one could in the golden days. Harnessing the vast scanning capabilities of machines and the sentiment of living, breathing people, we deliver information about brands to people who get it. If you think I’m wrong, you’re probably missing something.

Within the past month, we released our 2008 Newspaper Study, and the results aren’t all that surprising. It seems as if newspapers are finally catching on to the whole, you know, internet thing. With steady growth in most categories, the results show that the typewriter-types at Gannett and McClatchy are stepping up to the plate and transitioning into the digital forum. While they still have a few kinks to work out, let it be known that the nation’s editors are trying, desperately, to hold your attention online.

This trend has several implications for the industry and the way information is disseminated — namely, in our line of work, the division between traditional media and web 2.0/social media/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is being blurred. No longer are the days when scanning the nation’s top papers is enough to ensure you’re seeing most of your significant coverage. A media monitoring initiative must be all inclusive, spanning content types and niche audiences. Where people choose to receive their news is growing in diversity and complexity; as a result, so are the methods in which to keep up.

While some features like podcasts have dropped, more important factors like socially-driven bookmarking are skyrocketing among the nation’s traditional publications (92% of newspapers studied, compared to 44% in 2007). We’ve seen the way information flows turned completely upside-down with the Digg factor, which works in very much the same way. In addition, registration is at an all-time low (11%), meaning less obstacles to hurdle for the average user to access content.

On the ImpactWatch team, it is our priority to ensure that our clients see what’s being said about them — be it traditional print, online content, or socially driven media. When there’s simply too much clutter from too many sources, we help sort it out.