A Short Documentary on Google

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social Media Monitoring Tools - An Overview

View more presentations from Stefan Betzold.

SIX DEGREES OF SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING

A few days ago I posted my thoughts on social media monitoring for market research.One thing that has become apparent to me over the past few months is that there are a lot of folks using social media monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions, but truly they are capable of so much more with a little forethought and planning. Jason Falls recently posted a survey to determine exactly how people are using these tools (take it!) while others seem to be questioning how the tools are used or constructed. One thing is for sure, however–social media monitoring for brand mentions is not a substitute for research. The mere fact that people are talking about your brand means little unless you can really be sure of the context of those conversations, and equally importantly, who isn’ttalking about your brand and why.

Listening to the social web for brand mentions is really just the first “degree” of social media monitoring– a tactical tool for a tactical purpose. To really get the most out of your social media tools, you need to go a few levels deeper–and not all of it can be automated. With that in mind, here are my six degrees of social media monitoring from the consumer insights perspective:

1. Brand Mentions. This is really the lowest common denominator of social media monitoring, but even without going any deeper, monitoring brand mentions allows your customer service reps to go out and solve problems, meet customers and understand their requirements. On a deeper level, monitoring brand mentions over time allows a company to measure their conversational “velocity” and even take a bankshot reading of the effectiveness of a social media awareness campaign by simply measuring the increase (or decrease) in  brand mentions over time. Monitoring for brand mentions also includes monitoring the specifics around those mentions–is someone having a problem with your product? Is someone having a great experience? All of those tactical interactions really fall under the orbit of this first “degree” of social media monitoring.
2. Sentiment. Actually, I’m not a huge believer in sentiment analysis–yet–for two reasons: it isn’t yet as accurate as an intern would be, and even if it were–I’m not even sure what you do with it other than track it over time. There is certainly no correlation I am aware of between brand mentions and sentiment, or even “social media” sentiment andactual sentiment. Taking snapshots of sentiment is a lot like day trading–anecdotal events will “spike” sentiment one way or the other over the short term, and while you should never ignore a crisis, I don’t think you need sentiment analysis to tell you if you’re in trouble. Sentiment analysis over the medium and long term, however, may be a useful metric to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns over time.
3. The competition. Now we are just starting to scratch the surface of social media monitoring for strategic research purposes. Tracking your own brand mentions is only really interesting if you have other benchmarks with which to compare your data. If your mentions are going down while people are talking more about your competition, then you may have a social media awareness problem. But if mentions in your category overall are declining, you have a very different set of issues. Conversations about problems with competitive products are also extraordinarily useful to track, because you make money by solving those problems–whether they are with your products or someone else’s.
4. Direct Consumer Needs. Surrounding all of those conversations about your brand and your competition are specific consumer needs and desires–the context that wraps around the mention. Brand mentions about a car, for instance, are generally wrapped around the features and benefits of those cars. These can be parsed out and coded (by humans, folks–is your goal to automate or to understand?) by category to come up with conversational segments. Once you’ve mastered the first degree of monitoring and you’ve reached out to individuals having problems with your seat belts or Von Flavin valves or whatnot, you are ready to take a more strategic look at all of these issues. One of the dangers of a focus group, for instance, is allowing one or two articulate and persuasive people to run roughshod over the other respondents, leaving the undisciplined observer with a false impression of what the groups were about, or what the mainstream opinions really were. In our first “degree,” above, you solve the problems of the squeaky wheels, but in this stage, you determine whether or not you really have a problem. I talked a lot more about this the other day, but once you have a segmented, coded set of “buckets” that your brand conversations fit into, you can take a more macro- view of the immediate issues and concerns people really have with your product or service beyond the simple fire-fighting stage. This step is work, but well worth it.
5. Indirect Consumer Needs. Once you’ve fought the fires in the first step, and revised your offerings to social media participants based upon the last step, you are ready to steer the ship out into bluer water. Lexus did this when they launched with an extensive market research initiative that went beyond just asking prospective customers how many airbags they wanted. They listened beyond the “car”-focused conversations and really heard what their customers wanted to experience while driving. For the harried, affluent-but-time-starved prospective Lexus customer, that experience had nothing to do with anti-lock brakes, or acceleration or even lower price. Lexus launched their brand on the strength of one word: quiet. By going beyond the four degrees listed above and diving deeper into what the lives of their customers were really like, they determined that the potential Lexus buyer was looking for an oasis from their hectic work and home lives, and what they sold those customers was a quiet, peaceful place to park their tookus while they drove off to the rat race. Advanced social media monitoring is a great way to assess those indirect consumer needs–what else are the people talking about your category talking about? How can you provide the truest definition of value–to delight the customer profitably–by skating to where the puck is going?
6. Social Needs. This is the stuff that really excites me–the macro-level trends of a population that transcend even the previous discussions and look at the disaggregation and re-aggregation of populations around new and ever-changing societal norms. Sociologists know all about Dunbar’s Number, for instance, but what happens when an entire lifegroup or psychographic cluster of people changes the denominator by shifting the definition of “friend?” When generations of children who met locally on the kickball field now meet virtually on the Arathi Basin, what are their social needs? What do their parents need to know? Why are there so many “Tweetups?” Why does Tony Robbins have almost two million followers on Twitter, but the Dalai Lama has ten percent of that? Why does over 1% of the world’s population play Farmville? The seeds of those answers can be found deep within the unstructured data of the social web. And those are the answers that will power the global economy for years to come.

Increase Online Traffic - What NOT To Do by Anita DeFrank

We are always talking about ways to increase search engine traffic. But, what about what we shouldn't do? The following I'll share a few tricks that you shouldn't be doing.

Do Not Buy Traffic

This is one of the oldest scams around the internet. I'm not talking about PPC programs; that's a whole other article. The ones I'm talking about are the ones that 'guarantee you' 10,000 visitors for $10.00 (just an example). Do you really think that's possible? Not only do they try to sell you visits; they also try to say you'll get such and such amount of sales. In plain words…BULL! Besides, there is NO company that can guarantee you any amount of sales. Sales depend on the demand of your product/service, price and of course your ad copy. Plain and simple…Buying traffic is a scam. Don't do it.

Don't Bother with Top Sites

These quickly become a big waste of your valuable time. (Remember, your time is valuable and time IS money.) Everyone else listed there with your site is doing the exact same thing you're doing. Let me guess, every day you are clicking on your link and voting for yourself and/or you are sending out tons of emails (possibly spam) begging all your friends to vote for you. Am I right? Don't waste your precious time doing this. Instead spend your time working on your ad copy. It'll take you much further.

Submitting Your Site Myths

You don't need to submit your site to search engines. Submitting your site to search engines does not increase your search engine rankings. The important search engines will index a properly built website.

Web Rings

Web Rings can be fun but, you very well could be sending your traffic AWAY from your site. You are giving your visitors the opportunity to click away to another site. You need to be concentrating keeping your visitors and selling your product or service. Besides that, a lot of people break the web rings. These rings are set up to be all about the same topics. You are giving your visitors direct links to your competitors.

Don't Spam Your Website

Some webmasters out there have decided to spam their own websites. How do they do this you ask? One way they do this is to place a lot of unrelated keywords into their meta tags and keywords. Another way is to make 'invisible text' on their website by making the text so small that it actually looks like a dot or period. Don't do this. This can easily get you banned from the search engines.

Do Not Participate in Link Farms

What exactly is a Link Farm? A link farm is list of links created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. For example: One page of links is generated and to be listed on this page it is a requirement to place this page on your website. Search engines see this as an illegal move and can have you punished and banned from them. Please don't hesitate to investigate if you have a question about a particular program that you are involved with. It could save you tons later.

One thing that I frequently hear when referring to the above 'programs' is the following: "But, it's free, it's not going to hurt me." First of all, these aren't free. These are a waste of valuable time. As I mentioned Time IS Money and your time is precious. For every moment you are spending on these basically worthless ideas, you COULD be improving your traffic instead. Secondly, a few of the above mentioned are against search engine rules and could get you banned. That is a lot of hurting.

Social media in Plain English by commoncraft.com

Is social media a fad?

Or
is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics!!!! 

1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide

JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization, has put together an amazing video which shows the current state of the Internet. We have highlighted some of the data below, but please also watch the video for yourself (it rivals the Social Media Revolution).

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  1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
• 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
• 81% of Emails were Spam
• 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
• 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
• Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
• 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
• 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

3 Easy Ways To Use Twitter For Business Marketing

Web marketers love Twitter. It helps business to connect with their potential customers. You can send special offers for your followers. You can even communicate with your competitors & learn the tricks from them. All this has been made possible with twitter which has opened doors for business marketing. It is a fantastic way to use twitter for business marketing .In this article I would like to introduce you to three simple ways where one can use twitter for business marketing that can help promote your business.

1. Interact with your competition:

When you set up your company, speaking to your competitors rarely happens. Things are much more secret when it comes in terms of sharing business. The Internet & especially Twitter has changed it all. You can read the tweets of your competitors daily. Ask them for advice or give some. Of course, at the end of the day we are all still in competition with each other, but we get benefited with the conversation as we share a common interest. Get the opinions of your Twitter friends when you are uncertain about a new venture or something where you seek advice. Interaction with your fellow twitters is the first step in implementing twitter for business marketing

2. Interact with the Suppliers:

There are a large number of my suppliers who use Twitter. These suppliers offer weekly & even daily specials for their followers on Twitter. In the past they used to send these special offers through post which incurred significant expense or sent emails in your inbox which were often though as spam. Now consumers can log into Twitter to see what special offer is there for them. One can either ignore it or click to visit their website. Sending offers via twitter is a great idea to use twitter for business marketing and cut costs.

3. Interact with your Customers:

At the end of the day, your customers are what it is all about why you are using twitter forbusiness marketing. Twitter will help you to talk to them. Once you are on twitter you no longer need to send large promotional emails which are often annoying to them. You don’t have to make phone calls hoping they will be interested in your product and services. They will now know where to find you and will do that when they need you.

The Online Marketing Industry Report recently released by Michael A. Stelzner reviewed comments from 900 web marketers to ascertain if social networking is actually resulting in increased business opportunities for web marketers. The survey gave positive results on using twitter marketing tools and showed rise in profits.