Three reasons why the “experts” are wrong about social media mea There is an argument around the blogosphere that is DRIVING ME CRAZY. When it turns to the topic of measurement and social media marketing, many “authorities” flippantly rely on the “double standard” argument — If you’re trying to measure the value of SM, you might as well measure the value of a cell phone, the company car and the receptionist. One popular blogger and author recently said if your manager asks for the ROI of your social media initiative, you should ask him for the ROI of his pants. Their point is that you just need to accept the social web as something ubiquitous and necessary, so why worry about it? This is lunacy. Here are three reasons why this “no need to measure” view is an irresponsible position: 1) Never get caught with your stats down Let’s examine the argument that you don’t measure the value of a company car, or email so insisting that we measure social media is a double standard. 2) The fallacy of free But just how much money are we talking about?
Avoid selective hearing with 20 top social media monitoring tool You hear that? … What about that? … Still can’t hear it? What you’re probably not hearing is the sound of people talking about your brand online. Right now, you could be missing tens, hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of consumer led conversations about your brand. Unconvinced? Chances are that if you work for a big brand, your PR agency is listening to what the media and big bloggers say about you. There are painless and time-efficient social media monitoring tools that you and/or your PR agency can use to learn about what people are saying about you. By one count, I’ve read that there are over 100 social media monitoring tools out there. Free tools: BoardTracker: This search facility allows you to effectively search forums and discussion boards. BlogPulse Conversation Tracker: Run by AC Nielsen, this tool allows you to search for a company name and see a threaded view of the conversational graph that emerges. Trendrr: A useful site that allows you to track and compare trends:
Measuring social media Probably the most debated, and most perplexing, issue in social media at the mo, is how do you measure a campaign. Paul F has some good thoughts on it and the crowd involved in social media measurement camp have been making some great headway. For me, the slightly more pressing issue is "how do you convince a client of the value of engaging in a social media campaign" - particularly a client who isn't familiar with social media, [or one that thinks Facebook will lead to your website getting hacked.] I guess it's the same kinda thing as measurement, but usually put in a more blunt way i.e. "how does social media help me sell more stuff?" I reckon if you can answer this question in 30 seconds with geeking-out massively, then you are onto a winner, and are a better man than I am. This is as far as I've got: social media = engagement = favourability = likelihood to buy It's not scientific and at the moment I can't prove the correlation. The tool I've been having most success with is Radian 6.
5 Ways to Use Social Data to Grow Your Business Are you tapping the social media data stream? Inside that river of data lives great insight that can give your business an edge. Social media allows you to match data generated by social interactions with individual’s preferences and general interests. In this article I’ll show you five ways to use the data generated by your social network profiles—and those of your competitors—to expand your reach and sales. #1: Listening Data Nearly every social media plan tells you to begin by “listening,” but what are you listening for? Specifically, you can gather data about the reactions to your products and campaigns as measured by interactions with messages on Facebook, retweets, mentions on Twitter and comments on your blog. Measuring the volume, sentiment and relevance of these interactions—and tracking this data over time—will allow you to determine how new products, services and/or offers are received by your customers. #2: Benchmarking Data #3: Strategic Forecasting Data
How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies. See how it works here. Social media can be a scary prospect for small businesses; unlike traditional marketing methods, it puts part of the message in the hands of the customers. The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement. We spoke with small business owners and social media managers around the world who have successfully used social media to increase business performance, and we asked them for their stories and their tips. It's About Relationships, Not Pitches The most common advice we received from businesses successfully using social media: Use it to engage your customers in a conversation, not just sell your services. Blatz Market & Liquor's Joe Woelfle employs a similar strategy. Social Media Exposure: Better Than Ads and Cheaper, Too
Best Tools to Analyze, Aggregate, and Visualize Twitter Data | T Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million. Find below a collection of the best tools to analyze, aggregate, and visualize twitter data. Twitterholic.com Twitterholic not only shows top 100 lists by number of friends, followers and updates, but it also shows detailed information for a Twitter user account. Twist Twitter Spectrum TweetVolume Twitt(url)y Retweetist Tweetmeme TweetLists
The Value of PR Measurement - Part 1 | Show me numbers I intend this to be the first of a series of posts about the challenge of PR Measurement. The transparency of the Online Media World has brought with it greater opportunities to observe and measure the impact of PR, and often at a much lower cost than the equivalent offline measurement. At Measurement Camp last week (which was great by the way, just wish it wasn’t a 600 mile round trip!) I was struck by the fact that though there was some *very* good work presented there were no pound notes in any of the resulting measures. In my experience (and for those real experts out there please correct me if I am wrong!) These are all important and useful measures of performance and they allow us to build models to further refine our evaluation, but the one thing they still don’t “measure” (or perhaps quantify is a better word?) Value needs to be stated in pounds – or dollars, euros etc depending on your country of origin Actions should in theory be relatively straightforward to value.
CaddE-Réputation Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing By Jeremiah Owyang, from Silicon Valley In many respects, Silicon Valley sits atop the world. Its growth and influence has made it the globe’s top location for innovation, STEM jobs, IT patents, venture capital funding, and Internet and software growth, and Unicorn startups galore. And yet there’s also been a shift in the Valley’s culture. One could argue that there’s an emergence of signs that strikingly resemble Detroit in the glory days of the age of transportation. In Detroit’s case, where I visited earlier this week, the Motor City reveled in its dominance in the 1950s, but growing social unrest soon culminated in a massive riot in the late 1960s. Here are four threats, aside from natural disaster, or whole scale physical attack for Silicon Valley today, along with a futuristic probing of their possible conclusions in the coming decades: Threat Two: Lack of Economic Diversity Means FragilityOne industry in a single city is a risk.
Online brand reputation or social media listening software - a r BuzzStream: CRM for Social Media Savvy PR Types [ PR and marketing types have their work cut out for them, especially in the age of social and new media where relationship building is so key. Gist is a great tool for power networkers that certainly helps users gain better insight into contacts and companies. BuzzStream, however, which launches today in private beta, tries to take this a step further with their relationship management engine that's designed specifically for PR professionals and others looking to track and manage relationships around online buzz.BuzzStream's web-based product is like CRM for the socially minded, so it includes tools to manage and add contacts and media outlets while browsing. The Media and Link Buzzmarklets are browser-based bookmarking tools designed to make it easy to grab the relevant person or publisher info and save it to your BuzzStream dashboard for managing the history of your interactions in a simple and convenient manner.