Top Ten Ways Social Media will Change How we Do Business

Posted in Social Media ROI by Wendy Troupe on November 24th, 2009

 

The leaders of forward-thinking companies like Cisco and Coca Cola continue to set the bar for leveraging social media in new ways, even as the space becomes increasingly crowded with late adopters. These companies seem to understand that a top-down culture of protectionism and control actually inhibits a company’s ability to leverage the valuable and game-changing catalysts offered by open-source programming and social networking.

Often at odds with the antiquated corporate system of exclusion, open-source coding makes technology cheap and widely-accessible. Companies who empower their communities to further develop, expand and improve on their ideas are more likely to find primed and receptive markets for those ideas.

Coupling that effort with available Social Media tools makes it increasingly cost-effective to create an honest, open and engaging dialogue around those company-fostered ideas. The rate and volume of information that can be published and shared in social networks, provides an unprecedented conduit for reaching new audiences and engaging them in deeper interactions. (See Chess Media’s approach to the new socially driven business process.)

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Organizations that embrace this cultural sea-change and leverage the opportunity to work collectively with their customers will continue to advance, separating themselves from the legions of companies mired in outdated modus operandi. See Jason Fall’s more detailed blog post on the subject of a holistic approach.

Here’s are the top ten ways that social media creates opportunities for change:

• No. 1 ? Social Media as a Channel: using social networks to facilitate conversations with your online community to improve customer prospecting, support, etc.
• No. 2 ? Social Media as a Collaboration Tool: using social networks internally and collectively to improve collaboration across multiple business units
• No. 3 ? Social Media as a New Metric for Measurement and ROI: social networks when tracked and measured, can represent a way to validate traditional customer conversion metrics for a more accurate understanding of customer sentiment
• No. 4 ? Social Media as a Movement Towards Customer Centricity: social media requires that a company’s message be consistent and authentic which forces multiple business units to collaborate on a ongoing basis
• No. 5 ? Social Media as a Richer Set of Market Data: social media provides a incredibly rich set of data including sentiment, demographic, competitive, reach, influence, etc. When it is aligned with traditional metrics, the data set becomes that much more accurate
• No. 6 ? Social Media as a Way to Track Channel Performance: tracking the inbound and outbound flow of information through your online channels through the social web is the best indication of how well your channels are getting your message out to the right people and how they influence one another
• No. 7 ? Social Media as a Way to Measure Customer Value: mining information from the social web is the best way to accurately measure the value of your expenditures (such as retention, loyalty, and reach) in customer support, marketing, PR, etc. because you can identify and track customers, key influencers, and prospects and understand their motivations (Here’s an example of value not being valued by Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot)
• No. 8 ? Social Media as a Source for Competitive Intelligence: mining competitive intelligence from the social web relevant to a brand, product, and industry perspective can yield validation of topics that you’re aware and unaware of; more importantly, these conversation can provide context and understanding of customer motivations and why they choose you over your competitors
• No. 9 ? Social Media as a Brand Protector: when a company invests in their online community, this community in turn protects the brand that they so closely relate to which is the best protection from viral attacks (See Seth Godin’s point on this subject.)
• No. 10 ? Social Media as a Predictor for Success: social media adopted and embraced, is the best indicator for a company’s success in the long run because the any investment made in which a company becomes more aligned with its customers is one that will have a cumulative effect

What do you think about the transcendence of social media into something greater? Did I miss anything?

If you’re a social media advocate in your organization, follow me on Twitter @wendytroupe. I post the the latest news, discussions, and tips around the subject of social media and measurement.

Tags: Social Media Strategy
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6 Common Needs Unmet by Social Media Monitoring Tools

Posted in The Terametric Scorecard by Wendy Troupe on November 17th, 2009

 

As we stated in our last post, Social Media Monitoring Provider Evaluation, we’ve surveyed the Social Media Monitoring and Listening category’s entrants and experienced them either directly through test-drives or vicariously through the related experiences and research of individuals just like you.

During our research, 4 common and key needs, relative to the category’s current offerings, rose to the surface.

Below is a list of those needs punctuated by a small sampling of the influential and insightful blogs that voiced the representative concerns quite effectively:

1. Consistent and Reliable Data Collection
   • “I’ve begun to notice inconsistencies in the data that different social media monitoring tools produce. The dirty little secret or so it seems is they aren’t all working with the same data sources.” – Ken Burbary
   • “The reality is that while these companies provide you with piles of data and funky visualizations, the profound unreliability of the software means that you have to sit for hours and days and configure the dashboard, refine the data.” – Asi Sharabi
2. Nimble and accurate data filtering
   • “Efficient filtering of topics. This probably seems stunningly obvious, but often it is still poorly done. The ideal tool is a combination of both depth and breadth–it scans all possible media, yet returns only the most relevant results.” – ThreeMinds
   • “In some occasions, I had over 50% irrelevant data coming through my dashboard.” – Murray Newlands
3. Accurate and truly automated sentiment scoring
   • “One company claims it will get sentiment right (which is defined as in agreement with a human customer) about 72% of the time. That sounds pretty loose.” – CNET’s Rafe Needleman
   • “It’s currently time consuming to manually grade sentiment. Even though brand in question only returned 54 posts, it would have taken about an hour to go through each one, read, score sentiment and so on.” – Jason Falls
4. Accurate demographic and geographic segmenting
   • “The problem [with companies that claim this capability] is that it’s not about where you are but which domain you’re using. So reliable geo/regional analysis is, in many cases, impossible to carry or not complete.” – Asi Sharabi

These 4 needs and 2 additional needs below are front and center as we strive to engineer an accurate and automated Social Media Listening Platform.

1. Single Metric – Aggregation of data, measurement and analysis into a single, relevant metric that can quantify a company’s ability to retain and attract customers while pinpointing troubled social media channels, relative to the brand, for immediate action.
2. A reliable and accurate model for measuring online and offline investment against quantified results to achieve an understanding of true ROI.

We’d love to know your thoughts on the needs above or any additional needs we may have missed.

We’re developing an Listening Platform that is of, by, and for the Social Media Marketplace. With the help of voices just like yours, we can speed our progress and refine our offering, creating a best in class, enterprise level social media measurement, monitoring and analysis platform that collects both off and online results and aggregates them into a single metric, the SOCIALtality Score^TM – which quantifies a company’s ability to attract and retain clients.

Follow us on twitter for more progress updates and thoughts: @terametric

Tags: ROI, Social Media Measurement
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Social Media Monitoring Provider Evaluation

Posted in The Terametric Scorecard by Wendy Troupe on November 12th, 2009

 

Here at Terametric we’re deep in the process of creating a best in class, enterprise level social media measurement, monitoring and analysis platform that collects both off and online results and aggregates them into a single metric – which quantifies a company’s ability to attract and retain clients.

We’ve surveyed the category’s entrants and experienced them either directly through test-drives or vicariously through the related experiences and research of individuals just like you. We’d like to share some of that information with you for two reasons:

• We’d like our research to benefit the hundreds of individuals and companies out there, right now, trying to identify the right Social Media Monitoring resource. Maybe our preliminary work can help kick-start your search
• We’ve relied on the opinions and experiences of influencers and individuals in part to help shape our approach to the space. As we begin to share our preliminary findings, we hope that, through comments/objections/feedback, you will continue to help us to refine our findings and ultimately, our offering.

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Here is our preliminary Social Media Monitoring Features Scorecard. We invite your feedback:

 

We believe that there are no clear winners nor are there clear losers. None are “better” or “worse”. Each of the Social Media Monitoring category’s entrants has merit and value. Each has a viable features mix that makes them perfect for some. In an industry that we believe will blossom exponentially as companies increasingly recognize the value of mining the peer-to-peer conversation occurring across the social media spectrum, there is room for all.

We don’t have competitors. We have partners – service and application providers that share a mission and responsibility to continually improve our offerings.

For more progress updates and thoughts, follow us on twitter: @terametric

Tags: Social Media Measurement
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Quantum Theory and a Possible Road to Social Media ROI

Posted in Social Media ROI by Wendy Troupe on November 11th, 2009

 

“One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”

The premise may have been proven on February 27, 2008.

“. . . researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of “watching,” the greater the observer’s influence on what actually takes place.

This premise has long cast a tiny shadow of invalidating doubt on all manner of research. Primary marketing research like focus groups, usability testing, interviews and even surveys are no exception. The simple act of observing an action or response can to some degree skew that action or response.

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Yet, today, an array of Social Media Monitoring and Listening tools provides marketers and brand managers with an unprecedented way to access the actions and conversations of a particular group in such a way that the group isn’t cognizant of the observation.

Thus, possibly, yielding more valid and therefore valuable results.

In yesterday’s “Hashtag Social Media Twitter Conference”, during a very lively debate on Social Media ROI, which was moderated by social media strategist, Jacob Morgan, it was postulated that “Savings, not sales, might be the best way to demonstrate the ROI of Social Media”.

While it’s easy to quantify the cost of engaging in Social Media (only part of the equation), making a direct and unassailable correlation to sales lift can be problematic for many reasons.

Perhaps Social Media practitioners should take aim at their marketing research budgets. Study that plan and budget carefully and ask themselves, are there not research objectives and goals that might be more effectively and efficiently reached through Social Media Monitoring/Listening?

 

For more thoughts and progress updates join us on twitter:@terametric

Tags: Social Media ROI
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What’s Wrong with Our Attempts to Demonstrate Social Media ROI?

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 4th, 2009

 

Your efforts to use and invest in social media as a customer service, sales, and marketing channel creates value in the sense that you increase your level of engagement with your online community, provide additional support to your customers, and even build relationships with key influencers that generate loyalty. But when does value turn into demonstrable ROI? Let’s not confuse things by stating that ROI is a form of value but not all value takes the form of ROI.

To answer that question and clear up the confusion, let’s remember that ROI is defined as a financial metric – a calculation method that measures the profitability as a percentage of dollars returned for a given investment/cost. The investment may be new revenue sourced, cost savings or spending avoided. The bottom line – ROI is based in transactions and lives on the income statement.

Value, on the other hand, is created when we create more awareness of our product, service or brand. This can take the form of word-of-mouth referrals, product reviews, blogging and social networking posts, etc. Ultimately, these interactions occur over time and result in purchases but it is process oriented and therefore lives on the balance sheet.

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Because social media is a new channel with new methods to add value, we are having difficulty understanding how to distinguish the ROI out of the value they create. Many of the well-intentioned but misguided attempts to rename or reinvent what ROI means in social media – “return on influence” and “return on engagement” are probably the most widely used – seem to be the result of an inability to distinguish between value creation and ROI. We know social networks have the ability to create value through customer engagement and community building. However, ROI can only be measured by their ultimate impact on downstream metrics like sales, employee retention and customer loyalty/repeat purchase.

So your investment in social media remains an investment as it creates additional value to your brand if done effectively = intangible results.

But when those activities can be linked to a business transaction, it becomes part of an ROI calculation = tangible results.

If you’re trying to make the case for social media, make sure you make the distinction between the two. Use key performance indicators to demonstrate measurable effects for your ROI, but also make sure you articulate the value your programs are creating and how this value aligns with, and contributes toward achieving one or more desired business outcomes – and ultimately more ROI. Monitor these KPI’s to track and continually assess your effectiveness in using such metrics such as reach, engagement and influence.

And there you have it…

Tags: Social Media ROI
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