What the $%&# is a Social Intelligence Engine?

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on January 25th, 2010

 

2010 seems to be the year that everyone thinks corporations will advance beyond the often awkward and tumultuous stages of “Social Media Puberty” to the more focused stages of Social Media Maturity. Twitter is rife with tweets on the subject. Google’s delivering 700,000 pages on the search term. Social Media Blogging luminaries like Brian Solis, Marshall Sponder and MarketingProfs’ Paul Williams are cogitating and writing about it. In fact, MarketingSherpa recently made the 2010 Social Media Benchmark Report available, which detailed, among other things, the three phases of Social Media Maturity.

We felt that MarketingSherpa didn’t go quite far enough. In our recent post titled, ROI Measurement: The Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity, we added a new Phase of development. This new Phase captured a company’s evolution beyond the often siloed and isolated, strategic Listening Phase to a phase of social media maturity characterized by quantifying and correlating the performance and activity in one communications channel to the performance and activity of other/all channels. This phase not only makes social media ROI calculation possible but also makes things like advanced trend analysis, multi-spectrum sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling possible.

The chart below features our interpretation and embellishment Marketing Sherpa’s three phases:

---

Why do we need this fourth phase? I’ll let a far wiser person than myself answer that question. Brian Solis, in his Social Marketing in Twenty Ten, posts states:

“Measuring sentiment analysis, would-be referrals, and increases in share of voice are entry-level techniques that do not necessarily capture the potential of socialized media channels.”

Brian, under the heading “From Information to Intelligence”, further describes how growing corporate social media sophistication will soon necessitate more advanced social media tools:

“Businesses that explored the social landscape in 2009 most likely employed one of the many listening tools available in order to monitor and document activity in popular social networks and blogs. Forrester believes that we will move from an era of listening to one of data mining, trend analysis, and ultimately action. Listening and observation will impact other departments including customer service, PR, among others. . .”

Enter the Social Media Intelligence Engine. This new type of software-as-a-service application will:

• Perform an in-depth analysis of the individual communication channels that form the totality of a brand’s customer outreach, including: SEO, Offline, Email, Blogosphere, Social Networks, CRM, Website, traditional PR/news media and multimedia initiative.
• Measure each channel’s ability to reach your targeted audience according to the quantified performance of its inbound and outbound attributes.
• Map channel attribute performance to intelligence gathered from the social web creating a rich repository of “social intelligence”.
• Diagnose the underlying factors driving over and under performance and provide insight into key performance indicators to optimize channel activity.
• Score individual channel attributes and aggregate them into a channel score, then aggregate individual channel scores into a brand’s score
• A brand’s will quantify a brand’s holistic level of engagement, which is defined as a brand’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers.

Scores, however, can be very tricky things. In fact, Brian Solis warns his legions of readers:

“Take caution however, when determining if out-of-the-box formulas or “scores” will help measure success or progress.”

Many scores can be absolutely meaningless when taken in isolation. Who’s to say that a score of 46 is better than a grade of E? The true value of our social intelligence engine’s scoring methodology is derived from studying the delta or degree of change over time and having sufficient data to correlate that change to specific events, initiatives, campaigns or efforts. True score validity comes from studying and scoring a company and its competitive set to establish a benchmark and then re-scoring periodically to reveal performance fluctuations.

We’re currently executing our methodology manually for our enterprise-level Alpha testers. Through manual computation applied to real-world scenarios, we’re developing the knowledge necessary to fine-tune our automated software solution into the ideal social intelligence engine. Although our bandwidth is limited to a select few Alpha Testers during this phase of our offering’s development, please let us know if you think your enterprise-level organization could benefit from this emerging analysis methodology and that you’d like to be considered for one of our final AlphaTester slots.

Photo by Fractal Artist

4324XMQ2XKBV

Tags: marketing channel, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments

12 Must-Read Social Media Bloggers, Pt. 3

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on January 25th, 2010

 

This is Part 3, the final installment of our series, covering our 12 favorite Social Media Thinkers and Content Creators. Part 2 covered Olivier Blanchard, Scott Monty, Jacob Morgan and Jason Falls.

Our top 12 blogger list is more art than science. We’re not gauging our favorites by influence, readership, authority, etc. The people who made our list made it because they consistently and openly share some of the best critical thinking and research that the Social Media Space has to offer. We’ve also chosen these 12 because in some way, unbeknownst to them, their work has informed the development of our company, our intelligence and analysis methodology and our approach to the Social Media space.

Our final installment covers these last, but far from least, folks:

LEE ODDEN

In his blog, called simply, The Online Marketing Blog, Odden displays a great proficiency at blending technical know-how with sound strategic thinking and guidance. Many of his posts feature interviews with industry luminaries while others focus on decoding complex marketing tactics and providing a survey of related best practices. Odden’s posts are full of the type of valuable information that can develop one from novice social media marketer to informed intermediate. Odden is only one of a handful of bloggers posting here. We encourage you to check them all out.

JOSH BERNOFF

This is the man who quite literally wrote the book on the best Social Media Marketing engagement. Groundswell, the book, is certainly worthy of a close read…and re-read. Like the book, his blog is full of social media insight. His step-by-step guidance is both practical and easy to follow. Putting these steps into practice can often yield immediate results for readers. His personal anecdotes, illustrating his points in humorous ways, and his conversational style make his blogs a quick and fun read.

PAUL GILLIN

Gillin brings a journalistic mentality to his blog, often reporting on cutting edge technologies, methodologies and the tools that harness both. His reporter’s eye often uncovers things that many of the top bloggers have missed, and even when traveling well-trodden trails, his perspective often sheds unexpectedly fresh light.

SETH GODIN

Frankly, I’m not sure where to begin. This man’s expertise seemingly knows no bounds within the marketing sphere. If there’s been a new shift, change or movement involving the way companies market to people, this man has written a book about it. And he doesn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Each book seems better than the last. His blog postings, like the subjects of his books, do not limit themselves to a single formula, subject or standard length, rather they seem almost a stream of smart marketing consciousness.

We hope our list of 12 Must-Read Social Media Bloggers has provided you with a small, manageable roster of daily reading fodder. Who do you make it a point to read daily? Is there someone out there who absolutely must be included? Let us know in the comments section. In fact, with enough response, we’ll assemble a new list from those suggested in our comments. Thanks for reading the series.

Tags: Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

12 Must-Read Social Media Bloggers, Pt. 2

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on January 21st, 2010

 

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Our series covers our 12 favorite Social Media Thinkers and Content Creators. Part 1 covered Brian Solis, Marshall Sponder, Jeremiah Owyang and Erik Qualman.

Our top 12 blogger list is more art than science. We’re not gauging our favorites by influence, readership, authority, etc. The people who made our list made it because they consistently and openly share some of the best critical thinking and research that the Social Media Space has to offer. We’ve also chosen these 12 because in some way, unbeknownst to them, their work has informed the development of our company, our intelligence and analysis methodology and our approach to the Social Media space.

Today’s installment covers these fine fellows:

OLIVIER BLANCHARD

This brand-builder doesn’t limit his scope merely to Social Media, rather he includes it copiously as he sets out to cover all things relevant to building strong, lasting and engaging brands. Olivier isn’t writing for the ivory tower or theoretically-laden academia. His common-sense style focuses on actionable and applicable insights for the everyday brand team. His message is delivered simply, directly and with a splash of humor.

SCOTT MONTY

If success is an accurate gauge of intelligence, than check out the big brain on Scott Monty, the head of Social Media for the Ford Motor Company and the man behind the world’s largest tweet-up. Scott doesn’t use his blog to trumpet Ford’s products, rather he uses it to explore his perspectives on Social Media strategies, tactics and tools. The fact that he can relate first-hand experiences from the Social Media trenches of one of the world’s largest brands adds both texture and relevance to his words.

JACOB MORGAN

With the mind of Social Media Strategist and the soul of an adventurer, Jacob Morgan energetically tackles the toughest, hairiest and most complex issues facing the industry. Elusive ROI, Enterprise 2.O Adoption, Social CRM are all regular guests in his blog postings. And while he doesn’t always provide the answer, he does provide a roadmap for productive thinking and a call for the type of earnest collaboration that will get us all one step closer to the solution. Check out his book Twittfaced.

JASON FALLS

What more can I say about the man that Chris Brogan once called, “A god amongst men”. Actually quite a bit. When you first begin to dip your toe into the vast sea of Social Media, it’s easy to fall overboard into the confusing waters of jargon-filled, prognostication. If a life-preserver splashes down in front of you, promising to haul you from those befuddling waters, it will more than likely have Jason Falls’ name stenciled on it. Jason delivers the straight skinny and he does it with a wry and sometimes sardonic sensibility that makes his blogs humorously delicious and educationally nutritious.

Tags: Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

12 Must-Read Social Media Bloggers, Pt 1.

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on January 19th, 2010

 

We, here at Terametric, would like to take a moment to share our favorite Social Media Thinkers and Content Creators. There are no shortage of top blogger lists. Some lists evaluate the number of readers, while others track influence or number of inbound links. All very viable, logical and data-driven.

Our top 12 blogger list is based more on art than science.

The people who made our list may not all be found on Technorati’s Top 100 (though some are). They made our list because they consistently and openly share some of the best critical thinking and research that the Social Media Space has to offer. We’ve also chosen these 12 because in some way, unbeknownst to them, their work has informed the development of our company, our intelligence and analysis methodology and our approach to the Social Media space.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series, covering the first four people on our list (we thought breaking it down into bite-sized pieces might give readers a better chance to sample the wisdom and expertise of each of these Social Media bloggers):

---

BRIAN SOLIS

Brian is one of the industry’s best critical thinkers. His ability develop comprehensive and often complex social media concepts and then deliver them in an easily digestible and insightful manner make him invaluable to the industry–see his Conversation Prism or his book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations. His ability to quickly analyze new information or research and provide a completely unexpected, unique and dynamic perspective on that information is truly mind-boggling.

MARSHALL SPONDER

Marshall brings a highly-technical flair to his copious coverage to all things Social Media, Web Analytics and SEO. Unafraid to voice an often contrarian perspective on the day’s prevailing points-of-view, Marshall backs his assertions and reflections up with great examples, facts and details. A trip through one of Marshall’s postings can be a lengthy journey that holds surprising and unexpected delights.

JEREMIAH OWYANG

Ex-Forrester Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, has an amazing way of organizing and displaying his complex analysis through intuitive matrices. We can all benefit from his ability to coalesce the often chaotic and fuzzy world of Social Media into amazingly logical and simple constructs. He takes large and sprawling ideas and trims them down into only the most essential elements, adds his own considerable wisdom and then openly shares with all.

ERIK QUALMAN

A master of translating the implications of Social Media developments for the wider business community, Erik’s often irreverent style is incredibly engaging. His blog continues to build on the ideas put forth in his book, Socialnomics, How Social Media Transforms The Way We Live and Do Business. His research-based coverage of growing dominance, widening influence and increasing pervasiveness of Social Media is fascinating.

Tags: Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

ROI Measurement: The 4th Phase of Social Media Maturity

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on January 17th, 2010

 

MarketingSherpa recently published an executive summary for a new study called 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. If the executive summary is any indication, I think the report may hold some very interesting findings about the corporate adoption of social media as a increasingly-common customer outreach channel. If you haven’t read the executive summary yet, I strongly encourage it.

While I won’t provide a summary of the summary, I would like to share some thoughts on their findings. They’ve created a very interesting info-graphic below to describe both the recommended approach to social media and the various stages of, what the report calls, Social Marketing Maturity.

MarketingSherpa puts forth the R.O.A.D. Map method as the recommended approach to social media marketing. First, companies should research (listen), then plan according to a clearly defined set of objectives (presumably stemming from an over-arching goal) and then create strategies (action) that align to and help the company reach measurable objectives. Each strategy is deployed as a set of executional tactics (devices).

The graphic further illustrates the stages of Social Marketing Maturity. The first stage, Trial, can be described as a pell-mell adoption of random platforms with little to no organized and overarching aim. The second stage, Transition, occurs when companies begin to tap into those platforms to derive meaning from the stats generated. The third stage, Strategic, is characterized by a methodical and objectives-driven approach to the application and measurement of only the most relevant platforms. In this stage, careful attention to metrics guides the progress of the strategy. The graphic below tracks which which common social media metrics get the most corporate attention by Social Maturity Stage.

Not surprisingly, Direct Metrics such as web traffic, SEO and improved Public Relations have the smallest percentage spread – with the notable exception of the last two metrics, improving Customer Support Quality and Reducing Customer Support Costs. Companies at any phase find direct metrics easy to track. Unfortunately it’s the direct metrics, those easiest to track, that are the hardest to correlate to true ROI.

Indirect Metrics like Increasing Awareness, Brand Reputation and Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost see the largest percentage spreads between companies in the Trial Phase and companies in the Strategic Phase. Surprisingly, even for companies in the Strategic Phase, less than 60% are tracking these metrics. Indirect Metrics, those easiest to tie to demonstrable ROI, are also the hardest to track. In order to develop an accurate picture of these indirect metrics and ROI, a company must be able to understand and quantify the relationship between several indirect and direct metrics.

The Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity: the ability to quantify the correlation between the performance of several metrics to develop an accurate picture of ROI.

While many of today’s analysis and monitoring platforms provide accurate and detailed pictures of Direct Metrics, none (to our knowledge and belief) can quantify the correlation between those metrics. Until now . . .

Here at Terametric, we’re close to announcing our three, enterprise-level Alpha Testers. These testers are partnering with us to participate in a manual, real-world test of our analysis and scoring methodology — a methodology that quantifies the relationship between the performance of several communications channels. Not only will the methodology provide an understanding of how the performance of a tactic in one channel affects the performance of tactics in another channel, it will also quantify that relationship in a way that finally makes a detailed measurement of Social Media ROI possible.

Stay tuned for our Alpha Three announcement . . .

What do you think of our Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity?

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Strategy
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

The Sacred Pledge of Social Media Engagement

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on January 12th, 2010

 

I participated in the “Socializing My Business – What Comes After the Chit Chat” Social Media Hashtag Conference a few weeks ago. Lots of great conversation from the likes of Jason Breed, Marc Meyer, Frank Eliason and more. Most of the conversation centered around the approach companies, new to social media, should take as they enter the space and seek to engage their audience/customer.

---

Most of the participants agreed that you must first listen to the conversation occurring in the social space and develop an understanding of the topics your audience generates between themselves, before diving in to the social media pool. I agree wholeheartedly. You must first understand the context of a conversation before you can add anything relevant.

Relevancy is a foundation essential to meaningful customer engagement.

What is engagement? Merriam-Webster defines the term “engage” in several ways but, two particular definitions struck me:

1. To hold the attention of
2. To pledge oneself

Interesting, no? “To hold the attention of” and “to pledge oneself”. I think when discussing “engagement” as something companies seek with their customers, it’s important for companies to remember that in order “to hold the attention of” a customer, a company must offer something of itself. It must make a pledge to that customer.

The pledge isn’t something stated, rather it is implicit in fact that a customer is allowing the interaction to unfold and is willing to participate in it.

What is it that a company must pledge? You guessed it — relevancy.

Customers today are cautiously optimistic when it comes to social media interactions with brands. The skeptical side of customers is fed by a recent personal history of being shouted at or wading through the dark and often, uncharted waters of automated, telephone-based customer service interfaces. That slightly cynical side was born during untold hours of listening to on-hold music, praying that the next person that they’re routed to will take a personal interest in their plight and actively try to help rather than passing them on to the next, impersonal, uninterested customer service drone. And yet, customers are willing to give companies another chance.

That chance comes at a price. And that price is a pledge. Companies must pledge that this time, when a customer reaches out to them or when they proactively reach out to a customer, the company will provide information and an interaction that is valuable (relevant) to the specific needs (context) of that customer, at that moment.

A customer’s cautious optimism and that implicit pledge is what makes social media engagement so valuable to a company. To protect the value of engagement, we must all fight for the integrity of that implicit pledge. Companies should vow to listen first, understand the context of the conversation and only then, reach out with relevant and valuable information.

What other “look before you leap” guidelines should companies be mindful of when attempting to enter the social media space?

Photo by Art Of The State

Tags: Social Media ROI
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments

Why 2010 Will Be the Year We Calculate the ROI out of Social Media – How to Improve Performance through Measurement

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on January 8th, 2010

 

For those marketers that have experimented with social media for the last year and experienced some success and failure, they have learned that there is a value using social media and it resonates in many ways – better organic search results, increased web site referrals and activity, etc. For most, the best they can do is focus on episodic measures of success that include referrals, click-through and open rates. A few are honing in on more meaningful metrics that include returns on investment (ROIs), engagement value, and other more substantial metrics that align with existing channel data metrics.

Marketers realize that in order to substantiate and increase their human and capital investment in social media, they must come up with $$$ aligned with actual metrics to expand their budgets. The demand to make marketing more accountable becomes more insistent every year and 2010 is the year that the social media measurement will yield accurate ROI which will demystify marketing’s impact. The statistical techniques behind these analytical models will untangle the effects of social media’s impact on multiple online and offline channels.

How will marketers do it?

1. Correlate social media activity to channel activity and merge traditional metrics with social metrics.
2. Generate intelligence (i.e., engagement, reach, sentiment, demographics, etc.) based on metrics sourced from channel activity and the social web.
3. Identify key performance metrics that drive performance through all online and offline channels and break them down into metrics that drive inbound and outbound activity.
4. Calculate the ROI from these KPIs based on your investment to improve your outbound activity and yield higher inbound activity.

Marketers have to understand that social media is a channel to use but what exists in the greater social web, is a wealth of data that can justify the value of using social media to improve all channel performance if it is aligned with traditional metrics. And marketers will be on front line of the social media measurement trend that includes an increase in interactive marketing spending (expected to hit $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spending by 2014 - by Forrester) if they begin to draw the correlations now.

This is the year that social media analysis and measurement matures into its own right and empowers marketers beyond taking a leap of faith that social media has a positive impact on all of their channels and actually demonstrating its value with mined intelligence and metrics.

Tags: Social Media ROI
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

The Great Social Media Measurement & Analytics Fallacy

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on January 4th, 2010

 

A recent posting titled “What is Engagement and How do We Measure It” by Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls got me thinking. In his posting, he quotes several sources who formulate engagement based on a wide assortment of trackable factors. In fact, he quotes Lee Odden who says:

“Linking, bookmarking, blogging, referring, clicking, friending, connecting, subscribing, submitting inquiry forms and buying are all engagement measures at various points in the customer relationship.”

This is quite a melange of statistics. A person can easily get lost tracking the daily gyrations of a loosely associated string of digits. But, what do all these numbers really mean? Jason then points out that each of the luminaries’ definitions are, to one degree or another, couched in the phrase, “it depends.” I think Jason has uncovered one of the great fallacies of social media measurement.

I think the response, “it depends”, should be the equivalent of a blaring alarm bell to anyone in the C-Suite. It’s a sky-splitting shriek that declares that the marketing team is tracking tactical performance rather than strategic success. That phrase should send shivers up and down the length of any decision-makers’ vertebrae. To me, it signifies that marketing is playing mix and match with metrics, depending on the tactics deployed.

Email Campaign – A launched yielding an open rate of 17% and a click-thru-rate of 6%. And if they’re really on the ball – web traffic increased by 2.3%, average pages visited increased by 1.9 and average time on site increased by 46 seconds during the campaigns run.

---

Those seem like a decent set of numbers that could possibly illustrate “engagement”. But, the “engagement” from this email campaign is illustrated only in metrics directly effected by that campaign. What effect has this email campaign had on your on-going SEO and other channel efforts? To what degree has it effected the participation in your web site and social networks? If these questions can’t be answered, than you aren’t measuring the only type of “engagement” that matters.

Here at Terametric, we define engagement as a company’s ability to attract and retain customers. That’s really the only type of engagement that has strategic relevance — isn’t it? And you can’t measure that based on a mix and match system of metrics relevant to particular tactics.

In order to properly quantify your ability to attract and retain customers or true engagement, you’ve got to measure all of the inbound and outbound attributes for each of your communications channels on a consistent, on-going basis — despite whatever tactic-of-the-month recently launched.

Jason’s post was fantastic both for it’s intended and perhaps, unintended meaning. If quantifying “engagement” depends . . . than you’re really just measuring the result of an audience or initiative-based conglomeration of tactics.

Engagement cannot be quantified in terms of visits or comments or friends or fans or by any select combination of those metrics. True engagement, strategic engagement, engagement the way Terametric views it, is actually measured by taking all of those things and many many more into account and then quantifying the correlation between individual metrics across the entire communication channel spectrum.

What do you think of this approach?

Tags: marketing channel, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments