Posts Tagged ‘Social Media Analytics’

The World’s Largest Source of Target Data

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

Wendy Troupe and I were speaking to Nathan Gilliatt this morning about the nature of analysis, measurement and social media. The conversation ranged across a variety of topics: from his recent and very successful AnalyticsCamp in Chapel Hill to the occurrence measurement silos (we all agreed, by the way, that measurement silos stink and rob you of true cross-channel, big-picture insight). During that conversation, Nathan said something that stopped the coffee cup halfway to my lips. It was eloquent, simple and yet, profound:

“[If you set aside the corporate desire for engagement], Social Media becomes a set of really powerful, publicly-available, data points.” (paraphrasing, Nathan said it much better)

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people. According to a post by Brian Solis, covering the latest Neilsen report, that pool is growing at an amazing rate:

Global Visitors to Social Networking Sites

More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States. It should be noted, however, that less than half of the social media citizens (142,052,000) are actually from the United States.

Not only does Social Media provide detailed data on an incredibly diverse group of people, it may also eliminate what Quantum Theorists like to call, “observation contamination”:

“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.”

In a recent post, we explored this tenet of Quantum Theory and applied it to the Social Media space:

“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.

Yet, today, an array of Social Media 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.”

Couple this amazing pool of data with the elimination of “observation contamination” and those companies with the right analysis tools have an opportunity to learn about their targets in unprecedented ways.

In yesterday’s #SocialMedia Chat, Ken Burbary discussed how Social Media is changing the nature of target segmentation. Ken did a great job of providing an interesting framework and guiding the discussion when needed. Participants all agreed that Social Media doesn’t just change the nature of target segmentation, it forces it and our notions of what’s knowable to evolve.

Our understanding of the target is no longer limited to static demographic, psychographic and geographic data. We can now study their interactions, relationships, use of platforms, personalities, preferences, habits and behaviors in real time. We can literally watch them unfold before our very eyes.

If your company isn’t leveraging the power of social media to study the target, you can bet your competitors are. Social Media analysis should be a part of the customer study in every strategic marketing plan. If your company is like many, you may need to shift dollars from another marketing program to fund social media’s inclusion. If so, maybe it should come from your marketing research budget?

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Are You Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing?

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on February 15th, 2010
 

You can’t measure what you can’t see. If your tools are limited to measuring volume of mention, share of conversation, +/- sentiment, degree of influence, etc there may be a lot you’re not seeing. In fact, if your current analytics tools aren’t measuring the effect that your social media initiatives have on other communications channels, then you may be attempting marketing optimization while blindfolded.

Many of today’s leading social media monitoring and analysis tools are fantastic at providing a cornucopia of social media metrics coupled with exciting data visualizations. They slice and dice social media issue trends, the strength of your brand’s influencers and the power of your brand’s voice across social networks. Some even quantify the reception your multi-channel messaging efforts receive in the social media space.

Yet, how valuable is that insight in relation to your total, multi-channel marketing efforts? Aren’t those metrics really just a single step up in complexity and sophistication from tracking the number of friends, fans and followers?

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.”

As organizations begin to harness the true power of social media and strategically incorporate it into the wider marketing plan, it becomes increasingly important to understand and quantify its effects on existing channels and vice versa. Only through understanding the performance relationships between all channels can today’s marketer truly optimize.

SOCIALtality’s measurement and scoring methodology studies the performance of each channel at a molecular level, breaking it down and analyzing its inbound and outbound attributes. As initiatives are deployed in one channel, it begins to affect the performance of inbound and outbound attributes (measured through multiple data points) in other channels. The scores of those other channels automatically adjust in response to their own performance fluctuations, giving marketers an accurate gauge of channel performance correlation.

A note on our scoring methodology from our What the #$%&@ is a Social Intelligence Engine posting:

Many scores, even a single SOCIALtality ScoreTM, 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.

This cursory glance at SOCIALtality’s methodology may create more questions than answers. If so, let us know where you’d like more clarification. We’ll either reach out to you individually or if enough people respond with similar questions, we’ll develop a follow-up posting to address them.

Photo from Molly Orangette

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5 Ways Social Media Strengthens Marketing Planning

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on February 5th, 2010
 
strengthening marketing strategy

As companies move from tactical experimentation to the strategic integration of social media in 2010, it’s important to update the familiar marketing framework to include social media and ensure that its capabilities are being leveraged to their fullest extent at each stage of the strategic marketing planning and execution process.

Every strategic marketing plan starts with a form of Situation Analysis. It’s the foundation upon which a company’s marketing goals, objectives, strategies and tactics are built. Whether a company employs the 3 C’s, 5C’s, SWOT Analysis, or some platypus-like hybrid, each method organizes all of the relevant information needed to create a successful marketing plan. What follows is a potential situation analysis framework, strengthened by social media capabilities.

The 5 Components of a Socially-Activated Situation Analysis

CLASS

Traditionally, this “C” of the “5C’s” refers to “company”. We’re adjusting the title to increase its flexibility and relevance to various organizational subdivisions. A company that is truly embracing Social Media will become a flatter organization by necessity, distributing autonomy and authority to a wider group of people. This section of the Situation Analysis should fully define the internal characteristics of the entity (brand, business unit, product category, individual product) that will impact and be impacted by the marketing plan.

Historically, this section was limited to an often dated understanding of organizational structure, approval processes, stakeholder input schedules, sales/life cycle data, pricing information, budget parameters, etc. Today, however, an Enterprise 2.0 organization would have access to real-time data sets that more accurately reflect the day-to-day realities of the internal organization and it’s collaborative structure.

COLLABORATORS

This section details the external partnerships that help bring the “Class” to market. Previously, this section covered suppliers, distribution channel members, cross-promotional partnerships, etc. The ability to monitor, measure and analyze social media interactions has formalized two, very new groups of Collaborators:

  • The Influencer
  • The Affiliate Marketer

Brands can not only identify and monitor those who seem to hold sway over segments of their target, they can also dissect the factors that contribute to that “sway” and measure the strength of each Influencer’s “sway” to an unprecedented degree. With such data at a marketing strategist’s fingertips, the Situation Analysis can now include detailed profiles of these individuals, and categorize them according to a desired action:

  • Empower
  • Monitor
  • Counteract

CUSTOMERS

One of the most important sections of any Situation Analysis, this section includes everything a company knows about the people that experience its brand and buy its products. The data that informs this section used to be confined to periodic marketing research studies that, through static data, sought to categorize and define the target’s relationship with the category, brand and/or product.

Through focus groups, surveys, purchase behaviors, etc. marketers tried to delve deep inside the mind’s of their target to bring insight to the surface. This is where the true power of social media shines. Static studies are limited to a specific period of time, certain artificial parameters, simulated scenarios and the pitfalls observation-twisted results.

The studied application of advanced social media monitoring, measurement and analysis tools can access the thoughts, motivations, communications and sentiments of customers in a natural, real-time social environment – negating the skewing effects of observation. The collection of such detailed data over time can often yield nuanced trends that more formal research fails to uncover.

Static market research (surveys, focus groups, A/B testing) all have their place in the Situation Analysis. Social Media can augment these studies with even richer data or even replace some of the more costly and complex research projects – one of the many avenues to demonstrating social media ROI.

CURRENT PERFORMANCE

Typically, a Situation Analysis will follow “customers” with “competitors”. In this adjusted framework, we move “competitors” down a rung and place performance benchmarking immediately after “customers”. As the Greek philosophers say, you must first “know thyself”. It is essential for companies to carefully benchmark their communications performance in relation to their targets.

A certain, emerging class of social media analysis tools, called Social Intelligence Engines, make it possible to study and quantify a company’s inbound and outbound marketing performance across all communications channels. While monitoring tools like Radian6, Scoutlabs and Techrigy’s SM2 can be great for getting a general sense of conversational themes and a broad sense of segment sentiment, it is important to formally quantify the company’s performance in each communications channel and as a whole. This allows a company fully understand the relationship between marketing effort and return as they deploy the strategic plan.

The more detailed the benchmark analysis, the better!

COMPETITORS

Historically, this section was limited to your competitor’s brand and product data (price, positioning, value proposition, etc), marketing spend data and their market share. Depending on the sophistication of the social media tool deployed, a company can now quickly aggregate publicly available data, measure and analyze it to create a situation analysis for each competitor as robust as the company’s own.

Many widely available tools make it possible to study the sentiment surrounding the competition and the product, track conversation themes and trends, identify influencers, monitor share of voice, etc.

A Social Intelligence Engine, however, allows a company to not only benchmark their own performance but, also quantify the competition’s performance across each communication channel and, most importantly, develop an understanding of how the competition’s performance affects the company’s own.

The standard Situation Analysis generally includes a separate section for “Climate” or “Environment” that describes the external, market factors that affect performance. With a socially-activated Situation Analysis, that information is integrated into each and every section to more accurately reflect the real-world’s impact on the strategic plan.

The importance of a detailed benchmark analysis can’t be overstated. An ongoing understanding of performance fluctuations as strategies and tactics are deployed is equally essential. By quantifying the effect of each tactic deployed, marketing planners have the ability to optimize their plans in real-time, ensuring greater success in the real world.

How have you integrated the capabilities of social media into your marketing strategy? Is it limited to outreach or are you leveraging it to inform the foundation of your strategies?

Photo by Scootzsx

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

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

analysis fractal2010 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 SOCIALtality ScoreTM.

A brand’s SOCIALtality ScoreTM will quantify a brand’s holistic level of engagement, which SOCIALtality defines 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, even a single SOCIALtality ScoreTM, 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

 

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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 SOCIALtality, 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?

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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 SOCIALtality, 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 SOCIALtality 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?

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