Posts Tagged ‘Social Media Case Studies’

Three reasons why Klout fails as an effective Twitter campaign measurement and optimization tool

Posted in Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Twitter ROI by Taariq Lewis on January 12th, 2011
 

The team at Klout did a great job launching a new way to measure influence and engagement on Twitter. By their description, they are “The Standard for Influence.” That puts them in the hot seat to deliver a reliable metric that social media managers and marketing executives can trust as a turnkey standard. Along the way, they have also stirred up interesting analysis and experiments with Klout’s measurements and methodologies.

klout-logo-success

As social media managers tasked with running successful Twitter engagement campaigns, we have over 200 Twitter measurement tools from which we can choose, including Klout. However, using scoring methodologies to manage ongoing twitter campaigns is risky. Though I am not a Klout expert, I do use Klout daily to monitor my personal score. However, when matched against the most important activities in Twitter campaign execution, it’s my view that focusing on higher Klout scores fails to make Twitter marketing campaigns more effective and more influential for three key reasons.

Measurement without explanation
Klout scores are public, but the algorithms behind them are private. This is important so that folks don’t figure out and “game” or cheat Klout’s algorithms and render them valueless. As such, for Twitter analysis needs, Klout scores do not provide robust measurement that leads to testable explanation of Twitter influence and engagement. For example, if a Klout score drops from 40 to 30, marketers using Klout can only guess that user’s influence has dropped, but there’s no way to extract the explanation as to why the score changed. Without that sort of explanation, a Twitter campaign manager can’t determine what resources are required to reach the target Klout score. Measurement without explanation is not actionable in marketing. For Twitter campaigns, I don’t see how Klout can give deep measurement insights without sacrificing more transparency into its algorithms.

Optimization of Score vs. Optimization of Campaign
When managing a Twitter engagement campaign, it’s easy to use an improvement in Klout score as evidence of campaign success. After all, Klout is an independent measure. Of course, one can try to target Klout achievements as an indicator of campaign success, but Twitter marketing campaigns should be optimized according to the specific business goals of the total Marketing campaign. Tools that measure campaign effectiveness relative to goals would be a more effective than independent third-party measurements that give more general evaluations.

Klout is not predictive
Klout scores are not predictive of Twitter campaign success or failure. Specifically, we cannot use Klout to predict whether our campaign achievement or Twitter marketing ROI will increase or decrease due to a higher or lower Klout score. A Twitter campaign marketer cannot correlate specific Twitter engagement activities with target Klout scores because of Klout’s transparency limitations. If you’re looking for a predictive model, it would be best to determine what campaign activities correlate with goal achievement and optimize toward a campaign target. If your Twitter campaign tools don’t tell you this, then you’re just guessing.

Are you using Klout to measure your Twitter marketing campaign effectiveness and ROI? If so, share with us how you optimize and predict engagement trends. With so many tools, there must be smart ways to do this online.

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Terametric Friday: Top Stories in Social Media ROI

Posted in Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Twitter ROI by Taariq Lewis on December 10th, 2010
 

Welcome to Friday, December 10th, 2010, edition of “Top Stories in Social Media ROI.” This is Terametric’s series where we keep you updated on the critical evolution of marketing Return on Investment in the Social Media Channel. Our top stories for today:

Webinar: How to Measure and Improving your Twitter Marketing ROI
Missed out on the best Twitter marketing webinar for 2010? Listen to three Social Media measurement and analytics thought leaders discuss the challenges of measuring, optimizing and competing in the Twitter marketing channel. Learn what marketers will be doing on Twitter for 2011 and get new tools and resources for your own Twitter marketing campaign.

B2B Social Media Marketing — Does It Work?
Arguably, social media marketing for B2B companies is one of the most difficult campaigns to run. On the surface it seems there are more successful B2C social media examples than B2B, but online seems to be where it’s at if you’re looking to market to those B2B decision makers.

How the Fortune 500 Use Social Media to Grow Sales and Revenue
Given the hundreds of social media tools available, and the thousands of different ways to use them in business, you’d think that getting Fortune 500 companies on board would be a complex and daunting task. But it’s not. The truth is, there are only five different ways the Fortune 500 use social media. Seriously — just five. And once you know what they are, you can figure out which ones would be most useful for your business.

Twitter Proven to Impact Search Engine Rankings
Over the past 3 years most of us involved with marketing have heard of Twitter. At the same time businesses have prioritized their adoption of Twitter differently. Some businesses have made it a core part of their inbound marketing strategy, while others have delayed adoption in favor of other tactics.

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Taking Social Media Seriously

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on August 8th, 2009
 

Studies have shown the trend in the economic downturn has been less spending on traditional media and increase in budgets for social media. MarketingSherpa shows that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease.

As social media rapidly matures, it is not just the cost that is influencing the shift. Both the access to analytical data mining and identifiable metrics that help the increasing focus on determining the return on investment (increased conversion rates, higher customer service levels, more targeted prospecting, etc.).

Studies have shown the trend in the economic downturn has been less spending on traditional media and increase in budgets for social media. MarketingSherpa shows that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease.

As social media rapidly matures, it is not just the cost that is influencing the shift. Both the access to analytical data mining and identifiable metrics that help the increasing focus on determining the return on investment (increased conversion rates, higher customer service levels, more targeted prospecting, etc.).

Recently, a new report was published by Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint that ranked the top 100 brands by social media engagement. Based on their premise, companies that are “both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference”.

But measuring this is where it gets murky and it is why social media is still has not been taken seriously by marketers and executives. The case has to be backed up by data and with all the analytics that exist, it is still a manual and complicated activity to map analytical data into ROI calculations.

With the growing number of tools to measure, monitor and analyze social media conversations, companies can get a good sense of what is being said, where the conversations are proliferating and who’s influencing and driving the conversations. It is a good place to start before developing a digital strategy so that you have an idea of who you need to reach out to, what to say, and where to say it.

Ultimately, the underlying secret to success using social media, like the companies that use social media well (Dell, Comcast, Zappos), they have all become comfortable with letting individuals from within their company become the faces and evangelists for their brand and offering a real human connection to their online communities. They’re focus is to build their social capital which in turn provides a return in investment on many levels including markeing, brand awareness, loyalty, and most importantly sales.

If you’re interested in how we map the analytics to the ROI with our product, SOCIALtality, contact us directly.

For more thoughts on the Altimeter/WetPaint report, you can find commentary from ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and Mark Schaefer, who delve more into the underlying methodologies and data behind this report’s findings.

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How to Build a Social Marketing Plan

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on March 3rd, 2009
 

There are a lot of word-of-mouth elements such as blogs, microblogs (a la Twitter), syndication, online communities, social networks, and widgets are that are changing the rules of business as we know them and will be the new must-haves for your company’s success. Taken together they form the basis for an incredibly powerful toolkit that will enable you to communicate, promote your company and services, engage with, educate and listen to the customer directly, and spread your ideas and products virally so that you expand your company’s reach.

There are a lot of word-of-mouth elements such as blogs, microblogs (a la Twitter), syndication, online communities, social networks, and widgets are that are changing the rules of business as we know them and will be the new must-haves for your company’s success. Taken together they form the basis for an incredibly powerful toolkit that will enable you to communicate, promote your company and services, engage with, educate and listen to the customer directly, and spread your ideas and products virally so that you expand your company’s reach.

Here are the fundamentals of a solid social marketing plan as they align with your overall marketing objectives.

  1. Start Small
    Depending upon the skills sets that are available to you within your existing organization and the goal you’re trying to achieve, choose a tool and familiarize yourself with it – get a feel for its culture and features. Or, engage with a social media company that has both an understanding of technology and the marketing chops to assess your entire organizational structure and how to best start out with something that can be absorbed gradually and doesn’t overwhelm you.
  2. Define your Market Objective
    Start with analyzing your current marketing objectives and look for possible synergies with the tools that are available to you. Do you want to begin building your social capital and develop customer loyalty and brand evangelists who will reach out to their network of friends to build word of mouth referrals? Or do you want to capture customer feedback and begin a dialogue with your customers to target product insights. Or maybe you want to use the blog to build your brand identity and establish your expertise. The objective should help you select the best tool.
  3. Select your Target Market
    Who you choose to target is important and will also help to determine the tool that you choose. Generally, if you’re addressing a younger market (19-35) Myspace works. Young – Middle aged professionals you’ll find on LinkedIn and Facebook. But if you have a product for kids, then Disney’s Club Penguin is for you.
    You’ll also want to align with the technographics which are like demographics, only they are broken up by engagement levels. Forrester Research has defined the user types ranging from “Inactives (people untouched by social technologies) which have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population in 2008 to “Spectators” those who read, watch, or consumer social content which have ballooned from 48% to 69%, to Joiners, Critics and Creators at the most involved users of the social networking space. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.
    As a whole, the growth in consumption of online content coming from older people (middle aged -35-to-44 year-olds) especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.
    So as you can see, targeting the right technographic is also important. For instance, stay-at-home moms rank high on the scale and are actively courted in the online marketing arena. Who you choose to target is very important so nose around and search for like minded people, the online publications they read and the organizations or associations they may belong to. Use a web search engine to help you out. Look for online communities that specialize in your niche. Try to identify the key influencers in that group.
  4. Assess Your Current Web Capability
    Technology is an important element of your success. There are lots of applications out there that allow you to integrate your content so that the flow of information is both inbound and outbound. Your website has to be the central hub of all of it and it has to be easy to update your content, integrate code (widgets, blogs, online communities, etc.), be easy to navigate, and optimized for search engine optimization. Moving to a Web 2.0 platform such as Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla is the best route to take for scalability and superior content management systems.
  5. Set a Strategy
    If you are a company with a terrific new high tech product visit Tech Crunch (group-edited blog about tech start ups), see what they like to write about, and see whom you may wish to engage. If you are a nonprofit, Idealist.org is a great place to live, and if you’re a social media thought leader, Social Media Today has a great membership component that allows you to contribute to its blog. But you don’t have to have a blog to post comments on someone else’s. Perhaps you respond to someone’s request for help in a LinkedIn community, or join a Facebook group. The key point is that you begin to build a relationship with your target market.
  6. Measure your Engagement
    In the end, it’s all about building your social capital. If your social media plan is effective in building a community of people that are interested in what you do and can speak on your behalf, then you’ve begun to succeed.
    Measuring your engagement including behavior, feelings, and financial impact can be a bit trickier. On a basic level, you can use free tools such as Google Analytics, StatCounter and SiteMeter (for basic traffic statistics), Google Trends (to measure conversations about your target topics), and use Twitter search to monitor conversations. On a whole level up, you can measure true engagement using tools like Radian6 and Techrigy. I’ll be doing another blog just focusing on the elements for measurement and the tools themselves in the near future. Stay tuned.

And some important pieces of advice…

Pay attention to your customers – don’t just sell.
Traditional marketing has all been one way. A company decides what messages it wants to project on its market and it broadcasts those messages out via an ad or press release. But new word-of-mouth tools are two-way media and they offer the remarkable advantage of a real conversation. Listen to your market, take into account what they have to say, and you will have a very loyal set of customers.

Content is king.
Content is critical with any of the new word-of-mouth tools. What you offer must be relevant, interesting, and authentic and designed to bring readers back. Add new content often. Remember that when content is not updated, readership will drop off, often rather precipitously. Make certain that your content (or comments) add value and aren’t just to self promote. If they are, they will stand out as such and you may regret it.

Give to get, but mostly give.
If there is one truism in using any of the new word-of-mouth tools, it is that you must give to get – and give generously. On a group at Facebook, be the one who answers the question or provides the help and advice. Your generosity will earn you visibility in the group and give you credibility.

Measure and continually realign and redefine.
Once you have selected your tool, you will want to consider how you will measure your success. What did you learn about the tool and the process that you were not aware of? What did you learn about your target group that you didn’t know before? Take the time to think about and measure what you learned.

Treat your first foray as an exploration.
Starting small enables you to kick the tires and test what works. Not everything will, but along the way you will learn the ropes. The more narrowly you focus, the greater the likelihood of your success. Some market segments are the size of an ocean. Pick one part of it to begin. Respect any competitors you may run up against. Bad mouthing is poor policy.

Remember to give help generously.
And to acknowledge and thank those who help. Then take time to think about and measure what you learned.


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Team Obama Named Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Company and it is the Community Concept that Ruled

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on February 12th, 2009
 

It was Obama’s “triple O” or his online operation which “took a skinny kid with a funny name and turned him into the most powerful new national brand in a generation,” said Fast Company. As they described on their cover, Team Obama beat out Google, Facebook and Amazon to be their No. 1. Obama raised our awareness as to the power behind social networks.

The Obama team was the first to have the vision to use the technology in a way that further defined the statement – it is not the technology, it is how you use it. They took the political election playbook, applied it to an online community framework and targeted the young voter (considered unreachable).

We can all learn a lot about the tools they employed but one important fact is the big take away — they inspired their constituents with a consistent and clear message that resonated with them and they empowered them with community tools and a presence

It was Obama’s “triple O” or his online operation which “took a skinny kid with a funny name and turned him into the most powerful new national brand in a generation,” said Fast Company. As they described on their cover, Team Obama beat out Google, Facebook and Amazon to be their No. 1. Obama raised our awareness as to the power behind social networks.

The Obama team was the first to have the vision to use the technology in a way that further defined the statement – it is not the technology, it is how you use it. They took the political election playbook, applied it to an online community framework and targeted the young voter (considered unreachable).

We can all learn a lot about the tools they employed but one important fact is the big take away — they inspired their constituents with a consistent and clear message that resonated with them and they empowered them with community tools and a presence on every social network to spread the word.

“The online community that elected Obama raised more money, held more events, made more phone calls, shared more videos, and offered more policy suggestions than any in history.” — Fast Company

Here’s a bit about how his team covered the bases and a link to his community site “MyBo”:

  • Multi-channel campaign
  • “Hub” Web site
  • My.BarackObama.com (“MyBo”)
  • Barack Obama’s blog
  • Barack Obama on Flickr
  • Barack Obama’s YouTube channel
  • Online search and display ads
  • Barack Obama on LinkedIn
  • Twitter & the Barack Obama Campaign
  • Social networking with Barack Obama
  • Email-campaigning
  • iPhone application
  • Text messaging & mobile
  • MyBo community Video [6:26]

This cross channel format allowed him to penetrate all areas of the Web space which became his most powerful mechanism of communication. I recommend taking a few minutes to watch the instructional video they used to rally their constituents online.

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How to Integrate Social Media into the Structure of an Organization

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 9th, 2008
 

To talk further about my previous post about why social media is critical to your short term survival and long term prosperity, I thought it might warrant a further discussion about how social media infiltrates your organization. Which departments should it live and why, what types of expertise can be tapped to participate and when should it be outsourced to jumpstart the process?

Since this is a new medium that affects marketing, PR, product, customer service, advertising and sales, it all comes down to having a strategy which will determine the length and the scope of the organizational support that will be required. It can be as little as having a very small group that is dedicated to building community to having the entire organization using social networking tools that are integrated with all online initiatives.

Implementing a social media strategy, depending upon the size of the organization, can be either spread out into individual job functions in small to mid-sized organizations or compartmentalized in mid to large organizations. In either case, there a centralized strategy has to be driven throughout and the substantial learning curve and change in corporate culture has to be overcome. To jumpstart the process, training and mentoring should be part of the equation no matter what the size or scope of the initiative.

Here’s the argument for a social media department. Think of it in terms of the Web at its infancy. It was something that organizations didn’t feel they had to centrally manage and it was handled as an offshoot or a side show that the larger organization barely noticed. As the Web’s influence grew, smaller groups set up shop and proliferated which required a centralized group to maintain a single strategy and message. Today, it is one of the most important mediums for businesses and it’s about to become even more critical for survival.

Smarter organizations are going to tackle this from the top and make sure that it becomes an integral part of the organization and one that drives all activities. So let’s talk about what types of expertise is needed in a social media department, what type of budget and what type of oversight is required.

  • Executive Team Member: reporting directly to the head of the organization, he/she and attends all other high level staff meetings ensure that social networking principles are being implemented and can manage budgets, dispense reporting and ROI.
  • Virtual Assistants: are the social media evangelists who are responsible for implementing the social media strategy internally and externally throughout the organization and building relationships. They are responsible for monitoring and facilitating discussions, product reviews, and social networking sites around the clock.
  • SEO/PPC: much like today, this position tracks and reports on all Web activity by business goals including both Web site, social networking site and
  • CRM / Sales Networking: CRM will actually work because it has lost the systems complexity that it once had. In addition, it can easily integrate with other SAAS offerings like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. This team can use community building to enable loyal patrons to spread the word and generate leads.
  • PR Networking: responsible for using online social networking sites to spread the good word and the good word of others that have relationships with the organization to others. Social media is about helping others and public relations becomes a central part in building community with the larger industry and influencing it for the better.
  • Inbound Marketing Mavens: responsible for generating buzz about products and services as well as gaining insights into community behaviors; this position uses community to learn how to better market and serve their clientele as well as developing new methods of allowing customers to become evangelists and spread the word to others.
  • HR / Career Building: responsible for creating a community around career building activities from within the organization as well as supporting social networking sites from the perspective of attracting talent for the organization.
  • Mentoring/Training: a group dedicated to supporting community building activities that includes editorial, moderating discussions, customer support, etc. This group is there as a resource for all members of the organization that are learning about how to interact amongst themselves and their customers and constiuents using social media.
  • Web 2.0 Technology: this is one of the most important parts of the group because if done properly using open source technology, will allow the technology to work for the user, giving them control over their environment. It will not require the investment that it used to and its job is to continually integrate upgrades to APIs and possibly tweak them for specific business solutions.

Overall, a dedicated social media department will be able to singularly focus on the overall strategy and work with other departments to make the appropriate changes as well as providing support and training to do so.

Please tell me what you think! How have you approached using social media in your organization? Is it a disjointed attempt or is it a centralized and organized initiative?

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Barack Obama ~ Social Media Visionary

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 12th, 2008
 

The buzz is spreading to print, the airwaves and to traditional media outlets about Barack Obama’s visionary strategy for his campaign using social media. According to The New York Times’s David Carr, Barack recognized its potential long before he announced his campaign. Barack Obama likely saw similarities from his community work in Chicago as he tried to enact change from the ground up. It looks like he’s going to apply that same methodology to his transitional team (see www.change.gov) and will likely continue to reach out to individuals throughout his presidency. Nothing makes me more hopeful for this country’s worldly competitiveness than to have a president who “gets it” and utilizes technology to transcend physical boundaries to connect with us on a personal level.

The big take-away from all this is the inevitable fact that every business will have to make the shift and support this medium. Thanks to Barack, the awareness level is being raised and we can more easily overcome the initial obstacle of understanding “what is social media?” and “what can it do for my business?”.

The next step is to understand that there’s more to it than it looks. The Obama campaign was enormously successful in their crowdsourcing efforts in raising tens of millions of dollars from individuals donating under $100. But they also had the means to spend and invest in social media regardless of knowing if it would work. Your business has existed using traditional methods of marketing but with the economic squeeze, this might be the time to spend or more importantly, invest in social media which can meet short and long term business goals.

To sum things up, if Barack Obama sees the potential and has demonstrated enormous success using social media, there are clearly ways in which your business can tap into it especially during tough economic times. The investment doesn’t have to be huge to get started either and either way, it is much more affordable than traditional outbound marketing methods. It is also measurable, it creates a sense of connection and engagement, and it allows your customers to be your advocates and salespeople through viral word-of-mouth.

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How Social Media Changes the Way Companies Run Marketing

Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 4th, 2008
 

A good place to start is to listen to what is being said about you on the Web. Secondly, think about what kind of relationship you want to have with your customers and what kind of relationship they have with you today. Suffice to say, it is probably rather impersonal, distant and detached. Make the decision to change it be one that is personal, meaningful and long-term.

A good rule of thumb is to think about your relationship with your customers like you would you family and friends and treat them accordingly. Today, consumers want a different kind of relationship with companies they purchase from. If they can develop a long term relationship with you, they will reward you with their purchases and they will spread the good word about their relationship with you to others.

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