Archive for September, 2010

No use in having a social media strategy without the background story

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

During 2010, the news regarding the social media industry are predicting high growth to social media. According to a recent survey carried out by the Association of Finnish Advertisers, as many as 94% of the respondents (all members of the association) claimed that they will use social media in their advertising efforts.
From a social media service provider’s viewpoint this is particularly interesting news as there have been big differences between clients on their plans with social media. Some brands have embraced it enthusiastically, others have chosen to monitor the situation from the sidelines and some have said that there is no business in social media for them. Despite the signs of increased client involvement, quite often social media efforts tend to be treated as something separate from core marketing efforts, when in fact it should be an integral part of them.
Two significant obstacles in fully grasping social media potential are: measurability and diversity of social media. The results of actions need to be understood and the expected outcomes (or lack of them!) need to be measured. On the other hand as social media offers almost too many approaches to increase visibility and consumer engagement, and thus the social media environment needs to be mapped to determine the right entry modes and investments in order to create a sound social media strategy.
Well, fine. A good plan is needed, so how can one be written then? There is no use at planning a trip, if you don’t have a map. First of all, it would be extremely useful to get some bearings on where your brand stands among competitors, within the category and understand what clients are saying, how they form communities and where the influence is. Being familiar with your environment enables to plan conrete actions instead of abstract objectives.
This is why we emphasise the role of mapping your social media environment before formulating a plan or a strategy to enter social media. Clients want to initially find out, what is the starting point for their brand visibility and position and gain insights to improve their marketing planning in the first place. Typical mapping includes the following areas:

• Feedback (customer service & PR)
• Online visibility (Sales analytics, ROMI)
• Brand position (Brand marketing)
• Influence (Digital marketing, SEM)
• Preferences (Consumer research)

As said, a concrete social media strategy cannot be made before the environment is familiar. Getting hold of this information in the early stages allows setting measurable objectives and start measuring the forthcoming results. Initial research provides also a direct insight into the actual social media content that end of the day is what keeps brands alive in social media audiences.

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Posted in Campaign measurement, Customer case, Influence, Listening tools, Marketing, Newsletter, Reporting, Site Metrics, Surveys, Visibility | 3 Comments »

Hundreds of millions, or even billions of sources

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Quite often, clients ask social media analytics providers, ”how many sources do you cover?” Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the best question to ask in the first place. The reason being, that most often the provided answers are very far away from the best possible.

The thing is that since we are indeed talking about a concrete, that seems to tolerate comparisons, we quickly come to the situation where one analytics provider says they cover “200 million sources”, and the next provider claims they cover “221 million sources” – as long as the figure is higher than your competitor’s.

The problem here is that when we are talking about sources, are we all really talking about the same thing? The way the number of tracked sources is generated varies immensely. For example, one provider might consider Blogspot to be one source, whereas another provider could say that each blog under the blogspot.com-domain is an individual source. The difference here alone is from one source to tens of millions of sources. In essence, it is quite difficult to keep a common standard across providers on how everyone defines a source.

Another problem with the source amount question is that each provider might have a different idea on which number to present. Some might say that they receive data from a number of sources each month, or that their source amount number represents the cumulative number of sources from the past two years.

Simply put, this must be very confusing and at times even frustrating from the customer’s viewpoint!

At this point we could take a step back, and think whether it really makes a difference for the customer whether the magical source number is 200 million, or ‘just’ 20 million? What if we just concentrated on the question of what should customers want to know? What are the results we should expect to get from social media analytics? And on which basis should we then compare these results?

We could argue that the more pressing matter is in fact the volumes of consumer segment discussion and brand-related discussion. And suddenly, what actually matters when talking about source amounts, is the amount of relevant sources we are tracking from each customer’s perspective. Conversely, it does not really matter if we could track a billion sources, if none of them are really interesting for our customers in that the sources do not touch upon their brand, segment, category or even market area / language.

Posted in Site Metrics, Visibility | 1 Comment »

HBL discusses about the Many Approaches to Social Media Investments

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

On August 29th, there was an interesting article published on Huvudstadsbladet, Helsinki’s 2nd biggest daily newspaper, with the title Companies Are Committing to Social Media (registration required), which painted a fairly accurate picture of the difference between making plain social media investments, and on the other hand, making social media investments that actually work.

From Whitevector’s point of view, there were two arguments that seemed especially relevant regarding the level of social media knowledge expected from B2C companies, when making these investments.

1)     Companies that want to be in social media, might already be there

There is a distinct difference between having to pay for social media presence, and already having a high level of visibility in online discussions. Certain companies might have a relatively strong presence in online discussion due to a strong brand, special events that appear on the news and are worth discussing, or just because certain brand names are an easier way to refer to certain services or types of product (e.g. Coke can refer to basically any cola-beverage).

Brands that are not lucky enough to already possess this level of social media presence can however approach their target audiences more efficiently than ever, by participating in discussions through customer service, finding the most influential sites to target or optimising their search engine referrals with social media buzzwords.

However, as it was discussed in the HBL article, being visible online (even if it is for free) is not the end of the road, but companies should indeed be a part of that discussion as well. This way, the customer and the company are able to meet under the umbrella of social media, and consumers can get more response when dealing with their preferred brands, for example in the form of more flexible customer service through a Facebook fan page.

2)     Being in the right places is not enough

Once companies do bring their brands closer to their audience within the most relevant forums, blogs and social networking sites, it should be kept in mind that once the audience’s attention has been grabbed, it actually takes some effort to hold on to it.

Short contest-type campaigns within Facebook groups can indeed gather tens of thousands of potential customers to the same place, but if nothing is done after the winners have been raffled, the value of such campaigns might be significantly less as they would be, if such audience groups would be cultivated and cared for through recurring and relevant company-generated content.

One way of seeing how such social media campaigns have impacted each brand’s online visibility, is through analyzing how the overall tone of discussion has changed over time (through sentiment reports) or seeing whether discussions have spread farther than before, or if the general discussion volume per brand has improved notably – especially compared to the overall volume of each relevant product/service category.

Posted in Campaign measurement, Influence, Listening tools, Marketing | No Comments »