FreshNetworks Blog

This is the fourth post in our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll be looking at the  location of conversations.

In the last post in our series on social media monitoring we saw that the different tools being reviewed produced dramatically different results in terms of the number of conversations they identified for our key search terms associated with Starbucks. The smallest number of conversations was found by Biz360 and the largest by Radian6 – over 11x the difference.

When we were first analysing the results of our tests, it was pretty surprising to find that, using similar searches, we got such varied results from the different tools. Our research is intended to compare the tools without prejudice for those without prior knowledge of social media monitoring. And for an untrained eye, the reasons for these differences might not be clear.

One basic factor that needs to be considered when looking at social media monitoring is the location of the conversations about your brand. In fact, different social media monitoring tools classify the location of conversations in different ways using different approaches.

Location: Region, Geography or Language?!

Brands are generally interested in where the conversations are originating – a brand looking to understand sentiment about its product in the Argentinian market, for example, is probably less interested in conversations happening in the Philippines or Spain, even if they are all in the Spanish language. The social media monitoring tools use three main ways to determine the origin of the conversations, some more accurately that others:

1. Using the URL: It’s actually harder than you might think to use the URL of a site where conversations happen to determine the location of the conversation itself.  It’s not as simple as looking at .co.uk for the UK and .fr for France. Site URLs are not especially helpful in defining location.
2. The IP address: So each site has a unique IP address right? And these are allocated to counties? Well sometimes. However major social media platforms tend to be hosted in the US, whilst their users may be commenting from around the world. For example, Twitter gives the impression that all of its users are in the US.
3. Language being used: Some providers use the actual words in the conversations to identify the country.  This is pretty advanced and can work. But nuances in, for example, International English are extremely hard to infer location from.

Each of the tools addresses the issue of location in a different way. Looking through the conversations manually it’s easy to find examples that aren’t categorised correctly. As a result it makes the job of comparing the different tools much harder.

Next…

More detail on these tests, and the results, can be found in our final report which will be available to download on Friday 16th April. We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. You can register for the event by clicking on the button below:

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

This is our second post from the Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series.

In it we’ll be giving you an insight into how we have set up the comaprison of tools (which proved rather a challenge) and the volume of online conversations that each social media monitoring tool was able to uncover.

Setting up the search string
We decided to use Starbucks as a test brand for our social media monitoring because it’s a global brand that is frequently discussed online. Also, the word ‘Starbucks’ doesn’t have any other meaning or use other than being a brand/company name.

As well as tracking the word ‘Starbucks’, we also tracked the phrase ‘Flat White’, a new addition to the Starbucks coffee range which launched in December 2009 . We also tracked their new ready brew coffee, ‘Via’, which was released in the autumn of last year in the US and in March 2010 in the UK. We wanted to see what impact this new development was having on online conversations about the brand . Finally, because Starbucks is associated with its ‘Reward Card’ and the phrase ‘Fair Trade’ we tracked these subjects too. To keep things fair we created a similar search string for each tool.

It is important to note that some tools are capable of more sophisticated search strings than others. So we were testing to the lowest-common-denominator in this sense.

Comparison challenges
Although the tools are very different, we wanted to try and evaluate them all as fairly as possible. Thus the tools were used ‘out-of-the-box’, as they come, for the fairest comparison. Again, there are limitations with this approach. Some of the more sophisiticated options offered in some tools are only relevant to more experienced users. And some providers (e.g. Neilsen) are set up to provide a much greater level of analyst support than, for example more technology focussed firms like Radian6.

Our sense for the market is that most firms are still learning the art of social media monitoring and that tools are often managed day-to-day by people with only limited training in how to use them in anger. This drove our approach to the research.

Coverage
As the tools all have different coverage, whether it’s for different media or markets, we set up the same filters for each tool to create a comparable ‘universe’ of conversations for Starbucks. Our test was carried out using only the English language and for the same time period on each tool.

Sentiment analysis
One of the areas we wanted to test was the sentiment analysis accuracy of each tool. In order to compare the automated sentiment (ie, sentiment that is coded automatically positive or negative by the tool) with our own analysis we had to extract the conversations and manually code them. Some tools don’t allow you to extract certain conversations, others do. Where we weren’t able to extract sentiment for some reason, we’ve marked the tool:

Number of conversations
The seven tools gave very different results when looking at overall conversations -  the smallest number of conversations was found by Biz360 and the largest by Radian6 – over 11x the difference! But remember, more conversations is not necessarily better – there is often duplication.

*You can usually make arrangements with your account manager if you need more data.

Conversation types
When you compare the conversations by media type, again each of the tools shows quite a different result:

*Scoutlabs doesn’t allow you to extract Twitter conversations with sentiment. The tool does allow you to browse the latest twitter conversations though.

At this top-level, it’s clear the tools are each doing something quite different…

Next…
More detail on these tests, and the results,  can be found in our final report which will be available to download on Friday 16th April. We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. You can register for the event by clicking on the button below:

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

Twitter accounts with a profile picture have ten times the number of followers as those without. This finding comes from an analysis of 9 million Twitter account by HubSpot using their TwitterGrader tool. Accounts with a profile picture have an average of over 250 followers; those without a profile picture have an average of about 25.

This graphic is striking and shows clearly the impact that having a profile picture has on the number of people that engage with you by following your Twitter account. There are probably a number of reasons for this and no doubt some are structural. People who are actively using their Twitter account are probably more likely to set a profile picture, so increased followers and increased tendency to have a profile picture could both be caused by the likelihood of people to be active on Twitter. But it is clear the impact that uploading a photo can have and at FreshNetworks we see similar behaviour when we are building online communities.

Twitter, like all online communities, is a great place to connect and share information with people who have similar interests, questions, goals or aims as you. Regardless of whether you know them or not. People connect on content and information and not on any connections they might have had beforehand. In this environment it is important to think of ways that you can build credibility and authenticity. How can I know that somebody I am talking to on Twitter is actually a real person and that I trust and value the information they share with me? Well the information itself is certainly important, but adding a profile picture (even if it just an avatar that reflects your personality but not your image) can help to build this connection. In online communities you are not necessarily looking to become friends with people with whom you exchange information but you do want to know that they are real. Pictures can help here both for what they show but also because they mean that somebody has been to the effort of uploading an image to represent them online.

For brands looking to engage people online using Twitter, this highlights how critical having a profile picture is. Whether you are Tweeting from a corporate branded account or from a personal account, upload a profile picture if you want people to really engage with you and the information you are sharing in social media.

Later this month I’m the keynote speaker at the Dutch Marketing Conference Digitaal willen we allemaal in Utrecht. I’m speaking about the danger of building your social media strategy on tactics (“We need to use Twitter” or “We need to use Facebook”) rather than focusing on ongoing and sustainable engagement. Long-term success comes from a strategic (not tactical) approach to social media and from properly evaluating why you are using social media in the first place and how you will measure its success against overall business objectives as well as any individual campaign aims that you might be focused on at any given time.

This approach has a number of implications for what brands should be doing online and for the role of the social media agency and the brand itself. I’ll be talking about this in some detail later this month and will share the slides and more thoughts nearer the time. In preparation for the conference I was interviewed by the Dutch marketing magazine Tijdschrift voor Marketing, and the article (in Dutch) can be found here. For non-Dutch speakers I thought I’d share the full text of the interview I gave with the magazine below. In it, I look at current trends in the social media industry, how to develop a social media strategy and the role of the social media agency and of the brand in any engagement.

Q: What are the main themes currently being discussed in the social media industry?

The social media industry (such as it is) is in an interesting position at the moment. There are the usual discussions of social media measurement and ROI, social media monitoring, buzz tracking and how brands can use social networks (such as Facebook) and other social media tools to engage customers and others. However two significant themes are common at the moment:

1. How brands can best develop a social media strategy
2. The role of the social media agency and how it should work with brands

I will be talking about both of these issues at the Marketing Live conference in April. The first, the question of how to develop a strategy, tends to divide between people who are actually developing tactics and people developing a strategy. Tactics tend to be tools based (how do we use Twitter or Facebook, for example) and have shorter-term impact. Strategy considers what the business is looking to achieve and then how social media can fit into the marketing and communications mix. Too many businesses are still developing short-term, tool-based tactics rather than thinking strategically. This is a real shame and it is a pity to see brand who are still not taking a strategic approach to social media.

The role of the social media agency is also a contentious issue. Many brands think that the best person to manage their reputation and presence in social media is themselves. At FreshNetworks we would agree with this. However, for many brands this is a daunting prospect and when you are launching a new social media strategy you can benefit from working with specialists. Ultimately a brand should own its own presence in social media and an agency should be used where the expertise and experience is beneficial.

Q: If companies want to create value for their business (and not only their brand) through social media, what is the best approach? What should they think about first, and second?

The best approach to using social media in a business is not to take a tools-led approach, but to take one driven by business strategy, aims and objectives and that is measurable against these. Any business looking to develop a social media strategy should follow a four-stage process that puts these business aims first:

1. Listen to and understand what is currently being discussed online and in social media about your brand, business, market and customers. Social media monitoring and buzz-tracking is an essential first step for any business getting started in social media as it helps you to understand the media and what discussions are currently going on.
2. Think about your business aims and how you will measure these. Any social media strategy should relate to specific existing business aims. Isolate the aims that social media can best contribute to and then develop scorecard metrics for how you will measure these.
3. Explore the social media tools available to you and experiment with them. Use these as part of a deliberative process. Try some tools and then refine your use of them or try new tools to develop a mix that works for your business aims and the customers you are trying to engage
4. Measure your impact ruthlessly. Measure against your original business aims and refine your approach and strategy if you are not having the impact you expect.

Q: Is it possible for multinationals to have an global social media-strategy, what are the pitfalls?

This very much depends on the business, brand and market you are in. Any social media strategy needs to meet two distinct needs:

1. Your business aims and objectives
2. Your customer or stakeholder behaviours and needs

Often what works in one country may not translate to another country because customers there behave in different ways or have a different relationship with you. To understand how your social media strategy will translate between territories it is important to make sure you fully explore the people you are trying to engage in each market and how they interact with you. It may be that the same approach will work, or it may be that you need to refine your approach for a different market. Again, a clear and thorough strategy is key here.

At FreshNetworks, we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in March.

1. The seven harsh realities of social media for any brand

In our most popular post last month we looked at seven ‘harsh realities’ for any brand getting started in social media. There can sometimes be a tendancy to ‘do social media’ without any proper thought about why and what you want to achieve. Facebook is not always the answer and what works for one brand will not necessarily work for another brand. In this post we look at seven harsh realities of social media unless you get your planning and strategy right – from nobody to read your blog, to users will not generate content.

Working with any social media tool, just as with any marketing or communications tool needs proper thought. Here we look at the hash realities of using social media if you don’t put in this thought.

2. The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

3. Russia: the fourth largest social networking market in Europe

In a post from almost a year ago we look at data showing that Russia was the fourth largest market in Europe for social networks behind the UK, Germany and France.

4. How the Global Fortune 100 are using social media: some statistics

A useful survey from global PR firm Burson-Marsteller looks at the ways in which the Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media. The tools they are using and how they are developing a social media strategy. The survey highlights the ways in which these firms are using social media and is also insightful in terms of the tools and platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or a corporate blog) they are using. It is interesting to compare the use of the different tools – Twitter is the most popular and blogging the least. And to compare how behaviour differs by regions – particularly the differences between Asia-Pacific and the US and Europe.

5. Why Drupal is a great social media platform (in layman’s terms)

Five reasons why the content management system Drupal is a great social media platform. Easily explained in layman’s terms. From having the component modules that are suited to building an online community, through being great for SEO to good scalability. Drupal is a popular CMS and social media platform used by large brands and governments.