FreshNetworks Blog

This is our first post from the Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll cover the basics of social media monitoring.

Background

Social media tools make it possible for people to have conversations online. The uptake in conversations, comments and reviews has been explosive and the importance of these conversations is growing by the day. Among many other things, people are discussing brands, describing their purchase intentions and asking for assistance in making buying decisions or product support.

The opportunity for organisations is clear. They can now listen-in on the conversations of their customers, potential customers and other stakeholders in a way that was previously impossible. Through social media monitoring it is possible to gain insights from the conversations people are having online every day and to make improvements to products, customer service and marketing as a result.

Real-world ethnography has been around for a while – the process of analysing the context in which people act, usually researched by observing subjects in their natural habitat. It can teach us a lot about behaviour and influencing factors, however it is expensive and subject to The Observer’s Paradox (see also Schrödinger’s Cat).

Social media monitoring brings observational research to a mass audience. By tracking what is said in forums, on Twitter and in other social networks, brands can gain customer insight. But beyond getting geeky researcher’s excited, it can also offer very practical benefits to organisations. Customer service teams can listen out for customer issues online and then and resolve them. Competitor Intelligence departments can find out what customers are saying about competitors’ products. PR Managers can get early warning of pending PR disasters before they hit main-stream media and most of all, by listening first, companies can be better prepared to join online conversations and become social.

Social media monitoring clearly has tangible business benefits and as a result it’s a hot topic. Furthermore, the power and importance of what people are writing online is increasing. The reach an influential blogger can have is extraordinary. And according to Neilsen, consumer recommendations have now become the most powerful form of advertising (78% of people trust customer reviews). As a result companies need to monitor word-of-mouth more than ever.

Using search engines to monitor online conversations

Many online conversations can be accessed with ease and for free using Google or other search engines. Simply using your brand name as a search term, or using keywords that are associated with your brand (eg, for Starbucks you could search for “Starbucks” or “whole bean coffee”) you can find conversations that are related to your brand. Taking that process a step further you can set up Google Alerts so that you get an email when someone mentions your keywords.

However, if you search in this way you’ll probably end up with hundreds of thousands of returned results and a limited number of ways to analyse the data further. You will also get a mixture of professional and user generated content. It is possible to use some free buzz tracking tools to focus on certain areas. For example Omgili and Board Tracker are great ways to search forums. But until Google enters the social media monitoring market, the best way for enterprises to track social media is by using a paid-for tool.

The benefits of using social media monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools deal with the two problems of searching and analysing the online conversation. The tools use similar web crawling technology to search engines in the way that they read online conversations. However, unlike search engines, the tools clean, de-duplicate and categorise the conversations and then store them in a database.  As our report and future posts will show, some tools do these things better than others.

Social media monitoring tools also allow you to enter search terms into the database so that you can customise the way you view the results. The tools count the conversations that contain your search terms and provide you with the ability to display this information in graphs and charts.  Most tools also allow you to divide by location or media type (eg, Twitter or blogs) and at the cutting edge, some social media monitoring tools provide workflow management process that can help you disseminate conversations within your organisation, others are starting to combine buzz tracking with CRM in a bid to create single-customer-view Social CRM. And there are some tools that allow you to respond to conversations across the web from a single dashboard.

One key feature that marketeers have been most keen on is sentiment analysis.

What is sentiment?

Sentiment is a thought, view, or attitude that is often based more on emotion than reason. In the context of social media monitoring, it is the concept of deciding whether a specific online conversation is positive or negative. This is really useful in helping you determine the themes and topics that are driving both good and bad conversations about your brand.

Sentiment can also allow you to track the overall impact of marketing campaigns or news about your brand. We suspect the main reason people have latched onto sentiment is because it gives the impression that the plethora of web conversations can be summarised in a single number. Businesses love to track numbers and sentiment is often the KPI of choice for social media.

This is dangerous. Sentiment is more nuanced than a single number and using an automated tool to assess how people feel puts too much faith in the today’s software. We don’t believe that the tools on the market have nailed sentiment analysis yet. The tools can be extremely valuable, but it is important to understand their limitations as it is to understand their capabilities.

One piece of advice - it’s not about the bike

The most important thing to bear in mind when choosing a social media monitoring tool is that ongoing human interaction and interpretation are essential to get real value. If there is one mistake that companies are making it’s that they buy into a dashboard expecting insights on a plate. Months later they look back and wonder why the dashboard hasn’t changed their business.

Buzz tracking opens up opportunities for insight, but it is worthless without sufficient people resource and internal processes to act on information.

I am biased. My background is research (FreshMinds, our sister firm, has been twice named UK Research Agency of the Year by the Market Research Society) and we’re not selling a tool. Rather we help companies select the right tool and help them get value out of it on an ongoing basis. But I think you’ll find most of the software vendors will concur that their happiest clients are the ones who have properly resourced the listening effort and invested sufficient time in interpretation, dissemination and action. After all, what’s the point in listening if you never act on what you hear?

The next blog post in our series will be about setting up each of the leading tools to get the most out of them.

Social media monitoring breakfast seminar

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.

image via FlickR courtesy of LucyFrench123

“The problem with brands in social media is that they act like 19 year old dudes”.
Yelled Gary Veynerchuck at SXSW, excited as ever.

His point was that there is a tendency to approach every interaction with a single goal – sex for the dudes, sales for companies. And to rush towards that goal without pausing for breath.

I have been reminded of Gary’s comment a few times this week. Mostly by the economist, John Kay.

John has a new book out: Obliquity – why our goals are best pursued indirectly. And as a result he’s cropping up everywhere at the moment.

The premise of his book is that the greatest, most profitable companies achieve success as a result of focussing on higher ideals than cash generation. This is not an especially groundbreaking theory – I’ve rarely met a successful entrepreneur who was primarily money-motivated. However I do think he has coined a super phrase and one with a distinct social media relevance.

Obliquity – why social media goals are best pursued indirectly
Success in social media rarely comes from being the 19yr old dude. Sustained social media ROI relies on building realtionships, not converting one-night-stands. The tools of social media provide a new form of communication. As a result they can help you improve products, processes and customer relationships. An indirect, or oblique benefit, might be more sales.

However, obliquity is a tough message when you’re a nervous marketing manger who only likes to spend money on safe bets where ROI has been proven upfront or in advance.

The tragedy of social media is that “digital can be measured”. This drives a desire is to spend £1 and get £1 and 10 pence back before investing more. Whilst such an approach is fine for Google Adwords or other search marketing, social media plays by different rules.

Please don’t act like the 19yr old dude. Customers can spot it a mile off. You’re far more likely to achieve social media ROI if you focus on a different (oblique) business goal first. Use social media to engage customers. Use social media for deeper customer insight or to improve your customer service. The cash will follow.

Last week I attended an event on social media measurement and ROI as part of Social Media Week London. There were a lot of issues flying about such as ‘the meaning of ROI’, ‘campaign objectives or strategic objectives’. And some interesting perspectives from the panel on all of these topics and some discussions with the crowd. However one of the more important points discussed  was the use and relevance of objective setting. It was refreshing to take a step back and remember that with all this emphasis on objectives and direct results that we don’t forget that engaging in social media will usually help in ways that you never intended and objective setting can sometimes narrow your focus.

I have personally been working on evaluating some of our 2009 social media engagements, showing how this engagement met the initial objectives that were laid out as the foundations for undertaking the projects. After sifting through a lot of analytics, community data, and online buzz monitoring there were some really good results. The nicer part of this however was looking at some of the data and seeing the impact that a campaign had, that you would never have intended or expected it to.

A community that we have recently launched was set up with a view to strengthen the brand among a younger target audience, become an authority in its category and drive insight through the business. The campaign is doing very well in meeting these objectives, but we have also noticed that we have driven a lot of questions from people abroad and have been able to help international customers feel closer to the business and given them the ability to ask questions that they are restricted in asking due to the lack of stores in their country.

This is one of many examples that I have come across of social media adding value to a business that was never originally forecast or planned. I agree strongly that to make engagement a success and not open your company up to unwanted activity then you have to have clear objectives but make sure that your measurement is not as focussed as your objectives because you will miss out on value that you never intended.

The last post of our guide to Getting Started in Social Media looked at measurements and how brands should be ruthless about ROI. This presentation from Oliver Blanchard is a great introduction to social media ROI and how you should conceive of it and then measure it. It’s also quite amusing in parts and so is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks

For me the most insightful part of the presentation is the distinction between a non-financial ROI and a financial one. Blanchard’s model is that you get the non-financial ROI before you get measurable financial return. They are part of a continuum – your investment leads to something that will have a non-financial impact first and then a financial one. This is a model that really rings true in our experience of building online communities. Financial ROI can take time to achieve, but good planning and strategy should start to give you non-financial ROI relatively quickly. Brands often need to have this trajectory reinforced – just because you don’t have any hard financial return yet does not mean it isn’t just round the corner. It probably is if you persist with your efforts.

Over the last ten days we have shared our thoughts on four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. As I say in a recent article in the Independent: “The biggest mistakes companies make, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy”.

The four posts in the guide are below. Many of these posts raise as many questions as they offer answers and getting your use of social media right is not easy. But they should provide a useful framework for any brand looking to get started in social media. And if you need some help with this you can always give us a call!

The FreshNetworks Guide to Getting Started in Social Media

• Part One:  Do you know what people are saying about you? Buzz tracking, social media monitoring, the power of understanding who is talking about you where and why, and some great free tools for any brand to use
• Part Two: What do you want to achieve? Working out your brand’s aims and objectives (and making these measurable) is the single most important factor in a successful social media strategy. Do this before you think about technology.
• Part Three: Have a go and experiment with social media Once you have clear objectives that are measurable it’s time to get going. Try things out and experiment, but make sure you do them where you know you will have the greatest chance of achieving these aims and engaging the people you want to engage.
• Part Four: Track and evaluate the success you are having When you are using social media tools it is essential that you are measuring and tracking your performance against these aims. Measurement is critical and assessing the benefit you are having will help you to refine and improve your strategy overall.

For any brand getting started in social media, the most important thing is to be able to show the impact you are having. To be able to evaluate and assess what is working and what isn’t having the results that you might expect. To show the return on investment that your efforts are having and how this compares to other methods.

There is a lot of talk about social media measurement and it is true that in isolation it is difficult to know where to start. But for businesses with a clear social media strategy, it is actually much easier than many people think. We stressed earlier in this guide to Getting Started in Social Media the importance of thinking about the reasons you are using social media before you jump in to use any tools or to engage people. We talked though a process to define clear and measurable business objectives and aims for your use of social media. It is important that you make these both clear and measurable. Typical objectives that a brand might consider include – acquisition of new customers, retention of existing ones, number of new insights or ideas into the business, or number of customer problems solved. These are just some of the objectives that brands may have for using online communities and social media, and all of them are measurable. At the simplest level they either save money for a brand or they generate revenue.

In the online communities that we manage at FreshNetworks a lot of time is spent defining the objectives and then working out first what metrics should be measured against these, and then monitoring and reporting on these to make sure we understand how the community is performing. It is important to establish a set of metrics that you can measure to assess how you are performing against your aims. In many cases you will want to measure a mix of things for each aim, but overall you should be able to show and prove what impact you are having.

Example: If you want to use social media as an efficient way of resolving customer queries, for example, you probably want to measure the number of unique customer problems you have on the site, the number of problems that are solved by other members of the community. You can then put an equivalent cost that it would have taken to service these queries through other channels and measure the actual reduction in, for example, call centre costs that you witness over time. This is what Dell did, and this is how Dell managed to work out that one member of its customer support community saved them $1m a year in support costs. That’s real ROI.

So the final stage to getting started in social media is to make sure you are ruthless about measuring what you are doing. It’s the only way you will know what works (and what doesn’t) and prove the impact you are having with social media. To do this you need to have clear objectives and these need to be measurable. Then you can measure the actual impact you are having on business aims. The actual benefit your social media strategy is bringing to your brand.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

I’ve loved putting together a series on debunking community management as part of FreshNetwork’s commitment to promoting best practice and sharing knowledge. The hardest part, of course, was boiling such a huge subject down into just five blogs. And they ended up behemoths…

So to help any time-poor, interest-rich readers out there, here is a summary of the key points from the series:

Introduction to community management

The what, who and why of community management. It’s a strange job to explain, and a challenge to do well. The way you splice your day depends largely on the community set-up, size and specific-goals, but there are general rules that cross all communities.

• Respect your members
• Retain good, safe boundaries and rules
• Be fair
• Don’t allow yourself to appear provoked (even when a member is driving you potty)
• Listen to the group, and the individuals within it
• Balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group
• Keep records of everything

Read the full blog post

Champions, active users and trolls

We looked at who is using your community and how they are using it. The 90-9-1 principle has been a trusted favourite of community people for over a decade, but it’s looking increasingly dusty as new forms of micro-activity (such as rating, thumbs ups etc) come in and blur the edges between readers and editors.

We talked about that precious core of users that behave wonderfully, use the features, have the community’s best interests at heart and help keep it thriving and healthy: community champions. But what really came across in the comments is how not to underestimate the ‘lurkers’, as they are hugely important to the success of your community – especially if the number of page views is a KPI for your site.

Respect your ‘readers’ as well as your top contributors!

The toxic team, bores and trolls also got an airing. As delightful as it would be, it’s nigh on impossible to bring together a group of people without at least a handful of them behaving in a way you find aggressive, unpleasant or just really annoying…

Read the full blog post

Growth of a community

So you’ve got your community, now what? How do you know if it’s healthy? In fact, what do you consider to be a healthy community? If one of the core aims of your community is a vibrant and colourful debating space, the number of posts and replies plus the subjects being debated will be far more important than the number of overall members, for example.

How do you judge the health of your community, what should you measure? We talked about the importance of thinking about this way before you build anything. It should be central to your plans and your ongoing strategy.

But now you have your community, how to keep it vibrant, how do you recruit new members. Do you even want to actively recruit new members? Is it more important to you to increase engagement with the members you currently have?

We drew some top-line hints:

• Think open questions, talking points
• Keep it simple
• There’s more to engagement than posts
• Trust your own interests and be authentic
• Careful with current affairs

Read the full blog post

Moderation and safety

What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? How can you spot risks, and help eradicate them? What are the options for moderation, and the potential drawbacks of each type? You pre-moderate all content, and be sure of the quality of everything you let through, but this will create a very different (almost certainly slower and lesser used) beast to a post-moderated community, which in turn will behave differently to a reactively-moderated community where more of the control and responsibility is shared with the members.

The right moderation entirely depends on the community and its context, so we pulled together some thinking points to help your decision-making:

• Who is the community aimed at?
• Is it particularly at risk of malicious posting?
• Does your membership feel comfortable with self-regulation?
• Do you have the resources to pre-moderate quickly enough or will messages take too long to go live?
• Is the subject matter particularly legally-sensitive?
• Are children or vulnerable people going to be using it?
• Is there a high chance of defamation e.g. a celeb gossip community?
• How much control do you need rather than want?

But what about when the community doesn’t police itself very well, or show the restraint necessary to stay out of trouble?

In 2007, Mumsnet.com, an online community started and managed by a group of mums in North London, paid author Gina Ford a five-figure sum to settle a libel claim.

Gina Ford, a well-known figure in the baby book market, advocates strict, routine-based methods that some members of the Mumsnet community took exception to and allegedly defamatory comments were posted.

A legal fight ensued, with Justine Roberts, Mumsnet’s founder telling the press the site’s 15,000 daily comments were “impossible to monitor unless you have eyes and ears everywhere”.

Read the full blog post

Community metrics

Metrics are vital. Understanding the who, what, where, why and how many of your online community is vital. Understanding if you’re doing your company some good (or bad), is vital. Setting KPIs is vital and knowing whether you’re hitting them, is vital. Metrics are vital.

But which metrics are vital to you and your community? And how do you learn from these and share them with the wider organisation?

We spoke to various community managers, all of whom had a different favourite metric. And we also introduced some thinking about newsletters and external communications. In many ways, we argued, this is a more fragile relationship:

Mainly because unlike communicating within your community, where members have chosen to come to the space you have provided, here you are pushing your content into their domain. Their private space.

If you do it badly, intrusively, it could result not just in an unsubscribe from the mailing list, but a reaction on or an exodus from the community.

Put simply: You need to be as certain as possible how best to use newsletters. You need to know what works. And what doesn’t.

You need to measure everything that you do and be able to learn from it, because if you don’t, the health of your community is on the line.

Read the full blog post

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

I’ve read a few posts and articles this week discussing a report from showing that Facebook users spend more time on site than Twitter’s. These articles make the assumption that increased time-on-site is a good thing; that it is a sign of greater engagement and involvement with the site.

It is certainly true for social networks that there are significant benefits to be gained from increasing time-on-site. Perhaps not for the immediate benefits of greater engagement, but more because it is a sign of the increasingly important role that any particular social network is playing in a user’s life. We’ve written in the past how Facebook’s valuation is possibly related to a shift in our use of the internet to put social networks at the heart of a user’s experience. And in this context, time on site is important.

But in an online community, where we are interested in shared ideas and experience rather than share of time online, is time-on-site a useful measure of engagement?

As a health measure, we use time-on-site a lot at FreshNetworks, it is useful to measure and monitor over time and together with other health measures (such as number of unique users, depth of visit and frequency of visit). But a greater time-on-site does not, in itself, mean a better online community. We are more interested in the share of ideas than the share of time online. We want people to join, benefit from and, if they wish, add to the debates and conversations in the community. We want their contributions, even if they only spend a small amount of time on the site itself. Online communities are about shared ideas and interests – we want people who add to them.

So time-on-site is a useful health measure, but it does not necessarily determine the success of your online community. That’s why we think that the success of your online community should be tied to specific business objectives, and not to relatively arbitrary measures such as time-on-site and unique visitors. We have very successful online communities with only a hundred members, and very successful ones where people visit less often or for less time. It’s about establishing your business objectives and then working to maximise your share of ideas and share of insight. Not fighting to get more time spent on your site if that time is not productive or helping you reach your aims.

Some more reading

• Metrics and intuition (thisisherd.com)
• Forget Social Media Measurement. Get Back to the Basics. (kylelacy.com)
• ROI-Return On Influence (directmarketingobservations.com)

Our post a few days ago on measurement and ROI in social media, Social Media ROI: Measuring the unmeasurable, prompted a fair amount of discussion. The main thrust of the post, and of the presentation it highlights, is that in order to measure ROI in social media, you need to have a clear and reasoned understanding of what it is you’re measuring and why.

When building ROI models for online communities at FreshNetworks, we follow an approach that includes the following four steps

• Identify what success looks like in the online community
• List the success metrics you can measure
• Ignore things that might be a distraction
• Track and measure your success metrics ruthlessly

It isn’t rocket science, and social media ROI really shouldn’t be. The tricky part of the process isn’t measuring and tracking the metrics, but identifying what they should be in the first place. This is the stage that needs time and focused effort. But in some cases a very clear success metric can be identified.

One such case is of social media activity as a fundraising tool for not-for-profits. Here the measure of success if usually the cost effectiveness of the fundraising – they want to raise as much money as possible using as little resource as possible. And they are in a great position to compare the cost and effectiveness of a number of different methods.

One great resource for those in this industry is frogloop’s Social Network ROI Calculator. This is a fantastic resource that calculates in a degree of some accuracy the ROI that not-for-profits can get from social media campaigns. As frogloop say about the calculator:

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

The tool does require a lot of information but it is a comprehensive tool that delivers real and analysable ROI data for not-for-profit social media campaigns. Taking staff costs and a range of data on email acquisition rates, average donations and activities in social networks, it can calculate in quite some depth what the ROI story might be.

Go to the ROI calculator for social network campaigns

Of course, the problem with complicated models like this is that they are suited only to certain circumstances. This calculator would not be appropriate for all not-for-profit campaigns, but where it is it’s a great resource.

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Some more reading

• Social media is here to stay… Now what? (vator.tv)
• Recession resistant: 95% of social media marketers will maintain or increase social media spending (socialmediatoday.com)
• Marketing on the Web: How to Profit From Social Networking (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

Image via Wikipedia

On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities, comparing paid and organic search strategies. This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community – by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills.

Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online community and how we can measure this. This may be increased sales, a specific number of new ideas generated for the business, increased retention rate, traffic to an ecommerce platform, savings in market and consumer research spending… The areas where online communities can contribute to business objectives can be vast and depend on the specific needs of the business. Time spent working on this is time well spent.

That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co. I particularly like the way that they break down an ROI measure into a Success Metric and then into a Goal. This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have.

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Some more reading

• Social media is here to stay… Now what? (vator.tv)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Should We Even Consider ROI in Social Media? (kylelacy.com)
• 10 practical questions about Social Media (webnomena.com)
• What is the value of listening to social media channels for your organization? (beth.typepad.com)
• Is 2009 the year of social media & return on investment? (socialmediatoday.com)