FreshNetworks Blog

I wrote previously about how social media is changing travel, comparing a journey I have just taken traveling across the Balkans and Greece with a trip I took 15 years ago across Western Europe. The rise of social media has changed the way we travel. It has given us new opportunities to help plan our travel, and to help us whilst we are en route. It helps us choose hotels and restaurant, to see what others have experienced and to keep in touch and give real time reviews whilst we are travelling. And many travel and leisure companies are planning their social media strategy to help them capitalise on this change in consumer behaviour.

Having just returned from the trip, I can report that social media has helped to change how we travel whilst we are on holiday as well as in the planning phase. The use of reviews and forums to help choose locations is common to many of us. Using social media in real time as a travel assistant is less so.

Social media as a real time travel resource

We are very used to social media as a tool to help choose and plan travel. To help learn what others thought of particular hotels, restaurants or venues. And to learn about what there is to do and see in different destinations. But social media as a real-time travel resource is developing. Whilst away in Greece, I saw how this could work best. Using Twitter, I posted a picture on Twitter of where I was and what I was doing. A few minutes later I had a response recommending a place to eat – a place that was not touristy but full only of Greeks, and that I wouldn’t have found at all without this piece of advice.

Of course, it helped that my friend, @AJBradburn, works in the travel industry and has lived across Greece. But it did mean that I had perhaps the best meal of my trip thanks to advice I got in real time on Twitter. An experience I would not have had without social media.

How Foursquare could become the ultimate travel companion

Perhaps the most useful social media tool when I was Foursquare. And in an unexpected way.

I have often thought that the greatest value you can get from Foursquare is not in gaining Mayorships or points, but in leaving reviews and information around a town for others to pick up. Then, when I’m in a new town looking for a place to eat or drink, I could just switch on Foursquare and find somewhere to go based on the tips (or reviews) left by others).

When I was travelling I did this for the first time, with much success. Travelling in relatively less well-travelled places (including Bosnia and Serbia), I was surprised to find quite so much activity on Foursquare. But using it I was able to find bars and restaurants, read reviews and even find other information, including the passwords for various cafe wifi access, based on the tips left by other users. This was incredibly useful, and after benefiting from these tips I was even prompted to leave my own. Including for the bar that was recommended for me in Athens.

There is a real opportunity for Foursquare to become a valuable resource for travellers and for others looking for reviews of venues near where they are. This would be particularly useful for those visiting new places or new areas of town. When you want to find places near where you are and read reviews of them.

Of course this is not necessarily what Foursquare was designed to do and there are some changes that would help to make it more useful as a review site like this. Notably it would be good to improve the ability to search for venues. It would be great if I could search for venues before I visit a town and then favourite ones I want to try out. Then, when I’m on location, I could look at my favourites on a map and visit them.

Also, as Foursquare grows it will become important that I can filter tips. In a city such as Sarajevo there are not that many bars recommended on Foursquare. In London there will be hundreds (if not thousands). I will only be interested in certain reviews and those from certain reviewers – usually people that I consider to be ‘people like me’. An ability for Foursquare to learn what I like and what I do and then tailor recommendations based on this will add significant value to the service.

Of course, the first stage will be to encourage more people to leave tips. Foursquare is not about becoming Mayor of a local venue. It is about you sharing the best of what is in your town with others. And it is about you being able to tap into local knowledge when you are on location. Or it will be if it becomes and more user-friendly resource for this type of knowledge exchange.

“Have you checked us out on Facebook?” As I queued to pay at Abercrombie & Fitch in London over the weekend I kept hearing this phrase over and over again. In fact as everybody paid for their purchases the sales assistants asked them this very same question. Some may have found this annoying, some may have found it forced, and some may have found it distracting. But it is actually a sign that Abercrombie & Fitch is taking its social media strategy seriously. And a great example of just how to embed social media across your customer touchpoints and with all your staff.

Developing a social media strategy and how you will use the various channels and tools at your disposal to engage your customers is only the first step. Now you need to actually engage people. And to do that people need to know where you are.

There are many ways that you can grow your social media channels. And it is often best to start small with a process of thorough seeding. Identify a small group of people in your target audience that you can work with – they may be brand loyalists, people you interact with already or those you know would be keen to work with you. You can then work with these people to start to build content and engagement in social media. You can create a starting point from which you can grow. But once you have begun to seed the site, and you are ready to open it up to your whole customer base you will want ways to increase the number of people you are engaging and how regularly you engage them. The question then comes: how do we engage more people in social media?

There are many ways to do this. Initial seeding with brand loyalists will help to spread the word about what you are doing. Outreach marketing in other social networks – such as Twitter – and engaging with bloggers and relevant forums will help you reach new audiences. And you also have the options of advertising, running competitions and other more traditional ways of promoting what you are doing. Of course, your aim may not be to reach large numbers through social media. But if it is, the best way to do it is simpler that any of these: use every existing customer touchpoint.

We’ve written before about how social media does not just take place online, and the best way of growing and embedding social media is to fit it in to your existing processes and customer touchpoints. Rather than social media begin something that is separate to the other ways you engage and interact with customers, it should complement and add to it. You should examine every customer touchpoint and talk about social media where relevant and where possible. If you mail out envelopes to customers, you should put your social media channels on the back. If you include telephone and other contact details in marketing material, you should put your social media channels there too. And if your staff actually meet or speak to your customers you should talk about social media with them.

Abercrombie & Fitch get it right. There are a few moments at the till when the assistant is usually quiet – the customer is finding their money or waiting for their bank to authorise their credit card. It uses these moments to talk about their social media activity – and in particular a campaign they are currently running on Facebook. And with 1.5 million people liking them on Facebook, they are clearly doing something right.

So if you want to grow and engage more customers in social media the best way is to embed it into your existing processes. You currently have many customer touchpoints so make the most of them. And let social media complement what you already do rather than sitting on its own.

Virgin America is giving away free flights to social media influencers it has identified on Twitter. There is (it assures us) no catch. It has used Klout, a tool which analyses influence on Twitter, to identify influential people in the Toronto area and offered them free flights on its new services to Los Angeles and San Francisco. These influencers only have to pay taxes. They are not being asked to do anything in return for this. They are just being asked to enjoy a flight, free Wi-Fi onboard and a launch party in Toronto.

This is an interesting social media strategy. Typically examples of blogger and Twitter outreach have seen brands ask them to do something in exchange for free product or experiences. They might offer them something for free or invite them to an event, for example, but would ask them to cover it on their blogs, on Twitter, take and share photos or recruit their friends to discussions. Virgin America’s approach is refreshingly different. And also refreshingly clever.

It is often a shame when brands dictate what they want bloggers and Twitter users to do when they engage with them. Usually they have not understood what each of these influencers is looking to achieve with their blog or with their followers. A successful social media outreach strategy will treat each of these influencers as individuals, recognise that they are interested in different things and allow them to use their involvement with your brand to further their own blog or social media aims. For example, if I write a design blog, I might want to review the interior design and lighting on Virgin America flights. If I am a plane fan, I might compare the airline with competitors. And if I am a small business owner, I might review the offering from a business perspective, looking at cost and ability to work onboard. Each influencer wants to talk about different things in different ways.

With this in mind, there are two ways to work with influencers online as a brand:

1. Research each influencer and treat them as individuals – building a relationship with them and understanding their interests, their aims and what you can offer them or ask them to do that will help them as individual bloggers or Twitter users
2. Enable influencers to experience your brand or service and trust them to cover it as they so choose. You focus on giving them an experience they will enjoy and allow them to write and cover the experience in a way that works for them. Of course they may not write at all about your brand – although if you choose carefully people typically will.

The second of these is the braver option as brands will feel that they lose control over what may be written about them. In many cases, however, it can be the cleverer option. As in Virgin America’s case – give influencers an experience that you know is good and trust them to cover it in any way they choose.

This week we published the final report in our Review of Social Media Monitoring Tools (download the final report here). Reflecting on the report and its findings with clients and others this week, we have found ourselves discussing the importance of not just listening (although this can often be a good first step for those who are not yet doing it) but also acting on what is said about your brand and other terms of interest in social media. As the report shows, the different social media tools are of value for different purposes and choosing the one that is most suited to your brand and your needs is an important step.

Even before you have your social media monitoring in place, any brand can benefit from working out a plan for what you will do with all this information you are going to gather. Dashboards and reports can be useful, but the ability to take actions or make decisions using this information is much more useful for any brand. What you do with your social media monitoring is as important, if not more important, than getting the monitoring in place in the first place.

Different brands will want to engage with the conversations they discover online in different ways. The following are three great ways for any brand to engage with these conversations. The first two are ways in which you can capitalise upon the outputs of your social media monitoring internally and the last one on how you can use it to engage externally. They all require you to connect with different teams and functions in your brand and may need internal process change to make a real difference.

1. Inform the language of your marketing and communications

Observing and analysing the way people talk about your brand, competitor brands and the market you are in more generally can be a real and valuable source of insight for marketing and communications teams. It lets you learn how people talk about you, the language they use and how they compare you to other competitors and substitutes in the market. By properly searching not just for brand terms but also the terms that people use in relation to them you can start to explore the language that people use. This has a number of benefits. You can use the language and keywords to refine and ammend your search strategy. You can use relevant language and expressions in your marketing and PR activities. And you can start to use the same language when you are engaging in social media.

This relies on you ensuring that different teams across your brand are connected to what your social media monitoring reveals. And probably more importantly that you set up the reporting and analysis to ensure you are looking not just at what is said, but more importantly at how you can change your own communications and language on the basis of this.

2. Predict market changes

One of the real benefits of social media monitoring is that it allows you to track over time the things that are discussed in relation to your brand and your market. By tracking what is discussed over time allows you to identify when more conversations about certain issues being to emerge. Imagine, for example, that you are a large chain of pizza restaurants. One of the the things you might monitor is references to pizza being bought in a supermarket or eaten from take-away restaurants. Your social media monitoring should be set to alert you when and unusually large number of conversations of one of these kinds are present in social media. What is causing people to talk more than is usual about a topic and what can you do about it.

This kind of trend spotting can be of huge value to any business but relies on you having the mechanisms to capitalise upon this knowledge. Usually this would be a good indicator for your insight or research teams, or a marketing function to explore the trends that appear to be emerging and to make sure you are putting plans in place for any changes it may be spotting early.

3. React and respond to mentions of your brand online

Finally, any brand should consider its process for reacting and responding to what people say abotu you online. Whilst the previous two activities are very internal, this is external and involves engaging directly with people in social media.

There are many ways in which people refer to and mention a given brand online. And in most instances there is typically no need to respond. You can just leave the mention and monitor it if you think relevant. We have written before about how to react if somebody writes about your brand online, and the process described here is a great starting point. The next step is to integrate this with your own internal processes and to change these to ensure conversations online are engaged with and responded to when relevant.

This touches heavily on the importance of sentiment analysis – often negative comments need to be responded to in one way and by one set of people, and positive comments in a different way by a different set of people. We’ve written before about the problem with automated sentiment analysis and the best advice is to make sure that you keep a level of human involvement and analysis to make sure you’re responding to the right things in the right ways.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010 or download our final report

A few months ago I read a great tip from Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, in which he described the importance of ‘guerrilla customer service’ as a way to grow small businesses. Crowley described how he would actively search for negative sentiment about Foursquare on Twitter in order to help customers solve their problems. I wholeheartedly agreed with his approach, and believe it’s a crucial consideration for online community managers too.

Very often community managers are too wrapped up in the drive to grow their audiences, due to client expectations and the idea that larger audiences yield greater ROI. We also get wrapped up in engaging only with the branded online community that we manage, forgetting that the majority of our customer base may not be aware that the community exists. So what often gets overlooked is the importance of seeking out and retaining existing customers, especially the unhappy ones.

I once came across a client’s customer who had tweeted a photo of a broken shoe (not the fault of the brand), frustrated that it was old season and she wouldn’t be able to replace it. I helped her to source a replacement shoe in her size. Needless to say, she bought the replacement and thanked us publicly on Twitter for helping her. There you have a great example of quantitative and qualitative ROI, and what was nice for her was the unexpected surprise at being assisted without asking for help. Think of all those unhappy customers whose complaints get lost in the noise of the social web.

For me three points are key if you want to execute slick and successful guerrilla customer service:

1. Use social media monitoring tools to keep on top of all the sentiments flying around your brand everyday in an efficient way. Set up RSS feeds and real time alerts so that you never miss an angry tweet or blog post about your brand.
2. Deal with the unhappy customer in the public space online. Yes, you’re making your brand vulnerable to criticism, but at the end of the day the customer will publicly praise you if you’ve helped them solve their problem – driving positive word of mouth for your customer service.
3. Be prompt to respond. Aim for a best practice turnaround time by working closely with customer service and product teams. Use social media to communicate with the customer as close to real time as possible; the icing on the cake is in being able to prove that it is a more effective customer service channel than telephone or email.

We’ve been extolling the virtues of word-of-mouth marketing over big-budget advertising for some time now, and when a firm of consultants like McKinsey start doing the same thing it really feels like our message is hitting home.

A recent article in McKinsey Quarterly looked at the impact of word-of-mouth-marketing for businesses and how companies can take better advantage of buzz.

The article shows how many marketers are spending millions of dollars on elaborate advertising campaigns when often what’s really needed to help influence consumers is a  “word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source” which “cuts through the noise” of traditional marketing methods.

This is nothing new to us here at FreshNetworks. We’ve always said that online communities and social networks amplify word-of-mouth and that the right message can resonate and expand, affecting brand perceptions and increasing sales. But what is interesting is the way the article looks at at the impact of word-of-mouth marketing – or, what McKinsey term, “word-of-mouth equity”.

Word-of-mouth equity is a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase. In essence, this is the average sales impact of a brand message multiplied by the number of word-of-mouth messages.

When assessing the impact of word-of-mouth marketing the following factors need to be taken into account:

1. What’s being said

In order to influence consumer decisions a successful word-of-mouth message should address important products or service features. (While marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, consumers actually tend to talk—and generate buzz—about functional messages).

2. The identity of the person who sends the message

The word-of-mouth receiver must trust the sender and believe that they really know the product or service in question. Otherwise that message will not trusted or spread any further.

3. The environment where the message is circulated.

Messages passed within tight, trusted networks have less reach but a greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities (Think about the difference in hearing an opinion from someone you know and trust, to someone you’ve just met on the street), so there’s usually a high correlation between people whose opinions are trusted and the members of networks that are most valued.

If businesses take these key driving forces into account when pursuing excellence in word-of-mouth marketing, the potential benefits are huge. Yet many marketers avoid actively using word-of-mouth as it’s seen as an immature and somewhat unsophisticated approach to marketing.

As a starting point, marketers should look at word-of-mouth through social media. Social media monitoring can be used to track how the message is being spread online as well as the impact it is having on your brand or business. Marketers should also engage in social networks and online communities where they can help guide and stimulate word-of-mouth by interacting with customers and people who are interested in their business or services.  Any negativity or derogatory comments can be addressed and managed in an appropriate and timely manner and, more importantly, any good comments and recommendations will be broadcast to the entire online universe. Now that’s really spreading the word.

The McKinsey article is our Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week, and you can read the full article online.

According to a recent report in Travel Mole, the travel and tourism industry is facing a social media revolution.

The Social Travel Report, carried out by independent media agency Total Media, has found that almost 70% of consumers surveyed use the internet to book their holidays, compared to 23% by phone and just 8% in-store with travel agents.

Those seeking to go away on a break trust complete strangers more than recommendations from the travel industry itself, and most British holidaymakers see the internet as an extension of the word-of-mouth recommendations they receive from friends and family.

Online reviews on social networking sites like Facebook,  or travel websites like TripAdvisor, are now more influential than brochures, advertising, travel supplements and travel agents. And travellers are willing to write reviews, as well as be influenced by them – almost one in every three UK holidaymakers over the age of 16 has written an online review.

Perhaps surprising to some, it is a slightly older generation of consumers who are leading the travel social media revolution. 16-24 year olds are the most likely age group to visit a travel agent, while 74% of the 35-44 year olds who were surveyed use travel websites to book their holiday online.

So in order to regain lost ground, it seems that the more traditional travel and tourism operators need to become more social. Aside from developing a sustainable social media strategy, perhaps a more general message in this age of increased online conversation and heightened word-of-mouth is to engage with customers, not advertise to them.  Share things that would be of interest, encourage them to review your products and offerings, and interact with them online on a regular basis. By bonding with customers through social media, rather then bombarding them with information and sales messages, perhaps more traditional travel operators can enjoy the success of some of their online counterparts.

Some more reading

• Death of the travel brochure as holidaymakers opt for online reviews (telegraph.co.uk)
• Online Reputation Management in the Hotel Industry (blogs.praized.com)
• Facebook and Twitter Change Travel Trends (travelinsurance.org)

Can’t make it to the launch of our Social Media Monitoring Review 2010? We’ll soon be posting the findings from the research into seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. In the meantime you can follow the discussions and debates from the breakfast launch below. Join in and let us know your experiences and thoughts on social media monitoring and the tools we are investigating.

So what are social media monitoring tools?

In a nutshell, social media monitoring tools pretty much do what they say on the tin – they monitor online conversations taking place through social media.  They track anything that’s being said about your business or your brand on blogs, forums, Twitter and other social spaces. Each tool is different, varying in complexity and in the way they gather and process the information, as we will show you over the next few weeks.

Our sister company, FreshMinds Research, has been using social media tools to generate customer insights for years. We usually work with FreshMinds Research to conduct social media audits or monitoring when establishing a  social media strategy for clients. So over the next few weeks you’ll benefit from the unique findings of a research company working in collaboration with a social media agency.

We’ll start with the basics and work through our research step-by-step. If at any time you want us to explore a certain aspect in more detail, please let us know. Our next post will explore the basics of social media monitoring.

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

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.