Category: Updates

Social media monitoring

Social Media is at a busy messy stage.  It offers great potential, but also great complexity and confusion.  In order to demonstrate the benefits from a well designed social media campaign, an in-depth analysis and monitoring program has become a key success element.  Most of the action in social media is around other people’s comments, and the power lies in getting these people to talk you up, not in simply using the internet and social media communities as another channel for the same content and publications.  You need to find the discussions and engage if you want to win, and there are some great tools out there, but this one from Perspctv is so simple.  These can be put together quickly and provide a decent snap shot of the baseline that a campaign starts from.  At present its a beta with a few wrinkles, but the reporting content and graphical result is on target.

A more basic version of this type of reporting (but currently more robust) is offered by Google trends (click on graph to see full version).

The additional level in investment of time in monitoring the “buzz” on social media platforms is well worth it.  Increasingly there is a need to prove an ROI and alignment with objectives.  Results like these may be the start of mainstream corporate understanding and acceptance of this powerful marketing and communication medium.

Twitter vs Gamer networks for high speed news updates

No sooner had I finished reading a blog article about the transitions occuring in the way people get their news (see “where is everyone“), than I had a real live test study present itself. Last night we had a small earthquake and I jumped onto Twittersearch to see what the magnitude was.  Silence.  No action or posts. Next I turned to google and was directed to a local TV news channel blog post with a question from the anchor on what listeners had felt, and where.  The real eye-opener was the next link though to NeoGAF, a gamer’s forum.  These guys were on it in seconds and closed out with 50 posts in 15 minutes.  The reports came in with phone area codes and short updates.  Gamers are now more real-time, localized and real-world than twitterers?

acknowledgements: Thomas Baekdal

Inbound Marketing Summit: San Francisco ’09

 

I got back to Los Angeles last night and am still mentally reeling.  I went up as a guest of Bryan Elliott and Chris Brogan (thanks Bryan and Chris, you are amazing) to attend a summit on social media and was once again blown away by the people in this area. The summit was produced by New Marketing Labs and hosted by Chris Brogan and Justin Levy, both of whom were amazing presenters and moderators. The roll call of presenters was stellar, but the thing that stood out was the clarity and ease with which they explained their areas of expertise. No double talk, just straight forward useful tools and techniques. Although my family will forever believe that I am at the leading edge of social media, I have so much to thank these guys for and hope to give back a lot whenever I can. My summary is a small reflection of their efforts and knowledge.

Social Media is not Rocket Surgery (thanks, I know..) simple steps that I will be expanding on later are

1. Listen. There are a lot of people talking about you, your brand or your products. What you tell them, and what they say is rarely the same. You need to listen very carefully across several platforms before honing in and identifying what the market percieves about you. By listening first, you will hopefully find your fans, your detractors, and those who influence the rest. All these groups are powerful.

2. Engage. Find the leaders of the packs and engage with them. They have already engaged with you and invested their time and energy in you. If they love you, love them back, if they hate you, find out why and do something about it that addresses their problem. These influencers (bloggers, twitterers and personalities in the crowd) are where you need will get the breakthrough results. You should take the tie to segment your market and address several small passionate communities individually. No one wants to be part of a grey mass.

3. Provide compelling content.  This is ideally something you have developed, and should therefore be presented in your own voice.  New content is not an advertisement for a product. event or brand.  That is just a massive turnoff.  Ideally aim for 90% content outside yourself; photos, videos, commentary on events, comments on other peoples content etc.  You need to be in there so go ahead and talk about yourself for the 10% thats left, but if you want people to stick with you for that, make it funny, sad, scary etc (any emotion will do) and don’t bget too protective of it.  You want people to share it and spread the word.

4. As an individual, be yourself.  Your words will take on your voice and personality and on most platforms this is then broadcast to a global audience.  President Obama got this message and it worked pretty well for him, but he and his team worked hard and thoughtfully.  Amazingly, you have the same platforms on social media that he had.  For an individual, it should be simple, but several theories abound regarding “work’ and “personal” identities.  It seems a lot simpler to be the same wherever you are, maybe break the personal stuff out to a more intimate medium (phone or email) but let the social media content roam free and revel in its space. 

5. A brand needs an authentic voice. For a brand or company your voice requires some thought and consistancy.  Despite that fact that the newest arrivals in your office probably understand social media better than the more seasoned ones,  its not a great idea to let someone who has just walked into the office speak for your brand to the world on twitter (AKA “Twinterns”).

6. Promote others. There are a lot of people out there who are passionate about a subject, brand or idea.  They have lost sleep and worked hard to promote these, and whne you see them in support of you in some way, it really helps to give an “atta boy or gal”.  At times the loudest voices are ones that do’nt like what you are doing in some way.  Still better to engage, acknowledge and convert by taking on the problem (Taekwondo style), than leave them to poison the well with comments that usually have some basis.

7.  Be smart with your time.  once you have developed a decent strategy, use the tools that are online to spread the word or listen to the world effectively.  There are to many platforms out there that you could and at times should engage with for your to be going to individually.  As a company, or an individual, the cost of that time and scattering of focus is too high.

8. Be active.  You need to get in there and engage ona few channels. At a minumum select three channels (ie twitter, facebook, youtube) and integrate these to provide cross posting.  The systems will change over time as the herd moves on to greener pastures and we fall in love with shinier toys.  I will keep a list of whare I see the value ona seperate page.

9. Get out there.  People still like to see you each other and enjoy the sunshine.  There is no replacement in a computer screen for the endorphins and memories created by the physical world.  Tieing the online ot teh physical is powerful.

10. Acknowledge and thank.  Before I even wrote this and certainly by the time you read this, all these ideas have already been expressed.  Acknowledging where you first heard an idea is important (see my acknowledgments below).  Its a pretty level playing field, but some people are just better at getting the words and ideas out, and they often provide these ideas openly and freely without fanfare. They deserve your thanks and support.

 

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to the guys below for their great presentations at IMS’09

Bryan Elliott

Chris Brogan

Justin Levy

David Meerman Scott

Loic Le Meur

Tim Ferris

Jamie Dicken

Louis Gray

Brian Halligan

Charlene Li

Dharmesh Shah

Tim Walker

Sports Twittering

With the rapid advancement of Twitter into mainstream marketing toolboxes, many professional sports teams and leagues have now added one or more Twitter accounts.  These accounts can be vastly powerful in their reach, and Epic States has engaged in several projects recently to leverage this messaging service to deliver results aligned with corporate strategies.  For more information contact us at info@epicstates.com