Last summer, I had the privilege of doing a podcast with Gary King, the Harvard professor and co-founder of this social media monitoring company.

I caught up with CTO Chris Bingham and VP of Marketing Wayne St. Amand to talk about what’s new and what social media marketers should be aware of when it comes to the tools and offerings in this emerging space.

Jason Cormier: The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has documented well over 100 social media monitoring tools as part of an effort to help establish a criteria for selection. What do you believe marketers should understand about the differences among so many of these tools?

WSA: Although there are hundreds in the space, relatively few have the kind of investment, research and development to support the unique technology underpinnings that create real value.

Every player is doing at least one of three things. The first is a keyword/buzz-based, volumetric analysis. These providers are providing a detection and count of posts (tweets, blogs, forums, etc.) containing certain keywords.

As an additional offering, they may also provide a workflow functionality to help companies not only track the buzz they are interested in, but also follow up and respond.

A second methodology to social media monitoring is to work with these tools in addition to a very manual, human-powered process of analysis. Imagine using something like Google Alerts to collect a massive number of posts about a particular subject matter… then leveraging a room full of offshore labor to individually classify and apply context to the data.

The upside to this approach is typically an accurate and detailed aggregation of data to apply relevant meaning. The drawbacks are how expensive this process can get, and how long it can take. It can be good if you have months as opposed to hours or days.

The third and more technically advanced approach to social media monitoring, one still based on volumetric keyword analysis, includes natural language processing. Although this is “business intelligence” by definition, the limitations are in the pre-defined assumptions and judgment calls often made by engineers, who essentially attempt to apply all-encompassing definitions or meanings to a set of words.

JC: This makes me think of the kind of social media monitoring I witnessed for Travel Channel’s show, “Bizzare Foods.” Andrew Zimmern would be eating bull penis and people would be tweeting about how “bad ass” and “sick” he was.

In the context of what made the show successful, this was positive sentiment. But as far as the pre-defined social media monitoring tools were concerned, this language was bad news for the show – which of course, was inaccurate.

So getting to the punch, where does Crimson Hexagon fit among the three approaches you’ve mentioned, and why should we care?

WSA: With Crimson Hexagon, you are supplying the context from your own point of view, your logic, your intelligence to leverage the computer in a different way.

It’s the human-powered approach that is uniquely combined with the algorithm on the computer – only it is you who is replacing the pre-defined assumptions typically used by other advanced social media monitoring tools.

JC: So in using Crimson Hexagon, I may be reading and manually classifying one hundred posts (tweets, blogs, Facebook comments, etc). But by dedicating maybe 6-12 hours to doing this, I’m also training the algorithm to know how I think so it can then apply my rules and my context to the thousands of posts it will eventually collect and categorize on it’s own.

WSA: Yes, the yield is what’s most critical. Every tool seams to be capturing the “what” that is happening, but not necessarily the “why.” Quantifying the qualitative information is the key to determining the why.

JC: Chris, let’s talk about some of the newer items with respect to the focus and technology of your platform. We were working with your API to analyze Facebook comments that were being scraped in somewhat of a manual fashion on our end. What should marketers know about this?

Chris Bingham: Crimson Hexagon now has a Facebook application that can retrieve posts from brand pages for analysis. This is public facing data, so to speak, for those who are logged in to Facebook, which means you don’t have to be an admin of a page to enable the analysis.

JC: Cool, how far back in time can I go to review Facebook posts and comments?

CB: Facebook’s APIs have different, undocumented limits in terms of how far you can go back – so it’s somewhat varied based on what Facebook allows us to get for any given page.

JC: What else are you paying attention to over there in Harvard land?

CB: We are building on the principal that humans do what they are good at and computers do what they are good at. Each can achieve far more working together than apart.

A couple of things we are focusing on include proprietary (offline) data analysis, and the expansion of our product to help address better address engagement and workflow. We believe we can do for engagement the same thing we did for monitoring, but all within a comprehensive solution.

For us, it’s about having a massive volume of data, historical and current to provide analysis that gives real insight, not just numbers. There is a great deal of latent power and value that exists in the data… somewhere in there is the insights your company needs to make smart business decisions.

Note: I hope you found this post of value. Crimson Hexagon is one of several social media monitoring vendors my social media agency works with. We receive no compensation from them for sales, referrals, posts or articles related to their products and services.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not enough. Having social media accounts is certainly a great (and quite necessary) start, but if you don’t use them to interact with your current and potential customers, there’s really no point.

Luckily, I’ve picked 3 simple and free social media tools to get you pointed in the right direction:

• OnlyWire: Have a few social media accounts, lots to say and little time? Check out OnlyWire. This tool enables you to post content across multiple social networks at the same time, with the push of a button. The service includes all of the top social and professional networks, and the free version allows for 300 submissions per month. Say goodbye to multiple log-ins and hello to your customers.

• Roost: Use Facebook and Twitter, but not always sure what to post or when? Give your content a boost with Roost. Their free Campaign Creator connects to your profiles, lets you schedule single posts or entire campaigns, and analyzes their reach to suggest areas for improvement. This tool can also apply a fancy algorithm to your Facebook data, spitting out a score that determines whether or not your audience will drive business to your location. It’ll even tell you the geographic spread of your fans.

• Timely: Under the impression that the more times you hop on Twitter and drop your knowledge the better? Timely begs to differ…according to this tool, it’s not about the number of times you tweet, it’s about which times you tweet (however, please don’t forget that first and foremost it’s about the content). Timely will analyze your last 199 tweets, figure out the best time slots, and auto-schedule your posts based on the data. Now you can start dropping that knowledge when it’s most likely to be picked up.

With new social media monitoring tools (many of them free) popping up almost by the day, there should be no excuse for neglecting your networks. Start engaging with your current and potential customers and you might be surprised by the increase in online conversations surrounding your brand.

To illustrate this concept, I’m going to use a fictitious brand along with real social media research. My fictitious company, Brand X, sells popsicles and is interested in running a summer social media campaign. The goal for this campaign is to keep the brand top-of-mind for moms and ultimately sell product.

Step 1: Understand The Target’s Mindset Using Themes

First, I want to know what mom’s mindset is during the summer. Using Netbase, I can see what moms like and dislike about this time of year based on their online conversation in blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and forums.

Step 2: Read The Personal Narratives

Next, I want to read actual personal narratives to better understand emotions expressed by my target audience. Simply looking at key themes, tag clouds, or top phrases won’t give you the full picture.

Step 3: Identify Consumer Problems and Brand Solutions

After looking through a significant number of personal narratives (such as the two listed above), it’s clear that moms have three strong emotions around summer break.

1.     They enjoy spending time with their family.

2.     They have a hard time keeping their kids entertained the entire summer.

3.     They feel like the dreaded back-to-school time period comes too quickly.

These last two emotions are consumer “problems”. Brand X can potentially create solutions for these two areas via a social media strategy.

Step 4: Know Where Your Target Is Online

There are a number of consumer research tools out there that can tell you which social media platforms your target uses. Some of these tools (MRI or @Plan) can cost a pretty penny. I use Google Ad Planner, because it’s easy and free. Not surprisingly, Facebook has the largest reach against moms versus other social platforms.

Step 5: Create Your Strategy

Given the problems identified in Step 3, I would recommend creating a custom Facebook application called “Savoring Summer”. This application would provide moms with useful content to help keep their kids entertained and allow them to savor each day via an online summer journal.

Let’s not forget our initial campaign goal of keeping the brand top-of-mind and ultimately driving product sales:

• Keep moms engaged with the brand by providing useful content and a journal they can use every day
• Drive trial by providing a coupon within the application or suggestions for incorporating popsicles into daily activities

While this example is simplified and not completely fleshed out, the bottom line is this: Social media research can help you make strategic, sound decisions for your social media efforts.

Do you have other examples of how using social media research can help shape strategy? Comment below.

So, why is social media ROI so hard to measure? Many people have tried to create formulas or methodologies for measuring success. Jeremiah Owyang even created a framework, The Social Media ROI Pyramid, which I think is one of the best out there so far.

However, I think the missing piece lies at the strategy phase, not the measurement phase. Many businesses setup social media programs without first aligning their social media objectives to their business objectives. Forgetting this integral step makes it hard to understand the effectiveness of social media, and can leave community managers scrambling for metrics.

So, how do you align your social media objectives to your business objectives? Here are 5 key steps:

1. Write down your business objectives.
This is an obvious, yet frequently skipped, step. Understand what your CEO thinks is the main objective for the business. Is it product sales? Is it becoming the most forward-thinking company in your industry? Don’t just make an assumption here. Ask key business leaders so you’re clear on what’s important.

2. Consider how social media can help achieve these business goals.
If your business objective is product sales, and you sell your products online, this is easy. You can simply track how many sales came from social media referrals via Google Analytics. Most of us aren’t that lucky. Let’s say you only sell your products in brick-and-mortar stores. Social media can help generate awareness about your product or educate consumers on the benefits of your product.

3. Determine how you will measure both your business and social media objectives.
I teach a marketing dashboard class through the American Marketing Association, and have heard a significant number of class attendees say “brand awareness” is a key marketing objective for them. Last time I taught this class, I asked how many of these attendees knew how to measure brand awareness. Only one person raised his hand. How can you measure success if you don’t even know how to measure key objectives?

Write down the KPIs (key performance indicators) that will help you track success against these objectives. In the case of brand awareness, you can track things such as online conversations about your brand or number of unique visits to your website. You can also pay research companies to run brand awareness studies.

4. Set benchmarks.
Before starting a social media program, know where your company stands on major business objectives. Get average sales numbers, do some research on brand awareness among your target, or understand consumer opinions about your brand. Having these benchmarks setup ahead of time will better help you understand what impact (if any) your social media program is having on the bottom line.

5. Use a dashboard to track KPIs over time.
The reality is, understanding the effectiveness of a social media program takes time. Create a dashboard with the KPIs you wrote down in Step 3 and start monitoring it frequently. Look for trends and potential correlations between your social media efforts and your overall business objectives.  Do you notice that sales have gone up since you increased your Facebook community? Is consumer opinion starting to shift now that you’re active in Twitter?

In conclusion, consider this: there is no one-size-fits-all formula for calculating social media ROI. However, if you align your social media objectives to your business objectives in the strategy and planning phase, you are going to set yourself up to be more successful in determining the effectiveness of your campaign.

Of course, the answer will differ across brands and platforms, but I’ve come across two articles that will help any social media manager answer this question.

The first is a recent blog post from the SmartBlog on Social Media. This article focuses on how to close the emotional gap that the Web creates between customers and your brand. According to Jesse Stanchak, the best way to bridge this divide is to adhere to the holy grail of social media marketing: familiarity, engagement, and trust.

The second article, from Mashable, focuses on five suggestions that community managers should take into consideration when creating a content strategy for any of their social marketing campaigns.

Based on my personal experience, and these two articles, I’ve gathered the top three most important guidelines for community managers:

1. Content is crucial: As Mashable writes, “Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy.” It is the intriguing content that will keep consumers consistently engaged with your brand online. Remember: It’s important to experiment with the types of content that you’re sharing with your consumers to find out what best engages your brand’s online communities. For example, post a social media update that relates to a current event, a funny video, or ask your fans their opinion on something.

2. Transparency: Both SmartBlog and Mashable stress the importance of being honest when engaging with consumers. By being truthful and open in your engagement, you will create a deeper interaction with your consumers, giving the online experience a humanized feel. This idea of a “human brand” is the essence of a successful social experience for consumers. For instance, don’t pretend to be someone that you’re not, and don’t be afraid to respond to complaints about your business.

3. Go the extra mile: Prove to your customers that your loyalty to them is just as important as their loyalty to your brand. It is our personal responsibility as community managers to satisfy the customer’s experience online. A great way to do this is to go above and beyond what any of our competitors are doing socially. How, you ask? As SmartBlog suggests (and I think this is a great idea!), this is as easy as tweeting someone a picture of their order coming together, or wishing them a “happy birthday” on their special day.

Even though these are the most important three guidelines that I follow when managing my clients’ social communities, there are certainly other guidelines out there. What do you consider to be the top three strategies that any social media manager should follow when engaging with consumers?

Social media brings transparency to the sales process along each step of the funnel:

AWARENESS

Your company can join the conversation already happening about your brand or industry online to relate to and educate consumers. You can make recommendations to people looking for more information, thank happy customers, and rectify the situation with unhappy customers all within the public platforms where people already spend time.

Your company can also use tools to monitor the conversation and reach out to potential prospects. Through this, you can make prospects aware of the product and/or service your company offers to help them meet their goals.

PROSPECTS

After the prospect is in your funnel, the company can build trust by providing information about products and services.

The prospect may also be able to witness your company’s dialogue with existing customers, as the company demonstrates its service and response to current clients.

The idea is that you want to make people want to join the “club” of other customers and clients of your organization. Take the Mini for example. The Mini’s Facebook page has almost 661,000 fans as of today. They post photos and videos of Mini’s in landscape shots, “dressed up” for a night out, and other photos drawing thousands of likes on each post. Mini also created an extranet for customers called the Mini’s Owners’ Lounge where people share and communicate with each other. All these efforts make Mini owners feel like part of a select group and provide access to other owners and the brand.

LEADS

Once your company has formed a relationship with a prospect and they become a lead, you can listen to what is going on in their lives and in their companies through social media. For example, you can aggregate all your leads into one Twitter list to make it easy to keep up on what they are talking about. A Twitter list also makes it easy to participate in the conversations the lead cares about, keeping you and your company top-of-mind.

CURRENT CUSTOMERS

Easily sharable social media tools are a great way to continue to make your current clients feel special and use their experience with your company to demonstrate value to new leads and prospects.

In short, social media brings personality and authenticity to humanize big corporations while at the same time giving small and medium sized companies the opportunity to amplify their presence in a genuine way. These are important details in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

I recently caught up with Gary for a podcast, and am sharing a condensed version of our discussion with you as part of this post. Additionally, I’ve included my “Top 5 Things to Know” based largely on my experience and discussions with Lauren Maynard, who works with the tool almost daily as Room 214’s Director of Research.

Social-Media-Monitoring-Podcast-With-Crimson-Hexagon

Podcast Show Notes
1. We discuss the original intent of Crimson Hexagon’s technology, and Gary references the “disaster” of attempting to use documented practices for extracting meaning from large volumes of textual content.

2. Gary discusses how Crimson Hexagon overcame the challenges associated with common linguistic analysis by developing something I have come to refer to as their “proportional estimate” methodology.

3. I ask about the accuracy of data and validation methodology. Gary explains in detail.

Note: Gary sometimes refers to posts, tweets, blogs, etc as “documents.” Between his knowledge of the subject matter and natural train of thought, you may find yourself needing to listen to certain sections more than once. The last two minutes of the podcast, when he talks about people/messages basically saying the same thing over and over again, are my favorite.

The Top 5 Things You Need to Know about Crimson Hexagon
I’d like to quickly preface this by saying Room 214 is a tool-agnostic agency. My objective is not financial compensation from Crimson Hexagon for saying nice things about them or even selling their offerings.

It is instead to evaluate, recommend, use and help optimize business intelligence and social media monitoring tools from any number of technology providers my agency deems praiseworthy. This is the best way we know how to continue matching effective solutions to our clients’ requirements (ok, end of my pitch).

1. Crimson Hexagon Accounts for Consumer Variation

Consideration of varied language use is important because it can vary greatly by consumer segment. For example, 12 year olds and 45 year olds might describe something they love very differently, but at the core their statements are both saying, “We love this” or “We are going to watch this.” Identification and categorization of both types of conversation is valuable.

2. Crimson Hexagon Research Enables a Thesis

Using the same set of keywords, and assuming a given volume of subject matter, a question can be asked and subsequently answered. Example: For a TV show, questions ranging from intent to view to sentiment reaction can be answered. Most tools require manual sorting through piles of posts based on keywords and inferred trends. Crimson Hexagon can factually and correctly capture trends pertaining to the question being asked within a given set of posts.

3. Crimson Hexagon Enables the Training of Their Algorithm

We have been at this kind of work (leveraging social media business intelligence and monitoring tools) for about three years, so can appreciate that many of these tools are essentially in their infancy. Still, it wasn’t that long ago we joked about providers needing to activate the “army of midgets” behind the Wizard of Oz curtain in order to get calibrations/adjustments done due to poor data filtering or off-target monitoring.

Today, one of our favorite things about Crimson Hexagon is the ability to make their tools work more effectively without the need to give them a call. This is a huge time saver, allows us to better optimize the tools for relevant results and positions our analysts in the driver’s seat when it comes to delivering value.

4. Crimson Hexagon Helps Narrow the Research

The first steps of keyword refinement are made easier with Crimson Hexagon’s visualizer functionality. The visualizer helps us understand how to better narrow a search, and may even reference items that might be missing. This has made our process more efficient, providing automated assistance towards cleaner, more targeted results.

5. Crimson Hexagon Understands Customer Service

This might sound cliché, but we are all basically in the customer service industry (living in the “thank you economy”). We have somewhat of a unique partnership, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that Crimson Hexagon responds to us very quickly. We’ve had other “partners” that didn’t. This makes a huge difference, because the more we use their tools, the more we need to work through nuances. They have consistently demonstrated a willingness to help refine searches, take feedback and give tips and insights with respect to updates.

Show Notes:
Room 214 Co-Founder, Jason Cormier, discusses social media monitoring tools with Brian Chappell, Senior Social Search Strategist at Ignite Social Media.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The most valuable aspects of social media monitoring tools: Keeping tabs on conversations and customers for the purpose of crisis communications and reputation management.
2. Sentiment analysis in social media monitoring tools: Is automatic sentiment analysis developed enough?
3. What are clients looking for in these tools? Engaging in new markets through listening to customers, opportunities to include intelligence in product development cycles.
4. “Social media isn’t a salt shaker”: You have to work it into the base of your marketing.
5. What’s next with social media monitoring: Greater levels of CRM integration, and more consistent pricing models.

Notes: I appreciated Brian’s participation in the discussion, even as some have cited our agencies as competitors. It was affirming that Ignite is working through many of the same issues we are with respect to the tools. Hopefully, there is a nugget or two of insight here for others considering how they should evaluate the options. As one of our partners once put it to me, “it’s always preferable to combine our powers for good instead of evil.”

Show Notes:
Room 214 Co-Founder, Jason Cormier, interviews best-selling author and online marketing thought leader, David Meerman Scott.
In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Old-school measurement for ROI: What is really a “lead?” People want to apply same measures to social media. Traditional measures are being applied to social media marketing when so many other aspects of business simply don’t. Example: What’s the ROI of the receptionist, or even the accounting department for that matter?
2. We can measure how many people are exposed to our ideas, downloaded our YouTube video, etc. but these are very different measurements compared to traditional ROI measurements.
3. David states that ultimately, the ROI argument is used as an excuse based in fear. Many companies are simply afraid of social media.
4. David’s new book, World Wide Rave: How ideas spread and why people talk about you and your company. The first step in the formula for success is very counter-intuitive to marketers: Nobody cares about your products except you. To create something that has potential to spread, you can’t talk about these things. As soon as your product is brought into the equation, nobody cares.
5. Key take-away: Doing lots of activities in online marketing as opposed to one or just a few, should be the expectation when it comes to increasing your chances of success.

Notes: You can check out David’s blog at WebInkNow.com. I really enjoyed this interview, and am looking forward to reading his new book.

Show Notes:
Room 214 Co-founder, Jason Cormier, interviews Boulder-based social media consultant, Jeremy Tanner.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. To follow or not to follow: Acceptable twitter manners – great people in person doesn’t always transfer to great people on Twitter.
2. Advantages of Facebook vs Twitter: Facebook throttles down notifications, meaning you won’t receive constant updates from a person on Facebook, even if they are posting 20 items an hour.
3. A day in the life of Jeremy Tanner: It starts with his iphone (of course)
4. Bridging the gap between online and offline communications: It’s about keeping two-way conversations. Also, don’t forget or be afraid to pick up the phone.

Be sure to check out Jeremy at http://www.jeremytanner.com, and follow him via twitter at http://twitter.com/penguin