Capture the Conversation Internet Marketing Tag Feed for 'social media monitoring'

Social Media Monitoring Tools Podcast - A Discussion with Brian Chappell

Jason Cormier — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:30:00 -0400

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."

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The 4 Keys to Social Media

Jason Cormier — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:02:28 -0400

This has been somewhat of an anecdotal piece to many of our conversations about social media lately - so I'm sharing it. Given the countless layers of social media, it should be understood these keys are in the context of research, planning and measurement (not tactics).

Of course, many of our prospects and clients want to shoot straight for the tactics. Part of our responsibility is backing them out to the bigger picture of what the objectives are. Strategy follows, and only then are the tactics (and technology) addressed.

As practitioners we casually speak about listening, learning and engaging. The first two keys are specific to listening.

Here is Room 214's take on it:

1. KEY Words: Those again? Yes. Keywords are not just for SEO and search marketing. In fact, most of today's leading online business intelligence and social media monitoring tools are providing value initially based on keyword search queries. Even basic keyword analysis can go a long way.

2. KEY Topics: Beyond keywords, are key topics or emerging themes. Knowing what your share of voice is in terms of percentage of conversations about your brand (vs. your competitors or partners) has its place - but understanding common themes or topics in those conversations adds a whole new level of insight with respect to priority of messaging, response, etc.

3. KEY Performance Indicators: If you have an idea in terms of what success looks like against your objectives, then key performance indicators should be established to provide a means of measurement.

I realize we could get into an entirely separate discussion around score cards, Net Promoter and ROI here - but the point is to establish some form of measurement related to response. Might sound like common sense, but it's an often forgotten element.

4. KEY Influencers: This is where the gold is with respect to a great deal of action that can follow from the initial data (listening) collected. Social media is little more than word of mouth marketing on the Internet. Unlike traditional word of mouth, however, identifying influential people and web properties essentially enables the priority of who gets the word first.

When you consider these keys, which one do you think is most relevant to you? What parallels do you see with what might be considered traditional marketing and public relations?

Note: Thanks to nerdapproved.com for the image.

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Why Social Media is Succeeding at Qwest

Jason Cormier — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:01:01 -0400

Qwest announced its "Talk to Qwest" program today - a comprehensive social media effort effectively helping Qwest customers resolve a range of issues online - including billing, tech support, product/pricing inquiries, etc.

Starting on Twitter, @TalkToQwest, Qwest has put together a super-group of people clearly demonstrating their care for customers through daily outreach and response (in 140 characters or less). That is actually the short answer to why they are succeeding in social media: their people.

As the social media agency hired to assist them, it's a privilege to share a little personal insight on Qwest with respect to both challenges and opportunities. But first, I have a confession.

Frankly, I was a little concerned about the project before we even started working together. It's one thing to focus on a project within a department of a large company - but when multiple departments are motivated to participate, and impassioned individuals are talking about literally changing how the company does business… well, I'll let you fill in the blanks from your own experience. Exciting? Yes. Quickly and effectively executed? Often not.

My internal questions were simple. How quickly is Qwest really going to be able to move on this? Would even necessary things like "messaging" and legal stand in our way of doing it right? Could they be relevant? Could they be cool? Could they be timely? Would the people we worked with have enough buy-in from the rest of the organization to really show the world that Qwest "gets it?"

Today, you (and Qwest's customers) are in the position to answer some of the more important questions I had early on. Socialmedia.qwest.com is a good start for seeing how the company is introducing and addressing the relevance factor.

And cool?! How about those Viddler videos of the people behind Qwest's Twitter presence? I can't tell you how glad I am about the avoidance of over-production that could have so easily been present here. And you just gotta see what this Qwest guy does at the bowling alley after hours (see video below). Classic!

In answer to my own questions - it's refreshing to say that early on, what we discovered within Qwest were groups of extremely committed people excited to work across multiple departments to make this happen. The natural process of helping to educate stake holders on the what's and why's of social media was soon escalated in a way that gave us and them an effective platform to educate others while also communicating objectives across a wide range of departments and decision makers. We could not have asked for a better start.

From the collaboration needed to focus on the right research, to the flexibility of learning new tools and concepts - we saw the most rapid of time lines that were consistently met.

While I'm expounding upon the kudos, I think it is important to mention Qwest would readily admit they are not the first in the industry to embrace social media as a means of customer service.

Still, I believe the inventiveness and authenticity in their approach will continue to set them apart over time - and because I have some insight to the numbers, it's a little easier for me to speak about this confidently :-)

In terms of the challenges, they are similar to what we are seeing everywhere in social media. The sheer volume of data and online conversations must be effectively filtered and managed. Optimizing social media monitoring tools to conform to an organization's needs and workflow is an ongoing effort.

For example, imagine coming across a blog, forum or Twitter post about your company's products or services. It's one of several hundred you see each week.

What are the guidelines for determining:

If the source is representative of someone you might respond to?
Within each classification of source, what is the predominant theme pertaining to the content?
How will you track resolution?
Assign resources?
Implement Feedback?
Demonstrate improvement and ROI as a result of the effort?
Extend learning to other departments within your company?

As we pursue the ever-changing challenges and opportunities residing around these kinds of questions, it will be exciting to watch Qwest move forward in this space.

For us, each customer engagement opens a new realm of learning, sometime accompanied by unexpected surprises. Qwest has not fallen short in this - and one of the pleasant surprises for me personally relates to how well they have been able to do what has made our own organization successful over the last five years: "Get it done."

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Social Media Monitoring Podcast with Collective Intellect

Jason Cormier — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:02:00 -0400

Room 214 Co-founder, Jason Cormier, interviews Co-founder and CTO of Collective Intellect, Tim Wolters.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The value of Collective Intellect for social media monitoring

2. The specific values of online conversational monitoring in terms of base-lining share of voice among competitive brands, identification of themes, identification of influencers and what the sentiment is around a brand.

3. The maturity and differentiation of Collective Intellect's ability to track online sentiment, and approach online monitoring from a "topic net" approach as opposed to a simple keyword approach.

4. Tim's reaction to Google's potential patent-pending technology for identifying key influencers in Facebook, MySpace and others.

5. Tim's advice for getting started in social media (start monitoring with free tools).

Note: This subject matter has become extremely relevant to Room 214's social media agency services over the last two years. On that note, let us know if you are interested in hearing more about strategy, planning and/or tactical outreach efforts used in conjunction with these kinds of tools and data.

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