Jeff observes that at least we can get some trending data from the existing tools, but the art & science of tone / sentiment analysis is still fairly human-centric and that organization would do well to put a person into the process. The vagaries of language, jargon and the constantly evolving nature of slang will make this a task fit for human for quite some time to come.
Where is Twitalyzer going and what’s keeping them up at night? The biggest concern for Twitalyzer is handling the continuing changes pouring out from the data providers, but they’re confident that the challenge is manageable and it is the work they are about. Twitalyzer recognizes their part in answering the question of how social media is used for business and Jeff cites that social media analytics tools are at about the same place web analytics tools were about 5-10 years ago – growing fast and changing often.
An online presence needs to be tailored to your audience and, if your audience rapidly migrates from one demographic characteristic to another, you may need to create a presence that has many faces to it. Scott Chappell at Sessions College of Design has mastered the tactic.
Sessions has a year-round (3 semesters) enrollment model, graduation certificates that are presented monthly and classes that can be enrolled in anytime for enrolled students. So his use is everyday for the various tools Session employs (blog, micro-blog and social networks) to connection to the audience.
What’s the biggest obstacles for the growth of social media presence for Sessions? Scott says ‘patience’, he sees the the education product characteristics is not the commodity of a fast moving consumer good with a low price point. His effort is to get subscribers to engage in all areas in a way that they appreciate and have a value associated with the Sessions brand.
Scott has determined that for Sessions, there is a way to use social media to establish a lifetime value with the audience – education is pretty much a one-shot sale in most cases. The maturation of the relationship allows a prospect for Session.edu to become a student, attend classes and graduate into the business community. At some point he can trust alumni to evangelize the Sessions.edu product and he does not find that they need to scrub or moderate content.
In this episode we talk with Scott Chappell, who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Sessions College of Design (Sessions.edu), and a presenter at the MeasureUp conference in Chicago on March 10, 11, & 12th, 2010. Sessions.edu offers online classes for the design community from real experts (author, educators and others) in an asynchronous format, pairing student with instructors in a meaningful dialog about how to develop your design sense and knowledge of the industry. His presentation at MeasureUp is titled ‘Blog, Tweet, Repeat: How Social Media improved lead acquisition, sales and the lifetime value of your customers’ and in this episode, we get to meet Scott an find out about the Sessions.edu social media efforts.
Scott talks about how social media is used by Sessions.edu and how it has supported an almost 10 fold expansion of the number of monthly ‘touches’ with the Sessions Design College audience of prospective student, current students and graduated alumni. Scott explains how he has embraced the premise of Marshall McLuhan in that “the medium is the message”, but he cautions that too many contacts to an audience can cause them to disengage. In Sessions case, while social media has allowed them to dramatically increase the number of messages, the reality is that there needs to be quality and sincerity otherwise you run the risk of turning off the audience.
Our conversation with Aneta Hall / Emerging Media Manager for Pitney Bowes (PB) has been very informative to say the least.
If you would have told me a year ago that a 90 year old company would be an innovator in enterprise social media, I’m pretty sure I would not have believed you. After the time spent with Aneta, I can tell you that a 90 year old company is being really innovative in the enterprise deployment of social media and they’re showing a measureable ROI.
In the last two episodes we’ve covered elements of how PB has done it too. First, they approached it from an understanding that social media is not a set-and-forget proposition; they recognized a need for needed a sustainable program that at the same time, did not inhibit individual participation. They also understood that they needed to put some tools in place, watch key performance indicators (KPIs) and apply metrics, looking for the ROI; those efforts have led to a $300K saving in call-center deflections in a 3 month period.
I know that Guy and I are looking forward to connecting with her at the MeasureUp event in Chicago next month and to put a live presence with the enthusiastic personality she has shown in the podcast series here.
In this episode Aneta lets us know that while they do set certain measures and metrics in place, they are certainly open to evaluating them and updating policy as PB learns what actually makes a difference to their customers and to the bottom line. We open the discussion referring to the Twitter, Facebook and online forums that PB maintains, but Aneta tells us that social media at PB is not about an overarching corporate social presence. At the end of the day social media is about people connecting to people, and it needs to be a sustainable level of one-on-one social media interactions with PB employees taking the lead.
In this episode Lewis Goldman of 1800Flowers.com shares some of the successes 1800Flowers.com has had along with some of the lessons learned.
The first is the booming growth in the adoption of mobile, their application for placing orders on a variety of mobile platforms is growing rapidly. Today you can use your Blackberry, Android, or iPhone to place an order from the 1800Flowers.com Mobile Gift Center in several categories for personal or business.
1800Flowers.com has not been afraid to try out new ideas has often been a first mover in many areas to stay connected to their audience and they try a lot of things, sometime uncertain of the outcome; case in point was the effort in creating a 1800Flowers.com store in the 3D social platform of Second Life, which they discovered was not the right platform at the time to connect them to their audience.
A success is the development of the ideal customer model, which they have named ‘Tina’. Tina is the aggregate persona of the ideal 1800Flowers.com customer, which embodies the characteristics of the buying behavior they see in the market overall. Lewis shows us how they referenced Tina in the ‘Spot-a-Mom’ campaign leading up to Mothers Day in 2009.
The behaviors in social media are broad, but not so broad they cannot be identified. When you visit a blog, you can only do so many things –
These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite.
Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so. Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article. Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.
The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.
Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic. The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.
Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table. My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me. From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.
I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.
Equating a successful social media presence to a well-planned cocktail party is a common comparison. When plotting a strategy consider a variety of techniques based around the cocktail party model.
One of those tactics is a drawing or door-prize that uses a contest model. The conversation on how to develop an online contest has come often enough and over the holiday break, I took the time to use my favorite ideation tool to develop a model.
There are two legs to this model – one is low ‘hard cost’ and just requires a good deal of manual labor to implement, monitor and manage. The second leg assumes most all of what is in the first, but allows for a more robust implementation assuming a funded budget for custom programming and monitoring tools.
What would be the results of this kind of a campaign?
Increased awareness of the brand / message
Increased followers / fans
Some combination of the two
How would you determine the ROI of the effort? Begin with tracking the initial investments and setting the baseline of what’s happening now. Establish what a success looks like and monitor measure and readjust as needed.
There are probably a few more aspect than I have considered here though – what would you add?
The model used MindManager from Mindjet to create the Mind Map of the Online Contest Model. Make sure you are current with Adobe Acrobat8 and Flash9 installed and this mind map & player should work (MindJet requirements). Mac users may have issues – contact me to send you the MindMap itself if you have the Mac version of MindManager.
Working as a marketer in social media, a typical question is how do I find prospects for my product in service in social media? My answer, aside from first listening for mentions of your name, company, product or brand, is to also listen for what it is your product or service addresses.
Today I had a follow up with my dermatologist and in my pleasure of a mostly clean bill of health, I tweeted “Skin Dr says I’m good! Just dry skin!” with in a few minutes I received the following -
The link led to their web page where I saw some pretty ugly pics of Infantile Eczema and how their 100% natural product benefited that poor pink baby. I also learned that they are pretty good brand in the UK. Hmm… I might try some of their stuff (never have before and do not have any of their products in my house).
What I also gained out of this was another case study on how to engage an audience. Maybe not perfectly, but to me it was obvious they were listening to the social conversation at least.
I’ve tell business and brands that if you really want to connect to the audience, think for a moment about what it is your prospects are looking for, what condition or symptom they are trying to deal with when they might be looking for your product or service – when you uncover it, let them know you are open to the engagement.
In my case, I’m looking for a way to treat dry skin. What if you sold aspirin? Look for headaches / body pain. Auto body repair? someone commenting that they’ve been in an accident (hmm… good topic for ambulance chasing lawyers too I suppose).
You get the idea – to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky “don’t go to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going”.
Provided for your review is the response from Horizon Realty regarding their pending lawsuit and comments made by management to the Sun-Times. Here is the link to the blog post I made yesterday on this topic.
In my humble opinion, I’m seeing Horizon trying to put lipstick on this pig (which means trying to make an ugly situation look good without addressing the underlying cause).
Mandatory in a social media crisis containment scenario is they they mea culpa and admit an error. In the released statement, they show no remorse or contrition for their behavior or a willingness to try and make nice with Ms. Bonnen.
They suggest in their statement that Jeffery Michael’s comments were ‘taken out of context’ by the Sun-Times. Not a bad tactic, I’d try to get a podcast / recording out containing the conversation with the reporter if it existed.
In their statement, they try to characterize their customer as the bad egg. This again is their client, their consumer, and they shift blame to them for all this. Did she really have a lawsuit already filed against Horizon? Hmm… was this response then Horizon’s attempt to intimidate her into dropping the previous action? Could be perceived that way I suppose. Not enough details yet to make a call. In any case, I am not sure I’d yet be willing to consider Horizon as my property management company if all they do is blame others – we all make mistakes.
What Horizon may not be getting a grip on is that regardless of the portion of fault that resides with the client, their consumer, it is they that will end up being seen as the Snidley Whiplash of this episode.
This reaction may not serve to remedy the loss of social capital they have already suffered, which will most likely lead to a loss of financial capital, but taking your medicine was never an easy thing to do and if you’ve always counted on traditional media tactics, understanding how best to employ the model of social media sometimes gets lost in the translation.
What Can They Do Now? Are there other tactics they might employ to get this issue out of the news or at least improve the companies image in the press as a ‘sue first’ company?
I think so, but they require honesty, transparency and a commitment to do what’s right – even if it hurts a bit. Can Horizon still recover from this glaring faux pas of a very public customer relations situation gone bad? If they keep thinking of social media as just another outlet for the same old message, maybe not.
With my involvement in social media approaching it’s fourth year, I see a pattern emerging in the foundational elements of an effective online presence. There are three elements in the strategy that encompass the tactics that I believe need to be adopted to support a presence.
I see it as particular to the timeline of an exchange or conversation and how it contributes to social capital. The caveat is of course that no one strategy fits all companies. If however you are not going to engage for a professionally developed social media strategy, this is a good one to cut your teeth on and get going.
The first point of the triangle is the blog. Recently social media strategist have suggested that CEO’s and thought leaders might want to reconsider their use of the micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter. That’s because as valuable as a CEO’s time is, posting to a micro-blogging tool that is not indexed by search engines represents content that cannot be later referenced in the conversation with an audience. A blog on the other hand will retain the conversation, search engines will find it and those that want to, will then be able to find the content via search, by referral or via direct reference by other sites.
The blog is the component that represents the location on the web where you would want to to open or reply to conversations regarding your public strategy, the reasons you’ve invested in the products / services you have and the virtues of the organization (your organization) behind it – it’s the stuff you want the public to know about you, your product and your company.
It’s also where you’ll respond to comments posted elsewhere that you want to reply to that require more than a few dozen words. Lastly, and this is a point I’ve debated before with friends, pundits and followers, do not attempt to moderate the comments made to your blog. You can always delete spam, remove rude remarks and ban people who cannot be civil. An attempt to moderate a blog implies you do not trust your audience – a mistake when trust is the commodity you have to trade in a social media setting.
The second point of the trinity is micro-blogging. A lot of life and business happens between the more formal blog posts you make. Sprinkled into the millions of inane tweets are much more salient tweets that, in a well prepared social media strategy, could serve to connect you and your company to your prospects, customers and stakeholders. One at a time, the tweets might be irrelevant, but taken in context they can present a more human image of you and what you’re trying to accomplish. They might also support a powerful ROI, one modeled by Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV in his now famous comparison of direct mail, freeway billboard and micro-blogging-based campaign results.
The third point of the triangle is social networking. You may find that one social network is insufficient to connect to the audience you’re targeting, or you may find that there is a special-built social network that is already targeting your audience. A Pew Internet Study shows that the majority of Internet users are participants in social networks now and their use is growing.
The social network rounds out the model by enabling a conversation unfettered by you or your company. Unfettered, but not unmonitored. You want your users to be able to connect with one another in a place you can connect with them. They are going to talk about you, your product and your brand – there is just no stopping it. By providing a platform for the conversation at least you get a chance to engage.
As an opening effort for the do-it-yourselfer’s out there, The Trinity of Social Media is complete with a blog, a micro-blog and a social network. Pay attention to this, use at least this as a strategy and you’ll get a more positive result in social media than doing any single one of them without a strategy.
Is there a secret to it? Only if you think there is a secret to strategy and a coordinated effort. They need to be coordinated and developed to support one another in their operation and in the way they support one another. Could one be implemented without the other? Certainly – I present this strategy often enough to recognize that not everyone want to type / input their content.
What else needs to be answered in this model? a lot. If the blog was a video blog or a podcast would that work? If the micro-blog was video or audio based would that count? Which social network is the right one or should it be special constructed? How do you get the answer? subscribe here, join the community at TheSocialMediaBible.com or get a professional on your team and they can step your through the evaluation quickly.
Are there pitfalls to be avoided in the strategy? Undoubtedly – but the overwhelming failure is to not engage in social media and believe you will somehow not be ignored or that your competition will also be complacent. Actually, if you are a company and you are ignored, that is an important data point by itself – what might you be doing wrong?
In this final episode of the podcast with Jeff Katz of Twitalyzer we cover the tonality and sentimentality of automated analytics and how it still requires a good deal of human intervention. Jason Falls / SocialMediaExplorer.com had a post about this idea and a great product / service from Sentiment360 – this is where this process is heading, at least for the near term. 
Jeff observes that at least we can get some trending data from the existing tools, but the art & science of tone / sentiment analysis is still fairly human-centric and that organization would do well to put a person into the process. The vagaries of language, jargon and the constantly evolving nature of slang will make this a task fit for human for quite some time to come. ![MeasureUp2010Logo1[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/MeasureUp2010Logo11.jpg "MeasureUp2010Logo1[1]")
![ROI_SMGraphics_LG2111[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ROI_SMGraphics_LG21111.jpg "ROI_SMGraphics_LG2111[1]")
![MeasureUp2010Logo[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/MeasureUp2010Logo1.jpg "MeasureUp2010Logo[1]")
![ROI_SMGraphics_LG21[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/ROI_SMGraphics_LG211.jpg "ROI_SMGraphics_LG21[1]")
![PitneyBowes_Logo1_thumb[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PitneyBowes_Logo1_thumb1.jpg "PitneyBowes_Logo1_thumb[1]"){kind=logo}
![1800Flowers_Logo[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1800Flowers_Logo1.jpg "1800Flowers_Logo[1]"){kind=logo}
