Social Marketing Conversations

This is the final episode of the interview with Aaron Newman, co-founder of Techrigy, developers of the SM2 monitoring tool and Mike Talbot, co-founder of Alterian, which acquired Techrigy in 2009 to round out it’s offering of media monitoring tools to include social media – smart move that one.

In this episode, we conclude the interview and explore the ability of SM2 to be able to detect the sentiment and tonality of a social media mention as it is picked up by SM2 and how the tool can be ‘educated’ to provide better and more consistent results. 

Can the computer really understand tone and sentiment though? As Aaron has said in a previous episode, it’s more of an art than a science right now, but that is primarily because the nuances of human communications are more subtle than the system can understand. 

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Lon Safko, Guy Powell and I all wish you a very Happy Holiday Season, hope that your 2009 Christmas was enjoyable and that your 2010 New Year celebration is both safe and relaxing.  We too are getting ready to launch a new year here at TheSocialMediaBible.com and undertake an even more extensive library of content revolving around social media for business, business marketing a and media.

In this episode of the ROI of Social Media Series, we explore the question of assessing Sentimentality and Tonality in social media, an area that as Aaron reminds us, is still more of an art than a science.

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Marketing has historically had difficulty in establishing a ‘hard’ ROI, that is by virtue of what many business people use as ROI.

A commonly used metric is called ‘Advertising Value Equivalence’ which attempts to establish a value for a news article or print interview by comparing the value of the article to an advertisement, an ad equivalent. (note – it is not uncommon to see this term alternately used as “Equivalent Advertising Value” or abbreviated as some combination of the letters i.e.; ‘EAV’, ‘AEV’, ‘AVE’, etc.)

In this episode, Guy poses the question about using ad equivalence as a metric in social media.  Aaron responds and cites how we’ve become almost immune to a broadcast media message anymore and that we, as a culture, are seeking more pertinent input from the community.

Social Media is at it’s core a ‘word-of-mouth’ tactic, but the technology underpinnings have extended the community to a global scope.  Andrew cites that the trust level of the community has evolved to be a more significant influencer than the marketing message constructed by the marketer.

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Part three of the interview with Mike Talbot and Aaron Newman of Alterian SM2 finds us discussion the topic of how do you value a social media mention.

If social media is going to be an additional tool in the marketers toolbox, the simple mention of the brand will have some value to it – repeated mentions by the same person might have you classify them as an ‘Brand Advocate’ and worthy of special treatment, depending on what they say of course.

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“Why should I invest in social media, it’s all free and it’s just a fad right?!”

These are words that social media specialist and consultants hear from business people exploring as to why they should make ANY investment in social media.  It’s a fair question.

I also hear often enough a comment that goes something like this – (for a large business) “…our marketing intern just opened us up a Twitter account.  We’re going to see how that goes before we invest anything else”, or (for a small business) “…my <insert young family person pronoun here> has a Facebook account, I think they can handle that for us.”

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This is the second interview in the ROI of Social Media podcasts series.  In this episode we feature the co-founder of Alterian, Mike Talbot and the VP and co-founder of Techrigy, which was acquired by Alterian in July of 2009, primarily for their social media monitoring tool, SM2.

We’re doing this interview to explore how the social media industry views social media ROI and whether or not it is a measurable function.  Guy Powell, my collaborator in the podcast, is the author of ‘Marketing Calculator: measuring and managing the return on marketing investment’, who has made a study of the ROI question in marketing and now, in collaboration with yours truly, is bringing his knowledge to the question of ROI in Social Media.

What Guy and I are finding in our interactions is that the ROI of the two worlds, traditional marketing and social media marketing, are still very different.  We are exploring the question with an open mind, documenting our findings, producing content for you our audience and as we can, we’ll share our conclusions about this burgeoning subject.

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In this episode we press Marcel for the answer to the ROI question and he really delivers.  According to Marcel, the social web provides a greater capability than ever before.

When we examine the traditional media measures, PR and marketing professionals use the circulation of a magazine, times the cost of an ad in that magazine and that is the ROI.  The difficulty is than when you publish an article in say a magazine, you cannot tell who read the article, dog eared it, forwarded or took action on it.

In social media the ability to measure activity and behavior on the social web can be much more precise is what he says – and based upon what I’ve seen so far, I agree. continue reading »

I was treated to a demonstration of the Radian6 platform the other day and was able to see for myself the level of functionality and capability of the product.  It showed me just how far this technology has come and instilled in me thoughts about how far I think it can go.

Mind you my involvement in advanced applications and enterprise solutions spans a few decades, having worked with Computer Associates handling large accounts for database and development tools and then handling a global responsibility with MicroAge for enterprise systems management (ah… I remember Paris…) continue reading »

We’re past the guessing stage as to whether or not social media in a marketing sense is here to stay or not – media that includes social elements are definitely here to stay and we expect them to be come more, much more pervasive over the next few years.  The question now is about the tactics, tools and strategies of what a successful social media presence for a business or a brand looks like.

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, a tool in social media metrics and listening technology, sat down and shared an extended conversation about how he sees companies thinking about social media.

He observes three level of maturation in the evolution of using social media in business -

• Level 1 = listening
• Level 2 = listening /engagement
• Level 3 = listening / engagement / meaningful response

Marcel suggests that there are different models for different uses of social media in different business processes.  When it comes to a model of using social media in Customer Support, he cites the Comcast experience that recognized that the customers time is just as important as the customer support departments time – perhaps even more so.  The response is @ComcastCares on Twitter and a steady effort to find and support customers. continue reading »

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”.