Panelists:
Marshall Sponder, Monster.com
Breanna Wigle, Military Advantage
Adam Lavelle, iCrossing
Todd Parsons, BuzzLogic
Rob Key, Converseon
Measuring Social Media is obviously a new challenge, and we are all trying to function in this Brave New World.
Marshall started speaking…he mentioned there are a few ways to track:
- Categorize referrer traffic for social media attribution. Add up SM traffic and see what percentage of the total traffic it drives.
- Use comscore conversational media category chart. Also subscribe to segment metrics.
- Let Google do it – hopefully the analytics will evolve into letting us sort by social blogs and websites. For now the data is there, its just not something we can easily segment out and look at by itself. *sigh*
- Use tools like radient 6 to identify influencers in a conversation. Really. That’s the 3rd time I’ve heard about radient 6 but all I can find is BuzzLogic PPCing for their name. WHAT GIVES???? Annoying!!!!!
Next up was Rob Key, with the Converseon mining platform. You can find him at Socialtarget.com and blog.converseon.com
Expanding the social media universe: 45% of adult internet users have created content online, and 4 out of the top 5 websites out there are social!
Designing a social media strategy:
- Listen. Do some conversation mining. Identify current state of conversation. Get conversation above and below water line.
- Engage. Use product attribute Cloud tags.
- Measure/optimize. Get reports and charts to segment out traffic and how and where people are defining you.
How do you use this to your advantage?
- extension of customer service
- Listen, plan, engage
Where does it all go?
- trending. Knowing your stats and impact of the underlying conversation
- disparity of capabilities in social media monitoring and analysis will flatten
Are our metrics comparing apples to apples?
Sales data, traffic data, brand tracking, conversion analytics, conversation mining….how do all of these work together? Well, If you bring it together it’s the Big Picture.
Find the meaning within the measurement!!
Next up was Breanna Wigel with military.com, and Todd Parsins of Buzz Logic – they discussed a case study they did together.
MilitaryAdvantage is the biggest service related website on the web. (as in serve your country service) It helps military connect, find benefits, and read news and info. Military.com has other sources like spousebuzz blog for military wives, dodbuzz blog, and some others. The goal is to connect communities, not necessiarly create them, because they’re already out there.
They found social media traffic converts 6% better than non social media traffic.
Strategy: isolate influencers
Goal: increase product awareness and convert visitors into rss and newsletter subscribers
Challenge: is there even a market? How can we create more influence?
Buzz logic stepped in and found the big influencers online. They rank bloggers based off credibility, relevance, linking behavior, and reach.
They did keyword research to uncover conversations.
Then they did other site targeting for the same terms. They found a different outcome and how various sites ranked conversations for the preferred keywords
After finding the best influencer sites, they ranked those influencers and started to go down the list one by one.
Back to Breanna about the campaign. Make sure your creative is well done. It needs to be compelling with a clear call to action. The campaign for the newsletter had a highly targeted banner ad to attract defense industry influencers.
Results were GREAT! 86% higher CTR (click through rate) than their other traditional banner campaigns.
Key observations: active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences. Highly targeted display ads can perform in this environment
Social search is different than web search and traditional site targeting – its about outsourcing info via what trusted people are referring to. This can get you closer to a search like intent 🙂
Influencers and their network relationships – the nature of linking connections matter when it comes to ad performance. Sites that connect eachother around specific topics and targets.
Conversations offer a new window in analyzing user psychology and intent. The nature of conversation can impact ad performance. Find what works for your industry.
Question: How is a targeted campaign with buzz logic compared to a PPC campaign price wise? It depends on the campaign, but blogs are usually way cheaper to advertise on. Usually doing something with Buzz is less.
Next up Edmund Wong – Developing a social media engagement measurement framework.
He gave a perspective of how to improve the overall customer experience and customer service.
Case study: high tech client had people posting online about their product not working and tons of problems with them.
What to do? Engage! They had people go out to be useful and helpful online, they were all very transparent.
Outcomes: decrease in negative comments, natural search driving long term brand impressions on accumulated postings
Program learnings and recommendations are being shared across the entire organization to improve the overall customer experience. Oh ya, back links too say “go here on our website for more troubleshooting steps” etc. What a great experience and a link back to your website 🙂
Measuring and reporting
- measurement is key
- but a standard ROI measure does not work in social media.
- Monitor Metrics: tonality of user postings, categorization of discussion topics, site traffic for the forum sites.
- Engagement Metrics: direct impact of number of company postings, number of conversations engaged, number of members directly conversed with.
- Indirect impact metrics: page views of postings, number of links posted to clients website, amt of traffic resulting from these links.
- Analyze page views over time. This helps you predict future campaigns.
- Track links posted and clicks received by site. They use omniture data to match back URLs, its painful, but important data.
- Categorize and analyze discussion topics. If you’re doing this for customer service don’t do ANY sales and marketing. Be helpful. That means a percentage of discussions are those you don’t want to join.
- Track that positive feedback!
Takeaways: no one killer metric for social media (UGH, gotta do the above manually, sorry)
- Track anything possible to glean insights
- Not just about numbers
- Its all relative
- Measuring social media does NOT equal ROI for social media
- View monitoring social media as a social intelligence focus group for your company
Questions:
How can we get people to join our group? We can get them to be our friends, but not join the group??? Do discovery. Research to see what your company has to offer and what the public wants. Then create your group around that. Ask not what the community can do for you, ask what you can do for the community!!
We have a twitter impersonator who is impersonating one of our employees. How does this affect our trust factor? The panelists asked if the community called them out, she said they DID. Yay!!! Welcome to web 2.0, you can’t fake it. They’ll be fine.
