InfiniGraph - The Blog

3 Ways To Transform Social Analytics Into Actionable Intelligence

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:03:53 -0800

Brands are in search of what drives their consumers passion, engagement currency, share triggering and how content will convert those customers into brand advocates. Content marketing, storytelling and creating a social context for consumer interaction will be a major focus of 2012, because people are attracted to, and interact around content. There is a great deal of buzz regarding curation and the amazing growth seen by Pinterest, but without intelligence it’s just another mashup without measurable insights. The ability to measure engagement, act on it and adjust in real time will only position those brands with a competitive advantage over their lumbering counterparts. Brands need to know what’s happening, why it’s happening and what’s trending around their brands to achieve greater sustainable engagement.

Here is a view of such intelligence looking over top industry players and their engagement ratios.

1. Frictionless Sharing
Frictionless sharing is when friends broadcast their activities passively without taking a required action like hitting a "like" button. Examples include a user listening to a song on Spotify and having that song displayed in their Facebook feed automatically. Similarly, pinning content on Pinterest has this type of frictionless sharing.

Facebook's Open Graph enables third party publishers to broadcast consumer interactions with their content, which magnifies discovery of this content among their friends. This creates a ripple effect, as seen when we witness content repeatedly shared, even among unrelated parties. With frictionless sharing, this new type of application integrates directly with the content they are interacting with and provides marketers with actionable insights. No longer does a consumer have to click "share" or put something in their feed; it just happens based on the consumers' actions, creating a "data eruption."

Collecting and analyzing content interaction lets an advertiser know exactly what their audience is into. Understand you audience behavior enables intelligent planning content, knowing what type of content obtains highest traction and what content should be used in social ads. Keep it simple stupid if content does well in other places with a similar audience its highly likely will do well for yours. A recent AllFacebook post "How To Get 41% More Likes On Your Facebook Posts" addresses key strategies to extract context and act on them to increase great engagement. Another important blog post came from Search Engine Watch: “How Advanced Marketers Will Use Facebook in 2012” It discusses using consumer interaction to find the right social keywords for Facebook ad targeting.

The growth of frictionless actions broadcasting means you must leverage social data more intelligently to maximize your consumers connections.

2. SEO and your social channels
In our previous post "Social Smack Down 5 Ways Google+ is 2012" we suggest it’s no surprise that social media is altering search results- and that the way brands approach SEO must change. The more marketers integrate their content marketing across channels, the greater the sum of their content grows in relevance, which increases your overall SEO impact. Beyond engagement, brands must use search indexing to gain a competitive advantage on search engines. Using these industry trends will not only make your brand a thought leader but also keep your audience engaged and coming back for more.

A good volume of content, as we see from Burberry and H&M, ranks them higher on search since they are also posting on Google+. Brands are embracing Google+ for the sole reason to get Google to rank their content higher, which is a great strategy and now with Pinterest this will only become more prevasive Remember, specific keywords should be used in your posts because your feeds are being indexed by Google too. If you monitor content trends within your industry, you get insight into what’s working the best for your target audience. This allows discovering content from other brands and take action on what content is doing well. The majority of good content is not necessarily seen by the majority so take advantage of this fact.

Here we have Burton Snowboards trending content revealing the actional insights or what's working best.

3. Curation with Intelligence
No one is a content genius all the time; but there’s at least one piece of genius online content produced everyday. To get genius results more consistently, marketers must know what content works best with their audience (by measuring it); and how often and when to post. There is a rich pool of competitive intelligence to draw from because competitors and publishers produce industry content you can watch and repost (which we call “content curation”). The challenges of finding, organizing and sharing content online is greatly reduced by watching and comparing trends as they happen.

Make it happen
Brands have a responsibility to their customer to be thought leaders, and those that engage and cross promote will become the voice of their industry. Using InfiniGraph's tools, marketers can take the next step from being simply a content marketer to being a specialized content marketer in 2012.

Our Twitter @InfiniGraph, Facebook page and Google+ Page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content intelligence strategies and increasing conversions.

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Social Smack Down 5 Ways Google+ is 2012

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:30:15 -0800

By the end of the first week of 2012, the Google+ hype machine is in full swing; with 9+ posts of the good the bad and the ugly. The facts are telling, Google+ showed solid growth in Q4, initial branded page adoptions are happening, integration of +1 within in ads, linking YouTube to Google+ as well as Google+ showing high in search results there is no question the social smack down is in full motion.

The below image shows the leading brands and their smart mover advantage; Note these numbers are nothing to their Facebook counter part but they have linked with some of the top influencers via Google+.

For brands and marketing professionals who are taking a serious look at their entire media ecosystem, achieving greater results and measurable returns is appealing, while more pressure to simplify the process of integrating their paid, earned and owned media around social.

If you’re thinking “Oh No” not another social site” you’re not alone. In our recent blog post 5 ways to drive Engagement, Likes are so Last Year we address the opportunity to drive more engagement with the content that matters and how Hypercuration™ keeps you relevant. A media war is brewing, and many brands will capitalize in the wake of the carnage. The time is now, to begin to include Google + into your overall Social strategy with your Facebook and Twitter activities.

Below is Hitwise Google+ active user growth.

The gambling has begun, and if the consumer shift continues to Google+ and they successfully execute their new feature releases into their other platforms it will be full steam ahead for Google. The Integration of Paid, Earned, Owned and Social media is now more evident than ever. It is truly becoming a Social Ménage à Trois in Paid, Earned and Owned Media. The brands that want to be the voice of their industry will have to be even more agile as consumes demand more. The challenge is how to embrace these social changes.

The Google+ button is being put on every content item and in ads.

On the Google Display Network (GDN), the +1 button will be added to images, animated GIF’s, Flash, Display Ad Builder ads and select mobile inventory. You can also choose to include the +1 button on your DoubleClick Rich Media ads, which can run on or off the GDN.

Data, Data, and more Data
Data is the big play for Google. They are in the position to be the most integrated application set, with an enormous war chest of very popular applications. Yes, Facebook is big but most brands have less than a 1% engagement rate. Increasing reach , and achieving greater lift are imperative for Brands in 2012. By developing a Google+ integration strategy and working on SEO objectives will help brands meet their goal of increased reach and greater lift.

The above image show where the money is in media, however, the amount of intelligence from social is a big factor to drive decisions in other media spending.

By developing a strategy for all of your social data will be the biggest key for a Brand to achieve success in 2012. Google closing in on becoming the most integrated social network in the world, and this is Google’s best weapon in the war against Facebook.

5 Ways Google+ is relevant to brands in 2012

Like it or not Google+ is affecting search so embrace it: add +1 to your web site, blog and content. Google is indexing everything that is +1 publicly. You really have nothing to lose and all to gain because if you look at your organic traffic from Google will continue to play a major factor.
Google lets you import your contacts (email) and link them with your Google+ page as well as you can segment those contents into Google+ circles making it easy to target posts and other relevant information to a sent to key individuals or groups. You can’t do this in Facebook for brand pages.
Display ads with +1 “SocialAds” are just smart, while Facebook has worked hard to force ad networks not to use Facebook in ads Google is and presents an opportunity for media planning to content selection.
Hangouts on Google+ are very powerful and a large portion of influencers are on Google+, impressive growth; high engagement and a strong customer service angle - watch for forward thinking companies.
Social ROI is getting closers with a cohesive overall Social strategy on Google + since they include so many other Google platform add-ons.

Facebook anti position on integrated social share in ads is a major mistake in our eyes. While a brands' core strategy of creating content and messaging fans in their own news feeds and optimization will not change. Facebook has removed the restriction preventing non-fans from interacting with Pages, and there is no question paid media will be in greater need for driving higher engagement. will still be required to continue growing engagement over just followers.

Takeaway
Gone are the days of making easy followers on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ engagement requires continuous optimization and traditional media planning is just not working in the age of Agile Marketing.

Digital integration and the speed of delivery will change a marketers approach to every level in the organization must think of the social implications. Old school marketing and silo strategies are not conducive to the real time consumer media consumption behavior. The insights obtained from social media is making real-time marketing an imperative.

As Google plans for Internet dominance building a strong inbound marketing and Google+ content cross-pollination strategy is a must have. The analysis of these social touch points   and the collection of data is just as important. Leveraging content interaction will always be the best way to measure consumer behavior and intent and re-purpose this data will improve product development, increase sales efficiency, and create a more agile and responsive marketing strategy.

Be sure to check out InfiniGraph’s Google+ Page.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page and Google+ Page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

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5 ways to drive Engagement, Likes are so Last Year

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:37:00 -0800

Brands are stuck in many ways with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ due to the nature of the news feed. Social Feeds have begun to look like the stock ticker display that scrolls in Times Square… You look away for a millisecond and you miss so many relevant items that you start to lose count.

If your customers and followers are not on at that moment, you just missed a massive number of people that you could have potentially engaged with. A more sophisticated approach is required to maximize your content marketing ROI. You must go beyond timing content and general post optimization. While necessary, these are small factors needed to reach social mass.

“The Numbers do not lie”, we always say. What is your social engagement in comparison to your followers? In our previous post “Be Relevant or Die” we highlighted the fact that brands must enhance their engagement strategy to increase content marketing traction. With the recent chaotic changes over at Facebook, and the filtering of posts made by 3rd party API’s, Facebook is now back peddling off filtering. In return most of you have seen your feeds interaction start to rise, or the number of posts showing up in real-time increasing. Regardless, most brand news feeds are still at sub 1% engagement levels, pointing out the cold reality that even the best content is not seen by the masses or target audience. The challenges are real and the competition to capture the consumer’s ability to share content is never more palpable than now. Unleashing the potential of your content is not easy, however, going beyond the news feed is our primary focus in 5 ways to drive engagement.

Recently, eMarketing reported CMO’s are focusing on the nexus of social data, engagement, and user intelligence to drive greater relevance. Noted in the post is the emphasis placed on social media strategy, customer analytics, and data management.

These largely reflect the marketing aspects CMO’s felt they had the most room to improve; Over half the respondents indicated social media as a key engagement channel for customers and which almost 3/4 felt unprepared to leverage the large amounts of data that continue to flood the online marketing space.

Problem: Massive data, low response rate when content trends, and lack of action to encapsulate greater engagement.

The need to be more relevant and induce people to not only interact but also share has raised the bar again to getting your post action in the coveted news feed (friend’s / followers conversation stream). The on-going debate about which social network will create greater value can make one’s head spin. Twitter is about clicks and more authority, where as Facebook is more about engagement. Now Google+ is touting they have more engagement. PHEW!!! For a brand marketer they are being measured on how many units are sold or traffic being generated that results in direct client conversion. The “how” is somewhat irrelevant. The elusive Social ROI behind social is not simple since there are so many factors happening in a single promotion. But one fact remains, the metrics (numbers) on your own brand feed. You’re not alone. The tsunami of content is one cause of post engagement atrophy. Quality of followers and quality content is an amazing combination and must be fostered. In another recent post “Relevancy meets passion…” we postulate that the best indicator is crowd approved action based on their intent, but how do you reach scale with your content once you know it’s good?

1. Trending Content
Content that starts to trend on your brand is gold. The immediate reaction and how to cross-pollinate this information via other channels will be covered below. Some posts are better than others and the ones that are most relevant are ripe for content recycling on active days and times. This powerful approach not only scales with engagement but it will increase your organic reach if done correctly. On average this approach provides more than 30% amplified engagement rate and some we see as high as 100+%. Most brands will “post and forget” while others have a hard time putting previous content back out thinking they are spamming. Content half-life is short for Facebook and Twitter. The majority of your followers never saw the post to start with. Worried about losing followers? Focus on engagement measurement, and tap into the recent addition to Facebook statistics, which can validate even more reasons why engagement is critical to your strategy.

2. Facebook Sponsored Stories
Sponsored stories are one way to enhance post engagement on trending content items. It’s been proven that showing friends who liked the post, or what they engaged with, prompts the friends of friends to engage as well. The price is going up on sponsored stories. The average costs are in the range of $0.32 to $0.85 a click (CPC). Using Precise Interests (keywords) is a proven way to drive greater targeting and is a must if you desire a greater level of engagement. Avoid zombie clicks. For a brand, who cares how many clicks you get? It’s how many converted that’s the real measurement. For more on this topic see Maximizing Facebook Ad Buy.

3. Promoted Tweets and Target Timelines
Using trending content items in a Promoted tweet to followers costs $0.50 CPE (cost per engagement) such as click, re-tweet, favorite and reply. You can go broader with Target Timelines; “Users with similar interests will see your Tweets in their timelines.” However, you can’t control who sees your tweet nor the quality or the click statistics. We have found that targeting using keywords yields higher conversion, as in registrations, over just obtaining clicks. Relevance plays a key role in twitter as well as timing. Promoted tweets are powerful but you’re limited to your own Twitter community. A lower cost approach is targeting on keywords to increase your relevance. Using keywords based on the consumers who interact with other relevant content displays intent for a target industry or brand. This approach allows you to have lower bid amounts and more targeted control of your audience. Several people have talked about success with twitter promoted products and we agree with this strategy. We’ll discuss it in more detail in our next update.

4. Social Ads – Agile Marketing
This is a very exciting approach to display media where real-time content meets rich media. Agile marketing with Hypercuration™ is real and allows marketers to be more responsive. Using display media to target consumers and redirecting them back to say Facebook is a proven way to gain traction while further increasing organic reach. Creating greater relevancy in those ads based on media consumption is the crux of agile marketing. Being responsive, and leveraging trends in display ads, further amplifies relevance while enabling real-time content changes that prompts greater ad engagement. This is a radical change from the static rich media you’ve seen. If you know what media is being consumed you are able to target specific publications based on their social behaviors which will increase your relevance even further. Depending on the cost per thousand (CPC) network charges we have obtained $0.12 - $0.35 per engagement for highly targeted audiences. Flite/InfiniGraph Webinar on intelligence SocialAds with Hypercuration™

5. Blog Groups / Ad Networks
The Paid media meets Earned media approach is a great way to increase engagement. Many brands have embraced it (SocialMoms, MomCentral, BlogFrog, and GlamMedia) and many more established blog networks are using it for producing original content as part of a central call to action.

At the same time, these premium networks run display media that is often linked to the content marketing campaigns across the network’s relevant audience. These sites have trending content that can be leveraged as a collective source to enhance and expand their brand posts with the above methodology.

Conclusion
Scaling social engagement is highly achievable with good content. Taking advantage of trends as they happen, being responsive while utilizing agile marketing, and optimizing on consumer behavior’s all work in complete harmony to achieve measurable Social ROI. Driving greater engagement is now possible with intelligent Social Ads that leverage behavior based, precise interests and keywords. Both Facebook and Twitter are amazing engagement platforms, coupled with Hypercuration™, to give any marketer the competitive advantage of knowing what to target on and when the content is right.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

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Be Relevant or Die, Social Display Media and Trending Content

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:04:00 -0700

Facebook’s recent change to the News Feed has put greater pressure on Brands to feed more relevant content than ever before. Due to Facebook's distribution algorithm, Edge Rank, which is based on engagement; the majority of pages reach less than 1% of their fan base. Big Problem! In our recent post Social Ménage à Trois in Paid, Earned and Owned Media we addressed the fact that social is making a major impact in the way media is being integrated. Now page owners have access to a very powerful insight that makes it easier to optimize on engagement, which means they'll have to publish even more relevant content, but this is still not enough. Beyond the editorial calendar, content curation is a critical part of any content marketing strategy.

NBC Universal uses paid media to drive traffic back to their content and Facebook page. These trending content units are seeing between 0.5 CTR to 1+% CTR.

Content that’s very relevant and trends for a brand’s target audience is a green light to cross feed and the brands that GET IT will dominate. The brands that can’t get their trending content act together will suffer as their post impressions decrease and engagement falters because the overall Edge Rank is low compared to the brands that master engagement.

Lexus post on Steve Jobs off Mashable and Horizon Organic post on Power Breakfast off Parent.com.

Major brands such as Lexus, Mercedes Benz, Red Bull and Burberry are now leading based on how they organize where and how they distribute content over social-media channels. As brands harness intelligent content marketing, the ability to keep their audience engaged and the melding of branded media within display, brands are steadily becoming publishers, like it or not. Content intelligence / curation is a key factor in understanding what content is resonating in, and around, your community and no longer can brands just post and pray for engagement.

Comscore’s recent study shows how serious brands are using paid media to drive engagement on Facebook. Marketers Spending Big on 'Social Ads' That Drive Traffic to Facebook

A shift in content marketing is now making its way to display advertising from a direct-response form of advertising to branding media. The major challenge is how brands can expand beyond their social channels currently showing more linear growth. A recent quote by Bob Lord CEO of Razorfish is telling; "Go get me a million fans on my Facebook page' to "Oh my God, I have a fanbase, and how do I keep them interested and engaged with content?' An editorial calendar is a blueprint that's an expression of the brand's social voice,"

Focusing On Engagement
Facebook has made it easy to pull as a single number "People talking about this page" for any fan page on Facebook. Both the amount of engagement and number of fans is now available even from your competitors.

The “talking about” number comes from of all types of engagement such as interacting with posts, consumption (plays, views, comments, hovering over objects and expanding details ) and custom app actions. Facebook is clearly focusing more on fan engagement and going past fan acquisition. Marketing teams optimizing their social campaigns must focus on content relevance; this has huge implications because it now puts the focus on engagement. This is great news for consumers because it pushes brands to focus on content quality that the audience, based on behavior, is saying is relevant.

Scaling Engagement
The need to expand content interaction beyond just Facebook and Twitter is more important than ever. Content discovery in a cacophony of continuous bombardment will be more of a challenge, and brands must increase their content engagement if they are going to drive more Organic and Viral interaction.

To fulfill this challenge InfiniGraph became a premier partner on the FliteHub launch .

Flite provides the cloud advertising platform where InfiniGraph is the intelligence around relevant content curation and management. The combination brings brand advertisers closer to real-time marketing and scale to reach target audiences for more social action points.

Brands are still focused on Clicks and Conversion even though that conflicts with true engagement and makes it hard to justify spend. As ROI expands beyond the Cost Per Fan (CPF) to Cost Per Engagement (CPE) marketers will demand more accountability on what all these engagements are doing to drive sales. Facebook has made it easier to create connections between people and content by lowering the barrier from affinity to action. Brands with budgets will need to be decisive on what spend will drive the most engagement and content discovery with proper curation. It is becoming a major factor in content marketing planning. How are you driving more engagement and what other channels are working?

Join InfiniGraph at Social Media Marketing & Monitoring New York 2011 Oct 12th presenting NBC Universal case study, PivotCon Oct 17-18th, Socialize West Oct 21-22nd Guest Speaker on Real Time Marketing and OMMASocial Oct 27th panel.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

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Social Ménage à Trois in Paid, Earned and Owned Media

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:49:00 -0700

Maximize results or you’re going to lose your job. Facebook’s meteoric revenue growth is serious business, with $1.6 Billion in revenue for the first half of this year and it’s being widely reported will reach $4 Billion annually soon. It’s well known that social ads are yielding results due to the fact consumer action on ads creates spread, like conversations extend reach. Content creation and curation also has a major impact as to how well brands own their industry voice.

Without good content the engagement that drives reach will not happen as shown in our previous post Relevancy Meets Passion: 5 Ways To Increase Post Relevance. Social has become the best way to integrate “paid,” “earned”, and owned” media (PEOM) like never before. Examples from a social perspective:

●    Paid: Buying Facebook ads, Twitter promoted ads, and display ads / TV spots
●    Earned: Blog or news about your product, conversation on your social sites
●    Owned: Facebook, Twitter and a brands websites, all used to drive interaction

The fact that consumers are connected and the social graph is melding paid, earned, and owned media presents challenges in synthesizing and optimizing these three channels. CMO’s that are committed to integration will achieve greater marketing efficiency, higher ROI, and measurable success. Here’s why:

Social Always On
Nothing is for free and it costs to do social well. Many have talked about the costs but where is the ROI? Since social has truly leveled the playing field it takes work and here is where the “Earned” comes in. We rarely see a TV spot or other advertisement that does not promote a Facebook or Twitter presence and for good reason. Now the conversation can be continued and shared via social channels expanding the overall reach. A direct example of melding these three channels is seen on the NBC News (TheGrio) website homepage and the Flite.com ad unit embedded within in shown below.

Leveraging filtered, social content as it trends and streaming it within an advertising unit created +2.5 percentage points CTR higher over previous ads to the main site that’s a 50X uplift.

Dan Woolsey - Director of Business Operations, NBC News (TheGrio) "Every brand is familiar with the need for social media. The common challenge is that this general need for social media costs time and money and there are frustratingly few paths to a calculable ROI. Quite simply, InfiniGraph paves that path.

By identifying trending content from you own social media efforts and allowing you to place that content into ad units, your CTR shoots up. The bottom line is ads that display trending social media do better and become more valuable. Our initial test campaign started with a baseline CTR of .05% - not bad for industry rate. We incorporated our own trending content in the ads and the CTR jumped to 2.5%."

Social discovery linked with paid media delivered these results. Creating mass exposure via paid channels has shown to be a very promising approach in integrating content relevance. In the last three years a good set of brands have hired social media managers or social agencies and that has likely been the bulk the “social” budget, but now it’s taking more to realize an ROI and InfiniGraph measurement is way more than just “Like” counts. A Facebook Page is not free but it is “owned” media. Creating and managing content on that page costs real dollars, making it more “paid”, especially if you’re also buying Facebook ads. A great example in action is what Discovery Channel is doing to find super fans.

Social Earned Media
One proven way to increase effectiveness and lower your costs is earned media coupled with social optimization. With the social share button being one click away from spreading good content, the connection between “earned” and “paid” is undeniable. INTENT is everything, if someone shares, tweets, comments, etc., it all hits the graph and spreads to friends. That’s gold! Where brands fall short is the follow through engagement, re-posting the best-trending content means not just your super fans become your evangelists.

The majority of content is not being leveraged to its maximum due to poor tracking and the inability to be responsive. Creating more engagement on what’s most relevant not only expands the brand’s reach but also maximizes those paid assets. Below is a direct example of post optimization based on crowd-sourcing trending content.

Earned media’s biggest payoff is from shared connections compelled to create reviews, a blog post, a comment or a tweet, people sharing their thoughts on your brand with their social network. The nice thing about earned media, too, is that it provides more insights and is much more measurable than it was before social media went mainstream. (BEHAVIORAL)

Understanding Intent and Behavior around all that content gives brands a competitive advantage. All content being shared, whether it’s posts, text, messages, a video or a website —will all be reduced to a link hitting one of the major social networks. Word-of-mouth marketing now spreads at the click of a button and that’s why earned media has become so important to a marketing campaign.

The Ménage à trois – All about the data
Analyze the data to see where traffic is coming from – Finding out the what, where, and how of a specific call to action is not only critical it’s required. Many brands are still stuck on getting the LIKE count up but don’t translate it into measurable sales or don’t measure if those LIKE’s generate more traffic / conversation. Likes don’t provide much insight into interaction around the brand where content clearly does. Knowing what is relevant to your audience is critical in driving more engagement. A brand needs to optimize all forms of media, thereby enabling the brand to create the deepest and most meaningful relationships with consumers while also understanding their media consumption. Noted Dave Fleet created a few slick visual for interworking of POEM The 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem .

Social is a horizontal layer touching every part of your business, from customer service to customer acquisition, to customer retention. There are different performance metrics for each point along the marketing funnel. You can determine your effectiveness at achieving a goal, whether it’s brand buzz, brand awareness, brand preference, or intent to buy.

•    Were we able to increase our contacts and leads to sell more items?
•    Did we increase referrals or direct sales to a target location?
•    Are people saying better things about the brand or our buzz increasing?

North America is approaching social saturation (ubiquity) and the globe is well on its way to being socialized, generating earned media has become a higher priority due to the hyper social sharing behavior. Now more pressure is on paid and owned media teams to streamline their coordination or lose the opportunity of momentum. As the barriers are being torn down and silos altered, a new form of media collaboration must be created. Give us your thoughts; are you seeing the digital media landscape changing due to social?

Want to see more? Come see InfinGraph demonstrating live trending content with paid media. Ad Innovation Series: Brand Management in the Digital Age Thursday, September 22, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM (PT) http://innovationseries.eventbrite.com/ at Flite SF HQ and don’t be left out when in New York, Wednesday 12th October come see us co present our NBC News case study http://www.oursocialtimes.com/socialmediamarketingnewyork/. Then we're back in SF October 20-21 for Socialize West - speaking on Optimizing Social Media making real-time decisions with real-time data. http://www.mediabistro.com/socialize/

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies and increasing conversions.

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Relevancy Meets Passion: 5 Ways To Increase Post Relevance

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:36:32 -0700

Social attraction is about keeping them interested to a point where the relationship becomes physical, meaning more than just “I like you.” Regardless of the social channel, content clearly drives the progression of engagement with consumers. Twitter, Facebook and now Google+ are all about relevancy, social sharing and leveraging content as social currency. While most smart brands do search engine optimization (SEO) to use website content to improve their search rankings, the vast majority don’t optimize their social content to drive stronger customer interaction. In this post, we’ll dive into what brands must do to optimize their social ROI, maximize their Facebook EdgeRank and avoid boring their followers.

Several recent studies have pointed to the strong impact of social content marketing, specifically, content curation and news feed optimization. A brand’s dream comes true when consumers amplify brand content through active social engagement. Sharing of content lowers the overall cost of reach and, of course, builds awareness. A recent Comscore study revealed that 27% of Facebook browsing is done on news feeds compared to only 4% on home pages. This indicates that consumers are seeking dynamic content engagement versus static, one-way information. The study also illuminated the fact that brands optimizing their news feed posts, versus developing apps for their Facebook pages, are also likely to reach the most people.

Facebook marketing is similar in many respects to SEO. Just as you optimize your website for better search performance, Facebook content is optimizable for superior fan engagement. And, our research shows that increased audience engagement brings markedly higher click-thru rates, traffic and quality fan growth. Consequently, there has been a great deal of chatter about Facebook EdgeRank, the algorithm that governs how posts are prioritized in users’ news feeds. The main factors that control post visibility are described in this graphic from a presentation given by Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg at the 2010 f8 developer conference describing Facebook’s EdgeRank.:

If confused you're not alone, let's see if we can simplify this a bit more.

Affinity: This refers to the level of activity between the brand’s fan page and the consumer, primarily around content. Is your audience actively commenting on, sharing and “liking” your content? If so, your content’s EdgeRank should be rising.
Weight: Much like InfiniGraph’s trend score on content interaction rates, Facebook places different values on each type of interaction. For example, check-ins and comments have greater value than likes.
Time Decay: The older the interaction, the less relevant the relationship is. If your consumers have not recently interacted with your brand content or fanned the brand page or your content is not fresh, your EdgeRank will suffer.

Calculating EdgeRank is similar to measuring brand relevance and if a page’s content has a low rank, the fans will most likely never see its content. Like we said, actions rule the day and Places check-ins, shares, comments and likes being the lowest all determine the interaction impact. A recent post cites the finding that only 3%-10% of your Facebook fans are even seeing the posts you make. Here we list ways to use content optimization to lift your brand’s posts above the news feed noise.

(1) Time your posts: Just because you have lots of fans, doesn’t mean you have good engagement. You will generate much greater interaction if your content is relevant and you post at the right times. For example, research shows that weekend postings can do just as well as or better than weekday postings. We have verified these findings with our own testing as has HubSpot's Dan Zarrella. Your consumers are not 9-5; nor should your content be. Here’s one client example that showed triple digit percentage increases in traffic with more active posting on weekends and certain weekday time periods.

(2) Post frequently: Under-posting can lead to time decay which is an EdgeRank killer. If a fan hasn’t clicked on one of your posts for over a year, they may never see your posts in their newsfeed again. Optimization, like keeping fit, is a constant process. Unsubscribes will rise with increasing post frequency; however, it’s important to ask whether those fans were actually spreading your brand’s word in the first place. Increased engagement is the goal here and your reach does as well through consistent posting of relevant content that your active followers want to consume and share.

(3) Repost the good stuff: Trending content is ideal for reposting because your audience is giving you the “thumbs up.” InfiniGraph scores and ranks trending content to help brands identify which of their posts have resonated most strongly across Facebook and Twitter simultaneously We have consistently seen that reposting trending content on the weekend dramatically improves impressions, CTR and overall interaction. Also, refreshing your trending posts, perhaps with a question for your followers, and republishing them generates even greater engagement. If you don’t repost trending content, you risk missing active followers at peeks times. The graphic below shows another example of the increased visits and pageviews generated by reposting. The positive impact of reposting compounds because more engagement from new fans has a direct impact on EdgeRank. In our next case study, we will present more data on how a major publisher improves margins with optimization.

(4) Broaden the conversation: Don’t “always be selling.” Think of your brand as a media company or publisher (see our last post). Just as NBC tries to attract more viewers by offering superior programming, a brand using social media has to provide appealing content that motivates your fans to engage. This might be a company video, but could also include a relevant blog post by third party, the results of an industry study or a survey on a topic of interest to your brand community. Social media marketing leader REI actually tries to maintain a 75/25 ratio – 75% of their published content is general interest in nature and only 25% directly promotes the brand and products.

(5) Cross pollinate: If your brand has more than one Facebook and Twitter presence, leverage that to post content from one channel to the others. Also, other outbound channels, such as your website or email newsletter, can use content that drives users back to the Facebook page for further engagement.

The reality is not enough brands are posting what’s relevant to their audiences to increase overall engagement on their brands. Existing and new pages must have a strong content strategy as well as a thoughtful, consistent optimization plan. The key point is that intelligent curation is absolutely critical in determining relevance to your audience members and in keeping them engaged. What are you posting outside of product updates to engage your fans and what content marketing strategies or examples can you share?

OK some plugs here ..... Please vote for the SXSW 2012 panel we’re on, " "The Future of Content Monetization and Publishing" and come see us at Socialize West, Oct 21st in San Francsico. Our talk is on "Optimizing Social Media : Making Real-time Decisions with Real-time data".

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you. Yes, please LIKE it if you're into great content curation strategies.

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5 Ways Social Beauty Is Not Skin Deep - Engage and Win

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 18:25:00 -0700

The beauty and cosmetic industry is dominating Social Media for good reason.   Women are the most socially active consumer group when it comes to Facebook /Twitter, and they create a wealth of engaging content.   There is a high stakes game going on where whoever captures the mind share of this group, and evokes their passion, captures their pocket book.

In our previous post "Winning Curation Strategies and Brands Becoming Publishers"    we noted that good content curation enables thought leadership, higher engagement and increase in Facebook Edgerank. Edgerank is how Facebook manages which posts get placed at the top of an individual user’s news feed.   Brands that have figured out how to curate outperform and often are more profitable than those who do not curate their own content.

According to L2

L2 Think Tank is a research group who created the Top 100 Prestigious Brands , and we connected with the founder Scott Galloway, at OMMASocial NY where we saw the considerable level of work the team took in order to come up with the Top 100 list. The analysis focused on the engagement leaders within the luxury category in 100 top brands on Facebook.

InfiniGraph took this research further and applied social-behavioral analytics in order to better analyze the list. (NOTE: each brand name listed is clickable. Click the links below in order to run the InfiniGraph Social Intelligence on each brand.)

L2 Top brands	L2 Rank		L2 Class
CLINIQUE	165	Genius
BARE ESCENTUALS	149	Genius
BENEFIT	149	Genius
BOBBI BROWN	148	Genius
LANCÔME	140	Genius
CLARINS	137	Gifted
MAC	135	Gifted
NARS	131	Gifted
ESTÉE LAUDER	126	Gifted
AVEDA	123	Gifted
L'OCCITANE	118	Gifted
PHILOSOPHY	110	Gifted
KIEHL'S	108	Average
SMASHBOX	105	Average
SHISEIDO	93	Average
SK-II	63	Feeble
FRESH	62	Feeble

Scott Galloway says: "While many prestige brands wait for hard [return on investment] to justify a shift in human, creative, and financial capital from traditional to emerging platforms, others have taken a leap of faith and are in an arms race to acquire Facebook likes."

With cost-per-click "ads on Facebook up 40 percent" in the first quarter of 2011 versus the same time last year, "the industry may look back and regret not having aggressively built communities for a fraction of the cost". However, winning on Facebook is more than just like count. Although many prestige brands maintain monocular focus on the size of their Facebook community, "they have failed to embrace the authentic two-way communication and marketing activation required to monetize the platform."

Applying social-behavioral "intelligence"

Through InfiniGraph’s Social Intelligence which uses social-behavioral analysis on content interaction we found that Urban Decay Cosmetics was the second most connected brand to people active on the L2’s top Beauty / Skincare overtaking Clinique and Bobbi Brown . Below is the Top 5 Brand Affinities based on what consumes behavior is around other contented activity as they relate to the Top 5 L2 cosmetic brands.

Sephora is the most influential retail outlet and dominates socially, whereas top publications were Allure Magazine, Marie Claire, Who What Wear and Fashionista.

Looking at the Urban Decay Top Affinities chart above its clear where the best source of cross posting content resides. Sephora still leads the way as a major connector along with Marie Claire.

But, we wanted to take this cross relevance further. Below you can see the cross counts (who shows up more with greater content activity) of the L2 top brands with the most trending cross connections. Sephora is over 50% greater than any brand or retailer! Swiffer and Food Network made it in the top 16 providing a unique insight on what other properties are getting engagement and should be used in targeting.

All brand displayed were derived from the Top 5 Brand Affinities and shows you which consumers are the most socially active in reference to the L2 Top brands, and, where content should be sourced from via partnering and targeting.

Social Analytics is changing the way we communicate and interface with brands that sell the “feeling good” “health” “wellness” “beauty”, harnessing the power of passion. The brands that successfully leverage conversation will dominate, as more buyers become more socially connected.

Key takeaways:

Brands that allow posting on their wall obtain higher engagement
Engagement around products got the highest interaction rates
Posts around contests and promotions registered the lowest interaction rates.
There is poor integration across digital platforms when using the Like and Share within content and promotion
Competence on Facebook is inextricably linked to shareholder growth

It’s clear a lot can be learned from the beauty industry. Not all brands are created equal and in this tech savvy world, those that are more likeable, sharable and engaging can and will cut through the clutter. The competition is steep and they are all vying for your attention and everyone wants to be the “thought leader” but only a few can be. Learning how to harness your content makes for a much more effective social experience.

Questions to ask:

When Content trends on your brand, what do you do?
Are you getting the most out of your content marketing?
Are you expanding your outreach on what your consumers engage with, or letting it die?
Are you asking your audience questions around your trending content?

What areas of content are getting you the most social traction? Share with us sites you have seen that are doing well with curated content creating engagement.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you. Yes LIKE IT - if you're into great curation strategies...... we bring it.

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Winning Curation Strategies and Brands Becoming Publishers

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:28:00 -0700

With the massive growth of social networks, brands are evolving into publishers due to the rise of the Internet as a consumer buying power house. Recently, only the biggest brands could play this game with corporate publications or magazines. Now company’s of all sizes can establish platforms for broadcast and conversation through Facebook and Twitter. As, in our previous post 5 ways curation and content automation increases engagement here we will go into depth on the next phase of how brands are becoming publishers.

As brands scramble for attention, products like Strorify, Netvibes and Paper.li are all steadily gaining traction in enabling self publishing content curation. Social platform LinkedIn recently jumped on the bandwagon, blurring the lines between social media and the trending content from its users sharing, all in an attempt to keep you glued to their site.

Not everyone has large budgets to invest in online PR, or a social media agency to manage content that is distributed through social media channels. Many brands realize the value of social marketing, and are creating, finding and sharing compelling content. This can prove to consumers that a company knows the market, and is a thought leader in its industry and wants to keep its customers engaged.

According to a recent study, nearly half of US marketing professionals surveyed are now curating content as part of their strategy, and another 42% are familiar with the practice but not participating. Even among that group, 85% had done at least some content curation. If you ever pass around some interested content via email or shared a post, then you're doing content curation. The main objectives of content curation survey were establishing thought leadership, and improving brand buzz.

Brands with large numbers of followers have an absolute need to keep fans engaged. Yet most feeds are DEAD! Brands have a unique opportunity to own their content voice and be a thought leader in content that’s buzzing around them i.e. trending. If your content choice doesn’t touch a passion point with readers, you will lose social velocity and risk losing followers to a rival. The same goes for a brand’s social media presence.

Content marketing can do much to improve results in SEO and customer acquisition. Inbound marketing solutions firm HubSpot has reported on the effectiveness of customer acquisition via blogging as well as how content created for social media efforts can boost search rankings. However, content curation can be made simple; its usually not a low-touch activity. The greatest challenges are creating content that is original and compelling, and finding the time to do so. Nearly half of marketers reported that finding and indentifying relevant content was difficult.

Everyone knows the pain traditional publishers have seen over the past decade with the relentless internet growth, audience declining and just shutting down. Now you have converted a follower on Facebook/Twitter GREAT… So What! Customers have almost infinite choices. Keeping those follows, brands must keep creating value and feeding the information need, i.e. center of discovery. Your status updates, filling your customers news feeds. You better recognize that your role is one of publisher.

If brands don’t embed themselves in this process, they will be drowned out by the ones who master the industry voice. For brands to successfully make this transition, let’s learn from successful process:

Deliver compelling content and engage with customers while fostering trust
Create communities that promote two-way communication between your brand and consumers, as well as between consumers
Derive an understanding of customer needs and behaviors
Understand what is trending and why - feed other content creates thought leadership
Leverage trending content within your feed simplifies the curation process

The primary challenge is creating ongoing compelling content, while discovering and managing the deluge of information. The long-term trend for brands to become media is now very much a reality. Publishers and agencies must find their mojo in this fast growing space. Brands that listen and participate are able to make offering adjustments and therefore position with the communities’ involvement, while simultaneously attracting new followers due to the nature of how the feeds work. That is customer relationship management in action.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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InfiniGraph at RealTime NY, OMMASocial and AF EXPO

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:02:00 -0700

Come see InfiniGraph present Social Intelligence 2.0 at this years leading social media events. June is a very busy month for InfiniGraph with the launch of 2.2 scheduled to drop next week! Come and experience the benefits Real Time Social Intelligence has to offer and see how brands/publishers are harnessing their trending content, intelligent curation and social brand affinities to create real ROI.

RealTime NY #RLTM June 6th - NY

InfiniGraph's 2.2 Release event, live demo of intelligent curation in action and announcement of PeopleBrowsr partnership expanding the Twitter Firehose with InfiniGraph's Social Intelligence.

OMMASocial June 9th - NY

Optimizing Social Media: Making Real-time Decisions on Real-Time Data
Social media, with its nebulous, random activity, also gives marketers a lot of real-time intelligence about where their market – or potential market – is, and what they are talking about. This has led to the new specialty of social media optimization, which leverages all this data so that marketers can make the most of social media. This session will look at methods for optimizing – from posting when a target market is most responsive to technologies that target potential fans or followers

AF EXPO June 28th - 29th - SF

PR 2.0: Facebook for Public Relations
While there may be no secret weapon you can unleash on Facebook to make your PR initiatives successful overnight, there are a plethora of new tools, apps, features and targeting tricks that can work magic for your PR campaigns. This session will provide PR practitioners and marketers with a portfolio of tactics, tips and techniques for bolstering media relations work as well as consumer outreach along with insider advice on how to track these efforts. Whether you are looking to grow your follower base, brush up on social listening skills or simply glean PR 2.0 best practices, our Facebook experts have you covered. The panel will also provide step-by-step guidance to help you make the most of Facebook Places, Groups, Messages, Deals, and Stories. Get ready to take lots of notes!

If you missed it here is our guest post ..........

5 Ways Curation and Content Automation Increases Engagement - SocialTimes.com

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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5 ways curation and content automation increases engagement

Wed, 04 May 2011 06:46:00 -0700

We recently attended the book release party "Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators" by author Steve Rosenbaum in Palo Alto. It was mentioned at the party, and by some reports, that every two days we now create more content than was created from the beginning of time until 1993. We’re not entirely sure of the validity of that claim but, even if its an exaggeration by an order of magnitude, we're still talking about an insane amount of content being created every single day.

The major challenges are how to sort and filter through all this content to make sense of it. We're also challenged with how to make the content actionable to drive consumers to your call to action while creating authentic engagement. Enter crowdsourcing, the beauty of using your audience to determine what’s relevant is like a giant super human computer; working on your behalf, selecting and ranking what’s of value, and kicking out what’s not. This radical approach eliminates the complexities of keyword monitoring and a large sentiment analysis problem. What’s left is pure gold. A great article by John Cole “10 Reasons Why Automated Social Media Listening Tools Fail” highlights many of these issues.

Your customers know what they like and if they interact with content that’s a big statement of intent and that should be noted. Think about it. You’re leveraging millions of interactions at scale… now you've got something. Consumers connect to many brands, not just yours, and this context of other brand interaction is critical to you owing your content voice. Finding those that are interacting and moving this voice for your industry is the 1% mentioned often in social marketing. Tapping into the collective defined by trending content and doing it in context provides the competitive advantage to power curation.

Many Social Media Management (SMM) tools post on Facebook as well as other feeds. However, feed automation is problematic without a way to intelligently measure effectiveness of what content is getting the most social interaction and how it relates to other brands in the industry. With Facebook controlling posts that are viewable from publishing apps, the main issue is your posts don’t reach the audience and your impressions are low if you post frequently. You can post more frequently on Twitter versus Facebook, so be selective and use Twitter as a barometer for what’s relevant. Relevance is the critical foundation that enables real insight from social media data.

Publishing trending content will definitely increase your CTR. First, you need to understand what is trending and why. Content that’s trending on your brand is just as important as content that’s trending around your brand. Of the SMMs out there, listening doesn’t provide crowdsourced social relevance and this content can be easily piped intelligently, and directly into all the SMM platforms.

Dan Zarrrella's recent webinar on The Science of Timing nailed several key factors imprtant to curation. A major take away was ability to post more than once on the same topic. With Social Intelligence this process is made simple. See our recent ClickZ on “Tuning Your Content: Social Media for Content Publishers” by Dave Evans

Ok! On to Top 5 ways to increase engagement around trending content.

Facebook is not the same as Twitter. Post more on Twitter and analyze what content gets the most interaction. Focus those posts on Facebook.
Content that trends on a brand has a low perishable nature and can be posted again on nights and weekends to further the engagement.
Timing is key but, if you're posting often, you can’t jam them out in a few hours. Spread them out to avoid feed stacking and it's best to focus on the ones that do get traction.
Be the center of the discovery and own your content voice. Sharing content that's relevant to your customers creates engagement and makes your brand more human vs. just posting your product blurbs and discounts over and over.
Trending content is “Crowd Approved” and integrating within a Facebook Ad Buy using that same content is like pouring social gas on a fire. Very little can amplify the word of mouth effect, creating great social discovery and reach.

Twitter trending topics are not very useful directly, whereas what’s trending around your brand is. You won’t get what you’re looking for with social listening if you’re not listening to what your customers are saying. Knowing what content your consumers are interacting with and segmenting on what’s most relevant in your industry, is the most powerful method and use of Social Intelligence. Use affinity trending content to determine what sources are getting the most action.

Are you using Facebook and Twitter now to drive traffic and what content is getting you the most traction? What is driving your customer to engage? In our next post we will explore content streaming in ads and how to improve engagement by adding dynamic text within an ad unit.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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5 ways to maximize Facebook ad buy through crowdsourcing

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:43:00 -0700

eMarketer estimates Facebook sold $1.86 billion in ads in 2010, about 60% or $1.12 billion of which was self-serve, meaning advertisers that buy directly using Facebook's targeting tools. And more than 33% of online-display ads in U.S. in February appeared on Facebook according to Comscore. Companies like Marin and Kenshoo both have developed advanced bulk ad delivery via Facebook ad buy API along with several other startups enabling 1000’s of ads to be managed over many parameters, however, the need for higher relevant targeting still exists. As seen by WebTrends research on Facebook ad conversions with lackluster results in our view have more to do with the method of targeting over the platform ability to service targeted ads.

Facebook ad buy interface supporting “Precise Interests”

When talking with advertisers using Facebook ad buy the overwhelming requests are;

reduce Cost Per Like
increase CTR
what to target on
what copy / images will yield the highest engagement

Traditional marketing spend is shifting to Social. Evidence that Social is driving more engagement has created a need to provide greater direction on what keywords a.k.a. “interests” are most relevant to the audience as well as what content is trending to enhance the ad copy. Using crowdsourced brand affinities creates the ideal Interest segmentation “interest graph” based on social interaction around content. The combination gives marketers a direct line on what’s most important to their target audience simplifying the “joining the conversation” process.

Those who are active and have “in common connections” increase reach due to similar consumer composition and passion. Advanced content marketing based on the trending content affinities is a big deal over targeting broad categories that don’t link with what the collective consumers are doing on other social graphs. See results here on why affinities work.

Below are two brands showing side by side trending brand affinities that are used to optimize SEO as well as what specific topics to choose to complete the “Precise Interest” section in the Facebook ad buy interface.

Top 5 Ways to make your next Facebook ad buy rock:

Determine who is interacting with your brand the most and target that demographic
Segment your buys with copy that’s trending to attract more attention over just product pump (promote the buzz)
Include pictures that resonate with the trending content based on the crowd
Target on trending brand affinities … your audience is telling you what others have interest on
Buy over many trending affinities with small amounts then go big with the ones that preform best (affinities change in rank based on social content interaction so run more than one campaign over time and Twitter affinities can yield higher than Facebook)

The mountains of data Facebook has access to now will surely impact Facebook search results and ad buy functionality. With the recent announcement of using real time conversation mining to target ads this too could significantly improve the targeting relevance. We must fish where the fish are and trending brand affinities provides the best indication to date on what to buy against. Trending link sharing in the context of social density of “who is sharing” provides a much better discovery experience for the brand who wants to understand their social ecosystem.

Determining what’s resonating “trending” among the community creates the brand affinity matrix making Facebook and Twitter ideal for advertisers seeking to understand the buzz of their consumers. Social density based on topic is radically different approach over old ways of search that massive indexing the web based to fixed links here its based on social interaction and context.

InfiniGraph’s innovation in real-time trending content based on brand affinity association provides advertisers with a highly competitive advantage taking the guess work out of targeting at the same time understanding what most relevant for copy improvement. Now we have the ability to determine relevance of content beyond the number of links it has taking into account the social resonance of a particular topic that a key audience is resonating around. .

Your turn! How are you leveraging what your audience is telling you?

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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Beyond Listening: Reinventing Social Keyword Monitoring

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:32:00 -0700

Chase McMichael will present; Beyond Listening: Reinventing Social Keyword Monitoring. Social monitoring is key to every business that's interfacing with customer to reputation management. Of the 100 tools out there what is right for you business will be explored. Keyword-based social monitoring tools are difficult to optimize for targeted content delivery. They can also be difficult to use. In this session you will learn how, by leveraging your customers’ "Content Consumption Graph" you can not only deliver more relevant content but also dramatically boost engagement with that content. You will also see how advanced social intelligence techniques can deliver detailed graphs with insightful audience data. Register for the event March 29, 2011 \| 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Linked In 2027 Stierlin Court Mountain View, CA

@chasemcmichael

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Social Intelligence Drives Improved Facebook Ad Buy - InfiniGraph Case Study

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:44:00 -0800

Client: DigitalEye (for its client Golden Spoon)
In January, Golden Spoon ran a Facebook ad campaign. Golden Spoon owns and operates three stores in Coachella Valley, Calif. The ad was designed to drive traffic to the company’s Facebook fan page with the call to action being “Like” this page (see illustration below). Fans were also asked to complete a registration form to join Golden Spoon’s e-mail list.

Objectives
DigitalEye wanted to improve the Facebook ad buy targeting efficiency for Golden Spoon by using InfiniGraph’s Social Intelligence analysis to improve social targeting based on what consumers are connected to and most active around (brand affinity).

Discovery - Find brand affinities that are most relevant to the target audience.
Activation - Use trending brand affinities to increase targeting, clicktrough rates, “Likes” and improve purchase conversion.

Tasks included running a Social Intelligence analysis on Golden Spoon’s Facebook page and Twitter profile to obtain brand affinities, which were applied to the Facebook ad buy.

The prospect list was further refined using InfiniGraph’s Social Intelligence Brand Affinities feature, which taps into like-minded groups on Facebook, based on relevancy and activity.

The geographic target was Palm Springs and a 50-mile radius, while the demographic target focused on people ages 14 and up, women, as well as families (see illustration above).

Shown below is Golden Spoon’s “Affinity Map,” which shows how their target audience interacts with other brands. The Affinity Map was used to directly specify the company’s Facebook ad buy in the “follow by like” and interest area.

Brands, products and services consumer interact with the most (Affinity Map)

DigitalEye used InfiniGraph’s control panel to gain additional social intelligence and to determine what brands were trending most. Social Intelligence also aided in increasing clickthrough rate and reaching the most active consumer base.

Results
Top-line results were as follows:

Clickthrough rate: 6%
Liked page fan: 51%
Conversion to buy: 18%*
Same store sales: up 13.7% during promotional period.

* Coupon redemption rate was reported to be approximately 18% with each e-mail promotion.
New Facebook likes were up 162%, while monthly active users rose 105%. Post feedbacks were boosted 612% and post views increased 249%. DigitalEye CEO Gary Brewer adds “We’re running promos on slow days Mondays and Tuesdays on Facebook and sales are equivalent to what they are on a weekend.”

DigitalEye’s campaign tactics are shown below:

Golden Spoon’s Facebook fan page and sign-up form.

Post was picked up by ClickZ Tuning Your Content: Social Media for Content Publishers

CONTACT US TO SEE MORE EXAMPLES OF USE (VIA WEBEX) ( sales@infinigraph.com )
Social Intelligence Drives Improved Facebook Ad Buy - InfiniGraph Case Study (PDF)

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Social Intelligence Drives Improved Content Interaction - InfiniGraph Case Study

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 15:48:00 -0800

Client: Complex Media
The Complex Media Network delivers every element of life that young, stylish men need to maintain their position at the top of the style food chain. The 47-publisher network provides consumers with an ultra authentic and relevant deep dive into their core passion points – fashion, music, sneakers, style, gaming, sports, art and entertainment.

Objectives
Complex asked InfiniGraph to increase traffic to their site by expanding their social media presence on Facebook and Twitter and increasing interactions to drive traffic back to Complex.com

Tasks included determining what content is most relevant to its audience across social graph; what other brands they’re interacting around; what content is being shared; the content distribution path; and auto-feeding Facebook and Twitter to increase click through and consumer engagement.

Discovery - Find out what Complex.com readers did on social networks and what type of content they liked to read and share. Leverage that research information to drive great quality traffic to publisher sites.
Activation - Find and engage influencers connected with Complex and increase overall content sharing to increase reach.
Content Optimization - Determine what content is trending the most based on social interaction for republishing

Results

Traffic to the Complex website increased by 30%
Twitter followers by increased 25%
Facebook Fans increased by 30%

Below is an example of how Complex’ audience interacts with other brands and publishers, something we call the “Affinity Map.”

1. Brand / Product / Services consumer interact with the most (Affinity Map)

Complex used the InfiniGraph control panel to gain social intelligence in order to boost content interaction:

2. Trending content based on a brand’s affinity drives greater social interaction and activation.

Consumers rely on friends and business associates to determine relevant content to share. This discovery process is propelled by social connections and influence. When Complex content trends, it affords the opportunity to expose its published content to a wider audience while improving social interaction.

For Aleksey Baksheyev, Director of Technology of Complex Media, Inc., the results were self-evident: “InfiniGraph increased Complex page views by 30% and its Facebook following by 30%.” The New York-based company used InfiniGraph’s insights to expand its content distribution through the network driving overall click volume and social interaction.

InfiniGraph’s contributions were welcome because Complex’ staff was unable to keep up with 24/7 content and posting demands. InfiniGraph provided a clear way of managing this content stream, including measuring what was truly relevant to cross-post and repost.

Another welcome change was InfiniGraph’s simplified interface for tracking clicks, viewing well-performing content and gaining insights into the social graph. The InfiniGraph control panel allows content publishers to easily manage content feeds from many sources, with simple visuals that reveal trending brands around a company’s social presence, while providing the transparent ability to curate overlapping Facebook and Twitter presences.

Post was picked up by ClickZ Tuning Your Content: Social Media for Content Publishers

CONTACT US TO SEE MORE EXAMPLES OF USE (VIA WEBEX) ( sales@infinigraph.com )
Social Intelligence Drives Improved Content Interaction - InfiniGraph Case Study (PDF)

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Social CRM Doesn’t Exist, But a Need Does

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:58:00 -0800

The following article is a guest post from Houston Neal, Director of Marketing for Software Advice. You can view the original post here: Social CRM Doesn't Exist, But a Need Does.

Social CRM is to the social media craze what eCRM was to the dot com bubble. The enterprise apps community is hungry for a big new category and social CRM smells tasty. As a result, software vendors, tech media and research analysts are all racing to promote and opine on this new market. Gartner, for example, appears to have hastily published their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, which has been panned as confusing and unfocused.

But Social CRM Doesn’t Exist
In reality, social CRM is a misnomer. It doesn’t exist yet. This catch-all nomenclature implies a category far more straightforward than the diverse set of specialized systems currently targeting the social media opportunity.

“There is no such thing as a social CRM suite yet, says Jacob Morgan, Principle at Chess Media Group. You have community management platforms, CRM vendors, monitoring guys. No one does everything.”

The debate over social CRM has been drawn out over the past couple of years and analysts are still at odds over how to define it. Depending on who you ask, social CRM will mean something different.

“Trying to put a blanket over it and calling it a market is very difficult right now,” says Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink. “Gartner attempted to do it and they ended up doing silly things like putting community vendors like Jive and Lithium in the same quadrant with CRM vendors that are doing Twitter feeds.”

So why all the buzz? Because there is a need for social CRM. Companies need a scalable way to engage customers in the social sphere. This includes everything from managing brand reputation, to responding to customer service requests, to finding new sales prospects.

The State of the Market
Currently, the social CRM landscape is comprised of several evolving software categories, each with 20 to 150 vendors competing for market share. To help you understand the lay of the land, I’ve created version 1.0 of the Software Advice Social CRM Market Map. It provides a fast, easy way to visualize the leading players in the social CRM space:

In this map, I segment the market into four categories, each of which markets could be divided into as many as 16 subcategories. However, I can sum them up into three primary applications:

Social media monitoring. Monitoring tools allow organizations to “listen” to conversations happening on the web. Also referred to as brand monitoring, social media monitoring allows you to track who is saying what about your organization or your competitors, as well as track when it is said. Some systems also allow you to publish responses, such as Tweets or Facebook wall posts. Social media monitoring is a crowded space with roughly 150 companies vying for a piece of the action. (Radian, Visible, Alterian, Nielsen, Buzzlogic, BrandsEye, trackur, scoutlabs (acquired by Lithium), buzzgain to name a few)

Social analytics. Analytical applications go beyond web analytics and social monitoring to analyze conversations in the social sphere or social connections / content interaction using Social Intelligence. They can also analyze text, rather than just visitor behavior. For example, an analytics program could scour text from emails, surveys and social media, and then report trends and insights that help you decide how to respond. Social analytics companies often pair their main offering with social media monitoring tools. ( InfiniGraph, Gist (acquired by RIM), crimson hexagon, clarabridge, crowdfactory, InsideView, Attensity ) see Michael Tchong comprehensive review of Social Analytics.

Social platforms. Platforms empower an organization to build its own social communities or networks. These may be internal systems to foster employee collaboration or external networks for customers, prospects and partners. Deploying a social platform is like having your own private-label Facebook. There are roughly 125 vendors offering some form of social platform. (Lithium, Jive, telligent, Pluck, LeverageSoftware, vovici, SocialText, mzinga, LiveWorld and many others)

At the same time, CRM market leaders ( Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, RightNow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM) are trying to piece together their own social CRM suites through development, partnerships, and acquisitions. Salesforce.com is the most likely to succeed in this effort. Over the last two years they introduced new social applications, like Chatter and Salesforce for Facebook, and made strategic acquisitions – notably Jigsaw and Dimdim. I would argue that Salesforce is a social CRM leader, rather than just a CRM gorilla trying to edge in on a new market.

Software vendors are all racing to build complete social CRM suites. What does this mean for buyers in the meantime? If you want a complete social CRM system, you will have to piece together tools from multiple vendors.

Next Steps
First, ignore the buzzword. There is no standard for what should be in a social CRM solution and there are no vendors that offer everything. Don’t just say, “Hey, we need to get some of that social CRM!” Instead, you need to decide what you are trying to accomplish and which categories are most likely to make a meaningful contribution to your strategy.

You will need well-defined goals for your social CRM strategy. If you just want to track what customers are saying about your brand on the web, then a social media monitoring application will suffice. But if you want to analyze that data, identify influencers, or spot trends, you should explore social analytics. Finally, if owning the community is strategically important, you will need a platform to build out that environment for your constituents.

Keep in mind that social CRM vendors don’t offer the same level of sales, service and marketing functionality that traditional CRM vendors offer. So if you need capabilities like sales lead management, lead nurturing and a few social features on the side, then you should really be looking at CRM software.

We’re obviously just skimming the surface here, but we’ll be publishing more on this topic throughout the year. In the meantime, check out the 18 Use Cases of Social CRM from the Altimeter Group and Social Business Framework from IDC. These tools present possible uses of social media and align them with business objectives.

Special thanks to Brian Solis, digital analyst and author of Engage; Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President of Software Business Solutions at IDC; Kathy Herrmann, thought leader on social business and change management; Paul May, CEO of BuzzStream, and; Peter Hrabinsky, VP of marketing at Antarctica Digital for their input on this article.

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Expert Strategies for Using Social Media to Sell More, Faster

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 17:30:32 -0800

Role of Social Content in the Sales Process
Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne, argues that InfiniGraph’s business proposition is based on a Content = Digital Bait model.

Content once held a nicely defined niche in the sales process. It was used to articulate our message or hype our benefits. Content was highly sanitized and contrived. Now we see an entirely new role for content with consumers providing what is most relevant based on social behavior and letting brands participate in their digital conversations.

Content use to be what marketers decided, such as a 30-second spot, print ad, direct mail and e-mail, which was pre-defined and one way. Now there is an emerging discipline that has content taking on the role of DIGITAL BAIT.

The concept has marketers producing a whole stream of digital content for the market place. It can be on thought leadership, what your beliefs are, your special expertise in the form of a blog, or Twitter and Groupon offers.

This new skill set requires that marketers be great at creating content, delivering it to the market place and then understanding what people respond too.

Publishing content, understanding who acts on it, and who is driving the conversation in your sector, goes beyond social listening and monitoring and is key to capturing your business’ social voice.

It has been shown that using Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn increases your marketing communication program’s reach with target customers. Furthermore, it’s also true that about 1% of your audience shares your content that ultimately drives reach. Here is InfiniGraph's approach to content intelligence for more in-depth and to see the entrie Infographic go here.

Social engagement creates Reach, Relationship and Response enabling you to learn to sell more and faster, based on consumer interaction. Marketers who do not own their social voice and content space will see competitors grabbing increased share, so it’s imperative that one is prepared to compete based on Social Intelligence.

Below is an example of how InfiniGraph can assist in developing content intelligence:

Crowdsourced content is one of the best ways to determine what‘s trending around your brand and most relevant to your audience. Half the battle in content marketing is having the knowledge of what is driving the conversation, therefore, making you the smartest person in your community.

Knowing what to insert in your feed and seeing realtime results lets you build your content consumption’s success. Another major opportunity is increasing relevancy among your audience even if the content falls outside of your industry’s purview, which offers the distinct opportunity to interweave a brand message as part of a more advanced content marketing strategy.

How are you using content to be more relevant and what are you using to discover content that can turn your brand into a thought leader?

Please connect with us on our Facebook page too

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

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How to Leverage Social Media Optimization

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:27:00 -0800

Someone raised a great question on Quora, “What is social media optimization and how do you leverage it?” Any social site that has consumers interacting around content and connecting with other brands creates a social interest graph that connects consumers to brands via content and social action. We call this social action triangulation the Content Consumption Graph and it reveals how consumer interest is built around content.

Brands that want to use SMO to improve clickthroughs, comments, likes and shares must have a clear understanding of what their audience likes and what content gets them to act. Social Intelligence determines what’s relevant based on collective interaction. This is important now because top influencers determine what’s relevant by creating content filters on every topic imaginable.

With the recent chatter revolving around how Facebook and Twitter are not influencing SEO and how streams are being indexed by search, resulting in real-time conversations and links directly effecting page rank, Social Intelligence gathering is more important than ever.

Now that social networks like Twitter, Facebook and others are creating their own search categories, they’re becoming prominent traffic drivers, especially when compared to other methods of traffic acquisition, such as banner advertising, paid/earned media and affiliate marketing.

Continuously driving conversation and increasing clicks is what brands require. And because social interaction amplified by friend feeds are key for any brand to harness, content is central to consumers’ interest graph.
Any good social media strategy has to have a champion and be adopted by other advocates, either internal or external to the marketer. That usually means that the collaboration around content creation and the social interaction it delivers need to be flawlessly executed by one team and all its members.

1. Free Your Content
Most sites will not let you access a case study or other content until you sign up. If content is valuable enough, give only part of it away and make that accessible to the search engines. Understanding what your audience values requires a transparent way to measure content ranking to help you determine what is most relevant. But getting your potential customers to engage with you is more important than receiving an e-mail. Provide tiered access and let people take share your free content. It’s easy with Facebook, Twitter, LinedIn and StumbleUpon to socially share the excitement surrounding your product or service.

We’re in a very give-and-take society and it’s best that you give before you take and let your product quality speak for itself. Freeing some of your offerings will also enable search engines to index more content and capture your links. Social media bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Delicious and StumbleUpon will also expose your content and these sites have millions of visitors per month.

See Influencer, Content Intelligence and Social Engagement

2. Improve Content Relevance
Your consumers know what they like but the main challenge is that they’re also interacting with a great deal of other content that you may not be aware of. By harnessing the Content Consumption Graph you get a better understanding of what’s trending as they interact with other content. All brands have what’s called a “brand affinity map”, which shows user affiliation with other sites and content.

Knowing the social interaction of friends to content is a game changer. Now you’re able to truly understand what content is most relevant, based on social interaction within a given industry vertical. That knowledge enables you to optimize your content feeds or streams with highly relevant and meaty content, which in turn boosts social activation.

Access to Social Intelligence offers brands insights into highly relevant and trending content that can inserted fully automated or, if preferred, curated, before it’s fed into your feeds or stream widgets, and shown contextually juxtaposed with ad units that help further monetize your content.

Now that you have great, easy to access content on your website, you need to spread it. Don’t think people will magically find you; you have to broadcast your assets to the right audiences.

We have 2 more parts to this epic saga of SMO. Your turn, how are you embracing content and what steps have you taken to optimize your social voice?

Please connect with us on our Facebook page too

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

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Social Stream Marketing and Content Automation – Drive Actions Drive Results

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:20:00 -0800

Social Stream Marketing and Content Automation – Drive Actions Drive Results
Speaker Chase McMichael Las Vegas at Social Media Marketing 2011 Jan 12th

In this session you will learn how to maximize your content stream “Steam Marketing”, gain insight into what topics your consumers want to be engaged on “crowd sourced topic trending” and drive relevant content automation. With the growth of Facebook and Twitter continuing brands are allocating more budgets towards social marketing those who harness the stream with measurement and conversion into tangible events will benefit the most from the brands to consumer social graph.

Download InfiniGraph's case study on Complex Media

Wonderful quote by @ChaseMcMichael: "Life is not about being liked; it's about being effective." #smlasvegas via @sheckii

@ChaseMcMichael <--- #rockstar of the session so far... #usguys #smlasvegas via @lewisporetz

Other noted tweets @ #smlasvegas

@infinigraph:@ChaseMcMichael did a bad cartwheel at #smlasvegas via @Kate_Malinoski

Awesome cartwheel!!! @ChaseMcMichael #smlasvegas via @SuperDaniYell

Yea he did! #SMLasVegas RT:@ubercool: At Social Media Marketing: 2011 and speaker via @kate_malinoski

@ChaseMcMichael just did a cartwheel! :) #socialmedia via @DerekSchoen

Loved the gymnastics after your great presentation @ChaseMcMichael @infinigraph #smlasvegas via @JustAskMary

Omg @ChaseMcMichael just did a cartwheel after his preso! You're my fav #smlasvegas presenter! Giving what the people want #awesome via @Maria_Roncal

Props to @chasemcmichael for giving in to crowdsourced desire to see a cartwheel. #smlasvegas via @jayfenster

"It's about being effective." and "Don't be lame." #SMLasVegas #DontBeEffectivelyLame via @righellis

Users tell you via their actions what audience "passion points" are. 1% of population moves the brand, drives conversation. #smlasvegas via @jayfenster

Check @ChaseMcMichael's slideshow NOW: #smLasVegas http://bit.ly/fp0LZd via @24kMedia @assuranceagency via @24k

Cartwheel completed by @ChaseMcMichael. #epic #WhiteBoyGotMoves #smlasvegas via @sHecKii

Quality breeds quantity - focus on action. Your consumers demand quality. #smlasvegas via @assuranceagency

Great preso by @chasemcmichael. Tons of great ideas. #smlasvegas via @jayfenster

Social media content quality breeds quantity per: @ChaseMcMichael #smlasvegas via @neilglassman

Feed your feed with crowd sourced trending content. #smlasvegas via @assuranceagency

Interaction around content is more important than follower count. #EngagementIsAddingValue #smlasvegas via @jayfenster

Jargon throw-down! "Trending affinity map" and "crowd-sourced social intelligence" are in the lead. #SMLasVegas via @dribbleglass

Fingers crossed that @ChaseMcMichael really does a cartwheel. I'm not buying his excitement without a cartwheel. #smlasvegas via @JentheAmazing

"Your audience is full of smart people. You need to do more with them than 'social listening.'" @ChaseMcMichael #smlasvegas via @gosocialmotion

We just challenged @chasemcmichael to really do a cartwheel if he says he could . Prove it.#asw11 #smlasvegas via @prosperitygal

Agree 100% with @ChaseMcMichael's points on what actually has value in social. #smlasvegas via @jayfenster

Fingers crossed that @ChaseMcMichael really does a cartwheel. I'm not buying his excitement without a cartwheel. #smlasvegas via @JentheAmazing

Check @ChaseMcMichael's slideshow NOW: #smLasVegas http://bit.ly/fp0LZd via @24kMedia @assuranceagency via @24k

Check @ChaseMcMichael 's slideshow NOW: #smLasVegas http://bit.ly/fp0LZd via @assuranceagency

In a language the nerds understand: "Effectiveness pwns being liked in social media." @ChaseMcMichael #smLasVegas via @gosocialmotion

Wonderful quote by @ChaseMcMichael: "Life is not about being liked; it's about being effective." #smlasvegas via @sHecKii

Life is not about being liked, it's about being effective - @ChaseMcMichael at #smlasvegas #truth via @Maria_Roncal

"It's about being effective." and "Don't be lame." #smLasVegas #DontBeEffectivelyLame

via @righellis

really diggin @ChaseMcMichael presentation #smLasVegas via @LewisPoretz

Life is not about being liked, its about being effective @ChaseMcMichael #smLasVegas via @dtaylorcreative

Life is not about being liked, its about being effective #smlasvegas via @Missypoo586

"The activity stream is now serious #marketing." - @chasemcmichael #smlasvegas via @lollieshopping

"If people like your content, don't be afraid to put it out there again." via @ChaseMcMichael #smLasVegas via @gosocialmotion

Nice, @ChaseMcMichael used @briansolis + @jess3's Twitterverse Infographic. He mentioned @Quora during preso#smLasVegas cc @billfishkin via @24k

Be sure to check out our Facebook page

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

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Stream Marketing, Social Intelligence and Influencer Media

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 07:19:00 -0800

Come join our CEO Chase McMichael in Las Vegas on Jan 12^th at the Social Media Marketing Tips, Tools & Techniques

Are you in the echo chamber of delusion?

Brad from LA – “You've got to be kidding me - this is clearly an example of the echo chamber delusion that a lot of digital marketers exist in. So 8,000 people pressed "like" on Facebook? Did they buy the product? Did they evangelize the product to a friend? Are people who answer questions on random Twitter feeds influencers or, in this case, decision makers in the supermarket? Yes, you picked up more followers for nothing -- if that gets you paid, congratulations but don't kid yourself that your brand or bottom line is being forwarded.”

In the end it's behavior-based. A Facebook fan has no value. Getting a Facebook fan to do something does. @bdwallas Brian Wallace, VP-global digital at BlackBerry

We believe that many marketers think the same when sales numbers are more important than which post received the most “likes” or user shares. Fact is, we’re in the age of Stream Marketing, and where integrating your brand into the conversational steam and engaging your audience is a critical component of your marking strategy. Translating social interactions into click-through and engaging a consumer through relevance is what we will cover in the final story of this three-part series. (Read Part 1 and Part 2)

Social graph commands a shift in ad spend

The impact social media is having on paid search efforts and ad campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn is clear: Almost half of advertisers surveyed say that social is driving marketing spending. (Covario survey)

This study also found that advertisers will spend 10-20% of their pay-per-click budgets on Facebook next year, giving the social networking site the lion share of that market. How do marketers maximize social interactions around their brands?

Now that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital part of keyword buying, brands are looking to Social Media Optimization (SMO) to find out what keyword are trending and most relevant in relationship to the Social Graph. Social SEO is becoming the deciding force of the efficiency of ad dollars spent.

Influence and stream marketing

Running any campaign today without understanding the characteristics of your audience content consumption, their brands affinities, and knowing the Influencers is a marketing no-no.

People are socially promiscuous -- many boast more than one social presence, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a blog. If you’re not considering these facts you’re missing the greatest marketing invention, called Stream Marketing. Targeting influencers is not easy. It requires intelligence, relevant content and consistency, while understanding these five key factors:

· Influencers interact more with brands

· Influencers generate reach, boosting marketing efficiency

· Influencers accelerate product adoption and improve profitability

· Influencers amplify advertising messages via word of mouth

· Influencers drive conversation activating brand advocacy.

The Content Consumption Graph is driven by a brand’s active audience interacting with content around other brands they’re connected to. This trending content graph is highly relevant to a central brand and being driving by those influencers.

We’re entering the year of Facebook. Many retailers who established Facebook pages are wondering how they’re going to engage customers. Companies such as Best Buy, J.C. Penney, AXE and Complex have open Facebook walls and emphasize engagement as a key part of their social initiative.

Crowd sourced Social Intelligence provides the consumer affinity maps which are trending based on social interaction producing a near real-time keyword trend map. The more the interation the better the target trending.

Evidence suggests that Facebook is successful directing new customers to retailer sites. Blogger.com and Twitter are also connecting shoppers with retailer sites. Companies like PeopleBrowsr research.ly, Gravity Twiterest, SocialFlow, Backtype, Sharethis, Asteriq - mentionmap and Convers.ly help better understand the Twitter data stream in order to harness the Public Interest Graph, while optimizing the timing and content of posts.

Facebook and Twitter don’t displace editorial curation or search, but add a new mode — recommendations and links from friends, family and other trusted sources — that can spark viral distribution and mass awareness.

Social Intelligence and Engagement Media

Engagement media offer a plethora of tools to ignite passion and social distribution with nearly infinite supply of content creators and minimal cost of creating media, This affords brands a unique opportunity to leverage the influence engagement media with consumers. With a nearly infinite supply of content creators and minimal cost of creating media, the Content Consumption Graph is now more important than ever.

Redefining relevance and content toward conversational marketing must inspire feedback to expand the reach. Using Social Intelligence lets brands know what’s most relevant to their audience, while increasing positive brand sentiment and greater engagement. Engagment is not delusion if your interactions are matched with the brands goals.

What are you using today to determine what your audience engagement points are and do you think consumer relationships with brands are just waiting for a discount or coupon?

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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Influencer, Content Intelligence and Social Engagement

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:19:00 -0800

Talking with many brands and agencies the same challenge comes up over and over: “What should we put in our stream to engage our audience and what’s important to them?”

This is a very good question and any serious social site management has a content calendar / blog post schedule to do just that.   The bigger question is what do you do on a consistent basis (daily) and is the content you’re putting in your feed getting the attention you think it deserves? “You are what you feed” and in this hyper connected 140 character news bite world we live in, your brand must be on topic and as relevant as possible to as many people in order to obtain any social velocity around your brand’s ultimate call to action.

In this 2nd part of our 3 part series, we will explore direct ways to achieve greater relevancy, intelligent content discovery, consistency of engagement and being part of your audience’s conversations. Sharing and re-tweeting is a must have in the NOW world. You’re only as good as your last post. So, some may say, “Make it a good one.”   The importance in understanding your audience and what drives them can dictate what we put in our feeds that appeals to the greatest number of engaged consumers that are also compelled to share with others. This is the holy grail in social content marketing today...(Did someone say I want to make this go viral?)
Most have heard about the 1% rule — that just 1% of your brand’s social media followers are responsible for the majority of sharing. They share your social media campaigns with their larger social network, passing on links to your contests, promotions, deals, and other marketing campaigns. These key Influencers are more than just fans — they’re brand ambassadors and advocates.

With the growth of major brands engaging consumers across social channels, as seen in the graph above, more brands today have a greater need for relevant engagement. How to crowd source knowledge, and leverage what’s trending for your own brand is now at your finger tips. Brands that have fully embraced the social graph’s effectiveness to deliver growth, lead generation, loyalty and direct click throughs, plus the amazing number of Comments, Like and Retweets would make any competitor envious. AXE (Unilever brand) is a great example of content that’s not brand specific, however, engages and produces traction with its followers.

To get consumers to interact more and drive them to a call to action requires engagement beyond just the brand pump or product discount announcements. AXE consistently provides these types of posts to their audience allowing them to be in the conversation. Below is a screen shot of intelligent crowd sourced content trending around pet owners connected to other pet oriented sites (Content Consumption Graph). Thus, providing a direct example of content that’s highly relevant to the audience making this process of sourcing content simpler and more seamless to deliver on a real time basis, or as required.

There has been some argument regarding content vs. conversation. Social media isn’t just conversation, it’s about .......... WHO CARES! Let’s look at facts:

Conversations are a derivative of social media. Conversations are not social media.
Does content drive conversation? Yes, compelling content drives engagement.
Does good content drive good conversation? Yes, the more relevant the better.
Does engagement for a brand have to revolve around the conversation? Yes and No. It’s about stimulating interaction which may or may not relate.
Relevant driven Conversations and Brand Interactions are the results

All content sent in the brand’s feeds are tracked individually creates a rank list of the highest performers activity, providing instant feedback to what content is capturing Influencer attention and best social velocity:

A brand has to be more than just a great conversationalist to have long-term success in the social media. Social sites that have harnessed and engaged their audience have compelling content and tap into the passion points of their audience. This creates a huge marketing opportunity, called Content Marketing.
Using crowd sourced Social Intelligence provides a direct path to seeing what content is trending around your community (Content Consumption Graph). Monitoring the social interaction around your feeds provides a direct path by providing the most relevant content to your community and at the same time getting the most out of them.

Life is not about being liked, it's about being effective!

Your turn, how are you determining what content is on topic and are you engaging your audience and Influencers with relevance beyond your brand marketing message?

@chasemcmichael
@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

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