In the stock market world I would refer to the saying “buy low, sell high” and remind you that there are critical points in time that your plan, equipment, and team must be ready to take action in order to “ride the wave.”

To help visualize this statement I’m going to use information from Google to examine how different events played out over the course of each year through 2007 to 2011. This data is going to give me some insight to where I’m going to plan my own interaction using online market intelligence.

Why is this important?

• There are a lot of waves. You have to choose the right one.
• You don’t know where each wave is heading. You need direction.
• Some waves are too big. You’ll be lucky to survive them.
• Some waves are too small. They won’t get you anywhere.
• Some waves keep happening. Become an expert at repetitive actions.

 Insight via Online Market Intelligence

Instead of looking at one market niche by itself I am going to walk through several distinct industry segments. The key to researching market segments for future business strategy in highly interconnected with secondary industry and specific industry process points.

By learning to examine a niche and connect it to other secondary factors, a business professional can discover action indicators.

What is an action indicator?

An action indicator is a point in time
that indicates another action has a high correlation of happening.

Common Action Indicators

• Buying an engagement ring = marriage proposal
• Buying a new digital camera = upcoming special event
• Getting a new job = buying a new car  within 3 to 6 months
• Relocating to a new community = getting a new doctor

Online Market Intelligence Examples

A key to finding action indicators is examing multiple examples and understanding what trends are occuring.

I’ve included four market timelines below to help think about types of action indicators may exist.

Tax Software

 If I was a software company dealing with taxes I’d be a little worried right now. From 2007 to 2011 the numbers show that ‘tax software’ is in a decline.

We can either assume people are buying less tax software or that the market has become saturated and people no longer search for new tax software.

In either case tax software companies need to plan accordingly. Financial and accounting firms also need to look into strategies for reaching an entrenched base of software users.

• Action Indicators: end of year, software promotion, W-2 mailings, holiday breaks, etc

NFL

The NFL is actually doing pretty good moving buzz online. In 2011 the NFL had it’s most popular year online.

It is interesting to note in the NFL how a few date changes in game schedules is so accurately reflected in online traffic. On a year by year basis we could drill down into some of the additional valleys and peaks to see the reasons that some events triggered online abnormalities (competitions, hiring/firings, news scandals, etc.)

• Action Indicators: roster selections, ticket sales, play-offs, season tickets, holiday games, etc

NASCAR

Racing around the track was going downhill in 2008, 2009, and 2010… but 2011 came back with a vengeance and stoked up some new fans.

In 2007 and 2011 we can see a few peaks in the August and September timeframe that aren’t seen in the other three years. This is an unusual correlation that could be investigated to reveal whether or not these factors are unique to ‘good years’ or if they are direct results specific NASCAR outreach.

• Action Indicators: team sponsorships, PR announcements, race days, track development, news coverage

American Idol

Having worked on a few pop-culture projects over the years, the stats for American Idol are very interesting.

The biggest area of concern is that American Idol does what many TV shows fall victim to: they hit the end of the season and they drop off the face of the earth. There are millions of dollars being wasted by ending the season and re-starting it each year. A more effective strategy would include a maintenance campaign that keeps the ball moving forward.  

• Action Indicators: contestant entry, judge announcements, competitor selection, finalist selection, grand winner announcement.

Thanks for Stopping By

 Hopefully this helps you think about your marketplace and your data in a ‘big picture’ way to identify tactical areas of opportunity.

Let me know if you have any questions about gathering information with online market intelligence.

But is it? Really?

Local marketing may be a required bit of business… but the end result is that the hype behind local marketing and the reality of local marketing are two different things.

The simple fact is that there have been some pretty massive efforts to lay claim to the local marketing category for decades.

Originally ‘local marketing’ was primarily owned by the yellow pages and traditional directory advertising. Newspaper, radio, and television also had a sizable chunk of local market share.

Then the web came along and groups like Superpages.com tried to lay claim to it, yet in 2010 SuperPages went through ‘explosive decompression’ with an Idearc bankruptcy to be rebranded under SuperMedia.

In 2012, Local Marketing is still dying…

Below are a few stock examples about companies that focus on the local marketing industry. In all four examples you can see a very negative trend in stock pricing that tells you what the current industry looks like.
(stocks graphics below from Yahoo Finance)

• ReachLocal – ($6.61 share price Jan 3rd)
• Local.com – ($2.25 share price Jan 3rd)
• SuperMedia – ($2.95 share price Jan 3rd)
• Marchex – ($6.40 share price Jan 3rd)

The simple problem is…

That large scale organizations like ReachLocal, Superpages, Local, and Marchex are having extremely difficult times scaling technology against shifting customer demands that are being force fed by leading sites like Google and Facebook.

These mid-tier companies are being squeezed from the top and bottom into an extreme pressure cooker.

Google and Facebook are constantly maximizing revenue categories and when they see a loop hole or abusive technique begin to erode their own advertising systems they deploy a software update or make it against the terms of service (ToS) – This means that the mid tier organizations are constantly developing a ‘sacred cow’ only to discover that Google or Facebook has the beast firmly in the cross hairs.

On the bottom side of the marketplace you have very aggressive and nimble start-ups that can pivot on a dime.

These highly maneuverable niche competitors are making millions on highly profitable niches like dentists, lawyers, and small business retail. The more nimble companies are adept at monetizing profitable niches and have higher market penetration by focusing on highly targeted customer segments (without being distracted by the general consumer marketplaces.)

Stock prices reflect customer & employee sentiment

As organizations attempt to restructure and maintain competitive revenue streams that are being dissolved from both the top and bottom of the industry, clients and employees are turning to tools that shed light on the internal challenges this type of business faces.

(link to ReachLocal Glassdoor Reviews & ReachLocal Pissed Consumer Reviews)

The Market Shrinkage Effect

At the end of December 2011, local online marketing firm WebVisible declared itself a member of the start-up deadpool after spending $17 million in venture capital trying to create a niche for itself in the local marketing game.

This highlights a number of other local marketing cases where even nimble start-ups who attempt to ‘generalize’ and over commit to penetrate the general marketplace are falling short of positive revenue earnings.

My Thoughts

Local marketing isn’t dying.

The ability for major corporate efforts to ‘carbon copy’ and scale repeatable business models is dying.

As a business professional you have to think about the speed at which not only local marketing is changing, but the speed at which all online and social marketing techniques are changing.

Any organization that has a problem showing both a strategic and tactical execution plan for local online marketing needs to be heavily questioned. There should be on-going 30, 90, 180, and 365 day plans to benchmark effectiveness of your messaging tactics and to radically change the direction of your business should your market shift.

The reality is that new mobile technology, the trend of social adoption, and the way your business interacts with these will be a critical lifeline for the future of your business.

What do you see as the future of local marketing in 2012?

Will models like Groupon or Living Social accelerate this churn?

One of the core cross-over points is that many social media marketing campaigns are driven by massive traditional media projects.

There are occasionally true word-of-mouth and ‘viral’ success stories, but if you look at the details of most case studies you will discover a critical point where a mainstream media element took something a launched it into the tabloids.

With that in mind… look at the following infographic and think about the six power house media channels that control the national share of voice.

• GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features)
• News Corp (FOX, Wall Street Journal, New York Post)
• Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios)
• Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr, BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures)
• Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros)
• CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 minutes)

Do you think social media is really detached from this?

My network consist of serious professionals that range from marketing agency executives trying to bolster client profiles, to independent consultants wanting to earn top-tier recognition as subject matter experts. On numerous occassions the conversation has been a conversation with ‘social media elite’ who fully understand blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and social community who are trying to paint themselves in the best light.  

It is only natural that my professional network turns to me and ask the question

“how do I game my Klout score?”

The first answer is “you probably shouldn’t”

The second answer is “why do you want to, why not?”

To formulate the right answer about gaming Klout it is easier to understand if we detail the reasons why a specific model does or does not function.

We also need to understand core flaws with what is happening in the marketplace and how people are adopting different systems.

So here we go…

There are both long and short term consequences of being scored on Klout (or other services like it) and there are always ways to manipulate a proprietary ranking system.

 This includes real world systems as well as online ones.

• In politics = stuffing the ballot box, running a campaign
• In union work = contract kickbacks, employee strikes
• In social platforms = paid voting/profiles, creating awesome content
• In search engines = search optimization, paid links, advertising, great content

Each scoring or ranking system has multiple counter balances

• In political and union work you have a variety of legal and regulatory rules that attempt to minimize flagrant abuses.
• In social platforms there are two counter-balancing forces working against each other: business profit vs. social expectation (but there are almost no legal or regulatory rules.)
• In a search engine there are business needs of the advertiser, the publisher (Google/Yahoo/Bing), and the user. 

So what is it worth?

 It depends on your viewpoint, but it is priceless if you understand the big picture and take advantage of tactical opportunities.

With that said, having a real understanding of influence and decision making funnels has been the holy grail of sales and marketing executives. The more factors a business knows about the what influences your decision making process, the easier it is for them to funnel you into a monetizable set of choices.

So in 2008 a company named Klout came along.
Three years later they have a business valuation of $200 million dollars.

This is what Klout says about itself:

We could all say ‘wow’  for a moment as we ponder the amazing insight we will gain from knowing why you take action.

But the moment would quickly fade away into reality.

Klout IS NOT the standard of influence.

The ability to rank information systematically and algorithmically was the same promise that Google and every other major search engine promised us.  

We all know that categorizing information algorithmically works to some extent, but the underlying problem is that it is something that can be gamed, manipulated, and managed by the intellectual (and social) elite.

• The ‘little guy’ always gets the short end of the stick.
• The named celebrity, business, or brand always wins.
• The biggest budget gets the ad space
  (and the ad space moves according to the needs of the business.)

Comparative ideas that Google taught us

• Is Google’s platform now worth billions of dollars? Yes.
• Is Google’s platform consistently wrong? Yep.
• Is it currently the best most of us have? Probably.
• Could Google have done it without selling our data? No way.
• Can Google justify a multi-billion dollar organization without monetizing the data? Never.

 Why does Google’s model compare to Klout?

The first reason is that Klout is attempting to collect enough data and user interest to monetize a unique scoring platform. In many ways this is no different from thousands of other rating systems like the Google, Yelp, the Better Business Bereau, NASDAQ,  and even your Credit Score. Google has made billions of dollars by aggregating all sorts of content and providing a systematic rating for it (commonly displayed in the form of stack ranked search results.)

The second reason is that Klout is where Google was ten years ago. Right now Klout is in a mission critical phase known as ‘user acquisition.’

When a start-up figures out some basic cogs and repeatable processes, most of them immediately look for an infusion of cash to refine the process and acquire the market.  Klout recently gained a $30 million dollar investment (and a $200 million dollar valuation) from Kleiner Perkins and several other sources. At this stage of the game the Klout team now has to convince as many people to opt into the platform. Without a massive amount of user data and the acceptance of the Klout score, the entire process of monetization becomes incredibly difficult. (Read more)  

Compounding Your Future Interest, Your Risk

By opting into Klout, you are giving away an amazingly valuable personal asset in the form of allowing yourself to be categorized using your social data. If you don’t understand the full ramifications of this type of universal scoring system, go back and think about the scoring systems I mentioned ealier (Google, Yelp, Better Business Bereau, NASDAQ, Credit Score.)

Previous ranking systems have all had core flaws that typically weren’t seen for years. As any one system gains popularity, the becomes a percentage of users who understand how to abuse the system.

When it comes to online platforms and communities, an entire industry of unethical and abusive industry experts is waiting to cash out on an unsuspecting user base that doesn’t understand the full ramification of what is occuring.  This dark sided opportunity is multiplied when the population at large doesn’t understand the connection points of the data we are giving away.

The Inherent Flaws of Our Ignorance

I’m not saying that Klout is without it’s merits, but it is not a transparent or factually consistent model of influencer identification.

Klout’s own description says that it doesn’t use
“potentially misleading metrics like follower or friend count.”
What metrics do they use? (see list of problems below…)

The common person doesn’t understand the ramifications of being labelled, sorted, categorized, scored, and monetized. They probably don’t understand what personal data is or what issues regarding online privacy arise when assembling information about individuals and groups of people.

 The 10 Problems

Problem #1

What are we really talking about? I don’t think it is influence.

If Klout had made the PR decision to choose any other tagline and not claim “influence”  I probably wouldn’t be writing this article.

I could use the descriptors of conversion rate, audience penetration, social syndication factor, and digital word-of-mouth multiplier and all of them would be a more accurate of what the Klout score actually is.

Problem # 2

The ‘mystery meat’ algorithm and secret sauce.

 CNN Money’s guest columnist John Scalzi said it best: “Who made Klout the arbiter of online influence, aside from Klout itself? I could rank your influence online. If you like: I’ll add your number of Twitter followers to your number of Facebook friends, subtract the number of MySpace friends, laugh and point if you’re still on Friendster, take the square root, round up to the nearest integer and add six. That’s your Scalzi Number (mine is 172). You’re welcome.

Problem #3

The Standard of Influence…influence of what?

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez – “We believe influence is the ability to drive action.”

I believe this definition to be fairly accurate, but the action that Klout measures is whether or not the person continutes to carry a message.

While the model of influence can be construde to measure the ability to repeat or engage with a message, the end result isn’t measured with Klout… but with campaign metrics, sales spreadsheets, brand impact studies, and word-of-mouth.

Klout provides some useful information about the conversion funnel across a very large audience, but the tactical measurement of influence is lost as Klout doesn’t measure targeted goals specific to the task at hand.

Problem #4

Secret Scoring Algorithm X  Monetization Issues X Marketing Campaigns

= recipe for disaster

When you take a secretive scoring system, apply the need to monetize it because you took $30m in funding, and have a need to have successful marketing campaigns to pay investors back… the end result is a scoring system that is made to sell. It isn’t a question of if it will be abused; but a question of who, why, and how often.

Problem #5

 I haven’t found any real groups of social data experts who have signed off on an unbiased third party review of the scoring system as it works in the past, present, and future.

Sure there are big PR and Marketing firms out there using Klout, but there are very few (if any) PR and marketing pros actually researching the underlying Kool-aid they are selling to the end client. There are also plenty of platforms and third party tools that have plugged into the Klout score because they have nothing better to use.  

As a professional I am not only hesitant to use Klout personally, but also against using an automated ‘secret sauce’ score for anything but a fluffy “wow” slide.

Problem #6 

On the flip side of problem #5, there are plenty of educated, experienced experts that I respect that share some great professional doubts about Klout score.
(see additional links at the bottom of the article, with hundreds of commentatary points)

Jeff Turner -
“I want to say this as clearly as I can – Klout is a game. Nothing more. Nothing less.” - Read More

Jure Klepic -
“Without transparency and documentation of how Klout obtains their data to define users scores, the “standard” cannot be seen as a “standard” at all.” – Read More

Problem #7

FTC Violations?

 I’m not saying there are any here, but the information being provided by Klout to end users, third party partners, and end business employers skirts dozens of interesting aspects of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the FTC’s requirement to disclose endorsements.

Klout does recommend that you disclose getting perks (sample below), but with thousands of people taking perks I’m very interested in knowing how many perks have been disclosed. If I was a big brand promoting myself through perks, I hope that my legal team has signed off on all the disclosure requirements with our fan base. The FTC has ruled that both brands and endorsers are individually liable for this type of problem.

 Problem #8

Data integrity and model consistency.

When I review the results for any influencer analysis I am trying to compare Apples to Oranges. I need to understand the data so that I can be assured that there is not a contaminated source of bias.

• If I stack rank a number of people (or myself) I want to be compared against similiar silos of information and data.
• If I (as an early adopter of social media) input multiple profiles, the comparison of my data set against someone with one or no opt-in data set is bias.
• If I look at a result and it simply says “trust me… we’ve considered all the appropriate factors….” then I’m not serving in the best interest of social science.

Problem #9

Equal Opportunity. Tied to problem #8.

If I am a company offering perks to an audience, am I adhering to sweepstakes, give-away, and lottery regulations that are state specific?

If I am an employer using this information in any way related to an employee, am I giving the same equal opportunity to non-Klout users who need to be held accountable for both disciplinary and career shifting scenarios?

Scenarios like these are critical to the function of a long term business (and the avoidance of costly labor and class action lawsuits.)

 Problem #10

International Privacy and Data Compliance.

As a data aggregator with a massive amount of profile information, does Klout store information in a way that is in compliance with international data laws?

 Community Question

A commenter at Business Insider asked this question:

 ”The value of credit bureaus are the relationships they have with credit issuers, where they get proprietary data back about credit history. This is difficult to replicate. In Klout’s case, all the data they are using is public (to my knowledge), so can someone please explain how their entire product can’t be replicated by 3-4 smart guys, a long weekend, and a case of red bull?”

 Not too far off actually.

It would take a bit more investment capital to construct the data warehouse, customize a scoring algorithm, and buy full access to the Facebook, Twitter, and Google data APIs.  It would also require a bit of funding for general strategy and user adoption tactics. The end result is hard to justify a potential venture when a major service with tens of millions of users such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin, Microsoft, or WordPress apply a new feature set for an existing user account (all of the services mentioned have the initial user account data to construct a very competitive, if not leading product.)

 Why doesn’t Klout get help?

The problem is a simple truth… the people who have the experience in detailing problems like the ones above are not exactly cheap strategic or tactical consultants.

If a person like myself sees value in a virtual commodity like Klout score, they have a few ways of monetizing that knowledge.

• abuse the system, gain points for clients and projects while leveraging excessive perks through loopholes.
• work against alongside the system to develop competitive or partner products that monetize flunctuating data points.
• work for Klout and get paid to keep the secret sauce secret; trying to convince everyone that you have a secret recipe.
• work for Klout and try to convince them to change core elements of the model (a politcal nightmare)
• opt-out of it as a professional tool and understand the gamification benefits around social adoption.  
• ignore Klout and move onto a measurement tool more defined, transparent, qauntifiable, and with certified data.  

My personal view

I may be a bit harsh on Klout.

They are tackling a big problem and have start-up woes just like any other venture funded company.

They are also treading into a realm of personal data, privacy, identity, and reputation that I am very passionate about. I hate seeing the ‘little guy’ or the most deserving people get abused by automated scoring systems that claim one thing and deliver another. I’ve talked about other directory companies like Google and Superpages in the past when they began monetizing user data, and our online influence and identity will become paramount to our online credit score in the not so distant future.

You can check out my related articles about data privacy, identity, and online reputation at the very bottom of the article.

What are your opinions on Klout?

Have you seen any people gaming Klout for the sake of having a virtual badge?

 What other platforms  provide measurement of an individual?  

 Posts About Gaming Klout

• Elevate Local, Yousaf Sekander – Klout: Here is how you can Game Klout
• Elevate Local, Yousaf Sekander – More shocking case studies – How to Game Klout
• Social Media Today, Jure Klepic – Is Klout On the Way Out?
• USA Today, Dan Vergano – Experts differ on Klout’s clout

 Things you should think about when dealing with people gaming Klout

• Delete Your Klout Profile Now
• How to get Your Profile and Data completely disconnected from Klout
• When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web 
• Social Web Threatened by SOPA Legislation 
• Klout Updates Privacy Features. Is it enough? 
• Is Klout Using Our Family to Violate Our Privacy?
• Klout CEO Joe Feranadez Responds to Critics

 Things you should think about when giving your data away

• Wall Street Journal – What They Know
• What other Companies are collecting the same kind of data as Rapleaf?

Let me talk about how I go about creating a social media dashboard

The basic answer is that I don’t have one tool (I have dozens, if not hundreds.)

The real answer is that I am not tracking social media.
I am tracking key performance indicators (KPI)
I don’t care if it is a shipping problem or a viral YouTube video.
I simply want to know how I can track it, manage it, and maximize results.

With that said: when I think about creating a social media dashboard or using a platform to track results… I am looking at several unique business identifiers that define what tool I need for the job at hand.

Key questions that control my decision process

• Who is going to use it?
  A big problem with advanced tools is that they have advanced controls. Knowing how to use some of the most precise tools often requires a lot of training. Additional questions revolve around whether or not I am going to be working with people on my team, an individual point of contact, or a team of workers on the platform.
• Who needs to digest the end information?
  An individual or team may produce a report with all sorts of useful metrics, but does the end business user have the capability of digesting the final data points and acting on them?
• Does it need to tie into legacy systems?
  If I can wave a magic wand and replace all your internal systems I’d be in heaven… but the reality is that these systems need to adhere to existing process points.
• What business metrics do I need to map against online touch points?
  Human resources, marketing, sales, the executive team, and every other department all have different business metrics. All of these data points have unique requirements for security issues, update frequency, reliability, data archiving, and workforce management.
• Where and when is this data consumed?
  It is a big fallacy to think everyone is tied to a desktop computer with high speed web access. Some users may be in the field, on smartphones, or working with paper.
• What is the data I want and do I need another tool to communicate it?
  Many of the tools below use various methods to extract, collect, and visualize data. Tools that are exceptional at data collection are typically complex and unfriendly to the end user. This requires you to give thought about using different specialized tools to collect data, and another set of tools to communicate with.
• What does all this really mean?
  As soon as you start monitoring this data and trying to analyze it, big and fluffy numbers begin to hide valuable and tiny numbers. Define short and long term trends that tie into your business goals. Focus on the most valuable KPI (key performance indicators.)
• Did I share the information with the right people?
  All the reporting and analysis in the world becomes useless if the right decision makers are not involved in your dashboard process. Golden nuggets of wisdom are sitting on your screen right now and no one in your organization can benefit from them if you fail to properly share them.

I have a strategic idea… now what?

All of the strategy in the world boils down to getting it done.

Unfortunately the tools for  ‘Getting It Done’ are vast and complex.

Many of the social media dashboard tools have overlapping features, while almost all of them have one or two unique features that may be applicable to the task at hand.

This problem is compounded for your social media dashboard project by the simple fact that almost all of these tools are constantly evolving to adapt to the latest social trends.

The following list of tools will hopefully lead you on your way. I have listed the pricing for the services that have public pricing pages. For services without public pricing, be aware that a variety of the tools have ‘ad hoc’ pricing models that can greatly vary from one project to the next depending on the amount of data being provided.

*One of the biggest warning points of any of these services is that ‘one tool does not meet all jobs’ (think about the questions above!)

So here are 40+ Social Media Dashboard Tools

Basic, out-of-the-box thinking services

• Google Homepage + Google Gadgets
• Google Alerts
• Google Spreadsheets
• Google Analytics (new version out this month)
• Firefox (with the Webmynd plugin, or Tabble.it)
• MS Excel (not exactly social media, but it is the most popular data tool)

Quick & Easy ‘good stuff’ (+FREE)

Paid Social Media Dashboard Tools

Individual Centric Social Media Dashboard Tools

• Nimble
• Gist
• Xobni
• Threadsy
• Google Homepage + Google Gadgets
• RescueTime (for tracking all that lost time on social media.)

Twitter Focused Social Media Dashboard Tools

• TweetDeck
• CoTweet
• HootSuite
• Seesmic

Executive & Enterprise Software for Making Your Own Dashboard

 Any tips or services to share for
building out a social media dashboard?

(if you want some more tactical dashboard tips, check out this article I wrote on our corporate blog – Social Media Training and Team Sharing Dashboards)

I’m going to give you some incredibly useful tips for using Google and Linkedin to discover rich details about the exact type of person you want to reach out to.

Just keep in mind that you never know what type of information really exists about an individual, community, or business until you do some research.

(This is an example covering some tidbits about Boeing Employee Credit Union.)

Why am I writing this?

One of the most common questions I get is from professionals who are trying to sell something.

In the business world someone is always trying to sell something…

but the act of selling comes with a very difficult hurdle of locating people you can sell to.

That hurdle is made even more challenging as the price of your service or product increases,
the available pool of prospects with buying authority decreases.

Many businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to reach new prospects through all sorts of crazy marketing campaigns. They try events, mass mailings, executive interviews, public relations, online marketing, and buy all sorts of over used marketing lists.

At the end of the day they could have just thought about using Google.
(with some help from Linkedin…)

For Free.

Social Media for Sales – Tip #1

Establish your target profile.

If you are on Linked already, open up your profile and review the top 5 to 10 people in your network who were ‘perfect decision makers’ to talk to. If you don’t have enough people in your own account, check out some related professionals in your network that have been successful doing what you want to do.

Take note of the industries, companies, and titles of these individuals. Write down each individual’s Linkedin URL.

View each person’s individual profile.

Take note of the sidebar area where it says
“Viewers of this profile also viewed…”

Browse through this area and write down another set of  industries, companies, and titles of these individuals.

Social media for Sales – Tip #2

Building Your Social List

Go to Google.com

I am going to teach you about a highly useful  search parameter:

site:

The “site:” parameter forces Google to return only search results from a specific site. When combined with a few other parameters you can develop a long list of people to reach out to.

As an example I’m going to search for all senior executives at BECU.
(Boeing Employee Credit Union)

Google Search - site:linkedin.com (director OR vp OR vice president) + at becu

 This search result will give me 1,440 results, additional parameters could be added around geography, department function, company, and title to focus on high-value individuals.

As a general query it contains plenty of information points on page one.

• Vice President of Technology Services
• Vice President of Human Resources
• Vice President of Portfolio Management
• Vice President of Compliance
• Vice President of Legal

Some of the 1,440 results are not actually positions at BECU. They are actually connections to other business professionals at like-minded organizations.

This data allows me to see two things very quickly: the overall executive and organizational structure of BECU, as well as top-level connections to other industry groups.

A business development professional could spend plenty of time following up with this audience.

 Social Media Tip #3

Researching the Company

Google has some other useful links for researching press announcements and official partnerships.

These types of online declarations can be reviewed by simply using the “link:” paramater that would look like this example:

Google Search – link:becu.org

This will show us dozens of sites that link to the becu.org hompage.
If you want to sort by date you can use Google’s search tools to filter by recency and specific time frame.

Two additional searches that often pull up interesting data uses the parameter “filetype”

• filetype:ppt becu (522 Powerpoint results)
• filetype:xls becu (1590 Excel spreadsheet results)

 These filetype searches can be extremely damaging in the wrong hands.

By examining different search terms, an aggressive or criminal organization can often find data files that were unknowingly posted by an employee, vendor, or client. The nature of Powerpoint and Excel files in relationship to a credit union or financial group typically refers to sensitive financial data or forward looking business strategies.

Social Media for Sales – Bonus Tip
Finding Individual Details and Getting Social

If you are looking to research someone online and want to get a quick snapshot of how they appear online, we can take the lists we generated above and use a simple query on Google to locate them on social platforms.

Google Search: “john doe” site:facebook.com OR site:twitter.com OR site:linkined.com
(you can add a city/state parameter such as Seattle,WA if you are seeking local prospects.)

Wrapping up Your Social Media for Sales Strategy

The above audience list is just the beginning.

Once you have generated a list you need to sit back and apply a reasonable business strategy for reaching these individuals and converting them into the right call-to-action.

The reality of the social media adoption trend is that relationship information has shifted; the past few decades had given us the  luxury of forming relationships on a personally managed level.

That isn’t a 100% true anymore.

Ten years ago it was pretty difficult for an outsider to know who was in a circle of friends. A private investigator could have researched where I was and who I met on a daily basis, but the act of knowing who was in my social circle took a tremendous amount of effort to discover, track, and visualize.

Skip ahead to today’s current social experiment and a majority of us  have ‘opted in’ to sharing our social connections. In many cases the act of using tools like Google and Facebook have opened up a Pandora’s box of social data that very few of us understand.

Data researchers like myself can sit down at a keyboard with some advanced computer scripts and draw a picture of an individual, community, or marketplace in a fraction of the time it would have taken ten years ago.

How does competitive intelligence and social media tie together?

Take the amount of information we share about ourselves as individuals and multiply that by the number of people in our business (hundreds to thousands of times.)

The data begins to reveal things that no one person revealed as an individual.

Imagine this scenario: as a business development professional you are accidentally invited to your competitor’s annual client party where you’ve been given the opportunity to personally meet the account teams working on your competitor’s biggest corporate accounts and you also get to talk directly with the clients themselves.

You could have spent millions of dollars marketing to these people and never had this type of chance… to study what your competitor is doing and to ask top questions to the perfect ‘A list’ of preferred clients.

When you understand competitive intelligence and social media,
this type of party is going on twenty-hours a day, seven days a week…
and you are invited.

What types of questions can your answer with online competitive intelligence?

• Who are my competitors clients?
• Who are my competitors employees?
• Who are my competitors vendors?
• What projects are my competitors focusing on?
• What mega-trends are my competitors trying to monetize?
• Where are clients talking about my competitors?
• What keywords are sending traffic and revenue in my marketplace?
• What social trends connect with my sales process?
• What flashpoints cause customers to be dumped on the market?
  (bankruptcies, mergers, news, etc.)
• Who used to work for my competitor?
• What can my competition discover about me?

Understanding data silos

When you look at consumers, customers, and employees-  they  intentionally and unintentionally expose data points using social media.

This ‘social media’ can be in the form of social networks like Facebook, mobile device usage such as iPads and smartphones, or a variety of other public data systems.

With all this data you can begin to tactically plan around clusters of information that are very targeted to specific aspects of your business.

A few example categories include:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Public Relations
• Customer Care
• Expansion Opportunities
• Marketplace Gaps
• Product Planning

It is important to have some basic business methodologies to help define what questions you are trying to address. If you lose focus of what your objective is you can quickly research endless amounts of data and have no actionable business ROI.

A real world example

In a review of five large banking brands we analyzed roughly 85,000 employees to determine social media adoption.

Since we knew the naming conventions of the corporate e-mail for each bank, we could identify a majority of user e-mail addresses using published company directories, as well as simple searches on Google looking for a list of 100+ titles and specific keywords (“account manager” OR “account analyst” AND “Banking Brand ABC”) – we could compile data sources from other online entities such as Facebook, Twitter, ZoomInfo, Whitepages, Zillow, and Linkedin to correlate other personal/geographic/demographic information.

• 72% on Facebook
• 39% on Linkedin
• 4% on Twitter

A very small segment used public profiles on Youtube and personal blogs (less than 1%), but of those that were on YouTube and personal blogs they were also on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. This small section of professionals identified a ‘super adopter’ who was very familiar with digital communication tools. Less than 1% were also active commentators on blogs.

Once we had a list broken up by brand and title…

We could stack rank all of the users based on usage, most commonly used terms, and most popular conversations.

We could take segments of names such as all the Vice President titles and run them against open conference sites, popular blogs, and local meetings/events.

This allowed us to define what executives were actively engaged in specific industry conversations. It also allowed us to identify entry points in conversation between people at conferences using elements such as hashtags or mentions.

What could we learn from some executive influencers?

Social Importance- by examining specific executives we could see who they were engaged with. One executive interacting with them identified a base conversation, while multiple executives interacting with an individual identified high worth prospects/clients.

Prospect Profiles- by examining engaged personalities online we could see micro trends in followers, friends, and readership groups. This allowed us to target specific traits about like-minded people who were not already engaging. This data led us to sources where these individuals collected on topical items related to news sources, online communities, and search keywords.

Event and Association Audiences- once we had a prospect profile, we could backtrack back to specific real world events and associations. As the events and association groups had online components, these opened up additional high priority lists that we could examine previous attendees, executives of interest, and future social/search strategies.

 Competitive Intelligence is right at your fingertips…

All of the data is available here and now.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube all provide different sets of information to think about.

Your organization provides proprietary information on clients, prospects, marketing trends, and industry events.

Your business partners all have a few points of data to consider.

and a search engine is just a click away…

Have you given thought to your competitive intelligence recently?

If you need help with creating a social media training or policy framework, drop me a line.

I’d be happy to detail a few effective ways for using social media to get business results (not just marketing, business impact items like competitive intelligence  and influencer analysis.)

In the meantime, here are some of my ideas on
getting your social media policy tuned up.

5 Leadership Tips for a Social Media Policy

One of the biggest problems facing business leaders is that society at large has adopted the mindset of open dialogue and personal opinion. I personally believe that this has led to some great changes, but the downside is that very few people keep up to date on changes in technology, legal regulation, social trends, and  the business impacts.

Social Media Policy – 5 Essential Questions

Business executives often rely on traditional human resource and public relations tactics to manage how they manage the workforce. The problem is that these traditional tactics don’t take into account the numerous laws, regulations, and compliance issues that are found at industry, local, state, and federal levels.

Internal Social Media Issues

When examining how businesses can utilize social media, many professionals forget to examine low-hanging fruit that is already within and organization. The following tips will help you think about activating employee social media efforts so that you can monitor, manage, encourage, and grow your business.

Social Media Guidelines and Employee Evangelists

Unlike the legal tone of a normal social media policy and communication plan, social media guidelines need to be created in a way that encourages your internal supporters and immediate friends/family to grow your business.

Social Media Policy and Corporate Management

Your Social Media Policy serves as a channel for your leadership: communicating business fundamentals and actionable goals to maximize opportunities.  A good social media policy also involves educating and motivating your team to find the best possible uses for new tools and avoid potential pitfalls.

Social Media Policy Videos

The following social media policy and guideline videos provide a simple way to educate yourself (and your team) by simply watching five to thirty minutes of sample policy videos from organizations around the globe.

To produce valid social media analytics we first have to define social media:

Social media is not a simple or clear cut tool. It is a very basic and adaptable cog that fits into personal and professional needs. If we think about social media as a nebulous category, the ability to track points of impact that affect our audience become clouded by buzz words and gaps in knowledge.

We could say that social media is ‘all things to all people’ or that include includes the whole world wide web. In some conversations these statements could be correct.
In the business conversation these statements are merely red herrings that obfuscate the problem.

To help fix our murky view of social media we need to break down some core questions of who we are trying to impact… and understand where our market place is heading.

Core User Questions

• who is using it
• when are they using it
• why are they using it
• what hardware do they use
• what need does it solve
• what motivates them to use it

We also need to think of the business drivers that actually control return on investment (ROI) and where efficiency savings are located within our business process.

Step One: Stop thinking social media is free

Everyone who thinks it is ‘free’ is throwing away some of the most valuable business intelligence they could ever have. The lost opportunity of having ‘free’ associated to your understanding of online business has cost you untold revenues and savings.

In the long run social media takes tremendous amounts of time, budget, strategy, and planning to accomplish very specific campaigns. The core obstacle of scaling social media efforts is that it relies on a social component within a population of users. This social component is often very fickle. The best social media campaigns locate specific aspects of an audience that address  six core user questions and locate trends that have an on-going or repetitive cycle (i.e., they have identified themselves as not be ‘fickle’)

By answering these questions and applying them to the market, we can begin to create functioning social media analytics that make sense for our business.

Step Two – Analyzing Trends and Cycles

Persistent Trends

These are often called mega trends; when there is a massive social adoption and word-of-mouth promotion of some underlying need.

In simple examples you could look at things like “being environmentally friendly” gaining traction from 1990 to 2011. You could also look at the Apple product market and see a continually moving need to purchase iPhones.

In the social space itself, large trends like the adoption of Facebook and Twitter are easy to see from 2005 to today.

While the above examples are pretty big, it isn’t necessarily required that an mega trend last years and years.
Some trends last weeks or months and eventually die off (never to be seen again.)

Think about where you fall into the mix

If you are interacting with a mega trend, you need to wisely choose where your point of interaction is going to occur.

The biggest benefit of a mega trend is also your biggest weakness: you can tactically ride the wave or you can be crushed beneath it.

If you don’t have the critical budget needed to affect the mega trend at the top level, you need to strategically plan where and when you’ll be interacting with it.

iPhone, iPad, and iPad2 example

Unless you have a massive budget and a great idea, going head to head with Apple’s tidal wave of marketing and social adoption is a pretty futile approach.

If we drill down to specific geographic areas we can tactically decide where to win our victories.

The following charts show a breakdown of the search volumes and demand for iPhone, iPad, and iPad 2.

If we were a competing product or an iPad accessory, the 3rd chart shows us the top ten cities where we can potentially engage without spreading ourselves too thin.

Repetitive Cycle

If you’ve ever seen a EKG or heart monitor, you know what I’m talking about.

Repetitive cycles are an ideal  ground for social media analytics because they represent an opportunity to analyze the spikes, predict when the next one will occur, and strategize a tactic for when you want to interact with it.

The great part about repetitive cycles are that they are literally everywhere.

The bad part about repetitive cycles are they happen like clockwork, so if you don’t have your act together you will miss the opportunity.

While some repetitive trends require some expert forecasting, there are many scheduled industries that have repetitive cycles.

 American Idol example

The chart below shows the hit series American Idol from 2004 through today.

Each season has a nearly identical set of promotions, viewer adoption, and industry events. Each season can be analyzed to detail specific events that built up an on-going promotional buzz, followed by smaller interest spikes when news events such as judges quitting or contestants left occurred.

Choosing your Mega and Repetitive Trends wisely
The Social Media Impact Point

This is where strategic planning and tactical execution collide, when the proverbial ‘rubber meets the road.’

Being successful in a market requires an understanding of the effort required, the amount of traction gained, and the speed of which you can accelerate.

This requires a business to tactically execute against a market trend that overlaps with business capability to engage with that trend.

As a tool social media allows us to engage at an almost infinite number of points. The initial conversation that serves as a launching point into the next wave needs to be timed against the actual velocity of the wave. If you can’t devote enough effort or control to stay on top of the wave, you need to wait until another wave comes by.

You also need to know what a ‘really sweet wave’ looks like.

Even mega trends have ups and downs, and your team or equipment may not be up to par for trying to ride the tsunami.

If you business model has trouble accelerating and compensating for peaks and lulls, you’ll probably want to find a calm uptrend that your team can manage and monetize appropriately.

An example with shoes…

Assume we sell shoes…

We can see from 2004 to 2011 that running shoes (in blue) is going up year after year. On a yearly basis it also has some pretty hefty ups and downs. As a business owner, if I am trying to maintain a constant workforce and inventory with consistent sales I’ll be hard pressed to keep my monthly payroll and production capacities evenly matched without spending a hefty budget on warehousing and pre-order manufacturing.

If I want a very consistent yearly business, my two choices are walking shoes and more general athletic shoes… but walking shoes has a slight yearly increase compared to the slight yearly decrease of athletic shoes.

 Hope you learned something!

If you found it useful, please ‘like’ and share with your network.

The technical requirements and strategies of ranking high in organic listings is not rocket science (then again, I’m probably considered a rocket scientist when it comes to SEO.) The true hurdles of search engine optimization and answering the question of ” why is SEO important? ” boils down to some simple business fundamentals.

Imagine this scenario

Your company purchases $25,000 a month in adwords.
You are in a highly competitive marketplace that has multiple layers of advertisers trying to reach the same target audience.

Your SEM campaign represents 100 high-value keywords that average $10.00 per click.

On any given month your $25,000 budget translates to 5,000 unique, highly targeted visitors.

You maintain a consistent conversion rate of 2.5%
Your 5,000 unique visitors equals 125 new customers per month.

Your total cost per acquisition is $25,000 bduget / 125 customers = $200 per new customer

Over a twelve month period you will spend $300,000 and get 1500 new customers.

Of the 100 high-value keywords in your SEM campaign you are buying %100 of the available advertising.

This 100% equals only %25 of the available market.

For every one person who clicks on your SEM advertising, three people click on the natural search category.

If a new client creates $1000 in revenue, 1500 new customers from SEM create $1,500,000 in revenue.

If you had similarly ranking results in organic SEO listings, 4500 new customers from SEO create $4,500,000 in revenue.

Credibility and Brand Recognition

As individuals we have been subconsciously trained to value personal recommendations and expert opinions at a higher rate than paid advertising.

The act of searching on a service like Google, Yahoo, or Bing makes most of us take any advertising with a ‘grain of salt’ even when we do click on a button. We inherently know that advertising is intended to sell an idea, product, or service to us.

If you find two products online and one is from paid advertising and one is from an expert article. Most individuals would be more inclined to select the prodduct mentioned in an (apparently) unbiased result.

This selection means that the store selling the shoe has a higher conversion rate on this portion of the funnel. If the above 2.5% conversion rate created 1500 new customers using SEM, a slightly higher conversion rate of 2.75% could create 4,950 new customers.

A difference in annual revenue of $1,500,000 through SEM versus $4,950,000 via SEO.

If we were to select the product based on an advertisement we clicked on, many of us would likely go into a price competitive comparison of other advertisements.

By default of using advertising as a choice of selection, many consumers in the SEM funnel are price shopping. These are not loyal consumers, merely opportunity shoppers. From a business perspective these consumers are placed into a constant state of arbitrage as they wait for cheaper options to appear.

Questions you should ask yourself about SEO and SEM

• Do you want to pay for every click?
• Are you looking for opportunity shoppers or loyal customers?
• Does your company sell on price or value?
• Do you want 25% of the market or 75% ?

Any insights for why SEO is important to your business?