Upstream and Downstream Activities for Social Media Campaigns

As with any business activity, it is important to realize that the upstream an downstream activities are extremely important to the campaign’s success. What is the upstream activity for a social media campaign? The business purpose on why are we doing this work. Start with business strategy, define business goals and then list the social media objectives to align with business goals. Create a plan and budget for people, process and content.

There are 3 main steps to assemble a campaign:

• Listen – once the goals are decided, start listening for topics and keywords for your brand and competitors.
• Measure – finding how well you are doing needs measurements, analysis and review. This should encompass all parts of your campaign.
• Engage – figure out the social channels that you want to use for this campaign, strategy and policy to respond and engage with your target audience and yes, the content which will draw your audience

As the campaign starts producing results, its time to focus on the most important and often ignored downstream activity: Continuous improvement by reviewing the results to see what is working and what needs to be changed. Social media campaigns are a natural fit for the Japanese concept of Kaizen.

The listening or monitoring part of the campaign should provide insights to validate your business assumptions, discover topics or themes, understand sentiments, watch trends over time and to see how your audience is distributed across social networks. These insights should start driving the actions that you take.

Your engagement plan should include a content calendar with a variety of content types and enough bandwidth to respond to queries, suggestions, criticism and leads. As you engage actively, the feedback and interaction from your audience should guide your subsequent engagement plan. Keep an eye on the growth of your social reach.

Tips on managing campaigns

With so many tracks going on, this is where a measurement dashboard becomes valuable as it provides you at-a-glance summary of various measures and whether your primary goals are heading in the right direction or if corrective action is needed.

The key is to remember that social media campaigns require plenty of fine-tuning in the beginning to get the right balance of volume and quality. Too many results will overwhelm you and missing out on relevant mentions is obviously a problem. Remember the concept of Kaizen.

Speed also matters. Brands must get timely information, understand what it means and act on that.  More than ever, it is important for teams collaborate in real time, discuss ideas and be able to distribute work. The real time collaboration and task management features in MutualMind allow teams to be nimble and responsive. The interesting thing is that teams can see the impact of their work  as the campaign progresses. The ease of making changes to the campaign and the ability to post and schedule content make it a breeze to engage.

The solution offered by Itracks and MutualMind transforms market research to market insights. According to Forrester Research, “Market researchers increase their value when they provide not just research results but also strategy and insights based on customers, sales, and competitor information.”

Here’s the text of the full press release.

Itracks, the world-leading expert in online focus groups and patent holder for qualitative applications, today announced that it has teamed up with social software specialists MutualMind to offer breakthrough social media monitoring software designed specifically for the market research industry.

The Itracks Social Media Monitoring online application provides advanced social media monitoring and analytics capabilities for market researchers at an affordable price. The software captures data from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and data generated from other social media platforms. The data is then organized in a way that is meaningful to market researchers to develop their research design or monitor their client’s activity. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of what people are discussing online and the sentiments associated with brand mentions.

“We believe that this is the most powerful analytics tool to reach the research industry in years and the most significant advancement since the introduction of online surveys,” said Dan Weber, President of Itracks.

He added: “With the increased use of online social networks and more people talking about brands online, keeping track of such conversations and comments is vital for researchers and we’re pleased to be leading the way in helping them to do this.”

The Itracks Social Media Monitoring software gives market researchers the ability to provide organisations with a whole new level of understanding about what is being said about their products or services across the web. By monitoring actions taken as a result of any initial research, the application also gives researchers the opportunity to stay engaged with their clients, long term.

In addition to this, the product can also be used alongside any online qualitative research platform, traditional face-to-face focus groups or quantitative project, and is available through a pricing model that makes it accessible for more researchers.

MutualMind CEO Babar Bhatti said: “We are excited to be partnered with Itracks, the pioneers in online qualitative research, to provide the market research industry with a product that can truly assist with traditional methods and ensure researchers can engage with their clients, long term.”

About MutualMind
MutualMind is a web application that helps businesses and marketing firms monitor as well as promote brands on social networks while providing actionable analytics and insights to increase social media ROI. MutualMind Inc is a privately-held company based in Dallas, Texas and was founded in 2008 by a small team of entrepreneurs with extensive experience in technology, product development and analytics. Visit the MutualMind website: www.mutualmind.com.

About Itracks
Itracks is a world-leading expert in online focus groups and the patent holder for qualitative applications. Leading market research professionals and Fortune 500 companies recognize Itracks’ online applications as the most client-focused, reliable and flexible available. The sophisticated suite of qualitative, quantitative, online community, social media monitoring and panel services are easy to use and come equipped with a wide range of multi-media capabilities. Visit Itracks’ website at www.itracks.com.

Twitter

As can be expected, there’s plenty of diversity and variation in the Twitter use by different departments, labs and initiatives at MIT. There’s no official directory of social accounts from MIT so I manually searched for Twitter accounts from MIT community and found over 25 of those. I used a few basic measures such as followers, activity and influence to create a list of 10 MIT Twitter accounts:

medialab, techreview, mitpress, mitsloan, mitocw, mitworld, mitsloanexeced, mit_alumni, mitentforum and mit100k.

I examined the growth of these Twitter accounts over a period of 3 months, from May 2010 to August 2010. Here’s a brief summary of what I observed.

• MIT Media lab’s @medialab is the most followed, most actively growing and most listed twitter account from MIT.
• MIT Technology Review @techreview had the most tweets and the highest Klout (a measure of user influence score, more at Klout.com). It was number 2 in terms of followers and listings.
• These were followed by @mitpress (MIT Press), @mitsloan (Sloan School of Business) and @mitocw (OpenCourseware, praised here)

Facebook

There are 50 or so different places within Facebook where different MIT groups interact. But it is easy to get started because the MIT Alumni Facebook page has all the information. The tab called MIT on Facebook provides a listing of the Class Pages, University groups and Alumni groups and pages. It is easy to see the decentralized social media model at work here. The fan base and level of activity varies widely. Some of the existing groups are beginning to migrate to pages – most likely because of better insights which are available for Facebook pages.

MIT OpenCourseWare is the most popular on Facebook with over 7000 fans (see its praise here). It makes sense as the OCW program generates plenty of interest from knowledge seekers around the world and its Facebook page has valuable content such as engaging videos from YouTube.

MIT Alumni Association is second with over 4600 fans (as of this writing). The official MIT alumni blog, Slice of MIT, is promoted through this page. The fan page of MIT Enterprise Forum – an organization within MIT Alumni Association which promotes technology entrepreneurship – has over 2600 fans from around the world. Some pages have custom apps as well, notably Alumni Page and Sloan Executive Education. Overall, the inclusion of rich media, customization and a larger scale of members makes Facebook an important channel for MIT – one which can be potentially utilized in a much better way than it is being used now.

Disclaimer: Even though I have been associated with MIT Alumni Association and MIT Enterprise Forum of Dallas Fort Worth, the views in this post are based on my personal opinion. All of the information for this post was collected from public sources.

Facebook and Twitter Scheduled Posts

With this release, we now support the ability to schedule Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets for posting at a scheduled date and time of your choosing.

Scheduling a post is easy. Compose the content in either the built-in Facebook or Twitter client. Check the box marked “Post Later”, select a date and a time and click the button to schedule it.

You can manage the scheduled posts by clicking the scheduled posts link from the sidebar. You can also delete any posts which have not been processed yet just in case you change your mind.

Exclusion Filters

We’ve also added the ability to add exclusion rules to your campaign set up. If there are specific keywords you would like to have our listening platform ignore, just simply add them here and we’ll take care of the rest.

The exclusion filters can be modified when you edit your campaign. You can either specify a keyword or a web URL (http:// or https://).

What’s the difference, you may ask. If you specify a keyword (or phrase), then our listening platform will filter our any content where the keyword occurs in the body of that content item. If you specify a web URL, it will filter out content items whose destination URL contains the given URL pattern.

And Much More

We’ve also some minor changes and squashed some bugs along the way. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

What’s Next?

We’re working hard to bring you some really neat features very soon. Here’s just a taste of what were cooking up in our labs:

• Integration with Google Analytics.
• Enhanced campaign configuration with beefed up monitoring intelligence.
• Enhanced drill-downs. Because drill-downs rock… we can always do more of these.
• Integration with more data sources.

This story is an interesting case of how social media can be used to diffuse tension when a negative event happens. It is important to note that such a situation can arise for organizations of any size operating within any industry. Preparedness and awareness is the key to be able to respond effectively. Within a few days of this incident (that took place on August 9th), the term JetBlue has gone from being a noun to a verb. As in “to go JetBlue” on someone or something.

Take a look at some real-time search results we picked up recently at MutualMind while monitoring this situation:

We also observed a few interesting things from our monitoring platform:

Spike in JetBlue’s Share of Voice

There was a big reaction from the public which put JetBlue’s mentions ahead of its competition. Prior to this event, American Airlines was the top dog when it came to the volume of mentions for US airlines. Since August 9th, JetBlue became the top trending topic among airlines.

Before the incident (August 1st – August 8th):

After the incident (August 9th onwards):

Official Response

It took 2 days for JetBlue to come up with a response in the form of a well-crafted blog post. JetBlue decided not to engage on Twitter or Facebook for obvious reasons!

Impact on Reach

Compared with the past, this episode gave a boost to the rate at which JetBlue adds Twitter followers. The rate of change went up from 37 new followers per day for August 1st – August 8th to 147 new followers per day for August 9th – August 12th.

Shift in Sentiment

Before this event, the JetBlue brand used to have more positive sentiments than negative ones overall. During this episode, the ratio has evened out (9% negative, 9% positive) which shows a split amongst the general public about the different aspects of this story.

Sentiments before and after:

There are at least 3 success factors for a “question and answer” solution:

1. Quality of content – are the answers of best possible quality? are the right people answering the questions?
2. Ease of finding the information – how difficult is it to find the information within the product and on the larger web
3. Reputation of those who participate – can the system accurately identify experts and reward them?

Here’s the comparison view for Q & A platforms. The right column indicates whether the platform makes its information available to search engines or not.

I expect the Facebook Q & A feature to develop and mature over the next few months. As Mashable points out: Facebook Q & A could benefit from a more seamless and connected integration across the social platform. Perhaps most notably, the feature could be more effectively integrated with Facebook Pages.

What is your favorite tool to find answers and to browse the solutions from peers and experts? What features would you like to see in Q & A products?

Google Accounts Support

With this release, we now support access to Google Accounts. Just like Twitter and Facebook before it, you can add as many Google Accounts you have access to and MutualMind lets you access your Google resources without having to juggle multiple logins.

Go to “Admin” and then click “Brand Google Accounts” to get started.

YouTube Insights

With added integration with Google Accounts, we can now bring you detailed YouTube channel insights. Not only do we provide video engagement stats for your own channel, but for any number of channels managed by your competition as well!

Sentiment Filtering

We also added some enhancements to the sentiment browser. You can now filter the sentiment data in many ways for easier browsing.

And Much More

We’ve also some minor changes and squashed some bugs along the way. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

What’s Next?

We’re working hard to bring you some really neat features very soon. Here’s just a taste of what were cooking up in our labs:

• Integration with Google Analytics.
• Enhanced campaign configuration with beefed up monitoring intelligence.
• Enhanced drill-downs. Because drill-downs rock… we can always do more of these.
• Integration with more data sources.

Here’s my quick guide on how to effectively use automated sentiment analysis in social media.

1. Spend time to research the keywords which are best fit for your business objectives and optimize your search based on the result set that you get.
2. Use sentiment analysis to detect change in sentiments over a reasonable duration, say 3-months or longer. Shortcuts don’t work well.
3. Competitive Analysis – compare your results against those of your competitors.
4. Don’t miss the forest for the trees – sentiment analysis is more valuable in the aggregate. Explore the drill-down capabilities but don’t get lost on individual messages.
5. When using a tool, look for the capability to re-classify the sentiment, which should train the tool.
6. Don’t underestimate neutral comments – there are plenty of business insights and business opportunities there.
7. Source is important: Twitter users tend to complain more. Facebook fan pages tend to have more rich media associated with content.
8. Understand the limitations of software-based automation: irony and sarcasm are not well understood by software. Content with mixed opinions are hard to catch.
9. Context is key for improving accuracy of sentiment analysis. Optimize for your industry or vertical.
10. Combine user and content ranking with sentiments to prioritize your results.

I believe that one of the reason for the disappointment with sentiment analysis is the unrealistic expectations from what the science of today can deliver in terms of understanding human sentiments. With the explosion of user-generated content, Sentiment analysis has become one of the active areas of research in Computer Science and Linguistics (for example, follow this link for a recent paper on sentiment analysis).

I plan to write more detailed posts on the topic of sentiment analysis including the various approaches and options beyond fully automated analysis – call it semi-automated sentiment analysis where the tool does more than 90% of the work in automated fashion. I will also share case studies of how MutualMind has helped its clients with sentiment analysis.

I hope this was helpful – please suggest some additional points and share your experience.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
— Edward Abbey

References:

• New York Time
• Economist
• Net-Savvy Executive
• Web Metrics Guru

Facebook and Google are each coming at the same social search prospect from opposite ends of the continuum—one a search site looking at learning relationships, the other a social network trying to upskill in search.

Andrew provides interesting perspective on  Google’s long term plan.

Slowly, Google has been learning our social graph. One outcome has been the Social Search feature debuted in October – but this still feels experimental, rather than a final destination, and is only available to U.S. users.

For all the pounding it’s taken, Google Buzz is just one more expression of the graph Google has assembled – the input/output part. To me, Buzz was only ever intended as an inducement to populating that graph. The reasoning: if people are invited to aggregate all their lifestream outputs and to update all their social profiles from one place, they might see value in plugging their social identities in to Google Profiles (after all, how many Google users have ever bothered to create a Google Account?).

The more a search engine knows about you (and the people you know), the more relevant its results might be (and, perhaps, the higher its CPMs), because—the theory goes—we tend to trust personal recommendations.

The article ends with an interesting line: Google is no more a social network than Facebook is a search engine—perhaps even less so. But, while neither has yet cracked this nut, the game is long and the rewards ample.

What are your views on the big war? Which side are you on?

Near Real-time Sentiments

As of this release, sentiments and sentiment stats are updated in near real-time. You’ll be able to get up to the minute sentiment analysis for all the social content we capture for your campaigns.

Hour-by-Hour Activity Charts

We have also added hour-by-hour activity visualizations for most of the data we capture (whenever applicable).

The following data can now be visualized in this way:

• Sentiments
• Facebook page activity
• Twitter engagement, mentions and retweets

Sentiment Reclassification

We’ve added the ability to manually reclassify sentiments tagged by our system. Just click the star next to any content item to reclassify it. You can now help us train and improve our sentiment engine!

All Time Campaign Stats

We’ve added a concise summary of a campaign’s all time stats to the main insights dashboard. You can now see how well your campaign has performed since the day you started it.

Date Range Shortcuts

We’ve added convenient date range shortcuts to the insights date range bar. You can now quickly switch between last week’s and today’s data.

And Much More

We’ve also some minor changes and squashed some bugs along the way. We look forward to your feedback.