Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer while he visited our offices on Tuesday. During his stay, he spoke to our company, joined us for a local tweet-up in Seattle, as well as co-presented a webcast with our own Director of Professional Services, Carly Wilcox. The webcast was titled, “What She Said” – How Women’s Social Conversations Impact Buying Intent and Purchasing Behavior.  Their presentation discussed how listening to female conversations online can provide insights into what influences and impacts women’s buying decisions and behavior.

A few of the many key takeaways included:

• Marketers are missing the mark when it comes to connecting with the gender that accounts for 85% of all consumer purchases (everything from autos to health care)
• Forums can be incredibly important for insights around women’s buying intent and a critical place to connect and engage with them
• The types of forums your brand should participate in may not be as intuitive as you think

If you didn’t get a chance to join us live for the webcast, you can watch a replay of it here.

Today’s companies understand the importance of listening to their customers and value social media’s role in the listening process.  But blending social data into the mix of business data you are already managing is nearly impossible if the data is not consistent, clean and formatted in a way that allows you to slice, dice and pivot on the aspects that are meaningful to you.   In our last post we looked at the two more challenges businesses face when looking at integrating social data into their current systems—the processing the volumes of data to make it useful and having the technical expertise and requirements to build and maintain the systems required to accomplish these tasks.  Let’s take a look at the next challenge.

4. Data Quality, Quantity and Enrichment 

How many times have you heard the saying, “it’s the quality, not the quantity, that counts”?  When it comes to social media data integration, both ends of the spectrum apply.  The social data that is integrated into existing systems must be high quality, validated and consistent or enterprises risk polluting business applications downstream.  As we discussed earlier, social data comes from a diverse ecosystem of sites in an unstructured format.

This data requires parsing, cleansing, standardizing, validating, de-duplicating and enhancement with additional metadata prior to incorporating it into your existing systems.  And of course, to get the big picture view, to capture every selling, servicing or learning opportunity businesses want all of the data.  Not just a sampling, and not just Facebook or Twitter.  No, they want all of the data possible, from all of the social channels, delivered in the most refined format possible.  It sounds like an intimidating amount of work because it is!  But it’s also one of the greatest assets that the Visible Intelligence® platform brings to the table.

Data enrichments including sentiment, geography, media type, author influence, demographics, psychographics and custom enrichments, tags, turn a heap of social data in social listening platform into a social analytics powerhouse.  Sophisticated indexing and search capabilities combined with robust filtering and sorting tools allow businesses to sift and sort through data with unprecedented speed and accuracy.  When actionable content is identified it can be immediately handled on the spot and the entire enterprise will be updated.

Coming Up Next…

Four challenges down, one to go.

We’ve looked at 3 of the 5 challenges so far and one important fact is coming to light—to be successful, businesses need to spend the majority of their time focusing on their core competencies which usually do not include data collection, warehousing and complicated integration of social media APIs.   If you aren’t in the printing business and you need a fancy brochure, you’re going to hire a printer.  Social media isn’t any different.  Particularly when it comes to the complex world of data collection and normalization.  Stay tuned for the next post when we take a look at more challenges.

~Jackie Kmetz

Social Intelligence Crusader

Last Friday we had the pleasure of sponsoring/attending the first of five Explore events hosted by Social Media Explorer in Dallas Fort Worth. The event was chock full of information with speakers that ranged in the field of digital and internet marketing, social media, and subject matter experts in specific niches within the digital marketing world. The day’s agenda was indeed nothing short of top-notch!

I had the opportunity to sit in on some of the sessions including CopyBlogger Brian Clark’s “The Jedi Warrior Guide to Online Marketing Success.”

Brian’s presentation focused on content marketing and how businesses seem to struggle with content, which has now gone mainstream. He says it is here to stay and businesses need to understand that people don’t want to be advertised at or sold to, but they have real problems and they want solutions. In order to do content marketing well, you need to educate people enough to do business with you.

Here are the key steps to earning their business:

1. Know Your Audience
You must “listen” and get to know the people you are trying to reach. You must know AND understand the people you want to pay attention to you.

2. Pivot from Feedback
You must be able to shift directions at any given point based on what your audience is telling you. As in step #1, this also requires “listening”.

3. Accelerate
Once you know what people want, then you can move forward to create new products, new partnerships, and new media.

CASE STUDY PANEL

Another highlight from the day’s event was the case study panel that included some very knowledgeable panel members from M80, American Airlines, Aquasana and Social Compass.

Each member shared their perspective on how they are using social media marketing, and social media monitoring platforms to help brands be more informed and navigate the rapidly changing social and digital media landscape. American Airlines also shared how they are integrating social with CRM to efficiently track, route, and manage customer participation in social media conversations.

THE BIG TAKE AWAY

The event ended on a high note for me with Jason Falls’ closing keynote. He got me thinking about what it is marketers need to truly focus on in their role as marketers. What really are the most important things, or in this case, what aren’t the most important things? All of the things that have been talked about to be important in digital and social marketing (including listening, engagement, measurement, lead generation, SEO, presence on social networks, etc.), really are NOT the most important.

If these aren’t important, then what is? According to Jason, your job as a marketer is to persuade an audience to take action. Right before you publish something, hit the send key, approve, edit and sign off, be sure to your message passes the “Holy Smokes” rule. When communicated to your audience, will they respond with “Holy Smokes!”? If so, then you’ve done your job.

There’s too much to recap in a single blog post, but take my word for it, Explore 2012 was well worth the time and investment—great audience, content, and networking. Be sure to sign yourself up for one of the upcoming Explore events near you. We hope to see you in Nashville, Minneapolis, Irvine, and Portland!

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 | 5:00pm – 6:30pm | Brave Horse Tavern 

Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer, will be visiting the Visible office on Tuesday, February 21^st for our “What She Said” webcast and will join us that night for a tweet-up at Seattle’s Brave Horse Tavern to meet and connect with fellow social pros!

Jason is an author, keynote speaker and CEO, and continues to be a name that surfaces at or near the top of conversations and lists of thought leaders and top thinkers in the emerging world of social media marketing. If you’re working or are interested in social media, this is a fantastic opportunity to meet one of the greatest pros in the industry.

We’ll be meeting at the Brave Horse in South Lake Union from 5:00pm – 6:30pm on the evening of the 21^st, so if you’re available make sure to come connect with Jason, Visible, and other social individuals of the PNW.

Transforming your company into a Social Enterprise to be as social as your customers are can reap huge rewards. But this change can come with some real challenges without the right tools and partners to help.  Enterprises looking to accomplish this on their own face some intense hurdles.  In our last post we looked at the first challenge businesses face when looking at integrating social data into their current systems—dealing with the enormous volume of information and how easily that deluge of data can overwhelm existing business systems.

2. Unstructured Social Data is Hard to Manage 

Enterprises have been dealing with data from multiple systems for years and are well equipped to integrate and process data from various databases for advanced Business Intelligence.  But social media data is different.  Data is disparate, formatted in a multitude of ways and usually lacking well-defined field names and types.  The unstructured nature of social data makes the process of formatting and then integrating it with existing databases time consuming and expensive.

By choosing the right platform, businesses can remain focused on their core strengths and let the social media data experts manage the collection, structuring, validating and cleaning of data to make it useful, available and impactful to decision making.  Visible® specializes in enterprise social media integrations, working with partners including Oracle for full social integration into client CRM systems like Siebel.  Integrated solutions that enable customer service, sales and other teams to identify opportunities in social conversations and respond in real time while simultaneously creating service requests and leads into existing CRM systems for a true Social CRM system.

3. New Methods and Standards for Accessing Social Data

New media and new technology bring new methods and standards for accessing social data.  Accessing Web services requires a programmatic understanding of how to connect to individual Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).  This is usually a different skill set than what IT departments have on hand from working with existing databases.  To be effective, they need to be fully versed in a host of social media APIs as well as Web standards including REST and HTTPS in order to successfully incorporate and integrate social data.  They also need to dedicate resources to monitor the data feeds and perform regular updates.

Coming Up Next…

We’ve looked at 3 of the 5 challenges so far and one important fact is coming to light—to be successful, businesses need to spend the majority of their time focusing on their core competencies which usually do not include data collection, warehousing and complicated integration of social media APIs.   If you aren’t in the printing business and you need a fancy brochure, you’re going to hire a printer.  Social media isn’t any different.  Particularly when it comes to the complex world of data collection and normalization.  Stay tuned for the next post when we take a look at more challenges.

~Jackie Kmetz

Social Intelligence Crusader

Small business owners can get by with just a few free social media monitoring applications and tools out there for only so long.  At some point, you’ll likely come to the conclusion that the time and effort involved makes it well worth it to pony up a bit more of your hard earned cash and assign a bigger budget to the social media component of your marketing plan.  This article should help you know when that time has come and what to do about it.

Signs that you need to upgrade to a professional social media platform or SaaS (Software as a Service) application:

• It’s getting too cumbersome to track a bunch of separate RSS feeds

• You want to know the sentiment of each relevant post that pertains to your business

• Other marketing tactics aren’t producing the desired results and you’re ready to shift budget to a formal social media strategy

• You want to be able to see content on your brand or products for all media types (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc.) within just one application

•  The free/low-cost tools you’ve been using are not able to support your evolving social marketing measuring and monitoring requirements

• Keeping track of which posts and tweets you’ve responded to is overwhelming

• You want built-in graphs, charts you can drill into for more details and exportable data to help you better understand key trends and causes for shifts in volume or sentiment

What you should look for in a professional social media application:

Here are a few helpful questions you’ll want to ask and things to look for when exploring the right social media monitoring provider.

• What are the training options?  Most people won’t have time to become experts on social search – make sure the provider includes some training options and materials.

• What level of customer support can I get with the application?  The entry level versions of many professional applications provide only bare bones customer support.  Ask what level of support you can expect.

• How much historical data can I view?  Most cap this to 31 days or less at the lowest price point.  Ensure that you’ll have the option for more if and when you need it.

• Do they offer the Twitter “Firehose”?  There is a range of offerings when it comes to Twitter data.  Some providers will have the full Firehose of all Twitter data, some will have only a sampling of Twitter content, while others will offer a sampling combined with the Firehose of data containing a few keywords you can select. 

• How many saved searches or topics can I track?  Many starter level packages let you track or save a small number of searches or topics to monitor and produce dashboard charts for.  Make sure that unlimited searches are an option to start with or to move to when your needs grow. 

• Can I export the data to a spreadsheet?  Make sure you can export allowable content and/or data points so that you have the option to integrate your social data with other forms of data and reporting in your company.  

• How easy is the application to use?  All applications have a learning curve.  The training offered should help but the platform itself should seem fairly straight forward and user-friendly. 

• Look for and understand any hidden costs.  Some applications will contractually cap the amount of data you can view at your price point but will automatically charge more if you go over the limit.  Find out if there are any additional costs you may incur, with or without your knowing it.

• Can the platform grow with my business?  If the application is geared toward small businesses, there may be limitations in its ability to grow with you and your business.  Assess the options that are available at different package levels and what you think you’ll need when your business expands and you are ready to invest more into your social media program.

• How fast is the platform?  A high end professional SaaS application should return results quickly, be readily available and responsive.  If you make a search error, it should give you that feedback almost immediately.  And content should be ingested and displayed in the platform without much delay. 

• Can you take a test drive or free trial?  Can you watch a live demo before buying?

• Can you create alerts on specific searches?

• Does the application identify authors that could have influence in your industry?

• What are the Engagement capabilities or options?  At the entry level point, engagement functionality may be limited or absent.  Find out if you can re-tweet, reply, or post new updates and what options and costs are in case you need that capability down the road.

How much can you expect to pay:

At the time of this writing, February 2012, you can expect to pay an average of $600 a month for the entry level version of a professional grade social media monitoring application.  This will let you track most or all of the social data you want within a single platform and provide built-in reporting options and dashboards.  Of course don’t forget to budget human resources in your social program initiatives, including time to create content, respond to customers or prospects, monitor incoming posts, analyze data and create reports, manage a campaign that utilizes social media, and so forth.

According to Gillin and Schwartzman, authors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer, the general rule of thumb is to first determine your business goals, the metrics that matter, and the tactics you’ll be using to attain the desired metrics. Then the tools you need will become self-evident.  For example, based on your goals and tactics you may find that the company blog, Twitter, and industry forums will be the obvious tools.  After that, you can select the right services and applications to manage and leverage those tools most effectively.

In other words, figure out what you want to accomplish, how you’ll measure success, and what social media tactics and tools will help you get there and picking the right SaaS application should be a whole lot easier.  I hope this article has given you a better idea of when you’ll need to increase the social component of your marketing budget and what to look for when you do.

If you have a related experience to share or other insights, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Vicki Blair

Social Media Yogi-in-the-Making,

Visible Technologies

Last year we sponsored the third Gravity Summit event and we’re excited to be doing so again as the summit continues to grow. The event will take place at UCLA’s Covel Common Conference Center and it’s not too late to register. If you’re in the area, make sure to attend to gain valuable insights from some of the most influential social pros in sports and entertainment!

We’ll be speaking at 10:30am on “Using Social Data to Prevent Female Fan Fumbling,” where our own Director of Community Outreach, Ellen Enrico and Solution Architect, Ken Krumhansl will explore whether Super Bowl advertisers made the most of their $3.5 million per spot investment and how monitoring and analyzing social media data can help brands maximize marketing and advertising spend—hope to see you there!

Register to attend the Gravity Summit

[Images via Getty Images]

Ah, The Grammys. That annual chance for us to wonder aloud about who half the nominees are and whether that is their real name. Of course, there is a bit more to watch for, especially for those of you that are up on pop-culture: the performances! The presenters! The insane outfits! There is always lots to discuss the next day and Sunday’s ceremony delivered on that -but what specifically got people talking?

Because The Grammys is often a passionate event- people freely emote about them, everyone LOVES or HATES the performances/artists/acceptance speeches- I thought it would be interesting to look at them through the lens of sentiment. Instead of just seeing how much the people of the internet had to say, let’s also take a look at how positively or negatively they viewed the notable things that occurred.

Pulling up the Visible Intelligence® platform and looking at sentiment around the Grammys, these were the frequently referenced topics common to both negative and positive statements:

The Grammys heads the list, as that is what every comment had in common, but it is followed by Adele, who swept the evening with six wins, and Nicki, referring to Nicki Minaj, who had a memorable entrance and performance. The term #redcarpet is also up there, as people tweeted their (surely very emotional) reactions to wardrobe choices, but we are going to focus on the two people that inspired the most response. And so the event boils down to two emotionally charged topics: Adele and Nicki Minaj:

[Share of voice: Adele wins another thing!]

Adele

Sweeping all six categories she was nominated in, Adele had a good night! As the chart shows, talk about her increased as the night wore on, spiking on the red carpet, then as she won, again as she performed and as she won her final Grammy.

Sentiment about Adele was mostly neutral (grey) throughout the night, but there is a sizable positive (green) spike during her performance.

Nicki Minaj

Unfortunately for Nikki, she was not so well received. People had opinions, many of them less then nice, about her entrance (on the arm of a curiously dressed gentleman), her performance, and her outfit. She topped the negative sentiment list, meaning that of all negative reactions collected, Nicki Minaj was the most common topic.

Looking at volume of talk over time, conversation peaks while Minaj is on the red carpet and again during her on-air performance.

The next chart looks at sentiment-based chatter during these times, with green representing positive and red, negative. There is a little spike of negative sentiment while Nicki is on the red carpet and then a very large one during her performance. People had many thoughts as the night progressed:

Were Adele and Nicki the stars of the show? What was most notable about the 2012 Grammys for you? As we head into the final stretch of Awards Season, it will be interesting to see whats next. Bring on the Oscars!

All over the world people are celebrating Social Media Week this week – drawing more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile devices.

One of the events taking place in San Francisco today is the Social Insights Shoot-Out at Razorfish from 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM. During this session, presenters will be using social media analysis to address a hypothetical scenario around a major sporting goods brand who wants to do super bowl commercial featuring Tim Tebow and needs to determine if Tebow’s Christian background and previous Super Bowl ad appearance for conservative group Focus on the Family makes him too controversial.

We excited to be a part of this event by being one of the technology platforms used to help analyze this scenario.  If you’re attending Social Media Week in San Francisco today, be sure to stop by!

We’ve spent the last few weeks looking at what women talk about online and how their social conversations could help brands better connect with this powerful target audience that accounts for 85% of ALL consumer purchases.  We’re excited to share our findings next week along with Social Media Explorer CEO, Jason Falls on a webcast occurring Tuesday, February 21^st at 10:30am PT/1:30pm ET.

During this event, we will discuss how listening to what women discuss in the social sphere and integrating this social data with existing business systems can shed light on what influences women’s buying intent and purchasing behavior.

Attendees of this event will learn:

• The top topics women discuss online

• Key marketing and advertising learnings from these conversations

• How social integration can tie social buying intent with increased sales

• How leading brands are using social data and integration to increase online and offline sales

We hope you can join us and Jason Falls for “What She Said”- How Women’s Social Conversations Impact Buying Intent & Purchasing.

To register, please visit the following link. If you can’t make it live, no worries – sign up anyways and we’ll send you a replay of the event!