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Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

Why You Need a Social Media Hub

September 5th, 2010 by Judge

According to Samir Balwani; Why You Need a Social Media Hub

The social media hub centralizes a brand’s digital communications, connecting social media profiles with the business website. As more social media platforms begin to emerge, the need for a central branded social media hub grows.

Bring People to Your Branded Site

Many brands use their individual social media profiles as their central communications hubs. For example, some businesses focus their attention on Facebook and continue to direct their consumers there. Instead of capturing the community on their own brand site, the business is losing potential consumers to Facebook.

Although a Facebook fan is important, it’s more important to immerse the consumer in your brand. Instead of driving visitors to your social media profiles, use the Facebook and Twitter API to allow users to connect with you online without leaving your site.

Make Multiple Connections

Most marketers look at profiles individually when planning their social media presence. Consumers have multiple profiles; a Twitter account and Facebook profile. Why not connect with a consumer on each profile and create multiple connections?

The social media hub creates an area where consumers can flow from one social media profile to another. Make it easy to grow your network and control how consumers navigation across your profiles.

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Leverage Different Platforms for Different Things

When building a social media strategy, go beyond the simple idea of creating a community and instead think about actions. What do you want consumers to do on each social media site?

Use the social media hub to outline the action you want consumers to take on each social media profile. Consider it a “call to action“. Explicitly define what they should do (take the quiz, fan us, leave a comment).

Build a Central Distribution Platform

The social media hub ties together a digital presence that would otherwise be fragmented and broken. The hub helps a brand create a cohesive strategy that integrates each social media profile.

Brands with popular hubs are able to tap into the community to help spread published content. Hubs are extremely effective when distributing information, delivering branded media, and new media public relations.

Control and Brand Your Most Valuable Social Platform

BMW has more than 1 million fans on Facebook. That’s 1 million people they convinced to perform an action and subscribe to their page. What if Facebook decided to charge for fan pages? Would BMW walk away? What if they had planned ahead and captured this community on their own site instead?

Your social media hub, your website, is the most valuable social media profile you have. It is the only one that allows you to directly control and own your content. With a branded social media hub, you’re in charge and not at the behest of another company.

Don’t let Facebook own your whole community. Use the tools of sharing they afford, but be sure to be building that community on your site with email newsletters, rss feeds, and a robust networking system.

Collect Consumer Insights

Finally, nothing beats the data collected by a site you fully own. Want to know how many people visited your site? Where they came from? How long they stayed? What they did? It’s all information you can get from Google Analytics or almost any other analytics package once added to your social media hub.

Facebook offers some data but it leaves a lot to ask for. Twitter and most other social media platforms offer nothing.

Analyzing data allows you to better understand your community and optimize your social media strategies. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to collect huge amounts of data by ignoring your brand hub’s analytics.

Where’s Your Hub?

A social media hub is a powerful aspect of an online marketing strategy. In my mind it’s a necessity. Without it, you lose control of your community, create a disoriented digital presence, fragment your content distribution, and lose out on a great deal of data.

Do you have a social media hub? What brand has created a good central hub? How are you connecting your sites? How are you using your social media hub?

 social media 

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2010 Study Shows Marketers Plan to Spend More on Social Media Programs

August 31st, 2010 by Ernie

According to a Pivot Study; Shows Marketers Plan to Spend More on Social Media Programs

More Than 87% Will Increase Investment in the Next 12 Months

NEW YORK, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — The Pivot Conference today released findings from its survey of 137 brand marketers and ad agency professionals that point to a significant investment in social media marketing programs in the next 12 months. Of the marketers surveyed, about two-thirds (63%) have already implemented social media marketing programs, and 87% plan to increase that investment in the next 12 months. Of the 37% of marketers that are not currently investing in social media, 62% plan to invest within one year.

Based on measurement, analysis and goals for their programs, 89% of those surveyed said their social media marketing programs have been successful, and of that, 30% cited that programs were very successful, e.g. generated more sales or improved customer relations. On the other hand, 11% of the marketers surveyed said they were unable to tell whether their programs were successful.

“While the technology and tools are there, social media is still uncharted territory for many marketers,” says Chris Shipley, executive producer of Pivot Conference. “The survey results indicate that they are planning to spend money but are still looking for guidance on how to spend their budgets, how to track ROI and the best ways to engage with key customers.”

Social Media Marketing Is a Small Portion of Total Budget But Spending Is Likely to Increase

Despite the relatively low cost to implement social media programs, 74% of marketers surveyed said that less than 20% of their online marketing resources, including budget and staff to manage them, were devoted to social media programs. And yet, 87% stated plans to increase their investment in social media marketing programs in the next 12 months.

Who Is the Target Customer?

75% of the marketers surveyed are targeting the “always-on” consumer, described as “hyper-connected” because of their frequency of engagement with the Internet and mobile devices.

• 36% stated that the demographic is a primary target, and 39% stated it as a secondary target.
• Survey respondents believe that 50% or more of 18-34 year old consumers are “always-on.”

When asked their opinions about “always-on,” 18-34 year old consumers, the majority of surveyed marketers agreed:

• When marketing programs are formatted and delivered in a way 18-34 year olds find engaging, they are susceptible to branding or re-branding. (71%)
• Their attention span for marketing/advertising is shorter than previous generations. (70%)
• They often have different motivations than previous generations, such as green or socially conscious interests. (67%)
• They have the potential to be more influential than consumers who are not always-on. (62%)

The study indicated that just over half of the marketers surveyed (57%) are seeking active engagement with customers using social media platforms.  Another 30% are exploring customer involvement with caution or have not yet formalized how to engage with those customers using social media.

Where Customers Go, Marketers Follow

In keeping with the online habits of 18-34 year old consumers, the most popular Internet/mobile platforms that marketers are currently using include:

• Search engines (i.e. Google) – 89% using
• Social media sites (i.e. Facebook) – 84% using
• Micro-blogging/presence applications (i.e. Twitter) – 72% using

Emerging platforms in which marketers are planning to increase investment include:

• Mobile apps (i.e. iPhone) – 39% currently using; 42% plan to use
• Location-based services (i.e. foursquare) – 23% currently using; 35% plan to use
• In-game advertising (i.e. FarmVille) – 5% currently using; 23% plan to use

Methodology

The online survey was conducted by Extra Mile Audience Research on behalf of the Pivot Conference between June 29 and July 30, 2010. The invitation to participate in this online survey was sent to corporate marketers and ad agency professionals via email and through social media channels. 137 responded to the survey.

To request a copy of the report, please visit: https://pivotcon.wufoo.com/forms/pivot-survey-request-form/

About the Pivot Conference

The Pivot Conference, taking place October 17 – 20 in New York, is a new kind of marketing conference singularly focused on the 18-34 year old demographic: their attitudes, technologies and preferences. Pivot is the first and only conference where brand marketers can go to gain essential confidence in their power to inhabit the culture, conventions and conversations of today’s young consumers. Sponsors of Pivot Conference include Automattic, Geeknet, Glam Media, Ooyala, VideoEgg, Yahoo!.

 social media, Social Media Trends 

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How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future

August 30th, 2010 by Judge

According To Mashable; How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future

Today’s CEO is not social. So says Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony. Very few of the CEOs at top companies in the U.S. and the rest of the world have any material presence on the popular social media sites. Colony believes they should be social though, and all signs are pointing to a future filed with CEOs who can speak the language of the people — social media.

While one can only speculate about the future of CEOs and social media, there’s no question that social media plays a huge part in life and the world as we know it right now.

As younger CEOs replace older ones, news consumption habits change and social media continues its trend towards ubiquity, there’s little question that the man (or woman) at the top will need a firm grasp on social media — whether that be for recruiting, scouting, public engagement or social CRM.

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The Next Generation of CEOs

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When it comes to CEOs, there’s a vast disparity between the young ones heading up startups and the more seasoned CEOs running the world’s most powerful companies. That disparity is social media — the young are more versed than the old. The difference between the two groups can be attributed to different generations and different attitudes around content and information meant for the public and private domains.

No one is predicting that the venerable CEOs will be booted from their lofty perches for lack of a Twitter account. In fact, younger CEOs with a predilection and savvy for social media may find their visibility to either be a contributing factor to their rise or a liability once they graduate to bigger, hence more vulnerable, publicly traded companies.

Let’s have a gander at some stats on the status quo. In April, Colony let it be known that most CEOs are not social. In fact, by his own research and calculations, Colony has concluded that, “None of the CEOs of Fortune Magazine’s top 100 global corporations have a social profile.”

Social media abstinence even appears to extend to CEOs of tech companies. “Eric Schmidt of Google is an infrequent Twitterer and is not a blogger; Steve Ballmer at Microsoft has no blog and no Twitter account; Michael Dell is on Twitter but is not an external blogger … Steve Jobs of Apple, and Larry Ellison of Oracle have no Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or blog presences that we could find.”

His findings paint a bleak present tense. In the coming years, however, there will be a changing of the guard that favors social media over silence.

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We Live in a Social Media World

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Let us pause and reflect on the fact online users spend 22.7% of their time on social networking sites. That’s twice as much time as we spend on any other online activity. Consider where people are getting their news today. More and more, it’s not through direct sources like USA Today, The New York Times, or TV broadcasts, but through social networks.

Plus, industry is social. In the future, every company, no matter how small or how big, will be influenced and impacted by social media internally or externally. In the entertainment industry, for instance, social media has the potential to significantly bump up live television viewing audiences. Network executives such as Greg Goldman, formerly an executive director at ABC and now CCO at Philo, are nearly certain it’s happening now and will become more obvious with time.

Take what you know about the world today and then ask yourself, can a CEO remain relevant if they’re not versed in the new language of the people they serve?

SCVNGR’s youthful CEO Seth Priebatsch doesn’t believe so. The 21-year-old CEO says he’s “never lived in a world where I didn’t use social media.”

Priebatsch compares social media to cloud computing, and makes the analogy of how building applications for the cloud is a given. “It never occurred to me that you would write software to run on machines as opposed to access it through a browser. Why would you do that?”

For Priebatsch, social media is a given.

“Those companies that actively monitor, react and engage with what people are saying about them are at a huge advantage. If I’ve just launched a new feature on SCVNGR and people like it (or don’t) I know immediately. And that’s powerful. And what’s even cooler is that I can dig deeper. Someone says on Twitter: ‘Hey @SCVNGR, love the new social check-in. Way cool!’ and I can tweet back immediately ‘Thanks @user. What have you been using it for?’ And immediately get more information on how people are using SCVNGR, why they like it (or don’t) and how to make it better. That’s real power. It combines huge scale (tons of people talking) with massive granularity (ability to dig deep into one response).”

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CEOs and the Future

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The business leaders of tomorrow will be versed in social media, and we don’t need a crystal ball to predict how CEOs in the future will use social media. It’s the socially versed CEOs of today who help manufacture the following:

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Opportunity Knocks

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LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman, himself a social media advocate and user, believes that perceptions around social media being too risky for CEOs are beginning to change.

“I would predict that more and more executives will see this as an opportunity rather than a risk,” he says.

Certainly the opportunity is there. Ulman pulls from his own work at LIVESTRONG as proof of concept. “Transparency and authenticity are two important factors in our work and social media allows us to amplify both in a significant way.”

Plus, given the digital landscape of the world we live in, future CEOs using social media is practically a given.

“Those who are currently growing up using these tools and mediums will have them integrated closely with their daily lives as they begin to enter the workforce, so they will come to expect their colleagues to be engaged as well,” according to Ulman.

Colony also sees social media as a platform paved with opportunity. He believes that CEOs should be social if the CEO “has something valuable and distinctive to say,” and has “a specialized strategy for social.”

For CEOs looking to start their social path, Colony prescribes a four part methodology that involves targeting the right audience, defining a clear reason to be social, setting up social expectations, and choosing the right platforms.

Recruiting and Scouting

Talent is a commodity. Facebook, Google and Twitter often cherry pick each others’ employees. The company with the brightest minds is the one that’s most likely to excel. As such, recruiting is key and social media gives CEOs the ability to scout out potential hires and follow what they’re posting and what others are posting about them.

In a related fashion, CEOs will scout out the competition and search for potential acquires via social media properties. Many executives have already been doing this for years. Venture capitalists like Fred Wilson, for instance, have discovered the added benefits of maintaining a professional blog.

Wilson uses his blog to find companies to invest in and build relationships with entrepreneurs. It’s certainly no coincidence, then, that Union Square Ventures has an impressive portfolio of companies that includes Fousquare, Twitter and Tumblr.

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Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

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“Every CEO has a CRM dashboard right now. In the future, every CEO will have a social media dashboard,” predicts Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi.

Niyogi asserts that the social media dashboard will become a fixture inside the enterprise. “Every business unit will be using social media within the enterprise – customer support will use it to answer questions using tools like CoTweet, sales organizations will use it to get a better read on what’s happening with their customers in real-time, marketing organizations will be using it as a new channel to connect with new or existing customers. It’s already happening right now.”

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 social media 

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5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now

August 20th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now

What’s the first thing young women do when they wake up? Check Facebook. How do enterprise employees pass the time at work? With social media. With so many studies highlighting ever-accelerating social media usage rates, the conclusion is obvious — social media is everywhere.

What follows are five of the hottest social media trends right now. Each are influencing our social, online and mobile behaviors in significant ways.

Entertainment checkin services are changing the way we watch television. Mobile loyalty applications are helping us connect the dots between our real-world shopping behaviors and digital rewards. A new breed of Q&A services are changing the way we search. Barcode scanning applications are making products social, and deal-of-the-day sites are giving us ways to save by recruiting our friends to the party.

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1. Social Scanning

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Smartphone owners have the world at their fingertips. As grandiose as that may sound, advances in mobile barcode scanning technology have given rise to applications that allow for comparison shopping, QR code place checkins and ultimately a social experience around product barcodes.

What this means is that at any given moment, any smartphone owner can pull out their device, fire up a barcode scanning application, scan a code and complete activities or gain access to a wealth of immediately relevant information. Really, what we’re seeing is the convergence of social media and barcode scanning to create “social scanning.”

The consumer’s scanning behavior is so significant that location-sharing checkin services such as SCVNGR are giving away QR code decals to retailers free of charge. Even Google is sending their own QR code decals out to small businesses with popular Place Pages. What makes the scan so significant? It is a tangible connection between the physical and digital world. For Google, SCVNGR, and the businesses they serve, it’s about access to measurable offline behavior.

These scans aren’t inherently social in nature, but because they can double as verifiable place checkins, they can also possess the social properties of a checkin: location-sharing with friends on the same service or via social network distribution.

Services such as Stickybits and Bakodo are taking the social scanning experience beyond the checkin and creating product-driven communities around brands and items via barcodes.

Stickybits lets users add video, text, photos and audio to the barcodes they scan in the physical world via iPhone and Andriod apps. It’s a clever way to use barcodes to help people tag, share and connect around items. It has also recently become more brand-friendly. “Official bits” are barcodes that brands can claim in order to highlight their own content. New social features allow for user response in the form of threaded conversations, and voting to ensure that the best content attached to the code rises to the top.

Bakodo’s iPhone app began as a barcode scanner primarily for comparison shopping, but it’s evolving to add social scanning functions as well. App users can scan barcodes of all varieties to review items and check out recommendations from friends. The barcode intelligence search engine combines a wealth of product-related data and socializes the process for a comprehensive product-driven experience.

As scanning becomes a more socially acceptable practice, the barcode scan will only become more social in nature. Expect future QR code marketing efforts to tap into the social opportunities, and for brands to explore ways to engage with consumers at the scan touch point.

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2. Q&A and Intelligent Information Discovery

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Web-based Q&A services have been around for years. Now the previously sleepy space is seeing renewed interest from some of the Internet’s biggest names. This second iteration of Q&A services will likely forever redefine the way we find information, because it re-imagines “search” as intelligent information discovery.

The most buzzy of the bunch right now is Quora, an intuitive and relatively straightforward Q&A site whose co-founder, Adam D’Angelo, is most known for his past role as Facebook’s CTO. Quora was founded in June 2009, released into private beta in January 2010, and immediately became a hit Q&A site with the technorati crowd. In fact, web celebrities have been known to use the site to answer questions about themselves.

There are few Q&A services that have received the same type of attention as Quora, but the just-launched Facebook Questions project — which mirrors Quora in purpose and function — was released before Quora ever achieved mainstream recognition. Now the two products are essentially going head-to-head, competing for the same audience.

Facebook has the clear edge when it comes to its built-in user base, but we’ve repeatedly seen bigger companies fail at side projects — just look at Google Wave — simply because smaller startups can innovate faster and have the benefit of progressively scaling over time. Quora’s opportunity lies in Facebook’s somewhat bungled launch of Questions, and its smart exposure through search results.

Another notable Q&A site that contributes to the intelligent information discovery trend is Google’s Aardvark.

Aardvark approaches the space with a model that helps users surface answers through friends of friends. It’s an algorithmic social system that should help Google improve its search algorithms. In fact, Google should be able to use the technology to provide socially-relevant answers in search queries.

Google does have a reputation for letting purchased startups wilt after their pre-acquisition bloom, but given how closely aligned Aardvark is with Google’s core search product, that likely won’t be the case here.

There’s also the freshly enhanced Ask.com, which is seeking to join the “people plus search results” party with its new beta Q&A offering.

Most of the key players in the space believe in the power of intelligent information discovery and define it as the intersection of people and their social circles, with scientific methodologies for surfacing the best possible answers in the shortest amount of time.

Apple-owned artificial intelligence app Siri, however, eliminates the social and instead focuses on the science of finding the right answer.

Right now the overlap between services such as Aardvark and Siri is minimal, primarily because Siri focuses on solving immediate problems of convenience — finding food, calling a taxi or making a reservation — and not on long-term, more conceptual problems. Still, Siri is unquestionably a mobile search engine keen on intelligent information discovery, which means the technologies could become more competitive in the months ahead.

Another startup to watch for in this space is Swingly. The private beta service describes itself as a “Web-scale answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions.” Humans are largely eliminated in Swingly’s machine-driven Q&A formula, so it too challenges the notion that social integration enhances the Q&A experience.

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3. Group Buying

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Group buying is the deal-a-day group coupon trend made popular by Chicago-based startup Groupon. It’s also a slight variation on flash sale sites such as Woot, an Amazon property, which originated in the early 2000s.

Groupon is the brain-child of CEO Andrew Mason, who came up with the group buying idea after founding the earlier group-focused site The Point in 2007. The Point is a campaign platform designed to support group action around causes. In 2008, nearly a year after launch, the platform was repurposed to bring Groupon’s deal-of-the-day vision to life in Chicago.

Today, Groupon deals are available in cities across the world, thanks in part to the acquisition of international clone Citydeal. The company has also managed to come by a $1 billion valuation, partner with Twitter to power @EarlyBird deals, find alternative distribution via newspapers, and start personalizing deals for subscribers in select cities. Just yesterday, Groupon introduced its first nationwide deal — a 50% discount at the Gap — to much fanfare, attracting roughly 10 Groupon purchases every 10 seconds.

Over the years, Groupon’s successful model has been copied with ease. LivingSocial, 8coupons and a host of other clones have found their own way on the web. Recently, Yelp, Zagat and OpenTable have veered away from their core product strategy to bring group buying to their respective site audiences.

The clones and copycats keep on coming, but what’s also interesting is that a host of group buying enterprise-targeted software-as-a-service products are also cropping up. Each hopes to attract brand clients interested in offering their own Groupon-style deals. Wildfire has a Facebook-friendly do-it-yourself Group Deals product, Megachip Technologies just launched their own daily deal coupon software, and daily-deal site Adility launched a Groupon-like platform for small business earlier this summer.

All signs indicate that the group buying trend will only increase in popularity over time. Local businesses are finding that they can successfully attract new and repeat business by introducing customers to their services with a deeply-discounted group coupon. In fact, Groupon asserts that 97% of merchants featured on the site want to be featured again, which further demonstrates just how much demand they are dealing with.

In the future, look for more brands to create their own Groupon-style deals and for Groupon and its larger competitors to snatch up smaller clones in order to expand and enhance their offerings. Also watch for checkin and location-based services to intersect with group buying to create services similar to GroupTabs. The notion of having patrons check-in in masses to unlock deals is extremely business-friendly.

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4. Mobile Meets Loyalty

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As consumers purchase more and more smartphones and phone technology heads in the direction of the “super,” it’s only a matter of time before old-fashioned loyalty, rewards and club card programs head in the mobile direction. Two applications — Key Ring and CardStar give us a preview of what’s to come.

Both applications are designed to eliminate plastic loyalty card buildup with a single digital repository. The apps leverage barcode scanning technology so users can save gym cards, grocery store cards, drug store cards and the like, right to their phone.

This trend is just beginning to take shape as smartphones become more commonplace, scanners become more sophisticated and retailers become digitally savvy. In the future, we can expect integration with merchant loyalty programs, as well as integration with checkin services like Foursquare. The latter also demonstrates the inevitable convergence of social media with traditional loyalty programs, which we’re already seeing from Tasti-d-Lite’s innovative approach to automatic, POS-integrated social media rewards system.

Shopkick’s retailer-friendly automatic checkin service is currently being tested by Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority and Simon Property Group. This early interest in Shopkick points to retailer interest in verifiable, checkin-driven rewards. There’s also private beta mobile app Pushpins, which seeks to leverage QR codes to further enmesh the in-store shopping experience with digital retailer rewards, the likes of which resemble the sophistication of SCVNGR’s recently released rewards program.

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5. Checking-In to Entertainment

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What are you watching on television right now? Whether it’s the latest episode of Mad Men or the next installment of a reality dating show, chances are that you’re sharing the entertainment experience either through face-to-face interaction with friends and family, or by posting outrageous and shocking moments to your favorite social media channels.

Consuming most entertainment media is an inherently social experience. A crop of services have popped up in recent months to refine that social experience through entertainment checkins — the act of checking into the television show or movie that you’re watching right now.

We’ve already explored why entertainment will drive the next checkin craze, and three of the emerging startups — Philo, Miso, and GetGlue — propelling this trend toward mainstream audiences.

There are a few other services in the same mix that are certainly worth watching. CBS recently released their entertainment checkin service, TV.com Relay. It’s a browser-based mobile app for most smartphones that allows users to checkin to live television shows and follows the same TV guide-style format that Philo employs.

The CBS offering is nice to look at, and offers content-driven badges like the other guys. It also excels in the real-time comment department. In talking with the Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBS Interactive’s Entertainment and Lifestyle Division, Anthony Soohoo, it became clear that the vision behind TV.com Relay extends far beyond entertainment checkins. Soohoo also iterated that the application, which is just a few weeks old, already has 100,000 users thanks to TV.com’s built-in audience.

Tunerfish is another mobile and web television checkin service. It’s backed by Comcast and boasts partnerships with networks including HBO, Showtime and NBC. App users answer the question, “What are you watching?” by typing in the name of a show or movie and clicking the “I’m watching” button. The service also provides behavioral incentives in the form of awards, and has been actively working to bring network-sponsored, show-themed awards into the mix.

There’s also Clicker Social, a relatively new addition from Clicker that turns the television search engine and web TV guide into an entertainment checkin service as well.

The re-purposed entertainment version of the checkin is a smart way to link entertainment consumers with content they love, enhance the social experiences around television, and potentially inspire new audiences to tune into trending or friend-approved television shows. The enormous amount of competition in such a brand new space means that things are just starting to get interesting.

All of the services need to evolve to attach real value to the checkin. They each recognize that awards, badges and stickers are easy ways to encourage new user participation, but these existing game mechanics merely scratch the surface in terms of user engagement. In the coming months, look for constant iteration on this front. For example, we can expect Miso to introduce even more show-specific content exclusives via its show fan clubs and for GetGlue to experiment with offering discounts and coupons that users can redeem for their Glue points.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 social media 

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Why Social Media Monitoring Tools Are About to Get Smarter

August 20th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; Why Social Media Monitoring Tools Are About to Get Smarter

Over the last three years, social media marketers have gotten a lot more sophisticated about the programs they deploy and how they’re measured. Platforms like Sysomos and Radian6 () have become vital tools in understanding not only the social universe in which you operate, but how that universe responds to your brand.

But for all of our success, we’re still largely entering strings of Boolean variables into a tool and waiting for matching results to roll in. Most tools have added sentiment processing, but that clearly has a long way to go. Beyond sentiment, however, how are these tools going to evolve to provide more insights? The answer is with math.

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Cluster Analysis Shows Promise

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Cluster analysis is one of the features that many tools are adding. Basically, it involves complex mathematical computations that analyze how certain words are gathering — or “clustering” — relative to your search topic. It finds the words that are mostly likely to be associated with your search word. This may provide unexpected insight into what’s being said about you. In fact, some articles suggest it’s a way to predict record sales two weeks before they happen.

The downside to cluster analysis is that it’s complex. Nilesh Bansal, the CTO of Sysomos, likes cluster analysis, but worries it’s not that easy: “We very often find ourselves explaining to clients what these features mean and how to use them best. For a full blown unguided cluster analysis, a team of technical analysts will be required and it cannot be point and click.”

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Semantic Analysis Will Also Be Key

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When it’s not just where words appear but what those words mean that you’re trying to decipher, semantic analysis will become key. Semantic analysis strives to understand what words mean in context to provide deeper insights.

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, likes to think of various “analytic lenses” to apply to the vast data they collect. LeBrun says he doesn’t see cluster analysis as a direction to move in, but as one of the tools in the analyst’s toolbox.

He explains that cluster analysis works on the basis of math, but it can’t differentiate apple (the fruit) from Apple (the company). Semantic technology, he says, can add additional insight because of its ability to identify entities and nuances in language.

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Depth vs. Simplicity

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For a while, the relative strength of social media monitoring tools was dependent on how much data they indexed, and how far back they had stored it. Today, major competitors have largely mastered indexing the stream (private Facebook () updates being the obvious exception).

So the new race is on to display and interpret that data better than the next guy. Every monitoring tool is rushing to improve their dashboards, and competitors like RowFeeder are trying different approaches.

All of these companies are working with very smart people who can make data dance. Sysomos’ Bansal published a paper on cluster analysis applied to social data three years ago, indicating that they are ahead of the curve. The real challenge is to apply these complex lenses to the data in a way that lets us non-PhD holding marketers understand it at a glance — and to do it flexibly enough for different monitoring objectives.

Through cluster analysis, semantic analysis and enhanced dashboards, we’re likely to see an aggressive monitoring “arms race” over the next year. For the companies involved, nothing short of market share gains are at stake.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 social media, Social Media Tools 

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How to Calculate Your ROI With Social Media

August 18th, 2010 by Judge

According to Entrepreneur; How to Calculate Your ROI With Social Media

Free tools to help you measure traffic, sales and SEO ranking

When it comes to measuring and tracking and trying to determine what your ROI is with social media, you first need to ask yourself why you want to participate in social media in the first place. If the answer is to build your brand and develop a loyal following, then you are in it for the right reasons. Currency in social media is found in both relationships and content.

Still, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. So if your goal is to measure traffic, sales, or SEO ranking, here are some free tools that can help:

• Google Analytics and Feedburner.com are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s website or blog traffic, subscriber count, and keyword optimization, as well as additional trends.
• Gr.aiderss.com allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts. The most popular statistic is based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites.
• GetClicky.com shows you every action a visitor makes and offers a dedicated iPhone version.
• Socialmeter.com checks your website’s social popularity.
• Statsaholic.com compares rankings and other information on up to three websites at a time.
• Webslug.info compares your site’s performance to any other site.
• Xinureturns.com is great for adding a URL and for receiving a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.
• Sometrics.com is an analytics site that measures your social advertising efforts.
• Pagealizer.com is a web analytics that actually suggest changes and optimizations for your pages.
• StatsAdvisor.com is another great web analytics that helps you track both online and offline advertising efforts.

If your goal is brand reputation or customer relationships, you require a more qualitative measurement approach. Without some sort of benchmark, it’s impossible to determine your ROI. First start by asking yourself a key question: Am I being talked about online within my industry or target market?

You can find out who is talking about you online and what the conversation is about by simply setting up a few monitoring systems such as Google alerts and monitoring Twitter Search . You can also monitor how your competitors are being talked about online compared to your company with these same tools. You would know this if you are tracking your retweets through a system like Tweetdeck , receiving notifications when your name hits the web through Google alerts, and doing blog searches on sites such as Technorati.

The next step is to measure your success by asking whether you were able to build more relationships with your target market through your efforts online. You can reach out to your target market by typing in keyword searches in the connection section on social sites. For example, on LinkedIn you can use the “search people” tool. If you are in the hospitality industry you can enter keywords such as food, chef, wine, and restaurant. You can also search groups by keyword to connect you to target market communities.

Then, form stronger relationships with these contacts to convert them into fans. One of the best ways to build stronger relationships is to engage with contacts through conversation.

Facebook allows you to set up a company page and share valuable content, videos, company insider posts and more. This is an excellent way and place to build a fan club online.

No matter how your social media efforts and results are measured, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is raising the bar, moving product, or otherwise making an impact. This largely depends on the company’s social media objectives. Because these objectives dramatically differ based on the organization, it’s impossible to agree upon standards. That doesn’t mean, however, you can’t measure ROI at the company level by implementing a few key measurement systems. — Starr Hall

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 SEO, social media, Social Media Tools 

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5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media

August 16th, 2010 by Heather

According to Mashable; 5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media

No matter how much we open up on the web, creating new connections online can be intimidating. Just as not everyone can start a conversation with a stranger at the bar, not everyone can comfortably start conversations in social media. Luckily, there are hundreds of online services and apps popping up, trying to solve our social awkwardness and help us discover new connections in new ways. These tools allow even the introverts among us to communicate, find friends, business partners and, yes, dates.

One thing is most definite, online networks will continue to help us connect in more effective ways, collaborating with and inspiring each other. It can be as simple as connecting two “Mad Men” fans via Miso, or as large as organizing a global movement through CauseCast. The more we get used to the idea of creating new online connections and willing to try new ways to do so, the more chances we have in finding those that will turn to be meaningful.

Below, we’ve taken a look at at the five ways we connect using social media. From tags on Twitter, to locations on Foursquare, to algorithmic systems; each of these trends is helping us build meaningful relationships.

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1. Connecting Via Tagging

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Tags existed for many years on blogs and websites. Twitter and its hashtags redefined the way we think of “tags.” No longer add-ons to posted content, tags could actually organize and build communities. For example, during New York Fashion Week I met most of my business and personal contacts by using the hashtag, #NYFW. Although all of us attended Fashion Week before, none of us ever connected, simply because there was no easy way to connect us. Hashtags have changed that.

New York-based Hot Potato, dubbed by the Business Insider as the next Twitter, took tagging to a new level, categorizing them by interests. The app helps people connect based on categories like music, books, food, or simply what’s on their mind. The neat part about the tool is that you can not only share the activities, but create meaningful, real-time conversations around them. While the trend hasn’t spread beyond the early adopters’ crowd yet, recent rumors about Facebook acquiring Hot Potato might help bring it to the masses by integrating some of the features into the existing Facebook platform.

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2. Connecting Via Niche Content Sharing

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Just like with tagging, sharing actual content attracts people that are interested in what you have to say and share. These connections become especially valuable when they revolve around specific niches where communities and connections can flourish.

Foodspotting is a content sharing site for foodies where users can post photos of their favorite dishes. In the fashion space, GoTryItOn helps users connect to a global community of people willing to asses your outfit. Try on an outfit, post a picture, and the crowd will respond with (hopefully) helpful, honest advice. Another niche community, Dribbble, is great for designers looking to share and give feedback on new projects. Users can post snippets and previews of their work, comment on other projects, or even follow specific users with designs they like.

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3. Connecting Via Activities

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People have been using the Internet to organize offline activities since its first days, but some sites – old and new – make the experience so much easier and less intimidating, especially when you are looking for new connections.

The oldest among them, Meetup.com, has been facilitating local connections among people who share the same interests for almost a decade now. With its 250,000 meetup events happening across the globe every month, it connects more than 7 million members based on mutual interests. While it’s not the only site to offer these services, they have a friendly and effective user interface that makes the process easier.

Another New York startup that focuses on activities rather than on people doing them is the newly launched HowAboutWe, which completely redefines Dating 3.0 etiquette. People are matched based on the activities they propose for a date, rather than on their self-indulgent dating profiles. Its success only 3 months after launch is proof that there are lots of opportunities for innovative business models to be found in connecting people in new ways.

Plancast is a site that allows its users to share plans in advance. It’s been getting a great buzz among the early adopters and has some potential to change the real-time check-ins trend: Users intentionally broadcast their plans, meaning meetups are more scheduled and less happenstance. Here again, new connections can be created in advance, around events and activities, making an in-person meeting much less intimidating.

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4. Connecting Via Locations

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Location-based social networks have had some real buzz over the past 18 months. One reason for this trend is that our phones are finally powerful and fast enough to recognize and analyze local data. As with activities, it’s much easier to create connections when there is a common point of interest, like a neighborhood bar or favorite store. While location leaders like Foursquare don’t explicitly encourage new connections (yet), there are plenty of services that fill the void.

Yelp has been following this trend for years by creating a social network around places (mostly restaurants). With 33 million monthly unique visitors in June 2010 and more than 12 million local reviews, it’s the largest social network connecting people specifically around locations. Although the site’s major focus is user reviews, some of the “elite” members have developed a strong following of fans, and conversations are encouraged.

CitySense brings an interesting development to location networks by answering the question, “Where is everybody going right now?” The app, billed as a real-time night-life discovery and social navigation tool, is still in the process of adding more personalized options aimed at better creating those hard-to-find meaningful online relationships.

In the location dating space, one of the newest examples is meetMoi, a dating app that updates your location in real-time as you move around. At any moment, meetMoi searches for compatible matches near your actual location and sends you an alert when it finds a match. From there you have few options – wink, instant message or, if you are brave enough, meet instantly.

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5. Connecting Via Algorithms

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This trend combines the real potential of “Web 3.0″ by using semantic web and sophisticated algorithms to connect like-minded individuals. Hunch is the most buzzed about site, using collective decision trees to make choices based on users’ interests. Although the site has proven effective for some users, personal testing returned many incorrect assumptions on my personal taste.

Another, similarly titled, service is Lunch. It is based around recommendations and reviews by like-minded people. They even include shopping suggestions, which range from spot-on niche finds to super-obvious stereotypes like the suggestion that I might like a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

These automatic services still seem to be in their early stages and therefore not yet totally effective at creating real connections. As their algorithms become more sophisticated, however, they might yet redefine online discovery and help users create new meaningful connections with like-minded people.

 social media 

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Advertisers to Spend $1.7 Billion on Social Networks in 2010

August 16th, 2010 by Ernie

According to Mashable; Advertisers to Spend $1.7 Billion on Social Networks in 2010

The latest numbers from eMarketer project that advertisers will spend nearly $1.7 billion in the U.S. on social networking sites in 2010. Worldwide, spending will hit $3.3 billion according to the report.

The numbers represent a significant bump up from estimates published by the research firm at the end of last year, when it projected $1.3 billion would be spent on the space in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, eMarketer sees about half of that money (in the U.S.) going to Facebook, with MySpace continuing to see a smaller share of the pie. Separately, the firm estimated that Facebook’s 2010 revenue would hit $1.2 billion in a report published last week.

Earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that some of the social network’s biggest advertisers had boosted ad spending by 10x this year; a trend that’s apparent in the eMarketer report.

 social media 

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7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health

August 15th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; 7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should measure everything. Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success.

Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.

Having already written about the differences between “monitoring” and “measuring” and how to properly conduct the former. Now, we turn to some best practices to help you measure your brand’s overall social media health, as well as the effectiveness of your various online initiatives.

Read on for the seven steps to getting the most out of your social media measurements.

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1. Have a Goal

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In order to properly measure your social media efforts, you need to know why you are engaging in social media in the first place. This objective will dictate not only what you do, but also how you measure what you do. Let’s take a look at some objectives and the corresponding metrics you’ll measure for each.

• If your goal is driving awareness, you will be looking at metrics like share of voice, reach, readership and engagement with content (measured in action vs. views).
• If you need to increase satisfaction through better support, you need to look at sentiment, satisfaction rates in surveys, speed of resolution and percent of queries resolved.
• If creating better products and doing market research is a goal, you need to focus on top market trends and satisfaction with various competitive products.
• If developing customer advocacy is a goal, you should be looking at who your advocates are, measuring their influence and reach and their engagement with your product and content.

All or none of the above could apply to your particular objective. It’s important to be specific about your purpose and to measure towards that end.

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2. Get Your Departments on the Same Page

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Social media is not a silo. You need to set up your organization for success by better aligning necessary departments to work as units towards a common goal. Understand what goals are important for each department, and set them up for success with strategies and metrics that make sense.

You will need to establish a process by which your departments can communicate and share the right metrics with the right people on demand. Will you create a dashboard that’s easily visible by every department or simply send email recaps? Will they be customized to match the interests of each department? Can you export raw data and easily share charts and graphs?

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3. Always Consider Context

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Metrics without context are meaningless. If you know your share of social media conversation is 35%, what does that mean compared to your competitors’ shares or their change over time? Always look at metrics over time and inside of a competitive landscape.

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4. Select Your Platform Wisely

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Just like with monitoring, selecting the right tool for the job is the next step after figuring out your strategy. Here are some aspects you should consider when selecting a platform:

• Data – Which data do you need? Which channels are you going to measure?
• Reports – Identify how you want to share and present information. If you are going for a premium tool you should definitely be receiving embeddable and emailable charts and downloadable raw data. You can even automate delivery of reports and dashboards via email.
• Actionable insights – There’s a big difference between data and insights. Don’t forget the importance of an analyst within your organization, even if it’s a part-time effort of your social media specialist.
• Budget – Do you have a budget or can you only afford a free tool? Keep in mind that cheaper tools can sometimes be harder to use or come with less features. “Free” may cost you more time in the long run.
• Ease of use – If you have limited resources, your platform must be easy to use and allow you to get your job done quickly. Consider productivity-boosting alerts and workflow modules, automation and advanced analytics.

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5. Conduct a Full Social Media Audit

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Now that you have selected your platform, start by conducting a full social media “audit” with the specific metrics you are measuring. Note where you and your competitors are today and use this as a baseline against which you will measure at least once a month.

Conducting a social media audit can also help you monitor the current share of conversation of various players and channels. Through this process you can find where to listen for service issues and where you should be building relationships with thought leaders and influencers.

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6. Dig Deeper in Your Channels

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Start by measuring volume of conversation in aggregate, across all channels. You should also evaluate performance by channel, for yourself and for your competitors, to find which sections are performing well and to help give your numbers specific context.

A surface look at metric like share of voice, buzz and sentiment allows you to understand what’s happening during an identified period of time. However, to get the most out of your social media analysis, you need to dig deeper. If you discover a spike in negative sentiment or a spike in buzz for one of your competitors, you need to dig in and find out what’s driving it.

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7. Do A/B testing

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Do you have a couple of campaigns out there? Are you curious about the adoption of certain product features or what content is getting the best response? Social media measurement can help you conduct the right analysis to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Similar to how you can test web traffic patterns against website copy changes, you can measure the public’s opinion of things you try.

Remember to measure your general social media health comprehensively at least once a month and track responses to particular programs more frequently. Commit the right resources and choose your platforms wisely. Don’t be afraid to experiment and always measure!

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 social media 

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Social media – HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style

August 12th, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style

What’s your customer engagement style? It’s a question reminiscent of those light-hearted quizzes that proliferate magazines: Are you strong or sassy? Independent or group-focused? When someone @-replies you on Twitter (), do you respond immediately or wait a couple days?

These questions are actually important to consider. Why? Because customer engagement encompasses your company’s customer service, support, and marketing. It also deals with your company’s forums, Twitter accounts, blogs and meetups. How various companies use Twitter, YouTube (), Facebook (), and its ilk, goes a long way to define the long-term relationship consumers have with that brand.

There are some amazing success stories. Old Spice, using both Twitter and YouTube, recently ran a customer engagement masterclass that created a much-needed mania around the brand. Yet, for every success story, there are plenty of flops. When a Domino’s Pizza employee uploaded a disastrous video about the company’s hygiene standards to YouTube, a widespread negative viral campaign ensued.

The lesson: Ensure that your engagement style matches your company’s brand, goals, and general attitude. We took a look at the top five engagement styles that currently dominate the social web. Which are you?

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1. The Game Show Host

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Your message: Winning is sometimes the only thing. We’ve all seen things like this before: “RT – FREE STUFF OVER HERE LINK #welovefreestuff.” This social media personality knows that contests and special offers generate a lot of activity and set up a very clear (if slightly old-fashioned) relationship with the consumer. The consumer follows whatever steps you’ve laid out: Retweeting something, sending in a picture of yourself with company swag, or signing up for a newsletter. Then they are rewarded for taking these steps. Dialogue or community isn’t as important as having consumers hanging around hoping they’ll win something or get a special deal.

How you say it: Giving stuff away or offering deals works well only if you’ve got some trust built up. There are a lot of scams out there and acting like a wacko Twitter user doesn’t instill much confidence that this offer is trustworthy and/or legit.

Who’s it good for? Big companies with big pockets wanting to speak from the perspective of the corporation.

Example: Virgin America. Nearly all of Virgin’s Twitter stream is devoted to special deals and contests.

The bottom line: They keep the voice friendly and light, but also faceless. The brand itself is speaking here.

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2. Your Friendly Neighborhood Service Rep

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Your message: Like a good neighbor, you listen to your customers and engage them on an individual level, mostly to solve customer support issues or to capitalize on sales opportunities. You monitor social network channels because “that’s where the customers are,” and if conversations are happening about your brand, you want to be there to participate.

In this engagement style, Twitter is an extension of your customer service reps (albeit in a limited, loose way). Businesses following this style don’t so much start the conversation as they react to the ones that have already started – whether that’s a customer complaining about your brand or a consumer asking a question that your business is well-equipped to answer. You live by co-tweet, the @-reply and direct message.

How you say it: With one friendly “individual” voice. This engagement style calls for a business to officially anoint someone or selected people from within the company to be the official Tweet-voice. Their personality is allowed to come through on some level within company boundaries. Customers need to feel as if they are being handled by an actual human being who is personable, but not too edgy.

Who’s it good for? Larger, consumer-centric businesses, especially service and retail outlets, that have the resources to monitor multiple channels of customer feedback.

Example: Staples. Staples’ Twitter stream is full of @-replies asking for DMs. And they even use little illustrations of the actual people who are sending out those tweets as the background of their Twitter page.

The bottom line: Staples chooses to engage customers on a somewhat personal level; each tweet is “signed” by the person who tweeted.

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3.The Beehive

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The message: We’re all in this together people. Everyone who works for you can be your social network identity. Instead of having an official company account, you encourage all employees to participate in social media networks. Work identities collapse into personal social identities.

In this engagement style, the focus is not so much the direct relationship between consumer and business. Instead, it’s a distributed relationship whereby the business benefits by all the small relationships between its employees and the wider world. This is a radical way of thinking about customer engagement because it’s about cultivating a culture of engagement throughout your entire company.

How you say it: In a wacky, edgy, at times out-of-control voice. Often a company in this style will have a social media policy setting some ground rules and expectations; but the real thing holding this strategy together is a philosophy of engagement.

Who’s it good for? Idea-based companies, large or small. If your business is based on innovation, networking and generating buzz, this is the style for you.

Example: Any number of small software companies, but IBM is one of the most interesting examples of this style. They have an extensive and thoughtful approach to social networking (and computing). They encourage each of their employees to identify themselves on social networks as IBMers.

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4. The Community Builder

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Your message: Always an acquaintance but never a friend. You think of your customers as like-minded folks, and so you build spaces on the social web for them to hang out and share in their like-mindedness. You use Twitter to share non-business related links and quotes that you think your customers will like, but you also keep a slight distance from them in an attempt to let them drive the conversation. You probably use the word ‘movement’ in your Twitter bio.

Oftentimes, a business who follows this style will integrate their Twitter use within other social technologies – blogs (but for strictly non-business news), forums, and even entire websites devoted to the things your community cares about.

The community builder’s goal is to create conversation around things the company cares about and then link that conversation to the brand.

How you say it: With a balanced combination of passion and detachment. You want to encourage your customers to join your movement but you don’t want to either dominate the conversation or make the whole thing feel like it was cooked up by your marketing department. You are going for what people actually care about and so a little humility — making the brand ride shotgun or even in the back — works best.

Who’s it Good For? Businesses whose products and services already target a community with a definable set of values. If your customers and you would have a lot to talk about at a dinner party, this is a good bet for you.

Example: Timberland (). They run a community effort called Earthkeepers, a set of initiatives (including social media) devoted to environmental action. As described on its site:

“When you’re an Earthkeeper, you’re part of a community of like-minded people from all over the world intent on doing the little things and doing bigger things, like replanting eroded areas and retrofitting their engines to run on bio fuel. Earthkeepers learn from and support one another through original and inspiring ideas of making the world a more sustainable and livable place. And the more of us there are, the better.”

Note that while the Timberland logo is on the top of the page, it’s not mentioned here. In their tweets they take a more anonymous tone and almost always include a link to something the community might care about (often linking back to the Earthkeeper blog).

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5. The Friend

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Your message: Every customer interaction is like one amazing high-five. You are the business owner who knows all your customers by name and hangs out with them on the weekends. Your business Twitter account is way more important to you than your personal account (in fact you may not even have a separate personal account – it’s all the same to you).

Businesses in this style will share relevant info like menu updates, new products and event information but will also mix in personal thoughts, jokes and pictures of themselves at work. They tweet about things that have nothing to do with the business per se. These businesses want to their relationship with their customer base to be fluid and up-to-date.

How you say it: Just as you would say something to a pal. Pretty much anything goes, though the more personal the voice the better. Because your engagement with your customer is based on the friendliness of the relationship, the more natural and true to the voice of the person communicating, the better.

Who’s it good For? Smaller, local businesses. This is best when your social media presence mostly extends your face-to-face relationship.

Example: Choose any local restaurant and look at their Twitter account. There are a lot of food carts here in San Francisco like The Creme Brulee Cart which use Twitter to update their customer base as to where they’ll be that day, but you’ll also see messages to customers, friends, and other business owners.

The bottom line: They engage with their customers as friends.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

 Social Media Marketing, Social Media Strategy 

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