This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

If you’re aiming to tackle social media monitoring, then finding a suitable tool is simple. A stable of popular products such as Alterian SM2, Radian 6, and Sentiment Metrics offer users the ability to conduct complex searches through millions of historical records. The process generally entails inputting a list of important keywords–some of which are bound together by Boolean operators–and examining the output of records in order to answer questions such as, “which web communities are the most popular for a given keyword?”, and “who are the key influencers in these communities?”.

In theory, the social media monitoring tools provide these answers along with a variety of pretty charts and graphs that further illustrate the point. In practice, however, those of us that are tasked with reporting on this output are occasionally encountered by a sea of unintelligible records in which the charts and graphs are at best, misleading, and at worst, completely erroneous. Every client is different, and the variance between each keyword set can make one project a breeze while another project a burden. If you aren’t experienced in finding coherence within a large data set, you’re likely to be left with a disproportionate number of burden projects. But have no fear, adhering to these five key principles can drastically improve your efficiency and help you fully navigate through a sea of records.

1. Start with the most recent data – Your end goal may be to provide six months of historical data about a product, brand, or a specific subject area, but there may not be a need to immediately query all six months at once. If you’re critical, you’re operating under the assumption that the first set of search terms will need to be tweaked several times before returning acceptable results. By starting with the most recent results, your social media monitoring tool spends less time searching and returns fewer total records. This allows you more time to find negative terms, and more time to find recent relevant records that may warrant new keywords. It has the added bonus of ensuring that the top domains returned are likely to still be active and the sentiment will reflect the most current market perceptions.

2. Branded terms may be your bread and butter – When prioritizing which questions you want to answer through social media monitoring, you should consider that the most specific keywords will often return the most relevant results. Branded terms often offer the kind of keyword specificity that can perform the heavy lifting required to filter irrelevant results. For example, imagine how much more targeted and relevant search results for “Sausage McMuffin” would be instead of results for “Sausage Biscuit”. By leveraging specific branded terms, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend manually filtering spam.

3. Be aware of ambiguous terms – Sometimes, branded terms are not the silver bullet for relevancy.  For example, for every specific car brand such as “Volvo”, “Mercedes-Benz”, or “Lamborghini”, there may be a “Dodge”, “Saturn”, or “Smart”. The latter terms also offer little in the way of negatives that could refine these searches; attempting to create a comprehensive list of negatives can potentially open a can of worms that sucks time away from other valuable areas of investigation. Therefore, if you are trying to gauge the relative volumes of conversation about Volvo versus Dodge, you’re better off comparing specific models such as the “Volvo S40” versus the “Dodge Avenger”.

4. Do not always equate high volume with high influence – When reporting on key influencers, it may be tempting to choose the domain in which a keyword appears the most often. Make sure you consider factors such as multi-channel reach, unique monthly visitors, PageRank, and other factors that may enhance the authority of one domain over another.

5. Show no mercy for Twitter – When searching for short-tail keywords, spammy Twitter feeds can often overcrowd the result pool. The solution to reducing the volume of these results can be to use more complex search terms that reduce the likelihood a result will be returned given then 140 character limit. You may miss some important domains, but you can be confident that the ones returned are more likely to be targeted and relevant. A better way to find important twitter feeds may be to find high value domains that also use twitter to release content and engage their audience.

Social media monitoring is a work in progress, but hopefully these five key principles will help you decide on how to proceed. Surely, semantic analytics will advance by both process and technology, but in the meantime, there is a large enough space for ingenuity in social media monitoring to drive a truck through.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Help Your Online Marketing Strategies

Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing endeavors are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.  However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 (formerly known as Techrigy) can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• They Tell You What
  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• They Tell You When
  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• They Tell You Where
  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• They Tell You Who
  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who, What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

In our next series piece on the Research Pillar of the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, Kevin Olson, Serengeti Communications’ research guru, will be explaining how Human Analysis affects the research process for social media marketing.

I try not to be one to jump on band wagons, which is why I’ve totally left the whole Google Buzz nonsense alone. That said, when I think there are other points to be made about situations involving companies, consumers and social media, if its a band wagon that’s rolling by then I’ll gladly step on, even momentarily. Such is the case with SouthWest Airlines, Kevin Smith and what we’ll have now forever refer the situation to as “FattyGate”

Does Size Really Matter?

Does the size of your Twitter following account for anything (1.6 million +)? How about the fact that you not only tweet, you blog and you even have a podcast? Add on top, you’ve acquired a cult following, write screenplays, produce and direct movies and even act in a few of those movies. Let me introduce you to Kevin Smith, the guy even owns a comic book store in Red Bank, New Jersey. I’ve been a huge fan ever since I found out he was the guy behind the movie Dogma – any guy that has the kahunas to cast George Carlin as a Catholic Cardinal and Alanis Morrisette as God, has one heck of a sense of humor in my book. I follow this guy on Twitter, read his blog and occasionally listen to his podcast. I do have to say though, I refrained from seeing Jersey Girl, too much Ben Affleck for me.

Now does the size of your Twitter following (who you actually converse with), number of fans on Facebook, and comments on your blog posts account for much? How about the reposting of your videos, and links to stories about your great customer service encounters, and ranking #1 in the airline industry for a slew of ‘good things’? Let me introduce you to SouthWest Airlines. I’m a huge fan of them too, ever since the weekend my father died and how well they treated me, SouthWest Airlines won me over.

I state all this in this manner to show a few points:

1. I like both of the parties involved
2. Both parties involved are extremely social media savvy
3. Both parties involved have very avid, emotionally attached fans.

This Isn’t About Kevin Smith Being Fat …. Or Is It?

Lets face it, we all know, heck even Kevin Smith knows, he’s no 136 lbs. Michael Jackson skinny.   That’s really not the point here, and Kevin even points it out in his blog, that it isn’t about him being over weight. This is more about being consistent and truthful with your policies. Here Kevin Smith has a point.

He also has a point about how all of this was handled. If your policy states the arm rests come down, you don’t impinge on other people’s space and you aren’t in need of a seat belt extender, then, why pull the “people of size” policy card?  Whether he originally purchased two seats or not, doesn’t matter at this point if you were claiming he is being pulled from the flight because of his size and but yet he’s passed all your ‘tests’ that he’s not in violation of that policy.

What would have been a little bit more wise on SouthWest’s part was to not put him on that flight because he had originally purchased the two seats, and they wanted to accommodate those two seats again.  Kevin claims to buy the two seats so he can avoid talking to strangers, not for weight reasons.  I’m sure SouthWest would have wanted to accommodate that wish because of who he is and understanding that maybe he just wants to be left alone at times, had they really thought this through.

What “FattyGate” Really Exposes…. SouthWest Airline’s Inconsistencies

What’s at the real root of the issue here is not the two blog posts blaming Kevin Smith for the incident (sorry SouthWest, but that’s how it comes off), but what they were admitting they were wrong with, the “person of size policy” and how it was handled.  Immediately after Kevin Smith started tweeting and posting his picture that he got on the next flight and wasn’t thrown off because he was fat, his fans, and other SouthWest passengers who’d heard about the situation started posting other pictures.  These were pictures that were showing passengers that looked twice the size of Kevin Smith, without the “two seat” rule and SouthWest not enforcing the policy.  Inconsistencies can be a real problem for anyone in social media, and now SouthWest knows that from experience.

Admitting Fault is Good Public Relations, Asking For Help is Golden

When you admit you are wrong, truly wrong, people are willing to forgive you.  When you ask for help in trying to correct what is wrong, people are even more willing to assist you.  When you admit your wrong, but yet say in a very round about way,  “we’re sorry, but it’s really your fault because you are fat“, by posting your policy at the bottom of the post that’s suppose to be an apology, that really isn’t a good way of winning over those people who you want forgiveness & help from.

Why SouthWest just doesn’t say, “you know what Kevin, you are right, we’re not consistent with our policies, this was our mistake we’d like your help to fix it,” is totally beyond me.  The guy has likely bought hundreds of tickets by now on the airline – anyone could see that in their system (i.e. he was a loyal customer).  They guy has a following.  They guy knows how to use social media.  Why not recognize this and work with it?  If anything, SouthWest has consistently been social media savvy, not stupid, so this really makes me wonder who’s steering the boat over there?

Hiding your inconsistencies by trying to push blame elsewhere isn’t wise in social media.  Any form of denial only brings a much larger magnifying glass into every thing else you are doing wrong and makes you the media’s next punching bag.   It will even get you on the front page of CNN for all the wrong reasons.

Situations like these have to be seen as opportunities, especially if you are in or planning to be in social media, other wise they’ll eat you alive.  Solving problems like these with the help of your audience or those who feel wronged, makes evangelists, rather than enemies… which would you rather have?

*Airline Passenger Photo Credit:  ButtonMonkey

Who doesn’t love “free”?

Social media is free, isn’t it? Well in the very basic sense, yes social media is free.  Participating in social media if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

• Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere
  Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?
• Invest in Finding Your Audience
  Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?
• Invest in the Approach
  How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”
• Goals & Measurement Need Investment
  Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?
• Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right
  You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

While attending the eMetrics conference in the Washtington, DC area, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik announced a whole slew of new features being applied to Google Analytics.  From my take on it from a social media perspective, this can help companies start to track some of their measurements they were doing manually for measurement in social media.

So what all did Avinash announce?

• Experimental API for Google Website Optimizer
• Unlimited unique user analysis (which also shows as trending)
  • Avinash emphasized it’s “True” unique user data
  • You also can do this by picking unique time frames, you don’t have to “add” all your data together like with other analytics packages
• Advanced Table Filtering – Avinash calls this “In Line Analysis
  • You can choose your segmentation values
• 2 New Behavior Types of Goal Tracking
  • Number of Pages View
  • Time
• Custom Variables
  • Setting up variables such as
    • Comments left on blog
    • Traffic coming in from specific types of sites (such as blogs)
  • You can track things at a visitor, session, page  (visit) level
• Free Mobile Application (Apps) Tracking
• Custom Alerts
  • You want to know about those people coming from blogs – you can be alerted now!
• Intelligence  – New Dashboard Additions
  • Automatic Alerts – these will appear automatically now when you log into GA and see your dashboard.  GA’s algorithm will look for anomalies in your data and alert you to them automatically

Avinash also went on to say that this new intelligence which is giving you a peek into the “unknowns” is only phase one of what Google’s planning to roll out.

So how does this help your social media strategy and measurement?  Well for starters as Avinash pointed out, you can now track comments in Google Analytics by setting up custom variables.  This is something currently you have to manually put into a spreadsheet to keep track of, now it can be easily integrated into your Google Analytics tracking.

The same could be said for monitoring how much traffic you are getting from blogs, or specific types of sites.  The custom alerts allow you to be notified and this could even help you discover unknown sites that are helping to disseminate your content.  There’s a lot between the custom alerts and custom variables that you can put into place to help you measure some of the things you are doing manually now, all within Google Analytics.

Then there’s the mobile app tracking.  To me, this is huge!  Before you’d have to guess someone was using a mobile app by the browser they come in on “iPhone” or “blackberry” being listed.  With this new announcement from Google Analytics, this can  help any company wanting to know how mobile applications are affecting the traffic to their sites.

If you’d like to read more about the specifics of each of these announcements, the Google Analytics blog has detailed information about how each of these new features work.  I highly suggest taking the time to read up on them and implement them into your own measurement strategy for social media.

While this isn’t the be-all end-all way of measuring for social media, these new features that Google is adding to Google Analytics can help take some of that manual counting and heavy lifting off of your plate, if implemented in the correct fashion.  One of the nice things about these new features is that as Avinash put it, you don’t need a “God” to code this stuff for you to have it work, its very easy to implement.

On an off note, wishing a speedy recovery to Avinash!  Hope that arm heals up fast!

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of presenting on three panels and at the last minute, the honor of getting to introduce Thursday’s keynote speaker, Charlene Li.  As an avid fan of the book Groundswell which Charlene co-authored this was a real honor to do no matter how last minute it was.

Charlene had a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in her presentation which focused on the How to Prepare for the Future of Search and how social media is affecting it each and every day.  The biggest piece of advice was probably the hardest for any SEO or PPC professional to comprehend; Focus on the Relationship with People, Not the Keywords People Use.

Conversations in Social Media

That was the point of my presentation at Search Engine Strategies as well.  The session “Managing Social Conversations” included myself, Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo, Mike Volpe of Hubspot and Brian Kalma from Zappos.  The whole panel had that focus too, in social media its about the relationships and conversations you are having with your audience that ultimately win the day, not the keywords that drive those conversations.

There were two primary focuses to my presentation, the first was that social media needs a strategy.  That requires a bit of work to create something successful.  Research, defining and measuring all go into strategy – it’s not just tactics like putting up a Facebook page, or starting a Twitter account.  If you don’t have a sound strategy behind doing those tactics, your efforts will most likely fail.

The second focus on my presentation was on measuring and monitoring.  Without measuring and monitoring how does a company know that what they are implementing with their social media strategy is really working?  Unfortunately most companies have been conditioned to relate success to a “click to purchase” ratio.  In social media this type of action rarely happens.  So what’s a company to do?

In Social Media – Measure Something Different!

So what do you measure?  How about interaction, involvement, influence and intimacy?  These are all factors that can be measured and proven to affect the bottom line of a company.  These can be measured and monitored through buzz monitoring tools and web analytics, its just a matter of understanding the data and turning it into actionable data. This is what our new social media white paper: “Social Media Impact: Unicorn or Elephant” is all about, so sign up for it if you are interested in learning more about doing Social Media the right way.

You can take a look at our Social Conversations presentations including the ones from SES SanJose and connect with us on Slide Share.