Category Archives: Measurement & Monitoring

My favorite screen in PRN Media Monitoring shows top conversation topics within the social media monitoring results for the keywords I've selected. So cool. And dead useful.

A new report from IBM detailing the extent to which CMOs were unprepared for the advent of social media caught my attention yesterday.  Fairly stunningly, the report revealed that while most CMOs consider social media to be a key engagement channel, only a quarter of the large group surveyed were actively tracking blogs.  About half paid attention to different types of reviews.

Not surprisingly, the CMOs indicated that expressing ROI on social media is difficult. Furthermore, most of the CMOs surveyed indicated that developing their skills and understanding of social media was low priority.

Ignoring social media and its influence on customer buying decisions really seems like a risky approach to both planning a company’s communication strategy, and one’s own professional development.

I mused on this for a while and then opened up my PRN Media Monitoring suite, which I use to keep tabs on what’s going on in social channels.  I’ve used it for a while, relying on settings and parameters I set up months ago.  Frankly, it’s been a while since I set up a new monitoring profile.

In an attempt (albeit a biased one, I know) to look at social monitoring with fresh eyes, I set up a new monitoring profile and set about to see what I could accomplish.  In 20 minutes.

I bumbled around a bit, futzing with the keywords for my new search, before settling on the keywords “social media” with “press release” or “news release.”     And once my results loaded, I started having some fun.  Instead of following my “habitrail” and just looking at a handful of key metrics, I instead made discovery my opportunity.

• I found a guy who’s blogging for a small business site on the subject of PR.  He’s new, but prolific.  We need to talk to him.
• I admired the ripples the announcement of the PRN/Ektron partnership made last week, and spotted some coverage I hadn’t seen.  Cool.
• I found a raft of people on Twitter to follow and add to some of my lists.  They hadn’t @messaged me, but they are talking about topics I care about.
• And found a discussion on LinkedIn that I had managed to overlook despite my regular activity on that network.

All that, in just twenty minutes.

Any social media guru will tell you the first step you must take when considering developing a social presence for your brand is listening.   Understanding what your audience cares about is absolutely fundamental to social success.

Simply put, if you don’t listen, your programs won’t work, you will have a heck of a time defining any return for the time and resources wasted and you’ll probably think, “Eh, this social media stuff doesn’t work.  To heck with it.”  So why do folks skip the listening step?  I have a couple theories:

• It’s hard.  Setting up the monitoring parameters can be an exercise in experimentation.  You may wind up with way too many fish in your net.   However if you spend some time tweaking your searches  (I personally prefer to have a host of smaller, more focused searches), you will find the input is not only germane, but manageable.
• It creates more work.  True.  You will uncover opportunities that require response right now.   You will start to truly understand what people mean when they say the audience is now in charge.  And a lot of social media interactions are very high touch.   Blast e-mail doesn’t work here.

Ultimately, I think listening does make a company’s communications more efficient, and effective – simply because you know what your audience is interested in and where they’re gathering, and you can plan accordingly.

There’s no question the dynamics of attention have shifted.  Influence and information look far different today than they did five years ago.   The good news is that social media monitoring can reveal the new dynamics in your marketplace, enabling your brand to garner new insight and visibility.

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media, and is the author of the free ebook Unlocking Social Media for PR.

I had the privilege of attending the “Pay Attention! Social Listening Done Right” panel at this year’s Social Media Week in New York. As the title of the session conveys, this was a discussion about how brands and marketers listen in on conversations happening on social media channels, separate noise from meaningful signals and properly respond to the information they glean. In the company of about 120 fellow attendees (by my rough count), I enjoyed the free-flowing conversation that touched on a handful of intriguing topics and first-hand tales of the trade.

Michael Learmonth (@learmonth), digital editor at Ad Age, was the moderator of this five-man panel:

Kyle Monson (@kmonson), senior technology editor, JWT

Shiv Singh (@shivsingh), head of digital, PepsiCo Beverages

Brian Clark (@gmdclark), CEO, GMD Studios

Ed Sullivan (@ed_sullivan), vice president of strategic alliances, Radian6

Michael Jaindl (@jaindl), chief client officer, Buddy Media

Instead of typing out a play-by-play of the discussion, I’ve rummaged through my notes and have spotted four main points that I’ll recap below. If you would like to watch the entire session, head over to Social Media Week’s Livestream video of the event.

The panel was kicked off by Learmonth, who noted that though big brands are now listening to conversations happening in the realm of social media, “any 2-year-old” can do that. The real question, he asked, is: “What do I take from all of this information and how do I act?”

This led to the discussion of the following topics, among others:

1) The challenge of separating noise from meaningful signals: Singh was first to offer his thoughts on this, the “heart of the challenge we face.” He said that the information gathered through social listening “only makes sense when it’s put in the context of other information.” Digital dashboards that help his company track how they’re faring against their competitors in the social space are interesting when they’re placed beside volume data and brand-health data so correlations can be observed. Singh added that while his company listens to conversations on a daily and hourly basis, “The challenge continues to be separating the noise from meaningful insight, and then data that can be actionable and data that we can respond to in a real-time sense.”

Sullivan, whose company makes software and analytics to help deal with this issue, added, “The good news is that as more money is being invested into social media as a medium, as part of a fabric of a company’s strategy, there are really cool tools that are coming out to actually help that entire process of finding the right piece of information, the right nuggets, and getting them to where they need to be.”

Monson (who, funny enough, was monitoring the tweets about the panel with his laptop) added that the trick is putting the right person in front of all the information who can interpret the data and make the right decisions in a timely manner, an inherently risky task that might go against a marketers’ nature.

An easy way to discern the noise from the signals, according to Jaindl, is to start paying attention to anything with a question mark: who, what, when, where, why and how? This is a good place to start if you want to know what you should respond to.

2) How companies should respond/act: Once you identify the important signals, the issue becomes how you should respond to them, if at all. One of the more intriguing points of the conversation occurred when Learmonth brought up an example of Virgin America sending a traveler a $200 voucher by way of a direct message on Twitter because the traveler’s flight was delayed. Monson contrasted this with an airline responding to an angry tweet with just an apology and explanation, and drew the “common sense” conclusion that brands shouldn’t get involved with a customer’s moment of despair unless they can actually do something about it. “If you can’t do something, you’re just reinforcing the negative perception that I already have of your brand because my flight’s delayed.”

Clark pointed out that sometimes people will tweet in anger without wanting a response. He added, “The novelty of, ‘Oh look, the brand actually is listening to me,’ I think, over the next few years is going to be replaced by a sort of creepiness about, ‘Oh, the brand is listening to me.’”

The recent Wheat Thins commercials, where consumers who tweet about the brand are visited by a yellow van and a film crew, and given a pallet stacked with boxes of Wheat Thins, was used as a possible example of this. “Now, at some point that novelty’s going to wear off and that’s going to be creepy,” Clark said. He then told members of the audience who partake in social media listening that they are “professional voyeurs,” and that there are creepy ways to use the information gathered from these activities. Clark warned that every brand that messes things up will change the landscape of consumer reaction, forcing brands to be more sensitive to this matter of privacy.

Later in the discussion, Singh brought the conversation back to gray areas when he called out “the elephant in the room,” which was Facebook. While the giant social networking site clearly houses a wealth of valuable conversations for brands and marketers to tap into, the problem is that only a small slice of that is open to viewing and listening via brand pages and public profiles. Monson dubbed this walled-off information the “holy grail.”

“And that’s the big missing thing,” said Singh. “Listening is never going to be totally scalable until we can listen to that, or we can at the very least model out the impact of what’s happening on those pages.” He stopped short of saying whether Facebook should actually be opened up to this extent or not, but did say he thinks what keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night is the decision to make Facebook profiles private instead of public by default, which is the opposite of what Twitter has done.

3) Determining who brands should respond to: While it’s easy for brands to respond to customers who are either big supporters or detractors, “How do you find the normal people out there?” asked Learmonth.

“Normal people don’t make footprints in social media,” said Clark. After some laughter, he continued, saying, “People who make footprints are having an extreme reaction. They either really love the brand or they really hate the brand.”

Monson added that brands often respond to sentiments not held by the larger community. Nevertheless, Clark noted that by responding to extreme reactions, brands are showing that they’re actually listening.

During the Q-and-A time later in the session, when the panelists were discussing the concept of influencers, Jaindl made the point that brands might want to worry a little bit less about who their influencers are. “Everybody has a little bit of influence, and I think people like brands that are genuine and treat everybody equal,” he said. “So if someone’s looking at a brand and they say, ‘OK, that brand is only responding to who they think has ‘influence’ — that comes across as a little bit insincere.” Jaindl’s bottom-line suggestion was, “Stop trying to figure out who the influencers are and start responding to everybody.”

4) The perils of using Twitter as a focus group: “There’s a danger in putting too much stock in what Twitter users are saying, I think, because they’re not always going to be representative of the audience,” said Monson regarding the idea that social media conversations may offer a glimpse into the future for brands.

“You end up with ‘Snakes on a Plane,’” Clark added.

Learmonth added that listening to what consumers are saying online led to the failed attempt by CBS to bring the show “Jericho” back on the air.

“It’s so tempting to use Twitter as your focus group because it’s free, it’s pretty easy to mine what people are saying and it’s easy to throw those results into a PowerPoint deck,” said Monson. “But I think you still need to actually talk to humans because…humans talk in different ways than they do on Twitter.”

My takeaway: While many subjects were covered in this discussion, the overall sentiment that I walked away with was, well, more of an image — an image of a child on a quest, trying hard to wield a large sword. While it’s clear that social listening is a potent new tool that can benefit brands and marketers, there’s a distinct tension between that and the cost to the unknowing consumer. As it stands, there’s much to be learned about listening, responding and balancing this task in the grand scheme of bigger strategies. The path to the holy grail might be blocked, but it doesn’t mean people will stop searching for other ways to that prize, no matter how many times they might fumble their weapons along the way.

Authored by Jason Hahn, editor, Profnet.

Need to get your ear to the rail? PR Newswire Media Monitoring gives you insight into how your organization, product, service, competition and industry are presented in print, online and social media channels. Media Monitoring tracks comments on more than 40 million blogs, 5 million forum posts per day, and 30,000 news sources, social networks and microblogs, including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Our flat-fee subscription pricing model ensures you always stay within budget no matter how many article clips we find – and the ability to change your search terms keeps your media monitoring relevant.