Corporate Social Media

One of the reasons that I like reading white papers by the Altimeter Group is that the papers typically have a concise and implentable method to the madness.  For most of the clients that I work with, we are seeing an often chaotic approach to diving into Social Media.  Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett recently published a paper titled: Social Marketing Analytics – A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media.  I’ve included the paper from Slideshare below this post.

The thesis of the paper really is that “organizations that develop social media measurement strategies which align key success metrics with business objectives will evolve more quickly.”  Maybe this is something that is obvious, but it’s easier to say than to actually put into practice.  Sometimes a bit of structure can go along way, and the paper urges organizations first to think of their foray into Social Media as a learning experience that will build for the future.  I’ve said it before, but companies need to think about what their business objectives and requirements are before selecting a vendor or product.  Social Media is a tool.  Don’t start swinging that hammer until you know what it’s going to help you achieve.

Take the time to really map out what parts of your individual business unit (or entire corporate strategy) can benefit from two-way conversations.  For starters, the paper addresses four large business objectives: Foster Dialogue, Promote Advocacy, Facilitate Support and Spur Innovation.  From my perspective, these are successive objectives that can be addressed more fully as your organization takes action on each of the ones prior.

Most of our clients use monitoring tools to Foster Dialogue and Promote Advocacy, so it’s something that’s easier for me to talk about.  If you’re just starting out with Social Media, I would concentrate on really creating solid metrics around these two objectives first.  However, map out how you can use Social Media for the other two as well.  Having a plan and a clear sense of direction can help your organization ensure that your efforts are aligned with the proper growth of Social Media as it relates to your business.

Within Foster Dialogue, the paper points to three measurable KPIs: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement and Conversation Reach.  Conversation Reach is a bit harder to define, but probably the most important with respect to demonstrating ROI.  While they have created a general framework, it is imperative that you define relevant conversations first.  Which of your competitors do you want to track, and what aspects of the conversations around those competitors can actually affect your own business?  Based on experience, the hazy noise cloud of a thousand conversations can often lead to analysis paralysis.  Be concrete in what you are looking for today, and what you want to look for in the future.

Within Promote Advocacy, the paper points to three other KPIs: Active Advocates, Influential Advocates and Advocate Impact.  Again the last KPI (Advocate Impact) drives the most ROI, but right now this an extremely difficult piece to track.  Getting influencers highly tied into your sales and marketing efforts is the goal, but for most of our clients, that’s a long way away.  For the time being, I would stay focused on understanding where advocates both for your own organization as well as those of competitors are coming from.  Listen to their conversations, and try to discover where opportunities lie for high impact individuals to help drive campaign and product messages without injecting too much of a sales pitch into your own interactions with them.

Overall, the paper is relatively brief, and I would suggest taking a look for yourself.  The more metrics you can put in place from the beginning, the easier it will be to demonstrate the value of your future efforts.

Sure, we all want to be “Outside the Box”, but how far from the box do we normally venture when we try to put this into practice?  The “box” is a pretty safe place, and that’s really why we like to stay within its confines.  Even when we venture outside of the box, we typically like to stay close to the box because of the risk of being too far out there, etc.

With social media, we can test the grounds outside of the box and really push innovation.  Conversations are happening all over different social media channels, and more often than not, around your specific brand as well.  Current and future customers are asking for product enhancements, changes and improvements.  They have ideas that maybe you have not thought of, and yet they are telling you and your competitors what they are.  It’s amazing that so much great information is being discussed, while most of it is not being used or even heard.

I would suggest that brands begin listening to social media especially for new product and campaign launches.  Hear what your customers are saying and make changes if you can.  If not, feed that information back to marketing, research and product development for future launches.  The better you can know your customer, the more you can deliver innovative and exciting products back to them.  And in the end, that is simply good business sense.

Within the social media monitoring space, there is a lot of talk of using social media to innovate products and determine how trending data is pointing to new places that your customer wants products to go.  But how realistic is it that a company can use this information appropriately?

Generally, I would say that most companies who do not generate massive amounts of social media on a day to day to basis are going to find social media as a source of product innovation pretty difficult.  The real winners are companies like Subway or Taco Bell where there is enough flowing through Twitter streams, etc. to be able to quickly understand what consumers think about specific promotions and product releases.  Entertainment companies who produce content may also have a high level of engagement, but production take a long time, and many of the companies who we have talked to don’t really see how they can react quick enough to make a change.

That being said, there is definitely an opportunity here for all companies with regards to product innovation.  Just as it is great to bring in executive talent from outside the company to get renewed perspective, there is a huge benefit to bringing in the intuition of consumers who do not work at the company.  As opposed to a market research study, the unstructured and often out-of-the-box thinking that comes out of a trend cloud can help researchers and product innovators within the organization think differently about how to to tweak ideas.

Are we still in the infancy of using this data for product innovation?  Of course.  But is there a lot of information out there that can be already be used to think differently? Absolutely.