On Tuesday, October 26, 2010, Marketwire presented a one-hour webinar on how to derive business intelligence from social media.  We covered how to listen and measure social media conversations, and come up with actionable insights you can use to build your brand using Marketwire’s Sysomos products: Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. 

If you missed the presentation, not to worry! You can still register to watch the webinar in its entirety on demand.  For those requesting a copy of the slide deck, feel free to visit the Marketwire channel on Slideshare or watch the actual recording.

At the end of the webinar, we opened up the floor to questions from the audience, but due to the sheer volume, we were only able to address a few of them with the time remaining.  As promised during the webinar, we assembled all of the questions, including those that were already answered in this blog post below:

Q: You mentioned that there is no cap on results, but is there a cap on searches?

A: In MAP, there is no cap on the number of searches. You can run as many as you like. In Heartbeat, your only limitation on searches is the number of queries and tags included in your subscription tier.

Q: What is the best way to introduce a social media strategy, monitoring and analysis into a traditional government organization?

A: Several government organizations have seen value in “owning a message,” especially when it matters the most, such as during a crisis situation.  Several government organizations (such as Health Canada) leveraged the reach of their social media messaging during the H1N1 epidemic to ensure the public knew where to get checked and receive immunizations when stock levels were low.

Q: You mentioned the Old Spice campaign didn’t really achieve good return on investment (ROI). How do you bridge the gap between viral campaigns and actual sales?

A: The Old Spice campaign is a hotly contested social media marketing example because the buzz generated by their campaign was so great, some believe it elevated the brand and transformed it by reintroducing it to a younger demographic. 

Others argue that the true revenue generated by the campaign wasn’t anywhere near what Old Spice paid to produce the television commercial, and the numerous other videos personalized to bloggers and online influencers. 

Despite having a strong message, high production value, and good viral buzz, the campaign lacked a true call to action. Old Spice should have taken the opportunity to tie their broadcast and online campaign into point of sale, especially for products that are exclusively distributed and sold offline.  How could they have done that? Old Spice could have marketed coupons people could print out and redeem at their pharmacy or supermarket, for instance.

Q: I see how this could be really useful for B2C verticals, but B2B is more difficult because it’s harder to find evangelists and major discussions. What would you recommend?

A:  I would argue that B2C companies have much greater reach – inherently – than B2B companies.  However, chances are that B2B companies, their brands, products and services are discussed somewhere, perhaps on niche blogs and forums that aren’t as easy to identify.  These niche communities are usually much more engaged because of the scarcity of information and the potential value of peer-to-peer networking around a common, but highly specific interest.  Once you find these pockets of highly engaged, highly specific groups, you’ll find your evangelists and influencers.

Q: We have a client in the legal industry and we are using Twitter and Facebook on their behalf.  Twitter is updated with fresh content on a routine basis, but we don’t get many followers or traffic. Any tips?

A: As you may recall, we discussed several concepts that may be holding you back from fully engaging your community:

• Put down the bullhorn and engage.  Social media is about nurturing relationships with your community, not just publicizing a content marketing strategy.  For example, if someone is asking about the pros and cons of a prenuptial agreement and you’ve written about it in a blog post in the past, you might reply to them and suggest that person read your post.
• Join the conversation.  There are lots of conversations going on in Facebook groups, within Twitter chats and elsewhere online.  Make an effort to join these conversations and the “likes” and “follows” will come organically over time.
• Use a business intelligence tool.  How many followers do your competitors have?  Where do they engage users in social media?  Who are their influencers?
• Measure engagement.  This goes beyond just social media channels and tools such as Heartbeat and MAP, but also into the realm of web analytics.  Your question mentioned a content strategy, so I would suggest looking at your server logs, web analytics reports and any other data you can find that might show common trends in content consumption.  For example, average time on page for blog posts or bounce rate for specific referrers (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc).

Q: In the case of Canada, can you view demographics by province versus state or can you only filter on countries?

A: In MAP, you can drill-down to view results within a country by province or state, and in some cases, even cities, by using the Demographics and Location filters.

Q: What about comparing two brands on a local level, for example, can you compare queries of brands or products on a very granular level such as city and state?

A: Yes… Also, in MAP, similar to that last question, you can use the Compare function to compare the two queries, and be as specific as states, provinces or even cities. In Heartbeat, you can view a pre-built graph of results broken out by state and a Top States chart.

Q: In Heartbeat, can you manually select certain items for export?

A: Yes. To do this, you could either assign clips to a tag (such as “ClipsToExport”), or mark them as favorites with a star. Then, you’d run a simple filter against either of those criteria and export the results into your desired format.

Q: Can you elaborate on how to effectively recruit evangelists and what to do with their passion for your product?

A:  As we discussed during the webinar, evangelists are people that love your brand through good times and bad.  They are influencers within your community that often suggest your brand to others, whether that is online or offline, and even go the extra mile to engage others that might be negatively mentioning your products or services.  You wouldn’t necessarily recruit evangelists, but you could try to recruit influencers that may become evangelists.

Engaging influencers directly is usually not that easy. Most of the time, influencers will already know your brand if you operate in the same market they are involved in.  However, here are some ideas you can use to reach out to them:

• Give influencers the inside scoop.  Got a press release going out to announce a product launch? Pitch the story (but not the details, necessarily) to influencers and give them the opportunity to be involved in publicizing your product with a few days, or a few weeks, lead time.
• Offer exclusivity.  If the influencer in question fits so well into a particular strategy you’re working on, sometimes it makes sense to offer them exclusive rights to cover a story, product review or interview someone at your company.
• Loan influencers demo units or trial access.  Although there are disclosure concerns that must be addressed ahead of time, sometimes getting your products into influencers’ hands wins them over and turns them into an evangelist for your brand.

Q: What makes your products better than radian6 or Alterian SM2?

A: Beyond our streamlined display of clips and intuitive user-interfaces, the ones we feel are most important are:

• Proprietary sentiment engine – Sysomos has built its own sentiment-analysis engine and dictionary, which is not only a competitive advantage but it also yields a higher accuracy percentage. And we have the benchmark reports to prove it!
• Proprietary text analytics – Sysomos owns (and has built) its own text-analytics engine which is used to create value-added charts like the BuzzGraph. Since we own it, we can customize, adjust and tweak it on an ongoing basis. Many competitors license their text-analytics functionality.
• Greater geographic insights – Our geographic details about each source come from a variety of proprietary collection routines and system analysis. Many competitors rely simply on geo-location that is based on the web-server’s IP address to determine its location – which can yield lots of false positives for sites hosted on popular blogging networks or large web-hosts.
• Multi-lingual capabilities – The Sysomos products cover publications and social-network results in more than 180 languages and from just as many countries. And, the products have on-the-fly translation in and out of a significant number of those languages! (Many competitors just allow you to translate international clips into English.)
• Facebook monitoring and moderating – Heartbeat can monitor your company’s Facebook fan-page, run key value-added reports on your followers and fan-page activity, and (as an extra service option) have an AutoModerator which watches your fan-page for objectionable content and can take action when it finds it.
• Built-in workflow – Heartbeat promotes teamwork, with its ability to share clips between team members using the account, assign clips to a team-member for follow-up, open new cases, close cases and share notes about each clip. And, it keeps track of all collaboration through an Activity Log.
• Built-in engagement – Heartbeat allows you to engage your followers and reach out to them directly from within the interface, such as sending a Twitter @reply.

For more discussion on social media, join our weekly Twitter chats on Thursdays, 9:00 to 10:00 pm (PST) to learn more about social media and how it can help your business grow.

Related posts:

Tags: social media measurement, sysomos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.