10 ways social media monitoring builds brands and drives sales
1. 10 Ways Social Media Monitoring Builds Brands and Drives Sales March 23, 2011
2. Your Hosts Mark EvansDigital Marketing and Social Media Strategist (@markevans) Jeff Cann Manager of Accounts, Sysomos (@jeffcann)
3. Real-Time Response/Engagement Social media is a 24/7 activity in which conversations continue to take place and evolve. Social media monitoring provides brands with an effective way to see what’s happening and identify the most important, interesting and relevant conversations. This provides the insight needed to be proactive and engaged rather than being forced into action.
4. Influencer Identification As the amount of activity on social media expands and grows, it is becoming more important to identify the leading influencers and opinion leaders to ensure that they’re aware of what you’re doing and, as important, be aware of the conversations they are leading. For example, it may be important to see what a leading blogger is writing about to effectively engage and build relationships with them.
5. Feedback/Customer Insight Consumers are providing insight and feedback about your company, brand and products so it’s important to listen to what they’re saying – be it good, bad or indifferent. The ability to tap into this wealth of information and solicit ideas from consumers can be a valuable and powerful medium.
6. Sentiment Analysis So what’s the mood out there? How are people feeling about a particular issue, development, product or brand? By tapping into social media monitoring, it’s easy to get a sense of whether the conversations are positive, negative or neutral.
7. Competitive/Industry Insight One of the keys to social media is recognizing it can be used to do more than just monitor activity about your company, brand or products. As important is the ability to see what people are saying about the competition and the industry in which you operate.
8. Lead Generation As much as social media is a soft sales environment, consumers are using different services to discover and do research on products and services. In many ways, they are opening the door for companies to reach out to them with relevant and timely information that COULD turn into sales.
9. Customer Service Customer service is seen as the “killer app” of social media because it is an effective and real-time way to answer questions, resolve problems, provide solutions and reverse bad customer experiences.
10. Public Relations You have different target audiences to reach, communicate with and engage. Social media monitoring provides a way to discover and connect with these people.
11. Activity Audit/ROI Measurement For anyone leveraging social media, it is important to determine how much you’re getting out of it. Social media monitoring provides the information and data that companies can use to measure activity to figure out return on your social media investment.
12. Crisis Management When something unexpected happens that could damage your company or brand, social media monitoring is a way to manage the crisis. It could be a matter of becoming aware of a situation as it is developing, as opposed to when there is a full-blown problem. It could be a matter of being able to provide valuable and relevant information to mitigate the situation in a proactive and engaged way.
32. Share of Twitter Referrals Of the top 10 links referenced by Twitter users mentioning the BP crisis, one-third linked to social media websites such as blogs, videos and social media group efforts. CNN was referenced the most with 17% of all links analyzed, with YouTube a close second.
38. Crisis Management Get early notifications with alerts. Track the discussions and sentiment in real-time across sources, geographies and demographics.
Created without the use of IP address which is not accurate with social media due to the number of hosted platformsUncover markets and opportunities that may not have been apparentWhen you are looking to reach out to influencers or to tap into new markets you need an accurate way to identify geography
Also important to understand where mentions of your brands are occurring on the social web and understand how this compares to the competitive set. Are there opportunities to dominate a vertical? What can we learn from why the MacBook for example has such a large percentage of its mentions coming from Forums… which forums are these?
We also have clients that have discovered conversation themes that they were not aware existed. Here we have a buzz graph….
Another way to analyze what people are saying about your brand is extract all entities (names of people, companies, industry terms etc) and to group these words into each classification. At a glance we can uncover all of the industry terms people are using when they are discussing the new Nissan Leaf
As Mark referenced, a critical function of social media monitoring is crisis management
During the lead up to the Dry Max rash complaints the conversation there was a significant amount of volume around the topic happening within forums and social media. These conversations were happening for a month before a tipping point was reached at which time it spilled over into mainstream media
Another area Sysomos helps its clients in crisis management as well as listening is through the management of brands FacebookFanpages. We have seen a number of brand crisis situations where the main hub where a conversation blows up is on a fanpage.
With the volume and speed in which content can be created its important to have that 30,000 foot view to understand the scope of a potential issue