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Posts Tagged ‘social media monitoring’
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
 At yesterday’s Social Media World Forum in Santa Clara, CA, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Benchmarking Advertising on Social Networks.” The panelists represented American Airlines, Harley Davidson and Warner Brothers Records. I also recently attended a social media discussion with Dell Computer at the TechTarget Online ROI Summit. Here’s a recap on how these top brands are leveraging social media to acquire and engage with customers and fans.
How is Social Media Being Used?
- American Airlines (AA) uses social media in targeted geographies, known as “geo-targeting” to boost passengers on specific flights. They also provide travel-related content beyond flight information as a value-add to their passengers (restaurants, entertainment, lodging, etc.)
- Harley Davidson uses social media for new customer acquisition and to build a community of evangelists among its customer base.
- Warner Brothers recently brought its advertising in-house as it experiments with ways to monetize content that is often free on sites such as YouTube.
- Dell Computer uses social media to engage with prospects and customers and to track and respond to what people are saying about them. Dell uses blogs, online forums, bookmarketing/share widgits, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr and LinkedIN. Through social media, Dell sold over $2M of product last year using a Dell Outlet promo code. Employees can engage with prospects and customers online and follow a code of conduct that requires them to identify themselves as working for Dell and to “use their best judgment”. (To see the largest collection of social media policies, check out the Social Media Governance website.)
Benchmarking Process
- AA benchmarks by setting measurable goals, such as the number of passengers on certain flights.
- Harley Davidson uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as 1) relationships (no. of fans or friends), 2) click-through-rate (CTR) on paid ads, 3) visitor engagements (number of times content was shared among friends) and 4) media value (profile visits, cost-per-click).
- Warner Bros. tracks and measures the amount of traffic that they drive to an artist’s site, and the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
- Dell uses tools such as Buzzient to see the most active sources of a topic as well as Radian6, GoogleTrends, Google Alerts and TwitterSearch to measure their “share of voice” in comparison to competitors. They track changes in Twitter follower count, number of re-tweets, changes in website or blog traffic and their Twitter influence using a tool called Twinfluence.com.
Use of Facebook and Twitter
- AA uses Facebook to spur conversations among their passengers and to hook people to content, what they call “virtual hubs.” Twitter is used as a listening tool to monitor what people are saying about AA. Six full-time customer service reps monitor Twitter and reach out to people to assist them if appropriate. Twitter is used to deliver flight information as well – especially delays due to weather issues. As a result, calls to the AA customer support 800 number have dropped.
- Harley Davidson uses Facebook for initiating conversations with and among fans. Twitter is used by fans to see “what’s happening this moment” at Harley Davidson-sponsored events.
- Warner Bros. views Facebook as a place for conversations to happen. They post photos of fans with an artist and the fans will tag themselves. Twitter is viewed as a “digital billboard” to drive traffic to Facebook or an artist’s site. It also is used for scavenger hunts in which fans use clues delivered by Twitter posts to find CDs and concert tickets.
- Dell monitors Twitter for both positive and negative mentions of the company or their products as 20% of Tweets mention a product name or company. They have several Facebook Pages to build fans and discussions among their target user segments.
Summary
Key advice from these brands:
- Listen first – find out where your audience hangs out online and what they’re saying about you
- Integrate social media into your overall communications mix, being consistent with content and messaging
- Set measurable objectives and monitor results
At the end of the day, social media is another avenue to build a strong community and trust among your prospects, customers, partners and investors.
For more information, check out these blog posts:
Technorati Tags: Integrated Marketing, marketing trends, Social Media, social media monitoring, social networks
Tags: Integrated Marketing, marketing trends, Social Media, social media monitoring, social networks
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
 Social media is on top of everyone’s mind. Most professionals have already set up their profile on Linkedin. While many individuals are becoming conversant with Twitter and Facebook, the jury is still out on how effective and compelling these new tools are for selling in a business-to-business environment. Yet, that isn’t stopping marketers from integrating these tools into the marcom mix. Forward-thinking businesses of all sizes are being creative and clever in their social media efforts as they find new ways to dialog with and listen to customers and prospects.
A word of warning: social media is a different type of marketing tool where control of your messaging is an illusion. To avoid any miss-steps and potential embarassment, your company should have a policy on the “how, who, when, and where” questions of social media:
These are just a few of the questions which need to be addressed. The good news is that a number of companies have already penned a policy statement for their company. The marketing strategists at the Arlington Mill Group are experts in this area and wrote a blog post which offers some good advice on establishing a social media code-of-conduct.
Chris Boudreaux (of the Arlington Mill Group) has pulled together the web’s largest collection of social media policies. You’ll find policies from small companies, enterprises, non-profits, news outlets, and governments.
To quote directly from Arlington Mill Group’s recent blog post:
The ideal policy will look different for every organization, and change as your company shifts its participation in social networks over time. While developing this type of policy is hard work, it is worth it… If you haven’t examined this area of your business, now is the time to get started!
Technorati Tags: Integrated Marketing, Social Media, social media monitoring, social networks
Tags: Integrated Marketing, Social Media, social media monitoring, social networks
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
 In this social media age, smart businesses are listening to what people are saying about them online. Because blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are available to anyone who has something to say, when customers are dissatisfied, that is exactly where they go to complain — and probably not to you.There have been a number of PR upsets recently, where companies failed to respond quickly to comments about their company that were spreading like wildfire through social media channels. Amazon, Motrin and Skittles are a few recent examples.
OK, it’s a bit of “the higher they are, the harder they fall”, and most of our readers’ companies don’t expect such threats. Still, if someone not authorized by your communications department is writing about your company or your products online — good or bad — it is important that you know about it. And if you are deploying what you hope will be a viral marketing campaign, you absolutely need to know.
There are a number of tools that let you listen to what is being said on the web. One of the easiest to use is Google Alerts. Since Google has spiders out there crawling and finding everything that has been published on the web, they are able to let you know, if you wish, what they found. It’s easy to sign up and free.
For example, I receive email Alerts from Google on KickStart Alliance, our business name, and on morecontrary, my Twitter username. Google comes up with some “false positives”, such as where the words kickstart and alliance appear in the same text, but I also get solid hits when one of our articles is republished (as was the case recently on the Women in Consulting site). Google Alerts can be a bit slow to pick up mentions on other websites, but if you aren’t worrying about damage control, it does let you know what is happening.
The appearance on the market of numerous social media tracking and monitoring tools verifies the need for companies to find out what is being said about them online. Marketing Pilgrim lists 16 social media monitoring sites you can use to track what the world is saying about you and yours. You need to buy their report to get their analysis, but the post names the suppliers. Of these 16, Radian6 is probably the biggest and best known, with their dashboard display, analysis tools and real-time monitoring.
Some other reasons to track what people are saying are:
- To assess how your marketing campaigns are working. As Radian6 puts it, to “know which content is making an impact.”
- See who clicks on a short URL you use in your Twitter tweet, (Twitclicks shortens the URL and lets you track clicks on it.)
While you’re at it, wouldn’t you like to know what people are saying about your competition? You can add a Google Alert on your competitors’ name to stay on top of what is happening in your market.
Technorati Tags: Add new tag, social media monitoring
Tags: Add new tag, social media monitoring
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
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