One of the biggest question we recieve from clients and potential clients is along the lines of “How do we measure our ROI” or “How do we know the campaign is working?” This is definitely the largest gap in social media marketing right now. However with a little bit of ingenuity you can pull some […]
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Measuring the success of a Social Media Marketing Campaign
We’ve made the case for integrating media relations, SEO and social media into a digital PR program as well as covering some of the basics. Now we can drill a bit deeper into blogger relations and social media monitoring.
The advent of digital PR and the technology tools that serve as compliments means changes in the way agencies provide client consulting and practice management. In the case of TopRank, we’re running both a internet marketing agency and a public relations practice, so we’ve always counseled our clients on the use of targeted keywords during interviews and in communications with the media as well as with content published to the web. In a push and pull PR strategy, keywords are used to optimize content and digital assets to enable the media to pull themselves to a client’s news.
Optimize your media relations training. For media relations coaching with keywords, the phrases to use in interviews (along with the brand message) are the keywords the company news content is optimized for. When the interviews or articles are published on or offline, many readers will remember the topic, but not the names of all the companies mentioned. More often than not, readers will go to go to Google and search the topic of the article whereupon the company has prominent visibility in the search results. The traffic this tactic generates includes both consumers searching for products/services as well as journalists researching stories.
I’m a blog. Can you relate? Another emerging practice area for many digital PR practitioners is Blogger Relations. Pitching in media relations is similar in many ways to individual link building. Pitching bloggers for PR purposes or as part of a link building program can be a slippery slope when approached with traditional tactics. Most bloggers don’t respond well, if at all, to a mass distributed email pitch. For successful blogger relations, more effort must be undertaken into qualifying bloggers to determine their degree of influence, topics that are important to them and their readers. Pitching is customized and personal by default, not as an exception.
Spin cycle to transparency. Most tenured PR professionals grew up in the industry on spin so it takes a bit of re-training to get more experienced media relations staff in the habit of social participation and transparency. Blogger relations is a never ending task of practice and refinement as is link building for search engine optimization. PR is still about persuasion though, so there will always be some aspect of the pitching effort designed for a particular messaging outcome just like there is an intended outcome for a link solicitation with SEO. That’s not “spin” as we know it today, but it is still about influence, a “sale” to be made, a media “hit” to score.
Social crisis management. Another change with the increasing popularity of digital PR is how public relations practitioners handle crisis communications and the rapid spread of information online. In the past, PR professionals could call their contacts within the media to keep a negative story from getting coverage. With more and more editorial decisions in the hands of user generated content, there’s nothing any company or PR professional can do to stop negative news from being posted, ranted, commented and spread amongst blogs, Twitter and instant messaging.
Listen to the brand conversation. Today’s participatory web requires companies to be involved with online communities in order to gain any kind of foothold on what’s being said and discussed about their brands. The notion that, “Conversations are happening with or without you, so get involved or get left behind”, rings true for brands and PR as well as for advertising and marketing.
Brands need to be monitored continuously and when dissention is detected, it must be qualified and responded to quickly before it becomes a full blown crisis. Kryponite locks are a classic example of this and with the Bic pen fiasco still occupying top five search results, they could seriously use some SEO expertise with Search Engine Reputation Management.
It’s about people, technology and keywords. Corporate PR and communications need to allocate ongoing software (social media and brand monitoring) and human resources (Community Manager) to this end in proportion to the value of their brand equity. The bigger the brand, the more you have to lose by not paying attention to what social communities and the blogosphere is saying. Social media monitoring is keyword based, so understanding keyword research from a SEO and branding perspective can be instrumental in an effective listening effort.
As companies should “listen” to the social web for negative sentiment, they should also listen for evangelists. Reaching out to brand proponents and energizing their efforts with recognition and communication tools goes a long way towards building a brand online. It’s also the foundation for building community.
Is it really about “Adapt or die”? When it comes to digital PR and the integration of online PR, social media and search engine optimization, it’s a critical moment for PR agencies and corporate PR departments: embrace the social web or it will embrace you. New methods of online communication and influence require new tools and skill sets on the part of online marketing and PR practitioners. Listening, participating and engaging with less direct message control mean agencies must adjust their organizations in order to adapt. It also requires new models for managing client expectations.
Whether it’s optimizing news content for SEO, digital asset optimization for media and news assets or an integrated Push/Pull PR strategy involving both optimization and media/blogger outreach, new corporate “neural pathways” must be laid in order for companies to realize their place in the social web.
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Digital PR and SEO Series: Part 3
When running a successful social media campaign one of the most time consuming aspects is keeping all of the accounts synced and updated. It is vital in the world of social media marketing to provide a clear and consistent voice across all platforms you’re involved in. In larger campaigns this can easily top 20 or […]
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Hellotxt - essential for social network management
The Social Media industry seems to get just a little bit bigger every hour and it’s amazing how many different vendors can come on the scene and offer products and solutions that can help us design and build communities of one sort or another.
As an enterprise though, you need to be sure you are working with the right solution provider. Someone who is not only selling you a service, but helping you truly understand why and how to implement it. This is where you see Awareness Networks — an on-demand social media platform for Web 2.0 communities provider — emerge as a front-runner. They have the right technology platform and what appears to be a wealth of knowledge and understanding to implement your community(s) the right way.
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Profile: Social Media with Awareness Networks
Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.
Industry leaders Todd Parsons, Co-founder and CPO of Buzz Logic, Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, Edmund Won, Vice President of Strategy for iCrossing along with Breanna Wigle, CRM manager for Military Advantage share insight into monitoring the conversation and best practices to track success.
Marshall kicked off the session making the case for Google to start measuring and reporting user trends in social media.
Categorizing referring traffic from social media is the first step in attributing success. Is your traffic coming from blogs, social network sites, message forums, bookmarking sites, micro media sites and photo sharing sites?
Rob spoke specifically to the expanding social media universe and developing a social media marketing strategy.
With the expanding social media universe, you need to go where the conversation is going in order to remain relevant and pertinent to your customers.
Designing a social media strategy in 3 phases:
1. Listen to map the landscape
2. Engage to participate and ignite the conversation
3. Measure and optimize based on performance
Listening to identify the external conversation is a crucial key to success. To really understand what community members are saying, you need be ‘mining the universe’.
Know what you need to know:
- How are people feeling about your brand
- Who are the most influential voices
- How effective are you contributing (or not) to the conversation
- What influentials should you cooperate with
- What collaborative environment ‘tool kit’ do you utilize
- What kind of content should you be creating
- How do you optimize this content for highest visibility
You have the potential to help amplify your customers’ voice and develop an engagement strategy, but first you need to know:
- Where is your current audience
- What are they saying
- Who are the influential voices
- What are they talking about
- What is their sentiment
To track results for your social media campaigns, harness data and develop reports to measure volume of conversation, voice sentiments, topic relationships, and competitors and features.
Product attribute Tag Clouds can provide a more qualitative snapshot of the words associated with your brand. The anatomy of search, as it relates to social media, is the opportunity for us to identify important keyword phrases to map an engagement strategy based on those keywords.
The grand unified vision is to over lay all relevant data sets from a social media campaign for correlative analysis which will eventually help enable predictive modeling. Brining all this data together, will help to determine and ROI for social media campaigns. Finding the meaning within the measurement is critical.
Breanna and Todd shared a social media case study, in which they leverage BuzzLogic as a tool to identify where the conversation is and how to identify influential voices.
Marketing strategy was to isolate the influencers and reach passionate readers of military defense news and information. Campaign goal: Increase product awareness to new influencers and their audiences as well as to convert visitors into RSS and newsletter subscribers.
The challenge was, they needed to find those influencers, while advertising to their audience manually was daunting, given the fragmented nature of social media.
What they found was they were able to better identify and reach influencers in the long tail.
Step 1: Uncover conversations
Specifically, look at blogs and forums to help drill down to specific topics, and identifying the influencers in the conversation.
Step 2: Rank the influencers and their content
Look at the influential blogs, and the posts specific to each conversation topic. How many times does the blog write about that specific topic? And what is the blog readership?
To maximize ad placement within social media, look at the targeted influencers’ networks and identify the most heavily traveled paths regarding specific topics.
Ad campaign overview:
- Critical that the creative is well done
- Create a unique highly targeted ad
Successful social media ads are:
- Compelling
- Informative
- Have a clear Call to Action (CTA)
Key Observations / Learning’s
Edmond shared a case study with the audience, specific to engaging forums.
Situation: high tech client facing dissatisfied customers that vocalized their technological problems and frustrations in online forums. The solution was to identify, monitor and develop an engagement strategy on influential technical support communities. The goal was to provide support and help resolve problems with current products and improve community perception over time
Outcomes included:
Measuring and reporting
- Measurement is key
- Standard ROI measure does not work in social media
Monitoring metrics
- Tonality of user postings
- Categorization of discussion topics by product
- Site traffic for the forum sites
Engagement metrics
- Direct impact metrics
- Number of company postings
- Number of conversations engaged
- Number of members directly conversed with
Indirect impact metrics
- Page views of postings
- Number of links posted to client’s website
- Amount of traffic resulting from these links
Analyze page views over time
- Since many forums are optimized for search, engagement is highly visible….forever
- SEO continues to drive new page views for older postings
In addition, links posted in forums were tracked by thread and matched back to the client’s referring sources to determine the number of clicks. Often, a specific post generated more page views and clicks due to extremely high rankings within the natural search results for typical search queries.
Key takeaways
This was a very interesting session. Each speaker shed new light to the question on most our minds: What’s the ROI for social media. My key takeaway is that there is no one right answer, and mostly the answer is based on the campaign objective. As we continue to advance our ability to track results and monitor trending, all you can do is keep testing to identify what gets results.
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SES San Jose: Social Media Analysis and Tracking
