Middle School Marketing - Social Monitoring
Our September Middle School Marketing group continued the tradition of discussing ways to bridge the gap between old and new school marketing. There were several new faces, but as always the conversation sparked some interesting debate. We initially set out to discuss three questions:
- What are some examples of social media client case studies? How have mature companies used social media not just to experiment but to really have an impact (beyond just early-adopter “luck”)? How did they do it? (I guess that’s three righ there...oops)
- What tools and metrics are companies using to measure and demonstrate success?
- Is email marketing dying, morphing, or re-surging? How does it fit overall?
As usual, time was against us, and we only got to points one and two (mostly two)--leaving us plenty to talk about in October!
Here’s a quick recap:
The question "How do you measure social media?" is getting louder. It seems like everyone is asking, "How do you quantify?" "How do you measure?" or "What defines success?"
Nicholas kicked it off with a live demo of Radian6 capabilities. Our review of this monitoring tool raised an interesting discussion about "measuring" vs. "monitoring." You "measure" goals, you "monitor" conversations. "Measuring" defines a goal and measures success in fulfilling that goal, while "monitoring" simply reports on what’s happening and does not fulfill a goal in and of itself (KD Paine has a good post on this and also check out Ryan’s post on how Mini Cooper linked buzz to sales). That being said, the two need to work in tandem. With all these monitoring tools it might be easier to keep track of your brand, but many companies struggle with analyzing data, measuring it against a goal, and, more importantly, acting.
Everyone agreed Radian6 seemed like a pretty solid tool, but there was also some talk of other options, including one of my favorite’s Yahoo! Pipes (which is free). Rather than go in-depth on each of these tools, check a few for yourself:
Paid Monitoring Tools:
Free Tools (Not an exhaustive list, just a few we discussed):
As we shifted gears to talk about how mature company’s are embracing online media, Justin brought up Clearsprings integration with NBC. He was kind enough to use SNL’s recent Sarah Palin / Hilary Clinton skit as his example, which as been viewed over 4 million times via the Clearspring widget...talk about shareability! However, it is because of this shareability that companies are quite honestly freaking out as they realize they’re losing control of where their "brand" is showing up, and how people are talking about it.
"Control" is a dirty word these days. Once it’s online, it has legs. There’s really no controlling where it travels (think Johnson and Johnson’s sub-par corporate blog). Is this a good or bad thing? Mayby a little of both? Depends on the product we surmised.
Lastly, we chuckled about Lisa’s passion for Roy Rogers manifested in a Facebook group. Ah, to be young again…
I’m beginning to think these meeting should be sponsored by Roy Rogers—they come up every month!
The issue of big brands being comfortable with sharable media (i.e., stuff that can be displayed on any site) sparked a couple more discussions this week. I think an underlying issue that old-school marketers don’t understand very well is that younger audiences easily make the distinction between a sponsor of a *site* vs. the sponsor of (in this example) an embeddable video widget.
That said, the challenge for guys like Clearspring will be to track & manage massive amounts of data, in part to allow the advertisers better control of where their brand is displayed. That will address their fears, but more importantly give them the ability to target their branding with great focus. I think that’s good for everyone.
There is a free, fully functional version of SM2 from Techrigy available at http://sm2.techrigy.com . It is limited to 5 keyword phrases and 1000 results but is otherwise identical to the professional version.
Hi Josh,
Thanks for the review of the Radian6 platform. Awesome that Nicholas had a chance to demo it to the group. You definitely share a great point on the difference between measurement and monitoring. Monitoring can be used to track many things for PR, marketers, sales and customer support folks (we’ve seen many new examples emerging). Of course while there is still lots of debate on what to measure each one of those groups also has potential tradition metrics that can be adapted to be used within social media (while I would say that the ad folks would have the most difficult time with it because advertising has been traditionally one way and not relationship based while social media certainly is).
BTW, I love the name of the group. Perfect metaphor for the transition.
@Brian: Agreed. It’s a fair concern...while I wouldn’t want my brand showing up on someone’s personal blog with questionable content;—the visitor—would never get angry if a brand shows up in a video that some punk has on his site, that’s not their fault.
@Martin & @David: Looks like both the Techrigy and Radian6 tools are working well = )
Martin thanks for letting us know about your free tool. We’ll definitely check that out and see if it could work for our clients.
David: online advertising is certainly going through an identity crisis. I hope tools like yours can be the impetus to producing valuable ads and better content.
Cheers.
@Brian - Agreed on the idea that the “old school” may not fully comprehend how discerning the younger audience is.
But I would venture that we “new school” folks may be just as disconnected with how unaware the less tech-savvy folks are with the lines between site and sponsor.
The number of people I come across who can not clearly distinguish between paid and organic search results leads me to believe the old and new still face an enormous gap in understanding each other fully.
@Josh - Thanks for the write up.
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