(NOTE: The below is a cross post of a post I wrote for the Techrigy Blog from Aug. 7. It’s not exactly the same as I use a different image here than I did at the Techrigy Blog.)
You don’t really need to be active in social media.
Twitter? No. Blog? No. Facebook Page? No. Social bookmarking? Nyah. Second Life? Forget about it.
Social media — like any other tool for marketing — should be researched and evaluated based on how best to reach and communicate with your audience.
But (you can tell it’s a big BUT), you do need to be monitoring and listening in to social media.
- Do you have comment cards available for customers and prospects?
- Do you have a suggestion box in your location(s)?
- Do your sales people listen to customers?
- Do you have a customer service department or person?
- Do you have your company name in Google News Alerts or have a paid clipping service for news releases and such?
- Have you ever conducted a focus group or other similar market research?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you need to monitor social media.
I’ve been involved in SM monitoring almost since I first became active in social media in 2005. There are a lot of monitoring tools available, both free and paid. (For reference, see a previous post on online tools, and my Delicious bookmarks tagged social-media-monitoring.)
How and why you should monitor social media? Let’s look at four key ways to use social media monitoring:
Monitor your company and product names, as well as any other trademarked, marketing and related terms about you. This is a no-brainer. People are talking about you whether you are listening or not — so you might as well listen. You also can track competitors. During your monitoring:
- During your monitoring see what negative, neutral and positive things are being said. Before jumping in to respond to negative streams, gauge if the content is emotion- or fact-based — it’s tough to sooth a debate filled with emotion, so be cautious. Also determine if the author receives a lot of traffic or seems to have a lot of influence. If either are low, consider your timing if you should respond at all. (This point requires another post to really discuss.)
Gauge how effective your marketing messages are. I’m talking more than just negative or positive reactions. Those do not necessarily come from your branding efforts. Review the results for your company and related names used above and see what’s being said and what main points are associated with your terms. Then, adjust as you see appropriate. You also can track your efforts over time and compare to sales data to determine what impact social marketing has on sales.
Market research: Don’t look for your company-related names; look for trends and issues associated with your industry and your marketplace. You may have conducted surveys and other research in the past — with social media you can do the same in real-time (or at least pretty recent time). See image at right for an example: Tracking “glass and recycling” v “plastic and recycling” for a recent two-month period.
If you are planning an outreach, use social media monitoring to smooth the process: For the subject or topic you plan to use for SM outreach, search for it first. See who’s already blogging, tweeting and discussing it. Then, see if those people are ones you want to engage: Gauge their level of influence, their comments on your topic, etc. — all the while learning more about them. That will help you better connect with them if you do contact them.
For the image, I use Techrigy’s SM2 service. However, other services also have graphing and analytical tools. Even with free services, you can take the data and develop your own charts.
Point to Ponder: No matter if you use a free service or a paid service, there’s still an investment. Both require an investment in time to fully analyze the data. The trade off is in the amount of money you pay for a comprehensive service that will compile the data and start to analyze it, compared to the amount of time you need to gather and compile the results and then analyze using the free tools.
-Mike