MONITORING – Without it, we wouldn’t know what strategy to develop for a social media campaign and we wouldn’t be able to make a campaign dynamic and actionable.

To build a social media campaign strategy, we need to first conduct an audit just as we would for a more traditional PR campaign. The social media audit consists of four major monitoring-and-analysis components. The first three, which we break down in our September ’09 issue, monitor and analyze where a company (and its product) stands in comparison to its competitors, its market and its current social media efforts. The fourth component monitors and analyzes influencers who are most relevant to a campaign, a process we describe in our March ’10 issue.

But monitoring doesn’t end with the audit process and development of campaign strategy. Once the campaign has been launched, we continue to perform ongoing monitoring in order to identify specific actions and opportunities to proactively engage with target audiences (customers, potential customers and influencers). Ongoing monitoring differs from monitoring during the audit phase in that it leads to specific actionable recommendations that feed back into the creation of strategic content.

MEASUREMENT – Did the campaign accomplish its intended goals? Was it worth the time and resources? Measurement allows us to evaluate the success and value of a social media campaign.

The first question requires a method to identify and report the results of a campaign. To begin, it is necessary to set specific actionable goals for a campaign and to then determine metrics that have a direct correlation to the goals. Those metrics should be used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. The goals for a Twitter campaign typically involve increasing awareness (of a company, event or product), so metrics that determine the number of impressions and the level of interaction (or interest) produced by a campaign serve as a good indicator of whether goals have been reached. Our June ’09 issue details the metrics that we generally use when measuring the results of a Twitter campaign. However, these are just starter metrics and we should always make sure the goals are really appropriate for a campaign. For example, reaching the largest number of people may be less important than reaching specific people.

The second question of whether a campaign was worth the time and resources addresses the issue of ROI and is unfortunately a much harder nut to crack. Though we would be the first to recognize there’s no simple solution, we offer one way to tackle the issue of measuring social media ROI (especially in comparison to other marketing programs) in our July ’09 issue. We hope to offer more on this topic as we get more hard data from our campaigns for clients.

MANAGEMENT – You’ve completed your audit, developed your strategy, and even determined the metrics for measurement. Now begins the work of producing and communicating content as part of your campaign, a process that can be overwhelming and time-consuming. How do you optimize limited time and resources?

Our debut issue from May ’09 outlines steps to increase the results of a product launch by incorporating social media channels like blogging, Twitter, and video. But how do you manage those channels individually?

For example, many companies struggle to find a process that allows them to publish and promote posts regularly for a corporate blog. In our February ’10 issue, we introduce one method, which follows a publishing model practiced by media companies and which addresses the three main obstacles of corporate blogging: 1) getting busy people to consistently contribute content; 2) identifying relevant topics; and 3) generating enough blog views to justify the cost of time and effort.

With Twitter, the challenge lies in managing the flood of content that is pushed out to the Twitterverse. How do you know what requires a response? Is there a way to minimize the amount of time spent searching for and writing mini-posts to publish? We have found that some tools can ease the process and we provide a guideline to using such tools effectively in our issue from January ’10.

Integrating video into a product launch is especially effective due to video’s visual impact and YouTube’s viral potential. Video can tell the story of a company or a product in a way that cannot be accomplished by the written word (e.g. press release) alone. Unfortunately, producing a video is a foreign process to most companies. Budgets rarely allow for the employment of professional production studios, so how do you make a video that looks professional, yet doesn’t cost tens of thousands? We struggled with the issue ourselves and share some tips we learned in our November ’09 issue.

Want to hear more about our experiences with new social media technologies and the lessons we learn while carrying out campaigns for clients? Sign up for our newsletter

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Amazon. Yikes.

This Amazon challenge raises an interesting question about timing in general for social media campaigns. Should a vendor initiate a social media campaign as part of a strategy to enter a new market without a product or service that is generally available? After all, a big component of any serious social media campaign is identifying, attracting and energizing a community conversation around shared interests. For vendors, that usually means customers.

We think the answer is yes. Especially when you are raising awareness with a targeted community of early-adopter prospects while at the same time educating the industry influencers about your strategy and upcoming offering. It also helps you attract beta customers before your GA formal launch. This kind of pre-release campaign is particularly effective with technical audiences used to doing things another way (i.e., using Amazon).

For this new client, we followed the Page One process for developing a strategy for our social media campaigns. We monitored the online conversations around the client and its competitors, identified the key topics and influencers, prioritized the communications channels, and recommended a series of targeted programs that we could measure to achieve our business goals.

Fast forward to today, and yay! we surpassed Amazon on Twitter (measured quantitatively by followers and qualitatively by engagement), caught up with them on Facebook and still have some work to do on blogs. But by any measure it was a very successful start for just six months. What did we do?

First, we quickly recognized that we couldn’t compete with Amazon around the terms associated directly with “cloud computing.” They pioneered this category and we didn’t want to start our campaigns from a deficit position. Rather, we recommended to the client that we start by building on their positions of strength. In this case, those strengths were virtualization leadership and a very large installed base of developers already familiar with their enterprise solutions. We said, “Let’s talk about how easy it is for enterprise developers to use what they already know and move some of their work to a public cloud. And back.” It was and is a cool simple story and a unique value proposition that appealed to our target audience.

Following are some of the metrics we reported back to our clients at the six-month stage in our engagement. By the time the client launches a generally available offering, the key influencers and early prospects in the market will be well informed and ready to act on the details of that forthcoming announcement.

Growth in three social media channels managed by Page One:

By now, most of you have heard about the launch of Google’s real-time search, which pulls live updates from websites like Twitter and Facebook and features them alongside traditional search results.

From a social media professional’s vantage point, Google’s real-time search is a big step forward in illustrating the true impact of social media. Inclusions of live Twitter and Facebook mentions for a Google search stresses the value of having a social media presence to foster positive conversations about a brand or product. Hopefully this will convince companies who have not yet dove into the social media pool to jump in head-first off the high dive.

As real-time searches become accessible to a much wider audience, monitoring and tracking also becomes an invaluable service provided by social media professionals. Social media was once believed to be a setting for casual conversation. More and more, it’s becoming an official space for brand management and monitoring. If a person searching on Google instantly sees a negative comment about their search term, they will form an initial impression about the term before visiting its official website. It’s also noteworthy that people are more inclined to be influenced by a fellow customer than a corporate website.

Google’s real-time search is definitely a legitimizing move for the social media industry. Now it’s up to the social media professionals to develop the best strategies to leverage these new functions, and of course, be prepared for the next thing in social media.

At Page One PR, we’ve assisted companies like SAP and Cisco with their various monitoring campaigns. We’ve learned over time that useful “monitoring” really means in-depth analysis of a problem, using data from our own manual observations and social media keyword searches, to achieve a specific result or make a strategy recommendation to a client. While these campaigns come in all shapes and sizes – from an assessment of a client’s existing social media implementation to an analysis of a competitor’s online marketing programs – we believe that most monitoring projects can be performed according to a five-step process. Blame our public relations pedigree, but we believe a message-driven approach to monitoring will produce the best results.

Step 1: Audience Segmentation

At the beginning of the monitoring project, whether your focus is your own company or your competitors, it’s important to gain an understanding of the various audiences that the observed marketing or PR activity is attempting to reach. Ultimately, you will want to know whether or not content is positioned and delivered effectively for specific target audiences.

Step 2: Message Categories

Dividing monitoring parameters by major conversation themes and marketing messages focuses the monitoring project on organized, actionable data. You don’t need to know about every John Doe or spam bot that happened to mention your new product. You do need to turn a wild social media jungle into key findings that lead to specific strategic recommendations.

Step 3: Origination and Delivery

After discovering and building a list of key themes and messages, it is important to determine the location of those messages, who originated specific conversations, and how messages were distributed. For example, some of the questions you may ask yourself include:

– How is your company driving messages through its own social media channels?
– What social media channels contain important conversations?
– Do conversations link across multiple channels?
– How are external actors changing the focus of conversations or seeding new message themes?
– How are messages spreading virally?

Step 4: Goals

What are you or your competitors trying to achieve through marketing or PR activities? In order to determine the effectiveness of messages, it’s important to understand the purpose of those messages. At the end of the day, social media needs to achieve a business goal or it’s not worth doing.

Step 5: Effectiveness of Marketing/PR Messages

Try and answer two questions: did the messages reach the right target audience and what action did the target audience take upon exposure to the messages? These questions will help you determine if your campaign or a competitor’s was effective. If key influencers are commenting on blogs, “retweeting” messages, and making content go viral across multiple social media channels, you need to have a deep understanding of this process and how conversations are framed in specific contexts. Understanding effectiveness in this sense requires the kind of careful analysis that an automated tool simply cannot perform by itself.

The Page One social media team now starts every social media campaign with some form of monitoring to ensure our developed strategy and plan is based upon detailed research and analysis. Although this process seems simple enough, monitoring is by no means an easy task. Especially on complex projects, it’s important to have a team that carefully deliberates on analysis and strategy and remains vigilant in linking the findings to the ultimate goal of the project.

What do you think of this process? Have you used a different approach successfully for in-depth analysis of social media campaigns and monitoring results? I’ll even invite the plethora of tool-makers in the space to share their thoughts. Although if you say your tool is a cure-all for PR and marketing professionals, expect a robust debate!

Please send resumes to socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.

Want to put your social media skills to the test in public relations, marketing, and the high-tech industry?

I lead the Page One Social Media Program at Page One PR, an international public relations firm that caters to the high-tech industry. The Page One Social Media Team has experienced rapid growth in the past year and we’re now looking to hire a full-time social media specialist to join the team in our San Francisco office. Since the new member of the team will report directly to me, I’ll start off by telling you a bit about myself.

I joined Page One PR two years ago and soon after, founded our Social Media Program. I have a strong passion for crafting innovative strategies to communicate corporate messages and have developed an even stronger passion for social media as the right tool to do this. I live and breathe social media, because I believe, 100%, that social media is the future of the PR industry and if companies do not move quickly to adapt these new techniques, they will go the way of the dodo bird, just like the printing press and now the newspaper. Many people are sitting back wondering what is going to happen to PR in the next few years. I am not one of those people. I am that person running up ahead, trying to help define the solution and pave the path. I feel strongly that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this though. It’s all about metrics and measurement and connecting social media programs to real business objectives. Without having well defined, well thought-out goals and the ability to clearly track and monitor progress and results, social media campaigns are often just a waste of time and money. I really enjoy my job because Page One has allowed me the opportunity to grow and expand a program that has the potential to radically shake things up. I have spent the past year learning, experimenting, observing other PR agencies and developing our social media program and have created a process and set of services that will differentiate Page One PR and put us at the cutting edge of social media. Our results already speak volumes on this. Now I just need to build out the team!

So who are we looking for?

Page One’s Social Media Team has developed a unique, metrics driven process focused on generating great results for our great clients. We are looking for a smart, enthusiastic, highly motivated and driven individual that is looking for the opportunity to help high-tech clients integrate social media techniques into their communications strategy. We are ideally looking for an individual who is already actively engaged in a broad range of social media activities (blogging, social networking, community development, monitoring and response, etc.), has the ability to think creatively and develop strategic solutions, and wants to jump in and get their hands dirty to create and run successful social media campaigns.

Our new team member will have:

• 2-3 years PR experience that includes PR agency or corporate experience working with technology companies;
• Experience running social media campaigns and a strong background in social media techniques and strategy;
• Creative outlook and willingness to think outside the box to find solutions;
• Outstanding writing skills and verbal communications skills;
• Willingness to experiment and ability to deal with uncertainty;
• Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
• A team player with the ability to create great working relationships on all levels in the company and with clients;
• Four-year university degree.

What will you be doing on the Page One Social Media Team?

This position, while a lot of fun, will also involve a lot of hard work. We are looking for someone ready to take on the challenge! By joining the Page One Social Media Team you will have the opportunity to work closely with me to help define and shape the structure of Page One’s Social Media Program, work with top-notch clients, come up with crazy campaign ideas and actually receive the support and materials to implement them.

Okay, so what are some of the activities you may be asked to do?

• Develop messaging and positioning for complex high-technology products, many of them in the B2B space;
• Respond independently to engineers, business executives and media about complex business and technology issues;
• Develop strategies to package messages that leverage media and social media trends;
• Develop strategies to enable content to be distributed online through viral word-of-mouth channels;
• Detailed analysis of metrics to track the popularity and viral distribution of specific content;
• Produce graphs and charts of media metrics;
• Independent writing of both short and long content on complex topics. Content must be engaging and able to capture enough attention that a reader will naturally pass the content on to their friend;
• Discuss plans and concepts with both mid-level and executive-level clients in meetings and in face-to-face presentations. Instill confidence in clients that you can get the job done;
• Sell concepts and plans internally and to clients to drive consensus;
• Build Twitter following on corporate channels and develop strategies for content to go viral with retweets, hashtag, and bit.ly use;
• Manage video projects for YouTube and Vimeo, including videos directed and produced by Page One and videos created by the community;
• Manage Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns, including campaign strategy creation;
• Develop and manage blog promotion strategy, including management of content from multiple people that are slow in providing content;
• Establish communication with clients even when they appear to be too busy to respond;
• Have fun and spread the awesome potential of social media throughout Page One, the entire Silicon Valley region, and the rest of the world.

Benefits. The good stuff. Want 20 days off? OK.

Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off per year.

• 20 PTO days (even in your first year!)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance (twice your annual salary)
• Flexible spending account

The salary range for this position is up to $60,000.

If you are interested in applying to join the Page One Social Media Team, please send a resume and a note telling us about yourself to: socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.

Learn more about us on: Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook.

There are many services to shorten URLs for posting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn. A popular service, bit.ly, recently added analysis capability which makes it much more useful to assess the success of social media campaigns. The basic idea is to apply a unique URL to each specific channel, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. Although the use of unique URLs is an old technique, bit.ly makes it easy to set up unique URLs without having to ask technical staff for help. The bit.ly service, which sees about a third of the monthly visitors as the more popular TinyURL, also presents the data as a set of graphs that are easy to view. Marketers can now set up and track things on their own.

I previously used notlong.com which has a similar tracking capability and the additional advantage of creating unique URLs. For example, I used notlong.com to create and track this URL for a blog posting on social media ROI.

http://mediaroi.notlong.com

Although it is nice to have a custom URL, a feature that bit.ly lacks, the analysis capabilities of notlong are much weaker than bit.ly.

If you set up a bit.ly account, you are presented with a dashboard of all your links. In addition to total views by date, bit.ly also presents charts and tables for Referrers, Locations, retweets on Twitter, and FriendFeed usage.

This level of features is much much better than TinyURL, a service with 1.75 billion hits per month. TinyURL does have a stealth feature that hides the original URL. This is a useful feature that bit.ly lacks, for those cases where you want people to get information but you may not want them to know who hosts that site.

The is.gd service offers URLs that are one character shorter than bit.ly. However, it lacks the tracking and analysis features. The is.gd service has shortened 5.5 million URLs to date.

There are numerous other URL shortening services, including budURL, eweri, hex.io, idek.net, lin.cr, POPrl, snipurl, twurl, and urlBorg. budURL, designed by Andy Meadows, has features for marketing people at small businesses, including a useful dashboard and a clickstream of URLs. However, the level of analysis isn’t as deep as bit.ly right now. POPrl has a dashboard for tracking and a nice web page to view the most popular content that is being linked to.

bit.ly has a edge over the other services right now due to very strong analytics. It seems that they could easily turn their dashboard into revenue by placing advertisements on the side of the dashboard. I think that they should also develop more analytic features and offer a commercial service to marketing firms. There’s an opportunity for bit.ly to become the Google Analytics of URL shorteners, the preferred tool of choice in any marketer’s toolbox.

Here’s another screenshot of bit.ly analytics.

This one shows a view of retweets.

Working all the time with developers for many of our clients, I figured it would be cool to see how Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine stack up in the blogosphere – what key terms are people associating with them and what similarities or differences are there. A little compare and contrast exercise. I set parameters for the last month.

This is what EC2 looks like:

Not a surprise that most terms are developer focused. What about App Engine, where does it stand?

Clearly, there’s considerable overlap. This is to be expected since they offer similar services.

What’s more revealing are the differences. First, “cloud” is much more prominently associated with EC2 than App Engine. The “cloud” in EC2 dwarfs the “cloud” in App Engine. Second, EC2’s cloud reflects a larger enterprise base. “Business,” “company,” and “customers,” to name a few key terms, are all highlighted in the EC2 cloud, while similar terms are either not present or tiny and irrelevant in the App Engine cloud. Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine are closely related, arguably competitive platforms, with key differences that stand out.

This analysis only covers 30 days and is a crude instrument. But it paints an interesting ‘word’ picture. In the blogosphere, people are much more likely to associate Amazon’s EC2 with business and Google’s App Engine with developers.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

When discussing social media monitoring, many people talk in broad terms about the need for companies to listen and engage in this space. New media channels are becoming more important than ever. In late January Advertising Age reported on a study by the CMO Council which found that many CMOs do not feel they’re effectively tracking social media.

But how does social media monitoring work in practice? Can a tool like Radian6 work magic for companies looking to make headway in this new frontier?

My answer, although it may not be satisfying to some, is that the value of the tool depends on the goals you set and the metrics you’re trying to track. No one tool is sufficient for a successful campaign.

In fact, while the best features of Radian6 are its analytical graphing components, during day-to-day operations I’ll often find myself going elsewhere to monitor social media in real time. For instance, in a lightweight blog campaign, a combination of Google Blog searches may be adequate (and in some cases, even more useful than Radian6 searches, since Google has Page Rank and relevance functionality). For Twitter, hybrid desktop applications like TweetDeck and simple, yet intuitive monitoring interfaces like TweetGrid can do the trick. For determining influencers, I’ve found it essential to complement Radian6 with Google or Technorati searches.

Tools like Radian6 certainly do have strengths that you can’t get for free elsewhere. Radian6 provides the ability to process and analyze information to determine key trends and drill down on contextual information. For example, using the Topic Trends widget, you can not only track trends in social media mentions of keywords through a period of time, but you can also zero in on a particular point of interest and perform additional analysis.

Sure, Radian6 can aggregate diverse information sources into one interface, but its display features are not necessarily optimal for all activities. More importantly, the metrics it tracks are not necessarily the ones that are most useful or relevant to every social media campaign.

This is the big point – Radian6 is a good monitoring tool, but it doesn’t have all the answers (nor do the creators of Radian6 pretend that it does). When engaging in a social media campaign, it’s essential that you drive the metrics and not depend on a tool to do it for you. Fundamentally, Radian6 tracks the number of key word mentions in social media, but you may be interested in different kinds of values or metrics – for instance, how your campaign efforts have affected website traffic, or in the PR world, how successful you’ve been in securing placements in top identified publications or blogs.

Buying a tool like Radian6 is a step in the right direction but success in social media requires smart planning and identifying metrics that are appropriate to the unique circumstances of the individual campaign. There’s no silver bullet in this world, which may explain why it’s so exciting and challenging at the same time.

Tapping into social media in a meaningful way for clients is not as easy as a Google Blog, Technorati, and Twitter search. To narrow in on the right conversations, we needed an automated system for monitoring all types of social media. I recently led a project to find the best commercial social media monitoring service for our purposes, which we could use to tailor comprehensive analysis and services according to our clients’ needs.

Here’s a brief summary of what I found:
Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Visible Technologies service large clients and charge correspondingly large fees. A Visible Technologies product called Trucast uses sophisticated web crawlers to stay current with the most influential voices on the web and provides an easy platform for engaging social media communities directly through the software. One downside to TruCast – it is difficult to filter information according to different categories of social media. The lack of flexibility in that case, along with the high price tag for both of these services, told us that these are not good options for PR and marketing firms that deal with startups on a limited budget or larger companies with small-scale social media campaigns.

BuzzLogic is a more reasonable value option for startups and smaller campaigns. The interface allows you to divide tasks across workers and search results are easy to filter by influence metrics for blogs and the posts that appear as subheadings. The service includes other useful features like social mapping and recording engagements with bloggers. Downsides – they only offer yearly pricing schemes (too rigid for us) and it is difficult to narrow in on categories of social media.

The Radian6 interface is intuitive and allows you to filter results based on categories of social media, including rich media sites and microblogs (but not social networks). However, the “Influence Viewer” widget requires some manual follow-up. While the widget uses criteria such as number and length of comments and votes on social bookmarking services to determine “influence,” it doesn’t do enough to highlight the blogs that have power or authority in general on the web (as opposed to the ones that have a few comments and are on topic). Other downsides – search results track back only about 30 days prior to the query (other products allow you to get better historical data), and while the product might be affordable for primary research, buying many separate topic profiles after the seven day grace period would become cost prohibitive for many small firms.

There are a few other products I’ve checked out but haven’t mentioned here. But right now, we’re going with Radian6. Any suggestions? Something we’re missing? Feel free to comment below.

Hip tomes like Groundswell (2007), The Clue Train Manifesto (1999) and even a recent webinar done by monitoring service Radian6, all point to the importance of corporate listening. It’s seen as one of the foundational components of social media strategies.

A few quotes:
• “What is listening in the Groundswell – it is learning what your customers are saying. It’s tapping into that conversation. They are talking about your company, if you can listen, the information can flow back into your company.” – Forrester research vice president Josh Bernoff and co-author of Groundswell.
• “And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are.” Clue Train Manifesto, 1999
• “Marketers are trained to do nothing but talk. Listening is not part of the traditional marketing profession.” Paul Gillen, Paul Gillen Communications, 2008 Radian6 webinar

I actually disagree a bit with Gillen’s take. The best marketers over time have been great and unapologetic listeners.

For example, in 1991, Regis McKenna, the legendary PR and marketing consultant who helped launch brands such as Apple – wrote “a feedback loop is making advertising’s one-way communication obsolete.” Blogger and VC Brad Feld paraphrased this idea here in 2007:

Today, it’s more than listening. It’s active listening. Companies need to hear, analyze and engage in the uncontrolled conversations that are taking place about your company and your market. It’s analyzing what is being said and using that information to improve your brand.

At Page One PR we do more than listen. Sure, we use tools to monitor. We build the strategy and plan for how we respond. And we analyze the information in a way that is packaged back to various stakeholders to our clients. Product managers listen for one thing. Marketing and advertising folks listen for something else. Crisis communication folks listen for something different.

One of our clients LogLogic had marketing guru Andy Lark work there for a period of time. Lark is now at Dell – which is one of the most acclaimed big businesses in terms of how it participates in uncontrolled conversations. Its entire business infrastructure is set up around active listening. Dell community members directly impact new product functionality. They help create ads. Heck, community members even help each other with customer service.

At our agency, we see the power of listening and engaging with our client’s communities – we don’t see it as new, but we do see it as a foundational component of any company committed to success.