Why It Pays To Listen To Online Buzz

One of the hottest debates in social media over the last few years has been centered on the concept of ROI and why measuring ROI on your social media monitoring efforts is so important. While there have been several studies concerning the ROI of social media marketing, with more companies starting social media monitoring on a larger scale, brands are now concerned with the ROI realized from their social media monitoring activities. For instance, the Corporate Manager of Consumer Generated Media at Toyota, Bruce Etrmann, believes that the company’s benefits/returns from social media monitoring include strengthening customer loyalty and improving communication with the marketplace. There are several monitoring tools available today, including Position²’s Brand Monitor, that help brands listen to conversations on social media 24/7 to make sure all relevant mentions are captured. We believe that social media monitoring best yields returns when:

• You know by how much the attendance to your company’s brand page has increased because of a certain social media marketing campaign or change in marketing strategy.
• What was the dollar value of this increase?
• How does this compare to the time and money spent by your brand while designing a campaign/creating a strategy?

Brands engaging in social media monitoring have understood that ROI comes not just by ‘monitoring the conversation‘ but also from ‘joining the conversation‘, which involves identifying and proactively engaging with key influencers. This is just one of the dividends of monitoring online buzz. Here are some more:

• A report by the Aberdeen Group, the ROI on Social Media Monitoring, shows that the best-in-class companies that have made an effort to listen to online conversations are 2.6 times more likely than industry average companies and 93 times more likely than laggards to improve their ability to generate consumer insights that drive new product/service development.



• The report also shows that the best-in-class companies that engage in social media monitoring and analysis activities are 3.3 times more likely than industry average companies to improve their ability to identify and reduce risk to their brand.
• 78% of them have reportedly improved their y-o-y customer retention rates.
• According to Gleansight’s Social Media Monitoring Report, increased customer satisfaction and better marketing effectiveness are among the key benefits of social media monitoring for brands that primarily engage with customers.
• ‘Influencer engagement‘ is one of the most important value drivers of social media monitoring; this helps identify the conversations that the brand should be engaged with, thereby increasing traffic and contributing to the ROI factor.

Metrics for Measurement: The ‘How’ and ‘What’ of Social Media Monitoring

Before getting into a discussion about the metrics of measurement while tracking online conversations and brand mentions, we must first understand that there are two ways to measure social media ROI for your business:

1. Quantitative: Helps measure quantitative data such as traffic, sales or SEO ranking, click-through rates of brands’ product pages.
2. Qualitative: Measures brand or corporate reputation, conversations, brand-customer relationships, enables brands to determine if they need to engage in meaningful dialogue with customers, brands vs. competitors analysis, engaging with and building better relationships with audiences etc.

The ‘quantitative’ aspect of measurement is simple and direct; however, when it comes to the ‘qualitative’ part we know that this can be rather subjective and requires the presence of certain ‘base metrics’. The fact is that no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are; however, there are a few things you can pay attention to, for deeper analysis:

• Comments: Studying the conversation initiated by a particular post can indicate if people are listening and whether they feel compelled to respond. This conversation thread about social media monitoring, for instance, has several posts which show that people are listening and participating.
• Time with Content & Thread Size: When a brand posts something online, the length and the size of the threaded discussion that follows and the time spent pursuing the content not just specifies how interested the users are, but also if the discussions are useful and have an impact.
• Downloads and Subscriptions: Looking at downloads can be a great indicator of engagement around a topic or subject. Similarly, it is obvious when people subscribe to your blog or website, that they are interested in what you have to say.



• Demographics: Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang stated several elements of social data, one of which is demographic data. We categorize this as one of the most important metrics of social media monitoring and measurement, as this helps create context about consumers by gleaning through data such as gender, age, profile pictures and details.
• Referrals/Suggestions and Comments: Customers are talking about certain products, both explicitly through ratings and reviews and implicitly through gestures such as hitting the ‘like’ button on their social network. The sign of a well-engaged community is when they invest their time and intellect in guiding you toward business improvements. Suggestions, product improvement ideas, innovation forums etc indicate a vested interest on behalf of the consumers your brand is trying to reach.



• Sentiment of Posts: For brands tracking their social media activities, analyzing the sentiment of the incoming posts is a crucial part of their monitoring exercise. Online marketers and brands are eager to know if customers come to the product page to vent their frustrations; are the sentiments generally positive? Do they complain about the posts as being too generic, wrong or otherwise deficient? Sentiment monitoring is more of a Psychographic metric; benefits or returns include providing brands with increased opportunities to reach these self-expressing customers and market to them based on their lifestyle. This type of data also helps in message and conversation creation, besides identifying features and products to improve or fix.
• Unique vs. Repeat Visits to the Social Media Page: A ‘casual browser’ is converted to an ‘actual customer’ when he is a repeat visitor who wants to learn more about company, looks for general updates and is eager for information related to the product or service. For a brand that is using this metric to monitor its social media presence, the gains are obvious. A one-time visitor, though, shows that the company has effectively advertised its brand.
• Page Views: Attentively monitoring this aspect of the metric makes it possible to not just determine the overall effectiveness of the brand’s webpage, but also helps gauge the site’s ability to captivate the consumer’s interest on each page.
• Click-through Rate: While this is a quantitative metric, it is nevertheless, crucial for brands and marketers to know how many social media site visitors eventually become visitors to the company’s website.

Irrespective of whether your social media data is qualitative or quantitative, creating an engagement index is a good idea. According to Katie Delayhaye Paine, an Engagement Index which is unique to your company’s goals is one way of monitoring and knowing where the returns from your social media strategy are coming from.

Conclusion

As the need to generate a measurable return on investment grows, for online marketers, the concept of ROI itself is debatable and has seen both marketers and industry experts engage in endless discussions on how to justify their expenditure. Therefore, when it comes to realizing the ROI from social media monitoring, the general consensus is that this is subjective and is perceived differently by different companies. However, no matter what your goals are, one thing above all is obvious; the need to have a clear set of quantitative and qualitative metrics that will help calculate the return on investment from your monitoring strategies. Whether it is demographics, number of repeat visitors or time spent on a particular Facebook page or company blog, most marketers agree that the social media monitoring yields maximum returns when the brand successfully engages with its customers. We believe that customer engagement is the first and integral step to realizing the ROI from brand monitoring; once this is achieved, reduction in customer service costs, improvement in marketing effectiveness, driving actionable insights, generating sales leads, identifying brand advocates , understanding campaign and design impact etc will automatically follow.

Media monitoring is a great ‘health check’ of a brand’s social media activities and the ROI realized from this process will tell you if your digital marketing strategy needs a fix or if you need to listen better and invest more resources to connect with your customers. Instead of focusing on finding only a tool to deliver charts or spreadsheets of data, companies should try looking for a social media monitoring solution that combines technology and human expert analysis to help better interpret social media data and answer business questions.

• Is Your Audience Truly Engaged via Social Media? (1)
• #Quora: A Growing Channel for Brand Monitoring and Engagement (1)
• Tips on How to Engage Your Audience on Social Media and much more… | Best of the Week (0)

Social Media Makes Tennis Tournament Easily Accessible

The start of the 2011 Wimbledon Championships in late June heralded a whole new era of ‘open’ tennis, making the tournament as well as the players easily accessible via social media. Rewind a few years back, when viewership of sports events was restricted to television screens and discussions to living room conversations; the growing use of social networking made this year’s Wimbledon Championships one of the biggest events in web history. The players and fans, both, took tennis to a whole new level with a healthy dose of Facebook posts and Twitter comments. Here’s a brief overview of how social media extended the reach of the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament:

• Despite being associated with history and tradition, Wimbledon, this year decided to move with the times by taking its online presence to the next level through its Facebook and Twitter pages.
• This year’s ‘Wimbledon-on-Social’ wave was started by Andy Murray who teamed up with his racquet sponsor, Head, to launch the ‘Get Closer’ campaign on Facebook and YouTube. The viral campaign encouraged fans to interact with him during Wimbledon.
• In addition to the +694,429 ‘likes’ on Facebook, the official fan page functioned as a hub for all the Wimbledon activity online and gave users insight to the tournament.
• A huge number of pictures and videos were uploaded on Facebook, besides several contests that allowed fans to win tickets by simply ‘liking’ the page; a smart marketing strategy.
• The build up on Twitter increased as the tournament progressed, especially during the Novak Djokovic vs. Rafael Nadal final.
• Although the event initially attracted a small audience, it gained traction online, especially with the elimination of Roger Federer who was expected to qualify for the finals.
• Real-time access to everything surrounding the tournament was made possible through live video and radio streaming.
• People could access matches via iPad, iPhone and Android apps and follow play-by-play feeds of the tournament on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook from the start to finish.

The Social Media Buzz

Geographic and Demographic Break Down (”Wimbledon”)

Analysis by Position² Brand Monitor, for the time period between 5th June 2011 and 5th July 2011, shows that:

• The UK, as expected, witnessed the highest social media buzz at 44%.
• This was followed by Australia at 24% and US at 15%.
• The gender distribution chart leans heavily towards the male population (71%); the women, at 29%, were not as enthusiastic about the tournament as their male counterparts.
• The +65 age group was not very active in their discussions pertaining to Wimbledon; this reason for this could be because of their social media presence, which is not as much when compared to the 20-35 age bracket, which accounted for the maximum discussions (45%).

Volume Analysis and Top Media Break Down

The analysis of conversation volumes shows some interesting results:

• Although the final match between Djokovic and Rafael Nadal was played on 3rd July, the quarter finals between Nadal and Mardy Fish, played on 29th June, saw a spike in conversation volumes, with 22,775 posts registered on a single day.
• News, followed by discussion forums recorded the maximum buzz at 35% and 28% respectively.
• While blogs also witnessed a fair share of discussions (21%), Twitter (10%) and Facebook (7%) did not record as much buzz as expected.

Key Players’ Analysis, Male

Novak Djokovic (Wimbledon 2011 Champion) Conversation volumes for Djokovic, naturally, peaked on 3rd July during the final match (13,890 posts). The total posts for the Serbian champion were 88,716. The conversational tonality for Djokovic was mostly neutral (77%); this could be because the discussions and news reports mostly focused on match related updates rather than exchange of opinions. Negative conversations were marginal at 4%, while 19% of the conversations were positive (mostly in praise of the final match and Djokovic’s performance).

Rafael Nadal (Runner Up) Nadal recorded the maximum buzz (14,827 posts) during his play-off against Andy Murray on 1st July. Total conversations pertaining to Nadal were reported to be 136,463. The sentiment analysis for Nadal leans heavily towards neutral at 77%. Similar to Djokovic, the positive sentiment for Nadal was at 19%, while 4% of the conversations were negative.

Roger Federer The total posts for Federer recorded over a period of one month were 48,092. His quarter finals against J. Tsonga recorded the maximum conversations at 7,903. At 48%, the highest buzz was centered on news, while Twitter accounted for 20% of the discussions. The negative sentiment for Federer was negligible at 4%. The tonality of most of the conversations regarding Federer was neutral at 69% (mostly news feeds and tournament updates).

Key Players’ Analysis, Female

Petra Kvitova (Wimbledon 2011 Champion, Ladies’ Singles) The total number of posts for Kvitova amounted to 68,734. Her final match on 2nd July, where she played Maria Sharapova, recorded maximum conversation volumes at 26,081 in a single day. Twitter registered the highest share of voice at 37%, closely followed by news at 32%. The tonality of blog conversations was largely neutral (47%). Positive conversations at 39% included comments that admired Kvitova for ‘having the qualities of a lasting champion’ and so on.

Maria Sharapova (Runner Up) Of the 119,325 total posts for Sharapova, 27,827 were reported on 2nd July (as expected) during the finals. As in the case of her opponent, fans mostly discussed Sharapova on Twitter (53%), followed by news (20%). The sentiment tone (blogs only) for Sharapova was largely neutral at 51%. 30% of the conversations were positive in tonality, while 19% were negative.

Conclusion

What made the 125th Wimbledon Championships different from the tournaments hosted earlier, is the massive online buzz the event recorded. The organizers, players, and fans, took this year’s tournament to the next level with their discussions, play-by-play updates and comments on various social media channels. For the officials at Wimbledon, expanding the reach of the championships beyond tennis courts and television sets was the goal; and this, we believe, is something they more than managed to reach. While the organizers worked on the Wimbledon.com site to make it “a year-round destination and present it in an engaging and dynamic way to communicate with the global tennis community”, the players themselves made efforts to ‘connect to fans’. Among the top players that were highly active on social media were Nadal, Federer, Djokovic, and Sharapova, who interacted with fans on Facebook and Twitter.

For tennis tournaments like the Wimbledon Championships and 62 ATP tournaments worldwide, social media is now a vital part of the digital and onsite experience. In this interview, John Phillips, SVP Digital Marketing ATP, talks with Erick Mott about plans the ATP has to help make tennis tournaments more interactive and engaging for fans and players. Fans are already creating conversations (comments/blog posts/tweets) in real-time during tournaments and about specific matches and players, and the ATP is going to enable even more conversations via digital channels by collecting and sharing more data from related tennis experiences and content sources.

Here’s something interesting; our analysis shows that winners do not always occupy the top spot on the popularity scale. In the case of the men, as well as the women, although both Djokovic and Kvitova were crowned the champions, it was the runners up, Nadal and Sharapova who were most popular on social media. What also stands out is the neutral tonality of most conversations. After studying several posts, we conclude that people were more enthusiastic about updating each other instead of criticizing or overtly praising the players.

That said, social media has had a great year at Wimbledon 2011, helping fans to access their favorite sport in a very different way. While this year’s event was reinvented in the digital space, we are eager to see what role social media will play in the next Wimbledon Championships and if it will be just as influential or more.

• Harry Potter Finale Stirs Up Social Media Magic (0)
• PR Agencies and Social Media: 4 #Tips to Power #Social Brand Building #PR (1)
• #Social Media For B2B Companies; The Need To Have More Than A Website #SM #B2B (4)

We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Enhanced Daily Alerts, Reports and other Functionality Improvements

• Brand Monitor™ now has a new “Deep Dive” section under “Reports” which gives you a more detailed media breakup for each search bucket along with sentiment analysis. In phase two of our “Deep Dive” release, we will add advanced filtering functionality here.
• Daily email alerts will contain data with a “high relevance score”, which means more focused and useful data into your inbox.
• You can now set a default relevance score for each search topic.
• Brand Monitor now has a new Tag Cloud for each search topic, with new filters for discovering keywords for each media type.

Geographic and Demographic Reach

You can now discover the geographic and demographic reach of each search topic, via the dashboard and report pages.

The geographic breakup will show you the number of posts accumulated from each country. The demographic breakup has gender and age group graphs.

• The geographic data is further broken into individual states in USA.
• Demographics include an industry breakup for each gender.

In phase two, we’ll be adding in-depth state-wise geographic segregation for more countries and optimizing our charts.

LinkedIn Integration

Similar to Facebook integration now you can manage your LinkedIn profile via Brand Monitor™.

After adding your LinkedIn account you can see your connections’ status messages, application updates, profile changes, group activities and Q&A posts.

• Comment or like status messages
• Sentiment analysis on status message
• Use filters to view specific type of LinkedIn network updates: status message, connection, application, profile update, group activities or Q&A posts.

Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!]

• Advanced LinkedIn and Facebook Integration
• Advanced Geographic and Demographic reports

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Post Relevance

Brand Monitor™ is now powered by an enhanced relvance scoring engine, that you can control. Available under “Filters”, you can choose varying levels of relevance; this changes the stream of posts accordingly.


We do this by giving each post a “score” for relevance when compared to a search keyword. By default, “High Relevance” is selected, and posts with “Low” or “Medium” relevance scores are not shown.

If you don’t see too many posts in the stream for a particular keyword, try changing the relevance filter to “Medium” or “Low”.

Salesforce Integration

See a potential lead talking about your product or service? Perhaps a competitor? You can now send this person’s contact information to Salesforce directly via Brand Monitor™.


It takes about 5 minutes of setting up – we need to integrate your “Organization ID” from Salesforce into Brand Monitor™, and you can choose which fields you want to capture and send to Salesforce.

Once set up, every post will have a “Salesforce” tab, from where you can submit leads. In the near future, we’ll automatically populate as many of the fields as possible.

Facebook Integration

Brand Monitor™ will shortly introduce an integrated Facebook client. You can manage your Facebook accounts, Facebook pages and interact with your fan base. Managing your company’s Facebook presence is easier, quicker and more effective.

You can manage multiple Facebook accounts and pages, use the built-in URL shorterner (bit.ly), schedule multiple status messages for future publishing, update status messages, add comments and also “Like” posts.

Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!]

• More Facebook Integration Features
• LinkedIn Integration
• Geography and Demographic Reports

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Integrated Twitter Client

You can now tweet, reply, retweet, follow and unfollow right from the Brand Monitor™ interface! Sharing posts and creating new conversations is now easier and more convenient.

• Multiple Twitter Accounts!: You can add all your Twitter accounts into Brand Monitor™. Each Twitter account added gets a separate search bucket with graphs that show volume, sentiment, top influencers and “most talked about” topics.
  
  
• Never miss a single tweet: All tweets are tracked in one place and tagged with sentiment and influencer scores, even when you are not logged in!
• Clearly demarcated read and unread tweets help keep the information stream manageable – you can easily identiy new tweets, and the system works better than your exising Twitter client as it works 24/7 and not just when you are logged in.

More Customization for Email Alerts

You now have more control over your email alerts – you can choose which search buckets you want to get emails for, and you see the top posts for the day in your alerts.



Aggregation of Similar Posts

Too many posts on the same topic clogging up your information stream? Not any more! Brand Monitor™ identifies duplicate posts and tags them as one – you can expand the post to see duplicate entries.



We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Twitter Influencer Analysis and Display

Now, next to each tweet, you will see an “Influencer Score” (out of 100) that our algorithm has rated for the author. Also, if you hover over the twitter author’s username, you get to see more information about the author: Full Name, Influencer Score, Bio, Location, Website, Total Tweets, Followers and Following.

• How do we arrive at an Influencer Score?
  
  We identify 10 key sets of information on each Twitter author, and apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final score. The final score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging his/her audience and how large the impact of their opinion is.
• New Tweet Display
  
  We have redesigned the way a tweet is displayed, for a closer resemblance to how it looks on Twitter.

Post Title and Summary Redesigned, Media Logos Added

Earlier, our system used to remove special characters from a post title; this would make “AT&T” look like “ATT”. Posts now display special characters, and summaries end in a complete sentence.

• Media Logos
  
  Based on the media source, each post has a logo associated to it. This enables you to quickly identify the source of a post. These logos are also in the “Filter” section for media.

Preview Search Bucket Results



While creating a search bucket you now have the option to preview a sample set of results.

This ensures that your search is getting the desired results before you actually submit it, saving you time and effort.

Date Range for Comparison Reports



You now have the option to compare data based on a time range in the comparison report section.

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. If you’d like to try out Brand Monitor™, let us know!

• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)
• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)

Nestle, the world’s largest food conglomerate took successive hits to its brand image recently in an issue related to the company’s apparent disregard for the environment. It all happened in just about three days, and the damage was fueled by activity in social media.

The Issue:

Environmental group Greenpeace said the palm oil used in the Nestle Kit Kat bars was a threat to the endangered Orangutan. Nestle sourced palm oil from Sinar Mas, the single largest producer of palm oil in Indonesia. Activists claimed that the rising demand for palm oil is one of the main reasons for the depletion of rain forests, which are being leveled to make way for palm oil plantations.

To get their message across, Greenpeace created a bizarre video spoof of a Kit Kat commercial. It portrayed a man at work eating the finger of an orangutan out of a Kit Kat wrapper. Environment enthusiasts across the world immediately spread the word, which created a public embarrassment for Nestle.

And why did Greenpeace zero in on Nestle alone? Simple – targeting a giant corporation would attract the most attention. Nestle is the largest food and drinks conglomerate in the world, and is a major consumer of palm oil with its use of this commodity doubling in just a span of three years.

Position² tracked the story and analyzed the social media buzz around it.

The Sequence:

Greenpeace launched their campaign against Nestle on March 17th, 2010, with a ‘Killer’ logo, and a tagline that said ‘Ask Nestle to give rain forests a break’. They posted their spoof video on YouTube first, which Nestle got removed due to breach of copyright.

The video was then posted on vimeo.com, and received over 78,000 views in the span of a few hours.

The attack then moved to the Nestle Facebook page, where posts from fans got angry retorts from the company’s moderator.

The blogosphere and Twitter were next, with Tweets followed by almost 18,000 people by March 20th. After this, messages were posted using Google AdWords, and the issue was picked up gradually by traditional media as well. This caused significant damage to the brand image of Nestle.

Eventually, Nestle responded to the campaign and announced that it was cutting its contract with Sinar Mars. Nestle also promised to use only certified sustainable palm oil by 2015.

Social Media Buzz

The issue generated an overwhelming buzz in social media. An analysis on Twitter from 13th March to 22nd March 2010 showed us that there were over 215,000 tweets. In fact, Nestle’s policies and customer service were driven in huge numbers due to Nestle becoming a “trending topic” on Twitter.

A share of voice analysis (graph below) shows us the break up of mentions across forums, blogs and traditional media. With over 100k mentions across these sources, the Nestle incident became a major social media controversy.



We also noticed that the overall popularity of Nestle (primarily for the wrong reasons) increase considerably during the Nestle-Greenpeace social media furor.



It remains to be seen if the issue was blown out of proportion due to the Greenpeace video or the Fan page blunder.

Facebook Crisis Management Blunder

In the midst of this, Nestle’s Facebook moderator took an aggressive stance and threatened to delete posts from fans that were protesting Nestle’s lack of care for the environment. This enraged Facebook users who didn’t back down until an apology was posted. The impact of this on the Nestle brand is presented in the chart below.



Impact On the Nestle Brand – Negative Buzz Analysis

The graph below highlights the negative mentions of Nestle between Feb and Jun, 2010. Negative buzz spiked during the 2nd week of March to the 1st week of April. The increase in negative posts could also be attributed to the Facebook Fan page fiasco.



Lessons Learned

• Brand Monitoring is indispensable in social media – This applies even to a large company like Nestle that could assume they are in control of the situation
• Practice and plan for the worst case scenario – Develop a social media crisis plan and anticipate what can happen, to be prepared for it.
• Respond to negative feedback – An offer to make good the bad is usually well received. A defensive response only adds fuel to the fire.
• Plan ahead for onslaughts through social media – Think of worst case scenarios. For instance, measures that can be taken when a coordinated attack is launched that could turn into a PR disaster…
• Hire seasoned community managers – Even a Facebook fan page needs experienced managers to deal with angry members, foster relationships with advocates, and handle crises without stress.

• Social Media Monitoring ROI: Metrics For Measurement (1)
• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)

If you have been following my posts, you would know that  last time I spoke on Social Media Monitoring and its importance. In this post I will be talking about the importance of measuring social media campaign to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

Social Media should be used in a well planned way around your Objectives or Product. The key things which are cyclic in a well structured Social Media Strategy are:

1. Planning in advance
2. Designing your path
3. Execution
4. Measurement and review

Social Media Campaigns take time to show tangible results.  One should have some clarity in what needs to be done. Measure the engagement and plan your next step accordingly.

Measuring Social media is not just about the traffic or conversions that you get. Make sure you measure the conversations, search, and the influencers. Later measure the provoking level of the involvement, interaction and influence your campaign creates with consumers. To get a full picture make sure you put together all the factors of monitoring and measuring your campaign along with web site analytics.

We have Free and Paid tools to monitor these.  A tool like Radian6 might give you influencer insight where as a tool like Sysomos can help you in sentiment analysis. Even free tools like Socialmention, Samepoint help in evaluating your efforts.

Success or failure in Social Media depends on the engagement level that you are able to create and better understanding of your efforts.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

• Social Media Monitoring ROI: Metrics For Measurement (1)
• Brand Monitor – Product Updates – January 2011 (0)
• Brand Monitor Updates – December 2010 (0)