As 2009 comes to a close we have seen that brands and marketers have become more than willing to start conversations in social media, but that’s only the beginning of truly leveraging the social channel for customer and marketing interactions.

A MarketingSherpa survey of social media marketers revealed how brands are leveraging social media and the effectiveness of their practices today. The study revealed that a large majority rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.

My question is where is customer service in this study.  I think one of the most effective use cases for leveraging the social channel is responding and acknowledging customer issues - both good and bad to improve customer experience. A happy and loyal customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one - right? But, since this study was conducted with social media marketers perhaps the customer service topic was overlooked.

Some of the specific tactics that marketers favored for achieving results in the social channel were user reviews, relationships with bloggers and discussion groups. But many continued to be challenged with best practices for measuring effectiveness of the investments —only around 10% of respondents thought they were “very accurately measured.”

Can you measure the effectiveness though when many companies still don’t have a formal or even informal strategy in place for leveraging and interacting with consumers in the social channel?  Many of the best ways to measure social success is to ensure that it is connected with other programs, existing initiatives and is simply an extension of what marketers, customer service, research teams, or public relations are already doing.  While one-third of larger businesses had a written policy to manage brand communications, only 13% of smaller business did. Having a “formal policy” is great but more important is setting up cross-functional groups, collaboration, and resources across an organization (big or small) to be fully invested in interacting and learning from your customers.

Developing “policies” or a best practices for your company can be particularly valuable when it comes to responding to consumer feedback. Social media marketing is a conversation, and brands must be ready to respond to consumers whether its for promotion or service related issues. Interestingly enough, around  one-quarter of businesses of all sizes reported that participated in the study are still not monitoring social media commentary at all. While, nearly one-half of large businesses are keeping an eye on discussions without responding publicly. The amount of brands that are engaging when a negative comment is made is around 25%.

Business should at a minimum be investing in:

• Listening to what their customers or potential customers are saying
• Developing best practices across support, marketing and public relations for monitoring and interacting with customers that are having favorable or unfavorable interactions
• Integrating the social channel into the mix of existing channels that are being used for marketing and customer interaction

As we head into 2010, brands and marketers must take the next steps to fully exploit the social channel and the power of positive and negative feedback about their brands.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Most brands and marketers invest lots of time and energy into customer segmentation programs in order to develop unique offers or programs based on demographics or buying behavior of their customers. I would propose that understanding where your customers and prospects are “hanging out” is an equally important data point if a brand or marketer wants to maximize exposure to existing or target segments. One such group that appears to be ripe with opportunity is boomers and seniors.  Recent data highlights the massive uptick in online time and social networking participation among them.

According to the NielsenWire Online, while people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of the active Internet universe, in the last five years their number has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the increase of women online in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11% in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

88.6% of seniors, check personal e-mail as the No. 1 online activity performed in the last 30 days. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities.

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

Overall, the number of unique visitors who are 65 or older on social networking and blog sites has increased 53% in the last two years alone. 8.2% of all social network and blog visitors are over 65, just 0.1 percentage points less than the number of teenagers who frequent these sites.

Marketers would be wise to do more than test online marketing programs with seniors as we head in ‘10.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

I am frequently involved in discussions with brands about measuring the impact of conversations in social media and networks and frequently point out that one of the key metrics to understanding and measuring a baseline or ongoing change is tracking the sentiment of what is being said by consumers about your brand, products and services. Here at Visible Technologies we have always believed this to be one of the key ingredients of any successful social media measurement technology or program and why we have always provided it since even the early beta’s of our truCAST products. Recently, I had a great discussion with David Burcham, one of our EVP’s and thought the perspective was worth sharing.

Blake Cahill
Why is sentiment important and how do you define and measure it?

David Burcham
Sentiment is just one measure in the overall work of keeping track of your customer’s perspective online – but we have always believed that it’s an important one. When you’re spending millions of marketing and service dollars based on information, we believe that it should be as accurate and actionable as possible and not just a measure of the general tone of discussion.

Measuring the sentiment of crowds online is no simple task with over a billion people who might post information every day. False-positives, false negatives, sarcasm and irony are just a few of the problems that make it difficult. If you’re looking for the overall tone of the messages, then relatively simple measures can be used that count the positive and negative uses of words.

At Visible, we’ve chosen the hard path, but the one that we believe delivers the most value and the most actionable information. For definition, we consider tone to be the measurement of the overall tenor of a piece of content, and sentiment to be the specific measure of the Positives, Negatives, Mixed emotions related to a specific topic of interest.

Our systems first topically decompose a blog post or article so that we understand the subjects of conversation and particularly the ones that our clients are interested in studying. This is an area that is not talked about as often, but just as important to the overall measurement. The capacity to understand sentiment is most critical when you can be sure that the sentiment you are measuring is related to your product/company/issue.

BC
So how does Visible Technologies do this?

DB
Well, once we have broken down the post so that we can understand the multiple areas of discussion, we use a combination of automation and human-based analysis to understand the true sentiment related to that issue, NOT just the overall tone of the message. While a post might be really positive overall, the part where they mention your company or product might in fact be negative, mixed, or just neutral.

It’s also important to understand the sentiments that the post drives. When someone comments, is it positive or negative? When someone from your organization participated in the conversation, did they change the sentiment? Did they riot the emotions of the crowd or soothe them? Did they cause more people to talk or change the subject?

Because truCAST data is built up from a granular crawl of the web, with comments included in the thread of conversation, and with the multiple topics discussed in each post broken down, we can assess the level of sentiment – AND its IMPACT – in unique and powerful ways.

We can also help you understand the sentiment on the topic overall, the authors who are positive and negative on the subject, and the relative authority level of the sites and authors involved – again, on that topic, not just in a broad-reaching assessment of the post overall.

BC
Is their a right way or wrong way to be measuring sentiment?

DB
There are lots of ongoing debates about how much automation and how much human analysis gets applied and they will probably continue for a long time. Our answer is simple, though. We believe that there are advantages in both and we will continue to develop and apply unique and distinctive methodologies that deliver the most consistent and accurate possible data to our clients.

Thank you David for the insight on the topic of Sentiment measurement.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies

If you are in the final phases of locking down your 2010 marketing plan and investments to support your brand, lead generation, and customer satisfaction goals I would encourage a final once over to ensure investments are aligned to some recent data that is emerging.

According to the November “2010 Marketing Trends Survey”  of business leaders by StrongMail, 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in email marketing and social media budgets in the New Year. The industry survey of more than 1,000 global business leaders found that the positive outlook is supported by 50% of polled businesses that expect their customers to spend more in 2010, and nearly a quarter more that expect them to spend the same.  Only 8% of businesses expect their customers to spend less.

48% of businesses are increasing overall marketing budgets in 2010, and email and social media marketing are the two leading areas of investment at 69% and 59% respectively. Search marketing comes in third at 42%.  Conversely, events and direct mail lead the pack in decreased spend at 44% and 42% respectively.

Social media marketing is a clear focus for businesses, with 69% of respondents planning to integrate it with their email marketing campaigns in 2010.  However, of those who have already integrated the two channels, only 42% are achieving a lift in campaign performance.  35% report no significant lift and another 23% are unable to measure.   Respondents identified the top three benefits of social media marketing as:

• Awareness building (64%)
• Customer loyalty and retention (49%)
• Expanded reach (46%)

Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations at StrongMail, notes that “… this survey reveals a strong focus on high ROI channels like email and emerging ones like social media… (with) an unprecedented number of companies look to integrate email and social media in 2010…”

Reported survey highlights include:

• 89% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2010
• 50% of businesses expect customers to spend more; 23% to spend about the same; 8% to spend less
• 69% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 59% social media; 42% search
• 69% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2010
• 64% of businesses identify increasing awareness as the primary value for social media

If you haven’t adjusted budgets accordingly I would re-look at plans for investments in ‘10.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Increasingly brands and individuals are beginning to understand the impact of Online Reputation Management or ORM as some call it. As consumers increasingly use search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to search for information (to the tune of 400M searches per day by the way) the content they view whether company issued, mainstream media reported, or consumer generated represents a portrait of that brand or individual.

For many the challenge is does your brand look more like a Dali when you want it to be a Van Dyck? The way I think of ORM and that brand portrait is that it more like a Chuck Close. The picture that people see is actually hundreds, thousands, or millions of individual snapshots that when viewed in aggregate reveal the total picture of your brand.

A recent study by Brand Reputation, a brand communications firm, surveyed over 800 consumers to determine if online reviews influenced their buying behavior. The answer was overwhelmingly yes, but varies interestingly enough by vertical or product type. These results demonstrate the need for brands to monitor, manage and protect the brands related to online chatter – be it positive or negative. The survey revealed that around 84% of consumers were more likely to search the Internet for reviews before making a purchase. This isn’t surprising given the increased desire for reliability, a good deal and value thanks to overall economic climate. If marketers aren’t already monitoring their online reputations this should serve a wake-up call considering 4 out of 5 US adults are online.

The survey found that, in particular, consumers relied on online reviews when investigating the following items:

• Consumer electronics - 56%
• Home Furnishings - 33%
• Apparel - 21%
• White Goods - 45%
• DIY & Garden - 18%
• Entertainment Products - 12%
• Sports Goods - 9%
• Food - 2%

The amount of social content from sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs that consumers are creating which now appears and ranks in search engines any amplifies the importance of managing ones online reputation. Not only are a lot of other consumers or potential prospects viewing your portrait every day but is it actually constantly changing snapshot. Brands and individuals must constantly be looking at that portrait to ensure it is align with the brand, the realities of their offerings and managing information that is inaccurate. Like adjusting the painting a little or adding something new to the portrait to keep is to date and accurate.

To get a picture and score of your reputation - check out our truReputation score tool - it gives you a start about visualize what your portrait looks like.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies