Visible Technologies Social Media Monitoring Blog

I’m excited to announce that Visible Technologies is helping this year’s 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards (airing live on CBS January 31from 8 – 11:30PM ET/PT) go social in a big way through our amazing partnership with TBWA\Chiat\Day.

At the heart of the GRAMMY’s advertising campaign is the Web site www.wereallfans.com launched today by TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles to highlight music fans’ unprecedented impact in the current digital age. The site pulls fan tweets, YouTube, and Flickr posts to create images of GRAMMY nominated artists. The Web site also houses the “FanBuzz Visualizer” powered by Visible Technologies. The ‘Visualizer’ is a real-time, data visualization that will act as a barometer of fan passion from social sites around the web.

We are also specifically tracking fan passion for GRAMMY nominated artists on Twitter such as:

• Britney Spears
• Coldplay
• Common
• Dave Matthews Band
• Eminem
• Jay-Z
• Lady Gaga
• LL Cool J
• Maxwell
• Pink
• Silversun Pickups
• Taylor Swift
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The FanBuzzVisualizer is also shareable as a widget, allowing fans the ability to showcase the current standings on their personal social media pages.

It’s been an amazing opportunity to be a part of such an innovative and groundbreaking campaign - one that enables direct interaction between fans and celebrities as an integral part of the GRAMMY Awards and showcases that social media is now a mainstay of the entertainment business. Connecting with your fan base, whether you’re marketing a music performer or a consumer brand, is no longer just about concerts, press tours or even listening on Twitter. More than ever before, it’s about engaging directly with your audience to raise visibility and create opportunities for meaningful, direct interaction.

The entire GRAMMY ad campaign has social media at its heart and Visible Technologies is proud to be a part of it.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Today, Visible Technologies is pleased to announce that we have secured $22 Million in funding led Investor Growth Capital. IGC is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Investor AB, a Nordic-based publicly traded investment holding company with investment activities in North America, Europe and Asia. Existing investors Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP also participated in the round. The new funding will be used to accelerate our technology development and establish international operations.

Our new funding builds upon our previous achievements and this strategic investment demonstrates the strong confidence in the company’s market leadership and overall trend of social media integration into the lifeblood of Global 2000 firms. Our plan is to continue expanding the unique and comprehensive solutions we offer for online reputation management and social media engagement via SaaS products and service to serve companies as they determine best practices and discover new ways of using social media.

Our new investor commented that “Global brands continue to increase their social media budgets as they realize the need to tap into valuable customer feedback as well as holistically manage their online brand reputation,” said Matt Krna, vice president at Investor Growth Capital. “Many solution sets give the ability to listen but fail to provide what’s really needed—the power to transform social data into strategic programs and tactical plans. Visible Technologies has defined itself as a clear category leader through its strong technology solution set, best-in-class customer service and proven success delivering actionable social media intelligence.”

As validated by today’s funding announcement, the market for social media monitoring and engagement platforms is growing exponentially. Savvy brands are listening and engaging with their customers online. To learn more, watch Visible Technologies’ video, “Starting the Social Media Conversation” here: http://bit.ly/6AW0n0

Exciting news toady for @visible_tech and please check out the video above.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

We often speak with clients and prospects about the impacts that social conversations are having on their search engine results and how nowadays consumer perceptions of their reputation are increasingly influenced by online postings. As these worlds are becoming more and more intertwined the fear that negative comments are shaping consumer impressions is making brands wake up and drive the need to engage directly with their customers and prospects.

A recent report from Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia explored ways marketers can tackle brand bashing and turn negatives into positives. The survey asked what companies had done to minimize negative comments in the past and nearly one-half reported having executed a direct engagement with the consumer. I was pleased to see that so many companies were listening and engaging, but pitied that other 50% that saw their complaint or piece of feedback go unanswered.  Imagine if firms had rolling black-outs on the 800 numbers 50% of the time. Now that would get some CEO’s attention.

The next point that I found compelling and encouraging from the study was that firms are taking the feedback and actually trying to improve products and services. In many cases negative feedback is due to poor product, service quality or design and negative feedback may not have been there in the 1st place if fixes had been in place. Leveraging that consumer feedback is a huge positive and giant leap for many firms. The public nature of social conversations is likely driving the speed at which issues are being resolved; this is due to a fear that the issues or concerns will spread into a full blown crisis (i.e. United Breaks Guitars, comes to mind).

The table below from the study highlights the various methods companies are using to manage negative online conversations:

One of the more interesting tactics on this chart is companies that have tried to get offending content removed. While sounding like a good idea, this tactic can backfire and cause further negative remarks against the brand. Econsultancy noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results which I think highlights the lack of brands fully understanding and leveraging how both the search and social world are increasing coming together.

So where does one get started? The practice of “Brand Monitoring” is one the most important places to start and the rise and growth of Twitter usage has certainly aided with companies adopting some basic forms of listening and engagement practices. The study revealed that publicizing new content was the top activity verses using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.” I am not sure what “systematically” means but social engagement is not a templated process. At minimum brands should continue to build on a basic framework of listening via free or paid tools/technologies and in parallel build engagement teams and best practices within their organizations to deal with consumer feedback - both good and bad - just like they do in the contact centers, product feedback groups or executive complaints departments.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

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