April 30, 2012
3 Types of Social Media Signals – Interview with Robert Pease, CEO of Nearstream
I had the pleasure to speak with Robert Pease, CEO of Nearstream, after his presentation at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Nearstream specializes in filtering through the social media chatter to help companies identify customers based on their needs.
They do this by demand capturing, or the practice of carefully identifying signals of potential customers. These are people who are using social media channels to make an explicit statement of need on products and services.
Do people really broadcast their needs via social? Sure they do. In an example Robert gives, Nearstream carefully monitored the social media requests people made seeking project management software. “You’d be surprised about the demand for this kind of software, out there,” Robert comments.
With their proprietary software, Nearstream is able to sift through the mass of social media data and extract prime product and service inquiries and comments. These can be turned into extremely valuable leads for companies and service providers if they are handled correctly. But the art of working these leads is two-fold. First, is the ability to catch these with a software solution like Nearstream’s social business software. And next, properly approaching and nurturing them through the sales process.
The social sales process is different than traditional processes. There’s much more personal information being share, and the approach is necessarily different. Because of this, Robert’s company is based on the idea that “No one likes being treated like a lead,” as he explains. Given this, he identifies and highlights three types of social media signals, and how companies should interpret and respond to them. Each of these is an example Twitter exchange.
1. The Need Signal – Example: “I need help with a 401k rollover.”
In this case the user is posting based on a clear need. In this type of signal, your opportunity as a provider is either to engage or analyze. The proper way to engage is to do so in the moment, offering a prompt response. The response should be personal, and not overtly sale prompting, while still offering actionable information. The objective to bring about further and deeper exchange with the question poster.
In analyzing the social signal, the emphasis is on how the user is asking, and what it’s about. This could be used to tune messaging, better inform support process and content, and get to the true “voice of the customer.” Analysis can be done in combination with, or instead of, direct engagement around demand signal.
2. Questions to Influencers – Example: “What are good investments for a first time Roth IRA starter?”
This is a request broadcast to knowledgeable influencers of investment practice. Implicit in the post, is a request for response by those well versed on the subject. In this type of exchange, your opportunity as a provider is either to engage, similar to the need signal, or to “sponsor.”
Sponsoring is using more traditional marketing resources. As a company, if you are responding to this request, it becomes an opportunity to engage them directly to your website, eBook, whitepapers, or other relevant information. You can directly focus your opportunity into cultivating a sale.
3. Questions to Forums – Example: “Do I just do a rollover to use my IRA to buy real estate?”
This example is a forum post that has found its way into the Twitter stream. This happens with Quora, Linkedin, and other online gathering places, as well as forums that are organized around certain topics and needs. These social signals are rich opportunities for businesses. In these cases, it’s entirely appropriate to engage or support as an interested vendor.
But in all these examples, as Robert explains, your role as a company is to ‘be helpful” and “answer questions.” “The cut and past of marketing copy does not answer the question and annoys people,” Robert comments. After all, as consumers, we can “feel” when we’re being sold, and it’s an entirely more relational experience when we’re approached on a more personal and beneficial level. That’s the nature of why social media is used, and therefore, it’s the effective way for companies to engage.
First published 4/30/12 on Technorati by Andre Bourque.
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April 23, 2012
The Affordable, Advanced SMM Tool You May Not Yet Know – Interview with Actionly CEO, Alex Furtado
Actionly is a Social Media Monitoring (SMM) dashboard and listening platform. The company’s product enables agencies and businesses to connect with their customers on social networks, analyze sentiment, and identify influencers. Fully integrated across networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+,YouTube, Blogs, and Flickr, the tool monitors keywords so users can track what their customers are saying about them. Actionly’s proprietary technology helps analyze these social media conversations in a single dashboard.
If you’ve heard of Actionly, it may be because they’ve gained some press as of recent. If not, it may be because it’s hard to believe such a well -integrated, valuable system is available at a starting price of around $5 / a month per user. It seemed “too good to be true” for me as well, until I saw it all.
In speaking with Alex Furtado, Actionly’s CEO, I got a deeper look at this product’s capabilities. Alex explained,”It’s important not just to monitor what people are saying in your social media channels and react to it, but to be able to provide more intelligence around it.” Whether what is being said about your organization is on social networking sites, blogs, forums, or traditional websites, Actionly will pick up on it, make it sortable, and analyze it for the client. With this tool you can query keywords within the sentiment of multiple channels at the same time.
The company likes to differentiate itself from other SMM providers in driving to what is “action-based” results. The company’s positioning is that organizations often have trouble finding actionable insights from their social media monitoring programs. It’s one thing to collect Facebook “likes,” but what do you do about them? You can’t deposit them at the bank, that’s for sure…at least not at Chase, for those of us that bank there.
Therefore, Actionly focuses on three categories under which most actionable social media metrics fit into:
- Volume: The volume metric determines the reach and frequency of your brand or company.
- Engagement: Engagement metrics help you understand the affinity for your brand.
- Conversion: Conversion metrics that track how many leads or sales you’ve generated.
Actionly lets businesses measure their Social Media ROI using integration with Google Analytics. All posts through the product can be tracked, so clients can generate reports to see which of their messages are generating leads, pageviews or revenue. Clients can see which posts are resonating with their audiences. Alex adds, “You want to know who your key influencers are, and what to do next to engage them.”
Doing this consistently is critical to good social media management, and Actionly positions itself to enable that. Alex explains, “As more people share their views, you have to be there, and we monitor your key Social Media channels 24/7 so you don’t have to be in-front of your computer all the time.”
In a great content marketing and brand awareness move, Actionly features a regular series of social media stories from actual product users called “Social Stories” that can be found on their blog. Here, organizations share their social media learnings and best practices. Quantum, a data protection, data storage and data archiving company, shared, “One good lesson I’ve learned is that you almost can’t collect enough metrics to measure how well you’re doing on social media. We collect some 50+ metrics every week and I can still think of more that would be worth monitoring.”
First published 4/23/12 on Technorati by Andre Bourque.
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April 18, 2012
Facebook Adds New Music Feature
Facebook is about sharing and liking the things that matter to us with friends and family. Guess what? Facebook added another feature that’ll keep its users busy and more engaged to their already famous and sometimes complicated social network platform.
Facebook just unveiled the Listen button, a music Facebook page feature that will give Facebook users an easy way to listen to their favorite artist or band’s music right from their facebook pages using services like Spotify and MOG.
The new feature is yet another way for Facebook to reward its active users on the site and keep them there. If this little button goes global and becomes a fan favorite, it could spell another victory for Facebook over Google who didn’t think of this nifty feature first.
Google could have really pulled it off with a feature like this on Google+ with their already existing millions of users and fans on YouTube but they missed another opportunity to think about it and implement it on the already waning number of Google+ users.
Anyways, Facebook may score another big one on this new feature with Facebook fans. The biggest and most famous social network may even get new fans and users from Google+ and even MySpace patrons. Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.
First published 4/18/12 on Technorati by Dan Reyes.
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April 14, 2012
Etsy Most Pinned Brand on Pinterest and What That Means for Marketers
According to a RJMetrics study Etsy is the most pinned brand on the popular visual bulletin board site Pinterest. Everything that gets put up on Pinterest or any other social discovery or bulletin board site leads back to a specific domain. In this study, RJMetrics extracted the top-level domains from a random sample of around 1 million pins and found some interesting information. All said and done, there were over 100,000 distinct source domains so there is a huge breadth of content. No one source dominated with Etsy grabbing the largest percentage of pins with 3%, followed by Google links pointing to image search (which is really images that should be attributed to other sources, but that’s another story) with just under 3%, Flickr with 2.5% and then Tumblr at 1.1%.
This phenomenon of visual bulletin boards is not isolated to Pinterest either, in an article by AGBeat, a startup founded at the same time as Pinterest called 20Blinks, was compared as well as covered here earlier this year. The similarities would make you think that 20Blinks is just a Pinterest clone, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate since they were both started at about the same time and on opposite ends of the world as 20Blinks was founded in Amsterdam and Pinterest in Palo Alto, CA. Both have similar themes but their niches are different due to geographic, psychographic and demographic reasons.
The bottom line for marketers, is these sites represent a tremendous opportunity to gain authentic insight into their target audience, to see the world through their customers’ eyes. By posting their favorite images, video clips and audio snippets on these sites, users reveal the essence of their personality—what makes them tick—to create a truly unique online identity. Beyond the typical demographics and numbers-game of audience analytics, these more intimate glimpses of user profiles uncover subjective nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed by pure demographic analysis.
For example, Pinterest and 20Blinks allow individuals who might otherwise differ greatly demographically to connect and collaborate over shared interests and hobbies, shattering the clichéd notion that “birds of a feather flock together.” Users might share similar taste in art, music, fashion, home decor or travel destinations, yet differ significantly in age, gender, ethnicity or religion.
Unlike Facebook, Google and other online properties that rely purely on text-based entries and search results to bucket users for marketing purposes, multi-media bulletin board sites permeate these boundaries to provide deeper, more contextual insight into audience likes and dislikes based on subjective audience feedback. These platforms allow for many people from widely diverse backgrounds to pursue the same idea—even when that commonality might seem unlikely—and curate and re-rank the content based on their view of its relevance to this idea, rather than some algorithm’s determination of relevance based purely on the text associated with it.
In addition to subjective ranking, these sites provide an audience penetration point that’s higher up in the desire funnel, at the discovery phase. Google, Facebook and other text-based engines rely on users to know what they want and actively search for it. But, as Semil Shah pointed out in his TechCrunch examination of the Rise of Pinterest and the Shift from Search to Discovery, at sites like Pinterest, 20blinks and other Internet bulletin boards, users don’t necessarily have a preconceived idea of what they want—but they know what they want when they see it. This dynamic gives brands the opportunity to introduce products, concepts and content much earlier in the decision making process and actually drive discovery.
Given this opportunity, what can brands do to reach these gathering crowds?
- Create a brand account that’s fed with images, video and audio clips that reflect the brand/lifestyle image you’re looking to convey. This approach moves beyond offering the typical product discount for Facebook fans and builds brand loyalty and engagement at a higher level.
- Work with bulletin board platforms to cultivate a “featured feed” that displays brand content prominently or more frequently, yet fully integrated into the home page, newest, hottest or other key site indexes. For example, users who “pin” or “blink” images related to specific travel destinations can be served images, promo videos and other content related to local accommodations and attractions directly into their stream.
- Place small, unobtrusive sidebar ads on related page views that fit with the overall theme of the content stream and the site. For example, the Aruba Tourist Office might run a multi-media ad featuring serene views of sand and surf complete with the natural, tranquil ambient audio on pages users tag as travel destinations.
- Leverage bulletin boards as part of contest and promotional campaigns, asking users to pin or blink their original images, movies, music and other content that inspires them. When announcing the winner, drive traffic back to the bulletin board by posting the announcement with images and video.
No matter how you propose to leverage Internet bulletin boards as part of the marketing mix, it’s absolutely vital to remember the core tenants of brand engagement over social media: authenticity, transparency and sincerity are a must. Make it absolutely clear that the feed originates from your brand’s team, offer content of value that is more than self-serving and do so with a sincerity that invites open exchange, rather than a one-way, brand-driven conversation. Social-savvy web audiences are quick to spot a veiled attempt to infiltrate their ranks with pure brand rhetoric.
On the other hand, seamless integration of content that offers them a sneak-peak, keeps them “in the know” and allows them to stay on the cutting edge as opinion leaders by discovering and sharing the next big thing will win acceptance and loyalty.
First published 4/14/12 on Technorati by Geoff Simon.
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April 12, 2012
New iPhone apps to Prevent Insta-emo
Champagne bottles are still popping at Instagram HQ while Twitter remains outraged by the acquisition. Now what? Though reports say that Facebook has assured Insta-users that features will remain the same, many want out. Here are some iPhone apps that may keep you from being Insta-emo for the time being:
1). Path
Path is for the mult-tasker…or well, the multi-sharer. Share your thoughts, who you’re with, where you are, what you’re listening to, photos, videos, even what time you hit the sack. The app also pushes to public networks like Facebook and Twitter. It’s beautifully designed and uploading a cover photo adds a great personal touch to your profile.
2). Everyme
If Path and Google+ had baby, it’d be Everyme! Everyme looks and functions similarly to Path with minor exclusions like sharing music and bedtime. However, Everyme lets you create private or public circles. Just as Google+, you decide who you want to share your daily activiites with. One thing users may not approve of is the disability to share to public networks.
3). Pinweel
Okay, so if Google+ had an affair with Instagram and birthed a lovechild, it would be Pinweel. Pinweel is a photo sharing app with filters (Ooooh-ahhh). Users can organize their photos into albums and share albums with specific people or groups. I’m seeing a trend in new iPhone apps in terms of privacy, and I like it! Users can push to Facebook and Twitter and hey Team Android, a version for you will launch later this year!
RIP Instagram? Or are some of its hot and bothered users only bluffing? We’ll see if this really is the end and if some of the new networking apps can steal its shine.
First published 4/12/12 on Technorati by Brittney Valenzano.
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April 9, 2012
The Road Less Travelled: Social Business ROI
In 2006, most companies believed that Social Media was nothing more than a passing fad. And as with most disruptive technologies or business models in the early stages, there was no ROI in sight. But some companies began experimenting with Social Media and started to see its potential for new sales, marketing and support channels. And the revolution began.
Just a small group of companies and dedicated people, let’s call them Social Starters, got Social Media going. Mostly, Social Starters came from marketing and customer support areas. They started out by simply monitoring customer comments and feedback. Social Starters often became team leaders when social teams were eventually put into place. Many of the first teams started focusing on specific Social Media channels; instead of experimenting with numerous ones like the Social Starters did at the very beginning. Since different channels can produce different results for different organizations, this more focused approach resulted in more measurable results and they were encouraging. Soon, Social Media policies and procedures became more formalized and standardized including training and tools. With that, social teams were better able to determine how Social Media added to the value of the business.
Over time, more measurable and positive results started to come in. It became the norm for companies to listen and interact with the customer and as a result they were seeing an increase in satisfied customers, more traffic to their Websites and social channels, and an increase in sales and repeat customers; all directly attributable to Social Media initiatives. We were starting to see solid results of Social Media contributing to Business ROI. And as the results became impossible to deny, not only did all levels of the organization became more accepting of Social Media — the highest-level company executives became public advocates. Companies started to think of, and refer to, themselves as Social Enterprises.
Today, a true Social Enterprise listens to and considers customer concerns a top priority. It can anticipate customer needs, and market and promote products far quicker than ever before. Customer satisfaction and loyalty is at an all-time high. Customers remark that their needs are anticipated and their ideas are influential. Employees are more productive, stakeholders are more engaged and campaigns are more efficient since there is no guess work on what customers want and need. This is a major breakthrough for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, including cause companies, non-profits and other business organizations both public and private. And, probably most important of all, today’s true Social Enterprise relates to its social communities as real people: customers, employees and stakeholders; instead of just a way to make a profit. Although the disruption and revolution phases are almost over and Social Business ROI is getting stronger, there’s still more to do.
Sources/References:
(1) Social Business ROI: Myths and Successes
(2) Google Analytics Social Reports Ties Social Channels to Business ROI
(3) Social Business and the Growth of Shared Value [Infographic]
First posted 4/9/12 on Technorati by Stephen Paul
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April 8, 2012
Google+ Grows 27% in March According to New Data
Earlier this year Google+ was labelled a ghost town after comScore visitor data revealed that members of the social network spent approximately 3 minutes per month on the site.
New data from traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise is countering these claims however. CNet report that traffic to Google+ actually rose 27% between February and March of this year, seeing a total of 61 million people visit the social network during March.
Hitwise produced the following chart to show the rise in traffic to Google+ according to their data, which is derived from a sample of Internet usage from a number of Internet Service Providers that provide anonymous data to Hitwise.
Hitwise regards 1 visit as the number of visits to a site in a 30 minute window. So if someone visited G+, then went off to CNN for 15 minutes before returning to G+, that would be 1 visit. If they went off and browsed other sites for 31 minutes before returning however that would be 2 visits.
On Thursday Larry Page, Google CEO, claimed that Google+ had more than 100 million active users, although he failed to clarify how he defined an active user.
The level of activity fell under scrutiny after comScore released data showing that users spent just 3.3 minutes on Google+ in January compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook.
Google, which took issue with that data, asserted that 50 million users access “Google+-enhanced” products daily and that 100 million do so once per month. However, “Google+-enhanced” includes YouTube, Google Play and the company’s homepage.
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April 3, 2012
Travel’s Problem With Pinterest
First, we’re glad Pinterest backtracked. Pinterest’s pinmeister and co-founder, Ben Silberman, is no longer asking followers to ” avoid self promotion.”
The CEO and his fellow pinners are saying that the Pinterest etiquette that frowned on pinning one’s own content, is dead.
Originally, the fast-growing site wanted its members, as Hotelmarketing.com put it, “to share all the beautiful things they find on the web,” and eschew pinning their own content, thus the advice against “self promotion.”
But what followed was predictable: big questions about the copyright violations by enthusiastic Pinterest users who were pinning other people’s content and images, with no license to do so.
So, in a recently unveiled set of new Terms of Services, the site reversed itself, and asked its followers to go ahead, forget the previous rules of etiquette, and pin their own stuff.
The Wall Street Journal noted that the shift in policy from posting curated content to members’ own content reflects a maturing company which, in February, became the third, fastest-growing major U.S web site when its unique users jumped 52% to 17.8 million.
But here’s problem one.
Social Technographic Profiles across the board (Alpha Moms, men and women, Asian and European users, etc.), show that social media Creators – those who actually publish a blog, upload a photo or video, Tweet regularly- are a significantly smaller population than Joiners, Spectators or Inactives.
Will the shift to pinning one’s own work, rather than those of others, be too challenging to Pinterest members?
Was it less stressful, easier “to share the things you love,” which meant other people’s (better?) stuff, and not one’s own?
And could this shift to posting original content reduce member growth?
From the perspective of travel, there’s another problem.
In a recent post, Why Hotel Content is So Boring , we argued that hotels play it safe by posting images of empty hotel rooms, empty pools, impossibly gorgeous but fake families on the beach, and smiling photos of reception desk staff, who are very likely paid models.
Hotels want to play it safe. Why, as one observer noted, show a happy family in the dining room when a potential childless couple could be turned off by the image and not chose that hotel.
Pinterest encourages beautiful photographs, lovely images. Hotels and destinations will populate their Pinterest boards with such glossy, but empty images.
Furthermore, Eric Leist, an emerging technologies specialist with Boston-based ad agency allen and gerristen, says that travel industry professionals should be paying attention to what Pinterest users in their target market are pinning. Doing so will give them a better sense of what that members in that target market want, what styles and colors appeal to them.
Basically, he says, “Pinterest is a free focus group for the travel industry, and professionals should tap into it.”
Pinterest has the potential to surpass Faceboook and even Amazon in terms of helping people discover what they want and what they may want to buy…instead of just talking to each other.
While the site may give travel brands a great opportunity to show off their beauty and promote their brands, they must also bring the user/traveler closer to sharing the real-life, emotional travel experience of being at a destination or property.
First published on Technorati by Kaleel Sakakeeny.
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Instagram for Android Now Available
We all new that the wildly popular camera sharing app for iOS was going to be hitting Android devices soon enough, but there wasn’t much notice about it being available on a specific date. Tuesday April 3rd 2012 shows that Instagram for Android is now ready for download in Google Play marketplace.
The app is free, as it is for iOS devices, and has many of the same features and filters. It allows you to share your photos to your friends and followers through facebook, twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. Unlike the iPS version however, there is no integrated Flickr sharing (yet) and no way to blur part of the photos and no way to tilt. Possibly, we’ll see those additions in later updates to the app.
If you have an Android device and have been waiting for this day, go grab it by clicking the Source link below and start sharing those awesome photos!
Source – Google Play
First published on Technorati by Reed Sanders.
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