A framework for measuring social media activity 50 Free Social Media Tools You Can't Live Without A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is). A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis. Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up! Listening / Research The foundations for any social media marketing activity start with listening and in-depth research, ranging from influencer identification to campaign planning. General listening tools Best in class: SocialMention.com – As far as ‘free’ options go, this is a solid as it gets.Alternatives: BoardReader.com (discussion board specific), Addictomatic.com (a general listening dashboard) and PeopleBrowsr.com (big data, big insights). Specific listening tools General research tools Engagement
Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity Recently I’ve been tracking the growth of social analytics and the means of delivering well on it. Connecting analytics to the needs of the business is the next step beyond basics of collating, aggregating, and identifying patterns in what the world is doing that affects your organization. On ZDNet recently, I explored the rapidly growing trend of big data. Collectively, big data represents a set of highly innovative new ways that companies are developing to distill value from the sheer scale, richness, and complexity of today’s vast networks of people and their data, of which the Internet is just the biggest example. It is social media in particular, however, where big data and business value intersect. Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. Drivers of Social Business Intelligence Marketing Optimization. What does all this mean for you now?
Facebook Innovation Briefing It’s not often that brands are willing to share the mistakes that occurred during their social media campaigns, even though those are often the most valuable insights. Therefore it was very refreshing to hear Radio France’s head of digital marketing Virginie Cleve talk through a few of the things that didn’t go to plan when the business embarked on a new social strategy. Cleve was speaking at Socialbakers’ Engage NYC event today where she revealed that the public broadcaster, which has more than 5m daily listeners and attracts 3.5m unique visitors per month to its website, redesigned its digital marketing strategy in 2011 with a new focus on editorial. Metcalfe’s Law and Social Media Metcalfe’s Law Metcalf’s law in its simplest form assigns a value for a network. The value increases proportionally depending on the number of nodes the network contains. For a network with 5 nodes, or computers such as a simple office intranet, the computed value would be 5² or 25. In its simplest form Metcalf’s law states that the value of a network doubles with each additional person on the network, thus networks tend to grow exponentially. In the original planning stages Metcalf’s law was based on the number of communication devices such as telephones, fax machines or computers, rather than the number of users on the system. As technology progressed, the formula had to be tweaked somewhat so that it could be applied to users. Unlike many telecommunications devices, social media networks can connect simultaneously to all users. Twitter is only one of the social media platforms that many are using as part of their web marketing strategies.
Klout and PeerIndex Don’t Measure Influence. Brian Solis Explains What They Actually Do Whether you like it not, Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 are measuring your social capital — not your influence but your potential for it. Altimeter Group’s principal analyst Brian Solis today releases a free report that explains why influence is largely misunderstood, and breaks down what 14 of the top measurement services are really good for. It eradicates consumer myths about one of social media’s hottest trends, and gives brands an action plan for making money with these tools. You can see and download “The Rise Of Digital Influence” report on Slideshare, or check it out here along with my key takeaways and analysis of why these products are flawed now but have big potential. For the world’s social media users: accept that you’re already being indexed by these services, and they’re going to sell data about you. For brands: You too need to start by outlining specific goals for how you’ll identify influencers and what you want them to accomplish for you.
Big Data Analytics a Key Enabler for Social CRM - Airlines Case Study Big Data Analytics is a hot topic of discussion these days. But many feel that it is more of a “hype” and less of substance. In my opinion, Big Data Analytics is the real deal and if used correctly, can deliver great business results at a fraction of cost compared to other alternatives. As you can see on slide no. 27, the twitter sentiment scores obtained for many of the airlines are “comparable” to results of The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). What is important to note here is that by analyzing few tweets using freely available R programming language (which is part of the GNU project), it is possible to achieve results similar to that of an elaborate and expensive market research study such as ACSI at a fraction of a cost, that too in real time. Isn’t that a game changer? In one of my earlier post, I have defined Social CRM as the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty.
Social Media ROI: The Metrics Muddle For the last few years, the hottest debates in social media have centered around metrics, and how to prove the value of your activities. Two years ago, we were debating whether or not we should even bother trying to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our social media activities. Some people argued it was impossible, others that ROI wasn’t the point. We’ve come a long way in the last two years, and people like Katie Paine, Keith Burtis, Olivier Blanchard and Christopher S. Penn have shown us not only that we can measure the value of our social media activities, but how. Even so, as with many business buzzwords, there’s still some confusion about what we mean when we use the terms listening, monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI. (Two things: I’ve since added “listening” to the list of terms, so there’s a bonus for you, dear reader. Listening Listening is the first step in the ladder. Monitoring I see monitoring as one step beyond listening. Measurement Analytics Trivial?
Eight Principles of Social Media ROI by Beth Kanter | Community Techknowledge Share | I was honored to be a part the WomenWhoTech online summit. I did a panel titled “Social Media ROI” with Lauren Vargas from Radian 6 and moderated by Roz Lemieux from Fission Strategy . Here’s the description: Do you know what kind of an impact social media is having on your brand, mission, or bottom line? Return on Investment The Return on Investment financial process was created by DuPont and used by Alfred Sloan to help make General Motors manageable in the 1920s. Return on Investment is what many executive directors may be thinking when social media strategy comes up. • How much will it cost? And we wonder how do we calculate that? An analysis that looks at the benefits, costs, and value of a technology project over time. The Four I’s of ROI If we look at a broader definition of ROI – I see four different “I” words … Return on Insight This is using key metrics to harvest insights about what works and what doesn’t and the process of iteration. Return on Investment (Dollars)
4 Ways to Measure Social Media Success With Free Tools Do you know if your social media promotions or campaigns were successful? For many businesses, it can be easy to label a social campaign a huge hit or a blatant blunder, but which elements made the campaign successful? There are an array of powerful and free tools that can be used to help you understand the successes and failures of your social media promotion or campaign. Let’s dive into four easy ways you can use free products to break down the different elements of a social promotion. #1: Track Actions Visitors Take One way to better understand your social campaign as a whole is to understand how your users find out about it. Event Tracking, as mentioned in my previous post on integrating social media on your website, has the ability to report the behavior of website visitors by tracking certain actions they take. For example, Event Tracking can be used to track the number of times a video on your site is played, a file is downloaded or a certain link is clicked. The Results The Better Tweet
Why You Should Not Kill Your Blog Let’s be honest and cut to the chase – Social Media is not “free”. If you disagree let me save you time and suggest you skip the remainder of this post. I’m about to discuss ways I believe Associations can invest their time for maximize value for their Members through blogs. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a post titled “Why are America’s fastest-growing companies killing their blogs?”. This post bothered me. It bothered me because we are seeing many of our Association clients experience great benefits from Social Media, the most successful of these use a blog as the primary mechanism to “feed” their networks. I studied the post some more. Additional study allowed me to see where the companies who are blogging considered it the most “successful” Social Media platform for the fourth consecutive year. Blogs remain important, and if applied correctly can become an opportunity for Associations to deliver a great deal of value to their Members. The problem This is a problem – a big one.