A tool to measure social media presence – for sector and competitor research
Social Media Metrics have to date mainly focused on the view of their effectiveness from inside the company. At Evonomie we’ve been looking for a while for an external qualitative method to measure companies’ online activities as part of a strategic review.
Internal or in-company quantitative methods are in abundance and focus on activity, surveys and return on investment (ROI). These are certainly valid metrics and there is a comprehensive list in Jim Sterne’s book Social Media Metrics. The real question when conducting research is how can you capture the metrics if you’re outside the company? You don’t have access to their analytics so need to make a judgement on what’s important and whether the information is available.
Benefits of benchmarking competitor use of social media
Reasons we want to measure the social media activity from an external perspective include:
The review competitors’ activity, their strengths and weaknesses
To understand where and how the market segment is using social media
To identify opportunities
To identify threats
To review new markets companies may consider moving into
One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media.
Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used.
When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was interested to know more. I know Malcolm from many meetings at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization summit where he was .
Here’s my interview with Malcolm which presents the benefits and issues of managing this type of software.
Richard Pentin (of TMW) has done some sterling work by teaming up with the IAB Social Media Council to tackle the hottest digital marketing potato; measuring and benchmarking social media ROI. Well, more specifically measuring social media activity that in turn impacts ROI.
Despite the very serious sounding name of the IABSMC, we feel that this provides some great thinking that in a framework could well help us all to formalise a way to manage, measure and compare social media performance.
The SlideShare presentation talks through each step of the process from establishing your intent, assigning the most relevant KPIs around the 4 As – Awareness, Appreciation, Action and Advocacy – and references other benchmarks in order to draw meaningful comparisons.
What do you think are it’s strengths and weaknesses? It would be great to hear your feedback and ideas.
Through 15 years of advising marketers through my books and training I’ve found that, after time has passed, all that often remains from the course as a takeaway is a framework on which to hang future actions. C’est la vie! But busy people seem to like frameworks and mnemonics to structure their actions. To help digital marketers structure their thoughts, over the years I’ve created or been involved with:
The 5Ss of online marketing (PR Smiths suggestions on goals from our Emarketing Excellence book)
SOSTAC – a method for structuring digital marketing planning (again developed by Paul Smith)
CRITICAL – a practical way of improving Email Marketing
And of course it’s why we’re called SMART Insights.
So in line with our aim to simplify managing digital marketing we’ve developed RACE. This is the first article introducing it; later posts will go into more detail on how to apply it to get better results.
Question: How Do I Get My Customers To Recommend Me To Their Friends?
“I am interested in learning more about ‘Referral Marketing’ and wondered if you have any blogs or references on this subject. Essentially, my boss has asked that I e-mail all of my database with a ‘Please talk about us’ kind of message. I’m not too keen on this as I think it needs to have a bit more substance? Are there examples out there of people doing these types of e-mails? I’m not necessarily talking about incentivising base customers to talk about us, just nudging them to ask them to recommend us. Is that a ‘done thing’?”
Answer:
Just asking people to refer does not work — after all, why would they? Keep it authentic and treat people as you’d wish to be treated, we’re all human and it can be annoying if you sense you’re being hounded to help a business hit sales targets or ‘maximise the value of their database’ – it’s got to be give and take.
Rewarding, inspiring and entertaining people does work in a range of ways. And you have to be really honest how
