It’s Social Media Week — Do You Know Where Your Brand Is?

Filed under Application, Case Study, Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 7 February 2011 at 08:19 {2 comments}

Today marks the launch of Social Media Week around the world and there’s a lot going on. I’m hoping to get to one or two events this week in London. With so much taking place around the world it’s clear that the days of not paying attention to social media are over.

To me the foundation of social media — any media for that matter — is the concept of listening. Who is talking about your brand? What are they saying? Why should you care? What can you do? The rapid growth of technologies makes it far more easier to discover the answers to these questions, but my advice is don’t just use anything. Find the right tools. Here are some that I particularly like and have used to help us.

  • StockTwits: I’ve talked for months about the value of this network from an investor relations perspective. But the platform brings a much richer experience than traders just talking about puts and calls on your stock. This is a constant stream of investors who are also talking about your executives, products and services. You should register and tune in.
  • Hootsuite: I like what Hootsuite has done with its dashboard in terms of metrics and its ease of use. Because of the platform and how simple it is we can really take a deeper dive into specific topics and the people talking with us and about us. There’s also an ongoing debate around Klout, which is integrated into Hootsuite — I’m following the discussion closely. In fact, I just started an online poll about Klout the other day — http://twtpoll.com/s4luaa
  • 14 Blocks: This is a very simple tool that looks at the time your followers on Twitter are most active. The free trial is useful and does give you a good indication of when to engage with your audience.
  • Facebook: We continue to gain a larger audience on Facebook and I continue to be impressed with their analytics. I think they could improve them with more information about topics that our followers discuss, but I’m sure they’re working on that. And if you haven’t tried Facebook ads yet I would encourage you to do so. I think you’ll be surprised.
  • Omniture: If you’re not talking to your website team about this you should make it a point to do so this week. Their tools for your website can give you a much better picture of social media traffic and how you can improve your programs. Your web team will also appreciate the attention and how they can help. It’s a win-win.

There are lots of other tools and resources out there. In fact, my good friend Ken Burbary has created a Wiki of social media monitoring resources to use.  So what are you using to listen and why to you like it? Let us know.

Looking for the Method Behind Your Competitors’ Madness

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 5 April 2010 at 12:16 {no comments}

I recently finished an extensive social media analysis of a client’s competitors recently to help inform the client’s go-forward digital strategy. It was undeniably a valuable effort, an interesting look at who’s using Facebook, who’s using Twitter, who’s getting audiences to engage, who’s not.  Not only do I recommend it but the research gets even more interesting when you revisit it every six months or so.

In this case, I paid particular attention to the client’s largest competitor, a company’s that’s diving into social media aggressively – YouTube, bloggers, live tweeting, Facebook, everything. It’s clearly a well-orchestrated effort guided by a team of dedicated individuals that are also connecting the social media effort to a broader traditional media campaign. It was very effective in getting the client’s attention.

The other companies were tapping one or two social media channels, some with some apparent success – or at least they were generating a fair amount of activity.

But what do you do with this information?

I would offer that compared to competitive research around other components of the competition’s communications strategy (advertising, media relations, trade shows), you ought not to read too much into some of this competitive social media activity.

The fact is, there is a distinct chance that your competitors might be flying without a flight plan, hoping that by getting some social media initiatives off the ground, they’ll arrive somewhere of consequence. It may be tough to know the difference between a well-planned social media strategy and program with  no real strategy at all. So you may be looking for lessons that aren’t there. In fact, odds are your competitors are leaving gaps in their strategy that you can exploit – that may be the most valuable part of the effort.

The biggest issue I’m seeing right now with larger B2B companies is they are able to generate a lot of activity – blog posts, tweets, retweets of the tweets by the personal accounts of everyone on the communications team, Facebook wall posts, even videos. After all, it only takes enough time and/or money to generate activity. But a lot of them – I’d say most – are getting precious little audience engagement in return.  I’d learn from those mistakes, look for where there are glimmers of engagement, and then do better. Be creative on the backs of the failures of those that went before.

In fact, in that study I recently completed, it was one of the smaller brands that had the most intriguing success. Whether purposefully or by luck (but what difference does it make?), this was the one and only brand that managed to accumulate piles of fan posts on their Facebook pages – heartfelt posts of their memories of this nostalgia brand that reinforced that company’s brand positioning beautifully. Facebook was the perfect channel for sharing recollections of their experiences with this brand. They were capturing a sentiment and helping advocates share their stories in a way other competitors could not because their brands stood for something else.  I liked that kind of sustainable differentiation.

Until social media grow up, creativity counts for a lot. That said, competitive research is imperative – if nothing else to tell you what NOT to do.

Weber Shandwick’s SocialPulse capabilities can handle almost any competitive research challenge. As an example, here’s a study we published on the Twitter habits of Fortune 100 companies.

Are you using StockTwits? If not, you need to give it a look

Filed under Application by Allan Schoenberg on 19 October 2009 at 00:03 {5 comments}

I can’ t recall the exact date I went to StockTwits online — it was about this time one year ago — but I do remember that I was immediately captivated by it. What the site essentially offers is real-time commentary by traders who use Twitter to discuss what they are doing. The company was co-founded by Soren Macbeth and Howard Lindzon. You can see Soren on CNBC from April 2009 here talking about the company. Howard also is a co-founder of the fund SocialLeverage, which has invested in companies like TweetDeck and Bit.ly.

StockTwits - Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real time.

StockTwits - Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real time.

While the site is geared towards traders of stocks, futures, options and currencies, it also can act as a source of vital information for communicators doing or working with investor relations. As a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CME), I can watch what shareholders are saying about our company — how they react to our news, discuss the company, discuss competitors and trade our stock. Rather than wait to read the latest analyst reports or view a Google/Yahoo chat board, I can now read in real-time what our shareholders are talking about.  In addition, the page adds a real-time news stream about our company and a daily/weekly/monthly chart on our stock. If you work for a publicly traded company, or your clients are publicly traded, you now have a new tool to listen to a key audience.

Monitoring the competition also has its advantages via StockTwits. As outlined above, you can replicate the same strategy that you have established for your own company and now expand this to all your competitors. I’ve set up my StockTwits porfolio to track other financial exchanges in order to stay on track of their shareholder streams, how they are communicating to shareholders, and then report back anything I see as important or timely.

StockTwits has also expanded beyond their web site. The company recently launched a desktop application that has a look and feel of TweetDeck but geared toward traders. Two features I particularly like about the desktop application include: The ability to create or join individual groups that are topic specific (very helpful for our exchange-listed products to follow customers), and the ability to create groups in order to send private messages directly to the entire group or to multiple groups that don’t appear in the public stream. The company has also launched its own web TV program at StockTwits.tv.  

While I’ve found StockTwits to a must-have site for me, the integration of investor relations and social media is still young. I read this post last week on Investor Relations and Web 2.0 very helpful, especially the spreadsheet at the very end. The spreadsheet alone is worth the read and to share with your investor relations team. 

This week in Chicago is our annual Futures Industry Association Exposition. I was fortunate enough to be asked to lead the first social media panel for any conference hosted by our key industry association. This panel would not be complete without the participation of Howard Lindzon and StockTwits and he graciously accepted my invitation. I plan to follow up this post later this week with an interview with Howard. If you have any thoughts on StockTwits, investor relations and social media, or questions you want me to ask Howard let me know.

Social Media Monitoring is Vital…For ALL Brands

Filed under Uncategorized by annabarcelos on 20 April 2009 at 10:19 {8 comments}

Today’s post is by guest contributor, Chuck Hemann (@chuckhemann). I began following Chuck’s posts a while ago and respect his insights on social media and the importance of measurement. Thanks Chuck for today’s post!

As the number of individuals joining social networks has climbed, so to has the number of brands embracing social networks as an opportunity to engage customers. What is often overlooked is that there is more to social media than Twitter, and Facebook. The brands who are successful using social media follow a very simple, yet often neglected formula: listen, develop a strategy to reach customers, engage the customer, monitor and measure conversations.  Unfortunately for them, and for those of us subject to their content, they often neglect THE two most important phases: listening and monitoring

 

Doesn’t it seem like we get an example every week of a company that could have mitigated a crisis if they were just listening to, and monitoring online conversations? This week’s example: Dominos. The thought of a B2C brand, especially one as large as Dominos, not listening (side note: it is possible that they were monitoring, though the delay in which they responded to this crisis would suggest otherwise) to online conversations is staggering. Just because the examples often come from B2C companies, doesn’t make listening and monitoring any less important for B2B brands.

 

Back in February, Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications had a great post on his blog, PR Squared, about B2B and social media. In it, he mentions some of the typical responses B2B brands give for not utilizing social media, including:

 

  • “We already know all of our customers”
  • “We have a very technical, specialized product”
  • “Our customers are very conventional”

 

The reality though, as Todd notes in his post, is that if your customers are online, you should be considering social media strategies to reach them. And guess what? More B2B customers are making their way to social networks. A recent survey of technology buyers by Forrester suggested that 95% of those buyers were at least “spectators” in the conversations on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc…Sure, you could argue that these are buyers who would be naturally drawn to new technology, but do you honestly believe this is a phenomenon that will stay isolated to B2B tech buyers? I don’t.

 

How would a B2B company ever know if their customers were using social networks without monitoring the conversations first? Better yet, how would they know if customers wanted to interact with them on that level without monitoring? None of us graduate high school and then immediately start giving strategic counsel to our clients do we (Doogie Howser‘s need not apply)? No, we listen to professors and industry experts educate us on the proper techniques and then we engage in the process. Why should social media be any different?

 

So I will ask you…why aren’t more B2B companies at least listening and monitoring for customer conversations? Is it because they view social networks as a novelty? Is it because they think their customers aren’t using these tools? What could it be? We’d like to hear from you!  

 

Chuck Hemann is the research manager for Dix & Eaton, a communications consulting firm, where he helps lead monitoring, measurement  and competitive intelligence efforts for the agency’s clients. You can connect with Chuck on Twitter and at his blog Measurement PR-spectives. The views in this post belong to Chuck Hemann and do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of his employer.

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