Archive for June 23, 2010

Here is a story describing how Kraft, who did not have a social media plan in place, got a bad kicking because it took them 7 hours to respond

This is part of the reason its good  (call it ROI if you want)  to have one in place for your brand!

For the last two weeks, I’ve been watching with great interest a situation taking place on Kraft Foods’ Facebook page.

It seems that, in the end of May, a Florida mom found a gross blob in a package of Capri Sun juice. According to reports, that mom reached out to Kraft Foods – the maker of Capri Sun – to seek answers about the glob (which has since been proven to be mold). Not getting the response she desired after about 10 days, she posted an account of her story to Kraft’s Facebook page.  And, a full-blown social media and PR crisis has since ensued.

In the olden days – about five years ago – consumers who were disgruntled with a product would find that their only recourse would be to call or email a company directly. I once fell victim to a moldy box of Lunchables. I called Kraft and told them how upset I was, they sent me a bunch of coupons, and life went on for both of us.

But, as we’ve seen all too many times with the advent of social media, these cases can turn into complete crises in just a short time.

In Kraft’s case, much of the subsequent outrage seems to be coming from what many have deemed a slow response. According to one blogger, there was a seven-hour lag between when this incident hit Kraft’s page, and Kraft’s response. And, in case you aren’t aware, seven hours is a super long time in social media land.

In those seven hours, Kraft’s page was overrun with a maelstrom of negative comments, conspiracy theories (with people suggesting that the blob was an ear, a piece of chicken skin or an eyeball, among other things) and full-on fights between commenters. Some have even criticized Kraft’s response, calling it dispassionate – though, seven hours later, there’s probably not much Kraft could have said to make everything hunky-dory again.

One of the first things we always tell clients when dealing with concerns voiced via social media is to be responsive. Similar to how you would respond to a media query in traditional PR, it’s important to quickly address issues on the web, even if only to let you your consumers know that you are taking the issue seriously and looking into resolving it.

Think about it this way: If a reporter called you alleging that one of your company’s products was defective and had hurt someone, would you wait seven hours to call that reporter back? Probably not.

To Kraft’s credit, the company has since implemented several tactics to help manage this snafu. It launched a special tab on its Facebook page, providing answers to many of the questions about this incident and the safety of Capri Sun (also included: the answer to “Why have you been so slow to respond”). It also added a prominent call-out on its Facebook wall to direct fans to that tab.

Additionally, the day following the initial brouhaha, Vinay Sharma, director of Capri Sun Beverages, weighed in on the matter via a personal Facebook message that garnered 355 likes and 271 comments.

While much of the firestorm seems to have subsided, this latest incident with Kraft serves as an excellent reminder to businesses not to underestimate the power of angry people on Facebook. While you can’t necessarily control who is going to have a bad experience with your product and how they choose to react, you do have control over how – and when – you respond.

via [The MGH Modern Marketing Blog]

Blogs are growing a lot more slowly. But specialists still thrive.

Almost all users on Twitter are within five steps of each other, according to recent data from social media consulting firm Sysomos.

Eight in 10 Twitter Users Within 5 Steps or Less
On average, Twitter users have five degrees of separation between each other – meaning nearly everyone within Twitter is only five steps away. Of all friendship distances, five steps is the most common (41%), while a friendship distance of four steps is the second-most common (37%). Much smaller percentages are three and two steps away, leading to a total of 85% of all users being within five steps of separation.

Of users beyond five steps away from each other, the most common distance is six steps (13%), with 2% being seven steps away.

Reachability Nears 100% Within 6 Steps
One way to measure the connectedness of Twitter is by looking at the percentage of Twitter users that can be touched by reaching out a certain distance. Using the Twitter network graph, Sysomos analysts determined that, on average, a Twitter user will encounter 83% of all other Twitter users by visiting everyone’s friends up to a distance of five steps.

If the user visits all friends of friends up to six steps, 96% of all Twitter users will be covered. This means, the Twitter network has good social connectivity, and that, in theory, a re-tweet does not have to propagate that much to reach a potentially large number of people.

Twitter is Highly Local
On average, it only takes 3.32 steps for a user to find someone who is following them (with a standard deviation of 1.25 friendship distances). This means, if a user traces their friends, and their friends and so on, in 3.32 steps on average they will discover a follower of their own. This means there are many small, circular connections on Twitter.

Celeb Twitter Followers Have Low Authority
Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels (based on factors such as a user’s number of followers, following, updates and retweets), according to other recent Twitter-related data from Sysomos. Of five celebrities examined, the average follower of President Barack Obama had the highest authority rating on a scale of 0 to 10, 2.4. The most common authority score among Obama’s roughly 4.2 million followers is 1, held by 20%.

Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels. This could be because they attract everyone from all walks of life. Some people may only be on Twitter to see what their favorite stars have to tweet about. In addition, most celebrity followers tracked by Sysomos had few followers themselves, pushing down their authority scores.

About the Data: Sysomos examined 5.2 billion friendship connections on the Twitter network. Based on analysis of this network, Sysomos determined how connected the users are to each other.

via [Marketing Charts]

I guess this is pretty much the definition of a craze: It appears that almost half the companies that use social media for advertising, marketing, PR, customer relations, or recruiting have jumped into the arena without first determining what they hope to achieve or the methods they will employ to achieve it. At least, that’s the impression I get from the results of a new study of corporate social media usage by Digital Brand Expressions, aptly titled “Social Media Without a Parachute.”

According to DBE, which surveyed execs from 100 companies of varying sizes (ranging from under 50 to over 1,000 employees), 78% of respondents said their companies were using social media — but just 41% said they had a strategic plan. Crunching the numbers, that means that 48% of respondents who are using social media have no strategic plan. In a sadly comical finding, 88% of the group without a social media plan agreed that having a plan was important — just something on their “to-do” list, I suppose. Moving over to the companies with a social media plan, there was clear agreement that marketing is a natural social media utility, with 100% of respondents agreeing that marketing should be involved in formulating the social media plan.

It’s alarming but not terribly surprising that half the companies using social media are basically flying blind. After all, we’ve seen this before: remember the invasion of Iraq in 2003?

No, seriously — I’m not trying to be flippant, and obviously the stakes are immeasurably smaller when you’re just trying to sell toothpaste to someone — but there are definite similarities: You rush to get into a space at minimal expense, with no thought for what happens once you’re there; you plunge into a large, diverse population you basically know nothing about in the hopes they will receive you with open arms; and your goals are so general (and ludicrously optimistic) as to be meaningless, giving no hint as to how they might actually be achieved: “We will have a successful social media presence” is about as well-though and easily achievable as “Iraq will be a democracy.”

And, of course, (acknowledging again that the stakes are not morally equivalent, or even comparable) the Iraq metaphor reveals the danger of this approach, which might be described as “flying by the seat of your bare ass”: Above all, what happens when things don’t work out? Because you didn’t consider multiple contingencies, including less-than-ideal scenarios, you don’t have enough personnel deployed when it turns out the population isn’t friendly and thrilled to see you — substituting, say, customer service for neighborhood policing, and critical tweets or Facebook posts for IEDs. The small force you have assigned to the task risks becoming overwhelmed and demoralized by the onslaught and the lack of support from higher-ups. Suddenly, your Mission Accomplished banner looks a bit premature. Maybe you should have given more thought to these issues before you went in?

But it’s too late: you can’t back out now, having already committed your prestige (brand) to this highly public project. Now comes the long, painful, and very costly process of compensating for negligence in the early stages of the process. With all eyes on your organization (because you succeeded in getting the world’s attention, even if it wasn’t in the way you hoped) you have to actually understand the sources of negative sentiment so you can address them, for example through large-scale ethnographic surveys and opinion polling. Once you understand the landscape of public opinion, you have to identify potential friends and allies, and convince them to enlist in your cause despite the risks to their own reputation and credibility — an incredibly difficult task, given your large-scale screw-ups already on record, which will require a 100% sincere and persuasive sales pitch. At the same time, you may forge secret relationships with influential figures (bloggers, religious clerics) who can help shape public opinion in return for a favor or fee — but you have to be careful, because if these covert recruits are ever exposed, you and they are finished.

Again, just to be clear: I’m not actually saying social media campaigns are in any way “the same” as the war in Iraq, which obviously takes place on an entirely different moral plane. I’m just noting similar dynamics which result when large organizations undertake complex, ambitious projects without sufficient planning.

via [Media Post]

SUMMARY: Social media can improve website traffic, lead generation and sales — but by how much? And how can you improve those results?

The solution is through careful measurement of social media’s contribution to your marketing goals. We spoke with an expert in social marketing analysis to uncover five tactics that can help you measure which online social interactions drive business results.

As with any new marketing channel, social media offers marketers the chance to experiment with new tactics. But, after the experimentation phase, marketers should assess how social media helps their businesses — and how they can improve their performance in the channel.

A key way to do this is through measurement and analysis.

“Social media isn’t a sales channel, so it’s hard to measure it as you would a revenue stream. But it impacts the likelihood of sales,” says Amber Naslund, Director, Community, Radian6.

Naslund is an expert is social media analysis and co-author of Radian6’s Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis book). Below are five tactics she suggests for measuring your social efforts.

Tactic #1. Dedicate resources to connecting social and business data

Comments, shared links and other online interactions are encouraging — but they’re only useful if they help your business.

“Social media metrics alone, in a bubble, matter very little,” Naslund says. “It’s important that you can actually connect the dots: Is social media driving brand awareness? Is it driving customer retention?”

Without this connection, you cannot justify adding resources to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, blog or other social outlets.

- Set aside time and resources

The most difficult part of conducting this type of analysis is finding the time, Naslund says. There is only so much a company can automate, and some of this analysis is manual.

“There is no such thing as the computer that can combine all this data, spit it out and point to what to do. That requires human insight,” Naslund says.

Anyone on your team who is capable of analyzing quantitative and qualitative data and understanding their business applications could help your effort. You can begin making a case for more resources by documenting the amount of time and investment you’ve put into gathering, analyzing and acting on social data and the results you’ve achieved.

Tactic #2. Incorporate other reporting systems

Tying social data to your business data requires strong reporting for your website analytics, email, search and other marketing systems.

In fact, if any of your major marketing channels are not equipped with accurate and robust reporting, you should focus on those channels before worrying about social data.

“If the proper infrastructure isn’t there,” Naslund says, “you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

- Social monitoring tools

You will, of course, need tools capable of measuring basic social media information, such as your number of followers and comments over time, as well as more complicated information such as your “share of conversation” and online brand sentiment.

For example, you want to know how often your brand is mentioned in relevant discussions online and whether people mention your brand in a positive, negative or neutral way. Monitoring your performance in these areas can reveal whether improvements translate into business results.

Manually monitoring this information is not practical. Many tools, both paid and free, have sprung up over the last two years to help marketers monitor and measure online conversations. If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to get started, try free tools such as:
o Google Alerts
o Technorati
o Twitter’s search
o Seesmic
o TweetDeck

- Tie data into a CRM system

Every company will be different, but in general, Naslund suggests incorporating social data with a customer relationship management system so you’ll have an idea of social media’s impact on business metrics such as customer retention and purchase frequency.

A challenge here is combining the data, Naslund says. You cannot simply dump your Twitter followers into your sales database and match them up. Your team either has to build solutions to automate the process or manually append customer files.

Tactic #3. Start with concrete objectives

Measurement for measurement’s sake is likely to confuse and overwhelm your team with a flood of data. Instead, set clear goals and track specific, relevant metrics.

“You need to have two or three very clear objectives of what you’re going to glean from social media in order to track and distill metrics from that,” Naslund says. “Measurement itself is not the goal. Measurement is supposed to teach you whether you’re working towards those goals.”

For example, if your team wants to improve brand awareness, you can track metrics such as:
o Number of online conversations mentioning your brand
o Website traffic from social channels
o Email subscriptions from social-driven traffic

Naslund also suggests monitoring only two or three metrics related to each goal, as additional metrics often reiterate the same data and unnecessarily increase your workload.

Tactic #4. Use basic data correlations

“I tend to think the most simple stuff is the most impactful, mostly because we try so hard to overcomplicate things, because over complicating things must mean we’re serious,” Naslund says.

Say, for example, your team uses Twitter to broadcast a link to a specific product landing page and your audience re-tweets it. By looking at your website analytics, you see that subsequent traffic and sales on the page have increased.

In this example, re-tweets seem to be improving your marketing performance, which raises the question “How do we get more re-tweets?” From here, you can calculate a ratio between the number of re-tweets and the increased traffic to the landing page and use it as a benchmark to test other efforts.

“Most people will say ‘We’ll just ask people to re-tweet our stuff,’” Naslund says. “But what really motivates a re-tweet is free content. So that means we need to generate more great content that points people to those landing pages in order to repeat that process.”

- Compare lists to segment audience

There can be a lot of value in comparing your community database with your sales database, Naslund says. She saw an online B2B healthcare community’s team overlap their databases to uncover which community members were not customers. They developed a specific strategy to market to these community members and they saw great success.

“It wasn’t complicated. She did it with a couple of Excel spreadsheets.”

Tactic #5. Remember the community

Remember that this data represents real people choosing to interact with your brand. Although your goal is to improve business results, it must be done within the context of providing your audience with valuable content and genuine interaction.

If you’re hoping to get your audience to share a link, or comment on a post, you must do so by appealing to their needs — not yours.

“You can measure till the cows come home, but having the proper approach and mindset to why you’re in social [channels] has to come first,” Naslund says.

via [Marketing Sherpa]