I am not a fan of basketball.  There, I said it (and here in Kentuckiana, that’s borderline blasphemy).

So hopefully, I can be forgiven for not knowing who Vince Carter is last week, when I was invited to have lunch at his eponymous restaurant in Daytona Beach, Florida.  (BTW, if you get the chance, you should definitely go. Great food, beautiful setting, and the shrimp and grits were to die for.)

Upon getting home, I asked my husband (who is a fan of basketball) about Vince.  He said “At one time, he was going to be the next Michael Jordan.  He was an amazing player.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Jordan couldn’t have been Jordan without his team.  You couldn’t just ignore the rest of the Bulls.  Carter never had that.  Any other team knew all they had to do was shut down Vince, and they’d win.”

So where am I going with this story?

"waiting to play" courtesy sxc

Just like basketball, corporate communications success depends on a solid team effort.   The “Rock Star/personal brand” approach really only works well to build up an individual consultancy (and even in that context, it has it’s limits.)

No matter how amazingly kick-butt your social media manager or online community manager is, he or she is only one person.

Asking one person to be everywhere you need them to be on the social web, and do everything you need done, all while providing sufficient context through monitoring, analysis and reporting to gauge success or failure, not to mention degree of success or failure, is asking too much.

If personal circumstances shut down your star player,  if another team recruits him with a better offer, or if  she goes free agent, what’s your backup plan?   Can your program survive the rebuilding period?

Is it good idea to have a point man?  Sure.  Is team leadership crucial? Absolutely.  Does everyone need the same level of visibility?  Nope, not at all–in fact some people perform better in a lower-profile role.

But there’s a big difference between having a team that features a star player, and trying to get by with a star and no real team.

Can you have a successful social media program without a star? Yes. I know it can be done because I’ve seen it.

Can you have a successful social media program with only a star? From what I’ve seen, all signs point to “No.”

"man made" courtesy csremedy on sxc

My head hurts a little today, mostly from setting up and configuring tools to help me in my role as social media manager.  There are a lot of tools out there, they get major updates pretty frequently, and I get asked fairly often for a recommendation.

So I thought I would ask you guys:

In a perfect world, what would the One Dashboard To Rule Them All look like?

Is it better in your experience to have a One Dashboard, with different views or user levels that correspond to different roles?  Or is chasing that mythical beast a waste of time, and should we just settle on  multiple tools that each are best-in-class for specific roles?

MANAGING IN-DEPTH CONVERSATIONS

I know that when I was doing blogger outreach and event planning for a client last fall, BuzzStream was hugely helpful.  If you’re looking for a tool that can give you a snapshot of a person or website’s visibility, digital footprint, and keep a beautiful record of your interactions with them and the results, it’s great.  Rapportive, the new plugin for GMail, covers similar ground.

These two tools work great for blogger outreach at the activation level, for PR professionals who have added that service to their offering.  They’re also nice tools for an online community manager or social CRM role.

But there’s nothing in there that you could send along to a CMO to let him or her know whether the program was successful or not.  And they don’t touch managing social profiles for a brand.

POSTING TO MULTIPLE PROFILES & ACCOUNTS

Hootsuite and SocialOomph are two tools that do a wonderful job if you need to manage updating multiple social media accounts.  Hootsuite’s collaborative tools and integration with Google Analytics are supah-cool (I love the Tweets/Site Visits overlay).  SocialOomph’s  automation tools allow you maximum posting, following and friending productivity without resorting to thoughtless spammyness. They cover 80% of the same ground, but unfortunately, the 20% that each does better than the other are really the most valuable features.  And using both? Is kind of a pain.

These two tools are great for real-time monitoring of Twitter and Facebook in the sense of “finding keyword/brand mentions.”   Unfortunately, neither one touches blogs, forums or social news sites from a monitoring standpoint.  Neither one touches sentiment.  And while they offer decent point-in-time reporting for your posting activity, the reporting is still woefully light when you’re trying to justify a social media program to a real numbers nerd.

MONITORING/MEASURING CONSUMER MENTIONS OF YOUR BRAND OR INDUSTRY

Over the years, we’ve used Radian6, Attensity/Biz360 and ScoutLabs as monitoring tools.   There were things I liked and disliked about all of them.  None of them seem to integrate with a good posting utility (like Hootsuite or SocialOomph) or do that functionality well as part of the suite.  None of them integrate with Google Analytics to tell you if a bump in social media coverage is affecting your web traffic, or how it’s affecting it.  Yeah, you can manually pull the data from both and do your own comparison, but shouldn’t you be spending your time translating the data into marketing recommendations, not collating it?

This week, I took a look at ConsumerBase, which claims it can not only scrape the social web for brand or keyword references, but understand the context of them and spit it out as passive market research.  Now we’re getting closer to making the C-suite happy, but it has no other utility–they admit straight out that they’re not a monitoring solution designed to support “find and respond in real-time” activity.

THE MISSING PIECE: TYING IT ALL TOGETHER AND CONNECTING IT TO MEASURABLE KPIs

Also note, from a cost standpoint, I’m not even mentioning the most expensive, enterprise-level tools.

I know this post is ridiculously long, but management, monitoring and measurement of social media is where I live and breathe every day.  I feel a little like a carpenter who is making do with a mix-and-match set of hand-me-down tools.  Can I get the job done with them? Yeah, but it sure makes doing master-quality work a challenge.

I have always thought that social media marketing lends itself to right-brained “grammar geeks.”  Mainly, this is because social media marketing requires continually-generated, mostly-text, content.   Copywriters, public relations peeps, and bloggers can generally churn out the verbiage as-needed.

On the other hand, web analytics seemingly leans far to the left side of the brain, in the territory of the “numbers nerds.”  The ability to look at numbers and see trends and patterns is pretty key to being a good web analyst.  Not to mention the ability to rock a pivot table in Excel.

The problem with handing over the reins of your social marketing program entirely to the grammar geek squad is that sometimes, writers can fall in love with their own voices.  Without some kind of objective analysis of effectiveness, there’s no accountability on the creative/executional end of things.

Likewise, the problem with analytics being owned entirely by the number crunching crowd can be loss of context.  The temptation to let quantitative data (easy to get) dominate the qualitative data (usually a lot harder to get) to the extent that we fall into the trap of measurement for measurement’s sake.

Now, let’s take it to the C-Suite.

At the management/client level, there’s often a disconnect between the numbers nerds (who approve budgets based on whether the social media effort is being effective), and the grammar geeks who get their knickers twisted at the mere mention of the word “measurement.”

As a consequence, an unfortunate amount of the social content manager’s time is eaten up providing a convincing narrative explanation of the program’s value to CMOs who may or may not ever feel comfortable allocating budget based on a narrative with no supporting data.

They have to be the “social media expert” who has to continually keep selling and re-selling the program on the strength of their own conviction that it works, bolstered by case studies from other companies that may or may not apply.

Can’t we all just get along?

Ideally, the sticky peanut butter of content creation should be surrounded by the delectable chocolate of actionable insights.

If the person in charge of analytics goes beyond “monthly data dump,” and is capable of providing actionable insights to continually improve the response the social marketer is getting, they become the person who can make the social marketer look better.

[And since all of us social marketers are raving narcissists, that makes Mr. or Mrs. Analytics our good buddy.]

If the social marketer is willing to trust the analysts’ insights, and let the analyst provide sufficient qualitative and quantitative proof of concept for the social media program; then he or she can step back from the mission to constantly justify his or her existence.   The payoff for agreeing to be held accountable is freedom. The social content manager is then free to focus all his or her attention outward, on building fans and ambassadors for the company/client.

Can such an ideal scenario exist in the real world? What do you think?

Let’s get a little zen for a minute, shall we?  Sometimes, our approach to web marketing reminds me of something Bruce Lee once said:

“It’s like a finger pointing to the moon.  **THWACK!!** Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.”

We sometimes get focused on the metrics and lose sight of the meaning.  This happens in traditional marketing metrics, and also with web metrics.  The PR person who rattles off pickups, but misses that the outlets weren’t targeted to their audience.  The media buyer who rattles off impressions without realizing their client doesn’t have an awareness problem, they have an adoption problem. This is concentrating on the finger.

On the web, our fallback position is counting pageviews and unique visitors (which replaced “hits” years ago as the go-to web stat.)  But not all pageviews or visitors are created equal.  If you spend all your efforts and energy chasing a bigger gross number of pageviews or uniques, you can sometimes miss  the more profitable fruit of attracting and deeply engaging the best visitors.

Did you know that Time-on-Site is a potential Goal (a trackable conversion) you can set in Google Analytics?  There’s a reason for that.  Please do click the link for Kate Morris’ excellent post on CRO (conversion rate optimization) versus SEO (search engine optimization).  It’s another, deeper example of “seeing the forest for the trees” in web marketing.

So what’s the “heavenly glory” in this little marketing koan?  If pageviews and uniques are the trees, what’s the forest?

Lifetime customer value.  (Warning: the post from Avinash Kaushik at the end of that link may, in fact, melt your brain.  But it’s totally worth it.)  Here’s the bad news:

You’ll notice instantly that almost none of the data above is available in your web analytics tool.

You can’t find lifetime customer value in your analytics.  You can segment your most engaged visitors.  If you sell online, you can look at that segment’s purchase patterns and compare it to your other visitors.  You can use monitoring tools to find data on that engaged audience’s activity around your brand off your website and see the people who are consistently talking up or talking down your company.  Our experience with our clients tells us that your most-engaged audience is almost always your most valuable audience.

Our 5 Cs model for marketing at Doe-Anderson is highly focused on  putting your energy into developing long-term relationships with brand ambassadors.  We’ve do it because it works.  Wonderfully.  But it is a lot of work.  We create curiosity because it leads to connection, which leads to confidence, which leads to conversation, which leads to community.  And community is the holy grail of lifetime customer value.

Put in more specific terms, pageviews and uniques are important when they lead to engagement.  Engagement is important when it leads to not just purchase, or even future purchases, but recommendation and sharing.  At that point, you’ve transcended “acquisition” and created a relationship, not just between the brand and the customer, but between your best customers and each other.   Which brings us back to that holy grail of community.

Relationships are more valuable than acquisitions.  You know this in an unquantifiable way as a human being, where “value” is some inherent, undefined quality.

As it turns out, even when you quantify it and assign it a monetary value, it still holds true.

…because we’re not using the “b” word (personal brand).

Earlier this week, David wrote about Spring Cleaning Your Social Profiles.  I’d like to offer a slightly more personal take on the subject.

When I was in college, I wrote for our student newspaper.  As a young and eager reporter, I covered many beats, from business to campus to the arts. The experience of working in a newsroom turned out to be a tremendous asset, and has helped me a great deal in my public relations career.

A few years later, while doing some job hunting, I decided to type my name into Google to see what links popped up.  I found the usual stuff—links to articles I’ve written for various publications, online petitions I’ve signed, and so on.  But one link in particular caught my attention.

I had written a short, informational article about getting prepared for Spring Break during my last semester of college.  A website that specialized in, shall we say, ‘spring break fun,’ decided to include the article on their news page.

I was concerned that a potential employer might see this and be offended, so I sent the web site editor a polite message asking to remove the link.  He obliged without hesitation.

The point of this story is that you never really know what’s out in the internet stratosphere…or who might be researching you. It pays to do periodic check-ups of your name on various search engines.  If you see something fishy or potentially damaging, contact the site editor and see if it can be taken down.  By keeping your online social networking profiles up-to-date can save you from problems as well.

After all, if you don’t care about your online image, who will?

"compass" courtesy digital_a on sxc

A few short years ago, my former boss went to Todd Spencer, the CEO here at Doe-Anderson, with a simple request to leave the safe sanctuary of PR and explore the relatively new (to advertising agencies, anyway) frontier of social media.

Meanwhile, I was at a local interactive agency, poking my nose outside the door of banner ads, paid search and email marketing and considering whether the world of blogs, forums and Myspace I’d been immersed in at a personal level had any value for my career.

But that was then.  This is now.  2010.  A whole new decade.

Are there still companies who haven’t entered, at any level, the social web?  Sure. But they’re so far to the right of the adoption bell curve, we’ve effectively entered the territory of the Amish.  They might make awesome baked goods, but don’t know diddly squat about marketing a brand in the digital age.

I have a friend who is a social media consultant.  He spends a large portion of his time writing social media policies and response plans.  While that’s admirable work that fills a need now, I warned him that there’s a limited shelf life there.

Social media has lost it’s new car smell, for many if not most companies.

What’s not going away any time soon?

Content strategy–especially channel- and platform-agnostic content strategy that thinks about mobile, social, email, and yes, print content assets as much as the corporate website or blog.

Media relations that includes publishers of blogs, ezines, podcasts, vlogs forums.

Reputation management that recognizes that stories break on Twitter and then migrate to traditional media, not the other way around.

Community management.  Brand curation. These are things we’re just starting to explore, and will be for a while to come.

I’m doing something with this post that we try not to do here at The Social Enthusiast.  I’m talking to my fellow social media professionals.  We try to keep the editorial focus aimed at brand marketers: CMOs, marketing directors, and others for whom social media fluency is necessary but not central to their work.  People who need to develop enough social fluency and mental frameworks to effectively interact with the people who are at the level of mastery and specialty, to be able to judge good ideas from bad ones.

We’re busy doing work in the field–good work.  We see smart, experienced marketers still struggling with this, and we still struggle to communicate with them, and we’re trying to use what we learn from those struggles to create a sort of Rosetta Stone.  That’s why last month’s posts were so allegorical and brief–we were using the common tongue of metaphor and relationships to communicate the universal aspects of social media (and other marketing disciplines) instead of getting bogged down in the tech of it all.

We could court wannabe social media professionals and get a lot more readers.  We could engage more with the fishbowl, and talk amongst ourselves with other social media professionals, and probably get a lot more comments and traffic.  I don’t know–maybe we should do those things.

But the truth is, courting the wannabes, participating in the fishbowl, and even building a Rosetta Stone for marketers who don’t get social media are things that have a limited lifespan.

I’m breaking an editorial mandate, here.  One I myself set up, along with David.  So I may as well deliver something more than another navel-gazing fishbowl post.  I may as well provide some actionable value here.

I ran across this post linked by someone in my Twitter stream.  Apologies–I can’t remember who, or I’d credit them properly.  It outlines exactly how to install Google Analytics on a Facebook Fan page.  Helpful stuff, if you run a Fan page for clients, and they’d like to know if it’s doing well.

http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/

The one thing that has really frustrated me with Facebook is that their “Insights” often fails to load, or the data export just refuses to download the file.  There have been a couple of times when people have wanted stats on their page, and I just flat-out can’t provide them for a day or two till I can get FB to unclench and let go of their data.

The days of social media being something clients are exploring, without any expectations of business results, are pretty much over for all our clients.  We have to be able to provide hard data that we’re moving a needle of some sort, somewhere.

Way back when we were convincing companies that they needed a website at all, we talked in hits.  Analytics nerds the world over are pretty unanimous that hits are an awful measurement. But it was a starting place.  It was something to count, till we could find something that counts.

If I have any advice for my fellow social media nerds, its that you need to start counting stuff.  Despite the fact that it’s not a numbers game. Despite the fact that it’s all about relationships.  Despite the  fact that you may, in fact, come from a non-techy discipline, and all this techy analytics stuff scares you as much as the touchy-feely social stuff scares your clients.

Because I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to join the Amish for anything but dinner.

Since the core of what we do at Doe-Anderson is building relationships between consumers and brands, we thought it would be cool to use relationships as a theme.  So in honor of Valentine’s Day, all this month we’ll be sharing 28 Days to Make People Fall in Love with Your Brand. We hope you enjoy it. Have you ever been out on a date with a person who keeps blathering on and on about himself/herself? You know the type.  It’s great meeting a person who can open up and share, and they may be genuinely interesting, but fifteen minutes into the “conversation,” you’re wondering if you actually need to be there. What are the odds you’re going to agree to a second date? The other side of marketing communications is listening.  And fortunately, there are some amazing tools for doing exactly that these days. If your budget is tight, something as simple as Google  Alerts can do the job of letting you know when your ears should be burning, because someone’s talking about your brand on the web. If you’ve got a budget for it, the monitoring tools space has really matured in the last couple of years.  Take a test drive on ScoutLabs, Radian6, Community Insights, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon… And in addition to looking at how many and which people love your brand, or hate your brand, take advantage of seeing the other things they care about. It’s valuable intelligence that can help in your quest to win their hearts.

 Hi, there, folks!  This week, David Finch and I are acting as your intrepid correspondents from Blog World Expo, one of the largest blogging and new media/social media conferences in the U.S.  

This morning, I attended a panel on social media monitoring with Connie Benson, Amber Naslund of Radian6, Margaret Francis of ScoutLabs, Nick Coudas of Sysomos. 

It was a great question and answer session, and during the session I asked the panel about something that’s been pressing on my mind lately in regards to social media monitoring.  

There is a strong tendency, when a company begins monitoring social media references to their brand, to focus almost solely on the negative mentions.

It’s often a case of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," and it often results in a social media engagement effort that spends all its time trying to please the unhappy people and none at all acknowledging, encouraging and rewarding the people who are talking up your brand to their friends.  

A reactive stance feels safe. But "safe" isn’t going to get people to love your brand.  For that, you need sexy. Being a brand that other people brag about is sexy.  

While I agree that it’s better to listen carefully to negative feedback (because it’s great research to identify opportunities for improvement your product or service offerings), there are two problems with this situation.  

The first problem is, social media can’t fix product or service problems.  You can make the unhappy folks feel heard and valued, and that does help buy you time to address the issue.  But fixing a tangible quality issue with the experience you provide your customers is not within the scope of what social media can do for a brand.  

The second problem is, it puts you into a reactive mode of operations that forces you to ignore your company’s greatest strengths, its previously undiscovered benefits and its stalwart but unheralded ambassadors.  

If you’re using social media monitoring tools, it’s important to be careful not to get your attention so caught up by what’s wrong that you miss the opportunity offered by what’s going right.  

So what about you?  How do you go about avoiding a reactive, "band-aid" focused approach to engagement and promoting a proactive, cultivational approach?  

Hot Potato Topic of the Week:  Social Media ROI

Measurement of social media activity to determine ROI is a hot (and controversial!) topic on the web right now.  You can see some examples of just how controversial it is here, here, here and here.  Hat tip to Chuck Fitzpatric of ImpactWatch blog for those examples and more (and for the sound of dueling banjos that played through my head as I scanned the list of headlines).  

Still, few people will argue that social media doesn’t have clear, distillable value to companies. Social media monitoring, in my opinion, is one of the most easily translatable value-driven elements of corporate social media, especially when viewed as an add-on to existing brand research efforts.

Getting a Clearer Picture of Your Customer

A better understanding of your customer is critical to effective communication with them. Put it in the context of your interpersonal relationships.  How many communications misfires do you have in your personal and professional relationships due to a poor understanding of the other person’s perspective?  

Brand research is an excellent tool for gaining a basic understanding of your customers and prospects from a demographic and psychographic standpoint.  

If you’re using personas in any capacity in developing your marketing communications, social media monitoring can be hugely helpful in creating fully-rounded, three-dimensional personas instead of stereotypes and cardboard-cutouts

By monitoring social media for references to your brand, your products, your industry, and your competitors, you can gain additional insights that can often help flesh out and provide depth and dimension to your understanding of your audience’s attitudes, opinions and vernacular.  

These insights can help your organization speak your customer’s language more like a native, and less like a tacky tourist.  

Particularly for businesses whose customer base is largely made up of passionate enthusiasts in a particular activity or lifestyle group, having greater authenticity in your communications with them is critical to success.

The Plural of Anecdote Isn’t Data, But That Doesn’t Mean We Don’t Like Them!

We’re always anxious to hear stories of ways in which social media monitoring has been applied effectively to improve brand communications.  Got an anecdote you can share?  Drop it in the comments.  Or if you’d like, contact us about doing a case study guest post.  We’d love to have it! 

img "mannequin" courtesy SXC

When you first approach your advertising agency or a consultant about social media services, is your attention focused on activities with direct customer interaction? I know that my clients often overlook monitoring and measurement, unless I direct their attention to them. The irony is that these less-sexy activities often provide the most practical business value, particularly at the outset of an organization’s explorations into the social media space.

Starting a social media program without first spending some time doing monitoring of their customers, brand references and competitors is much like launching a traditional advertising program without doing any market research. An even better analogy is that it’s like jumping into someone else’s conversation without first spending some time listening. You can just imagine the potentially embarrassing outcomes.

Beyond being the best foundation for social media marketing, insights drawn from social media monitoring can also improve your traditional marketing efforts. Understanding your customer—his attitudes, interests, and behavioral drivers—is critical to the success of any business. Using social media monitoring tools and analysis to draw specific and clear insights about your target audience can add value even to your traditional advertising efforts. What are the descriptive, emotional words people use most when they’re talking about your brand? How does that compare with your competitors?

Because the information is pulled from real online conversations, rather than surveys, the qualitative data provided can deliver deep, honest and accurate insights into the minds of your customers.

If you’re a marketing director, make sure that as you’re investigating the benefits of social media for your business, you don’t overlook monitoring services. And if you’re a provider of social media services, don’t forget that any discussion about those services should probably start with a discussion about monitoring.