People keep rambling on and on about how you need to leverage data to tell a story. But most of the times what we as analysts or B2B marketers leave behind is the audience.
Isn’t that ironic?
We get caught up in broadcasting our story and forget about who’s listening. Their background, their know-how, and vocabulary on the subject matter are even more important than the amazing story you crafted in your mind. That’s because they might solve for different problems than what you are solving for. And you might be off by 1,000 miles just because you did not ask: who are you? do you want fantasy or the documentary movie on how our ad/campaign/website/brand is doing?
These are just Friday musings of an Analyst on coffee. Born out of the work I do, these are meant to record the learnings and help me move forward.
This is a geek rant on how my ideal social media tool would look like. If you do not work in social media/online communication hit the close button — this will get long and technical. But it needs to be said (OK,OK, I need to say it!)
Background: I’ve done social listening since I started working in online advertising four years ago. I’ve used online tools to help me collect and analyze data on the online conversation around my clients ever since. And tools to evaluate performance of said clients efforts on social media (oh, the golden days of organic reach on Facebook!). I’ve done the free Google alerts, manual check-ups and email alerts. But I have also used local Romanian tool ZeMonitor, international Radian6, Social Studio, hash-tracking tools and content discovery platforms. I’ve tested blogger outreach tools and continue to investigate and test every tool I can get my hands on — right now I am researching Sprinklr, one of the market leaders.
What am I looking for? The Knight in Shinning Armour of social media tools. A Swiss army knife I can use, quick and easy, one I can customize according to my own needs and whims.
It’s utopia and I know it. But, as with finding a soul mate, I know there is someone out there for me. Not perfect, but at least trying to be.
Let’s proceed. What do I need my knight to do? Collect, process and present data on three main areas: what people are talking about (earned media, the holy grail), what my client is talking about (owned media — be aware, I also include paid media here) and how all social activity around my client translates into results for his business — ROI. Here it comes, the heaviest listicle I ever wrote online.
Data, data, data!
Crawl online conversation across all social channels — Facebook including, even if it is just quantitative. Yes, I know they have privacy restrictions and you only get restricted access to their API. But, honestly, I do not care. It engages 1.7 billion users as of June 2016, please do not tell me I have to decide where to invest my marketing budgets without having at least the quantitative data on if such a large audience is talking about me. And if I do pay for a social listening tool, I want it to be able to give me at least that. Otherwise your data might prompt me to make the wrong decision for my client and ultimately lose money.
Make sure language is NOT an issue. In other words, do not promise to crawl all possible languages, but only deliver English conversations.
Crawl results as fast as possible. If I do a monthly report on the 5th of the month and at the end of the month results are fundamentally different, it is not only frustrating, but most of the time useless — I cannot make decisions in real time and that has high costs. My client loses trust in me and I lose part of his budget. See how it all comes down to money?
Integrate owned and paid media content in the social listening section of your tool. I want to be able to have the broad picture and assess whether my branded content influenced online conversation or not. Is promoted content driving social buzz or not? Can I see an increase in Share of Voice during and after my campaigns?
Have extensive lists of influencers in main industries and make sure you crawl all their mentions. Provide data on trending topics on their social channels to instruct content marketing and PR efforts.
Help the Analyst analyze
I hate exporting data to Excel files and generating graphics out of these. Why do I even have a tool if I have to manage it all through Excel? So please, please make sure you do check out the following if you want to qualify as my Knight in Shinning Armour of social media tools.
Help me deliver analysis and insight over long periods of time, more than 1 year. I want to look at industry seasonality, trends, not just numbers for quantitative research.
Make it easy to use — UI, UX, have you heard of those guys? Maybe you could ask them for advice before you ask me to click seven buttons to generate one graphic I need for the presentation to be delivered asap.
Make it easy for me to create customized reporting.Get inspired by Google dashboards and make sure the information there is live, dynamic.
Help me integrate social listening reports in other Business Intelligence platforms. I am interested in looking at the entire digital landscape in just one quick click. I want to correlate social media data with web analytics, sales analytics other offline research.
Help me prove ROI – a perfect tool will:
Help me optimize social media paid amplifications campaigns and cut costs.
Help me have foresight into trending conversation topics with customized researches done for the industry/vertical my client is part of. Do these researches regularly and share recommendations with me. I might even have the budget to pay extra for those as long as you can prove their value.
That being said I am still looking for my Knight in Shining Armour. And as with all fairy tales I expect happily ever after.
I am fascinated with consumer conversations about brands. Most of the times they do not really care about what brands say, they have their own chats around why and how they use their products and services. And brand key message is most of the times lost on them. Because they do not CARE about your message. They do not CARE about your brand.
Can you fulfill their need asap? Can you provide great product and service? Then they will talk about you, recommend you.
Otherwise your entire advertising plan for the upcoming quarter, year, is bound to fail. Key messages born in the creative laboratory of an agency that does not necesarily use your product will maybe (if you are lucky) get their attention and maybe (if you are even more lucky) get them to try your product. But they will forget your shiny messages and start their own conversation threads. And then your key messages blows up in pieces and research done on carefully selected audience samples loses relevance. They will post hundreds of messages on how to fix your product, they will seek help from other users and complain about customer service, they will mock your beloved ads that cannot answer their questions on product functionality and your lack of social care.
Brand managers have to stop focusing on reaching as many people as possible and start thinking about what customer experience they offer across touchpoints.
Maybe a shift from potential reach to customer personas, from counting down impressions to counting down potential leads, from just prompted research done in a small room on the outskirts of the city to listening to people’s organic conversation threads.
As a social media analyst I am a big believer in getting insight from those social media conversations. And I have a couple of reasons:
it’s organic – you know for a fact that users reactions are not prompted by any incentive or marred by intermediaries:
you can test it out on different digital touch-points and validate your hypothesis:
it can tell you a story you were not looking for, a story about your customers and their needs and message for the brand; 4) yes, you can also assess key message and USP.
Should Social Listening And Social Media Analysis Replace Traditional Research?
No, not always – this guy points out a couple of the shortcomings in this article (to mention a few – lack of scalability, organic – you cannot ask your own questions, sentiment analysis has higher costs).
Should you test it out? Yes! Do test, see what works for you and with what ROI and then decide. But please, oh please, do stop and LISTEN for other conversations around your industry. Maybe you will find insight that goes a step further than assessing campaign reach. Maybe you will find out what matters for your customers enough for them to take the time and write down what they think. Maybe you will find out what type of experience they would be willing to pay (more) for.
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