Agencies out there, get to know your client before you come up with proposals on anything digital. Here are 3 topics you should research.
Company Structure
you may have more than just one client. No one on the company side will tell you from the very beginning. Understand who to engage and on what topics, it can save your pitches. Make sure you get to talk to the person within the company that can understand your proposals and can become your advocate or even approves them (that means you get the budget to implement your idea).
Digital Footprint
Find out what and how they communicate. It’s self-explanatory. Show, don’t tell. You claim you are customer-centric, but you know nothing about your prospective client?
Internal Communications Team
they can be your allies if you treat them well. If you step on their toes, you only make your life more difficult. And trust me, they can do that very well. Find out who they are and what they do for the company. If your responsibilities overlap, figure out a way to work together, not against each other.
Customers do NOT talk on the topics brands want to push out. And us, marketers and brands alike, miss out on important, relevant conversations just because we are too self involved. We want to brag, not to listen.
And maybe that is why Share of Voice is such an important metric, the one you’ll find showcased in every social media analytics tool dashboard. Similar to fans/followers/likes, without context this might just be a vanity metric. Why? Because:
A Share of Voice increase might actually mean you have a problem. I.e a product malfunction, a reputation crisis, the site is down, there are rumors the company is being sold out etc. Ask yourself why the increase before you decide it is a good thing.
A Share of Voice increase might not mean you did good by your brand. It can literally mean that your competitors stopped pushing their product through PR or ads. Or it might mean that the online retailers had giveaways/special offers that triggered online mentions and now they stopped.
A Share of Voice increase might be a blip on the radar if not interpreted correctly. If you track it monthly, it can literally mean just some dozens of online mentions, and they could be just a halo effect of a PR campaign you did a while ago.
There are a lot of solutions for the problems outlined above, but they imply that both the analyst and the Marketing Manager are willing to hone in on what is really important and don’t give in to the reporting frenzy. Let’s just list a couple of these solutions.
Three Solutions To Improve Reporting Focused On Share Of Voice.
Proper set-up of both the social listening tool AND the reporting framework. Make sure that your tool is set up properly by setting up spam filters and including all relevant sources for you.
For example, if you are running a PR campaign on multiple industry publishers’ sites, make sure the tool crawls them (Forbes, for example, has been reported to prohibit tracking by some of the tools I worked with)
Double down on Share of Voice with other relevant data points to paint the whole picture.
This translates into sentiment analysis (how much of the mentions are positive/negative) and follow that trend, Also track main topics of conversation and most shared news.
(For pros with access to a lot of data and in depth understanding of business needs and brand identity): leverage imagological analysis to create an ideal brand persona and measure and report on that one.
How would that look? It’s not an easy job and as an analyst you need full access to the brand strategist/whoever safeguards the brand in the company you work for or on the client side if you work in an agency. This ideal brand persona would focus on two, maximum three dimensions. Let’s work with an example, let me stick with Vodafone as I already wrote about them.
For Vodafone the dimensions I would work on would be (just off the top of my mind, brand execs might not agree on this one): 1) technology, 2) stakeholder relationships, 3) value for money provided. The social listening tool would be leveraged to tag all mentions with one of these three and I’d double check on the sentiment analysis. And then it’s a matter of numbers. And good, relevant reporting on brand health and which of the dimensions is responsible for most of the risks or most of the positive conversation. This will not only paint the entire picture, it will also help brand execs know what dimensions need improvement in terms of brand perception and where more investment would actually turn the needle.
Done with reporting? Let’s look at other ways to leverage social listening for your content.
Reporting is important, but sometimes most of the juicy stuff that comes out of social listening gets lost in translation from analyst to reporting template. The insights sometimes just do not fit into the little boxes, graphs, the quarter of the quadrant you have available to squeeze in all your learnings.
The solution is simple: go beyond this and provide the team that actually creates the content for the brand with the insights you get out of listening in on all those conversations. What to look at?
First of all, look at what your target audiences are interested in/talk about.
See if it matches your content strategy. If not, update it to include trending topics. If yes, ask yourself if you have the right tone of voice, reach the audience at the right moment and have the right distribution channels in place to reach them. Maybe you do talk about topics important to the audience, but not on the right channel. When doing social listening reporting for one B2B business I found a lot of conversation around engineers (the business’s core target), but it was all on … google groups if you can believe it! An idea we discussed back then was to talk with our in-house engineers and identify one brand advocate to enter those groups and share relevant know-how and be helpful for the community there. Similar to Quora, where brand advocates respond with helpful advice and are fully transparent about where they work.
Address the problems your customers experience while engaging with your brand’s product/service.
If they have security concerns you could propose to address those in a lot of ways: improve FAQ section on website, create educational content on how they can protect their personal data, have live Q&A sessions on your social channels on the topic. You get it, be transparent and helpful.
Look out for potential partners out there and get the right people from your team to contact them.
For example, while working for Small Academy, a Romanian start-up focused on delivering quality STEAM courses for kids aged 5–14, I joined a lot of Facebook groups for teachers and parents. Just being part of those communities helped me get names of school principals that we could work with, influencers we could reach out to. You get the idea.
Social listening is far more than reporting on Share of Voice. Just think about it for a while and find ways to squeeze out all the insights that could instruct your brand communication strategy and, why not, even your business plans.
I deserted my Twitter account years ago. I am not proud of it, but I did. I know it started as a good place to engage and interact with other like minded people during events, on trending topics and it proved useful for some social movements, but I deserted it. Facebook dominated the market I worked for and there were very few active users I found useful to engage with on Twitter. I had Facebook, blogs, forums for that.
But now that I have worked for more than 18 months for the North American market I can appreciate how easily it can give you a glimpse into American social media behavior, one Twitter handle at a time.
First of all, social care is a big deal in North America.
Much bigger than in Eastern Europe and smaller markets. For some, writing to brands on social to get customer support is as natural as calling a 800 number. And expectations are high. If as an Analyst you cannot provide the best possible set-up to identify and engage on such issues you are facing a big risk especially if working in a B2C industry.
Twitter handles showed me just how one-sided mainstream media in my country really is. And how the informational bubbles we live in are dangerous to our understanding of current events and foreigners.
Mainstream media in my country only delivered a skewed message on the #POTUS, always critical of the republican president. Twitter handles of conservatives, republicans, extremists have shown me a different way to look at American politics and shed another light on political decisions of the American electorate. The intensity with which supporters of @realDonaldTrump broadcast his messages and fight his battles are a force to be reckoned with, a force that helps divide the US (nothing new here, societies and electorates across Europe seem to be more and more divided and conflictual, too).
Guns are a reality I do not want to deal with.
On ads that promoted security cameras Americans would comment that a gun will do a far better job. They talk with pride of their guns and their right to use them to protect their propriety. I knew of this reality, but reading about it and seeing it first hand in social posts is still unsettling for me. Why? Maybe because you cannot buy or legally own guns as easily in Romania as you can in US. And if you do own one, you are looked on with suspicion by members of your community. The state and its public security forces are in charge with citizen security, both personal and propriety.
With 0.14 firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per day, Romaia is not not even on the map.
People install home security systems mostly for burglars, but they’ll shy away from confrontation and call the police instead of turning to guns and conflict. When one high profile pilot shot a burglar who entered his home at night public debate was heated as the court deemed the pilot innocent. He was the first one to be aquitted for such a deed in 2005.
The list is open and I keep adding to this. And this is one of the reasons why I really enjoy working in social media for different markets. It forces me to look at distant realities from a different perspective. And Twitter handle.
Romanian 
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