As worldwide social media use continues to rise, social media budgets are rising as well. More spending means more responsibility and more expected return on investment. ROI has always been in question when spending on social media, but even more in today’s economy. According to eMarketer establishing measurements for ROI tops the list of social strategy goals in 2011.

How do we measure social media ROI and what strategies help us reach that return? That question is answered differently by brands, small businesses, and agencies.  By looking at how we use social media, we can build some basic metrics for measurement: Revenue, Knowledge, Protection.

Revenue: Social Commerce and Location-Based Services

Just look at how social commerce grew in 2010 and it’s hard to dispute how social media can directly provide ROI and even become an integral part of your business. Most importantly, you’ll recognize social commerce (purchasing direct from social media platforms) can directly reflect how well your brand engages consumers and positions itself on social media.  This proves that revenue can now be a key indicator of an effective campaign, even in social media.

Location-based services continue to prove a great tool for driving in-store traffic that may otherwise walk right by, and if they are utilizing a check-in deal/coupon, tracking those sales becomes much simpler than measuring brand awareness through social media.

Knowledge: Consumer Insights and Competitive Intelligence

According to a MarketingProfs study, 80% of CMO’s reported customer suggestions help shape product decisions. This means that gaining a better understanding of your consumers, competitors and your market is one of the safest bets for social media ROI.

By listening to your consumers through social media you can gain insight into their wants and needs, informing your product innovation and marketing campaigns. Through listening to your industry broadly, you can uncover industry trends as well as glean an immense amount of competitive intelligence.

Leveraging social media for market research is often less costly than traditional market research.  Additionally, the leveraging identifies shifts in trends earlier, and can span across the entire enterprise providing a return on investment all departments can see.

Protection: Brand Monitoring and Threat Awareness

Brand monitoring continues to top the list of must-haves for social media strategists in 2011, but is it enough? Having a brand monitoring dashboard is essential for brands, but does it solve a problem if no one is looking at it?  There is no ROI in data, it’s all in how you use it. Having the expert manpower and a sound brand monitoring & threat tracking strategy is just as important as the technology behind it.

What should you be looking for? Customer complaints, mentions in online and news media, employee activity, and of course videos in reference to the brand. We all know how fast news in social media can spread and if you’re not actively monitoring your brand, there’s a good chance that a large portion of your customers will be aware of an incident before you are. Don’t just get a dashboard, develop a brand monitoring and threat tracking strategy to actively monitor your brand.

Where are you searching for ROI when it comes to social media? Is it all about building brand awareness or does revenue reign supreme now that monetizing social media is becoming more achievable?

Over the past year, social media listening has grown from an engagement tool to market intelligence that is being leveraged by brands worldwide. Still, many marketers often question whether or not listening to their brand or market will provide any real value. Market research is now beginning to leverage social media in a revolutionary way that provides insights and impact across the organization.

Whether your focus is on advertising, marketing, or product innovation, social media can be used to drive your business performance.

1. Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

When it comes to marketing campaigns, knowing as early as possible whether or not your million dollar campaign is resonating with your target consumers is vital. Even the most well-thought out campaigns can quickly under-perform or possibly exceed expectations. Sales data only tells part of the story, as it doesn’t provide the ‘why into the buy’.  Is the campaign contributing to the success?

Social market research allows your company to measure campaign performance from the start, alter course mid-stream if needed, and even compare units sold with online consumer conversations giving you a full view of campaign effectiveness.

2. Purchasing Decisions

Consumer purchasing decision starts with a want or need and typically end with a product sale. The path a consumer takes to get from point A to B is often greatly influenced by their social circle. Often the path to purchase includes consideration of competitive products, feature and benefit evaluation, recommendations from others, reviews and of course price. How do you know which factor is the biggest barrier or driver to purchase your products?

By leverage social media research you can quantify and qualify which step in the path to purchase continuum is stopping consumers dead in their tracks. Does your brand have a bad reputation? Is your product too expensive in the market? Is there a lack of product information readily available? Social market research can provide answers that the marketing team can utilize to generate more sales.

3. Product Innovation

Innovation is a driving force behind many market research departments.  What needs are not currently being met in the marketplace? How can we improve our existing products? Social market research can help answer these questions by listening to not just your products, but your target market.

By listening more broadly you can capture consumer conversations from the world’s largest focus group, social media. Read more on how to use social media market research for product innovation in this previous post.

Find out more about how you can leverage social market research by pre-registering for our next social market research webinar

Social media monitoring has significantly changed the way brands and marketers leverage social media for business. The constant stream of mentions on sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs provide a great way for companies to monitor their brands, products, and consumers in social media. While monitoring has been useful primarily in customer service and buzz-tracking, there is far more value to be realized.  Enter the age of social media intelligence.

What is social media intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the combination of quantitative and qualitative insights gained from monitoring a specific brand, product, or subject matter in social media.  All in real-time.

How can social media intelligence benefit my business?

Social media is the world’s largest focus group with millions of participants sharing their unbiased thoughts each day. With this massive data set, businesses now have the power to mine and further understand consumer opinion and slice and dice data by gender, age segmentation and location.  Here are 5 specific case studies on social media intelligence:

Applebee’s Restaurants – Campaign (in)Effectiveness

Seven (7) days after the launch of Applebee’s ‘Real Burgers’ national TV ad campaign in March 2009, the campaign was really striking a cord with consumers. The only problem was that we saw it was overwhelmingly negative (80%) with most wondering ‘What were they serving us before?’  Applebee’s ended up running the campaign for 4 months too long.  Imagine the money saved and harm avoided if they had learned that it was bombing sooner.   Their competitor, with our help, knew all of this as it unfolded, whoops.

Membership Association – Why are members canceling?

A national membership association was seeing a sharp increase in membership cancellations over a 3 month period.   Through social media intelligence they learned they had a material age segmentation issue: the organization’s stance on key political issues and a changing membership demographic was making a segment of members very unhappy.  The association segmented their member-base into three distinct buckets and now speaks to each segment with a unique voice.

Soft Drink Company – New Product Launch

With the launch of a new soft drink in 2009, a soft drink company saw that young men loved the the new product while women had mixed opinions.  Through social media intelligence the company quickly learned that older women were taking offense to the TV ad creative, not the product (the taste was great).  The soft drink company replaced the creative to better reach its female target.

Major Restaurant Chain – Location-based Issues

In September 2009, a restaurant client saw  ‘tough meat’ being discussed by its guests in social media.  Through geo-location, we helped the restaurant chain learn that the issues were regional in nature and all specific to the northwest US.  The client traced the problem back to a regional meat purveyor who had outsourced to a third party.  This issue was resolved within 3 business days.

Cable TV Network – Rapid Consumer Insights

In TV and Entertainment, learning what viewers think of programming is critical to success.  In Q2 2010, a cable TV network aired its hit show’s season finale on a Friday, by Monday we delivered the network intelligence on what viewers thought of the finale, the show’s entire season, and reported on 100’s of fan suggested story-lines for next season.

Social Media Intelligence Empowers Decision-making

Social media intelligence gives actionable insights into business and detailed and segmented information about consumers.  If your organization wants to understand questions like “why teenagers choose a competitor product, or how females in the northeast US feel about your service”, contact us.   We deliver the intelligence.

The list of social media monitoring tools gets longer everyday. Each tool offers something different. There are lots of bells and whistles that separate the free from premium, things like sentiment and influence analysis, workflow and demographics. But regardless of the tool, tools provide data – not answers.  A tool alone is not enough.

1. Technology is only part of the equation
   A monitoring tool requires human interpretation. No matter how cool the technology, a tool provides data (for you to dig into), not insight into what the data means or what to do with it.
2. Social Media Monitoring probably isn’t your core competency
   Social media monitoring is both art and science.  Experience is everything.  Much like SEM and SEO, listening requires skill and in-depth knowledge of technology and linguistics.  For this reason you’re probably not executing SEM & SEO campaigns in-house, you’ve outsourced them to the experts.  Social media monitoring is no different, it’s complicated and it’s time-consuming.
3. Social media monitoring is cool, but first establish why you want to listen
   Sure people are talking about your product or service, but what are you ‘listening’ for?  Is it to track a campaign? Learn more about a competitor? Measure a new product launch?  Data in of itself doesn’t deliver better business decisions.
4. Tools offer promises, not deliverables
   Insights, intelligence, action and ROI are the promises of tools, not the deliverables.  Expert people are needed to turn these promises into deliverables.
5. Real-time insights drive the ROI
   More timely, insightful information makes for better decision making.  Better decision making is what drives ROI.
6. Answers are everything
   Ask a social media monitoring tool to answer a question…

Social media intelligence is the combination of social media monitoring technology and expert insight delivery.  It includes dashboards, reports to answer tough questions, and expert services to better understand what the data means and (most importantly) what to do with the data.   You’re able to answer questions like: Is our ad campaign working? What do people think of our new spokesperson? Why do teens choose our competitor? How do we increase enrollment?

If you’ve already tried a DIY monitoring tool and want to take the next step in gathering intelligence, we can help.  Contact us and we’ll show you how social media intelligence transforms business.

Social media monitoring is one of the most discussed topics in social media marketing these days, and with good reason. It is still a new industry and there are a lot of different things to look for. If you have a brand or sell products, you NEED to know what people are saying in social media. If you aren’t, you’re leaving your brand in the hands of consumers and one bad experience could turn into a PR nightmare.

So you’re ready to listen, now you need a plan. Of course it’s different for every brand, but this as a general step-by-step guideline for a solid social media monitoring strategy.

Step 1: Determine WHAT you want to listen for

Do you want to listen for just your brand, or do you want to listen for specific products? Should you be listening to what is being said about your competitors? Are you looking to develop leads or compile market research? These are the questions that you need to think about to get a better of idea of what you should be listening to. With so much chatter out there on the web, it’s important to know what you’re looking for before you hit step 2.

Step 2: Start Listening

Now that you know what to listen for, it’s time to start listening. How to listen depends on your needs. Our Resonate platform provides a full-service solution for social media monitoring combining cutting-edge technology with a dedicated industry analyst. We manage social media listening for you.

Step 3: Analyze the Data

Depending on what you’re listening for, you can have 100 mentions a week, or 10,000 mentions a week, either way you’ll need to be able to analyze the data and know what people are really saying and this is where advanced tools are required. In order to analyze social media, you need to know whether mentions are relevant to your brand, whether the sentiment is positive or negative, and what the relative influence level is for each social media posting . While looking at data you’ll see some things that you’ll likely want to respond to, and that takes us to step 4.

Step 4: Get Involved in the Conversation

If people are complaining about your brand there’s no better way to find out how you can help. This is where real-time social media monitoring is important, you can respond on the fly as soon as it happens. If your customer had a bad experience, simply reach out to them and offer to help. A recent study shows that a majority of consumers APPROVE of being responded to by the companies they are talking about. If you don’t already have an established social media presence, this would be a great time to get started. Showing that your company cares about its customers goes a long way.

Step 5: Use the Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions

Social media monitoring isn’t just to see what people are saying about your brand, it’s also to see what people are saying about your competitors. Use social media monitoring as a complete market research tool. Social media is the world’s largest focus group, just start listening. You may learn that people hate your latest product, or they just really loved the old design or packaging. You can use the data in all parts of your organization to improve performance in customer service, marketing, human resources, design & development, etc.

BTW, if you’re still using Google Reader, or RSS feeds to track the mentions of your brand, it’s really time to upgrade. Hopefully these 5 steps will give you something to think about when planning your social media strategy – just remember to adapt accordingly to your brand.