Social media listening – it’s time to commit to it

What is social listening (and why commit to it)?
In a nutshell it is paying attention to what is being said on social media, but obviously it’s more than that. 

It starts with social monitoring – or collecting every social mention and action relevant to your organization, brand, purpose etc.

After monitoring comes social listening – this requires analysis and reflection on what has been gathered. It also means watching for patterns, tracking sentiment and drawing conclusions based on where and when conversations happen.

So why should you commit to social listening? Among the things it can do:
• Improve customer care
• Learn about opportunities – business and otherwise
• Get feedback on products and services
• Identify your influencers and advocates
• Discover where your community hangs out

How to do it:
• Monitoring – what people are actually doing, not just what they say they are doing, on social platforms and the web in general
• Listening – separating signal from noise; determining importance and relevance
• Interpreting – what does it mean to us now? In the future? Do we see a problem we can solve for a customer?
• Taking action – turning data into insights; acting on those insights

Manual steps (free):
If paying for monitoring tools that simplify social listening is not in your budget there are free things you can do:
• Plan to listen: Set aside time (daily is best) to search on keywords and/or hashtags that relate to your business, its name, its products and services and the industry you’re in.
• Plan to respond: Have a document that spells out how you will respond on social to both the good and the bad comments etc. about your organization. This should include how you can redirect people to helpful online resources or be helpful in other ways. Also, have conversation starters ready to use with influencers and others who are interested in your industry.
• Plan to follow up: When you have jumped into a conversation be sure to follow it to a natural conclusion … and be timely (in other words don’t allow more than a day to elapse between responses – much less time if you’re dealing with any kind of crisis communication).
• Plan to document: Keep track of who you have interacted with and when. Complete a monthly summary of this activity and its benefits to your organization so you can send it to your boss so a higher-up will understand the value of spending time on this.

Paid tools:
There are a lot (see "Resources" below). Here’s what’s important in whatever tools you use:
• Learning curve: How hard is it to get up and running on the app/software?
• Data collection: What kinds of data can be collected and how customizable is this?
• Reporting: How is the data reported and can it be manipulated by the end-user for inclusion in reports?
• Historical reporting: In addition to the regular reports how does it aggregate data and report it over extended timeframes?
• Planning: Does it allow any kind of “what if” scenarios that show how changing one action might affect results?

So, there you have it, social listening is clearly important for anyone on social media. The question is to what extent your organization should commit to it…. I’ll address that in a future post.

Do you have thoughts on things I may have missed? I’d welcome your feedback.

Resources:
• 6 Social Media Monitoring Tools to Track Your Brand
• Top 8 Social Listening Tools That Do Way More Than Listen
• A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions

2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program

As 2015 is shaping up to be the "Year of Employee Empowerment" in social media more and more companies are wondering how they might benefit. 

Social media employee empowerment programs are proving highly successful at brands such as Lenovo, Oracle and Cisco where employees using their own social networks effectively become brand ambassadors.

Increased reach and engagement are just two of the often-cited benefits for brands. But how do you set up an effective employee empowerment program? 

During a recent Brandwatch webinar called Social Monitoring & Gamification: Creating Employee Advocates at Cisco (the slides from the webinar are here) Brandwatch’s product manager Caroline Goodwin outlined one possible approach: 

Raise awareness of the value of social. She said organizations can do this by:

• Putting social up on screens in the workplace where everyone can see social activity around the brand and its products and services.
• Using reports to regularly show employees at various levels what is happening with social efforts and how they help the brand.
• Integrating social facts and figures for the brand with other numbers employees are more comfortable and used to seeing such as sales figures or call numbers. 

Enable your employees by:

• Training them and providing tips and guidelines about what kinds of information can and can’t be shared about and around the brand. Also share how social media efforts are measured.
• Promoting the type of content you’re hoping employees will share, the hashtags your brand prefers and any tips on the ways to share content from the company website.
• Collating all of your employee’s social handles so you can accurately track their efforts. Goodwin says the surprisingly easy way to do this is to "just ask" for each participating employee's social handles.

Encourage healthy competition by:

• Creating a table showing who has the greatest impact (either by using an existing commercially available tool or creating your own measurement) that looks at frequency of sharing, numbers reached, and numbers of responses and re-shares. 

Harness the power of your advocates by:

• Planning ahead, for example, by giving your employees a heads up on an upcoming marketing campaign and share the relevant hashtags and links to the content that will be going out in the near future.
• Monitoring results by tracking specific links and hashtags and who is sharing them and how far they are going. Brands can also keep the momentum going by providing very regular updates to employees during the campaign so everyone feels involved.
• Recognizing all participants once the campaign is over and sharing its success with all. But then also recognize the most successful social media advocates.

So that’s one approach to employee empowerment in social media, what about others? My next post will look at that and provide links to some great thinking around the whole topic.

Related posts
Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand 
Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

5 things brands should be doing on Instagram

Instagram, the free photo-sharing application which allows users to share photos and short videos on its own service and across other social media networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Flickr, has become immensely popular among brands and consumers alike.

The latest statistics reveal 75 million people use it every day while 25 percent of all Fortune 500 brands are active on it, as well.

And while some brands “get it” as to how to best use the platform to benefit their particular brand, some still struggle.

To those struggling to find their way on Instagram, I offer…

5 things brands should be doing on Instagram

1. Monitor Instagram for mentions, because every mention is an opportunity for marketers to engage (see No. 4 below). Since the platform introduced tagging last year (see Instagram Now Lets Anyone Tag You [Or Brands] In Photos….) it is important for brands to see what, or if, they are being tagged. When they are, and presuming it is in a positive image, brands should consider a ….

2. Regram. This is re-sharing others’content that reflects well on your brand, your products or your services and your values. A brand adding re-shares to its own Instagram is building an image-based community – it’s not just the brand’s images but also the fan’s images. To do this you’ll need one of the tools that makes this possible with Instagram. For a list of these tools see How to Repost Instagram Photos.

3. Profile yourself on Instagram. Using the Profile page feature that Instagram added a little over a year ago smart brands now use their collected images as a way to tell their story. This visual storytelling drives interest and possibly regrams of your images by others. To learn more, see  Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web.

Ben & Jerry's successful Instagram profile

For examples of brands doing Instagram Profiles see Ben & Jerry’s with its 340,000+ followers and the NBA page with its 1.8 million followers. Notice how both use a combination of their own images and videos to tell a behind-the-scenes story and to highlight the content of real fans (see “Regram” above).

4. Engage. This can be by responding to others’ posts on Instagram, the aforementioned Regramming, offering special deals to Instagram followers and running such things as photo contests. The latter is easy to do on Instagram: Ask Instagrammers to follow your brand, give them a topic to photograph and a hashtag to use (so you can easily search for the posts). If you offer a prize or two people will remember your hashtag. Heightened engagement in this way places your brand in the social feeds of others, thereby multiplying your reach. For solid tips on contests see the Instagram blog post How to Host A Photo Contest on Instagram.

5. Feature your customers and employees. What is your brand without these two important groups? Find ways to make stars of your customers and show how they use your products and services and mix in images of your employees on the job or out in the community. This humanization of your brand will feed into the growing desire of all social network users for authenticity. By its nature Instagram images look less polished and more genuine. Displaying your people and your customers in this way will make your brand come alive for viewers.

For a great read on “…brands that are using Instagram in unexpected and creative ways…” see Stay Authentic, Build An Instagram Cult Following: 6 Brands That Get It Right from the The Idea Lists blog.

So, what will your brand do to leverage Instagram on social media marketing? Do you have other ideas? Please share in the Comments section.

NOTE: This post was originally written for the Responsys New School Marketing Blog