Radian6 and other monitoring platforms need to improve their reporting of the SEO impact / ROI of social media engagement.
I’ve tested literally dozens of social media monitoring and analytics tools over the past few years. Radian6
has always been at the top of my list in terms of overall power and functionality for major brands. SproutSocial
is pretty slick for small businesses and agencies. Engage121
is among the best I’ve seen for national brands and franchises with lots of local storefront local sales or storefront outlets. But there are literally thousands of tools on the market. ( SocialMention
is among the best free tools I’ve seen).
And maybe it’s just me but I cannot for the life of me understand why none of the major social media monitoring and analytics platforms are focusing on providing helpful ROI analytics related to the search engine optimization (SEO) impact of social activity.
Even newly emerging star SocialReport.com
(which looks to me to be among the best-in-class in overall social media ROI reporting) seems to miss the boat on SEO. (Please do correct me if I am wrong!)
Notice the focus of their ROI feature set is on conversions
:
Please, don’t get me wrong: I think it’s FANTASTIC that tools like Radian6 and SocialReport are helping marketers track conversions. But if Radian6, SocialReport and others are only focusing on tracking conversions, share of voice, sentiment and other metrics that link back to specific social mentions then they are missing entirely the crucial analysis and reporting of the SEO impact
of those mentions and the conversions. For example, did Company ABC just improve its Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking as a result of Joe Blogger’s latest blog post? What impact did ABC company’s 200% increase in fans have on its ranking? Was there a change in MozRank that correlates with the SERP ranking change? It is extraordinarily difficult to isolate social mention variables in order to correlate them with SEO impact but it seems to me monitoring analytics tools, perhaps in partnership with best-in-class SEO analytics tools like SeoMoz, need to be moving much more aggressively to tackle this
analytics challenge.
Am I the only one? Is SEO impact not an important part of the ROI measurement puzzle that is being overlooked by Radian6 and other monitoring platforms? Search is where the rubber meets the road. I’m thinking social media marketers could put the pedal to the medal with better SEO insights.
Introducing the Digital Reality Conversation Series
: The following is the first in what will be a series of conversations (some written and some recorded on Blog Talk Radio) between VMR and other digital media marketing agency and in-house practitioners. There’s no shortage of insightful talk about digital and social media marketing theory. But as Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com recently opined:
With those words in mind, these conversations will hopefully complement the theory-oriented dialogue by introducing our online community to some of the best and brightest marketing and communications leaders who are putting the best theories to work. Our focus will be how best to apply the theories to the every day practice and implementation of internet marketing and communications initiatives in the age of the real-time web. I’m delighted to share the first conversation in this series, with a rising star in the world of digital marketing and communication, Thunderbird’s Samantha Novick.
– HM
Samantha Novick
is Public Relations and New Media Specialist for Thunderbird School of Global Management, one of the world’s most prestigious international business schools with operations in the U.S., Geneva, Moscow and Beijing. Samantha’s past professional experience includes work as a journalist and editor for newspapers and magazines in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
In September 2012, she taught in the N2K Media Sustainability Program at Thunderbird, sponsored by the US Army and the State Department, which delivered business skills training to radio broadcast journalists from Afghanistan. Her program focused on social media engagement via mobile and SMS technology, essential in a country with less than 6 percent Internet penetration.
A journalism graduate from Arizona State University who has undertaken advanced coursework at The World Bank Institute and Thunderbird, Samantha is a member of the Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations and leads the Academic Conference Call series between Thunderbird and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an avid hiker and world traveller. What follows is the result of an email exchange in February of this year. Special Thanks to Samantha for her willingness to be interviewed by VMR.
Hugh Macken:
Samantha, can you summarize in a nutshell the nature of your social media /new media work experience at Thunderbird to this point?
Samantha Novick:
I am responsible for leading and executing our institutional social media strategy. That means taking care of the content for our diversity of social media sites— http://knowledgenetwork.thunderbird.edu/research/social Mainly, I work with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I also work with different stakeholders around campus to help them meet their goals through social media. So that could mean assisting someone in Executive Education with finding a new client through LinkedIn. Or by helping someone in Admissions and Recruiting publicize their event through Facebook or a combination of platforms. I’m there on the strategy side, but also spend a fair amount of time training and helping my colleagues understand these platforms and utilize them to their best advantage. I also guest lecture in our digital marketing class and in our global business plan course.
HM:
It sounds as if you’ve worn quite a few hats at Thunderbird. Of all your roles, which one (if you could pick one) do you feel has had the biggest impact on Thunderbird’s embrace of and success with social media communications? Strategy leadership? Execution/Content Development? Training/Education?
SN:
I feel that my most valuable contribution to Thunderbird has been the training and mentoring I’ve been able to give to my colleagues and even those outside the organization in social media. One of the best parts of my job is being able to work with someone else and show them how they can achieve one of their goals in a new way. Sometimes these training sessions turn into big strategy sessions, and that’s when it gets really cool. You can see people looking at sales, connections and their personal network differently. There is always an excitement about it too, and it is great to be in a position to encourage that discovery.
Social media is not completely rewriting business development, but it is changing it. And I want my organization to be on the cutting edge of that trend. So being in the position to dispel myths, provide a new way of thinking and share my experiences has been really powerful.
HM:
Do training sessions often turn into strategy sessions and vice versa?
SN:
Usually. What I do when I go through training an individual or a group, is customize the presentation to their needs as much as I can. It is always very fluid and there will be lots of questions. I always start each training session with—- “what do you want to accomplish? What is your top goal with this?” These types of questions. That usually sets the tone of the discussion differently, and we work out as a team how to make social media work for them.
HM:
How do you respond to colleagues who ask you how to link social media outreach to quantitative ROI measurements?
SN:
I always tell colleagues to have a very clear goal in their mind before doing anything in social. What do you want to get out of this? You don’t know how many times I have gone into meetings with people who can’t answer this question, or else say— “well, we just have to be there.” That doesn’t tell me anything, and that doesn’t help you. Define what you really want— Do you want to have a better line of communication to prospective clients or the media? Do you want to have a quicker, more transparent line of communication to your customers? Would you like to be better aware of your competitors? Would you like to connect with prospective clients in XYZ industry? Social media is a tool you can use to meet some of these objectives. Say you are in the business development side of a firm, and you handle B to B sales. If you need to close three deals this quarter, there are certainly ways you can use social media to help you meet that. It can help complement the work you are already doing—- hitting the pavement, collecting business cards at conferences, making cold calls.
HM:
Do you have to report the ROI from your work? What qualitative or quantitative measures do you find to be most useful?
SN:
At this point, I am not asked to report anything more than follower or fan growth per each platform, even though that only tells part of the social media story. I like to look at metrics like number of retweets, mentions and click-throughs on links. Other things could be the number of online RSVP’s you receive on Facebook or LinkedIn events. These show how engaged your audience is with your brand. I think Crowdbooster is a pretty adequate platform for providing this kind of data. It can also gauge your impressions— an estimate of the total possible number of times someone could have seen your tweet. I frequently will “favorite” tweets that have something really positive or constructive to say about our brand. These are great to have easily accessible, and help to make a case to someone who is wary. Anytime you can participate in a conversation that you couldn’t have been apart of before is a value add.
HM:
Does Thunderbird use social media monitoring using tools like Radian6 or Crimson Hexagon or google alerts to evaluate sentiment or share of voice?
SN:
We use Cision and Google alerts to monitor our web coverage, but do not necessarily pay for any further advanced social media monitoring. For an organization of our size, it doesn’t really make sense. I also feel that the technology behind social media sentiment analysis has a little ways to go before it is worth investing in.
HM:
What is one of your top strategic priorities / goals for 2012 for Thunderbird’s social media outreach?
SN:
I think that we would like to do more with international social networks, specifically influential platforms in China such as Renren, Sina Weibo and Tudou. There is huge potential here if it is accessed effectively. Also I think that we would like to do a better job of monitoring foreign language content and becoming more prominent in international blogs. We could do a lot more by utilizing our international base and our foreign language capabilities.
What if I told you anyone in the world with a Facebook account can edit your Page without being an Admin? And that doing so does not violate Facebook’s terms of service?
I’m guessing, if you’re like one of my clients, you’re frowning right about now.
And although the changes submitted in this way by the general public have to go through an approval process – Get this – The Facebook Page Admins…do not appear to be part of that approval process. Indeed, it appears it is entirely up to Facebook to determine whether a suggested edit gets published as an official change to the info sub tab of your Facebook Page.
I recently had to explain this to one of my clients… I can’t say I blame them for being dumb-founded.
A little loss of control they can deal with…but this??? I think Facebook needs to give a little territory back on this one. Or at the very least clarify how the approval process actually works.
What do you think? Should your approval be required or at least requested for suggested edits to your Places Page?
Can a pastor or a Diocese looking to promote a Church event do so by using Facebook?
That’s a question you might be asking as the holiday season is just around the corner and you look to find creative – and free – ways to promote your Church’s events using Facebook. The answer is an emphatic yes!
The Diocese of Bridgeport made use of Facebook Pages to promote a vocational discernment event for young people.
The event was named “Summer Vocation Days.”
According to the event’s website page:
The diocese created a Facebook Page specifically for the event, which you can view here
and a somewhat impressive 112 people had become a fan of the page as of the writing of this post. (The total may have been higher or lower immediately prior to the event.)
The landing page for the Facebook Page prompted visitors to “Like this page to get updates.” And below that call to action was a brief message with nicely done graphics encouraging visitors to also click on another link in order to register. That link then connected to an online registration page.
According to the Diocesan website
approximately 60 young people participated in the event.
One Facebook application the Diocese did not appear to employ was the Facebook Event application which allows Facebook users to indicate whether they plan to attend a particular event. An online registration page would still be necessary to record additional details and to collect payments from registrants, but using the Event app is a very smart idea because of the positive peer pressure that results. And every online registration form related to a Facebook Page can prompt the registrants to share the fact that they are attending on Facebook and encourage them to send an invite to their friends.
As for the Facebook Event application, if Jane Smith clicks on the “I’m attending” button within the Facebook Event page, all of her friends see that she will be attending. This, of course, can be an encouraging sign to Jane’s friends who may otherwise avoid attending the event if they do not know who else is going.
Seriously though, I guess the biggest question in my mind regarding the new social media platform is whether there will be anything even remotely comparable to Facebook Pages. From what I’ve seen so far, google + is for circles of friends to communicate in real time. But what about brands? What about organizations? Will they be able to set up a profile similar to a Facebook Page profile on google +? Deep Focus’ Ian Schafer
wrote a thought-provoking post(worth reading) that suggests Google Plus will revolutionize how brands share content and the importance of content quality.
Really? How so? How will this be any different than twitter or Facebook?
I’m genuinely curious. And…since I never got an invite, I’m a bit in the dark about this. I’d really appreciate an inside heads up from someone more in the know on this topic than me.
In last week’s post, I discussed cause-related marketing and why it can be a terrific fundraising approach for non profits dealing with the negative effects of a slumping economy.
Let’s take a look at one non-profit who benefited from a cause-related marketing campaign: The UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
The UCSF Children’s hospital chose to make use of the Facebook Causes app
in its online social fundraising campaign.
I’ll let Marc Benioff explain the logic behind leveraging the power of Facebook to raise money and support from people who who would have otherwise never even known about the hospital, let alone the exciting fundraising campaign on Facebook to support it.
So what were the results of this campaign?
In a word, amazing.
Over 65 different teams from all over the world competed to raise the most money for this cause. And donations came from over 164,000 people.
In under 60 days.
What’s revealing for our purposes in this post as we look at cause-related marketing is how businesses reached out to their customers and other contacts to raise money for this cause.
Take a look:
You’ll notice the cause started by Zynga was responsible for over 163,000 donations. Zynga is a software company that develops social games played on various social networks including, of course, on Facebook. If you’ve been on Facebook for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with a few of the games Zynga has developed: CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, FishVille and PetVille.
But I digress.
In October of 2009, Zynga’s co-founder, Mark Pincus, founded zynga.org. Its mission? Get this: To transform the world through virtual social goods.
Those virtual social goods came in handy for the UCSF Challenge for the Children campaign.
Now how’s that for an innovative fundraising idea? Forget cookies and brownies. Sell virtual candy canes!
That’s assuming you’ve got a willing audience ready to buy them, of course! Zynga has over 250 million customers.
There were other companies and celebrities who leverage the power of their social networks on Facebook to raise money for UCSF Children’s Hospital as well. As you can see below, companies like AOL pitched in as did celebrities like Ashton Kutcher.
Hopefully this gets you thinking about ways your fundraising campaign might be able to tap into not just the pocketbooks of your most loyal supporters, but also, perhaps more importantly, their connections and influence.
How can you see such an approach working for your organization? Do you have any questions or comments related to this post? Please feel free to comment below!
Photo Credits:
Marc Benioff
: https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/db2266f5/File%3AMarc_Benioff_in_2009.jpg
Mark Pincus
: https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/db2266f5/File%3AMarkpincus2.jpg
Cause-related marketing (CRM) offers a uniquely powerful way for non-profits to partner with corporate supporters during difficult economic times. And for those of you struggling to make sense of how to make good use of social media like Facebook, you’ll be happy to know CRM also happens to be a terrific strategy for both businesses and non profits on social networking sites like Facebook.
You can think of CRM as a win-win-win for (1) business, (2) non profits and (3) the non-profit’s beneficiaries.
In this edition of our newsletter I’d like to focus on clarifying our terms to make sure we understand what CRM is and what it is not.
First off, CRM is not marketing aimed at changing societal behavior. So, for example, an MADD radio campaign to reduce drunk driving would not be an example of CRM.
Also, CRM is not a type of corporate philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy generally requires that a business give financial support or in-kind grants to a charity without any expectation of corporate gain in return.
With CRM, a business may have altruistic motives but CRM is expected to positively benefit the business’ bottom line while benefiting a charitable cause in the process.
Let’s look at one early (though not the earliest) example of CRM. It occured in 1983 when American Express partnered with the Statue of Liberty Restoration Project. What’s important to note here to understand the difference between CRM and corporate philanthropy is the non-charitable business impact to American Express’ bottom line.
Put simply, American Express had a business objective of increasing transaction volume and new customer acquisition volume. Its non profit partner, The Statue of Liberty Project, had a charitable objective of ensuring the long-term well being of the Statue of Liberty. In order to accomplish both of these objectives, American Express and the Project chose a CRM strategy in which American Express donated one penny for every transaction and one dollar for every new card issued to new customers.
The result was outstanding for (1) the charity, (2) the business partner’s bottom line, and (3) the many millions of tourists who would later visit the Statue. In only four years, $1.75 million was raised for restoration, new American Express customer applications grew by 45% and customer transaction activity jumped 28%.
This example is one of many that illustrate how CRM has been used for the benefit of both non-profits and their for-profit partners.
NEXT WEEK: An example of a successful online CRM campaign using Facebook.
I have to admit, I was frustrated. Very frustrated.
As a consultant who advises small and mid sized organizations, I was really hoping I could tout the wonders of Facebook Causes for small and mid sized businesses in their cause-related marketing efforts during my upcoming presentation at the Central Wisconsin Social Media Conference
and in general when I advise SMBs.
I really took seriously Causes supposed embrace of the notion of equal-opportunity giving.
To quote from the Causes’ app description:
This line in particular made me sure Facebook Causes would be the perfect tool for businesses with limited resources:
All of that is true. But it hides a disturbing fact:
Small and mid-sized businesses, precisely because of their smaller budgets, do not typically have anywhere close to the financial resources required (usually a minimum
of $10,000) if they want to start a cause.
Jake mentioned that there are other Facebook apps out there for small business that are useful.
And that too is true.
But why should small business have to think smaller than the 100+ million users who currently use the Facebook Causes app? Why not create a turn-key solution (that would not cost a fortune for Causes developers to customize for each campaign as they do with the big brands) for small and mid-sized business to create true equal opportunity on Causes?
I really hope Causes will consider working with those of us in the small biz community who want to tap into the growing number of smaller businesses on Facebook who can and want to make a world of difference with what I believe is the best tool on the market – Facebook Causes.
The challenge is providing a solution that is profitable for Facebook Causes (which is actually a for-profit company) as well.
I believe that’s possible. It will require some creative thinking on the part of Causes, the small business community and individuals like myself who admire their work and believe in dreaming big by acting…
