Module 1 - Instructor Blog Post
There’s much wisdom in this saying, which
has been attributed to both W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker.
It explains why the recent explosion of
digital DATA is so important. Simply put, because of digital data, managers can
measure, and with some effort
know, radically more about their businesses, and then directly translate that
knowledge into improved decision making and performance.
But metrics isn’t the same as evaluation or analytics.
Metrics – which provides the data
that is fundamental to analytics – is imperative. And analytics takes metrics one step (or
many steps) further in order to make sense of data in the context of business
objectives (Lapointe, 2014)
To understand social media evaluation and analytics more
fully, let’s start with what it isn’t (Lapointe, 2014):
- Social media evaluation and analytics doesn’t just measure something. It isn’t just about extracting and aggregating data. This is still data – and not analyzed and evaluated data.
- Social media analytics do not define success and determine if you’ve reached it. This might sound really odd at first. However, if you think about it, the opposite is actually true. It isn’t a social media analyst that defines success and even determines if success has been achieved. The role of analytics is to translate success terms into social media-friendly terms and vice versa. The strategic social media analyst may earn a seat at the strategic table, but their role is still to align the role of the web with the overarching business goals of the organization.
- Social media analytics is not a tool. Perhaps the most famous tool to measure and aggregate online data is Google Analytics. Don’t let the name fool you. You’re still the analyst. It’s the tool. An example that will help make this real: A GPS is a tool. Driving is not a tool, and the tool does not drive. The driver drives and, even when using a tool like a GPS, still has to apply analytical skills. You can ask Sabine Moreau, who left her home in Brussels to pick up a friend at the train station, a stop NORTH and slightly out of the way of her home base (Hansen, 2013). She followed her GPS straight through Germany (two gas stops and a nap) and into Croatia before questioning her data (Hansen, 2013). Don’t let tools think – they can’t.
So what is social media evaluation and analytics?
The answer is very simple and highly
loaded – pretty much everything to do with understanding social media in the
context of your business objectives – whether those are highly social concepts
(better quality of life for the community) or highly quantifiable concepts
(increase sales by 3 per cent this quarter).
It is a multi-disciplinary practice that
aims to understand (and, predominantly) attempts to quantify success and
uncover the best practices associated with using social media to breed even
more success. And it’s not about better
of the social media use, it’s about betterment of the business success by
optimizing the use of social media in relationship to it.
To help show the difference between
someone who works with metrics v.s.
analytics and evaluation, consider the beagle v.s. the
wolf. Both are hunters. They are both fast, sharp, and focused on the
hunt. However, one hunts in order to
stop, point and bark. You can think of
this as pulling data and pointing out – quite simply – where social media data
has increased, decreased, changed etc.
The other hunts in order to dine.
It has a clear outcome in mind, and it goes after it. The wolf doesn’t stop at the metrics. It looks for patterns, possibilities, opportunities,
themes, etc and
translates them into better hunting and, as a result, dinner on the table.
Let’s look at this analogy in the form of
a case study in the business world.
Consider retailing. Let’s say the goal of the seller is to
increase sales. The beagle tracks
books. He can tell which books sell and
which do not. In the online environment,
the beagle can even track which books the customer looked at and did not
buy. The wolf also sees value in these
measurements and then provides recommendations on how to strategically
put
them to use in the context of the goal of increasing sales. The wolf wants to know how customers navigate
through websites and then provides recommendations to enhance that experience. The wolf wants to develop algorithms to
predict the books that customers would like to read – algorithms that perform
better every time that the customer responds to or ignores a recommendation. The wolf recognizes that it is the individual
customer experience that needs to be enhanced online and caters to ways to
improve the individual, rather than mass, experience. The wolf focuses on the numbers – the
quantitative – and also creates opportunities to be influenced by qualitative
data, even if the qualitative data tends to be mined in quantitative ways.
Amazon as a company has performed like a
wolf – putting many brick-and-mortar bookstores, or beagles, out of business.
Social Measures
With the advent of social media, the
nature of our online interactions begin to change. The focus on mass media has already been
shifting, especially with the ability to directly target individual consumers. Now, for a few of years, companies have
been focused on the one-on-one relationship between the marketer and the
consumer. They’ve been strictly
measuring the nature of this relationship.
While more complex than the one to many nature of mass media, the
one-to-one relationship provides substantially better data to the company. It has helped them understand their consumers
better and given them opportunities to focus on enhancing the relationship
directly.
Social media changes this substantially.
While humans have always dealt with the
complexity of many-to-many relationships in real life, they’ve never had to
think about what many-to-many relationships look like online. The same is true for organizations. The nature of online interaction has now
shifted so that the organization is no longer in an online relationship with
its consumer but with many consumers, who are also in relationship with each
other. While these dynamics were taking
place in a small way behind the scenes, they rarely factored into a companies
strategic planning, marketing and communications, or measurement. Now the many-to-many dynamic is happening
around the company and, whether or not they have a strategy to leverage the
opportunities, they are right in the midst of its impacts.
Online Metrics
In the early days of the internet,
companies tried to apply traditional
advertising and traditional metrics online. The Display Ad was the first form of advertising on the internet initiated in 1994 (Waite, 2014). The way of measuring success online in
1994, was primarily to capture numbers and then to interpret or assign meaning
to them (Waite, 2014). It was hugely quantitative
thinking, and it was considered extremely valuable in the company
boardroom.
This linear way of thinking about
advertising and measuring the impact of advertising became slightly more
advanced but was still entirely within the same paradigm (Waite, 2014). The Display Ad evolved into Google AdWords,
which was launched in 2000. While more sophisticated in its thinking, the
metrics work on a Cost Per Click (CPC) or CPM (Cost
Per Mile) (Waite, 2014).
CPC advertisers bid on key word phrases relevant to their target market and
only pay when an ad is clicked on.
This clamoring for presence in a sea of
information was well received by marketers. It is still a highly popular means
for companies to raise brand awareness. By 2012 AdWords became Google’s main
source of revenue proving that awareness is still a mainstay of all marketing
efforts (Waite, 2014).
The limitation of course is that Google
AdWords only sees value in the direct relationship between the company doing
the advertising and the consumer. It is
the online version of direct mail – trying to minimize the cost to the
advertising company to directly reach and impacts its end user. The CPC and CPM are measureable ways to
determine if the consumer took online action.
It focuses on the behaviour and
not the quality of the relationship or quality of the behaviour. Consumers could be clicking through out of
curiosity, out of interest or even out of a reaction of disgust for the
product, company or advertisement. There
is nothing in this approach that helps understand the beliefs the customer
holds about the company or product, or his or her intentions related to the
company or product.
Between 1994 and 2012 we are still
applying quantitative measurement, although now we have moved beyond
impressions or online interaction and are able to measure whether the
interactions translate into paying customers (Waite, 2014).The metric is known as CPA
(Cost Per Acquisition or purchase) whereby the ad campaign cost is divided by
impressions x click through rate x paying customers (Waite, 2014).
A publisher that only charges the
advertiser when the publisher delivers an acquisition (or a conversion as
mutually agreed between the publisher and advertiser.). CPA networks offer
similar assets to CPC networks such as display banners, contextual advertising,
mobile banners, leader boards and social media (Waite, 2014).
Three years after the internet begins, US
Telecoms company AT&T places the first digital display ad (Waite, 2014).The metric is Cost Per Mile (CPM) (Waite, 2014).
Advertisements are sold on a CPM basis by calculating the cost of an ad divided
by the audience size (Waite, 2014). Analysts measure the amount of impressions served, even
though a user may not have seen or clicked on it (Waite, 2014). By the year 2000, consumers are seeing up
to 10,000 ads per day (Waite, 2014).
The advent of social media also started
to make online metrics more credible in the boardroom because they could be
calculated based on conversations – direct two-way feedback with people –
rather than on leads (CPL – cost per lead is a variation on cost per
acquisition, CPA) or just brand awareness or impressions (Waite, 2014). This is the start of
the shift from the quantitative element of analytics to the qualitative.
The term “Cost
Per Engagement” is trademarked in order to attempt to
bring more credibility and accountability to ad units (Waite, 2014). Social advertising takes
off in the year 2008 when Facebook launches
engagement ads. Facebook user growth explodes from 150
million to 450 million during the next 12 months (Waite, 2014).
Unlike CPM or CPC, cost
per engagement impressions are free (Waite, 2014). Advertisers
bid and pay only for user engagement such as watching a video, leaving a
comment, sharing information or posting a retweet.
Promoted Tweets – Starbucks produced the first Promoted Tweet (Waite, 2014) . This is a form of
traditional push marketing but the difference is in the content.
Promoted Tweets are regular Tweets with
the added bonus that they can reach more people who are interested in your
business. They should be used to place your best content in front of the
audience that matters to you at the right time. The promoted tweets appear at
the top of relevant search results on Twitter.
If your goal is to drive
a particular action via Twitter, Promoted Tweets are a great place
to promote engaging content that includes a call to action to users.
Using Promoted Tweets you can:
- Drive website traffic by asking users to click on your best content
- Offer coupons and deals in the copy of your Tweets
- Drive leads using Lead Generation Cards
- Promote sales and giveaways
If your goal is to drive
awareness for your business, Promoted Tweets can do this in a
variety of ways:
- Expand the reach of your content like blog posts, white papers, and more
- Connect with influencers and brand advocates by ensuring they see your content
- Promote awareness around events and product launches
- Ask for retweets to gain an even broader audience for your messages
Measuring Social
Many believe modern technology has created
“social” marketing but this
concept has always been in existence because we are social beings that thrive
on connectivity, belonging and interaction.
Instead, social media gave social marketing scale.
Today’s “social” marketing is a return to
basics. It is how business was done hundreds of years ago: face-to-face, one
handshake at a time. The difference now is that scale or reach is no longer a
hurdle. Using social media companies can build loyalty, trust, preference and
value with 140 characters or an image or a video, shaking hands from hundreds
of miles away and having interactions with customers tens of thousands of miles
away (Blanchard, 2011). More than this, social media companies
can be confident (and this can be good or bad) that others, like in a village
or community, are observing the nature of the relationship between a company
and its target audience. The interaction
between a company and one customer can form an impression on many customers
because it can easily be observed, shared and commented on by others, expanding
the relationship in multiple directions (Blanchard, 2011).
The nature of relationships are no longer
linear and simply about the relationship between the customer and the company (Blanchard, 2011). One customer that spends a lot of money may not be as valuable as one
individual that has a strong network to many potential customers. This is a very different way to think about
measures because it changes the types of things that organizations find
valuable.
References:
Blanchard, O. (2011) Social Media ROI:
Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Pearson
Education, Inc. Boston, MA.
Hansen, L. (2013). Eight drivers who blindly followed their GPS
into disaster. Retrieved from http://theweek.com/article/index/243813/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-their-gps-into-disaster
Lapointe, E. (2014). Web analytics. Retrieved from: http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/web-analytics/
Waite, J. (2014) Twitter Help Centre. Retrieved from http://support.twitter.com/articles/142101-what-are-promoted-tweets
Hi everyone!
ReplyDeleteIt’s a pleasure to continue learning about social media, now with a focus on the evaluation, metrics and analysis.
I am still working on the social media for WITT at the moment (women in technology and trades), and enjoyed reading and practicing some of this modules insights already. According to Baym (2013), “The most central form of industrial analysis has been counting audience size”. Baym goes on to discuss how a ‘hit’ on the internet does not account for demographics, other than geographical location, and a number of other issues that can be associated with different forms of measurement. I have found a completely different and unique issue with measuring the value of social media with regards to WITT, which I will come back to in a moment.
Kaushik describes the conversion rate, amplification rate and applause rate which can be used together to determine an economic value, which can be used in addition to, or alongside the basic counts which Baym indicated. Trying out the website from Kaushik’s second update on the blog – truesocialmetrics.com, I found WITT to have very low conversion, amplification and applause rates, leading to low economic value. Things brings me to question – what goals do these measure, and for what types of organizations? WITT is a part of a not-for-profit, and while economic value is, of course, important in measuring the success of the initiative, there are other factors which contribute outside of these measurements.
Let me elaborate.
WITT focuses on programs with less than 30% female representation – often as low as 1%. While many of them have social media, few seem to be very active (based solely on observation on a number of WITT followers with fewer than 50 posts, a potential area for future study). Just because the community is small and the rates are low doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
On Twitter, listening is more commonly referred to as ‘lurking’, and the listeners are often defined as non-participants in the online community. The majority of studies and social media metrics focus on the number of comments, posts and general ‘volume’ users have in terms of communicated presence. Crawford asserts that “a consideration of listening practices allows for a more acute assessment of online engagement” (2009, p. 528). According to Crawford, further studies in online listening would provide valuable insight into the “nuances of connection and communication that these [online] spaces afford” (Crawford, 2009, p. 533).
So how can ‘listening’ more accurately be measured alongside the engagement metrics? Maybe hits, followers, and reach is actually valuable in some instances, in contrary to Kaushik’s statement that what matters in social media is “Not the number of Friends / Followers / Subscribers. Not the number of posts / tweets. Not the ridiculous Followers to Following ratio” (n.d.). Perhaps what matters and how to measure success is more dependent on the audience demographics and psychographics and the goals of the organization using social media to connect.
I do, however, truly love the website provided by Kaushik for analytical purposes, after all, it is another tool in the toolkit allowing for a greater understanding of what is happening on the social channels used in a communications strategy.
*On a side note, could the font size of future blog posts be larger? It is a bit difficult to read this one. I zoomed in but when I read on my tablet I am unable to. Thanks for considering!*
Baym, N. (2013). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No. 10 http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752
Crawford, K. (2009). Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Continuum: Journal Of Media & Cultural Studies, 23(4), 525-535. doi:10.1080/10304310903003270
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
"Many believe modern technology has created “social” marketing but this concept has always been in existence because we are social beings that thrive on connectivity, belonging and interaction. Instead, social media gave social marketing scale."
ReplyDeleteThis quote caught my attention as I read through the module posting, and considered the class readings. Indeed, social marketing has always existed. However, with the "scale" that social media has allowed social marketing to gain, metrics, and more importantly, analytics and evaluation, are increasingly important. Data is simply data, and statistics are simply statistics, unless they are taken one step further in social marketing to understand their implications and opportunities.
Kaushik asks the question: “So what actually matters in Social Media? Not the number of Friends / Followers / Subscribers. Not the number of posts/tweets. Not the ridiculous followers to following ratio.” Instead, Kaushik argues that what should be evaluated is the conversation rate, amplification rate, applause rate, and economic value of social marketing. In order to generate economic capital, strategic goals should be set, and opportunity should be identified based on metrics.
Baym offers insight, “Some will build information systems in order to predict, control and make money. Others will be build them to understand whether and how they are moving others” (2013). Regardless of how metrics are evaluated, they should have meaning to a company. Kane summarizes this concept well, coining the term, “social business maturity”. As I consider building a social media presence for the companies with whom I am affiliated, it is important for me to remember that success is not simply defined in metrics: the number of followers we have, how many likes we get, or how many views on a post. Instead, it is the interpretation of those metrics that takes social marketing to the next level. In a recent Adweek article Kimberlee Morrison writes, “It’s well documented that companies with a defined strategy are the ones that experience the most success on social” (Morrison, 2015). Social strategy involves using tools and metrics to “listen, measure, respond, integrate, and engage in real time online conversation” (Morrison, 2015).
Sources:
Baym, N. (2013). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No. 10http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752
Kane, G.C., Palmer, D., Phillips, N., & Kiron, D. Finding the value in social business. MIT Sloan Management Review. Spring, 2014, Vol. 55, Issue 3, p.81 - 89.
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value.http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
Morrison, K. (2015, June 25). The Social Strategy: A Five-Step Process For Social Media Marketing Success. Retrieved January 12, 2016, from http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/the-social-strategy-a-five-step-process-for-social-media-marketing-success/624937
Web technology has been a complete game changer in terms of our ability to analyze and know our audience and make better business decisions based on that knowledge. The challenge is that “The people who create audiences through their work may be ill equipped to access, move, manage or interpret the data it takes to track and measure those audiences” (Bayme, 2013) I would suggest that most people are in this situation. Analytics based on web metrics is relatively new, and therefore, it seems that it is a select few who truly understand it. What is more challenging though, is that there seems to be a select few who understand that they don’t understand it. Since anyone can use social media and anyone can visit a website, many conclude that anyone can ‘do’ analytics.
ReplyDeleteSocial tools are best utilized as a means for understanding your audience/clients so business decisions can be made that reflect this understanding. The key, as Kane et.al (2014) point out, is to balance internal vs external facing initiatives. “To truly understand our clients needs and what solutions would truly help them, we needed to listen, collaborate and engage with them in new ways. Learning how to operate as a social business allowed us to hear our clients more clearly than we had in the past” (p.85). This is truly the power of social.
I especially appreciated Kaushik’s (n.d.) reminder that “we do not measure to manipulate the metrics, we measure to know if we are adding business value”. This is an important distinction because in many cases, as we work towards gaining more support from Senior Leadership for social business budget, it is tempting to cheapen our metrics by doing what is easy to get more likes/favorites/etc. In some ways, this is akin to counting output instead of outcomes – similar to the days of counting how many brochures were handed out at the tradeshow without really looking at any outcomes of the effort. As Kaushik’s posits, the distinctions between conversion, amplification, applause and economic value are important. Each metric is valuable, but must be viewed within the context of business goals. This helps to take social to a greater level of sophistication.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that social business is still a baby. Anyone involved is like any parent, partly trying to influence, partly trying to watch the baby’s personality grow so we know what to do next!
References:
Baym, N. (2013). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No. 10 http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752
Kane, G.C., Palmer, D., Phillips, N., & Kiron, D. Finding the value in social business. MIT Sloan Management Review. Spring, 2014, Vol. 55, Issue 3, p.81 - 89.
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value.http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
I initially had a difficult time applying the readings to myself as I currently do not use any social media platforms in my employment position, as the Albert Government (Human Services) has not been an early adopter of these platforms. Kane, Palmer, Phillips and Kiron (2014) discuss the ideal of social business maturity in 3 stages: early, developing, and maturing. The area, in which I work, falls under the early stage because social media is only used to market services and no measurements of possible data occur (p.84).
ReplyDeleteAs a Career & Employment Consultant, social media can be used to increase social business maturity in many ways. Facebook and LinkedIn can be used to advertise job openings. Twitter can be used to provide job seekers with information on how to find employment. Two way conversations can occur on any of the platforms. These opportunities focus on the external business (developing stage of social business maturity) and can be measured with conversation, amplification and applause rates, as well as, economic value (Kaushik, n.d.). These measurements can help identify and target the audience and areas of labour market shortages.
As the measurements become more sophisticated they begin to help management make decisions about how to operate their business internally, reaching a maturing social business (Kane et al., 2014). I could measure the number of audience comments to a post to inform me of what kind of information job seekers are looking for. I can then providing the most relevant information to job seekers, which could result in increased clientele and profits. Applause rates could help us identify which careers are in high demand and allow us to reach out to organizations with those careers to develop potential paying customers and increasing profits.
Social media metrics provide us with predictive data, but don’t always give us a better understanding because not all data is measurable (Baym, 2013). For example, when we help an individual find employment they may provide us with message to thank us. It is not something that can be measured/ tracked through various social media channels, but is impactful information.
References:
Baym, N. (2013). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No, 10 http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.pjp/fm/article/view/4873/3752
Kane, G.C., Palmer, D., Phillips, N., & Kiron, D. Finding the values in social business. MIT Sloan Management Review. Spring, 2014, Vol. 55, Issue 3, p.81-89.
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
It is my experience that businesses today feel pressured to use social media but decision makers struggle to justify its use and to determine a bottom line return on investment (ROI). How much additional revenues will flow into the business from social media? How will they measure this additional revenue? How do they justify allocating staff time to social media activities?
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, when I work with marketing managers, they often comment “we know we should be using social media to market our company and we don’t know where to start”. They ask for talking points to take back to their bosses because they don’t have any data or positive experiences to relate. Basically they need to educate their bosses to justify starting a social program.
This week I used the “Finding the Value in Social Business” article and chart on page 84 (Kane, Palmer, Philips & Kiron, 2014) in three client meetings. I had the article up on the TV presentation screen so the chart was very large. My clients immediately identified that that their business had no social maturity. They were relieved that there are indicators for stages of social business maturity and that they can start to implement strategies with the expectation of evolving positive business outcomes. This gave a framework to think of what we can do over the next 12 months to get started and the article gave them something to take back to their teams.
In general, we start a social media program using a blog with one or two blog posts monthly and related posts on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter which link back to the blog. Kaushik’s article (n.d.) fits perfectly with what we do and we start the conversation of macro and micro conversions to measure economic value. A question we get all the time from businesses with no social maturity is “so tell me again why we want Facebook and Google+ likes?” We use the concepts of applause, amplification, and conversation rates and how they link to economic value. We provide monthly analytic reporting metrics relating to those concepts but we do not do the manual chart as suggested by Kaushik. We highlight comments, retweets, and shares and likes to show engagement which is a qualitative metric. Showing the total number of likes can be quantitative “data puking” (Kaushik) and that number really has no value if there is no social engagement.
Through trial and error, we have found that for organizations with no social media implemented, our best initial goal is to build data and process around social connections and gain positive experiences from social media. Later we set new goals relating to their business and marketing plan. Kane at al validate what we do. I like the visual that “social” marketing is a return to basics of one customer, one handshake at a time, enabled by technology and unlimited by geography (Blanchard, 2011).
Baym (2013) speaks to the point that different types of organizations and industries have different goals inherent within their organizational culture. Baym profiles musicians as being more interested in social and personal values (qualitative) rather than purely economic rewards; hence social data and metrics are best defined within the context of the organization and industry whether it is profit or not for profit. In my experience social media for non-profits relates more to engagement for building community around a cause or project and for fund raising.
Baym, N. (2913). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No. 10
Blanchard, O. (2011) Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Pearson Education, Inc. Boston, MA.
Kane, G.C., Palmer, D., Phillips, N., & Kieon, D. Finding the value in social business. MIT Sloan Management Review. Spring, 2014, Vol. 55, Issue 3, p. 81-89
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplication, Applause, Economic Value. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
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ReplyDeleteAs Baym recommended, “If you are going to look for an audience, you have to define what it is you are seeking” (2013). I developed a mortgage broker referral program where my company would provide a comprehensive insurance plan to cover their clients’ new mortgage. My social media strategy involved focusing on building relationships and providing value to mortgage brokers. Baym also stated, “They may seem to be industry, but may not frame their audience only as economic assets but also in more relational and ephemeral terms involving emotions and aesthetics. These constructions of audience cannot be assessed with the same economically motivated data or tools” (2013). If my goal was purely motivated by profit I don’t believe I would have been successful. Value also came from caring. I genuinely like helping people and Twitter enabled me to connect mortgage brokers to realtors to whom I matched based on their personalities. I watched their relationships develop and how they were there for each other for more than a business transaction.
ReplyDelete“It [social media evaluation and analytics] is a multi-disciplinary practice that aims to understand (and, predominantly) attempts to quantify success and uncover the best practices associated with using social media to breed even more success. And it’s not about better of the social media use, it’s about betterment of the business success by optimizing the use of social media in relationship to it” (de Bruign, 2016).
I also used social media to stay in touch with my clients. It’s much easier to schedule annual review appointments when you’ve been in touch with your clients on a regular basis throughout the year. With Twitter I got an inside look into my clients’ lives when they posted about their work, relationships, family, and interests. They in turn learned more about me. It was easier for them to refer their friends and family and recommend me to their followers because the felt they new me through my posts.
Success also came from my near obsession with the analytics reporting. I believe numbers tell a story, and if you listen carefully you can make a real difference in your organization. Through analysis I was able to tailor my conversations to my audience and give them more of what they wanted. I learned they enjoyed a mix of humorous tweets along with financial advice. Kaushik explains, “A high conversation rate requires a deeper understanding of who your audience is, what your brand attributes are, what you are good at, what value you can add to your followers and the ecosystem you participate in.” I once saw a client’s tweet about her and her husband considering opening an RESP for the second child they just had. She wanted to know her followers’ thoughts. I commented that I would create a blog post outlining my ideas. I shared it with her and she shared it with her followers who participated in the conversation. I was able to give my audience content they considered to be of such incredible value that they wanted to share it (Kaushik). Through analytics I saw the reach and it became a post I shared regularly.
References:
Baym, N. (2013). Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics. First Monday, Vol. 18, No, 10 http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.pjp/fm/article/view/4873/3752
de Bruign, M. (2016). Comm 597: Social Media Evaluation & Analytics Blog. Retrieved from http://comm597analytics.blogspot.ca/
Kane, G.C., Palmer, D., Phillips, N., & Kiron, D. Finding the values in social business. MIT Sloan Management Review. Spring, 2014, Vol. 55, Issue 3, p.81-89.
Kaushik, A. (n.d.). Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/
Michelle - I love to read about the practical ways you use social media to interact with your clients!I struggle to learn the balance between personable and relatable on social media, while maintaining professionalism.
DeleteI suspect that the ways you've used social media to create personal connection with clients gives you influence (or ROI) far more valuable than simply the numbers of followers and likes you receive. Do you find a lot of your clients are referred by word-of-mouth?
I’d like to share one more experience I’ve had with social media that ties into the readings. Kane and associates discuss the different levels of social business maturity within organizations (2014). I had a pleasant experience dealing with Telus mobility for a not so pleasant situation. After being on hold on the phone for an extended period of time I decided to turn to Twitter. Through social media Telus was able to satisfactorily address my issue. In the chart Kane provided as one whose business processes involved not only marketing, innovation, and leadership but operations as well (2014). Integrating social media into customer service is an example of what makes Telus a mature social business. Although as Kane stated, “Social business maturity involves a higher level of responsibility and accountability within the organization” (2014), imagine if my experience didn’t go so well, Telus in this case really stepped up to the plate.
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