Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City

After four weeks of evaluating social media software vendors, we’ve come to some conclusions about the reality of these tools versus the hype that we heard along the way. Let’s just say that the parallels to the Wizard of Oz are pretty interesting…

Ever since I played the Wizard in third grade at Grant School,  I’ve really loved this movie, the books, and all things Oz in general. In fact, the head janitor at my town’s high school (Westfield HS in NJ) was one of the flying monkeys in the movie! But I digress…

Impact Interactions provides multiple types of social media services to our clients including consulting, moderation, and reporting. We’ve also been doing social media monitoring for several years for a couple of clients (although it was first called Brand Defense, then Reputation Management, and now Social Media Monitoring). It was a natural extension for our trained moderation teams to help clients. We’ve been looking for a good tool for our monitoring projects rather than relying on manual means of collection. We’ve spent several weeks talking with prospective clients for this service (and yes, it’s a service but more on that later). We’ve also been socializing ideas at conferences with other social media and online community folks to build our business case for adding this service.  So with all of that background, here is how the Wizard of Oz fits in…

I Am The Great And Powerful Oz!

In listening to people speak about social media monitoring tools, they believe that they are an all powerful tool for learning where all active conversations about their brand are being held online. The content is fresh, vibrant, and oh so relevant to their business objectives. Many believe that they’ll be able to manage the flow of information with this great tool, driving insights into their organizations effectively through the export of reports from these all powerful tools. Blogs- check. Twitter- check. Article comments- check. Communities- check. Sentiment analysis- check.

Unfortunately some of the hype around these tools has put vendors in the position of trying to meet these expectations with tools that look great, work smoothly, and export reports in a single click.

Ignore That Man Behind The Curtain!

Just as the Wizard was discovered to be a mere mortal, many customers are discovering that they had expectations that were far too high for the tools. What they are finding is that the tools take someone to work with them daily to review the delivered content, decide which nuggets of information are relevant, build the trends in content sentiment, and create the report.  Just as Dorothy and friends put all their faith in the wizard only to be disappointed when Toto pulled the curtain back, many companies are finding out that Social Media Monitoring requires more than a tool… it requires a team to review the content and deliver what is relevant.

I’m Not A Bad Person, Really.

The software vendors on the other hand must shake their heads when they hear the expectations for their tools. In our discussions with many of the top vendors (and some start ups too), we found them refreshingly honest about the capabilities of their tools. This was especially the case when the hot topics of Sentiment Analysis,  Twitter, and Online Community searches came up.

Sentiment analysis is an art form, not an absolute according to every single vendor we spoke with. The range of accuracy claimed by the vendors we spoke to ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 55%. In our B2B and B2C report testing, that range seems about right. Since most if not all vendors use a similar algorithm to categorize content, that would make sense.

In essence these tools work by analysing the 2-3 words prior and after the associated keyword to determine sentiment. As we can demonstrate, there are many false positives and negatives. To counter that, most allow the end user to rate or assign sentiment to content they find with the idea of strengthening the algorithm for future searches.

Twitter is another interesting discussion. Since Twitter is the social media du jour, everyone is interested in their Twitter buzz. The issue is that these tools use the Twitter search functionality rather than getting a full read into the Twitter Database of Tweets. (Say that five times fast!) So even the top tools are not much better than doing a Twitter search on your own. But as we were told, everyone of the vendors is working on this. According to Microsoft, Bing will have this capability soon. (Kara Swisher broke the news on this one.)

When the subject of online community content was discussed we received the same honest answers from everyone.  If the community has an RSS feed, they can get the information. If it doesn’t you are out of luck. We also learned that several vendors are working on a new tact to obtain the deepest of relationship content. One of those vendors is Boardreader. They are a company to watch if your interest is in content from communities.

The Good News – The Wizard Can Help!

Just as the Wizard offered to help Dorothy return to Kansas, many of the vendors in this space will offer to help clients to structure the searches for their project. But in the end, Toto runs off and Dorothy is still stuck in Oz. All the best intentions cannot overcome the single point that organizations need someone to run and make sense of the volumes of data these tools provide.

How Do We Get Back to Kansas Now?

Sometimes despite visiting a Wizard and killing a Witch or two along the way, you still need help to get where you want to go. That’s where we come in. At Impact Interactions, we recognize that Social Media Monitoring is a service. The choice of tools is important without a doubt, but it takes a person to effectively use the tool and report the results. We offer Social Media Monitoring as a service for clients.

Impact Interactions - A One Stop Shop for Social Media Monitoring

Impact Interactions has a great social media team using a top notch tool to provide social media insight reports for our clients. We understand that you are interested in seeing where the conversations are happening, but don’t have the time to review 1,000 blog posts, 400 tweets, and 500 comments each day. By hiring Impact Interactions, you can concentrate on your strategy while our team provides your Ruby Slippers. And you don’t even have to drop a house on us to get them.

But we don’t stop there! Our team’s experience in online communities is deep. Our social media associates can help you respond to bloggers, commenters, and Twitterers too. We believe that a social media monitoring project should be integrated into your communication efforts. Our team can help you execute that strategy at a reasonable cost.

Want to learn more? Please contact us or give us a call at (410) 604-3304 to discuss how your organization and team can get the most out of social media monitoring services.

Social Media Metrics – Driving to Value

We’re members of the Online Community Research Network and recently received the latest report on Community Metrics derived from a survey of the membership. While we’re happy to see a lot of progress in the responses about tying measurement to business objectives, we continue to see confusion about measuring value. Over the past ten years, we’ve developed a methodology that can help online community and social media managers structure their reporting in order to focus on the value their efforts produce in terms of business objectives.

Looking  at the report’s question #12 (Were your community’s metrics created in support of your organization’s broader business goals or were they created independent of a corporate business?), the following responses were given:

• 47% Created to support existing business goals
• 31% Created independently but helping refine existing business goals
• 22% Neither of the above (summarized from three additional responses)

Looking at what metrics the respondents use to support or refine existing business goals provides insight into the confusion over what constitutes value in online community and social media efforts.

Question 19 asked “What are the three most important community key performance indicators (KPIs) in the reports you send to upper level management?” The answers are a startling contrast to the answers to Question 12:

1. Number of Page Views or Clicks
2. Number of Site Visits
3. Number of Unique Visits

Why are these responses startling? Because the metrics are traffic metrics not value metrics. These are base level metrics not KPI worthy metrics for upper level managers. (In fact, three of the top five metrics measured as detailed in an earlier question were traffic metrics too: Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visitors. Only two were not: Registrations and Posts.)

What these two questions’ responses demonstrate is that the respondents are still struggling with determining value from their community work that truly builds into measurable business objectives.

When asked about ROI, 71% of respondents confused engagement and traffic metrics with value. Only 29% correctly identified a tangible value metric to use in measuring ROI.

To provide a little clarity in reporting metrics, let’s look at how Impact Interactions’ reporting methodology can help. First, our categories are structured as follows:

• Traffic - The basic building blocks that measure “How Many?”
• Behavior – The second level of metrics measuring conversion and engagement
• Value – The highest level of community metric where the activity has an economic or dollar value associated with it (This is what management really cares about!)

Some of the actual metrics that we use for clients are as follows:

1. Traffic - Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, etc.
2. Behavior- Page Views/Unique Visit, Page Views/Unique Visitor, Active Members/Unique Visitors, New Registrations/New Unique Visitors, Total Registrations/Total Unique Visitors, Downloads/Registered Member, Content Added/Registered Member, Content Added/Unique Visitor, Downloads/Unique Visits, Full profiles completed, Referrals from Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, etc.
3. Value – Number of successful customer support resolutions in the community, Total Contact Sales Inquiries/ Total Unique Visitors (or Registered Members), Total Leads Qualified/Generated, Product Referrals, Positive Product Reviews as a % of Total Product Reviews, Direct Revenue Generated from Community Activities, Length of Sales Cycle for community member vs non-member, Average Purchase Size/Frequency for community member vs non-member, etc. 

Take a look at those metrics again. The first two categories of Traffic and Behavior can usually be obtained using the platform’s tools (like Jive, Telligent, or Lithium) or through your web analytics’ tools (like Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends). The Value metrics take a little more work. In fact, to really be able to perform a realistic ROI calculation, you will need to get help from outside the community/social media area of your organization.

To derive an ROI related to marketing objectives from a community, you’ll need to access your CRM system. For a support ROI, you’ll need to know the cost per interaction in complementary/competitive areas such as a call center. The standard tools won’t get you there, you’ll have to build relationships within your organization in order to really build a solid analysis that ties back to business objectives. An ROI model built on traffic will contain far too many holes to be useful.

We’ve been helping our clients with these issues and have developed a strong set of best practices that can help you succeed in your reporting. Please feel free to share your insights into this issue and ask questions about reporting and analyzing your community and social media efforts. We’re happy to answer them and help reduce the confusion.

2009 Trends — It’s Not All Doom & Gloom

It has been a very busy summer here at Impact Interactions. We’ve added more work with our existing clients like Cisco and SAP, added new clients, added more staff, launched a new small business service (Impact Social Media), and have received many more calls about our services. Taking a step back from the activity to analyze the social media/online community industry, we’re seeing the following trends emerge:

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

Online Community – Understanding the Myths

Are You Blindly Following the “Wisdom of the Crowds” ?

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

Impact Interactions Strengthens the NetApp Online Community

NetApp launched its first online community in March 2008 to build better relationships with customers, partners, prospects, and other stakeholders. Initially, the community was well received, but NetApp’s community team looked to Impact Interactions to accelerate their results. Working with prominent technology companies such as Cisco, SAP, Intel, and HP has given Impact Interactions the knowledge and understanding needed to guarantee that NetApp avoid many of the pitfalls that newer online community teams make.

“Our initial assessment of NetApp’s online community determined that their community team was using many of the correct tactics for building a successful community,” said Mike Rowland, President of Impact Interactions. “But with our strong experience in B2B community creation, management, and measurement we were able to provide an enhanced roadmap for NetApp based upon proven B2B best practices.”

Working together with experienced consultants like Impact Interactions can give an organization that is new to online community a significant advantage over competitors who either take on the task alone or avoid it altogether. These advantages include a shorter development stage; generating realistic, measurable objectives; and avoiding costly mistakes. Many communities don’t understand how to increase conversion and engagement rates or how to generate useful metrics reports for analysis, which Impact Interactions can help with significantly.

The advantages of using an outside consultant aren’t limited to those who have yet to launch a community. The fresh perspective and experience they provide can benefit a community at any point in the lifecycle. This is partly because public information is still scarce on the development and management strategies needed to make communities a successful endeavor. Furthermore, most of the research and information that is available about online communities is based around business-to-consumer (B2C) communities. The strategy and techniques used for B2C communities is often times very different than what should be used to make business-to-business (B2B) communities successful.

This is an important concept to grasp when developing a community. “A lot of times I hear people say that they want the community to be like Facebook or MySpace, but what they don’t realize is that social networks and B2C communities have a totally different purpose and a totally different audience than B2B communities. The strategy and management techniques used for these professional communities need to reflect these differences,” said Mike Rowland, President of Impact Interactions.

For additional information regarding online community consulting or moderation services, contact Mike Rowland or visit http://www.impactinteractions.com/.

Online Community Metrics & Reporting- Another Viewpoint

Matthew Lees of the Patricia Seybold Group and Robert Dell’Immagine of VMWare presented the topic of Metrics and Reporting to the Santa Fe meeting last Monday morning. Several of Matthew’s comments were interesting from the perspective that it appears many organizations continue to have trouble measuring the true value from their communities. A couple of his comments from his research:

But the most important message from Matthew’s presentation was: What are you going to do once you’ve measured the impact of your site? Too often, organizational managers say “Great, our numbers are up or our metrics are okay.” instead of trying to understand why the metrics look the way they do and what they can do to improve them.

Measuring activity is easy. Measuring business value is hard.Out of the box platforms’ reporting tools will not give you value/impact metrics.

 

What are your customers using to measure their success vs. what does success mean to your organization?

(An example of using metrics for advancing a web site was demonstrated by our client SAP. In reviewing landing page metrics for multiple countries, we noticed that one country was not converting its visitors to registered members at anywhere near the same rate as our other country pages. Because of this data, SAP reviewed its page in the context of navigation and contextual language and discovered that the text was unclear as to the real benefits of registration for the targeted country’s population. The pages were then re-written with a different call to action and tested. Over time, as the metrics came in, further adjustments to the call to action text were made and the overall conversion improved.)
The process that Matthew recommends for measurement and action is as follows:

Hypothesis –>Baseline–>Action–>Evaluation–>Moving the Needle

Robert’s presentation was a good reminder for everyone that metrics evolve over time and that one set of metrics agreed upon at the outset of the community may not meet the needs of all stakeholders. For example, Robert’s community team reports to multiple stakeholders including the community team, support, product management, marketing, and executives. Each has their own requirement for information and metrics to back up their own ideas. As Robert stated, “our metrics viewed have evolved over time.” I couldn’t have put it better.

Are you interested in learning more about reporting and metrics? Impact Interactions is the leading online community strategy firm helping clients to measure the impact of their site offerings. From your pay-per-click campaigns through your ROI, we can help you understand how visitors/members are using your site and how it ties to your organizational/business goal. To learn more, please contact us.