Topic 11 - Analytics

Make Better Decisions with Social Media Analytics 

What is Social Media Analytics?
Social Media Analytics refers to the study of the structured and unstructured data generated by the users of the social networking sites like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc. to make informed business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is gauging customer opinion to support marketing and customer service activities. It is about to know what consumers are talking about a brand or product or services, it is about analyzing the new trends in consumer preferences and taking feedbacks to improve on brand image and service offerings. Social media provides valuable data for your business, along with a medium for conversation. These tools enable you to spot trends, opportunities and get insights, enabling you to act on some of those insights by participating in conversations that are going on and increasing your ROI.
What needs to be done?
Step 1: The first step in social media analytics is determining your purposes for social media involvement in the first place. Typical objectives include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, crowd sourcing, getting feedback on products and services, and improving public opinion of your company or products or a combination of above.
Step 2: Define Measurable and actionable KPIs: The second step is to define and identify KPIs or Key Performance Indicators (business metrics used to analyze or answer specific objectives or achieve goals). You could evaluate customer engagement, for example, through numbers of followers of your corporate Twitter account and numbers of retweets and mentions of your company name, or number of likes or mentions.

• Define specific KPIs for each social network
• Define actionable KPIs
• Choose Metrics that translates into business context

Few examples of actionable KPIs are: Number of people in a specific location who follow your company on twitter or like your page on FB, Number of product improvement suggestions, percentage increase in product reviews, percentage reduction is support costs etc.
Step 3: Configure your analytics

• Create a filter or segment for social traffic – Identify quickly which actions work and from which social network
• Add event tracking for social media – Customize your landing pages for different users based on different promotions they are looking for. Directing user to correct landing page is big factor for your online campaign success.
• Add tracking to measure interactions and event responses – Which buttons do visitors interact with? How much time they spend on landing page vs. other pages on site? What graphics make users click often and more on? Is that button doing what you expected? If not Change It!
• Add Campaign tracking to URLs – Figure out what wording leads to more click-through and conversions.

Step 4: Use Other Social Analytics Tools: There are a number of types of tools for various functions in the social media analytics process. These tools include applications to identify the best social media sites to serve your purposes, applications to harvest the data, a storage product or service, and data analytics software. Social media tools crawl blogs and social network sites for brand mentions and enable companies to build communities and engage with their customers.
Some Free and Popular Social Analytics tools are:
Social Mention, WhoisTalking, Howsociable, Backtype, Trendistic, Thinkup and Tinker.com
Some effective Paid tools are:
Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, Ubervu, Raven, Hootsuite pro, peer index and Lithium
Step 5: Understand each Social Metric
Quantitative data: New Likes, Total Likes, Page views, Referrals, Profile data including followers, following, tweets and Daily tweet average, number of clicks, number of retweets, what times, which tweet structure gets a better CTR?
Qualitative data: User Profiles, user location, language, Comments (sentiment), Interaction times, Brand mentions, mention content
Step 6: Action and Strategy
Based on the analysis of data generated above you need to evaluate if you are achieving your goals? Keep on measuring, act differently and keep on experimenting to get even better results. Identify worst performing metrics one by one and devise an action plan.
The ROI of Social Media
Return on Investment is a business metric which measures the effectiveness of the social media marketing efforts. Measuring ROI of social media marketing vs. traditional marketing is very tricky and also very different concept than measuring ROI through traditional marketing efforts. Different people, strategists and marketers have defined the concept of social media differently. This is precisely because Social Media ROI includes various intangible benefits other than the one that can be measured. Measuring social media ROI is to go well beyond the simple metrics of number of followers or likes. It rather depends on the combination or all of below attributes:

1. Attitude towards the brand: There are various studies done which shows the linkage of returns based on the attitude of users towards a brand, like buying a brand, or recommending the product to friends.
2. Engagement:The more engaged your user or fan means stronger brand and greater ROI. ROI increase happens because of
   1. Consumers who share about brand are more likely to buy the product (based on cognitive consistency theory)
   2. When consumers engage with your brand, your message travels to wider audiences
   3. When folks engage your brand, it acts as an endorsement to their friends and we know recommendations by friends are more powerful than any commercial marketing campaign.

3. Customer Service: How a business handles complaints of negative remarks is going to be major differentiating factor in increasing ROI. Complaints travel faster than praises. So there needs to be a mechanism in place to address negative comments by companies.
Overall, social media marketing doesn’t translate directly into social media ROI, but it has an impact on overall ROI of business. Social media marketing is a communication plan, it can act as change agent, increased visibility and wider reach and it translates into revenues through various intangible means. The increase in ROI through social media needs to be managed by engaging with clients, tracking what clients and users are discussing on various platforms and forums and addressing customer complaints.
According to Forrester, identifying the value of social media marketing efforts comes down to looking at four factors:
1. Financial: Have costs decreased or sales increased?
2. Brand: Have perceptions of the brand improved?
3. Risk Management: Are you better prepared to respond to issues that affect brand reputation?
4. Digital: Has the brand enhanced its digital assets?
Disclaimer: Some or all of above facts and figures are compiled from different open source websites licensed under creative commons license and hence reproducible. This post contains various opinions and judgemental statements which are based on the research and studies done by me. However various facts and figures are sourced and compiled from the research done by several institutions including but not limited to Forbes, Dreamgrow, Psychology degree, FB newsroom, Harvard.edu, comscore, pewinternet. Please use this information as per your discretion and I would not be responsible for any loss attributed due to actions taken by you based on information presented herewith.


Following are some data about Social Media Analytics. Hope it can help you better understand about the social media analytics and can get some ideas from it.

Some Interesting facts:

• 1 out of every 8 people on earth are on facebook
• 9 out of 10 US internet users are on a social network
• 1 of 5 minutes spent online is on a social network and on average the time spent on social network has increased from ~8% in 2007 to ~20% in 2012
• In one minute we produce: 694,980 status updates and 532,080 tweets
• Average number of friends in real life: 150, whereas average number of friends on facebook: 245
• People add friends because: 82% know in real life, 60% mutual friends, 29% due to appearance and 11% for business networks
• 250 million photos are uploaded daily and 35% of users tag themselves

Now this is even more interesting: Half of all users compare themselves to others when they view photos or status updates:

• As people spend more time on Facebook, they start believing that others have a better life than they do (Did u ever felt that ….)
• People with high levels of narcissism or low level of self-esteem spend more than an hour a day on Facebook
• When people get frustrated by seeing others high success, they start feeling depressed and many a times quit facebook or stop going to facebook

Topic 10 - Preventing and managing social media marketing mistakes

-comment:

At the begining, I would like to share one of my own real experience about the mistake that I had made with social media.

I have a blog which I often used to share my recently living conditions. Sometimes I would like to write some sentence to describe the story and then put a relevant photos to share. However, last time I made a mistake with the photo. The story is talking about my friends wedding party. But when I put the photo to share what’s going on the wedding party, I had put my birthday party on the page. I did not realize that I made a mistake until my friend ask me: “today is your birthday too? Had you share your birthday day party on theirs wedding party too? why not invite me as well? who came else?” Then I knew I make a funny mistake. Using the word I learn from this course, I think this is a kind of social media mistake. I think with the rapidly development of the technology and the social media platform, it will become more and more easy to make a social media mistake. And in my opinion, I do really easy to make a social media mistake. May be the mistake is not a big deal, but you have to spend many time to correct the mistake as long as you put online. You may not image how powerful the social media has !

 

Many Companies have rushed into Social Media with no real understanding of how it works, what sites will work best for their business and are blissfully unaware of the potential damage they can do to their brand on such a big stage.

So what are the biggest mistakes companies make using social media?

1. No Consistency

Many businesses start off like a speeding train with their social media efforts. Only to find out that they cannot sustain the volume of activity and engagement. Don’t start something you can’t finish or don’t intend to do well. If you decide to blog, make a decision to do it on a consistent basis. Not randomly. And the more often, the better. Be consistent, present and responsive. Or don’t do it all.

2. Listen to me! Sell Sell Sell

Many businesses forget that they are dealing with real human beings. With hopes and dreams and pet peeves. People relate to each other through two-way conversation, both online and in person. Ever met someone who monopolises the conversation? I have. And I tend to walk the other way when I see them coming. These shiny new social media tools are not loud speakers. Talking about yourself won’t make others talk about you. Don’t shout offers and deals and me, me, me. Take your sales hat off and think like a human being. Invest in getting to know your customers better than your competition does. Listen. Be curious, and interested and engaged. Tell stories and share knowledge. Most of all, ask yourself how you can provide meaning and value. How can you be helpful? How can you support your best friends and biggest fans? How can you lift them up? It’s about people.

3. No Plan

Lots of businesses, especially small businesses don’t take time to build a proper strategy for social media or even do any planning or set any goals. Failing to Prepare is Preparing to Fail.

4. It’s Not the Holy Grail

So many businesses believe “social media” is the solution to all their problems. It’s not, but coupled with other forms of marketing it can be very useful. Think of the word social media as “word of mouth marketing”. (Other tools that work alongside your social media strategy are – Your Website, SEO, Digital PR, Database marketing….even your telephone, email and face to face communication).

 

5. Time

Many companies give up on their social media efforts just before they were about to succeed. It can take time to see a return on your social media efforts. Time – to get a loyal number of readers for you blog, Time – to build up a significant number of likes on your Facebook page, Time- for followers to start to trust and engage with you on Facebook and Twitter etc. So be prepared to give more than you get back initially and you will end up getting back far more than you put in.

6. Testing

Many companies rush into social media and never properly assess which Social Media sites are best for their business. There is no point being on Plaxo or LinkedIn if your customers (current and potential) are not there. Also, many companies make the mistake of posting great content on the right site at the wrong time. So test different times of the day with your posts and see what days and times get the best level of engagement.

7. Mixed Messages

Many companies make the mistake of acting differently on different social media sites. Eg. Being overly stuffy on LinkedIn and super casual on Facebook. This can confuse your customer and potentially damage your brand.

8. Seplling

Yes I did that on purpose…Spelling! Many companies become careless when using social media. Very often we see big companies publishing updates on Facebook or even articles riddled with spelling errors. This can look very unprofessional. Make sure you have all updates and posts spell checked and/or properly proof read.

9. Measure

Many businesses have no clue whether their social media efforts are working for them or not. They have not put anything in place to track or measure the impact of their tweets, facebook posts etc.

10. Knock Knock

A recent study in the UK found that 42% of customers expected a response to a query left on Facebook or Twitter within 60 minutes. Many companies are too slow in responding to their customers on Social Media sites and some fail to respond at all.

11. Getting Shirty

What happens when someone complains about our product or service online? That is a real nightmare and worry for most businesses. However it may in fact be better or someone to complain about us to our face, rather than behind our back. I have seen many companies making the mistake of getting defensive and starting a visible argument online. This is extremely damaging and in fact very often draws people over to the conversation as your bad press spreads virally. So if a complaint happens online acknowledge it and take the conversation off line ASAP.

12. Permanent Ink

Companies occasionally make the mistake of saying something they shouldn’t. This is a bad error in a meeting, but can be a disaster if done online. Remember everything we write on our Social Media sites are public and may even be searchable forever.

13. Ownership

A common mistake that many companies make is that they get a staff member to set up the company’s Facebook page or LinkedIn Group. If the account is set up by that individual’s personal details they can own the rights to that page and not the company. I heard of a company who recently paid an ex employee thousands of Euro to regain ownership of the company LinkedIn group. So ensure all accounts are set up using company emails and make your staff administrators of those accounts.

14. Believing everyone sees your content

Sometimes companies assume just because they have posted something up on Facebook their customers have seen it. This is a dangerous and ill advised assumption.

15. Believing no one sees your content

When we put information out in the public domain we must be aware that we are not in control of who sees our content. We think no one is listening or watching, but chances are we are wrong.

16. Get your facts Right

Companies have been caught out in the past by making up false statistics and facts online. This is a bad idea in a business meeting, but even more reckless online.


As social media marketing mistakes are so easy to happened, what and how to advoid the mistakes seem important and smart way to deal with the problems.

Here is a shor video about how to advoid social media mistakes. Hope you can get something from it.

Topic 9 - Promoting social media marketing programs

Hoteliers have been struggling to get a handle on the fast-moving social media universe. Whether it’s developing process for responding to guest issues, or even simply learning how to use Twitter, there are more and more options each day and it’s a struggle just to keep up.
A social media program is more than just responding to guest comments or sending out Twitter promotions. A comprehensive social media strategy has three components: strategy creation, monitoring and managing, and analysis. Much attention has been focused on the first two components, but hoteliers are just beginning to scratch the surface of the third. We will review the first two components, and then focus attention on the analysis stage to provide a deeper understanding of the options available to turn the data generated by your social media efforts into a strategic information asset.

The first stage is creating the social media strategy, which forms the foundation of the program. A good social media program is based on an online personality, which is not only compelling but also congruent with the brand personality. A channel management strategy dictates which channels to focus on and which messages to push through those channels. The goal of this phase is to establish a presence in the social media universe. Many companies employ an agency or consulting firm to help them through this stage, although this is not always necessary.


Next is the monitor and manage stage. In this stage, the strategy for consolidating activity on all channels, monitoring the activity and managing customer issues is developed and executed. There are technology solutions available that can consolidate activity on all channels, track key metrics, and allow the hotel to tactically respond to guests’ issues, comments and questions from one interface. The goal of this stage is to engage with the guests and resolve issues before they become a serious problem. Most activity in this stage is at the property, and executed by staff who know both the location and operations at a level to respond to detailed feedback from the guests.


The pinnacle of any social media strategy is a sound analysis program. The goal of the analysis stage is to elevate the firm from the tactical, day-to-day issue resolution to strategic, longterm reputation management. There are emerging analytics available to turn all of the activity in your social media universe into meaningful, actionable information. Basic descriptive statistics that quantify activity through the various channels, enumerate friends and followers and report on response rates to social media promotions are widely available, but those hotels who wish to gain a competitive advantage will also leverage advanced analytics for social network analysis and social media analysis.


Social network analysis, or customer link analysis, allows you to use the connections between people in social networks to identify those participants who are most influential. These are the people that your guests listen to and faithfully follow. An influencer is not just the person with the most friends and followers, but those who are referenced, retweeted and referred to over and over again. Once these influencers are uncovered, you can launch programs to target these folks directly, hopefully influencing them to say positive things about your brand. For example, if you are about to open a new property, or a new concept within a property, invite these influencers to the opening. Give them a special preview or an “insider” chance to experience your services. They will then go back to their networks and “market” your new property for you, in a genuine and credible way.


Social network analysis also allows you to identify micro-segments in the market. Whether it’s groups of potential customers who travel with pets, want to try new cuisines, or are looking for eco-friendly options, these micro-segments represent an opportunity to drive incremental stays to a new, specialized group of customers.


The second area of focus for social media analytics is text analytics. This is a series of algorithms that apply natural language processing to turn volumes of unstructured text data into meaningful, actionable information. There are three main types of text analytics: content categorization, text mining and sentiment analysis.


Content categorization classifies text documents into categories for further storage and analysis. This method is useful, for example, in automating the process of classifying the unstructured text feedback from open-ended questions in guest surveys. The algorithms could distinguish between a comment related to housekeeping from a maintenance issue, so that the comments could be automatically routed to the correct department.


Sentiment analysis, the final example of text analytics, identifies how guests feel about your brand in general, as well as specific attributes of your product or service. Natural language processing identifies emotions about your product or service, positive or negative, within unstructured text documents using the context in which certain words or phrases are used.


Best of all, social data is public data. With very few exceptions, any data on review sites, blogs, news channels or forums can be scraped and analyzed. This means that for the first time, hospitality companies can do an apples-to-apples comparison against their competitive set. You can use the same sentiment analysis that you used on your data on your competitor’s data, uncovering how your guests feel about you versus your competition.


After a solid analytics strategy has been put in place, including sentiment analysis, hotels can begin to compare sentiment to operational data, and understand the influence that the content of user reviews have on key operating metrics like booking volume, booking pace, ADR, occupancy, revenue and profitability. Collecting and storing social media data over time in an analysis-ready format allows for comparison with key operational metrics. These comparisons will allow hotels to further refine their social media strategy, paying attention to those channels that generate business, where social media truly has an impact, and not wasting effort on those that do not.


A comprehensive social media program includes a well thought-out social media strategy, a process for monitoring and managing guest comments, concerns and questions, and a sound analysis plan that allows you to leverage the information contained in the volumes of unstructured text data. The analysis component elevates your social media program from merely a tactical, day-to-day issues resolution effort to a strategic reputation management tool.

Topic 3 - Social technographics

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Google GmailYahoo MailOutlook.comAOL MailAny email    

By AddToAny

It is said by Groundswell that individuals fit into 1 or more of the 6 categories.

- Creators – may create blogs, websites, etc.
- Critics – participate in communities, blogs, commenting, etc.
- Collectors – bookmark websites
- Joiners – join communities e.g. Facebook
- Spectators – just read
- Inactives – don’t use social media at all

Over the years, the Social Technographics ladder evolved, with the numbers growing and shifting as social media grew in prominence among mainstream users. In January 2010, Forrester’s Josh Bernoff released an update to the popular Social Technographics ladder to visualize and categorize the current state of how consumers participate in the social Web. As you can see, behavior shifted upward in droves, in some cases doubling the level of engagement within roles that define social experiences. The definitions have also evolved to better reflect the online activity of today’s socialites.
Creators
2007 – 13%
2010 – 24%
Critics
2007 – 19%
2010 – 37%
Collectors
2007 – 15%
2010 – 20%
Joiners
2007 – 19%
2010 – 59%
Spectators
2007 – 33%
2010 – 70%
Inactives
2007 – 52%
2010 – 17%

 

“Social technologies have arrived big time. Facebook and Twitter are on the vanguard of much of the

most active online social activity. When we created the Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors,
we anticipated most categories of social behavior that continue today with one exception: the rapid
conversations that take place in tweets and Facebook status updates. To reflect the new behavior, we’ve added a rung to the Social Technographics ladder: Conversationalists, a group that starts out with 33% of the online population (compared with 70% who consume social content and 59% who use social networks). Marketers should still analyze the behaviors of their target audiences, but now analyzing markets by segment has become more important.”

 

Social Media Campaigns

In today's business world, communication become much more important than before.

Today, like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other online blog and other social media provides businesses with a new advertising and promotional platform.

Social media applications -- such nonprofit social media has made the scale of commercial enterprises have been actively involved.

*PP*http://news.carnoc.com/list/142/142872.html


JetBlue on Twitter Register a new account named "JetBlueCheeps", from July 2009 onwards, the company released every Monday morning for the next two weeks promotional information, such as their recently launched Burbank to Las Cheap Vegas $ 9 one-way ticket.

With twitter maturity and improvement of system functions, activities, proceeds further.

Many airlines also use youtube to benefit from the visual representation.

With Qantas Airways (Qantas Airways Ltd.) As an example, Youtube Qantas channel from 14 February 2006 on the line since the channel already has more than 45,500 visits. Their advertising "I Still Call Australia Home" in 3526 published within three days of visits there, and "Painting of the first Qantas A380" video, there are 87,152 visits.

 

 

 

 

 

Qantas: The Unliking of an Iconic Australian Brand

 

Topic 8 - Social CRM

 

CRM

 

 

   Customer Relationship Management (Customer Relationship Management, CRM), the first country to develop Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the United States, the concept of the original by Gartner Group, at the beginning of 1980 there is the so-called "Contact Management" (Contact Management), which collects customers Contact the company all the information, by the year 1990 has evolved into a including the call center support for data analysis of Customer care, Customer care). Recently began to popular in the enterprise electronic commerce.

 

  Online for a long time, CRM customer relationship management system for salesman is a very good tool to manage customers, with the help of the online CRM, the salesperson can better sales activities with the customers and follow up.



Customer relationship management (CRM) has three meanings:

(1) embodied in the new state enterprise management guiding ideology and concept;

(2) is the innovation of enterprise management mode and operation mechanism;

(3) is the enterprise management of information technology, management methods and application of the software and hardware system integration solutions.

references:

http://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E5%AE%A2%E6%88%B7%E5%85%B3%E7%B3%BB%E7%AE%A1%E7%90%86

Topic 5 - Key Platforms/ Key Social Media Platforms

Key Social Media Platforms

 

There are many social media platforms that organizations can use.  For example:
  * Facebook --social networking
   One of the most popular social media platform in the world. It's the top 1 social media platform being used in Australia.

  * Micro-blogging: Twitter
    The Twitter platform is used by 94% of marketers. Total visits in May 2009 were 134 million ; with 32 million unique visitors in April 2009. What's more, the answers question in short sentences of 140 characters or less.

  * Blogs 
    Currently there are 12,9 million active blogs with more than 5 billion readers.

  * Linkedin
   Linkedin is a kind of professional social media platform. So far, it is far more than just  50 million professionals to exchange the information and business networking.

  * RSS
   allow people to subscribe the websites or blog that they like. It's time-saving for reader to search the information online and easy to follow and update the staff that they like.

  * Youtube - vedio sharing
   For many organization, youtube still is an underutilized resource.

  * Flickr - photo sharing.
  People can put the favourite phone online.

  * Social Bookmarking
  Sovial Bookmarking allow users to save or tag or manage or share the web pages that they like.

  * Podcasts
 Podcasts usually is digital audio or video, which is released regularlly and made available for download by means of web syndication.

  * Chatrooms
  Build the network yourself that you would like to share something with others.




Reference:

D. Walsh. April 2, 2012. Six Key Social Playform For Busy Professionals. Retried from:  http://deswalsh.com/2012/04/02/six-key-social-platforms-for-busy-professionals/

Virtual Project Consulting. 2013. Retried from: http://www.virtualprojectconsulting.com/11-key-social-media-tools/