The real numbers behind your social media indices

According to a new survey by online business community Manta, Social media use is trending upward and nearly 50% have increased time spent on social media this year and nearly 55% say they’re using platforms like Twitter and Facebook as the most important tool for either acquiring new customers of generating sales leads. It is very praiseworthy that more and more companies are getting involved in social media, but few are able to report its real value. According to eMarketer, only 13% of marketers feel they are "very effective" at measuring social media efforts. In terms of measurement and accountability, social media should be treated the same as email, search, display and other marketing channels. If you want to see social media's true impact on your business, you need to have a system and framework for pulling real meaning from the data and trends that emerge from your measurement and monitoring.

You need to build a social media measurement strategy that aligns with business objectives, exhibits the business value of your social media program, and provides the insight that enables you to optimize for maximum impact. Put meaning behind the data you gather from social media.

Why it is so that few businesses have a framework in place to measure the real value behind social media? You need to align your business objectives with social measurement.

1. Monitor and react to social media 24/7:

Every minute is vital when it comes to preventing a Social Media crisis. 24/7 moderation protects a brand’s reputation and alerts them to developing issues as they occur.

2. Moderate and remove unsuitable content such as racism and pornography immediately:

Seventy-five percent of Facebook users believe pornographic and racist comments on a brand page are completely inappropriate. Sixty-six percent users would ‘unlike’ the brand and 39% would never buy the product again.

3. Implement strong threat detection and escalation processes:

You need to react immediately to your Twitter account being hi-jacked on a holiday. As we saw with the recent hacking of a fast food chain’s social media account, it is critical to be alerted to a hacked account as quickly as possible. In this instance, it resulted in 53 hijacked tweets that were retweeted more than 70,000 times.

4. Monitor your campaign sentiment:

A badly thought out Social Media campaign can spread like wild fire. A quick reaction to negative sentiment will make all the difference. A recent example involved the banking sector using charitable organizations in their campaigns receiving a huge social media backlash.

5. Influencers need to be responded fast:

A celebrity tweet complaining about your product or service will only go one way if it’s not dealt with fast. Conversely, a quick and proactive response can do wonders for your brand’s reputation.

Through today's technology, your business likely has increasing access to information about how customers and potential ones behave especially online - consuming media, interacting with friends, indicating interest in products, and of course making purchases. Needless to say, this data is a source of competitive advantage that your group, large or small, can and should leverage to predict future behavior and better position yourself in the marketplace. The challenge, for many businesses, is in lacking the tools, know-how, and resources. Once you've found the data you know matters, you can analyze and make interpretations that means to all parts of your business planning and practical execution, which will help you to take actionable decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Content Marketing - making of a newsletter

In today’s competitive scenario, every big enterprise wants to prove themselves as a thought leader in their respective segment. Newsletters play an important role in brand-building strategy to target a specific audience which might convert into your potential customer. It is an effective way to build a relationship with a prospect, nurturing them along until they become a customer. Great content can always be helpful in getting their attention and keeping their attention. Newsletters often play the role of a strong medium for external and internal communication. Making of a newsletter involves specific skill sets and goes through the following process:

• Decide on the theme and periodicity of the newsletter.
• Based on the theme, co-ordinate with the writer, copy-editor and the designer to decide on the requirements to accomplish the assignment.
• Come up with a project schedule and scope of the work document.
• Based on the theme, the writer will come-up with a table of content (TOC) and will take approval from the competent authority.
• The writer starts working on creating the content.
• The content is sent to the copy-editor for proof-reading, grammatical and linguistic changes.
• The copy-editor sends back the copy-edited versions to the writer for final approval.
• The second copy-edited version is sent for final approval. This step may repeat multiple times based on the complexity of the project.
• During the quality check process for the content, the design team comes up with a design template for the newsletter.
• The design template gets approved and the final content is sent to the designer for creation of the final print-ready pdf version.
• The print ready pdf version is again checked by the copy-editor to ensure the quality of the content.
• Create the final draft of the print-ready pdf.
• The pdf version is made available online and downloadable from the required website and html pages are made online for the website visitors.
• Send an E-mailer to the client database to inform the subscribers about publishing the newsletter.
• Share it through your social media portals. Your readers will love to re-share it as long as it carries great and knowledgeable content.
• Request for email responses to the newsletter content.
• Think about using a moderated blog with audience posting as a source of newsletter content as it might be useful not only to get directly involved with your target audience but also to generate curiosity and interest about the content. 

By following these simple steps, you can easily design your newsletter. But, involvement of quality contributors in every step to accomplish the task is more important and crucial. At any cost, you have to provide quality content maintaining the periodicity of the newsletter.

IDC report - optimistic on social vendors

IDC MarketScape has released its "Worldwide Pharmaceuticals Social Media Analytics 2012 Vendor Assessment" report. The report says that there is an increasing interest in social media software applications and profiles the vendors such as Brandwatch, Cognizant, Genpact Social and Digital Transformation Services, Indegene, ListenLogic, Meltwater, Radian6, Semantelli and Visible Technologies.

Congnizant has been recognized by IDC MarketScape as a leading vendor for pharmaceuticals social media analytics for the year 2012. As per the report, “Cognizant is highly focused on the pharmaceutical industry and is considered by its customers to have very high pharmaceutical industry expertise.”

Eric Newmark, Program Director of IDC Health Insights' Life Science Business Systems service, was quoted in the release, saying, “Many pharmaceutical companies are ramping up their investment in social media analytics as a large majority of consumers now go online to research their medical condition and treatment alternatives. The information they find, combined with their physicians’ opinion, is often the largest influencing factor on the prescription or treatment sought. Hence companies should understand what consumers are finding online and closely monitor its effect on their brand.”

This is very true. Social media has a measurable impact on PR and analytics. It also gives huge boost to brand recognition. However, many companies are still struggling to identify clear social attribution. Branding in this social media age is very crucial and challenging, where the biggies always need to keep an eye on the social media listening trend.

The findings of the IDC report will surely help the healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to choose the right analytics application and right vendors to analyze their social media brand perception.

“Adobe Social” - will it be a game changer?

Last week, Adobe entered the race of social media analytics by launching its first end-to-end social media marketing and analytics software suite “Adobe Social.”

AllFacebook, the “Unofficial Facebook Blog,” gives Adobe Social a strongly positive review. The blog recommends the product for its extremely user-friendly interface. It states, “Adobe Social’s ability to create and demonstrate business impact from social media will enable the social marketer to secure a seat at the planning table.”

Over the past decade, social media has become an unavoidable and integral part of business strategy. With Adobe Social, the company promises to move social media users “from social media intuition to marketing insight.”

“The ability of Adobe Social to reveal deeper connections across the social activities of our fans and manage key business results and hundreds of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles across a single platform is incredibly valuable,” states Gretchen Fox, VP Social Media, LiveNation, at Adobe Social’s official product overview.

The Tech Crunch blog also gives it a positive review by saying, “The other big selling point is the integration with other products in Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite — as Adobe puts it, it’s breaking social advertising out of its silo.”

The social media analytics market is currently dominated by Radian 6, Cision, Vocus, etc. and will offer a fierce challenge to Adobe Social. It will be watchable in near future how Adobe Social will penetrate into this market segment and proves itself as a game changer.

Social CRM: why it is crucial?

Over the last one decade, social media has changed the definition of traditional CRM. Before, it was just a one way communication process. But emergence of social media and its maximum utility for CRM had made it a two-way communication channel. This evolved the concept of sCRM or Social CRM.

As per Paul Greenberg, “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Why sCRM is crucial in terms of your brand perception? Because it is spontaneous…………….. If you do not engage a monitoring system or do not keep a close eye on the developments, you might loose your brand loyalty. At the same time, if you keep your customers engaged with your product/brand and you have a real-time tracking system of your brand’s performance, sCRM can create a win-win situation for you as well your customers.

sCRM is more than just engaging your customers or prospects to your product’s/brand’s microsites or Twitter/Facebook pages or building communities or blog pages. It is not only about social listening or creating a media buzz through your PR agencies. sCRM is a mix of all.

Say, you have engaged your customers through these channels. Now, the challenge is how do you monitor the activities. Is it through some enterprise listening software? Or, some third party service providers? Or self? Well, it is again a mix of all.

Now, the next challenge you might face is your customer’s identity in social media portals. Most often you face the issue of multiple identities of your customers. So, you should have a technology or a practice to integrate multiple identities (Identity Management).

sCRM is all about creating a collaborative environment, both internally and externally. The key to sCRM success is to understand the issues/challenges pertaining to your product or brand and solving them with customer engagement and interaction in a process-driven way.

E-Mail Marketing - 15 ways to take it close to your sales prospect

1. Spam filters: to avoid mails landing up at spam folders of the recipients, you should avoid using product or service promotional words such as discounts, free etc.; special characters such as $, %, #, etc. both in the subjectline as well as in the mail body.

2. Always use a targeted and clean mailing database. Recheck and update your mailing list periodically.

3. Autoresponders: use periodical autoresponder feature to target your sales prospect with high integrity.

4. Sender’s signature: always use a signature to avoid confusion about sender’s identity.

5. Link-clicks: as per studies, internet users respond well to blue/bold/underlined texts most often. You can use this logic to your link-clicks in the mail body.

6. Avoid heavy graphics to minimize the size of the E-mailers. Use only meaningful images relevant with the subject.

7. Use consistent, professional and user-friendly color codes.

8. Put the most interesting content at the top so that if your recipient is using any mail preview feature, he/she catches the most relevant part in the preview.

9. Subjectline: if your subjectline does not able to catch your recipients’ attention, he/she will immediately delete the mailer before even looking at the mail body. To grab receiver’s attention, you should specify the benefits reading the E-mailer at the subjectline.

10. For repetitive E-mail campaigns, you should send all the E-mailers at a predefined time and schedule. Before fixing that time and day, understand the receivers’ working schedule. For example: if your database contains mostly personal E-mail ids, you should send your mailers during the second half of the day; may be just before you leave office. If your database contains mostly official E-mail ids, you should avoid sending the E-mailers in the morning hours.

11. As per some research studies, E-mails that are sent during the middle of the week (Tuesdays & Wednesdays) get maximum readers’ attention.

12. Unsubscribe option: your E-mailer should always give a freedom to unsubscribe your mailers at any point of time. This should not be a hectic and tiring process; just a one-click option.

13. Disclaimer statement: any E-mailer without a disclaimer statement is regarded as unauthentic.

14. Ask for readers’ feedback: you can do so by putting a direct link to your social media pages or creating a short online form.

15. Your E-mail service provider: last but not the least; a lot more depend on your bulk E-mailing software/tool. Test and try different service providers before selecting the best one; also, check different features such as campaign report generation, user-interface, etc. before going for any paid option.

IBM Forward View Virtual Forum 2011