“Big-Picture” of Multi-Channel Social Measurement

Facebook’s “Insights” tab or Twitter’s “Activity Dashboard,” are few examples how the social networks are gradually accepting the importance of measurement for the social marketers. However, majority of the marketers struggle to get the “Big-Picture” of their social media data analysis. To get the view of their social landscape, often they find it challenging to standardize the metrics or analyzing the data in context. To conclude with the deeper insight of any complex social media data, there are few fundamental rules for multi-channel measurement.

The list of social networks that are relevant to marketers is long and diverse. One of the biggest problems that marketers face with multi-channel analysis is having access to all of their data across all platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, etc.

Most of the social media analyst measure and report on Facebook and Twitter. However, to get the big-picture, you should analyze at least six networks. This breadth of reporting equates to a lot of time and energy in compiling the data and filtering out the noise. The data aggregation process is about balance, gathering as much context as possible and put it in the most simple and practical format possible.

Putting metrics from various channels in context is crucial to understanding social performance and gaining useful, tactical insights. The problem is that the growth in number of social channels makes it hard to consolidate and standardize reporting. The key to putting this massive amount of data in context is standardization. By standardizing terminologies around similar metrics, you will be able to look at activity and engagement in a simple format and with full context. For example, instead of Facebook Fans and Pinterest or Twitter Followers, use a term like “Audience.”

Once you standardize your terminologies, focus on benchmarking the methodology. The most effective and commonly used benchmarking methods for social media marketers are: taking at-least three periods as an average and apples-to-apples comparison of these periods like pre-campaign performance measurement to the post-campaign monthly reports. Just average the last three months to benchmark the most recent efforts and you will get a solid rolling average. With this type of comparison, it makes the most sense to focus on rates and ratios. You should focus on measuring things like growth rate and engagement rate. This approach will allow you to normalize over time periods without worrying about the scale differences.

Data has become a central need for social media marketers. No longer are aggregate totals enough. Marketers need complete, practical measurement that allows them to review all of their activities. Multi-channel analysis is the key to this holistic approach while each puzzle piece is crucial. It’s the complete picture that helps social media marketers do their best work in terms of taking a corrective measure during a mass-media campaign.

LinkedIn as the Content Marketing Hub

LinkedIn is gradually becoming a hub for professional content. 1.5 million publishers are actively using LinkedIn “Share” button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform. There were 184 million unique visitors worldwide to LinkedIn in Q3 of 2013. According to a recent survey, “Content Managers spend 8 hours each week consuming professionally relevant content. 61% of them consider that professional content is necessary for success. 91% of them are using it weekly for professionally relevant content vs. 64% for online news sites and only 29% for Twitter and 27% for Facebook.”

Some quick facts about LinkedIn marketing:

Unique content: Create content that sparks the discussion. Increase the frequency of updates and publish unique content via LinkedIn. The opportunity to build programs around LinkedIn leverages content to drive engagement life-cycles and stimulate organic community building. Members are more likely to share professional content that builds their professional brands, strengthens their professional networks, or helps them sell to their networks.

Popular content: Emphasize on sharing popular content types such as new research, breaking industry news, case studies, content produced by business leaders, etc.

Sponsored updates: LinkedIn sponsored updates can increase the visibility of the content by many folds.

Optimized employee profile: An optimized employee profile can boost the visibility of the company and its content in the search results—both on and off the network. That’s because search engines like Google scour pages and URLs for keywords, and LinkedIn profiles offer many opportunities to embed keywords, such as within the LinkedIn URL, other URLs listed on personal profiles, job titles and descriptions, and content links the profile holder includes.

LinkedIn influencers: Connect with the LinkedIn influencers. Take advantage of discovery modules within LinkedIn to help you find more relevant content based on the people you’re following and the posts you’re reading.

Display ads: Make use of LinkedIn Premium Display Advertising and integrate display ads.

Follow company ads: Use “Follow Company Ads” to deliver personalized messages on the homepages of your target audience, establishing the relevance of your business to these members and building your Follower audience.

Make use of “Pulse”: Using LinkedIn Pulse, access full articles and rich graphics, from a wealth of resources and more than 750 publishers. Start liking the most relevant and share a few periodically.

Showcase pages: With “Showcase Pages”, you can build a presence and present a unique voice for every important part of your business. By creating dedicated pages for your more prominent brands, businesses, and initiatives using “Showcase Pages,” you can extend your LinkedIn presence.

Attract more followers: Cultivate a larger following with a multi-channel approach. Encourage employees to add a link to the company page in their email signatures and add a Follow button to your website.

Follow the 4-1-1 Rule: The 4-1-1 Rule was coined by Tippingpoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, originally created for Twitter. It can successfully be applied to company’s content marketing strategy using LinkedIn. The rule states: “For every one self-serving tweet, you should retweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” Instead of constantly bombarding your followers with demos, webinars, and whitepaper downloads, create a cadence of helpful insights relevant to your audience.

LinkedIn groups: Create more focused groups for the services and products category, encourage members to actively participate, and get aligned for community success.

Track the success/failure: Keep a track of your “Content Marketing Score” and the “Trending Content” to qualify your content marketing efforts on LinkedIn.

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.

Impact of a case-study in building brand credibility

A case-study may be defined as an analysis of a given scenario or a situation that often regarded as a challenge for an establishment. A case-study gives a solution to a problem which might be technical or non-technical. It is often seen that case-studies play an important role in establishing a strong opinion about finding the ways to solve a business challenge. Manufacturing giants and business service providers are mostly benefited by the facts they share about their products/services through these studies.

In current business scenario, case studies are not just limited to any management curriculum. They are widely used for brand-building activities. These studies often help the business giants to establish themselves as the thought leaders in their respective segment. The main challenge in designing a case study could be inspiring the reader to make a favorable decision. Even tiny little things like the design and layout could impact readers' decision making process. The content has to provide potential customers, investors and/or partners the information they require to make buying or investment decisions. It should also showcase the first-hand experience with a company, product or service and hence build credibility. The case evaluates the effectiveness of a product or service. Hence, the writer should be careful in delivering message through this new form of journalism that complements traditional mediums of advertising.

A case study can also help introducing a new product or service with impact extending the value of advertising message with in-depth and content-rich coverage. An effective message will surely generate the desired impact. Designing an influential case-study involves lots of research on how others have defined the situation. If the situation is common then the challenge is more as you will also have to deal with a competitive scenario and you have to establish the facts in favor of your product/service. Interviewing the key resources in developing the case helps you establish the facts. These skilled resources can be quoted directly to present it in more convincing way.

Detailed analysis of all the information collected plays a significant role in ascertaining your overall statement that you are well-versed with the situation. Finally, conclude the study in such a way that it gives a fruitful solution to the situation described. The whole purpose of designing a case can not be successful without a clear and crisp message. A message that directly influences your potential customers, investors and/or partners to make a investment decision.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/impact-of-a-case-study-in-building-brand-credibility-6426124.html

KOLs - today's pharma thought leaders

In today's volatile market scenario, listening and engaging Key Opinion Leaders or KOLs in your digital marketing plan is very crucial. In order to identify KOLs, there has to be a firm understanding of the issues and circumstances that make them key in the first place. Typically the opinion leader is held in high esteem by those who accept his or her opinions. KOLs are often regarded as the key to business success in Pharmaceutical/Healthcare industry. They are the agents who actively participate in discussions or forums in order to address drug-related issues or queries raised by people. Now, the question is “How do they influence your brand perception?”

KOLs may not necessarily be involved directly with your brand; however, they have the ability to build or destroy your brand image by influencing their followers. They are the people others are watching. Irrespective of the therapeutic field, the use of KOLs is a global phenomenon for business success. In pharmaceutical business research, KOL management and mapping play important role. Your KOL databases have to have the names who can easily tell what your research should focus and what are the target customers’ current needs. In terms of marketing & sales, KOLs act as a the leading indicator of therapy acceptance. Pharma companies generally connect with the KOLs early in the drug development process to provide advocacy activity and key marketing feedback.

To identify the KOLs, you need to know their key characteristics. Market Strategies International conducted a research study among a selected group of 100 national and regional KOLs and came out with the following key characteristics of a KOL:

• Regularly sought out by their colleagues for opinions or advice
• Speak often at regional or national conferences
• Have published articles in a major journal during the past two years
• Consider themselves early adopters of new treatments or procedures
• Help establish protocols for patient care

Identifying KOLs using social network analysis

Mostly medical practitioners use their local network to advice, opine and showcase their expertise. You can term it as a closed community that has the ability to influence millions of people. It needs a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account both the direct and indirect links in the network to identify the best influencers who really can create an impact on your consumers to build an opinion or a sentiment. If you have a strong community management model around your brand, these influencers will bring in more people to talk about your brand. Building an interacting model of communication and closely monitoring the conversation help to build strong brand perceptions which result in increase velocity of product adoption.

So, are you listening???

Salesforce gives the Cloud a new social direction

Is this an aggressive marketing move? Or, is this a step to stay ahead in this social revolution age? Salesforce launching today its new social media analytics software suite “Marketing Cloud” is regarded as a timely push to bring in consumer social media features into business and industrial settings.

Salesforce is no longer a company that provides only online software managing your sales process. It has evolved itself to explore new markets like social media marketing in order to sustain growth. Marketing Cloud is a product of Salesforce's closely watched, $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media. However, the company is getting tough challenge from its rival Oracle, which has captured headlines with its social media-related acquisitions recently.

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, said at the Dreamforce conference 2012, “Are you and your company going through a social revolution? We see your customers and your employees and your partners are all connected.”

Yes, Mr. Benioff. You are right in saying so. Everyday or rather every moment, big brands face challenges from social media either in the form of opinions or reviews or customer sentiment. Listening, analyzing and engaging – these are the three ways how one can counter the challenges and this forms three closely-related market segments called Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing and Social Media Consulting. All the big players like Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft and Google have their own interest to dominate this market. This might be too early to predict who will win the race, but this competition is slowly getting very interesting to watch out for.

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