Target Message vs. Social Conversations I’ll get right to the point: When “audience” becomes “community,” “message” becomes “conversation.” Conversation is reciprocal, because dialogue is reciprocal, and social media is a dialogue marketing medium.

In order to start and participate in a meaningful, reciprocal social conversation, you have to think about what your community will find most engaging.  Content is the cornerstone of a good social program, and social karma is its belief system.

Our last social media blog post on The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing discussed moving from the traditional concept of “target audience” to “target social communities”.

If you missed the first delicious nuggets of this social media strategy series, here’s the short summary:

1)    Social Listening: Listen first.  Use a good social monitoring tool if you can, and a free one (or collection thereof) if you can’t.

2)    Dialogue Marketing: Word-of-mouth marketing is the only thing that makes your marketing social.  If nobody’s talking (read: clicking and typing), you’ve just published long-format broadcast advertising.  Measure social media program success using metrics based on social actions, not impressions.

3)    Social Communities: Communities are the new target audience.  They are credible and interpersonal, and with the right social engagement tools to help identify them, you’ll find that they often contain influencers.  A monologue marketing campaign aims to influence audience members individually; a dialogue marketing campaign aims to influence community members collectively by sparking conversation.

Speaking of conversation, it’s the new message like kale is the new spinach.

Social Conversations vs. Target Message

For the purposes of social marketing, one-way broadcast messages have been replaced with two-way reciprocal conversations.  It’s important to remember that in order to be a conversation (rather than a broadcast message masquerading as one), content must spark engagement or social action from the community.

As a brand or business, you want to engage your community to the point that your members take the time to use their online equity to influence their own communities using your good content.

This is important, so I’ll highlight it: when someone in your community becomes an advocate for you to the point that they give you brand placement on their own personal, digital real estate, you achieve free impressions among a new group of people who have connected, on purpose, to the person putting out those messages.  Call it word-of-mouth marketing, call it social marketing; it is both of these things, but more importantly, it is influencer marketing.  People have overlapping online communities, and carry varying degrees of influence among them.  We’ll cover identifying the most engaged influencers later; for the purposes of this post, it’s enough to say that while your advocate’s communities may not be targeted like your advertising (i.e. demographics, interests, etc.), they are extremely targeted in terms of attention span.  Here’s why:

Community brings with it a willingness to pay attention to messaging from a trusted source – i.e. one of its own community members – and this is why social sharing is so critical to the success of any good social media program.

The benefits of inspiring social sharing within a social community are:

1. Free brand impressions on an extremely targeted channel
2. Personal endorsement from a trusted source within a community
3. With that personal endorsement comes exposure to a new group of potential brand advocates.

The potential of social media to influence people exponentially is crucial to understanding its importance.  Once your content is being shared, there really is no end to the number of people it might touch.

This exponential possibility is the reason that the primary goal of social marketing is to drive word-of-mouth buzz because, when it happens, your customers are introducing you in a credible and viral way.  As we discussed in our initial exploration of dialogue marketing, a new consumer must be exposed to a message 5-7 times before remembering your brand.

Here’s the challenge: starting conversations and inserting your brand into them isn’t necessarily easy.  People aren’t connecting with each other online so that marketers can sell them stuff, so it’s up to you to figure out how to grab the attention of someone whose average online attention span is 9-seconds long and who doesn’t necessarily want to be sold to in the first place.

Social Conversations & Content Marketing Strategy

Because it’s difficult to start those viral conversations, strategy behind social conversations is part of what the industry calls “content marketing.”  We’ll dig into the details of developing a good content marketing program in a future blog post.  For now, the social media marketing strategy infographic from the pros at Social Media Marketing World 2013 offers a good checklist to apply to your social conversations strategy.

If you’re just getting started using social conversations as a marketing device, the first thing to do is to be helpful. Social and content marketing specialist Jay Baer calls this a “Youtility,” and tells us that being helpful is critical to social marketing success.  A great example he gave in a recent talk is the app to help you choose the right car seat, developed by the Phoenix Children’s Hospital.

Remember that the larger goal for social conversations is engagement.  It is at the core of human nature to expect reciprocity in communication; one-way conversations are rarely fun for anyone.  Being listened to, helped or entertained in some way are some of the fundamental requirements we have in most social interactions.  Think about the blogs you read, the Facebook updates you notice, or – if you remember the  mid-’90′s – that magical time at the advent of email when the bulk of your inbox was filled with “Fwd: fwd: fwd:” in subject lines that led to a joke, a cute or funny picture of a cat(s), insider news, or some sort of helpful list of tips to navigate through the world (like “How to Not Be Fooled by the Nigerian Money Scam”).

Sparking Successful Social Conversations Takes…

For more on crafting strong social conversations, download “The Four C’s of Social Media Marketing”

• Relevance– Make sure that you’re looking to your community interests first, not your own
• Reciprocity – Community is about give and take.  Give first.
• Engagement – A dialogue is two-way.  Be sure to engage your base and give them something great to share with their communities.

So when you’re crafting your social conversations strategy, the #1 thing to remember is that the way to achieve meaningful brand engagement and buzz is to provide content that encourages community interaction.  So yes, be helpful.  Or be funny, or understanding, or be all of those things.  Be whatever it is that your target social community would find most engaging and useful to them, and you’ll spark truly social conversations.

The post Social Conversations | The Second C of Social Media Marketing appeared first on English.

Social Media Marketing Strategy takeaways from #SMMW13

Meltwater was a proud sponsor of Social Media Marketing World 2013 last week in San Diego.  This conference brought together a Who’s Who of social media gunslingers for an in-depth discussion of social media marketing strategy, tricks and tips for taming the wild west of social.

The top 11 insights we came away with are listed at left.  Many of the key takeaways to inform your social media marketing strategy circle back to the main point in our social media how-to, The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing: traditional monologue marketing techniques should be re-calibrated to apply to the new social dialogue marketing model.

In short: be social like a real person, because you are a real person, and so is each member of your target social communities.

Social Media Marketing Strategy by the Pros

It was inevitable that the presenters at a social media marketing conference would use a few clever tricks to dominate the conference chatter.  Hats off go to Dave Kerpen, who managed to garner the most tweets of anyone due to having a champagne lottery for folks tweeting about him, and Mari Smith, who came in second by tweeting her favorite quotes from other notable speakers, which were in turn RT’d by those following the #SMMW13 hashtag.

Guy Kawasaki used a clever little gimmick: taking photos of anyone taking photos of him.  This caused a lot of post-conference buzz once the gallery was published, demonstrating that Guy, unsurprisingly, has a great handle on his target social communities and the sort of reciprocal content that will garner positive social karma.

Another great social media marketing strategy shout-out goes to keynote speaker Sally Hogshead and her fascinating personality test, because assembling an audience of highly connected and inherently self-promotional social media marketing experts and letting them take a groovy personality test for free is a really good way to get people talking about that personality test.

So remember: be fascinating, people.  (And take the comma out and be that, too.)

The post Social Media Marketing Strategy | Top 11 #SMMW13 Insights appeared first on English.

In our social media blog series digging into The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing, we’ve discussed social listening as the foundation of a strong social strategy.  Once that strategy is set, campaigns come to life by engaging target social communities in conversation, rather than broadcasting a message at them.  Content that goes unshared is lonely, long-format advertising, not social marketing.  Remember, the number one goal of any social media marketing manager is to inspire word-of-mouth buzz.

With that framework in place, we can now dive into the first C: social communities.

Social Communities | What are they?

Those of us who grew up steeped in traditional marketing and advertising principles (read: those of us who remember life before the 90’s) learned that any successful marketing campaign has three components: a target audience, a message, and a channel.

Once we move from the one-way message of monologue marketing to the two-way conversation of social dialogue marketing, our target audience becomes a target community.  Like advertisers, social marketers can qualify social communities with standard demographic and psychographic filters (e.g. name, age, gender, interests).  However, the nature of social media is that social communities can also be evaluated by their member relationships, behaviors and profiles.  With this insight, marketers can determine what sort of content is engaging its community members, and who the influencers are within that social community.

Social Communities vs. Audiences

An audience, by definition, is a group of people who witness something.  A community, by contrast, is an interconnected group of people who participate in something together.  This is where we clearly see the difference: a monologue marketing campaign aims to influence individual audience members directly, whereas a dialogue marketing campaign aims to influence community members collectively by sparking conversation.

Both audiences and social communities are made up of people.  Evaluating a community as a sum of individuals allows us to examine participation and influence beyond the single target community into the other communities where an individual may be a part.  The ability to spot and engage the most influential members within a given community is one of the big advantages social media marketers have over advertisers, and it’s why social analytics should focus on actions (shares) rather than intentions (impressions).

For more on building strong social communities, download The Four C’s of Social Media Marketing

Social Communities Are…

• Social – members interact with one another
• Collective – members share a common interest
• Credible – members share a foundation of trust with one another
• Engaged – members are paying attention
• Collaborative – members want valuable content to share, and will respond in kind

Managing Social Communities Well

In our recent SXSW wrap-up post measuring social media brand effectiveness, we noted the success of the Grumpy Cat campaign sponsored by social media publisher Mashable.  The cat’s appearance and consequent domination of social chatter was a great example of marketers knowing their audience – and in this case, that audience was a vibrant social community.

The Internet loves its feline memes, and a picture really is worth 1,000 words.  Mashable set up a tent where people could come to take a photo with Grumpy Cat at a conference drawing 25,000 attendees, self-selected as both tech-savvy and tweet-ready.  By leveraging Grumpy Cat’s online popularity in person (in the fur?), Mashable gave the technorati a valuable piece of personal content to share on social channels and hijacked the social buzz, making Grumpy Cat was the most talked-about attendee of the entire show.

Mashable crafted its social marketing campaign with a target social community firmly in mind.  Everyone who attended SXSW is a potential Mashable reader, and a large percentage of attendees are motivated to demonstrate their position on the bleeding edge of digital by sharing hot interactive trends.  In planning a campaign that would delight, engage and inspire this social community to share, Mashable demonstrated that cultivating strong social communities can really be as easy as flying a cat to Texas – and hey, cats fly free when accompanied by a human.

The post Social Communities | The First C of Social Media Marketing appeared first on English.

Meltwater’s online intelligence capabilities are already used by 20,000 clients worldwide for insight into online media (Meltwater News) and social media (Meltwater Buzz).

Now, the Meltwater approach to Big Data can find the Luvv of your life!  Meltwater’s proprietary Luvv algorithm searches across social networks, relationships and actions to give you a truly holistic view of your potential match.

Meltwater’s comprehensive online intelligence informs advanced targeting features such as the Revolt-o-Meter®, and also allows for endless social search filters.  Find 25-30 year olds who:

• Have recently changed their Facebook status to single
• Have a steady job with a Sr. Manager title or higher
• Have previous long-term partners who said mostly positive things about them while they were dating
• Are still Facebook friends with their exes, but don’t engage in flirty social actions with them
• Have never listed “It’s Complicated” as a relationship status
• Tweet less than 3 times a day
• Grew up within 25 miles of your hometown (making holidays with your future kids easier)
• Like “50 Shades of Grey” and “30 Rock”

The infographic at right compares old-school dating sites with Meltwater Luvv.  The difference is in the data!

Stay tuned for this exciting new product launch!

*Please be advised that this is an April Fool’s Day joke.  Meltwater is not planning to launch any sort of dating product or service, although given the amount of social data already tracked by Meltwater Buzz, it’s possible… hmm, tempting…

Seriously, though, Meltwater is going to stick with online intelligence for your business Marketing programs.  Happy April 1st!

The post Meltwater Luvv – Big Data-ing Service Coming Soon! appeared first on English.

Working for a social analytics company that measures gazillions of sources on the Internet is pretty interesting.  The big deal about Big Data is that social listening gives Marketers the opportunity to move away from a monologue marketing model and to a social dialogue marketing model in order to jump-start word of mouth – and word of mouth gives Marketers exponential and free real estate to make an impression on closed, interpersonal communities.

This week we decided to measure the social chatter surrounding the Supreme Court (for the Twitterati, that’s #SCOTUS).  We measured from around 9AM on March 26th to 4PM on March 27th, capturing over 600,000 pieces of social content with our social analytics suite Meltwater Buzz.

What we found from an overall sentiment view wasn’t necessarily surprising given the self-selecting nature of those using social media regularly.  That’s to say, from a social analytics standpoint, the pro-marriage-equality chatter far, far, faaaar outweighed any chatter supporting Prop 8 & DOMA / opposing same-sex marriage.

The story from a Marketing perspective, though, was the incredible response to one extremely well-organized campaign, and a few well-worded tweets.  The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) absolutely dominated Facebook and Twitter; their #marriageequality hashtag was far and away the single most tweeted term, with 190,000 mentions in the time frame we measured.  To put this in perspective, the #marriagequality hashtag received about 30% of all social mentions, period, earned 44% more chatter the Supreme Court itself (131,000), had over twice chatter of DOMA and Obama, and outdid Prop 8 itself by almost 4X.

The HRC’s social dominance continued to Facebook, with a red-and-pink version of their logo taking over avatars here, there and everywhere.  This blogger is only sad that social analytics don’t recognize images (even Facebook can’t do it… yet!), so how much uptake there was numercially is a metric that, sadly, will remain a mystery.  But at a  glance this campaign was enormously successful, with profile pictures changing consistently over the 2-day period that the trials were held.

Sophisticated social analytics provide marketers with the tools to not only measure their campaign efforts, but to look at multiple data points before, during and after a campaign in order to glean the sort of business insights that will help them adjust their next campaign.  By honoring the the 4 C’s of social media marketing – Community, Conversation, Channel, and Campaign – the HRC was able to dominate social chatter by jump-starting viral word-of-mouth.

The post Social Analytics on Prop 8 & DOMA – Infographic appeared first on English.

If a tweet falls in a forest and no one is around to share it, does it make a sound?

The short answer is: nope.  If your content isn’t shared socially, it simply isn’t social marketing.  As social media marketers, driving word of mouth is our only goal.

Social Dialogue Marketing Metrics

Word-of mouth marketing is a hallmark of social dialogue marketing gone well. It’s a form of engagement, and online community engagement is trackable.  Measuring the success of social media marketing campaigns is therefore best accomplished by using metrics associated with action: tweets, shares, emails, likes, other cleverly-named clicks.

Traditional PR and advertising models use impressions to measure performance.  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do too, and for good reason: it’s the biggest number, and it provides an idea as to the possible number of people in the forest.  The old advertising adage is that people won’t remember your brand until they’ve seen it 7 times, so the number of impressions is a good metric to track, especially in advertising and PR.

In a social media marketing program, the inherently participatory nature of social media can increase your impression number exponentially.  When someone with 700 followers re-tweets your content, and 5 people in their network in turn re-tweet that content, your community members are giving you free, interpersonal ad real estate to make an impression on their network.  This is where word-of-mouth becomes incredibly powerful, and it’s a primary reason we as social media marketers strive for inciting the share over everything else.

The most compelling advantage of social media as a communication channel is that it combines the scale of traditional broadcast advertising with the dialogue of a personal sales call.  By using impressions as an indicator of a sound channel strategy, but using the actions themselves as a measure of performance in a social media marketing campaign, we’re well on our way to word-of-mouth greatness.  (Psst… tell a friend.)

Social Dialogue Marketing & The Four C’s

The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing provides a framework for applying traditional marketing principles to the wild west of social media marketing.  Social listening is the first step in leveraging the available tools and technologies out there to understand what a target audience is saying; as we discussed here, the second step is to use this information to jump-start interpersonal, credible, and viral word-of-mouth sharing.  We’ll dive into the 4 C’s themselves in future blog posts, but in the meantime, you can download this free social media marketing how-to guide in order to provide some context for driving social media marketing strategy and ROI.

At the end of the day, we must remember that social media marketing is supposed to be social.  Being social implies some sort of interaction between people.  The hallmark of honest social interaction is, you know, honest social interaction.  So when we’re thinking about pre-scheduling all those tweets, we have to bear in mind that placement on a social media channel doesn’t make our marketing social.  The difference between monologue advertising and social dialogue marketing is word-of-mouth sharing.

Tweet wisely, soldiers.

The post If a Tweet Falls in a Forest… | Social Dialogue Marketing & Word of Mouth appeared first on English.

As SXSW is the largest interactive media conference in the world with 25,000+ attendees, we were not surprised by the high level of chatter, nor were we particularly surprised by all the talk about parties, lounges and free food.  What surprised almost everyone, though, was that internet sensation Grumpy Cat managed to upstage all the human keynote speakers and declare herself “Chairmeme Meow” of the whole kit and caboodle.  Move over, Elon Musk.

Mashable’s genius in bringing Grumpy Cat to the event reminds us that getting heard above the roar of the crowd requires one thing most of all: know your audience.

The internet community loves its memes, and particularly loves its cat memes.  While the drinking word cloud would indicate that more than a few attendees were flexing their late-night beer muscles in search of Olivia Wilde, by the light of day folks were a lot more excited about the prospect of being on the inside of this timely feline interactive joke.  Heck, even PETA didn’t object.

Despite Grumpy Cat’s domination of mammal-based social chatter, though, party talk still won the day.  All business travelers love free food and drinks, and SXSW had a wide variety of sponsored parties and lounges.  The “Lounge” and “Party” word clouds give us a good idea as to whose budgets were giving them the most bang for the buck.  VegasTech showed up consistently in both lounge and party chatter, so hats off to you, VegasTech.  If disrupting the conference with chatter about your brand was your PR goal, you did well, even without a cat.

As traditional PR and social media continue to converge, it’s important to remember that a social media initiative does not even necessarily have to involve someone facing out and managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  One of the main advantages of social media is that it allows PR and marketing professionals to listen to the public at key times such as before they craft strategy, during crisis communications, and after a campaign is complete.  This sort of social listening allows marketing and PR professionals to filter out the noise from an analytics standpoint, and measure how effective their program was versus others.

For more on how social listening can inform your PR and Marketing strategy, check out this SXSW Summary 2013 article on Big Data, and be sure to download our new e-book, The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing.

If you were at SXSW and want to know how effective your efforts were in generating positive PR, please contact your Meltwater account manager or sign up for a free Meltwater Buzz trial.  We have the data, and would be happy to provide you with a brand analysis report.

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Social Listening | The Signal, The Noise

Being the largest interactive conference in the world with more than 25,000 attendees, South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas brought together a wide variety of industry professionals united in the spirit of education, debate and – as evidenced by social listening we did to pull SXSW data – a sincere appreciation for free beer and tacos.

Nate Silver, statistician and author of the FiveThirtyEight.com blog, gave a keynote speech about his approach to Big Data.  His main point was that, as more and more information is available, business and society become polarized by a human tendency to cherry-pick the material we want to notice.  As Silver put it, “You have a gap between what we think we know and what we really know.”

Social Listening in Social Marketing

This disconnection between what we think we know and what we actually know is one that marketers have been trying to resolve since the advent of advertising; it was raised obliquely in a few social media sessions throughout the 2013 SXSW conference phrased, typically, like this:

“How do I know who my influencers are?”

But the most common question asked in social marketing sessions was the age-old question of all marketers, particularly those not tied to a direct marketing discipline, and that is:

“How do I measure the effectiveness of my campaign?”

The answer to both of these questions lies in the data, but no one data point is going to give us a holistic answer.  Big Data requires big solutions, and cutting through the noise with a social listening solution that provides truly valuable insights requires sophisticated tools that synthesize information in such a way that we marketers can make heads and tails of it.  Nate Silver uses an algorithm; Meltwater employs social listening via the Meltwater Buzz social media online intelligence suite.

Any tool is only as good as its usage.  With Silver’s warning in mind, we come back to the common question of how to measure a social campaign.  The problem with this question is that it’s so often asked before a sound campaign strategy is crafted.  In focusing primarily on how to measure social media marketing results, we’re taking a backwards approach to the question of how to be effective in our marketing campaigns in the first place.

Social Listening for Dialogue Marketing

The number one way to succeed in any marketing campaign, social or otherwise, is to recognize that social media has transformed marketing from a monologue model to a dialogue model.

This means that we marketers need to do something that isn’t second nature, and it’s something that Nate Silver does quite well: be quiet for a moment, and listen.  Social media is not just a platform that allows us to deliver a pre-scheduled message from our phones via three different channels, but rather an opportunity to inform all of our marketing efforts by social listening: first and foremost, we must tune in to what our customers are saying.

In the new Meltwater e-book, The 4 C’s of Social Media Marketing, we explore social listening as the first step in applying traditional marketing principles to the new social dialogue marketing model.  (Spoiler alert: the 4 C’s are Conversations, Communities, Channels, and Campaigns.)  The 4 C’s will soon be examined in this blog with real-world examples, but in the meantime, anybody interested in how to craft a thoughtful, informed marketing strategy can download the e-book and get started.

Big Data is a big deal.  Our current and prospective customers are conducting billions of social conversations, and in those conversations lie the insights and information that we marketers need to create reasoned, targeted campaigns, regardless of medium.  Using Nate Silver as inspiration, we can all do well to take an attentive, data-driven approach to our own predictions with social listening.  The good news is that once we craft a campaign based on this sort of circumspect intelligence so that we know what we’re looking to accomplish, measuring effectiveness is the easy part.

The post The New Social Listening – Big Data Lessons from SXSW and Beyond appeared first on English.

Insofar as sessions chatter went, Elon Musk was the most talked-about presentation of the conference.  The “lounge” word cloud gives you a good idea as to what brands succeeded in resonating with the 25,000 folks who showed up to enjoy free drinks, food and popcorn while they networked with other like-minded web professionals, but overall, free beer seemed to be the most sought-after prize (along with Olivia Wilde).

An interesting data point to note is that Al Gore’s chatter was higher the day after his keynote than the day of it.  Gore was roundly taken to task for selling Current TV to Al Jazeera, which filtered out to the world post-keynote and caused a ripple effect that amplified beyond his keynote speech.  An inconvenient truth, indeed…

One hilarious data trend that we noticed is the mention of extremely attractive celebrities attending SXSW film (Olivia Wilde, Ian Somherhalder) within the “drinking” word cloud specifically.  With all the interactive parties going on and easy access to free beer (and tacos) throughout the conference, it would seem that folks were flexing their late-night beer muscles and looking for a celebrity run-in.

We’d like to thank our friends at Mashable for bringing Grumpy Cat to delight her loyal audience with her supreme grumpiness (this blogger is incredibly disappointed at missing an opportunity for a photo op with the famous feline), and for publishing our daily 2013 SXSW infographics.

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With all the big parties on Sunday night lasting into the wee hours of Monday morning, it wasn’t surprising to see a sudden surge of people talking about free food on Monday.  There was lots of chatter around free tacos specifically, but twice as many people are still looking for BBQ.  We also saw more people talking about sessions proportionally than on any day since Day 1.

The conference wraps up tonight with the Interactive closing party, and we’ll be publishing a final 2013 SXSW infographic wrap-up tomorrow.  Meltwater is here today at booth 1425 giving demos of our newly improved Meltwater Buzz social media monitoring software, so please stop on by for a brand analysis report, or sign up for a free social media monitoring trial online.

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