Monitoring the Social Media Conversation: From Twitter to Facebook

Richard LomasManager of Account Development

Vocus

Jenni Lloyd Social Media Strategist, NixonMcInnes

• 15 years’ experience in digital marketing across entertainment, travel, finance and not-for-profit sectors.

• Lead strategist with the UK’s largest team of Social Media specialists.

• Jenni creates and delivers social media strategies that bring major brands into social spaces to successfully engage with their audience. 

• Current clients include Coca Cola, T-Mobile and Cooperative Financial Services.

Neil Stinchcombe BA, ACMA Managing Director, Eskenzi PR

• Director of Eskenzi PR for 12 years• Heading agency’s activities in Social Media tools and

monitoring - including campaigns on Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and YouTube

• Previously European Financial Director and Managing Director of the French division of software development company, Datawatch

• Before that FD for CPB, one of UK’s top design consultancies a division of WPP PLC

What is Social Media and Why is it Important?

• Social Media - the latest tool by which people are reading and sharing news, views, information and content

• Plus – it’s fast, constantly changing user-generated content, which creates an instant dialogue between company and customer

• Minus – user-generated content is a double-edged sword: for irate user-customers Social Media can provide a public space for frank, Watchdog-style criticism of a company – with potential implications for that company’s image

• So Social Media needs to be monitored, and its content engaged with. In public - to turn a minus into the plus - instant dialogue between company and customer

• IMPORTANCE – For PR, it is another route to our clients’ key audience. However, it is a method where you can achieve instant feedback

Examples of Social Media Sites

Social Media Program

Social Media Tools Used:

• Social Media Press Releases

• Social Networks – all clients have presence on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn

• Microblogs: Twitter

• Social News sites: Digg, Delicious, Reddit

• Blogs – clients own blogs as well as influencing bloggers

Social Media Releases

• Content• Text News• Video • Graphics• Cartoons• Photos• Podcast• Contact details• Widgets, Gadgets, Games and other web 2.0 apps

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/05/prweb2434214.htm

Cartoon

Blogs Engagement Strategy

• Ignore them at your peril• Your customers will read them• How do you engage with the bloggers?• Which ones should you influence?• What do bloggers like - How do they communicate?• Monitoring and Feedback• Tools to use

Your Key Audiences

• Which social media audiences are important?• How do you find them?• How do you build a social media strategy?• How do you contact the different social media creators?• The three C’s - Content, Context and Contacts• What’s the difference between good social media PR and

traditional PR?

Strategy to Reach Audiences

• Define key messages • Define communication channels • Decide what you’re going to communicate• Tone the message according to the platform• What tools will you use?• Who are your key spokespeople?• Treat social media as you would any other traditional

communication channel• Q&As for teams that respond to social media can be low level

customer support up to Executives• Escalation policy• Disaster response

Social Media Monitoring Tools

• Radian 6 • Millward Brown• Vocus• Meltwater• TweetBeep or FiltrBox• Google Alerts• Seesmic Desktop, Tweetdeck, Twirl and other similar

tools

Social Media Reporting

Thanks Neil!

• He’s given us a great look into the world of social media for PR

• I’m going to speak from a brand owner’s perspective, taking you through some of the steps we use to help clients move into a more conversational relationship with consumers

• Now for a very small amount of shameless promotion …

Who are NixonMcInnes?

• The UK’s largest dedicated team of social media specialists; founded in 2000

• Full service social media agency: strategy, network mapping, outreach, design, build & community management

• Thought leaders: instigators of ‘MeasurementCamp’

Hands Up (Virtually) if You…

• Know what social media is– Results…

• Use social media yourself– Results…

• Are happy that you can explain the value of your social media to your colleagues– Results…

There’s a Fundamental Shift

• We can no longer see our websites as a destination• We have to recognise that consumers are playing

elsewhere• Conversations about us are happening between

consumers anyway – we can’t control them• If we want to talk to them, we need to be where the

conversation is• To start a conversation we have to have something

relevant / interesting / useful / entertaining to say• We have to understand the cultural norms of these

spaces that we don’t own

Coca-cola Have Got the Right Idea…

Adam Brown, digital communications director at Coca-Cola

Skittles took it as far as it can go (and maybe further than it should…)

But enough about them… what about you? How can you join the conversation - without upsetting legal and/or spending all day on Twitter?

• It’s not about technology• Twitter / Facebook etc are just tools• Technology is changing all the time - and communities

shift, morph and change allegiance

• You need a sound strategy before you can be successful!

First Things First - Who are Your Customers?

• What are they ready for?– Assess how your customers will engage, based on what

they’re already doing• read / watch / listen• social networking• use RSS, tag and vote on other people’s content• rate / review / comment / post to forum / comment• create content

• Where are they playing already?

What is it You Want to Achieve?

• Forrester Groundswell model– Listening– Understand your customers better & generate insight– Talking– Participate in conversations with customers & help them talk to

each other– Energising– Identify your fans & help them help you market your services– Supporting– Help your customers support each other– Embracing– Integrate your customers insight into your service/product

development process

This Isn’t Just a Job for Marketing or PR

Social Media Spans the Whole Business

• Listening = research• Talking = marketing• Energising = sales• Supporting = customer support• Embracing = service development

• And what about Legal?• And Brand?

Set-Up a Social Media Council

• Plan for success by setting the foundations to support effective organisational change– Identify & mitigate risks through multi-discipline workshops– Develop strategy and schedule– Develop content plan– Identify resources– Train– Develop & share ‘rules of engagement’– Create & optimise social media properties and/or social hub– Measure, iterate & optimise

Listening is the Primary Activity (One Mouth, Two Ears)

• Map your communities of interest• Identify key influencers• Determine topics & sentiment• Establish success metrics / KPIs• Use a monitoring tool to set benchmarks before activity

begins• Share with the business

• Your brand is what your customers say it is

Start Talking

• Nerve wracking but OK if you’ve prepared well• Work out what you’re going to say, who’s going to say it and

how will risk be managed• Monitor and measure effect of activity• Develop a feedback loop into the rest of the business - don’t let

the insight go to waste!

• Ditch the campaign mentality - a community is for life, not just for Christmas

Measure It

• Focus on measuring engagement - it’s no longer just about eyeballs

• Determine impact on sentiment / reputation• Tie-in with website analytics• Segment referred traffic and review differences in behaviour• Make use of third party tools (bit.ly etc)• Share with the business through actionable insights and a focus

on trends rather than pure data

• Feed back insights into your programme - learn, change, adapt – use insight from your customers to be remarkable

• One of our clients runs a loyalty programme• One of our first actions was to design and build a blog as a feedback

channel to the main site.• Acting as a rapid publishing platform the blog both enables consumers to

comment and converse about the programme and provides the client with valuable feedback with which they can improve their offer to consumers.

• We also redistribute content published to the blog to other social spaces, such as Facebook and Twitter, through RSS feeds.

• We worked with internal stakeholders in the marketing, PR and legal team to establish a moderation and escalation process and now moderate the very active blog on a daily basis.

• We also run a very successful Twitter presence, with the number of followers having doubled week on week since launch.

What Does All This Mean in Practice?

The Blog: Page Views and Visits

38

The Blog: Traffic and On-Site Registrations

39

Twitter: The Engagement Scale

Awareness

passive follower

active follower

inquisitive follower

Winners

Strangers

Evangelists

strangers – no awareness of the brand on twitterIdentified through searching twitter for relevant conversation topics and targeted with relevant messaging to encourage following.

awareness – know of the brand but not a followerIdentified through searching twitter for brand terms and signposted to our profile to encourage following.

passive follower – following but not engagedEncouraged to engage with us through asking questions, servingthem offers and signposting to content.

active follower – following and engaged on a low levelTalking to others about us, but not to us – we will contribute to their conversations to drive engagement with us and your site.

inquisitive followers – following and engaged directly with usTalking directly to us – we will engage with them, providing useful information and help to create loyalty.

evangelists – engaged followers that are our advocatesFollowers who regularly retweet our messages and offers, signpost people in their network to us and generally help usfurther grow our followers.

Twitter Metrics

41

Evangelists

Opted-in

Buzz Monitoring

42

Buzz this week mainly:

_Twitter conversations

_Discount/Freebie sites (general discussions)

_Requests for points

94 mentions this week with a sentiment score of 0.9. This is a 59% increase in mentions since last week.

Twitter is site with most mentions this week (63) – this includes a lot of buzz generated by official account and its followers

Buzz: week on week

Thank you!

jenni@nixonmcinnes.co.uknixonmcinnes.co.uk/people/jennitwitter.com/jennilloydslideshare.net/jennilloydtealady.soup.io

Now over to Richard for the Q&A…

Contact Information

• Jenni Lloyd, Jenni@nixonmcinnes.com

• Neil Stinchcombe, Neil@eskenzipr.com

• Moderator, Richard Lomas, rlomas@vocus.com

Post-Webinar Survey:

About Vocus

• A global software company specialising in on-demand software for public relations management

• Successful, proven applications currently used by thousands of PR professionals

• Recognised for excellence in products, growth, leadership

“Innovation of the Year”