Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

If you haven’t noticed, Biz360 is quite social! With 10 years of media monitoring and analysis and many clients, we have relationships all around the social media universe. We would like you to follow along and engage in the conversation.

Social media is about the conversation

The conversation is going on about social media monitoring and analysis and we want to make it as easy as possible to join in. With so many potential sites for a discussion, as Brian Solis pointed out in his Conversation Prism, we want to bring the most relevant sites to you. Biz360 has features on our blog to easily share the stories you read through social sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon just to name a few. If you enjoy one of the posts you read, we encourage you to share it with others and get a conversation going. Just click on the icon at the bottom of the post and you will be taken to the social media site to share the story.

Furthermore, Biz360 is actively engaged with our fans, clients, partners and prospects on other social platforms. We want to hear from you and  build our relationship with you wherever you hang out online. Please click on the social media site that is right for you and follow us there!

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There is much more to come and this list will continue to grow as we build relationships in more places (think community portal, slideshare, and who knows what else!). And please let us know of places where you would like to see Biz360 – we would love your input! Keep track of Biz360 in our Follow Us tab. We look forward to a conversation with you!

Note: Social media images provided by the folks over at Web Design Ledger

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

With so many different tools to use to measure and engage in social media, it is important to understand how you can get such different results while searching for the same thing on different platforms, or even how some platforms like Google return different results at different times. If you care about accurate metrics or avoiding sifting through irrelevant results you should understand what makes the difference. Most of it comes down to the way you and the tool defines the topic.

Let’s say you wanted to find all of the conversation about customer service at McDonalds. Many of the low end or free social media tools provide very basic search queries where you can either search for an exact match such as “McDonalds Customer Service” or any content that includes the words “McDonalds” and “customer service” anywhere in the same article/post/tweet. Here are some examples of the difference between these search methods:

• Searching social media for the exact phrase “McDonalds customer service” generates only 12 results for the past 30 days
• Searching social media for the terms “McDonalds” and “customer service” mentioned anywhere in the same post/tweet generates more than 2,000 results for the past 30 days
• Searching social media for the terms “McDonalds” and “service” mentioned anywhere in the same post/tweet generates more than 20,000 results for the past 30 days

The exact match example is eliminating many relevant results because people don’t always use exact phrases when talking. They may say “the service was awful at McDonalds”. The two examples looking for any mention of those words within a single post does not necessarily mean there is any relationship between the terms (McDonalds and service). These are the most common methods low end social media tools use to define topics. Some allow you to add more terms or even exclude terms but they still use either the exact match or terms anywhere within the post method, and that is challenging.

There is a better way. With more sophisticated tools you can use advanced search features to get more accurate results. In order to get optimal results in our example, you want to be able to find all of the occurrences where people are talking about McDonalds and customer service even if they are not using the exact phrase. At Biz360 we use proximity searches and multiple phrase topics to get more specific results. Proximity searches allow you to find multiple phrases within 3,5, or 10 words of each other including a reversed order. This shows Biz360 Community Insights creating a search for McDonalds customer service using proximity:

The results are better when you can include proximity:

• When searching social media for any results where McDonalds is mentioned within 3 words of the term service or customer service, we find more than 500 conversations where people are talking about customer service and McDonalds.
• This method allows us to include phrases like “awful service at McDonalds” and “McDonalds has awful service” which the exact phrase match would miss.
• This method eliminates results where the term McDonalds and the term service may be in the same post/tweet but not associated like: “We were hanging out at McDonalds. I hate when I cant get cell service.”

We can use additional techniques including excludes to further refine the topics. So to be sure that the results do not include any phrases that we do not want as a part of our topic we can add an exclude to the topic such as filter results to exclude mentions of “cell service” or “cell phone service” so we avoid examples like: “I got awful cell reception at McDonalds”

Demanding social media marketers need tools and technology that will help them get the most accurate results so they can spend less time sifting through the noise and more time acting to acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and promote their products/services using social media marketing.

To learn more and take a look, visit Biz360.

For the purposes of this blog post, when I refer to a ‘post‘, I am referring to a datum of social media.  This can include a blog post, discussion forum, video, picture, etc.  When I refer to ‘sharing a post‘, I am referring to a post being bookmarked, voted, linked, tweeted (or re-tweeted), commented, etc.

If a post is not shared, does it have value? What impact does an opinion that is never heard carry in social media?  Very little.  All too often I find people sifting through endless blog posts and tweets with little prioritization.  This is an expensive and time-consuming task.

When a post is shared, we can calculate the level of engagement or conversation by looking at various metrics including: comments, links, bookmarks, tweets, and votes.  Metrics can be weighted based on the the subjective value and the audience participation with the metric.  For example, someone may weight commenting over bookmarking since they feel the act of commenting requires more work by the reader and demonstrates interest in the subject.  Sharing that crosses various forms of social media would get a boost factor.  For example, a tweet that appeared in a blog, a video that was linked to in a forum, or a comment that referenced picture.

Conversations may lie dormant for months before they hit the social stream.  With this engagement or conversation metric, community managers can easily sort the coverage, triage the issues, and respond to the most valuable conversations in an efficient and expeditious manner.

We are very excited to announce our strategic partnership with Chess Media Group. This partnership combines social media analysis with ROI and strategic consulting is a positive step for both clients and the industry.

As the demand for social media grows, there is an increase in the request to provide accountability and to measure the impact of investing in social media to companies. Social media is a new territory for most marketers and executives with the majority of efforts in the space have been experimental. However, as the case studies for success in social media have materialized, more companies are asking how their social media investments are performing.

This partnership provides the most comprehensive technology to monitor and measure your brand in both traditional and social media combined with the expertise to understand the ROI and real impact of these efforts. Furthermore, this combined solution will help you optimize your social media investment going forward.

Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan and Chess Media Group are well recognized and respected social media business advisors. They have provided many companies, small and large, with expert strategy, implementation, and ROI analysis of their social media programs. In addition, Jacob has been named an advisor to Biz360.

Brad Brodigan, Biz360 CEO, mentioned, “Our leading monitoring and measurement technology is a perfect complement to the social media strategy and ROI expertise of Chess Media. We are proud to work with them to leverage our technology and their expertise to better serve the growing customer demand in social media.”

Chess Media Group offers services that enable clients to create and capture the value of social media. Their processes can provide solutions that will optimize the effectiveness of any business’ social media investments. Chess Media also writes a popular blog on social media.

Jacob Morgan believes, “the business intelligence platform of Biz360 combined with our accountable social business approach delivers compelling solutions that will justify and optimize our clients’ marketing investments.”

We look forward to working with Chess Media and our customers.

The biggest mistake I see with inexperienced salespeople is talking too much.

They come in with the idea that to sell, they have to be the one talking. They don’t listen because they’re talking and not asking questions.

An effective salesperson is a detective. To be good at what I do, I need be Columbo. Some of you probably don’t remember the TV series Columbo, but it starred Peter Falk as the title character – an unassuming, humble detective with a keen eye for detail. The series was different from other detective stories because most episodes started by showing the perpetrator committing the crime. The show’s creator described it as a “howcatchem,” rather than a “whodunit.” It centered on Lt. Columbo figuring out who the criminal was by asking questions and examining overlooked evidence.

So the philosophy I impart to my sales team is to focus on being like Columbo.

I investigate an enormous organization and find the person whose business problems I can solve. When I identify the prime suspect, I go in and discover the evidence to see if I can indeed really solve his or her problem.

Telling the potential customer what I think they need at our first meeting is no more beneficial than it would have been for Columbo to tell a suspect his theories before he had asked any questions. There is no humility in that. It would be arrogant to assume I know how to solve problems before I even know what those problems really are.

Instead, I ask potential clients about their businesses, their challenges. I follow up with questions like, “When that happens, what does your department do then?” and “Is there a financial impact?”

A good salesperson’s job is to ask tons of open-ended questions to understand the client’s business – to collect the evidence.

“What’s the impact on your company if you’re not listening to what your current customers are saying? Is that a risk to your business? What kind of risk? Have you had anything bad happen? Have you ever used information like that to improve? What strategies do you have to grow your business? What types of things have you tried?”

On the flip side, when I’m asked a question. I offer massive transparency. Ask me a question, and I’m here to publish it for everyone to see.

Therein begins our relationship, a relationship built on honesty.

Eric M. Israel, VP of Sales

In short, my answer is yes.

After 17 years in sales and seven with Biz360, I’m now the VP of Sales and have been working on developing within my team the trust equation idea – the concept that we should be focusing on things that are not necessarily good or bad for us, but are genuinely good for our clients.

Frankly, it can be scary, but I truly believe that is the basis for a long-term business relationship and in this economy, relationships are more important than ever. Having a sales team that focuses only on generating revenue destroys your relationship with the client and breaks the trust equation from the very get-go.

Instead our goal is to truly understand how our clients’ businesses work. We should strive to understand their challenges and how those challenges impact their companies. That’s really nothing new – it’s pretty basic research. But then I guide my team to go even further. We should be finding out how the clients’ challenges are affecting them personally. How do these challenges affect their workload? Their careers? Their stress level? Even their families.

We help because it’s the right thing to do — not so Biz360 gets another deal. It works the other way around. The more you do for the client, the more those clients enlist your help. Those clients develop the longest relationships with you and they end up being the most profitable.

Each and every time we meet with our clients, our goal is to figure out more about their business, and how we can help them get further down the path toward their own success.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to use this forum to tell you how the sales department works here at Biz360. I’ll be honest. I want potential clients to compare the experience they have had with our competitors, and hopefully, decide they’d rather work with our team.

And I welcome feedback. As you’ll find out in my next post, feedback is essential.

You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

Today we’re announcing the latest addition to our social media analysis capabilities: MediaSignal™ for blogs. It’s a significant development that enhances our customers’ ability to tap into the blogosphere for insight and information.

At Biz360, one of the guiding principles of our product development process involves taking a pragmatic approach to fulfilling our customers’ needs. In this case, there’s a clear need for marketing and PR professionals to be able to measure the relative impact of blogs—from the top professional blogs to the fringes of the long tail—and to be able to make direct comparisons to traditional media coverage. Because here is no definitive standard for blog impact measurement, we saw the need to come up with something new.

Most of the current methodologies for measuring blog impact involve either estimating site traffic or counting inbound links from other blogs. Limitations of these methods include:

• With a list of blogs ranked by their overall authority or influence, it’s impossible to know which blogs have the most impact in a given market—is it the highly-ranked blog that occasionally writes about the market, or the lower-ranked blog that covers it incessantly?
• Links from mainstream media provide an interesting view into which blogs are influencing traditional media, but they typically aren’t counted.
• The impact of the “linkerâ€? typically isn’t accounted for, even though a link from a top-tier blog implies more impact than a link from a less popular blog.
• The impact of the reader typically isn’t taken into account. PerezHilton receives more traffic than Engadget, but the topics over which they have influence differ greatly.
• Today’s site traffic panels are too small to estimate visitors to low-traffic sites in a statistically valid manner.

After a great deal of experimentation and testing, we settled on a methodology that provides a new estimate of reach that incorporates traffic estimates, linking patterns from blogs, and linking patterns from mainstream media. Our link analysis produces particularly interesting results, employing a technique that enables us to estimate not only the number of sources linking to a given blog, but also the impact of the sources.

The benefit of the detailed link analysis can be seen in the table below. Over a 3-month period last year, Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce received incoming links from similar numbers of sources. However, the sources linking to BuzzMachine received more than twice as many distinct links as the sources linking to Dooce, implying greater impact.

• Apples-to-apples comparisons. With MediaSignal, we have a single measure of brands, trends and issues across both traditional and social media.
• More relevant reach. Because our source rankings incorporate each source’s reach as well as its topical relevance, we are able to product a customized list of which publications and blogs matter most to each of our clients.
• More accurate reach. Our calculation of MediaSignal for blogs involves large-scale link analysis, calibrated by audience estimates to provide an understandable metric than pure visitors or pure link metrics.
• Tone impact. By factoring MediaSignal into the negative, neutral and positive impression counts we derive through our Point-of-View Sentiment engine, we’re able to weight our tone ratings by impact.
• Improved spam filtering. Thanks to the link-source impact analysis, we were able to identify and weed out many splogs that received many links but only from other splogs in the same farm.

I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report – Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media – the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM – health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

AdWeek published an article today by Wendy Melillo and Joan Voight called World on a String that outlines the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to consumers’ increasing power over the fate of brands. They explain that whether unprompted, such as the Mentos-Diet Coke video that gained fame on Revver and You Tube, or prompted, as in Chevrolet’s consumer ads gone awry, there’s little a marketer can or should do to push the direction of the customer’s brand experience.

In the end, more attentive listening to customers throughout a product’s lifecycle is the best way to avert unwanted negative word of mouth.