PostRank Connect

Image via Wikipedia

I learned about PostRank Connect at the recent Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston and decided to give it a try as it meets my key criteria:

• It promises to provide me with insights about my content through the PostRank Analytics application (free, for now, when you sign-up for PostRank Connect).
• It promises to connect me with brands that could lead to mutually beneficial relationships.
• It is FREE.

How do you sign up?

Navigate to the sign-up page and enter standard information like your username, password, and location.  Now identify your content sources, your blogs and your social media accounts.  Important points:

• It is critical that you identify the attributes of your blogs as you set them up, making it easier to do the matching of brands and influencers.
• When you identify your blog you must also prove ownership, like you do with Google Analytics and other similar tools, by either adding a page, an image, or making a networking change through DNS.
• When you add a new contact source you can link it to a Twitter account.  Ideally you should also be able to tie in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and any number of other accounts as well.
• To achieve the best results you should use Google Analytics to your site.  This will enable you to see how engagement and traffic tie together.

Alright, what else?

Well, return to business as usual for a couple of days, running any planned campaigns or just letting the sites run as you normally do.  After a few days log back in, select the My Sites tab and then click upon the View Analytics button.  I set this up for a brand new community that I am very slowly tweaking and very slowly rolling out.    When I view analytics for this site I see the following:

You can view, side by side, the page view information and the social engagement information associated with this site.  If you scroll beneath this first chart you will also see all Facebook status updates and Twitter messages that are related to content or pages you are tracking for this site.  By default all blog posts (tracked via RSS feed) are tracked.  Other content must be added manually as part of the setup process.

Deeper analysis?

You can click upon the Analyze menu to download a CSV file which I am, at this point, unimpressed with.   You are not given the option to choose a date range or fields to include in the CSV file and the data, at least for my test site,was not useful.  I am looking for, and hoping to see, PostRank put a lot more into the reporting for this solution.  This offering is not significantly more powerful than Google Analytics alone.

My verdict?

The product is easy to set up and requires a minimal effort to interact with.  If you are already making use of Google Analytics and investing in Twitter and Facebook than you should give this product a try.  If you are not using Analytics, however, I would not both using this product.

John

Related Articles

• Analytics For Social Media (outspokenmedia.com)
• Social Graph, Influence and the Social Web | PostRank Blog (postrank.com)
• Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? (adamsherk.com)
• PostRank adds Google Chrome extension and soft launches new service, PostRank Connect (techvibes.com)

Monitor your brand on the cheap with SocialMention

You know people are chatting about you, your organization, or your brand on social media channels (or you hope they are).  The problem is that most organizations cannot afford to spend money on expensive listening platforms and are often left scratching their heads about how best to approach this need without spending money. SocialMention provides a good tool for people looking to listen on the cheap.

How do  you start?

• Navigate to the SocialMention.com home page.
• Enter the search terms and the channels you want to search across.  I recommend searching across All channels.

For example, I searched for the term “SocialMention” and saw a google search like display page with the image on the right of this post displayed on the left side of the SocialMention page.

Beyond the conversations,what does SocialMention tell you?

SocialMention provides you with some solid metrics. Here are the ones I recommend you pay attention to:

• Strength.  This percentage tells you how active your search term is across the social media channels you searched. It takes the number of actual mentions in the last 24 hours and divides this into the total potential mentions to give you a number.
• Passion.  This is the likelihood that someone will repeatedly discuss your search term.  If every mention of your search term is from a unique user (not repeating) than the passion score will be low.  You want to increase your number of advocates, those that are repeatedly discussing that term.  A higher passion number is a good thing.
• Reach is a measure of unique authors vs. the number of mentions.  It is an indicator of the audience for your search term. 
• Average time between mention.  How popular is this topic?
• Top users. These are the people who are spreading the topic you searched on. How can you best engage with these users to make them advocates?
• Sources.  Where is your traffic coming from?

SocialMention does give you an indicator of the sentiment of your mentions but take this with a grain of salt.  Sentiment analysis is always imperfect so, while you should review it, do not spend lots of time digging into sentiment information.  Instead, focus on using the audience information to grow an engaged community.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

ObjectiveMarketer: An options for your social media driven campaigns

I had the pleasure of chatting with Amita Paul, CEO of ObjectiveMarketer.  She started the company in August of 2009 and has focused on delivering a solid tool for Enterprise users. While the company has focused on the tool first, and not marketing and sales, they have been able to work with customers like Answers.com and Intel.

This focus on the tool has paid off. In the month that I have played with the product I have seen major updates ranging from the roll-out of a much more intuitive user interface to new reports (and formats) and Twitter and Facebook automation tools such as a simple rules engine for managing twitter auto-follows.

What about pricing?

Pricing is always something companies struggle and I would expect their pricing to evolve over time. However, small organizations would be wise to try the 15 day free trial and then look at the Basic package. This offering will give these organizations the functionality they need and a little more.

What are some of the core capabilities?

First and foremost, ObjectiveMarketer simplifies your social media driven marketing campaigns. You are able to specify the messages, the channels for these messages to be sent through (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), the schedules for the delivering of these messages. While it lacks integration with your mail campaigns (which is a hole I am hoping they will close in the future) it does a nice job of managing the social media portion of of your campaigns.

As your messages are delivered you can track click-throughs, retweets (for Twitter) and gauge the effectiveness of your message. You can use this information, combined with standard A/B testing methodologies to refine your message, learning how to get the biggest return on your social communication investment.

It is worth noting is that you can queue messages up as part of an internal review process, only having them released after the reviewer approves the content. Basic notifications occur, informing reviewers that there is content they must check out. While this is a basic system it is also a good starting point.

You can also create custom landing pages, like these created by people like Brian Yanish at Marketinghits. These pages are a header for your content (think Hootsuite) where you can code links to your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and you are truly only limited by your own imagination. I minimized my use of this during the demo period but will be exploring this further as I continue to explore this tool.

ObjectiveMarketer also supports polls, which I will be using in an upcoming post, stay tuned for more information on this front.

Okay, reporting?

On-screen reports are solid and the drill-down functionality is useful. The majority of reports can be downloaded as CSV files so that you can import them into Excel to slice and dice the information to your hearts content. I want to see more analytics and business intelligence capabilities to give me clear answers about how well my campaigns are performing. More is needed.

What do others think?

Brian Yanish of Marketinghit notes “After putting ObjectiveMarketer to the test for over 6 month I found it to be the best tools for social media marketing. I have many of my clients also using the software now to reach new audiences within the different social networks.”

Debra Ellis of Wilson Ellis Consulting also notes: “I’ve been using ObjectiveMarketer for several month. Like Brian, I find it to be one of the best social media tools. My favorite feature is the landing page. I’m using it to promote special items for my company and my clients.”

Liz Cohen of Answers.com told me “..Answers.com has been using ObjectiveMarketer for about six months now and we are very pleased with the kinds of stats we get. One of my favorite things is the way it is so easy to create an entire Twitter campaign based on scheduling and reposting.”

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note.  If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

 

Social Media Monitoring software is a commodity

You may recall that I took time earlier this year to deliver the customary predictions for 2010.  With the acquisition of Sysomos by Marketwire it makes sense to review one of those predictions:

“2010 is also going to be a year of consolidation. There are simply too many companies, some running with too much debt, some with too few customers, which are reaching the end of their lifetime. I would expect to see at least a half dozen Social Media Monitoring and Social CRM companies disappear in 2010. There are already a small number that are in trouble, or nearing trouble, and others will have challenges as they seek to differentiate themselves from the competition. The news, however, is not all bad. We are also entering an era where you will see many partnerships and acquisitions taking place. Jive Software made a good move when they bought Filtrbox, adding Social Monitoring/Listening capabilities, the other major players will need to do something as well.”

Some of the key acquisitions to date include:

• Jive Software purchasing Filtrbox
• Attensity purchasing Biz360
• Lithium Technologies purchasing Scout Labs
• MarketWire purchasing Sysomos

Social Media Monitoring capabilities are a must have for today’s social solutions.  No longer a differentiator as much as an expected part of these solutions, expect to see many more companies absorbed into larger product offerings.  These are some of the companies that I expect to see acquired this year:

• Radian6
• Visible Technologies
• Synthesio
• Twitalyzer

Who could be in the market?

• INgageNetworks
• Salesforce.com
• Parature
• Oracle
• IBM

Stay tuned, more acquisitions are on the horizon.

John

Engage with all of your communities with Postling

I recently read about Postling being used by companies as a dashboard tool to monitor the latest conversations across the major channels the companies are engaged on.  The tool is free and I setup an account to give it a try while simultaneously asking those on my blog’s Facebook page what they thought of the tool.  Sometimes, just sometimes, you receive so much information that it becomes time to turn that feedback into a guest post.  This was one of those times…

Mike Whaling, of 30lines.com, responded with feedback that matched my observations,and with feedback that can only be obtained by using the product for longer than a typical evaluation cycle. Here, in the words of our guest reviewer, are some thoughts on Postling.

“I’ve been using Postling for a while, and I’m mostly pleased with it. It tracks replies to tweets and Facebook page updates well, although it’s not in real-time. The keyword tracking is OK, but this also isn’t quite in real time. I haven’t tried the blogging features yet; I’m primarily using it to post to and monitor social media sites.

It’s easy to add brands and link your accounts. Replies to comments on Facebook and Twitter are a breeze. Being able to monitor reviews on Yelp and CitySearch in the same place is incredibly handy, too. The support from the Postling team has been great, and they’re all easy to find on Twitter.

All that said, there’s plenty of room for improvement. There’s no easy way to search your dashboard or save posts for later action, and you can’t manage followers or lists from within the app. You only see tweet and replies directed at your brand, so it’s much like CoTweet in that respect. (I find a lot of value in monitoring the stream, looking for items to retweet or share to my Facebook pages.) Some of the features aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and I’d like to see it connect with LinkedIn and a few other sites. There’s also not a mobile-optimized version of the site or smartphone app, yet.

All in all, I much prefer Postling to the majority of alternatives, but it still requires a second tool like Tweetdeck or Seesmic for full access to all the social tools I’m looking for at this point.

….

I’m using Postling to monitor my page at http://www.facebook.com/30lines, so feel free to direct your readers there if you want to give them a feel for what the updates look like when posted through the app. I look forward to reading the full review!

….

One point to add that I just realized: there’s no way to manage direct messages on Twitter. Again, this is easy enough to handle through Tweetdeck, but it doesn’t really make sense to have a Twitter monitoring tool that can’t monitor DMs.”

Mike, thanks for being a guest reviewer.

John

The better you know your customers the happier they will be… Surprised?

No business, local government, or agency is ever surprised by this simple statement.  However, the way they do business is often very different.  Information living in silos.  Departments, teams, not communicating.  Leaders, executives, failing to communicate goals and strategies clearly.

From the time you begin marketing to potential customers through the point of sale, from the delivery of services through calls between customers and your customer service team…  With these touch points you are demonstrating your perceived value of your customers (potential and existing).  While many companies focus on great messaging and sales techniques too few companies focus on developing a complete view of their customers to maximize the relationship throughout the lifetime of this relationship.

Have you ever?

Had a problem with a product or service and called into customer support?  Maybe you had a problem with your iPod or maybe it was an issue with your voter registration.  Either way you started off by making a simple phone call to get the problem resolved.

As  you were transferred from person to person, each asking you the same basic questions, you begin to slowly realize that there is no consistent understanding of who you are, what your problems are.  This lack of understanding leads to frustration for everyone….  You do not feel the love.

MarketingProfs released some great information in a post titled Access to Customer Data = Retention, Sales, covering the importance of this complete customer view, you should give it a read.  The first paragraph says it well:

“Companies that have access to a holistic view of customer data achieve better customer service and efficiency, improved loyalty, and  more repeat business from their established customers, according to a study by Aberdeen Group and VeraCentra.”

Those of you that know me well know that my first thought is that a CRM strategy, complimented by solid tools, is key.  This article points out a  couple eye-catching stats right at the beginning:

• Best in class companies, those that excel at this whole customer view, see a 91% customer retention rate and an increase in net customer value (NCV) of 6% year over year.
• The lowest performing companies, the laggards, see a 62% retention rate and a decrease of NCV by 9% year over year.

If these number fail to get your attention you should make some popcorn and watch Sleeping Beauty as a fairly tale existence is probably more to your liking.

While I will let you read the full article, these are the key practices demonstrated by the best companies:

• 80% capture customer history and make it visible to all customer-facing staff.
• 77% have a single or primary point of contact in their company for each customer.
• 52% have a technology-based common view of the customer.
• 72% monitor customer satisfaction.

These companies are not locking data in silos, they are blasting customer information throughout the organization enabling all areas of the company to see the complete picture of the customer. 

Are you investing in the necessary strategies and tools to enable yourself to be a best of breed organization or are you satisfied with being just one of the crowd?

John

Charging for carryon bags? Spirit Airlines misses an opportunity

The airline industry is always looking for more ways of making money and I have no problem with that.  However, when I saw that Spirit Airlines was going to begin charging for carry-on luggage my first thought was that they missed a great opportunity to leverage the power of social media to collaborate with their customers on alternative solutions, alternative ways of both benefiting their customers, the company itself, and the entire airline industry.

Here is my advice to the Airline Industry, and each Airlines, on how to correctly engage your customers and vendors to decide the best approaches to cost management.  Let me know what you think.

First….  Why is it that the Airline Industry is constantly complaining about the inability to make money? Should we all go back to taking the train?

While I love a good train ride we all understand this is not the answer.

• You, the airline industry, understand your cost per passenger.  Share this on a publicly available dashboard, including the up to the minute number.  In other words, gas is constantly changing price, keep it real-time.
  • Provide a simple cost calculator around this cost per passenger and let your customers play with the data.  The learnings, the thought process invoked, will feed directly into the Ideation Platform…
• The GSA has done a fantastic job with it’s Better Buy Project, still in it’s infancy.  Leverage the learnings of how they are working with their vendors to come up with alternative solutions to both open up, but also reduce the cost of, engaging with the federal government.
• The Ideation Platform:  As part of this dashboard add a very simple ideation platform, similar to what the Federal Government has done with its Agency Dashboard or that HP and others do with their Ideation platforms.  Bring your customers into the conversation, hear their ideas.

I can almost picture a day in the future when our baggage costs, meal costs, etc.., fluctuate daily based upon the market conditions around the airline industry…. 

Why are you not leveraging your CRM system?

Flat fees, without any consideration about the flyer, should be a thing of the past.  The sales guy that flies Boston to New York 5 times week should have a different cost structure than the infrequent vacationer.  The systems are there, use them.

What else should the airline industry be focused on to engage customers, and vendors, in the cost conversation?

John

Remember that real life is Bayesian, not Gaussian

I hope you find this video chat useful.  I continue my conversation with Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist, on how Lithium is working to model the complexity of network behavior.  As companies seek out the all-important super-user these self-adjusting models will play an ever important role.

John

AT&T is taking holistic approach to their social media strategy

I reached out to the AT&T Customer Service team to chat about their approach to tying collaborative social strategies and tools into their overall business, focusing primarily on their approach to customer service.   I spoke with the leaders of their social support and their corporate communication teams about how a company as large as AT&T started down this road.  The lessons learned from their approach apply equally well to small businesses, the enterprise, and the public sector.  The approach focuses on delivering the right social solutions as part of an overall strategy, not as a silo’d response by one business unit or function.

How did it start?

AT&T feels that social strategies are only useful if they are part of the overall corporate strategy and weaved throughout the business units and job functions.  The entire company must understand the customer.  However, as you shift to implementation, taking an iterative approach within a single function or unit simplifies the effort and improves the chances for success.  For AT&T, social strategies started in  the Corporate Communications through the build out of a Facebook fan page.

Do you remember the uproar from customers when AT&T changed iPhone pricing last year?  Well, lets just say customers found a way to vent anywhere and everywhere they could.  One of those places was the Facebook fan page.    Molly DeMaagd, ATTCustomerCare on Twitter, was pulled into the fray, learning a lot about how to manage support on social channels.

AT&T recognized the need to provide customer service through social media channels.  Molly brought in Shawn McPike who began to strategically plan the rollout of customer service on Twitter.  His goal was to focus on how to deliver the function in a way that supported growth, focusing doing it right versus doing it quickly.  In fact, before they started tweeting, they:

• Got commitment from the top.  The CEO at AT&T wanted to become a leader with social media and made this a priority.  In most businesses you will need to make the business case and get everyone on board, plan on it.   AT&T was fortunate, however, to have the CEO as the executive sponsor.
  • The CEO support, the executive sponsorship, will make or break any company’s efforts to “go social”.  In the case of AT&T, the CEO had Molly take part in a company-wide town meeting to highlight her team’s efforts.. 
• With the level of executive sponsorship, Molly was able to hire who she wanted.  With this freedom, who did Molly hire?  She brought in people who had been with AT&T for a long time, people who were customer service heavyweights.  The characteristics that were most important were:
  • The ability to make decisions on the fly.  Social media is real-time, waiting for approvals slows the entire process down.  The ability to respond in a timely manner is critical.
  • Were empathetic to the needs of the customers.  You cannot fake genuine interest, genuine willingness to help.  This team has it baked into their DNA.
  • Were passionate about delivering great customer service.
• Developed approved policies and practices based upon the practices already in place at AT&T.
• Developed and delivered training programs for everyone involved.  These programs were created with comments from other AT&T organizatoins including PR and legal.
• Listened to customers on Facebook, the web, etc..  As they launched their program they knew the general categories of problems they would encounter; they were prepared.

I asked AT&T how they knew the right team size to start wth…. The answer…. Educated guess. The reality is you are unlikely to accurately gauge the volume until you start.  AT&T started with 4 members in their social support organization and quickly scaled to13.  The key was knowing that the need to rapidly scale might be there and being ready in advance to do so.

Now..  How is AT&T handling support issues on Twitter?

Their team of social support, social media managers, monitor the twitterverse for users encountering problems with their products and services.  On an average day, members of this team reach out to more than one hundred people about their problems and work with the traditional support teams to try to resolve customer problems.  

What tools do they use?  I am glad you asked..

• In addition to Twitter, AT&T has a robust social support community solution, powered by Lithium Technologies, that has 2 million registered members. 
• For social media monitoring the team is currently making use of  Evolve24.
• The Wireless unit, where the bulk of the social support is being provided, uses Clarify for their CRM system.  The other business units each use something different and a robust integration between units, and between social media channels and CRM is lacking.  This is an area I would urge AT&T to invest as their will be a large payback for this effort.
• The primary tool being used for communicating on Twitter is CoTweet.

What about ROI?

The team at AT&T struggled with this answer, in part because they are not called on to answer this, in part because they have not found a great way of measuring this.  If the folks at AT&T want my advice, let me know as you will want to answer this question soon, for the executive team, the shareholders, and the customers.

What else?

I could probably write another post or three from my conversation, but I’ll condense it down to a couple of extra points:

• The Social Customer service team works very close with the Social Corporate Communications team.  They share training, insights, and best practices.    This provides good insights on customers to the communications team and great insights on messaging best practices to the customer service team.
• AT&T needs to do a better job promoting their customer service effort on Twitter. They have had no real PR, no real messaging, around their presence here.  Putting more effort here will help them better service more customers and that is what it is all about.
• AT&T should look to push their support efforts into a place where they can talk with other companies from a thought leadership position.  If the CEO is truly serious about being leaders, set the tone, show the way.

AT&T has done a great job ramping up their social support efforts.  While there is clearly room for improvement they have taken a thoughtful, holistic approach and it will pay off for them in the long run.  Good job.

John

Martha Coakley, Attorney General in Massachusetts, talks about Social Media

Martha Coakley continues to look for ways to innovate, to find better ways of achieving the goals associated with her role as Attorney General of Massachusetts.  I was fortunate enough to get her insights on a number of questions, I hope you learn as much as I have. 

Q. What are your thoughts on government 2.0, the open government directive/initiative?
A. Government leaders and agencies that are open to adapting new practices will see benefit from doing so. The opportunities new technologies afford government and the people we serve are important.

Transparency in government is essential – not just for efficiency and access to information- but to maximize participation by all individuals and groups and to build confidence in how our government works. President Obama’s willingness to explore new uses in government for  web-based technologies is an encouraging step forward and represents an opportunity to build public trust. 
 
Q. Have you seen the Open GovTracker at http://www.opengovtracker.com/?  Would something like this add value, in your opinion to the AGs office?  Would you consider leveraging an ideation platform like this?
A. I was not familiar with the OpenGov Tracker – it is a very new tool, but I’m always open to looking at new ways for the work of the AG’s office to be accessible and transparent. 
 
Q. How does social media and other collaboration strategies and technologies (blogs, wikis, twitter, etc) it fit into your overall communication strategy?
A. Social media has become an integral part of the education and prevention work that we do in the Attorney General’s Office.  In our view, social media tools are channels to provide information to our constituents. We engage through our own Twitter account and office blog, as well as constantly working to make sure important consumer information makes into the online discussion. 

In 2007, we took on a massive website redesign to create what we hope is a very robust tool with useful information.  Our mission was to create a tool to better empower citizens and provide direct, easy guidance to the often complex questions asked of us.  Our social media tools have been a way to increase traffic and help assure that people have access to timely, helpful information.  They have not, and may not, replace other traditional means of communicating with our office, but they have certainly supplemented our efforts in this respect.
 
Q. How return on investment are you seeing from your efforts?
A. We are continuing to see an increase in the number of people who are accessing information from our office through new media.  We’re also able to receive constituents’ feedback through blog comments, Twitter @replies, and website traffic, to help us not only enhance communication but identify trends and be more efficient in our information dissemination. 

There are also some ‘intangibles’ in our social media outreach that can be difficult to quantify, such as public confidence and trust in our work, and enhanced access to accurate and timely consumer information. 
 
Q. Has social media played a part in any convictions?
A. Our abilities to investigate and prosecute crime with a cyber component greatly increased this past September, when our office opened a state-of-the-art Computer Forensics Lab in Boston.  The lab is designed to help the Commonwealth develop a statewide capacity to prevent, investigate, and prosecute cyber crime.  The lab has expanded the office’s forensic capabilities, allowing us to conduct exams on a variety of digital media such as computers, cell phones, laptops, PDAs and GPS devices. 

Without addressing specific cases, I can say that law enforcement officials are always mindful of the public nature of social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter.
 
Q. Are their laws that Massachusetts residents should be aware for social media and collaborative technologies?
A. Criminals are constantly finding new ways to exploit technological advances.  Social networks can be another means for criminals to access personal or identifying information, so you should always be cautious about what you are posting about yourself online. 

On the state level, I filed An Act to Combat Economic Crime with a coalition of legislators, District Attorneys, and law enforcement organizations, designed to give law enforcement the necessary tools to investigate and prosecute sophisticated criminal enterprises in the 21st century. 

When I took office, we created a Cyber Crime team right away, and they can be a resource to you. Please contact us anytime with questions about illegal online activity or internet safety! 

Q. What social media usage policies/guidelines do you have in place for the AGs office?
A. Governor Patrick and the Information Technology Division have established guidelines and best practices for social media use by state agencies.  They have researched and compiled ways for government to use online tools responsibly to enhance civic engagement and increase transparency and access in government.  In my office, we follow these guidelines, and we work to ensure that our constituents and users know how we use these tools and why.  You can find our usage policies on our website.
 
Q. Are you using a CRM system?  If yes, how is it being used?
A. In my office, we’ve been transitioning to a comprehensive database system to work seamlessly with as many divisions as possible, and with web-based applications like complaint forms. Given the legal work we do and the broad scope of the office, we must also prioritize compliance with public records law and protecting sensitive information.  We have prioritized finding ways to more efficiently track consumer complaints, case filings, fair labor intake, charities filings, and we are also working towards systems that allow for seamless online complaint filing and municipal law research.
 
Q. Have you seen results from social media that you could not have replicated using other communication channels?
A. The benefit we have seen unique to social media has been the two-way flow of information.  While we have always taken calls and received emails and letters, social media allows for a conversation with constituents that is more immediate and more viral.  For example, we are able to watch @replies on Twitter, identify a trend in a particular area, and use this information to craft an appropriate response such as a blog post, a new brochure, or an investigation if appropriate.