Middle School Marketing - Social Monitoring
Josh Chambers, Former Viget
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Our September Middle School Marketing group continued the tradition of discussing ways to bridge the gap between old and new school marketing. There were several new faces, but as always the conversation sparked some interesting debate. We initially set out to discuss three questions:
- What are some examples of social media client case studies? How have mature companies used social media not just to experiment but to really have an impact (beyond just early-adopter “luck”)? How did they do it? (I guess that's three righ there...oops)
- What tools and metrics are companies using to measure and demonstrate success?
- Is email marketing dying, morphing, or re-surging? How does it fit overall?
As usual, time was against us, and we only got to points one and two (mostly two)--leaving us plenty to talk about in October!
Here's a quick recap:
The question "How do you measure social media?" is getting louder. It seems like everyone is asking, "How do you quantify?" "How do you measure?" or "What defines success?"
Nicholas kicked it off with a live demo of Radian6 capabilities. Our review of this monitoring tool raised an interesting discussion about "measuring" vs. "monitoring." You "measure" goals, you "monitor" conversations. "Measuring" defines a goal and measures success in fulfilling that goal, while "monitoring" simply reports on what's happening and does not fulfill a goal in and of itself (KD Paine has a good post on this and also check out Ryan's post on how Mini Cooper linked buzz to sales). That being said, the two need to work in tandem. With all these monitoring tools it might be easier to keep track of your brand, but many companies struggle with analyzing data, measuring it against a goal, and, more importantly, acting.
Everyone agreed Radian6 seemed like a pretty solid tool, but there was also some talk of other options, including one of my favorite's Yahoo! Pipes (which is free). Rather than go in-depth on each of these tools, check a few for yourself:
Paid Monitoring Tools:
Free Tools (Not an exhaustive list, just a few we discussed):
As we shifted gears to talk about how mature company's are embracing online media, Justin brought up Clearsprings integration with NBC. He was kind enough to use SNL's recent Sarah Palin / Hilary Clinton skit as his example, which as been viewed over 4 million times via the Clearspring widget...talk about shareability! However, it is because of this shareability that companies are quite honestly freaking out as they realize they're losing control of where their "brand" is showing up, and how people are talking about it.
"Control" is a dirty word these days. Once it's online, it has legs. There's really no controlling where it travels (think Johnson and Johnson's sub-par corporate blog). Is this a good or bad thing? Mayby a little of both? Depends on the product we surmised.
Lastly, we chuckled about Lisa's passion for Roy Rogers manifested in a Facebook group. Ah, to be young again...
