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Social Dialogue Marketing -> Social Conversations

Target Message vs. Social Conversations

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.

 

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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.)

 

 

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Social Communities | The First C

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 are the New Target Audience

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.

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.

Finding Influencers in Social Communities

Both audiences and social communities are made up of people.  Evaluating social communities as a sum of individuals allows us to examine participation and influence beyond the single target community into the other social communities where an individual may be a part.  The ability to spot and engage the most influential members within a given social 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).

Finding your influencers is much more easily accomplished with the right tools.  Community management has gone from the eBay model of activating an existing pool of people who chose to engage on your message boards or with your service to actively prospecting influencers within both your industry and within your frame of influence, whether or not those people have already engaged with your brand.  Having sophisticated community management tools gives the social media marketer an efficient, scalable way to build strong social communities around specific campaigns, topics and other criterion.

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.

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Meltwater is thrilled to announce its newest Big Data-ing social intelligence suite, Meltwater Luvv®!*

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.

Social Analytics Infographic

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.

 

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Social Dialogue Marketing Drives Word of Mouth

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 are Based on Action

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.

Successful Social Dialogue Marketing Leads to Earned Media

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 earned media on their personal networks.  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.

Social Dialogue Marketing is Social

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.

 

 

 

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Meltwater was lucky enough to be on the ground at 2013 South by Southwest (SXSW) learning, listening, and running data until the wee hours of the morning to measure the social chatter.  Our collection of SXSW 2013 infographics that reflects our findings is live for you to enjoy on the Meltwater blog (and on Mashable).

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.

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The interactive portion of SXSW 2013 has ended, with Austin making way for the music fans.  The 2013 SXSW Infographic summary below gives you a good idea as to what folks were twittering about, as measured by our Meltwater Buzz social media monitoring software.  Grumpy Cat upstaged all the human keynotes to be the most talked-about mammal of the conference, proving once again that the internet loves its feline memes.  Move over, keyboard cat: there’s a new gal in town.

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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As you can see from the Day 4 2013 SXSW infographic below, Grumpy Cat upstaged all the keynote speakers to be the most-talked-about mammal of the day.  Although she’s gone home already, Tardar Sauce (the cat’s real name) has been making a big splash here at SXSW, impressing international audiences more than anyone else who’s made an appearance.  This includes Ashton Kutcher, who threw a private party at the W Hotel on Sunday night that lasted into the wee hours of Monday morning and caused a bit of a stir in the Twittersphere.  (Grumpy’s agent can neither confirm nor deny her involvement in such shenanigans.)

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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Meltwater Buzz social marketing software picked up some groovy insights on Day 3 of SXSW, with one main trend being an increase in sessions talk compared to party talk.  Rachel Maddow and Nate Silver, unsurprisingly, both spoke about politics.  Maddow talked a lot about military spending and the dysfunction within the way our military actions are executed, funded and communicated.  Nate Silver talked about how his approach to big data enables him to achieve the sort of phenomenal election predictions he’s published, with one example of his data points being the emergence of cable television directly correlating to a polarization in personal politics.

The big chatter in terms of sessions, though, went to design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg (#swissmiss), who delivered am incredibly aspirational and inspiring keynote about the creative process (and being someone’s eccentric aunt).

Despite the fact that both Twitter and Facebook threw parties at the same time, the winner in terms of party chatter was National Geographic’s 80′s party with uber-popular electronic musician Girl Talk.  This event was at capacity before it even started, and this blogger gave up trying to get in once the line was wrapped all the way around the building and beyond.

Whether that line was longer than the line for Elon Musk’s keynote is up for debate, but as someone who saw both lines, my naked eyeballs would guess that Girl Talk was actually harder to see than Musk.

If you’re interested in testing out the new and improved Meltwater Buzz social marketing software, stop by booth 1425 if you’re in Austin, or just sign up online for a social media monitoring free trial.

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Meltwater Buzz social media monitoring software provided some pretty interesting insights for Day 2 of SXSW 2013, which wrapped up with a whole lot of conversations around the after-dark activities.  Elon Musk gave an inspired keynote that rocketed him to be the most talked-about person of the day, but even the man conquering space couldn’t compete with the chatter surrounding the various parties happening in and around SXSW.  BBQ, beer and tacos were also popular topics.  Hey, when in Austin…

Meltwater is on-hand at booth 1425 to conduct free demos and provide brand analysis reports for folks on the ground.  If you’re not in Texas but would like to see what this sort of online social media monitoring intelligence can do for you, sign up for a free trial of the new Meltwater Buzz and we’ll be happy to provide a social snapshot of your brand.

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Day 1 of the SXSW Interactive conference wrapped up yesterday, and we took a look at #whatsthebuzz on the ground, as seen below in a Day 1 SXSW Infographic.  Primary chatter around the first day had to do with the various sessions being had, but parties and drinking weren’t that far behind.  Al Gore was the most anticipated speaker on Day 1  (his talk on #thefuture is this afternoon), but even he couldn’t compare to the buzz around parties.  We’ll see if he pulls ahead of beer talk once he speaks today!

Meltwater will be at booth 1425 in the Exhibition Hall through 3/13 demo’ing our new and improved Meltwater Buzz social media marketing solutions.  If you’re a PR or  social media marketing pro, feel free to stop on by for a free brand analysis report, some sunglasses and a glass of champagne as we celebrate the new standard in social.

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On Wednesday, February 20th Meltwater hosted the Tweet is Right, a live social media themed version of the classic game show The Price is Right.  The event, held for the second year during Social Media Week, gave guests the chance to win prizes by tweeting their best guess of each prizes’ value.

Over 100 participants showed up and they had 3 minutes to tweet their guesses  for each prize with the event hashtag #SMWinning.  After bidding closed, the first guest to tweet the prize value (or the closest guess without going over) was announced the winner and had to ‘come on down’ to the stage to claim their prize.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our Social Media Week event! For more on the Tweet is Right check out Meltwater’s Flickr gallery and the Storify recap.

[View the story "Tweet is Right 2013 New York" on Storify]

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Our ongoing Social Media Marketing Use Case blog series is based on recent roundtable discussions with social media marketing professionals. The series explores social media marketing topics with the goal of sparking open discussion and informing social strategy. The fifth use case in our series, social media promotion, focuses on how businesses can derive direct revenue from their use of social media marketing.

Recent studies have shown that almost 40% of people connect with brands over social channels because they want to receive offers and discounts. But another recent study stated that people disconnect from brands because of over-posting or irrelevant content.

Brands want to see ROI in their social media marketing efforts, and one of the core ways for them to associate revenue and profitability directly to social marketing is through running a social media promotion. Dell Outlet is one of the key success stories regarding the use of social media promotion. They have a Twitter account dedicated to selling discounted merchandise and have seen success in their approach.

These questions kick-started our roundtable discussion: How can a brand take advantage of online engagement with consumers to drive social media promotion? What are the rules of engagement and best practices?

Social Media Promotion | A Lesson From Traditional Sales Promotion: How Much Is Too Much?

• Example: An outdoor products retailer sends out email marketing newsletters every day or two. They are not segmenting the list by interest, they are not providing special promotions other than through email marketing, and their promotions are similar each time (usually 20% off). While people are more forgiving of promotional emails around the holiday season (they are looking for deals), how long will it take the average consumer to disengage and unsubscribe? If this retailer were doing the same thing on social channels, how much less tolerant would a consumer be of this barrage of deals?

• Brand exclusivity often drives how contacts perceive a promotion. Designer brands may erode their brand status by offering discounts too often; but when they do, many people will probably jump at the chance of getting 20% off of current season items.

• Predictability may erode a brand’s revenue stream. If a retailer provides discount offers too often, consumers may just wait for deals before purchasing rather than looking for an every-day value retailer.

Social Media Promotion | Maintaining a Content/Promotion Balance

• Users come for community and stay for good content!

• While people are often looking for deals when they connect with a brand online, great content that pertains to the brand’s target audience will help the consumer engage with the brand on levels higher than just transactional promotions.

• Brands that provide only promotions through their social channels will miss the opportunity to learn more about their customers, engage them further, and develop those customers into brand advocates.

• Social channels may be the lead to a consumer opt-in for social media promotions, but it may also make sense to deliver those promotions on different channels. Savvy marketers will consider delivering promotions on multiple channels and let the consumer dictate their preferences and the rules of engagement.

Social Media Promotion | Different Rules for Different Social Channels

• Twitter updates can fly by, and a consumer may see an occasional tweet. Multiple promotions may or may not be noticed and may or may not come off as annoying to followers.

• Frequent Facebook updates, however, may have a greater annoyance factor especially if a contact doesn’t have a huge volume of communications from their contacts. The brand’s status updates may stay on the consumer’s newsfeed, and too many promotions (or even too many updates) may cause the consumer to disconnect from the brand.

Social Media Promotion | Different Deals on Different Social Channels?

• Should brands offer different deals on each social channel? That depends on the brand’s goals as well as the audience profile on each channel.

• If a brand decides to offer exclusive promotions on a particular channel, they better make sure that they follow through and make the deals worth the consumer’s engagement on that channel!

Social Media Promotion | Value and ROI From Lead Capture

• Example: Pepsi Refresh campaign. Tons of people signed up to support different causes and Pepsi built a huge database. What now? How are they going to use this information? Where’s the ROI?

• The database can lead to distinct, attributable ROI for social media marketing. Deal distribution, tracking by channel and by person, offer redemption in the retail channel, and direct ROI. This is happening today!

• The database can also provide media impression data. ROI for traditional marketing and advertising used to be about media impressions and ROI based upon sales volume for a period during or after a campaign. With social, there’s a greater ability to measure the direct and residual impressions (through social sharing) in a traditional light and measure the redemption of social media promotions as well.

Intrigued? Would you like to join the discussion? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters of social networking. The problem is that most sales reps treat LinkedIn like a prospecting database for cold calling. It’s just too enticing when all your target prospects are out there showing off their company names, titles, areas of expertise, blogs, and opinions. You can use LinkedIn as a prospecting database, but it is probably the weakest and most professionally irritating use of the technology. To succeed at social sales, you must have something to offer beyond your product. You must be someone your customers want to know.

This is the fourth post in a series on social business designed to help B2B sales and marketing professionals make better use of social media by thinking in terms of social networking. This installment provides ten social sales tips that will turn social media into a lead generation machine for your business by following the B2B Social Business Bill of Rights.

Social Sales Tip #1 | Activate Your Social Sales Network

B2B businesses still have rather spotty usage of social networking. Most B2B sales reps are on LinkedIn, but far fewer have active Twitter accounts. Depending on the industry, B2B prospects and customers are even less likely to be active social networkers. Social Business Right #1 says you must expand your social sales network, so take the lead and give your sales reps, prospects and customers a reason to get more social. Use social channels like blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to communicate with your customers and prospects. Encourage website registration using social networking accounts. And, create promotions and contests that require participation in social networks. Activate your company’s social business network by motivating its members to follow your company’s lead.

Social Sales Tip #2 | Capture Social Sales Contact Profiles

Upgrade your CRM to capture Twitter handles, LinkedIn profiles, blog URLs and Facebook pages in addition to the standard phone, email and fax. Does anyone still fax? Add these items to lead capture forms on your website and use data appending services to augment them. Your sales team can’t link up without the right social contact information any more than they can cold call without phone numbers.

Social Sales Tip #3 | Train Sales in the Art of Referrals

The most common social sales mistake is treating social media like a prospecting tool; it is a networking tool. Stick to direct cold calls and email for prospecting. The reason most sales reps struggle at networking is that they fail to understand the critical role of referrals in the art of networking. Sales reps are trained to hunt. Account managers are trained to farm. Networking is about gathering. Gathering contacts. Gathering useful tidbits of information. Gathering opportunities. Gathering things that you can share.

Social Business Right #2 advises that you build your social sales community by being helpful. Sharing referrals are not selfless acts of kindness, because reciprocity creates social networking karma. Smart networkers look for opportunities to provide referrals to those people from whom they would like to receive referrals. They know who they want to meet and what those people care about. They identify opportunities that can be referred and opportunities to refer them. Networking requires a gathering sales discipline. It’s not something you go out and do once a month. It’s something you incorporate into your daily routine, because opportunity waits for no one.

Social Sales Tip #4 | Train Sales on Social Networking Tools

If your sales team masters the art of networking through referrals, then your social network training will become an entirely different experience. Approaching LinkedIn with the mindset of gathering contacts that you might do business with or might introduce you to someone you might do business with someday and looking for ways to share information, introductions and business opportunities will generate many creative ideas. This proper use of social networking contrasts sharply with the more typical sales prospecting default of searching on title and trying to link up with a product pitch.

Each social networking tool from LinkedIn to Twitter to a personal blog offers different networking capabilities and opportunities. Sales reps should select the ones that fit their respective business needs and professional styles. However, mastering the ins and outs of the features, functions and formalities of each tool is essential. For example, if you choose to write a blog, you probably need to know WordPress and SEO. If you choose Twitter, you need to know how to use handles and hashtags. If you use LinkedIn, you need to understand groups and updates. Despite all your good intentions of being a helpful business colleague, it’s a competition for attention out there and mastering social networking tools is essential to social sales success.

Social Sales Tip #5 | Prepackage Useful, Share-able Content

Social Business Right #3 asks that you should accelerate information sharing within your social sales network. Maintaining a library of incredibly useful, industry-specific tidbits of information in easy-to-share packages like like PDFs, PPTs, Web links, and so forth can be a big time-saver, because when opportunity knocks to share some useful information, you need to answer quickly and concisely. Marketing departments can help sales reps in a big way by making sure sales is plugged into the content marketing pipeline for both original and curated content.

Social Sales Tip #6 | Invest in Digital Media Monitoring

The timeliness of shared information directly impacts its usefulness. Therefore, it’s important to stay on top of what’s being said in your industry everywhere from Twitter to traditional news. Staying on top of industry buzz has become impossible to do manually by reading your favorite trade publications. Strong media monitoring tools not only keep you informed, but they can become a competitive weapon for the social sales professional, because people gravitate to those who are always in the know.

The Tipping Point for Social Sales

There is a challenge hidden in these 10 Social Sales Tips, and since most sales professionals love competition, I will make it explicit. The ultimate goal of the Social Business Bill of Rights is to light up your social business network with viral sharing of business referrals through social networking, from simple retweets to new prospects, partners and personnel. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell provides a straightforward formula for enabling virality built upon three key network players: connectors, mavens and salesmen.

• Connectors, are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions.
• Mavens are information specialists, or people we rely upon to connect us with new information.
• Salesmen are persuaders, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.

Presumably, a strong sales rep is already a salesman in the Tipping Point sense. The challenge then is this: can you become a social sales triple threat by being a connector and a maven too?

Social Sales Tip #7 | Launch a Referral Reward Program

Operationalizing referrals throughout your social sales organization is no easy task. It requires new knowledge and new habits. By introducing a simple referral rewards program, you provide a vehicle to reinforce the habit of asking for customer referrals. It is a great misconception of customer referral programs that they drive referrals through monetary incentives and discounts to your customers. They do not. When a customer provides a referral, she is doing it in order to help her friend, not the salesperson or the company. If a customer is not happy with your service, she will not refer her friend regardless of the incentive, because it will make her look bad. The best referral programs provide a small reward to your customer (reciprocity, not an incentive) and an incentive to the prospect (which allows your customer to do her friend an even bigger favor).

The most important ingredient in driving customer referrals is never a reward or incentive. It is timing. You must ask for a referral when your customer is most willing to provide it. When she is happy with your service and feeling the reciprocity vibe of your social sales karma. While there are modern marketing tricks that can triangulate on the right time and place to ask for a referral through some online call-to-action, there is no tactic stronger than the sales rep asking for a referral directly after being told by your customer just how fantastically happy she is with your product and service.

Social Sales Tip #8| Increase Social Sales Productivity

Staying on top of every prospect’s and every customer’s social activity across multiple social netorks is an impossible task for most busy sales professionals. Therefore, it is essential to start investing in systems that boost their social sales productivity. Twenty years ago most sales managers would have scoffed at the idea of maintaining a pipeline of opportunities and simultaneous conversations with hundreds of prospects. Today it is routine due to the productivity impact of enterprise CRM systems. The social CRM systems of tomorrow will allow sales reps to hear and participate in thousands of conversations going on inside their social sales network, but outside of today’s enterprise CRM systems on the other side of the firewall.

Social Sales Tip #9 | Create Online Networking Opportunities

Now that you have your social sales reps all linked and followed, why not give them more opporunities to engage? Don’t let them just sit around waiting for that great article to share or contact to introduce. Create opportunities for your social sales reps to social network. Start a LinkedIn Group. Launch a community industry blog or forum. Create social networking events by integrating online networking into offline events. Or, just create social networking events, such as tweet-ups and contests. However you do it, give your social sales reps more online networking opportunities. More opportunities for online engagement mean more opportunities to strengthen online relationships.

Social Sales Tip #10 | Create Offline Networking Opportunities

Social Business Right #5 asks that you consistently work to convert weak ties to strong ties within your social sales network, so sooner or later you’ve got to take it offline. All the tweets in the world are still no substitute for thirty minutes over coffee. Help your social sales reps develop stronger business relationships by providing offline networking opportunities with prospects, customers and industry influencers. These can be as simple as a meetup at the local bar or as complex as a global annual user conference. As industry trade shows shrink in the wake of modern Internet marketing, there is a growing vaccuum that must be filled to satisfy the fundamental need of B2B professionals for face-to-face networking. Don’t forget to mind the gap.

This social sales blog post was cross-posted courtesy of B2B Marketing Strategy @chaoticflow

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Our ongoing Social Media Marketing Use Case blog series is based on recent roundtable discussions with social media marketing professionals. The series explores social media marketing topics with the goal of sparking open discussion and informing social strategy. The fourth use case in our series, direct social engagement, focuses on how businesses can take advantage of the open nature of social media and have unprecedented, direct access to customers and prospects.

One of the core opportunities for brands and businesses to utilize social media marketing is to engage directly with their current and potential customers. While brand awareness is a first link in a business’ social marketing value chain, the ability to connect directly with a consumer to draw them closer gives the brand the opportunity to drive consumer advocacy, engagement, and feedback. How are brands outlining social engagement with customers today? What are the best practices they need to use to ensure positive consumer response?

Direct Social Engagement | Engagement by Consumer Type

• Finding and publishing meaningful content for social sharing can be a daunting task. What kind of content are people looking for? What are the best practices for social engagement?

• Altimeter Group published an “Engagement Pyramid” and accompanying tactics for marketing to different social consumers in the marketplace. They hypothesize that in social networks, 90% of people are audience members, 9% are editors (create content), and 1% are curators (heavily involved in online communities). Their recommendations for social engagement at all the levels of the pyramid are included in the SlideShare presentation below.

Direct Social Engagement | Should You Use the Same Brand Messaging on Social Media?

• Your social voice should be your brand’s voice (reflecting brand identity, values), but on a personal level. A social voice should be just that…social (rather than just messaging/promotion-oriented).

• The social voice, and the content and communications that are published socially, should reflect the pillars of the brand (the company’s/brand’s values) as well as the topics and flow of conversation from people using the brand’s products. For instance, an organic food product’s social voice should include content and comments about the organic lifestyle, organic recipes, sustainable farming, and other key pillars and topics that support the brand’s identity. This kind of content will attract the audience most likely to buy the brand’s products and create an opening for “Watchers” to become “Sharers” and even “Commenters” (in Altimeter’s terms).

• The content shared on social media by the brand should enable target customers to identify and develop brand affinity and advocacy. Even brands with commodity products (e.g. gasoline) can engage with consumers based upon their brand’s pillars; for instance, an oil company can engage with consumers about conservation, ecology, etc. Just make sure that the social voice is a true reflection of corporate values; social consumers want to see authenticity in the brand’s social voice.

Direct Social Engagement | Brand Affinity and Brand Trust

• People buy from the brands they like, use, and admire. If they find those brands on the social web, it’s an opportunity for the brand to get closer to the consumer.

• When engaging consumers who may not have a relationship with the brand, a business should use a light touch first and then let the consumer set the pace of social engagement and communications. For instance, a brand can comment on a consumer’s Twitter status update and follow that person. If the consumer follows back, and even sends a comment back, it’s a great first step. Brands shouldn’t try to sell at first touch, they should let the consumer investigate the brand. Just following that person will introduce the brand to the consumer.

• Most brands hope to drive new contacts to their website; social media (and content sharing) helps people find the brand, and the website explains what benefits the brand offers. Make sure that the website is clear, provides great content and value, and supports the brand’s social identity. Make sure links from the brand’s social pages (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) are directed towards appropriate pages on the brand’s website.

Direct Social Engagement | Ask for Permission, Don’t Overstep Boundaries

• Strictly adhering to the communication preferences of the consumer helps you keep that consumer engaged and develops trust.

• The “ask” should not be done at first touch; however, asking at various junctures on the brand’s website, Facebook page, on landing pages, etc. is desirable and acceptable.

• Remember: Date first before thinking of marriage!

Direct Social Engagement | Measuring Value

• There’s pressure from management to have measurable, tangible results from social engagement. In fact, some within corporate leadership still don’t see the value and are afraid of seeing the negative comments that are being posted about them. Remember that the comments are happening whether or not your company is listening; social engagement is an opportunity to receive feedback from customers and to turn negative consumer experiences into positive outcomes. But you can’t do that if you’re not listening to and engaging with social consumers.

• The value can be measured like other media–impressions, clicks, and even commerce. The use cases are there but the business needs to commit to moving forward with social marketing in order to prove the value.

How are you engaging with consumers? What value has it brought to your company? We’d love to hear from you!

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