Online marketing Calgary» Social media marketing blog category by Alex Zagoumenov

Social media monitoring: LAR model revisited

Zagoumenov — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:04:15 +0000

Late last year when I worked at Apis Design, we blogged about a simple social media monitoring process and we called it LAR model. LAR stands for Listen, Analyze and Respond. Recently I've been looking at web monitoring more closely and identified one more step - Measure. This post will go over the key stages of this new updated model.

Listen to social media space

Listening is the most important business skill. It does not only help you communicate but it also saves you from saying stupid things. Listen first - is the golden rule. In social media listening is even more important. Knowing people's problems first helps you get to the right conversations at the right time. Once you're able to understand what the problem is it's way easier to solve it, thereby building a stronger relationship. There are a few tools that will help you get better at listening. I like Google Reader. And, as I promised to some of my colleagues, I'm working on creating a step by step guide on how to use it to monitor social media.

Analyze your results

Once you set your social media monitor (a tutorial is coming up in a couple of weeks), and get a list of relevant news items, it's time to look at the list and do some analysis. It's actually much simpler than it sounds, no semantic analysis involved at this stage yet. All you need to know if that you are looking for either opportunities or threats in those news items. Some things may hurt your business and you should look though the list to pinpoint those. On the other hand, spotting the right opportunity will get you a raise or increase market share of your company.

Look at it from a funnel perspective:

first you have a large list filled with tonnes of irrelevant information
then you filter all the garbage out and are left with a smaller list with only the items that are relevant
finally, at the end of your analysis stage, you should end up with a small list of actionable items, which will graduate you to the next step - engage!

Engage in social media

Social media engagement is a tricky thing. Many people start their social media journey with it. They create a Twitter account, start a Facebook page and a Youtube channel. And the most common question is "what do I do now?". In this case, you'll notice that engagement only comes after we listened and understood the problems our audience is having. By this stage, you'll probably have a few solutions ready. Now you can go out and start solving problems by still listening to relevant conversations (either via Google Alerts, Google Reader or using real-time search tools like search.twitter.com). I won't go into a lot of details here, but I will commit to write a process guide to this and other stages of this social media monitoring process.

Measure social media engagement

By now, you will have engaged into a few conversations on Twitter, Facebook pages or Linkedin and will want to see what works and what does not. This crucial stage does not necessarily have to be the last. Some social media tool providers have it second after listening. Having it last is just my interpretation of the process. Anyways, at this stage we start talking about ROIs, different ways to measure your social media engagement and some hard numbers.

Believe it or not :), defining your social media engagement is not as straightforward. I'm not saying it's difficult, I'm saying it's not always as simple as previous 3 stages. The main reason is that something that worked for one audience in one market does not necessarily have to work in others. There are things though that are general enough and can be applied to different cases. And this is exactly the topic of a separate guide on how to measure social media engagement. And, guess what? It's coming up!

I recently presented this model at one of Calgary's meetup groups. The presentation is available on my online marketing presentations page. Let me know if you have questions or feel that I'm missing something.

Social media demographics: research, findings, sources

Zagoumenov — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:26:55 +0000

I attended a meeting where a few people were discussing age groups who uses social networks the most. I didn't have any valuable insight (proven results, experiments, statistics, etc) on it so I decided to go and do some looking. Here's the result of my social media demographics research. This article can help you find where your audience is.

Findings

People talk, but it does not necessarily mean that these talks are substantiated by real research
There's more female on MySpace and Facebook than male. However, if you want to socialize with boys go to Digg and Reddit.
MySpace is a place for young and middle-class people, whereas Linkedin hosts a lot of 75-99k folks as well as leads in all categories above 100k.
There's a lot of graduates that are looking for a job on Linkedin. MySpace leads with people with "some college" education.
Want to talk to 55-64? Go to Linkedin. 0-17 babies are all on MySpace.
According to Google Ad Planner, the most active social network age group in the U.S. is 35-44.
Bebo has a lot of kids and Classmates.com is the biggest on 65+ age group.

Sources

I'd appreciate if you can share some of your sources for social media statistics.

Social media starts with people

Zagoumenov — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:06:30 +0000

Social media presents us with a set of tools and rules that enable us to communicate in a different way. It's important which tools you use to deliver your message to your target audience. However, let's forget about these tools for a minute and think about the basics of any communication.

What's your product?

What are its strengths and weaknesses? What's the problem that your product solve? For example, a cold soft drink on a hot summer day solves a problem of thirst. So, when we sell soft drinks we sell thirst quenchers. So, when selling widgets, think about what problems those widgets solve and think of your product in terms of solutions it creates.

Who's your audience?

What's the demographics we are talking about? What do they do at work, in their spare time? Knowing who they are and what they do will help you figuring out the process they use to find solutions to their problems. A notion of personas comes in handy. Here's a few resources to learn more:

What's the decision process?

Given your product solves a problem, how does your audience go about solving it? Usually it's a 5 stage process (problem identification, search for solutions, evaluation of alternatives, making the decision, evaluating the decision). But depending on your industry and / or product the process may be slightly different.

What tools / websites do they use?

Knowing who they are and what they do helps you to understand where they are online. Google AdPlanner is a great tool to find which sites / communities have your target audience's interest. only then choose appropriate message, tools, and process. Marketing Charts is a great resource to get graphs and stats about online behaviours of your target audience.

Only after answering these questions you should look into picking social networks to join. A lot of people start the other way around and, I believe, this is the primary cause of confusion about social media. I hope that helps a bit. Good luck and let's discuss!

Online marketing Meetup by FoundPages in Calgary, event review

Zagoumenov — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:01:30 +0000

This one will be short and as concise as possible. I just came from a great event put together by the team at FoundPages. It was about 5 easy-to-use tools to improve your online marketing efforts. Great turnaround! 5 presentations followed by a few discussions were quick, to the point and very well moderated by Jimmy Wong. Presenters line-up was a follows:

Twitter Basics by Terence Fong of Business Instincts
Google Places for Businesses by Kathryn Blair of FoundPages
Google Alerts by Shannon Bowen-Kelsick of sbk MARKETING
Posterous.com by Bryanne Miller of Be Real Communications
ActiveProspects by Ritu Singh of ActiveConversion

Feel free to contact each of the presenters using the links above to request a copy of the presentation. Lear more about the event and sign up for the next one at Meetup.com. I'll definitely be looking for more events by this group!

Executing social media, notes from event (part 1)

Zagoumenov — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:59:07 +0000

As promised, below are some notes from the second day of the event. Please note that it only includes notes for presentations by the following people: Shawn Ohler, Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman. I had to leave at the lunch break.

Social meida insights from Shawn Ohler, ATB Financial

Social media campaigns are rarely a success, but when they work, the results are amazing.
Asking audience "what do you know about our company?" is often a good first step to solve a brand recognition problem.
Many companies say they care about communities, but in fact they rarely do. So, identifying a strong value and sticking to it is very important. The idea is to create a value that resonates with the entire company. ATB Financial found it as "we are Alberta".
WeAreAlberta.ca, or any other social campaign site is not a place to sell your product. The company treats it as a place where conversations start.
According to 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, the top 3 corporate reputation factors are: transparency, quality of product / service being offered and trust.
Based on ATB Financial's experience, traditional media started the conversation and social media picked it up and continued.
Asking your Facebook friends to contribute to your social campaign does not work. Instead, look at relevant conversations in relevant online communities, offer help, contribute, share value, then ask for help.
According to Shawn, any social media project should accomplish 3 things: publishing (content development and distribution), engaging (starting conversations with the target audience), and influence (ability to influence audience's decisions based on the relationship formed during the campaign).

Social media trainer and consultant, Ernest Barbaric, Ernest Media

Ernest's presentation was of two parts: trends and social media campaign steps. Below is the summary of key points.

Trend 1: Mobile. Smart phones are taking over the market. According to admob data, 50% of all phones are smart phones. 30% of mobile users access social networks from their phone. In short, our experience is becoming increasingly mobile. As marketers, we need to make sure we strongly consider this mobile revolution.
Trend 2: Location-based services. It's about here and now. Yelp and FourSquare are two example of location based services that have been growing substantially in their user base. Google Places is a good example of bigger company concerned with location-based services.
Trend 3: Augmented Reality. Conversations are happening outside of places they originated. For example, I wrote an article on my blog, distributed to my social networks profiles. As a result, my article is discussed on those networks, not on my blog. Another lesson is that conversations are happening where it's most comfortable for your audience, not you. Learn more about Microsoft Augmented Reality Research.

To be continued with more from Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman.