Who’s Analysing Who?

Media Analysis, Media Measurement•on October 24th, 2008•No Comments

There are over 80 (at least) Social Media analysis tools on the market, perhaps closer to 150 worldwide. About 95% are focused on marketing and PR usage. So that’s agencies and companies monitoring  Social and Traditional Media for buzzwords, trends and reputation management. Such monitoring is becoming increasingly valued by businesses and governments – some call this Big Brother.

But even as participants we’re watching each other as well. Take Twitter Grader for example. People seeing where they “rank” in terms of popularity with Twitter. Plurk awards Karma Points based on your participation. Then there’s tools like MyBlogLog from Yahoo! Friendfeed gives you Stats and Posterous tells you quickly how many people have viewed your posts. You can put a widget on your blog for RSS feeds so others can see how many get your posts via RSS (whether they read them or not seems to be irrelevant.) I’m sure there are others I’ve left out.

So we’re all watching each other. We’re looking at each other to determine how popular a blogger or microblogger is. Blogger and social media researcher Dan Zaralla discussed this to some degree in a recent blog post calling it Social Proof – essentially proof of who you are and the “value” of your content. We call this Social Value with our clients.

So why all this analysing? Does it matter? The why is easy for businesses and government; to understand what’s being said to make better marketing, PR and HR decisions on their reputation and brand efforts. For consumers or individuals, as Dan points out, it’s Social Proof that others think you know what you’re talking about, that you’re relevant to the topics at hand. This is a form of social acceptance behaviour, validated through the number of tools that quantify participants. Essentially this two-way monitoring is akin to how we behave socially in school, at work or at parties and other social functions. I’m sure much more can be covered on this topic, but for business and participants in Social Media, it shows how the Social Web is evolving and developing peer recognition, and there are implications.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)

Social Media Beyond Marketing

Best Practices•on July 28th, 2008•3 Comments

Seems most businesses are looking at Social Media as a marketing and/or customer service channel. Is this too narrow a view? Is something being missed that could add even more value to the brand than just marketing? Based on our conversations and clients, we think so. What do you think?

The more we read on Social Media from the commercial end, the more we see discussion around relationships to “buzz marketing” and “behavioural marketing”, how monitoring tools relate to these uses. These are, without doubt, highly viable approaches for business to Social Media. But doesn’t engaging in Social Media mean more than just selling products/service?

One excellent application for Social Media is investor relations when it comes to both industry analysts and to retail shareholders. Monitoring forums and blogs for commentary around a stock can elicit vital intelligence to both the PR and IR teams in a company. Engaging in the conversation can help a company to clarify issues around the latest financial statements or product release being discussed by shareholders. What’s the value in this case? protecting the possibility of a sell-off or maintaining a stock price through a difficult financial time. For the company, this means protecting your valuation. This is important if you have institutional investors.

There’s also innovation. By engaging not just customers, but other thought leaders or professionals through Social Media channels, a  company can uncover potential innovations for products and services or even how it does business with its suppliers. Uncovering an opportunity to innovate can result in increased margins, a better product that beats the competition or increases market share – all of which contribute to the shareholder value, or even Economic Profit.

What other benefits do you see coming from Social Media? What about Governments? Of course, while the benefits may be there, in the end it also matters what the company/organization does with this intelligence doesn’t it?