The 5 W's of Business Social Intelligence

The five W’s are fundamentally a part of how companies and their brands must comprehensively look at social network information.  Companies must analyze, gaining weighted insight into what is happening within the social media eco-system for their brand.  Social media has dramatically changed how companies communicate, market and sell their products and service. It has also changed the dynamic relationship between companies and their customers.   


Now, customers can play a major role in what's being said publicly about your products and brand.  This is a great challenge, however I believe it is the best opportunity to engage with customers in new and different ways, building stronger, longer-lasting relationships and enhancing loyalty and great sales.

Who is doing the talking and what's their influence?

Quickly identify the key influencers and get detailed information about their gender, age industry, Klout rating and interests.  Key influencers can work with you for a win-win situation.  Remember, the influencers are talking about others at a 15-to-1 ratio over talking about themselves.  Are you?

What are people talking about and what are the key conversations?

Monitor (listen) to buzz and key conversations to see what is being said about your brand, service and products.  Then identify the major themes and issues that are raised about you within the social media landscape.  Engage in those conversations as needed to show you are involved in an authentic way.

Why are conversations happening and are they positive or negative?

Discover why those conversations are happening. See whether what's talked about is positive, negative or neutral and determine the impact on your brand and business.  Don’t wait until it escalates; listen often for the best results.

Where did these conversations occur?

Access geo-demographic information to see where and when around the world conversations are taking place - drill-down to the country or city, as well as the age demographic to gain relational insights.  

When did these conversations happen?

Analyze the activity to learn more about when these conversations happened - both historically and in real-time.  Then, compare and contrast buzz generated over time vs. efforts and time-lines associated with related buzz and awareness.

Using this intelligence, it is then important to take next steps utilizing Social Media Best Practices:

Listen:  The social media eco-system has a lot of white noise.  Utilize tools to overcome this challenge.  Identify and monitor the conversations on social networks, blogs, forums & communities, news sites, etc.  There are millions of conversations about your company, your brand and your products.  Listen in real-time for effective engagement.

Engage:  Now that you have heard those voices about your brand, identify key people, drilling into those conversations and understand who they are, what interests them and how their authority or relevance applies to your brand.  Engage key influencers and thought-leaders to build, nurture and manage those important relationships.  Using tools to automatically secure authority measurement and Klout scores, you can work with these influencers based on inbound links, social bookmarks and mentions, comments and other important activities.

Measure:  This is where you need the right tools.  Using real-time analytics, you can track and measure your campaigns, products, as well as brand reputation and sentiment.  Analyzing this data over time garnishes your metrics with context, benchmarking and comparisons with competitors.

Understand:  By listening, engaging and measuring, you gain valuable understanding into the intelligence (IQ and EQ) of where the conversations are taking place.  You can then determine the impact on your company’s brand and products, and if needed, make adjustments to align your communications, PR, marketing or sales plans.


Look forward to your comments and thoughts.




Twitter: @RikWalters

Top Content Tips for Facebook Marketing - Lead Generation and SEO

Facebook Content Marketing Basics

 
If you are writing a Status Update or creating a post in Facebook Groups then remember to include the keywords you want to gain rank.

Have a blog?  Using Twitter?  Make sure you tie them together.  Use backlinks and let twitter know about your Facebook page and vice-versa.

Use FBML (facebook markup language) to design a landing page.  Research shows that is a far more effective way of gaining ‘likes’ than the wall which just looks like a mass of words.  You will need some basic skills.  If you lack those, there are vendors that can do this for you for a reasonable cost.  Well worth the effort.

It is important to back-link with your website, landing pages and micro-sites.  Search Engines use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that - Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.  Got that?  This not only helps your overall SEO efforts, both for your social media and more importantly for businesses, for your website traffic and lead-gen efforts.

Vanity URL.  Simply get to 25 page ‘fans’ and then go to Facebook.com/username to change the URL of your page to make your page not only easier to find, but stand out in search results. 

 
Top Ten Facebook Content Tips

Use the 80/20 rule.  80% of status updates should give value to the fans first, 20% of status updates can be promotional, or brand first.

Use every status update category.  Text, links, images and video. Variety increases reach and user engagement.

Reply to fans.  When they comment on status updates. This encourages fans to comment more and increases the total interactions count for an update.
  
Recursive linking.  Include links with videos and links: When uploading videos and call-to-action links, include links to in the description to drive viewers back to your website, micro-site or landing page.  Double up and add the link back to Facebook within your SEO structure on your website, micro-site or landing page.

Contests.  Ask fans to title interesting photos and announce a winner, have a “Fan of the week/month” for mentions, etc., every 100 likes and more.  When promoting contests, email sign ups, sales landing pages or other calls to action, send fans to a Facebook tab for these actions whenever possible. Research shows conversion rates increase when Facebook users do not have to leave Facebook.

Create a consistent offer or specials.  Fans to look forward to on a regular basis. For instance, post a new product specific 20% off coupon the first of each month.

Top Ten Lists.  Spread out top 10 lists over the course of 10 status updates, once every day or week as a countdown.

Celebrate awareness months (engaging in community).  Find creative ways to celebrate commemorative months like Black History Month (February), Autism Awareness Month (March), Clean Up Your Computer Month (January), and more.

Post simple facts or stats.  Fans love numbers and stats, but include a question to actually get a response. Otherwise, you will get mainly likes.

Ask fans questions (quizzes, contests, facts).  Ask fans to upload simple photos to the wall “What is the view like from your desk?” or “What does your computer desktop look like?”  When fans post content to your wall independent of likes or comments on your status updates, it increases the chance that they will see your status updates in their news feed in the future. And it makes the activity on your Facebook wall look more fan friendly.

The key here is to keep it fun and make the most out of your page with great and engaging content.  You must use call-to-action and offers to get people excited about being a 'fan'!  Whether you are a small business, large corporation and whether you are a B2C or B2B facing company.  Leave the formal relationship to your website.  Facebook is where you can show people the human side to your business, engage customers and potential customers, talk about them and let them ASK about you and your brand.

@RikWalters

Google and Bing Increase Impact Of Social Media On Search Results. How Will Social Search Affect Social Media And SEO In The Future?

The Social Media Future Is Here...Now!

What most of us believed to be true is now showing acceptance by the big boys.  Google and Bing are beginning to increase the impact of social media content and links on their search results, citing social networking activity as an indicator of what might be most relevant to business and consumer searches.   This developing acceptance is likely to spread fast (given social media!), as the positives and negatives begin take shape.

For digital Media & PR, social media and SEO agencies, the changes have the potential to significantly manifest in new key priorities.

How this will affect search and social media?:

Increased focus of social media buzz for brands/businesses – an increased requirement for your brand to be mentioned in social media to benefit from high search engine rankings.  Social ‘chatter’ is important now, but to have an impact on search results, the pressure is will be your brand to develop conversations and be in the mix of online discussions.

Increased importance of social media link strategy:

Buzz quality is important, however the links back to branded assets (website, social media assets) will generate the most traffic and show search engine spiders that a brand is relevant in the social space for matched search topics or terms.

It’s not yet clear if spiders/bots will analyze semantics and ‘social speak’, but perhaps it should be presumed that they do now, which is extremely relevant to social media content.

Brands must, more than ever, monitor online audience sentiment: There are plethora of sentiment tools that analyze social media content to filter out how a brand is perceived in the social ecosystem.  We can then presume that Bing and Google will measure this too.  Very important to maintain positive buzz around a brand, because if it turns negative without monitoring, there could be a risk that the search results of the brand would then be mirrored by its social media perception.

Now the positive - Brand benefit from new search engine results: Your brand stands to significantly benefit from the impact of social media content in search engines.

If your brand has a savvy social media team or manager, they will have a positive impact on the quantity, quality of conversations on social networks involving the brand. 

Are you a part of the conversation about your brand?: The spread of ecommerce into social media is on! Relevance in social media commerce now and the future will depend on your brand’s willingness to commit to social media.  Your business and brand must ensure that any social media commerce platforms developed are well optimized.  Make the most of social media functionality to develop conversations around your products, the new key to achieving more traffic through search engines.

What effect will all of the above have on the online marketing world in the future?  We  need to see how it all develops, but it’s safe to say this will change the way brands use social media.  There are undoubtedly more changes over the social media horizon, brands and businesses must be prepared…now.