The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

Three Steps for Successful Web Listening, Engagement & Social CRM

OMG! Margarines just one molecule away from plastic! #NoMoreLurpak! Prince William really needs Regaine! LOL

Loving the driver side mirror in the new Nissan Juke

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

About Synthesio
Synthesio is a global, multi-lingual Social Media Monitoring, Research and Engagement company, utilizing a powerful hybrid of tech and human services to help brands and agencies collect and analyze consumer conversations online. The result is actionable analytics and insights that provide an accurate snapshot of a brand, and help to answer the ultimate questions how are we really doing right now, and how can we make it better. Founded in 2006, the company has grown to include analysts who provide native-language monitoring and analytic services in over 30 languages worldwide. Brands such as Toyota, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Accor Hotels, Orange Telecom and many others turn to Synthesio for the data they need to engage their markets, anticipate and prepare for emerging crises situations, and prepare for new product or new campaign launches. www.synthesio.com

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

Table of Contents
Introduction.............................................................................................................. Listen.................................................................................................................... Measure your brands presence rapidly using free tools......................................... Discover your brands personality.......................................................................... Select your monitoring parameters....................................................................... Choose your monitoring vendor............................................................................ Analyze.................................................................................................................. Get past the noise to actionable insights.............................................................. Identify influencers............................................................................................... Detect and manage social media crises................................................................ Compare online and offline data.......................................................................... Analyze sentiment, man or machine?.................................................................... Pick the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)......................................... Compare your results with competitors................................................................. Define report formats .......................................................................................... Engage.................................................................................................................. Discover social CRM............................................................................................. Choose the right spokesperson for your company.................................................. Nurture a community of advocates........................................................................ Perform online customer service........................................................................... Conclusion................................................................................................................. References................................................................................................................ Glossary.................................................................................................................... Acknowledgements................................................................................................... Credits....................................................................................................................... 8 11 12 13 21 24 27 28 29 31 33 34 35 36 38 42 43 45 46 48 54 55 55 59 59

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

Introduction
While listening to social media conversations has been possible for several years now, many businesses still need guidance to get the most out of their social media strategies. This guide is a culmination of our experiences with various brands across the world. It gathers best practices and top goal-oriented approaches to web listening and analysis, to help you turn online chatter into actionable insights that improve decision making across your organisation. Getting started in social media listening and implementing these goals is easier than you may think, and involves the three simple steps covered in this guide:

Listen

Engage

Analyze

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

1 Listen
Every good relationship is based on good listening; your brands relationship with the public is no different

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

Measure your presence using free tools

1 - Choose the right free tool
A number of free tools exist for quickly measuring your brands presence online. These give you a first look at who is talking about your brand and your competitors, where, and how often. These free tools include:

There are countless additional resources in the form of thought leaders in the field who share great insights, such as Ken Burbary1, whose personal website is a treasure-trove of digital marketing, social media information and best practices.

2 - Evaluate your monitoring workload

With regards to handling your monitoring workload, if your brand garners from 100 to 500 comments per day, one person working a full-time job should be able to add this listening to their daily routine. Any more than about 500, though, and you may need to dedicate more resources internal or external and implement more enterprise-level tools.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

10

Discover your brands personality

Finding out your true online brand personality is an important first step in determining how you will listen, and how you will measure the results of your digital strategies and activities. Synthesio analyzes over 5 billion online conversations in its database. From this, weve been able to identify four distinctive brand personalities online: Boring, Functional, Exciting and Vital.

Boring

Functional

Exciting

Vital

Take our quick quiz to determine which personality best fits your brand.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

11

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

12

1 - The Boring Brand

Generally speaking, the boring brand does not generate much interest among buyers organically, essentially leaving consumers indifferent. 70% of brands online fit into this group, and therefore need to be very creative to generate emotional attachments and establish a community of supporters, fans and advocates.

Best practice - Blendtec Blendtec is a classic example of a boring brand a simple line of blenders possessing as much excitement as, well, a blender In order to raise public awareness of their brand and infuse emotion into the public consciousness, they launched a social media campaign entailing a series of simple yet highly effective humorous web videos called Will it Blend. These videos depicted the Blendtec founder throwing anything from golf balls to iPhones and iPads into their blender and grinding them into a pulp. As of May 2011, the videos have garnered an astounding 161,000,000+ views on YouTube, transforming their brand into a household name worldwide.
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 13

2 - The Functional Brand

The personality trend of the functional brand is focused on the product or service rather than on the brand name. The product must deliver on certain criteria to establish its need within the market, and, perhaps most importantly for this brand personality, it must focus on quality customer service. Companies such as Internet Service Providers, telecommunication providers, hotels, logistics firms, banks and insurance companies, etc. must respond to customer needs first and foremost to establish their competitive edge.

Social Profile

The Functional Brand

Definition: Brands that rely heavily on customer-service to establish superior reputation, customer satisfaction and sales. Examples: PayPal, Best Western and T-Mobile. Goal: Social Media listening should provide real-time insight into public conversations and direct engagement capabilities to interact with customers when necessary.

Social Media Presence Mainstream Media Presence Brand Emotion Level Engagement

High High Average Low

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

14

Case Study

Global listening in Hospitality Improving customer service & reputation

Overview Accor is one of the worlds leading hotel operators, with a broad portfolio of hotel brands including Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, Adagio, Motel 6 and Ibis. Over 50,000 customer reviews are published each month about Accors hotels on sites like Booking.com and Tripadvisor. Lately, Accor has been focused on customer satisfaction and quality of service and wanted to use social media listening to identify the root of a problem at its source, in order to fix it as quickly as possible. The goal The company approached Synthesio to: 1: Learn what customers are saying about their brand and competitors hotels (around 12,000 hotels worldwide) and combine these results with their internal customer satisfaction data. 2: Empower individual hoteliers with a monitoring tool and guidelines for taking action on social media content in order to improve the customer experience. The solution In response, Synthesio created customized approaches geared towards different levels of decision makers within Accor: Corporate marketing 1 global dashboard with the data on all brands, hotels and competitors globally. Brand marketing and operations director per country - 40 dashboards with country-specific data for all hotels and competitors for the brand Hoteliers 4,000+ local dashboards with specific data used to optimize campaigns. The result Synthesio worked with Accor to create a customized KPI called the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) to provide a structured metric against which progress could be measured. This was taken into account to incentivate hoteliers. Accor experienced a 55% increase in positive sentiment in 2010/11 (and negative online comments have declined). This has translated into double-digit online sales growth.
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 15

3 - The Vital Brand

Vital brands are those with products and services which relate directly to customers personal sources of concern, such as baby care products, pharmaceuticals, energy, food and environmental subjects. These areas can cause anxiety and doubt, generating large volumes of conversations which vital brands can tap into to gain a richer understanding of their customers and how they can better meet their needs.

Social Profile

The Vital Brand

Definition: Brand that affects customers primary sources of concern. Examples: Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson. Goal: Understand the emotions fueling online public discourse in order to create better offerings and enhance corporate communications.

Social Media Presence Mainstream Media Presence Brand Emotion Level Engagement

Very High Average High Very High

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

16

Case Study

How Social Media is changing the rules in Pharma

The #1 topic most discussed on the Web today is Health 14% of all user-generated content mentions a specific drug or disease. Social media fulfills a basic need for safety Many who choose to socialize on online forums, Facebook, or Twitter, do so with the intention of asking for or looking for advice, and particularly, to be reassured about their health condition. Patients are now in control People search for their symptoms on sites like WebMD, Patientslikeme or Doctissimo, and formulate their own diagnoses from all the feedback published by other web users. Brands, physicians, clinics and hospitals are increasingly faced with over-informed patients who demand prescriptions for medicines and treatments which they have already chosen online, and who do not hesitate to post their own reviews of their experiences for all to see (as on Meamedica or Note 2BIB). Synthesio has even analyzed several new websites like Vitals.com that allow patients to evaluate their doctors. A new relationship between patients, physicians, and the Web Physicians are using the Internet in increasing numbers to learn more about certain pharmaceutical companies and devices, and are starting to group into professional online communities like docboards.com or PratisTV. Some companies have launched Blogs, such as Roche and Chugais Polyarthrite 2.0, directed at patients in order to inform them about diseases, treatments, events, etc. Utilizing super focus groups to gather opinions and views Cancer, depression and diabetes are all diseases for which specific social networks have emerged where thousands of patients, physicians and families around the world meet and share their experiences and opinions on a grand scale. Brands now have the unprecedented opportunity to harness these online communities and use them as their personal super focus groups to extract valuable insights which may otherwise have gone undetected.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

17

4 - The Exciting Brand

These brands generate online interactions naturally, as they appeal to our desire to belong. Companies like Apple, Nike and Nintendo have a large amount of people wanting to talk about them and share their experiences and opinions. Moreover, they have the potential to produce even greater levels of buzz by creating compelling and engaging content. The monitoring needs of exciting brands will be more complex, but listening can be used to gauge the impact of campaigns on the public discourse, compare various campaigns over time, and conduct market research to gain an understanding of public opinions on new products.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

18

Select your monitoring parameters

Now that you have a good understanding of your brands personality, youre ready to start listening to what people have to say about you online. But before initiating the task, its vital that you select your monitoring parameters, i.e. the right tools and methodologies to follow so you meet your specific needs. The 4 steps to successful listening set-up:

1 - Make a list of topics that clearly define your company or brand

If youve already engaged in measuring your online brand presence using free tools, you may have come upon key terms, which you may not have previously considered. In any case, define which expressions and/or combinations of words you would like to monitor. Keep in mind that these can always be changed at a later date, but starting out with a complete set of keywords may help you to avoid missing vital information. Some keywords to consider may be:

- Company Name - Brand Names - Product Names - Key Competitors - Industry Issues - Key Spokespersons - Executives

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

19

2 - Determine which countries and languages you would like to monitor

This may seem like a no-brainer, but consider various potential markets which may be talking about your brand. Certain social listening tools allow for geo-location, but these vary on the granularity of the information and sources. Certain languages that have different alphabet and encoding, such as Russian and Chinese, require the right technologies and services to aggregate and analyze online conversations.

3 - Consider how you would like to visualize your social media data
You should establish how to best display the information, i.e. by brand, topic, country, etc. This will depend on your objectives and will allow you to get a feel for the key trends in the data easily, before you dig in 100%.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

20

4 - Determine who will sift through and analyze your social media data
One constant that remains across all social media listening platforms is that there is always an element of human work required to fully understand social data. Think of social media listening as a form of ethnography. While we can collect certain quantifiable elements, the deeper insights come from unstructured information that must be analyzed with human logic. In other words, effective online listening and analysis is as much an art form as it is a science. Profile of a good social media analyst Native speaker Deep understanding of the culture and industry Strong knowledge of social media Efficient, meticulous, patient and organized

In-house or outsourced? Your social media analyst can be a person coming from your in-house resources dedicated to listening to what others are saying about your brand online. However, this is often a full time task and requires a grasp of the language at a native level, understanding the local culture, and having a good knowledge of your industry. Hence, you may consider outsourcing this job to a specialist.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

21

Choose your monitoring vendor

Choosing the right monitoring vendor is without a doubt one of the most important parts of the listening process. There are currently more than 200 monitoring companies in the marketplace, providing a wide spectrum of monitoring and analysis tools as well as personalized services. To help make sense of the vast number of options out there, weve broken them down into 3 vendor types Free, DIY tool, and Full Service. Take a look at the visual below and see which looks like the best fit for your needs.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

22

Chapter 1 Summary
Make a first measurement of your online presence using free tools Evaluate your monitoring workload: Up to 500 comments per day, one person working full-time will be able to analyze your daily social media activity. However, if it goes beyond 500, you will need to dedicate more resources. Discover your brands personality: The boring brand: Leaves consumers indifferent. Goal: Generate innovative social media communications to differentiate the brand. The functional brand: Relies on product communications and customer-service. Goal: Direct engagement to interact with consumers. The exciting brand: Generates a massive amount of organic online buzz. Goal: Listen to communities and influencers, and gauge the impact of campaigns. The vital brand: Affects customers primary sources of concern. Goal: Understand peoples emotions to improve offerings and corporate communications. Select your monitoring parameters: 1 - Make a list of topics or key words that clearly define your company or brand. 2 - Determine which countries, topics and languages you would like to monitor. 3 - Consider the best approach to visualize your social media data. 4 Assign your social media analyst. Define who will sift through the data: In-house or outsourced, your analyst should be a native speaker, with a deep understanding of the country, culture and industry to be monitored, and must possess a strong knowledge of social media. Choose your monitoring vendor: Your chosen vendor, be it Free, DIY, or Full Service, has to be able to match your specific monitoring needs.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

23

2 Analyze
The true story of your brand behind the numbers

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

24

Get past the noise to actionable insights

One challenge with monitoring social websites is getting past the noise and retrieving the precious nuggets of information and insight that can help move your business forward. At Synthesio, we recommend taking the following three steps to reduce the amount of spam and cut to the good stuff faster.

1 - Set objectives before monitoring

It is essential to set specific objectives before starting to monitor. Once you are clear about your goals, you can focus your listening efforts on meeting them.
Objective 1: Identify our goals

2 - Use sampling solutions for better quality data

Very often, brands generate large volumes of conversations on a global scale, and struggle with analyzing it all in order to obtain as much insight as possible. Depending on your goals, however, it may not always be necessary to analyze everything, which is where a data sampling strategy can be very effective. Analyzing a sample of the data harvested, based on the influence of each piece of verbatim (i.e. tweet, article, blog, post to a comment, etc.), can save valuable time and resources, while still providing insights into the key trends, conversation clusters and weak signals that matter most to your brand.

3 - Focus on customer concerns

Social media participants are typically not paid for their opinions, and thus can be assumed to be more honest than if they were invited to an event for their opinions. Furthermore, utilizing online consumer reviews, ratings and comments enables the brand to discover additional trends and topics of concern among consumers, which otherwise may have been missed asking predefined questions in a survey.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

25

Identify influencers
There are a variety of influence-scoring platforms that can provide information about key industry influencers. Some of these tools can also provide detail on the levels of influence generated by web sites or media type. i.e. how many of your Twitter followers are clicking your links and retweeting your content, the level of engagement within your Facebook page, etc.

Blogger

Facebook User

Twitter User

Journalist

Forum Member

Some influence ranking services include: PostRank: Delivers objective, real-time data and analysis on topics, trend, or interests relevant to business. KLOUT: Measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage, you have the capacity to influence others. The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure: How many people you influence (True Reach) How much you influence them (Amplification) How influential they are (Network Score2) Traackrs: Identifies the most relevant online influencers for a topic or campaign.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

26

SYNTHESIOS SYNTHESIORANK influence ranking system, simple score ranking 0 to 10: Reveals for each brand or topic the influential individuals online and the various sites where they live. It provides a simple score for any given piece of verbatim (i.e. a tweet, article, blog post, forum comment or comment on a Facebook Page), based on 3 elements: The influence of the website where the mention takes place (includes elements such as traffic, Google PageRank, frequency of updates, number of backlinks and number of on-topic mentions for the brand) The influence of the user who is mentioning the brand (followers, listings, level of activity, impact of the verbatim and number of on-topic mentions) The positioning of the brand within the webpage (i.e. how on topic a piece of verbatim is) The ability to accurately identify the influence of a brand mention, website, or individual can provide a variety of benefits, including: Filtering through thousands of mentions to find that needle in the haystack. Identifying key communities of advocates (or detractors) in order to more accurately target your advertising and communications. Streamlining customer service efforts by prioritizing your resources and responses to ultimately improve brand reputation, customer satisfaction and sales.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

27

Detect and manage social media crises

The question of how to spot and manage crises as they unfold online often comes up when companies first start listening to social media. The first step is to realize that monitoring 100% of the web is not only impossible, but also costly and unnecessary. Here are three quick tips for online crises monitoring (you may want to keep our Crises Detection Fire Safety Card in your pocket at all times).

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

28

1 - Data Spikes
An unusual amount of information on one topic is one possible tipoff to a coming crises. This is why organizing data can be so important. If comments coming in are grouped into one topic or another, you can quickly and easily see that one topic (such as price, environmental or a product name) is receiving far more comments than usual. One technique for identifying potential crises is to define an average volume threshold for your brand, which, if surpassed by a data spike, will trigger an alert to your team.

2 - Large Conversations with Many Comments

A growing conversation that is visible via an increasing number of comments may also signal a coming crises. A good rule of thumb to begin with is that any online conversation pertaining to your brand which sparks more than 5 comments should be given close attention by your team.

3 - Real-Time Alerts on Sensitive Topics

Alerts set up based on sensitive keywords are also a must for any company that may suspect a possible crises. Pharmaceutical brands, for example, can easily fall prey to attacks online. For brands launching new products, keeping an eye on those keywords is essential for ensuring that the launch goes smoothly.

2 new mails

16:36
Thu Aug 4 11

4 new mentions

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

29

Compare online & offline data

Whether people interact online or offline with your brand, they still see you as the same company. Combining online and offline data is essential to see the big picture, to fully understand your market, and to better communicate with customers. The approach is essentially a coming together of two worlds: The world of Customer Experience teams, which have traditionally used offline customer satisfaction surveys, call center logs, and other internal listening posts as their main sources of Voice of the Customer data. The world of Social Media Monitoring, which has been busy developing increasingly sophisticated tools for monitoring, analyzing and measuring customers rants and raves on the web.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

30

Analyze sentiment: man or machine?

An ever-increasing number of brands and agencies look to analyze their markets online conversations to quickly gauge the levels of positive versus negative feedback. However, the method utilized for sentiment analysis can have a big impact on the accuracy of the results. So, automated or human? The table below may help you to quickly understand the pros and cons of each sentiment analysis method.

A hybrid solution may be ideal One way to avoid sentiment problems is to combine human and technological analyses, allowing machines to detect which posts contain sentiment, and humans to assign sentiment to one topic or another. Seth Grimes3, an expert in semantic analysis, has said that you can yield high levels of accuracy with machines filtering and humans analyzing.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

31

Pick the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Every department has their own KPIs. Marketing professionals do not evaluate their efforts on social media in the same way as PR, and the sites to which they should be listening may vary greatly as well. The illustration below lists the various KPIs that pertain to each department, and helps clarify the different ways in which each department may utilize online listening and engagement.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

32

Compare your results with your competitors

One of the growing needs in social media is to establish benchmarks within each industry to compare results across departments and competitors. Although an official benchmark does not yet exist, at Synthesio we often create a customized industry benchmark to help brands better understand their current positioning and progress as compared to the competition. Example of the automotive industry benchmark:

The study covers the major car manufacturers with a distribution network in France over the periode: 01/11/2010 - 30/11/2010. Facebook and Twitter are excluded from the scope of this study. This study was performed in partnership with Performics. The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 33

Case Study

Benchmarking the video game industry

Overview The video game industry is simply massive, and has been evolving rapidly and consistently since the days of Mario, Zelda, Sonic and Frogger. Each week new games with new technologies are released onto the market, keeping fans very happy, but also making it quite difficult for brands to keep up with the rapid changes in the industry. A leading global computer and video game publisher wanted to try their hand at tracking the industry, to benchmark the visibility of each game and gauge their PR activities. They worked with Synthesio to rank 300-400 games weekly and provide detailed reporting with an industry-wide scoring system. An in-depth scoring and ranking system was developed based on volume and influence of online conversations, allowing the client to compare 2-5 subsets of games at a time and compare the changes in consumer conversations over time. The goals / Results Global listening project across 15 countries in 10 languages including Swedish, Italian, German, etc. Provide the whole company with a weekly newsletter with rankings and visuals to give a detailed snapshot of the industry (300-400 games weekly) and help all departments keep up to date with the latest developments worldwide. Ranking of the games is based on volume and influence; the score for a game is the sum of the individual SynthesioRank of verbatim mentioning a game. The video game publisher also wanted to compare 2-5 games at a time and compare them in terms of levels of buzz and influence over time. Challenges for Synthesio Establishing a system to continuously update sourcing and monitoring coverage in order to accurately track online conversations for all games, currently sold on the market, meaning the monitoring settings had to be changed and reconfigured very regularly. This enables them to adjust their media spending accordingly, taking into account the game being a hit or a flop on the market.
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 34

Define report formats

1 - For busy decision makers, keep it short and sweet
Reports can be a great way to encourage busy decision makers within your organization to take notice of key trends identified by a listening program, without them having to visit an online dashboard. The best reports therefore tend to be short, to the point and tailored to your organizations most pressing areas of concern.

2 - Qualitative vs. quantitative reporting

Automated reports focusing on quantitative metrics and sent in email format can be a useful way to highlight key changes and trends over short reporting cycles (for example, weekly). However, qualitative analysis by a human being is essential for monthly or quarterly reports if they are to contain real insights into the stories behind the numbers. The inclusion of excerpts from key pieces of verbatim will also help to bring a report to life and ensure that your decision makers are exposed to the fresh and authentic voice of your customers - a voice that can often make them sit up and take notice.

Weekly

Monthly

Quarterly

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

35

3 - Answer the so what? question

When everything is automated, with very little human analysis and input, it can be easy to fall into the trap of just ticking a box when it comes to monitoring. Reports containing recommendations for action are often the most insightful output of a listening program and help to establish the true ROI in listening. After all, social media monitoring nirvana comes from knowing why you are monitoring and what you hope to get out of it, and then connecting the dots between the insights you gain, the actions you take, and the results they deliver for your business.

ROI

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

36

Chapter 2 Summary
Get past the noise 1 - Set objectives before monitoring: Be clear about your goals. 2 - Use sampling solutions: Prioritize what you analyze using the influence of the verbatim. 3 - Consider social media as a super focus group. Identify influencers Influence-scoring platforms give you key information about the influencers in your industry and how to find them. This helps to target your advertising and communications, improve brand reputation, and drive up customer satisfaction and sales. Detect and manage a social media crises 1 - Data spikes: Determine an average threshold and get alerts. 2 - Large conversations with many comments: Pay attention if more than 5 comments. 3 - Set real time alerts on sensitive keywords. Combine online and offline data, for a richer understanding of your customers experience through a One Voice of the Customer program. Analyze Sentiment 1 - Human: Accurate, reliable, contextual, topic and sub-topic break down. 2 - Technology: Useful large volumes of data, can be inaccurate, flawed, and has very weak multi-lingual capabilities. 3 - Hybrid: High level of accuracy, machines to detect sentiment, humans to verify and present sentiment to one topic or another. Establish social media KPIs by department: Market Research, Marketing, PR, HR, Customer Service and Sales. Compare results with competitors: Benchmark each industry to compare results across departments, and among competitors. Keep reports strategic and action oriented: Avoid the so what? monitoring trap through qualitative reporting focused on providingto Social Media Monitoring 37 The Quick Start Guide actionable insights tailored to your business.

3 Engage
How to best interact with your customers

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

38

Discover Social CRM

Social CRM is customer relationship management nurtured through social media such as Facebook and twitter. Instead of just dealing with data and information, Social CRM deals with conversations and relationships. It implies the process of communicating to customers in the form of fans and followers and converting them into customers and advocates - the next step in the evolution of a brands direct communication with the public. However, with the exponential growth of social media, consumer behaviour is shifting as an ever-increasing number of consumers communicate online to share their opinions and experiences with brands. Thus, Social CRM is not just communication from brand to consumers; it also implies conversations from consumer to consumer. Today, 88% of consumers consider a recommendation when purchasing a product or service. 93% of Americans want brands to have a presence on social media sites (Cone Business in Social Media Study). This creates a venue for communication, marketing and networking. As a result, brands have been adapting to this new paradigm by listening to online consumer feedback, taking part in individual conversations, responding in real time, gathering negative or positive comments and recommendations. Accordingly, brands utilize next-generation social CRM platforms to establish a centralized command center where employees (marketing, PR, customer service, call centers, etc.) engage directly with consumers where they live online. The goals are, of course, being able to better understand the market, enhance communications, and ultimately, to build a loyal customer base by providing a better experience and service.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

39

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

40

Choose the right spokesperson for your company

Faced with widespread consumer adoption of social networks, businesses are equipping themselves with web and customer relationship specialists to put social response strategies into place for Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums. They are either called community managers or online customer service operators and are the primary spokespeople of the brand online.

VS
Community managers vs. customer service operators

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

41

Nurture a community of advocates

1 - The community managers goal: grow and nurture a community of advocates

Marketing is the ongoing process of engagement whereby strangers are nurtured into advocates. Trey Pennington4

For small and large companies alike, a community managers main mission is to underpin the brand in its marketing strategy by creating a community of advocates. A community manager accompanies a brand throughout the entire process of: Identification of potential buyers and influencers for a brand Advocacy and evangelism towards people who are not familiar with the company and/or its products Content creation for community members Interaction in the community while taking notice of new expectations and changes

A truly vital connection between the brand and web users, a community manager is present across the entirety of social networks and presents him or herself as an intermediary between brands and their customers.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

42

2 - Online community management 10 best practices

1. Select a community manager to ensure the company mission and user mission are well defined, and the direction of the community remains up-to-date and pertinent. 2. Put the needs of the community members first. Open conversation, honesty, trust and freedom - even if the participants recommend a competitors products or complain about your services. 3. Be active. Communities require ongoing active administration, management, and moderation. Otherwise, they can easily generate abuse, spam and poor behavior. 4. Measure success. Not only is it important to track the number of page views or members, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the contributions being brought to the table by participants. 5. Use it as an innovative channel. Customer communities tend to project customer influence and create more sustained contact with the brand. This creates a cooperative exchange for mutual brainstorming, and co-development of ideas and outcomes. 6. Integrate your business. Deep involvement and communication by both organization members and customers will favour great participation. 7. Let the community find its identity. Many communities struggle for a while until they reach the right participants, or until they identify the optimal means of engagement such as focusing on a social network instead of discussion forums (or vice versa).

8. Remember that control is in the hands of the members. Do not impose artificial rules, this will invoke dissonance and prevent natural communities from developing. 9. Go where the community is. Users are more likely to be comfortable using their existing social sites for customer interaction. 10. Get involved with your community. Organizations which successfully involve their community in a variety of activities, online and offline, reap the benefits of enhanced efficiency, innovation and productivity.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

43

Perform online customer service

1 - Understand the value of online customer service
70% of web users are influenced by others comments, and the visible complaints of other consumers online can play a pivotal role in their purchasing decisions. According to findings from the IAB and Lightspeed Research5, the most popular channel for complaints is online (44%), followed by phone (36%) and letter (22%). The 90-9-1 law remains true online: 90% of visitors are spectators, 9% commenters, and 1% are creators of content. This means that although the number of comments online may be less than the number of calls to a call center, an answer will be viewed 9 times on average for each contribution. Each response also provides a trace for future clients.

1% Super Contributors 9% Contributors 90% Viewers

2 - Pick your operators from the offline customer service team

Trained within the framework of the customer service department, customer service operators respond directly to customer requests and problems online. Many sectors turn to customer service operators for not only resolving customers problems but also providing answers for future consumers and the viewers.
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 44

Specialized in customer service, the activities of these customer service operators reduce costs thanks to the higher visibility of answers online, and therefore generating fewer calls from people with the same question.

3 - Find the right channels to engage with your customers

Facebook and Twitter are the western worlds social media superstars, but they may not necessarily be the best sites to pay the most attention to in your social media monitoring and engagement. Instead, the sites where your customers live online should be given top priority. When monitoring for a top automotive brand, for example, we focused on top automotive forums and blogs, keeping an eye on Facebook and Twitter but not giving them top bill.

4 - Dont respond in real time, most conversations will be auto regulated

Truth: Some online customers expect real-time responses, and some dont. If you jump into a forum conversation too quickly, you could miss the opportunity to let one of your (unpaid) online advocates chime in for you. On the other hand, if someone is asking a question with your Twitter name attached to it, you can be certain they are expecting a near instant response directly from you.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

45

Case Study

Engaging in Social CRM with Orange

Orange goes fishing where the fish are Orange is a leading telecommunications company in Europe that has partnered with Synthesio to actively listen to and engage with consumers online. Orange knew that if answers to common customer questions were more visible on the web, then it could reduce the number of calls into its contact centers, thereby making significant cost savings. After building out its owned customer service properties on the web (including its own customer forum and an extensive FAQ site) Orange wanted to fish where the fish are and start engaging with customers on key third party sites. Listen before engaging your audience Orange began by listening to determine the key sites where conversations were taking place. This revealed a group of influential forums, and within these forums a group of super contributors - community participants who regularly post good answers to visitors questions. Prior to commencing engagement in these forums, Orange devised guidelines for intervening which included asking initial permission from the forum administrators and letting the super contributors answer questions first. The results Orange now has a team of 30 online customer support managers who use Synthesios Unity engagement platform to actively engage online. Orange estimates it has achieved savings in the millions of euros through a reduction of call volumes due to the increased level of answers and support customers can now find on the web.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

46

5 - Social Media connects with CRM platforms and call centers to build social customer support
The last step will be connecting Social Media Monitoring and CRM platforms with call centers to allow for fluid, connected customer support. When all touch points are connected, customers will be responded to equally no matter which channel they use, and customer service agents will be able to connect the dots between the various touch points.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

47

Chapter 3 Summary
Discover Social CRM: Robust monitoring systems with centralized command centers where employees (marketing, PR, customer service, call centers, etc.) engage directly with consumers where they live online. Choose the right online spokesperson for your company: Community managers, web consultants, or online customer service operators, present across all social networks as an intermediary between brands and their customers. Nurture a community of advocates Marketing is the ongoing process of engagement whereby strangers are nurtured into advocates. Community management is the best way to achieve that goal. Perform online customer service Understand the value of online customer service: Answers provided online will be viewed an average of 9 times by consumers, and provide a trace for future clients. Pick your operators from the offline customer service team: Reduce calls into the call center from people with the same question, thanks to the higher visibility of answers online. Find the right channels to engage with your customers: Focus on the venues where customers share their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Dont respond in real time, most conversations will be self-regulated: When you do respond, coordinate internal community managers or team members so that one person responds and sends feedback to the team. Connect Social media monitoring with CRM platforms and call centers to build social customer support.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

48

Conclusion
The primary question pertaining to Social Media Monitoring and engagement has changed. It is no longer a question of if we should be listening to online conversations, but rather: how do we set up the right approach to best suit our specific business needs. Online listening and engagement can be effective if integrated with existing business practices, corporate cultures, and conducted with strategic objectives in mind. Attempting to add Social Media as if it were a different department slows down information flow instead of increasing it to keep up with the speed of social networks. Online monitoring and analysis are essential for transforming handshakes online into positive, long-term relationships between brands and consumers. It requires an investment of time and money, but if planned appropriately in advance and coupled with the right tools and/or services, the investment will prove to be not only helpful, but essential for your companys long-term success.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

49

References
1 2 3

http://www.kenburbary.com/

http://klout.com/corp/kscore http://sethgrimes.com/ 4 http://treypennington.com/ 5 http://www.iabuk.net/

Glossary
Advocates and Detractors: People posting positive or negative comments about you, your company or your products. Audit: A thorough initial analysis of your online presence at a moment in time. Audits are immensely valuable for establishing a baseline benchmark against which future results can be assessed. Theyre also useful as a standard part of new product launches to determine the expectations of the marketplace. Buzz: Online chatter about your brand. Establishing a benchmark level of online chatter about your brand before a launch will help you assess the impact of the campaign during and after the campaign. Crawler: An automated computer program that browses all types of websites in order to uncover comments and mentions across the web. Crises Monitoring: Proactive attention to real-time comments made while a crises unfolds. Dashboard: A convenient, easy-to-use online tool presenting a snapshot of your online reputation. Data Validation: A human intelligence process. After the crawler archives data relevant to
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 50

your search criteria, analysts scan comments to clean raw data and separate truly relevant data from irrelevant data, define sentiment, and sort information by topic. Hotspots (and emerging hotspots): A concentration of negative sentiment emerging in comments on the web. By monitoring hotspots, companies can take advantage of an early-warning system to reach out to influencers online before the hotspot grows into a crises. Human Analysts: Real people who understand the nuances of written language. Computers can accomplish much for mankind; some tasks, though, still require humans. When it comes to sentiment analysis, computerized natural language processing can be helpful, but it takes real humans to detect and categorize the subtlety of sentiment. Influencer: Someone who is actively publishing content on the web and has a network of significant size. For some industries, an influencer with a fan base of only a few dozen can still move the marketplace with his or her opinions. Media Equivalent: A method for estimating the purchased media value of mentions online. It takes into account the advertising rates for the publication in question or similar ones and calculates what it would have cost to purchase an ad of equivalent size. Metrics: Variables used to assess performance. Each widget in a dashboard is based upon a specific metric. Online Reputation: The combined image of your brand on the web. It takes into account content you publish about yourself and content published about you by others. Search Term Thesaurus: A collection of keywords linked by Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.). The quality of your thesaurus will have a direct and profound influence on the quality of your ultimate search results. Spending ample time with your account manager to define your thesaurus will help ensure your monitoring program provides information you need to make decisions and engage effectively. Score of Satisfaction: An indicator of the relevance of Internet users verbatim regarding a particular topic we analyzed. It takes into account: sentiment of verbatim about specified
The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring 51

topics, volume of information and influence of the verbatim. Sentiment Analysis: An automated and/or human analytical process to determine if comments are positive, neutral or negative. While it may be helpful to know the total number of mentions your brand or product engenders online, knowing the direction (positive/ negative) of the mentions will give you a better sense of the pulse of the marketplace. SynthesioRank: An indicator of the influence of people, sites and articles. It takes into account several metrics specific to each type of media (site audience size, frequency and volume of publication,Googles PageRank, number of fans, views, inbound links or comments, etc.) Verbatim: A comment on the web. A verbatim can be an article, blog post, video, photo, comment in a forum, tweet, or a comment left on a blog or article.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

52

Acknowledgements
Wed like to thank our investors, whose trust and support have made Synthesios vision a reality; helping to transform a small start-up into a global leader with offices in the UK, the U.S. and France. We acknowledge all the leading brands and agencies with which we have been working since 2006. We owe a great deal of our experience to our clients and partners, without which this guidebook would not have been possible. Thanks to all Synthesio team members whove contributed with their knowledge, experiences, insights and skills to make this guide happen. Appreciations to great resources such as Web Business by Ken Burbary, Instituto Cervantes, Marshall Sponder, Trey Pennington, Forrester Research Inc. and Influenceon, all of whom have helped to contribute to our work with key facts and figures on social media research and analysis.

Credits
Book written by Ben Farkas and Sara Portell. Design and Illustrations by Matteo Batazzi.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

53

This guide book collects all Synthesios best practices, experiences, and practical learning amassed from working with leading brands of all industries around the basic steps to get started in Social Media Listening and Engagement; it is intended for Marketing, Communications, Media, Human Resources, Sales, Public Relations and Customer Service departments, which have either already begun, or would like to begin monitoring online social (and mainstream) media to achieve optimal measurable business returns.

The Quick Start Guide to Social Media Monitoring

54