Monthly Archives: July 2012

How can monitoring social data help your business?

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There is a lot of talk about ROI in social media and an increasing number of high quality tools put forward to help measure and monitor the social web… Radian 6, Brandwatch, Facebook Insights, Social Mention and many more.

One of the problems is that there is often too much focus on just looking at the data provided by these tools without consideration to what you want to find out.

Many tools have been created to gather/sort the available data and present it in nice charts. Analysts then attempt to interpret this data as best they can to see if there is any ROI. But what does an increase in mentions, likes or comments mean?

A better way to look at it is to step back from the data and ask a research or marketing question such as ‘How can I better engage our customers in Facebook?’ and then look to see what data is available to help answer that question. It will usually come from a mixture of sources.

How the social web has changed customer service forever

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Dell's customer service think tank imageCustomer service used to be a more private affair than it is today, with in-house teams taking phone calls, letters and emails from customers with complaints and compliments.

Today, these methods obviously still take place, but the social web means that customers also talk about brands, for better or worse, online. Many brands have embraced this evolution of customer service to great advantage, recognising that online, customer service also encompasses reputation management and customer engagement.

Binding your customers together
Using blogs, social websites and social networks like Twitter and Facebook to allow customers to ask questions, post their point of view doesn’t only allow the brand itself to provide customer service – it allows other customers to respond also, creating a community of customers bound together by their brand experience.

A good example of a customer care community many organisations use is Get Satisfaction, a “friendly online environment to encourage people to answer each other’s questions, pitch in and solve problems… it powers 65,000 customer communities for companies of all sizes”.

Useful links

Get Satisfaction
http://getsatisfaction.com/
Get Satisfaction is the leading customer engagement platform that helps companies build better relationships with their customers and prospects, and better relationships mean better business.

Well’s Fargo case study (slideshare)
http://www.slideshare.net/joolliee/wells-fargo-social-media-case-study-10882165
Powerpoint presentation with details of Well’s Fargo and their online customer service initiative.

Why Dell is still a good case study
http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/why-dell-is-a-great-case-study/
Article discussing why Dell is still a great case study in customer service after all these years.

Dell’s evolution on Twitter
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/6090-case-study-dell-s-evolution-on-twitter
Article discussing the evolution of Dell’s Twitter presence and how they made it work after initial teething problems.

People are increasingly task driven online – but does your online communication reflect this?

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Traditionally, most websites have evolved around a company’s own structure rather than a specific user need.

As the social web continues to grow and dominate the online space, brands and organisations need to take account of how sociability affects people’s behaviour online.

Increasingly, as more and more websites, blogs, social networks and apps vie for attention, people are becoming more and more task driven in their behaviour – they know what they want and they want a website or app to provide this.

Apple app storeApps for SmartPhones are a very good example of how people’s behaviour has changed – part of the success of web and mobile apps is their singular nature – they provide one, succinct service.

People don’t want their apps to make them wade through information about the company or other extraneous information – they just want it to ‘do what it says on the tin’. If they’ve downloaded an app to tell them the weather in Shropshire, they want to know just that – nothing more, nothing less.

Online, websites need to start accommodating this behaviour – why are people visiting your company website? What are the main tasks they want to achieve? The main thrust of any online presence should address these tasks quickly and succinctly – all other information should be in addition to these tasks – not an irritation to wade through in order to achieve the task in hand.

The growing importance of digital photo sharing to brands

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The rise of the ‘social’ photograph
Social media is becoming increasingly visual in nature and the photograph is fast becoming the centre of a large proportion of social media engagement.

A recent Harvard Business School study suggests that Facebook’s new Timeline layout has contributed to the fact that as much as 70% of all Facebook activity is based on photographs.

But Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg; Pinterest, a wholly image based social network, has taken the digital world by storm – it hit 10 Million unique users faster than any other site in history and continues to grow.

The increasing usage and popularity of mobile SmartPhones also means people are taking and sharing pictures as part of their everyday lives like never before.

Instagram homepageInstagram is a photo-sharing programme that allows users to take a picture, add an effect or filter, then share it across a variety of social networks.

Now in the process of being bought by Facebook, Instagram went from 1 million users at the beginning of 2011 to 27 million in March 2012.

 

The growing importance of digital photo sharing to brands
In short, the use of photographs in a company’s social interactions directly increases customer engagement – that means brands ignore the phenomena at their peril.

Posts of Facebook that include an album, picture or video increase engagement by an average of 180%, 120% and 100% respectively*.

Our own experience running and analysing social media campaigns for a wide range of clients at Qube Media has shown a marked increase in customer engagement related to posts with photos in over the past two years.

Photos can help to reflect your brand without being directly sales related. Social networks differ to traditional media in one key respect – they allow two way conversations. This mean brands can ask their customers to share and contribute pictures with them, as well as publishing their own.

Photo sharing facts at glance

  • Facebook has 850 million active users, with 250 million photos uploaded every day
  • As much as 70% of all likes, comments and shares in Facebook are related to photographs
  • Pinterest (a photo based social network) is the fastest growing site in history
  • Twitter has more than 465 million accounts and in excess of 100 million active users, all able to include pictures directly into their tweets

Useful links

The Rise of the Visual Social Network (Infographic)
http://www.adverblog.com/2012/04/28/visual-social-network-infographic/
Great infographic showing the emergence of visual media, photos and video on the social web from Adverblog.

Will the rise of photo apps kill the written word?
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/blogging-and-content-creation/will-the-rise-of-the-photo-apps-kill-the-written-word/
Article discussing the rising importance of photographs in company’s social media presence.

48 significant social media facts
http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/04/23/48-significant-social-media-facts-figures-and-statistics-plus-7-infographics/
Facts and figures about the largest social media platforms and their current usage, from Facebook to Linked In.

*Source: The Rise of the Visual Social Network