SM Maven eBook2

Guide to Media Intelligence

The Savvy Social Media Mavens

2 The Savvy Social Media Mavens s Guide to PR

Table of Contents

A Note to the Social Media Marketer 3About the Author 3

Lets Redefine Media Intelligence 5Traditional Media Intelligence Is No Longer Smart Enough 5Look Beyond the Firewall for Outside Insight 5

If a Tweet Falls in the Forest... 8Digital Breadcrumbs & Shared Knowledge 86 Ways to and Marketing Value with Social Listening 9

We Need Answers, Not Data 11Quality Is Simple, Not Easy 11We Need Answers, Not Data 12

Why Engagement Matters 15Quality Can Be Hard to Quantify 15Advocacy Cant Happen Without Awareness 16Customer Purchase Funnel 16An Indirect Pitch Can Be a Strike 18Good Outreach Takes a Mix of Good Legwork and Good Tools 19

Measure What Matters 21Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics 21Competitive Benchmarking 24

A Final Note to the Social Media Marketer 26


If youre a social media expert acting as the real-time brand voice for your company, I dont have to tell you how dynamic and chaotic your channels can be. Social technology has fundamentally changed the way that people communicate and, consequently, brands have been struggling to adapt their communications programs to this new model and to understand what success looks like.

If it makes you feel any better, Ive been there myself: I started managing my first socialmedia program in 2008, when senior executives were scratching their heads trying to figure out what on earth The Twitter was contributing toward the bottom line.

When it comes to that last piece, theres still a lot of confusion. Being on the front lines of customer and influencer relationships is a huge responsibility that has, ironically, been difficult to prove from a success standpoint. Those of us who have helmed these positions have almost assuredly had to endure someone up the food chain raising eyebrows and questions as to what the value is in a social media program and those questions have been very difficult to answer with hard data. Hey, quantifying the qualitative isnt easy.

Heres some good news: modern media intel-ligence can give us what we need to be more strategic in our communications approach by cutting through the noisiest communication channel out there and surfacing what we need to hear. While strategic is somewhat of a buzzword these days (its apparently the grand-kid of yesteryears proactive), when I use it, I mean it: crafting and measuring a thought-ful program based on hard data that leads to deliberate action is well within the grasp of the over-extended social media manager. Yep, I am saying that we should tweet responsibly.

Having the intelligence to thoroughly under-stand how those public conversations play into our campaign goals is what uplevels our social media efforts into smart, deliberate programs. It also enables us to provide clear, measurable value to the rest of the organization by giving us the tools we need to manage and report up on the public conversations that drive our com-munications programs.

If you have a different job function, you might check one of our other media intelligence guides, aimed specifically at the Marketing Generalist, PR pro, and the CMO.

Onward!

Chapter 0

A Note to the Savvy Social Media Marketer

Leslie Nuccio is the lead Content Strategist at Meltwater. Shes been in digital marketing for longer than shed care to admit, and immersed in the wild world of user-generated content since 2003. When shes not nerding out on marketing and technology, you can generally find her enter-taining her 4 year old or hiking with one of her dogs.

About the Author

How Technology HasChanged the Industry

Part 1


Traditional Media Intelligence Is No Longer Smart Enough

Its time to redefine the notion of media intelligence.

Typically, when weve talked about media intel-ligence in marketing circles, what weve actu-ally been talking about is media monitoring and it was mostly used for PR purposes. In fact, one of the first results when Googling media intelligence is the Wikipedia entry for media monitoring service, which reads as follows:

A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping

service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest

to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content,

analysis, or editorial opinion, specifically or widely.

Traditional media intelligence provided us a historical view as to what was being said by journalists on traditional news outlets. This narrow perspective gave PR no good way to understand whether our messages were be-

ing heard, making it difficult to understand the overall impact of our communications programs. With that in mind, Ill go ahead and propose that the media intelligence of yesterday, while informative, wasnt actually intelligent.

Look Beyond the Firewall for Outside Insight

Todays media intelligence is a different ballgame, out of necessity: our media landscape has changed drastically since the first tweet paved the way for dynamic, real-time, 140-character public opinion.

Those of us who have been in communications for a while know the reality: were not lacking for information. In fact, there is an ever-grow-ing real-time pile of data around us its just not necessarily easy to dig through it to under-stand our impact. This is especially true on the social media front, wherein were simultane-ously watching, conducting, and starting mul-tiple conversations across multiple channels.

Chapter 1

Lets Redefine Media Intelligence

Chapter 1. Lets Redefine Media Intelligence

6 The Savvy Social Media Mavens Guide to PR

We have the most active communications landscape out there, and its not an easy one to navigate.

The good news is that the right media intelligence tools can help us sort through the noise to prove out what we already know: while its still important to look at the information we have within our own firewalls and those of our media channel partners (impression numbers, for example), that information is much more powerful in context.

With that in mind, modern marketing and business strategies will be increasingly shaped by the knowledge derived from the qualitative online data thats out there living beyond the firewall: this is outside insight.

The new wave of media intelligence enables modern social media marketing professionals to do four things that traditional media intelligence didnt:

1. Listen to everyone at once: sophisticated monitoring technology can scan millions of sources in real time. The notion of coverage changes significantly with this sort of dynamic and comprehensive source base. We can monitor well beyond traditional media sources to see whats being said on blogs, social media sites, comment fields, review sites, and pretty much anywhere someone is posting their thoughts outside the firewall.

2. Understand the big picture: by having access to billions of sources of data crunched down into digestible reporting, we can connect the dots to arrive at timely business and marketing insights in a way that wasnt previously possible.

3. Spur quality engagement: modern communications is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and that person may or may not be a journalist. Understanding whos say-ing what and where is the first step to qualifying our outreach programs.

4. Benchmark ourselves: because were talking about public data, we can conduct the same analysis on our competitors that were applying to ourselves. This goes well beyond who got more Google alerts, so rest assured that the next time someone emails you a competitors earned media, youll already be armed with an answer.

Chapter 1 - Lets Redefine Media Intelligence


Having the intelligence to thoroughly under-stand those public conversations is what up-levels our communications efforts into smart, deliberate programs. It also enables us to provide clear value to the rest of the organiza-tion by giving us the tools we need to manage, measure, and report up on what matters.

And so, let us redefine media intelligence:

Media intelligence uses data science to analyze public social and

editorial media content. It refers to solutions that synthesize billions

of online conversations into relevant insights that allow organizations to measure and manage content

performance, understand trends, and drive communications and business

strategy.

The following four chapters will explain how these four modern media intelligence advantages can help shape a smarter, more measurable social media program.


out to PR and corporate communications to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Being in social media means that were going to hear about most things before anybody else does, and the sheer volume of conversation we can monitor gives us the most comprehensive view of the landscape. With that in mind, its important to come up with a regular process by which were swapping notes with PR and corp comm cohorts, as well as anyone else whos talking to our customers.

Sharing our knowledge with other depart-ments helps us understand our relationship with our community: our brands influence and reputation isnt shaped on a single channel. It takes multiple touchpoints to form a relationship, and people interact with our brand across channels without thinking

does it make a sound?The short answer is yes.

Every tweet, status update, comment, and blog entry outside the firewall is a digital bread-crumb that can inform our PR and marketing efforts.

Every tweet, status update, comment and blog entry is a digital breadcrumb to inform marketing.

Anyone with the latest media intelligence tools can indeed hear the tweets that fell in the forest, as well as the ones that made a boom-ing sound and caused the sort of message amplification we want (i.e., people sharing our content with the folks in their social circles). Now, those of us who are managing social channels arent strangers to this concept, but we may or may not be getting the most out of our knowledge base.

Shared Knowledge Is SmarterSocial listening isnt enough, any more than a clipping service is enough: one of the main mis-takes that we make in marketing is using siloed data sources without taking a look across the company to see what everyone else is hearing.Sharing knowledge within marketing doesnt always happen, either, so its up to us to reach

Digital Breadcrumbs & Shared Knowledge

Chapter 2

If a Tweet Falls in the Forest...

Chapter 2 - If a Tweet Falls in the Forest...


about it. With that in mind, having a thorough understanding of what folks are saying and hearing across their experience keeps us on the forefront of it and this makes something like crisiscom-munications a lot easier to manage.

6 Ways to Add Marketing Value with Social Listening

Most of us are using some sort of social listening tool; this job is nearly impossible without one. As follows are six ways that we can help overall marketing efforts with good listening:

1. Test messaging This is one of the more obvious use cases, and thats because its one of the easiest. By listening to social chatter, we can monitor and join conversations to see which way the wind is blowing and this can help inform longer-term messaging programs. Using our social community to give us an idea as to what resonates is especially valuable during everyones favorite challenge: crisis communications. Speaking of which

2. Stay ahead of a crisis The interplay between social and traditional media sources means that a negative article might get to us via Twitter before our traditional media feed picks it up. We also tend to bear the brunt of unhappy customers airing their 140-character grievances. Our job in these scenarios is simple: escalate the issue im-mediately to whoevers job it is to fix it and make sure that we get the response we need to manage

Sharing information with other customer-facing departments in our organization gives us a better picture of the trends. By talking to customer service, for example, we can compare what were finding on the social media feeds with what theyre hearing on customer feedback calls, surveys, and emails.

Have a protocol in place that clearly specifies the response process andescalation path for negative com-ments, tweets, status updates, arti-cles, and otheronline chatter.

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Chapter 2 - If a Tweet Falls in the Forest...


All of these efforts are made easier and more accurate with sophisticated tools, and adding value to the business is one way that we can make the case to get them. In Chapter 3, well dig a little deeper into what sort of technology can help inform these sorts of qualitative exercises with hard data.

need to understand it.4. Find influencers and brand advocates The

nature of influence has changed dramatically with the advent of social networks; we may find that our best influencer isnt actually a journalist, but rather a loyal customer. Keep-ing an eye out for these folks and having an influencer relations plan in place adds value to our efforts, and rewards our company with brand advocacy.

5. Test creative Using our social channels to test new creative concepts is a great way to save money on a big production and media spend. Partnering with our creative and ad departments and sharing out whats working and whats not is bound to both give us new content more often, and improve our creative efforts.

6. Use paid media to amplify owned and earned What were all striving for is earned media. To that end, when content on our owned media gets attention (giving us a sig-nal that its resonating), we should use paid media to promote that content. This gives it a better chance of earning media and magnify-ing our impact.

our own channels. Usually this is our PR person, so when were confused as to who to alert, thats a good place to start.

3. Measure a crisis If were seeing a lot of RTs and Facebook shares around something wed rather not be circulating, it unfortunately means that the message is being amplified. We may find that there is a small but organized minority of people talking to themselves, or we may find that the conversation is growing in ways we dont want. The double-edged sword of social message amplification is some-thing that every social marketer and PR pro has to manage and in order to manage it, understand-ing the scale of the problem is important. Its our job to understand it, and to inform the folks who

EXAMPLE: An iPhone case manufacturer learned via Twitter that their most ardent fan base was a group of tech buffs in Japan where they didnt yet make their cases. That changed shortly thereafter, and penetrating that new market was easier due to already having an engaged fan base.


Social media and PR are in many ways the same program: were both trying to spur positive conversations around our brand in the hopes that the people who see them will take positive action on our behalf.

Our PR cohorts try to engage reporters, analysts, and other industry influencers. We in social media try to engage everyone. And

Chapter 3

We Need Answers, Not DataQuality Is Simple, Not Easy

were doing it in real-time, all day every day. With that in mind, we need to think a little more like a PR pro with a trusty Rolodex (or contact list) and qualify our interactions for the best chance of engagement. The key to mastering the technology-driven media landscape is finding the right conver-sation to have with the right person in the

right place in that order.

The social interconnect-edness of modern con-tent sources creates a message amplification effect that can afford PR an amazing earned media upside, but the downside is that we can have way too much of a good thing. Without the right navigational tools to make sense of whats around us, we are lost in the center of a chaotic sea of conversation unsure of how to move forward.

Chapter 3 - We Need Answers, Not Data


We Need Answers, Not Data

It sounds simple because it is simple. But its not necessarily easy. Successful engagement today depends on un-derstanding an almost overwhelming amount of contextual data and navigating a complicat-ed system of social interconnectedness. And, to make things even more challenging, were not the only ones surrounded by constant chatter: our audience is besieged by messages flying at them from every direction.

In todays communications ecosystem, our core PR challenge stems from a place of opportunity: big data.

We are at the center of a chaotic, endless vor-tex of conversation. Finding our bearings and determining which way to go requires both a high-level view of the overall messaging hori-zon, and the ability to zero in on the people and places that matter at any given moment. By understanding where were going, why, and whos going to be there, we stand a far better chance of engaging the right people in a quali-ty conversation that amplifies our message.

With that in mind, the most critical tool in our PR and marketing arsenal is a sophisticated

communications search engine.

If we dont have a tool to pinpoint what we need to inform and assist

our business efforts whether that be a journalist in the greater

Sydney area who wrote positively about solar power in the past year, or a high-level under-standing of what the trends are in alterna-tive energy worldwide a bigger haystack just means more digging to find that needle. The reason that a powerful communications search engine is instrumental in modern messaging efforts is because, by doing what no mere mortal can analyzing millions of content sources in the communications ecosystem at once it enables PR pros to connect the dots and answer questions that used to be both difficult and time-consuming to obtain.

What are our customers saying about us?

What are our customers talking about?

Wheres the best place to introduce this message?

How is our reputation holding up?

Is our message being seen, heard, and shared?

Is there a journalist whos already been talking about this?

Are there any influencers worth engaging?

What are the general trends in our industry?

Is there a conversation out there worth joining?

How are our competitors positioning themselves?

Chapter 3 - We Need Answers, Not Data


The right conversations direct us to the right course of actionA smart, data-driven digital Rolodex for the technology-driven media landscape qualifies people by the conversations theyre having. The modern communications ecosystem is fueled by conver-sation, and that conversation can start anywhere by anyone. The right influencer for us might be a journalist, or it might be a blogger, or it might just be a brand advocate with a small but loyal following in a highly relevant social community.

By the same token, the panoramic view of the billions of conversations out there gives us the in-sights we need to set a definitive direction for our programs and course correct, as needed.

When we have the tools to both navigate the ocean of data around us and get a fix on our desti-nation, we can come to a firm understanding of our overall business purpose. This allows us to set a communications course thats both deliberate and measured. Well get more tactical about how to do that in the following chapters.

A Purposed Social Media Program Starts with Answers

Part 2


Quality Can Be Hard to QuantifyThose of us in softer marketing disciplines (social, PR, brand, community, events) have traditionally had a very difficult time quantifying our efforts to prove our worth, as it were, to higher-ups accustomed to the cut-and-dried metrics of direct marketing disciplines (SEM, direct mail, display). Media outlets have used measurements like ad value and impressions in order to assign numerical value to earned media for their advertisers and marketing partners. These metrics essentially measure awareness opportunity, and can cause a raised eyebrow among C-level execs who want clear, quantifiable ROI.

Well dive more deeply into the metrics in Chapter 5. But first, we need to understand the value of

engagement.

Relationships arent best measured by a single interactionAwareness is actually a perfectly valid business goal: customers dont usually give it up on the first date just because we winked at them. But in the case of social marketing metrics, we have the

technology to measure engagement: a click, a share, and a mention are all indi-

cators of engagement.

Chapter 4

Why Engagement Matters

Chapter 4 - Why Engagement Matters


Before we get into a deep discussion of what success looks like (read: our KPIs), its important to differentiate between a direct marketing discipline and a relation-ship marketing discipline. Direct marketing leads to single-sale conversion, and its met-rics are very simple. We send an email or post an ad with a prompt to buy, and a certain percentage of those people will click buy. The customer journey is clear, linear, and trackable.

Now, established brands can use social media channels for quick, direct sales: Clif Bar, for example, once used Twitter to sell an overage of bars at a reduced price. But this effort was a direct marketing campaign that happened to be on a social channel not a social marketing initiative. For the purposes of this chapter were going to talk about the relationship market-ing discipline. Social marketing is, at its core, about building relationships.

Advocacy Cant Happen Without AwarenessRelationship marketing is a nurturing model that heartily embraces awareness as the beginning of the customer path to sale, and carries with it an understanding that most customers will need multiple touches, or impressions, before they buy something. Put more pithily,

Relationship marketing disciplines are nurtur-ing models that serve a multi-touch awareness effort.

Before social networks, marketing communi-cations were a monologue. We broadcasted

AWARENESSCONSIDERATION

PREFERENCE

PURCHASELOYALTYADVOCACY

static messages to a pre-defined audience. We had no immediate vehicle for our audience to participate in that message. Today, our com-munications are a dialogue. Our audience is now a connected social community, and our message is ideally a conversation within that community.

That conversation is a core driver of our cus-tomer relationships and engagement is what creates that dialogue.

A typical sales funnel starts with awareness and ends in purchase, but an ideal customer journey ends in advocacy. Relationship marketing disci-plines typically touch the customer at the top and bottom of this funnel - and once someone passes through to be a brand advocate, they throw their own social community back into the top of this funnel.

Customer Purchase Funnel



Beyond the long-term customer value that building relationships creates, the reason were after engagement in the socially networked communications ecosystem is simple: engagement leads to earned media. That earned media gives us a qualified introduction to a community of people, and as such can meaningfully increase our impact. Earned social media is particularly significant: it has the power to forever amplify our message. That echo can, in turn, earn us traditional media and this is something that gives a boost to our larger marketing programs.

Trust Me, Im Not a Professional

In its research, Nielsen found that recommendations from friends and family remain the most credible. In 2014, 84% of consumers trusted recommendations from their friends and family up from 78% in 2007. The other forms of advertising that jumped a significant amount of percentage points are both owned and earned:

Social media is dependent upon social networks, and those networks are made up of people who are uniquely attuned to the other people in those networks. That attunement is what makes the social share so powerful. While the Wall Street Journal can give us access to a community target-ed by demographics, our Facebook friends are paying attention because they know us and weve built up a level of trust with them. If our Facebook friends and Twitter following have come to rely on us for sharing interesting content, were more than online influencers: we are media outlets.

Nielsens latest Global Trust in Advertising Report listed this core finding:



All of this points to word of mouth being more compelling than ever for our brands and word-of-mouth marketing is the payoff of engagement. If we think about it, even traditional editorial content is gained by engagement: weve just engaged a reporter, as opposed to a Facebook fan.

That said, while we know that earned social media can be a payoff of earned traditional media, it also works the other way around.

There is now a firm handshake between tradi-tional journalists, bloggers and social influenc-ers: reporters look to blogs and social channels to find and research stories, and to find their own angles for stories.

Journalists and social media pros actually have the same job: to communicate a message that is understood and appreciated by the people who see it.

An Indirect Pitch Can Be a Strike

That being the case, it makes perfect sense that journalists would do a little social listen-ing to see what sort of messaging might reso-nate with the public.

As I mentioned previously, if our brand is men-tioned in a post on a social media site or blog, were gaining exposure to a community. This becomes especially powerful when part of that community is a journalist. With so many journalists using blogs and social media sites to research their stories, the cherry on our communications sundae is something Ill call the indirect pitch: a journalist finds our story via everyman editorial content (this could be as simple as a retweet of our post), and we end up with more coverage via traditional press.

The social shareability of content isnt just a concern for us: journalists are now consider-ing that too. A recent survey of journalists by


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Check out where competitors are featured.

Find out who competitors and their industry influencers are following on Twitter.

Research and follow hashtags that pertain to our industry or specialty, on both Twitter and Facebook.

Follow industry influencers across a variety of social networks: LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twitter, and other social channels.

Figure out what else our influencers are talking about, and how theyre talking about it.

Check out story pickup: how are our influencers are picking up stories? How are our competitors reaching out?

Edelman (theyve summed it up via an infographic) found that 76% of journalists feel pressure to think about their stories shareability on social networks. The key takeaway:

Social amplification can no longer be an after-thought of media strategies; harness social, paid and owned channels and consider these key ingredients for successful storytelling.

Good Outreach Takes a Mix of Good Legwork and Good ToolsFinding the right bloggers, journalists or social influencers to engage takes a little legwork. If were starting from scratch, here are some quick (if manual) outreach program tips:

Working with PR to make sure that our influencer strategy is aligned ensures that we dont duplicate efforts or miss anyone. In a perfect world, we have a joint influencer strategy that assigns specific influencer relationships to specific people within our companies.

Once we understand whos saying what and where, were in much better position to reach out with an informed, meaningful mes-

sage that helps service both our goals and those of our target influencers.

This sort of deliberate, data-driven approach to tailored media outreach is a far cry from the broadcasted blasts of yesteryear

and thats why it so much more effective.


Influencer Outreach Doesnt Stop at CoverageThe more we engage with the community around us, the more likely they are to follow us as well and, as social media pros, our community includes bloggers and social influencers. The social dialogue model means that we should keep listening and participating in conversations. Its a cycle that powers good community marketing, and rewarding the folks talking about us with a share and a high-five is a great way to pay it forward.

As we talked about in Chapter 3, big data marketing is not an exploration for the faint-hearted: in a raging sea of information, its a lot easier to find who and what were looking for with a re-ally good boat and a really good navigation system. A good social listening tool will have great data and a great search engine, making the manual labor on qualifying our outreach a lot more minimal.

2 Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, Nielsen, Sept 2013

1 Pew Research Center: http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/social-media/social-media-use-by-age-group/


Chapter 5

Measure What MattersVanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics

Actionable Metrics Reflect Achievement, Not OpportunityAs we talked about in Chapter 4, those of us on the qualitative side of marketing PR, social media, events have tradition-ally used the success metrics available to us by our channel partners to provide marketing KPIs for our programs. The most common ones we used typically had to do with community size: impressions, reach, fans, attendees, etc. Listing our community size on reporting isnt necessarily a bad idea: big numbers look good on charts and graphs, and it gives us an idea of how many people we might reach on any given channel. That said

The problem with using community size itself as an indication of success is that community size is an opportunity not an achievement. Quality Interaction was Always the Point of Messaging KPIsOur #1 goal in todays communications ecosystem is spurring engagement to start a dialogue.Now that our media has become interactive, we have ways to examine and track that engage-ment. Figuring out what those metrics are is as simple as understanding the difference between vanity metrics (opportunity) and engagement (achievement). The former is a possibility, and the latter is a proof point of our success in inciting an action that helps move our social marketing goals forward. With that in mind, heres a little matrix to illustrate the point:

Chapter 5 - Measure What Matters


If we look at the communications programs before social media (advertising, PR), we can recog-nize that our goal was never impressions it was to make a good impression that would, eventu-ally, lead the person behind the eyeballs (i.e., a journalist, and by extension his or her readers) to act in our brands favor. That action might have been writing an article, becoming a customer, or simply passing the word along to a friend or colleague. Looking at communications that way, one thing is clear: while the marketing landscape has been irrevocably changed by social technology, the primary goal of our programs has remained the same and now, we can measure it. Heres how:

1. Determine What Engagement Looks Like on Each ChannelEngagement simply means that someone decided to share our mes-sage. The matrix above lists the most common channels we use in PR these days, but you may have more.

2. Measure and Qualify EngagementHow many people took an action on behalf of our brand? Now that we know what engage-ment looks like, measuring it is easy with the right tools. A good media intelligence tool will identify and quantify that engagement for us. Something to bear in mind is that we want to track the social shares not just from our paid and owned channels, but our earned ones too (e.g., how many shares did that article in the Huffington Post garner?). That sort of channel-specific analysis will help us both measure and qualify our engagement.

Now, to answer the age-old communications question: is our message actually being heard? The qualitative side of measurement is less linear, but still doable. An advanced media intelligence tool allows us to set up a variety of custom searches to really hone in on what were after, making comparative analysis a snap.

EXAMPLE: Monitoring the Superbowl 2015, we at Meltwater set up a se-ries of searches around different brands to see whose advertising spends caused the most resonance, and what the sentiment was among the chatter. If were monitoring an event in real time and something unex-pected happens like Oreos 2013 Superbowl power outage tweet we can quickly craft a new search to figure out its impact in context.



Another useful media intelligence feature is threshold alerts, which let us know when a term (like our brand name) is resonating more than normal. These in conjunction with custom searches can help us track whether or not the language and positioning were introducing into the market is being adopted. If its not, by listening weve iden-tified both what messages are out there, and where we might insert ourselves and/or engage in order to change that. Dialogue marketing is a cycle that looks like this:

New media intelligence also gives us metrics that were hard to come by previously: geographical spread, poster demographics, and overall sentiment.

Our social marketing metrics therefore might list a hard number of retweets, and we can qualify our success with sentiment analysis and spread (is our message moving beyond where it was previously?).We can then show a few concrete examples (i.e., screenshots) of our message being out there organically, in the form of other folks adopt-ing it.

Fostering a productive conversation with the right people starts and ends with listening.



3. Measure ReachThe reach and follower numbers that our channel partners give us are also an important part of our metrics impressions are, after all, at the top of a purchase funnel, and we want to understand the oppor-tunity there. This is the communications metric were most used to using: before social media, it was the best one available that demon-strated the value of media placement.

Because our earned, paid, and owned channels work together to in-crease our impact, measuring our reach in conjunction with both hard engagement metrics and qualitative messaging analysis gives us a systematic, comprehensive view as to the success of our campaign.

One piece of reach measurement still missing is the social amplifica-tion that takes place off the social apps site. Facebook, for example, will give us reach numbers for content we own, earned or paid for on Facebook, but they wont give us the reach for the 1200 shares we garnered from that Huffington Post article. With that in mind, its important to keep track of those shares with an understanding that there is an unknown but real impression number attached to them.

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Competitive Benchmarking

One of the most advantageous uses of all that social and traditional media dataoutside the firewall is competitive comparison: our competitions data is just aspublic as ours is.

Once we set our own messaging goals and understand what were after, its worth using our technology tools to craft the same searches with the competitive land-scape in mind. This can be as simple as taking advanced Boolean searches weve set up in our engine to monitor ourselves, and replacing our brand name with a competitors name.


By sharing this intelligence with the rest of our marketing organization, we prove the value of having advanced media intelligence tools to help us do our jobs more deliberately.


5 Competitive Insights for Social Media We can come to a deeper understanding of our competitors by checking out not only what the community is saying about them, but also what theyre saying to their community. Heres a quick list of things we might want to listen for in the competitive landscape:

1. Positioning How are our competitors talking about themselves? 2. Community Relations Are their customers, investors, and employees happy with them? What are the

main themes there? How are they responding to complaints, compliments, and requests?3. Content Whats working for them and whats not?4. Product & Services Have they made any product or service announcements? Whats their positioning?

Whats the reaction? 5. New Markets Any news of a bigger building or a lease in a new city?


A Final Note to the Social Media Maven

After reading this book, you should have a thorough understanding of how modern media intelli-gence can shape our communications programs for the better.

At the end of the day, its important that our higher-ups understand that getting people to click on a Twitter link is easy, but unless were a known brand with lots of followers and were having a deadline-driven sale, chances are that our social marketing program has more to do with growing awareness and nurturing relationships than closing the deal and thats as it should be.

Social marketing programs usually have an indirect but strategic connection to business goals, and proving our value doesnt have to mean an immediate sale off a click. However, we must understand and demonstrate how social marketing encourages the prospective customer along the purchase funnel by spurring engagement. Then, we can work with our marketing partners to set up a flow that nurtures the customer relationship to prompt a sale, loyalty and if were really lucky advocacy on behalf of our brand.

Although our social marketing world is flooded with nonstop information, finding the golden nug-gets of business knowledge that help us craft and measure our efforts is well within our reach if we have the right tools and the right methodologies.

If youd like to learn more about running smarter social media programs in todays dynamic mar-keting environment, please hop on over to some of our resources:

Meltwater Marketing Blog Meltwater Insights

www.meltwater.com

_GoBack_GoBackA Note to the Social Media MarketerAbout The Author

Lets Redefine Media IntelligenceTraditional Media Intelligence Is No Longer Smart EnoughLook Beyond the Firewall for Outside Insight

If a Tweet Falls in the Forest...Digital Breadcrumbs & Shared Knowledge6 WAYS TO ADD MARKETING VALUE WITH SOCIAL LISTENING

We Need Answers, Not DataQuality is Simple, Not EasyWe need answers, not data

Why Engagement MattersQuality can be hard to quantifyAdvocacy cant happen without awarenessCustomer Purchase FunnelAn Indirect Pitch Can Be a StrikeGood OutreachTakesa Mix of Good Legwork and Good Tools

Measure What MattersVanity Metrics vs. Actionable MetricsCompetitive Benchmarking

A Final Note to the Social Media Marketer

twitter: Page 2: Page 31: Page 52: Page 73: Page 84: Page 95: Page 106: Page 117: Page 128: Page 139: Page 1510: Page 1611: Page 1712: Page 1813: Page 1914: Page 2015:

facebook: Page 2: Page 31: Page 52: Page 73: Page 84: Page 95: Page 106: Page 117: Page 128: Page 139: Page 1510: Page 1611: Page 1712: Page 1813: Page 1914: Page 2015:

linkedin: Page 2: Page 31: Page 52: Page 73: Page 84: Page 95: Page 106: Page 117: Page 128: Page 139: Page 1510: Page 1611: Page 1712: Page 1813: Page 1914: Page 2015:

google plus: Page 2: Page 31: Page 52: Page 73: Page 84: Page 95: Page 106: Page 117: Page 128: Page 139: Page 1510: Page 1611: Page 1712: Page 1813: Page 1914: Page 2015:

meltwater: Page 2016: Page 2: Page 3: Page 5: Page 7: Page 8: Page 9: Page 10: Page 11: Page 12: Page 13: Page 15: Page 16: Page 17: Page 18: Page 19: Page 20:

Page 2016: Page 2: Page 3: Page 5: Page 7: Page 8: Page 9: Page 10: Page 11: Page 12: Page 13: Page 15: Page 16: Page 17: Page 18: Page 19: Page 20:


Page 63: Page 6:














Page 2622: Page 21: Page 22: Page 23: Page 24: Page 25: Page 26:






Button 1: twitter 5: Page 6:

facebook 5: Page 6:

linkedin 5: Page 6:

google plus 3: Page 6:

Button 2: twitter 3: Page 21: Page 221: Page 232: Page 243: Page 254: Page 265:

facebook 3: Page 21: Page 221: Page 232: Page 243: Page 254: Page 265:

linkedin 3: Page 21: Page 221: Page 232: Page 243: Page 254: Page 265:

google plus 5: Page 21: Page 221: Page 232: Page 243: Page 254: Page 265:

Community Size: Button 26:

SM Maven eBook2

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