My daughter  came back from school all excited about the next week. “It’s only a couple of days until summer break”. Nice, I thought, now I have to stress about what’ going to keep her busy for the next couple of months. “Dad”, she continued, “can you come next Monday and explain what you do to my class?” I was elated. Glad my daughter thought I was doing something interesting enough for her to want me to come and share with her eager class of 7 year olds.

“I told them you spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter” she continued, adding “my teacher said that’s not a job, its what you do for fun”. I ought to speak to her teacher I thought. First, I had to explain to my daughter what I did though. This query made me realize that my 7-year-olds inquisitiveness ran deeper than merely cracking the meaning of social media monitoring! Skipping the inanity, I plunged straight into giving into 3 main points.

1. First what is it? – “Just like the way a teacher monitors the class and keep tabs on each student’s performance, social media monitoring tools can help you track and keep you informed about what the world is thinking on a particular issue/topic matter a product (in this case read her toy).
2. Second why do it? Brian explains it best. Its because its what customers are doing now. They are talking about products, brands, what they like, what they don’t. Ahh she says – like we all talk about the new teacher during lunch”. “Something like that” I countered, “So if you like the teacher, she will tell others, and if there’s something you think she needs to change it will help her do that”.
3. Finally how do you do it? Blog, twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. are where people are talking about companies, so you should monitor them and find out what they are saying.

A newly established company ought to make social media monitoring an essential part of their overall communication strategy. The traditional media tools will no wonder help them announce their arrival to the outside world but if the company needs to connect or ‘make conversations’ with his key influencers- a blog, twitter or Facebook can do the trick. Applications such as ours which transcend beyond the traditional media tools will help you connect with your target audience in a much more effective way.

Lets define ROI first as the simple return on the money or time invested in an activity. There are 2 kinds of returns – financial and non financial.

When they ask for financial returns they use certain metrics to track it, including:

Payback Period. The amount of time required for the benefits to pay back the cost of the project.

Net Present Value (NPV). The value of future benefits restated in terms of today’s money.

Internal Rate of Return (IRR). The benefits restated as an interest rate.

Non financial benefits include “intangibles”, “soft”, or “unquantifiable” benefits.

Leveraging social media to provide better customer service, get product feedback, etc. is great, but the financial impact of those is not easily measurable.

Why do we say that? Lets take just one example of using social media for customer service. Since social media for marketing is a big mess anyway.

1. Having customers help each other: For any large enterprise, less than 2% of customers actually use twitter, get Satisfaction or multiple other tools for customer service. The ideal scenario for a customer service organization is if customers help each other without the organization even being involved.

There are some implications for that unfortunately, especially if customers provide the wrong information or incorrect solutions. So if your customer service organization is going to monitor social media for support this is yet another channel which incurs costs for the organization.

2. Allowing customers to manage a Wiki for support. There are many situations when you realize your customers who use your product on a daily basis know more about it than your company does. Ideally they can form an extension of your “documentation” to leverage the wiki. Similar to the argument above though, the time and resources required do not go away because you have a wiki. A new channel for communicating now is opened, which brings with it, costs with no clear financial ROI.

3. Using social media to reduce escalations. Everytime an issue gets escalated the cost of the issue goes up dramatically. If you can provide a solution using social media to reduce escalations by proactively pushing out information to customers on potential issues, instead of reacting to the issues as they come though, your cost of customer service goes down. The problem with proactive outreach is one of reducing signal to noise ratio. What’s good for one customer scenario is not useful for most. If it were, then it would be documented anyway.

Does this mean you should not leverage social media for customer service? Absolutely not. Dont expect to show a financial ROI towards it that is justifiable to senior management, is the point we are making.

Image credit http://www.solutionmatrix.com/return-on-investment.html

In Public Relations, It’s useful to have all the information in a media map in a tidy format. But Media Map should be the beginning of the pitch research process, not the end. After you discover what types of media your stakeholders are listening to, it’s time to determine who the key influencers are within those media segments. In other words, find those particular journalists, bloggers, analysts, consultants, etc. who write about or comment on your industry and whom your prospects and customers trust. There are two simple ways to do this.

One: read, read, read. Read a variety of publications and learn as much as you can about the publications relevant to your business. Pay attention to the bylines and take note of the people writing about your industry.

Two: Locate the journalists covering your beat. An excellent resource for finding journalists is through Twitter. This is a very Web 2.0 method and one that is updated often. The two Twitter pages to try are Media on Twitter and Twittering Journalists.

In today’s media landscape the professional blogger is gaining relevance within the news making community. In fact, some blogs are better read than many traditional newspapers and magazines. Make sure that both traditional media and social media is an integral part of your media map. You can check out Buzzgain’s Do it Yourself PR to learn in detail about understanding the media map.

We all love the topic of influence and authority. Its the primary reason any top 10 list exists. There are inherently many pitfalls in measuring and ranking any person’s authority online or offline. The questions that come up:

1. What parameters do you take into measuring authority? – for e.g. a few include: #twitter followers, # of re tweets, # blog readers, # of saved items on delicious? All of the above in some combination?

2. What about influential people that dont have a significant online presence? E.g. I know the Chief Mentor of Infosys Narayan Murthy has not a very big online presence, but every time he says something over 2 million people listen to him. How do we track that?

3. How much weight to you give to the various sources of influence – main stream news vs. blogs vs. twitter vs. any other social network.

We ran an interesting experiment with BuzzGain over the last few weeks. Friend and all around nice guy Chris Brogan was tracked against Indian prime minister candidate L. K. Advani. Here are the results.

1. In overall mentions, Chris is holding fort and in many cases getting talked about a lot more online than L K Advani. This is awesome for Chris, since over a billion people in India know L K Advani, and a lot fewer know Chris. But online, Chris is King.

2. Sentiment for Chris and L K Advani is mostly similar, mostly positive and some negative, but its trending in similar directions.

3. Main stream media news is where L K Advani beats Chris in mentions. Which is expected since the # of news outlets covering the elections in India is far greater than the # of bloggers writing about Chris and social media.

4. In the blogosphere, the exact opposite metrics hold true obviously, since the # of bloggers in the US far outweighs the # in India.

5. Finally there’s a reason he’s called the Mayor of Twitterville. Chris just overwhelms L K Advani in terms of mentions and retweets on Twitter.

This leads us to a new set of questions:

1. How much more influential is Chris than Mr. Advani online?

2. Should we start to leverage circulation numbers for main stream media (offline viewership) to account for their reach when fewer than 10% of users are on the Internet (as in the case with India)?

3. What would you like us to compare next?

Drop me a note or leave a comment and we’ll explore that next in a future post.