Social Listening Research Archives

WOMMA’s 2013 Influencer Guidebook

WOMMA (The Word of Mouth Marketing Association) has recently announced the publication of it’s 2013 Influencer Guidebook. This Guidebook is an educational resource for marketers to better understand the mechanics and metrics of influencer marketing.

I’m excited about this new Guidebook because, I was part of a WOMMA committee that researched, developed, and wrote it over the past year. My fellow Research & Measurement Council members on this project were Neil Beam (Neil was our committee leader. He’s from MotiveQuest), Ashley Libby (The Anca Group), Bill Chamberlin (IBM), Jane Collins (BlogHer), Michael Fein (Fanscape), Amy Laine (IBM), Susan Emerick (IBM)and Dhara Naik (Social@Ogilvy).

With the rise in social media over the past five years, Influencer Marketing programs have become an important part of any social media marketing strategy. All types of organizations are looking for influencers who have the potential to change the purchasing behavior of the people who follow them.

The WOMMA 2013 Influencer Guidebook helps those that are developing Influencer programs in a number of ways:

Definitions. Four critical elements have been defined and discussed: Influence, Key Influencers, Influencees, and Influencer Marketing and their relationship to each other
Types of Influencers: The identification and description of five distinct categories of influences: Advocate, Ambassador, Citizen, Celebrity, and Professional/Occupational
Program Considerations: A discussion of three levels of program considerations a marketer should consider when constructing their influencer marketing program
Influencer Attributes: Picking the right influencers is important. A discussion and list of attributes that an influencer can possess is discussed.
Metrics: The Guidebook clarifies the difference between “potential to influence” metrics from that of “actual/observed influence” metrics – there is a difference and different methodologies are required

These five areas are all covered in a single, easy-to-read’ PDF file that make the new guidebook an important read for anyone considering or implementing an influencer marketing program. To get the Guidebook, you need to be a registered WOMMA member (see below for a description of WOMMA). If you are not a member, but want some more detail on the guidebook, here’s a few links for you to get more information.

June 6 Webinar: Influencer Marketing-Put it to Work!
WOMMA Blog Post: Influencer Marketing: Put it to Work
WOMMA Blog Post: WOMM-U 2013: Influencer Marketing – Put It to Work!
WOMMA Blog Post: 5 Takeaways from the WOMMA Influencer Guidebook
WOMMA Blog Post: Influencer Handbook Series: The Evolution of the Citizen Influencer
WOMMA Blog Post: Influencer Handbook Series: How to Use Celebrity Influencers
WOMMA Blog Post: Influencer Handbook Series: Finding Citizen Influencers Online & Offline
WOMMA Blog Post: Meet WOMMA’s New Influencer Guidebook 2013

About The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is a trade association in the word of mouth and social media marketing industries. The organization is committed to developing and maintaining appropriate ethical standards for marketers and advertisers engaging in such marketing practices, identifying meaningful measurement standards for such marketing practices, and defining “best practices” for the industry.

Keyword selection is critical to social research success

Selecting keywords for your social listening research is the most critical first step to harnessing relevant insights. In a world with a billion computers, four billion cell phones and a robust global Internet, there is an overwhelming amount of digital messages being posted online every day. Since most are likely not relevant to the brand or specific product you’re building a social marketing strategy for, it is important to determine keywords that are contextually aligned to the on-line conversation you’re interested in understanding.

So how do you get started?

Establishing predefined keywords allows you to narrow down the universe of all possible posts to only those that are relevant to the research objectives. Much like developing a screener to determine who you want to invite to a focus group, for example: “Small Business Entrepreneurs” that are “IT professionals” and are the “primary hardware purchase decision-makers” in the “U.S.”

Determine the criteria for inclusion in the listening sample set by defining the keywords that signal: Include this POST in data collection. If the keywords are too broad, then you will get “noise” (irrelevant posts) but if they are too narrow, then you miss relevant conversation and may draw erroneous conclusions.

Every post Relevant posts pic for blog 2011-06-21_131911 — Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

Keyword Refinement Process

When conducting conversation mining, several “strings” are needed:

– A category string designed to pull in discussion relevant to power-type servers

– A branded string designed to pull in mentions of IBM within the larger discussion of power-type servers

– The category string is shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

– It is primarily composed of the most commonly occurring phrases in the product areas, the idea being that by zeroing in on the terminology that buyers actually use, we will best capture their online conversations

The branded string is primarily based on the IBM branded product names and terms

The original list is re-shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

Here’s an example of a topical hierarchy from a recent project I did for IBM Server & Technology Group, Power Systems brand:

Keyword topic hierarchy for Power Systems 2011-06-21_132327 — Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

The following recommendations will help you to get started selecting relevant keywords for social listening research:

Review all of the brand, product specific messaging available to you
Review messaging of key competitors
Categorize keywords into a topical hierarchy
Consider adding a qualifier, such as the Topic name (e.g., Unix, Server)
Think of what other meanings the words you are using may have in the marketplace (e.g., storage, ensembles, power, service management)
Be sure to clearly define what you would consider irrelevant, for example: Power Systems related to technology is relevant but Power Systems related to Power Tools or Power/Utility Systems is NOT relevant
If you are including acronyms, be sure to define and qualify them
Consider qualifying keywords by proximity mentioned to other relevant keywords, this helps to indicate topical relevance of the dialog
Validate keywords through Google or other search engines to validate your selection and qualifiers
Validate keywords through using Twitter search; Think of how Twitter may change words, in terms of abbreviations and slang (e.g., “service” may be “SVC,” “management” may be “mgmt”)

*Note: Boolean Keyword String – A set of keywords that employs Boolean logic to focus and return specific, relevant messages in search

What role does social intelligence play in empowering a social workforce?

A solid social media marketing strategy focuses employee interactions on concrete outcomes that enhance their social presence, project their expertise, stimulate innovation, and deliver business value.

To ensure that employees are focusing their interactions where they will drive business outcomes, it is important to provide them enablement support. Be sure that workforce enablement is a key part of your social media marketing strategy.

One of the first priorities of your enablement plan should include is providing market place segmentation. Gathering intelligence from monitoring on-line conversations will provide you an understanding of where your target audience participates in on-line dialogues most often, in which venues and with whom. Packaging this social intelligence into an easy to understand market segmentation road map will allow your employees to spend their valuable time and effort developing and nurturing relationships in the social ecosystem aligned to your brands objectives.

Such a road map will also allow them to begin making connections with opinion shapers, decision makers and “mavens” on topics of interest. It will help them prioritize, sub-segment and customize their communications more effectively. They will have a clearer view of where the competitors are connected or absent.

Armed with this understanding, they will be empowered to build strong relationships and become a powerful channel for sharing their expertise in the market. They will be valuable catalysts to introduce the target audience to new connections, for example to key advocates of your brand.

Using Social Intelligence to Kick-Start Your Social Marketing Strategy

While social intelligence plays a critical role in developing an effective B2B social marketing strategy, many marketers make the mistake of instead rushing to deploy tactics and experiment with new tools first.

Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the importance of gathering social intelligence before you develop your social marketing strategy.

The foundation of a social marketing strategy begins with social research. It’s imperative to understand the social eco-system relative to topics important to your business priorities, the on-line behaviors of your target audience, and your brand’s current or relative position and opportunities within it.

Slow and steady wins the race.

The first step to building your social marketing strategy should be taking the time to gather as much social intelligence as possible and harnessing insights from it to build an informed engagement and tactical execution plan. I refer to this first step as “Listen and Learn” of formulating a data-driven strategy and consider it to be foundational to informed strategic decision making. Some questions that may help you frame what you seek to learn would be:

• Where are conversations happening?
• In which venues and domains?
• Who’s leading the conversations?
• Have are these individuals earned a stature of authority on the topic?
• Who’s following and contributing to the dialogue?
• How often are they discussing key topics?
• What is the natural language used?
• Is your brand mentioned? If so, by who? Your customers? Your competitors?
• Are you or your employees a representative voice within these conversations on behalf of your brand?
• What is the sentiment around your brand mentions?

The second step is to create Understanding, this is accomplished through mining and analyzing on-line conversations from social listening and monitoring and primary and secondary research. Building a baseline of understanding from patterns such as topical themes, keywords and phrases that are most used, trends over time, as well as prominent and/or influential people and their connectivity across the social web eco-system. Using insights from analysis allows you to develop informed data-driven strategies, establish new or refine existing goals, identify publics, and determine the need to develop unique strategies for key groups. In this phase, practitioners frequently analyze and evaluate:

• Target Publics (audience segments) to obtain information on decision makers, these could be a mix of current customers, prospective customers, and influencers.
• Market segmentation is the process of dividing a group of potential consumers into different clusters based on characteristics. What a company is then left with are sets of consumers that should respond similarly to marketing strategies.
• Determine if additional social listening and monitoring, and primary or secondary research is necessary to better understand audiences, trends, by conducting additional market analysis, to further examine opinion, behaviors, and attitudes.

Harness the findings, then use them to inform your social marketing strategy and the best mix of tactics is considered the third phase and is focussed on planning. Using the understanding of the natural language expressed in social dialogue, attributes, behaviors and buying patterns of target audience ascertained from the previous learn and understand phases, identify the specific target audience(s) that must be reached to achieve the goal and objectives of the plan. Each target audience will have specific messaging, strategies, channel and communications preferences that must be considered and applied to the tactics developed. You may develop primary messages or secondary messages for each audience. Also, this is a good time to set benchmarks. Then use them for measuring relative change over time as you implement and evaluate the effectiveness of your tactical execution plan.

Finally, evaluate the tactical execution to determine content performance in terms of the content types and the channels in which the content was distributed, will determine which channels reached the target audience more effectively and once reached which content forms attained higher engagement and re-sharing. This is also the time to focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the execution and engagement led by influencers, employees, and brand advocates who were equipped to share information across all channels. Which of them is performing most effectively? Which is accomplishing the goals aligned to the strategy? Are any under performing? If so, what remediation plan needs to be instituted?

It is important to determine a cadence for harvesting insights, conducting analysis and reporting results. Providing a summary of and clearly articulating performance is key to helping stakeholders understand results. This is also your opportunity to gain their confidence and support to continue optimizing your data-driven strategies. Here’s an example of KPIs that you may construct to demonstrate program performance: