Category: Social Network Analysis

Empowering Camp Moxie teens to establish and manage their social reputation

Stimulating young women leaders by increasing their understanding of personal internet reputation management and social media analytics.

I recently had the opportunity to partake in a rewarding opportunity. In partnership with Institute for Learning & Performance Improvement, College of Education at Wayne State University, I volunteered my time and social business expertise as part of IBM’s Corporate Citizen Initiative to present at Camp Moxie, a summer camp, sponsored by Girl Scouts of America.

It’s not just a summer camp though, it’s much more! It’s a leadership adventure for girls who want to make a difference in the world! At camp, girls explore their interests and talents, build confidence, and strengthen leadership skills. They make lasting personal friendships while cultivating valuable professional relationships. Girls develop leadership skills by participating in exciting, interactive, hands-on workshops and activities facilitated by local women leaders in business, philanthropy, and elected office.

I prepared this presentation, which was intended to stimulate their understanding & interest social entrepreneurism, personal reputation management and social media analytics.

Using myself as an example, campers learned about visual rendering of data, how it can increase knowledge, communication and help shape your personal brand. In a workshop which followed, they were provided the opportunity to analyze basic social network structures and understand their implications. As well as explore the complexity and reach of digital communications, while recognizing how to apply social media to increase awareness of issues relevant to their lives.

This community outreach opportunity allowed me to live a few of IBM’s Values and practices, including:

  • Put the client first. With an audience of 150+ teenage girls from 12-17 yrs., I weaved throughout this talk relevant points to them (from following and tweet to Justin Bieber to SnapChatting with their friends) as I spoke, while also bridging to the future which is not far off, such as preparing for graduation and potentially college.
  • Think, Prepare, Rehearse. As I prepared my presentation, I thought through my material from the vantage point of my audience (luckily I have my own children in this same age bracket, so I had plenty of first hand understanding of how they use social networks and what they expect from it). I prepared for the evening with a few key objectives in mind. I wanted the girls to be inspired and take these messages of empowerment away after the session:
  • I pulled together a story based on the notion of “your regulation proceeds you”
  • Understand that every interaction is public and can be mined and analyzed
  • You’re empowered! Use it for GOOD, anything is possible!
  • And last, but not least, There are women leaders everywhere! Will you become one? ~ Thanks for the inspiration Ginni!
  • Share Expertise. I’m so fortunate to have open leadership, which encourages sharing our passions and expertise. This opportunity not only benefited me through sharing my passion and helping to teach and demonstrate my expertise, it also helped 150+ teens think about their digital reputation and what it means in shaping their character. Many, with eyes wide open, thought about this for the very first time!

I would like to thank the Wayne State staff at the Learning & Performance Improvement, College of Education at Wayne State University who made this possible, especially: Dr. Kenneth Chelst, Monica Tracey and Ingrid Guerra-Lopez

WOMMA’s 2013 Influencer Guidebook

A guest post by Bill Chamberlin

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. WOMMA Influencer Guide Book 2013-06-03_215459

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:

    1. Definitions. Four critical elements have been defined and discussed: Influence, Key Influencers, Influencees, and Influencer Marketing and their relationship to each other
    2. Types of Influencers: The identification and description of five distinct categories of influences: Advocate, Ambassador, Citizen, Celebrity, and Professional/Occupational
    3. Program Considerations: A discussion of three levels of program considerations a marketer should consider when constructing their influencer marketing program
    4. Influencer Attributes:  Picking the right influencers is important.  A discussion and list of attributes that an influencer can possess is discussed.
    5. 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.

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.

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:

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:

  1. Review all of the brand, product specific messaging available to you
  2. Review messaging of key competitors
  3. Categorize keywords into a topical hierarchy
  4. Consider adding a qualifier, such as the Topic name (e.g., Unix, Server)
  5. Think of what other meanings the words you are using may have in the marketplace (e.g., storage, ensembles, power, service management)
  6. 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
  7. If you are including acronyms, be sure to define and qualify them
  8. Consider qualifying keywords by proximity mentioned to other relevant keywords, this helps to indicate topical relevance of the dialog
  9. Validate keywords through Google or other search engines to validate your selection and qualifiers
  10. 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

 

Targeted social media marketing engagement

How will you ensure that your social marketing engagement is on target to support your brands marketing priorities?

A lot of B2B social media marketers struggle with how to sustain the social engagement of their Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with the target audience. I’ve done a good amount of work in this area and have built an approach I call social ecosystem mapping. In this post I’ll share the inputs required for building a social map. I’ll also provide you some tips on how to organize your social coverage model, selecting the best suited SMEs for engagement and how to support them with content.

Taking the time to build a social map will position your SMEs not only to represent their expertise but also to express brand/product value in the exchange. Ultimately SMEs will be well supported to sustain social engagement long term with the target audience as brand evangelists.

Social ecosystem mapping

Here’s an outline of the steps to build an informed engagement plan based on social research and marketing priorities

Prerequisites:

1. Prioritize the idea/message for which you want to be known based on your business priorities and marketing objectives
2. Monitor the dialogue by conducting social monitoring research based on the key topics of contextual relevance
3. Analyze research findings and use the insights to inform your engagement plan and set priorities

Now you’re ready to build a map of the social ecosystem based on these insights.

By topic map out:

1. Communities and top domains for targeting
2. Influencers/Authors that are considered leading authorities in the dialogue
3. Select the best suited internal SMEs for engagement. You will want to choose those that are well positioned to provide sought after expertise and can provide business value in the exchange. (There will likely be multiple SMEs, try to map them to support the outreach based on their ability to support the progression stages mentioned in #6 below)
4. Determine the SMEs enablement requirements based on an assessment of their social readiness and develop support
5. Evaluate content requirements; determine the assets required to support SMEs in their ongoing dialogue.
6. Select assets. It’s best to map the assets out by the progression path of the dialogue. For example classify assets based on consideration stages: Awareness, Consideration, Interest, Evaluation, Final Selection, Sale and Post Sale
7. Prepare assets for digital distribution, optimizing content for search, content tagging etc.
8. Determine an editorial calendar. Timing and cadence. This will need to be built based on your content develop process.

With this social ecosystem mapping complete, you are now ready to provide it as guidance to your team of SMEs. I have found SMEs to welcome this kind of engagement guidance. It helps them to focus their time and effort in social where they will provide the most value. It also ensures that their outreach is aligned to your brands business priorities and marketing objectives. Supporting them with content at each stage ensures that they are on brand/on message. If they follow the map, they will be well positioned for effective long term engagement that will drive business outcomes.

9. Activate SMEs to establish & build relationships in targeted communities, top domains and with key influencers.

Relationship building on-line takes time. With this map SMEs will focus their efforts on nurturing the most important, high value relationships in the target segments. Ultimately, if influencers receive value from your SMEs they will become advocates & foster advocacy on behalf your brand sharing with their followers & extended networks.

10. Ongoing monitoring and measurement is imperative to ensure that you stay abreast of changes in the social ecosystem. Providing you an understanding of what’s working or not working in the engagement model. Be prepared to take action based on what the measurements are telling you. Make necessary adjustments. Measure if these adjustments have a positive or negative impact. Social ecosystems are dynamic so you will want to be fine tuning your engagement model on a regular basis.

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: