Loudpixel Media

Tapping in to social media is becoming a logical step in most business plans. As the world becomes more reliant on the web, so does the success of a growing business. However, it’s difficult to assume that all businesses need a strong presence within the same realms of social media. Facebook, while arguably the most popular of these outlets, is not the only way to reach an online audience. Twitter, blogs and new social avenues like Foursquare and FriendFeed are also viable options. Don’t be afraid of trial and error in attempting to find the right outlet(s) for your business.

In short, how you promote your business online depends on the nature of the company. For example, if your business is mobile, consider tweeting your location on a daily basis or releasing it on Foursquare (a la Chicago’s very own Flirty Cupcakes). If your business is a multi-million dollar corporation, promoting your services through several social media outlets is probably in the company’s best interest. It is important to note that any business can benefit from a social media presence by researching its audience, being consistent with posting relevant content and tracking response levels to adjust accordingly.

So where do I start?

The first and most important step in creating a successful social media campaign is to define your audience:

• Determine if your target audience generally prefers one social media outlet over another
• Consider maintaining a presence in multiple arenas in order to reach a wider audience

How do I maintain my account?

Be consistent in updating your online accounts. Nothing is more frustrating to an online audience than a Facebook page or Twitter account that goes from being regularly updated to abandoned.

• Make sure your contact information is correct and easily accessible
• Provide timely information like upcoming sales and promotions
• Post relevant items that address current industry news and trends

Who’s Listening?

It  is critical to track the response to your social media efforts in order to find out what’s working. Smaller businesses can start by monitoring the number of people that follow their posts. This information, especially for Facebook and Twitter accounts, is readily available. If you maintain a blog or a website, free sites like Google Analytics,  Feedburner, bit.ly, Compete.com and Quantcast can assist you in tracking the number of hits you receive in a given period of time. For larger corporations, depending on your response volume, investing in a monitoring software may help you stay on top of marketing trends and opportunities and potential crises.

No matter the size of your business, ignoring or addressing the magnitude of social media will likely have an effect on your numbers, and how you utilize its benefits may give you the edge on your competitors.

If you’re not filtering out affiliate spam sites from measurement results, it could be.

Affiliate spam websites and Twitter handles are built to drive traffic to sites like Amazon with an end goal of earning a percentage of the sales dollars. These sites regularly “borrow” content from directories in order to bolster their search rankings. While Google and other search engines have made progress in the battle to filter out or push down these sites in search results, many social media aggregation tools are still returning a number of affiliate sites in results.

What does this mean for marketers?

When conducting online measurement and research for consumer packaged goods, we’ve often found that affiliate sites make up 40-60% of social media results. For some clients, this means that results may appear to be thousands of posts higher than they actually are. At Loudpixel, we tend to reference the percentage of affiliate to “true” opinion posts and reactions, but it’s important to exclude these sites from any in depth analysis—this overly promotional content will skew the numbers.

And to make matters more complicated, tools such as Radian6—which work on tiered pricing structures based on volume—could be more you costing more than necessary to pull in extraneous content.

How to identify affiliate spam websites

• Check out the URL. If you see that the main URL is a string of mumbo-jumbo letters or numbers (e.g. ab3bg.com/widgetreview) or directly related to selling a particular product (e.g. buywidgets.com/widgetreview), there’s a good chance you’re looking at an affiliate website
• Look for multiple posts with the same content. Retweets are one thing, but if you see a string of the same overly positive or promotional posts from different sites with no direct attribution, you’re likely looking at affiliate spam
• Look for specific keywords: Proceed with caution when you see words like “buy cheap,” “buy now,” “low price,” “hot deals,” “online shop,” “Amazon” or other content that is overly promotional toward the brand or company—in fact, in many cases, you can filter these words out from the get-go, depending on the specific client and goals
• Look for a string of positive reviews followed by links to Amazon. Affiliate sites will often repost positive product reviews promoting the product, followed by a link to buy the product online
• Use your best judgment. Sometimes, affiliate spam is obvious (as in the example below), but the more you pay attention to the general design and features of the sites, the better you’ll be at identifying  them

In order to return accurate measurements and results, take the time to identify and familiarize yourself with the characteristics of these sites. Otherwise, you’re probably wasting effort.

The concept of listening to social media conversations has caught on in a big way in the past year—but before jumping in, there are a few important organizational questions to consider with your team.

1. What are the goals of monitoring and analysis?

Thought starters—goals may include:

• Measuring the results of a specific program
• Gaining feedback on traditional advertising
• Keeping an eye out for potential crises
• Integrating customer service to respond to issues
• Spotting opportunities for creative PR initiatives
• Keeping an eye on competitive initiatives
• Collecting data over time to add aid in market intelligence
• Gaining knowledge for new product development
• Finding out who is influencing the conversation

2. What cultural shifts will be necessary to get the most out of monitoring and analysis?

Thought starters—shifts to address may include:

• Will the customer service team need to be linked more closely to PR?
• Will the results of online analysis be tied into advertising creative or media buying decisions?
• Does it make sense for the team to meet on a regular basis to discuss opportunities and general consumer feedback from the research?
• What voice will be used to respond to questions and issues?
• If a crisis or issue does arise, how will a response be handled?
• If an issue arises on the weekend, who will take charge?

3. What tool(s) will we use to collect conversation data?

There are an overwhelming number of tools available for monitoring—the best tools will vary from one organization to another based on budget and specific goals.

4. Who will execute the monitoring and analysis?

Will the organization hire an internal team to manage monitoring and analysis? How will responsibilities (and budget) be split among brand teams, corporate teams, customer service and/or insights teams? Will the organization benefit from hiring a specialty firm?

5. How often will analysis reports be delivered?

Common reporting periods include:

• Daily monitoring with weekly analysis reports
• Daily monitoring with bi-weekly analysis reports
• Daily monitoring with monthly analysis reports
• Quarterly analysis reports
• Benchmark and follow-up analysis reports for specific programs

Before you spend a dime on monitoring and analysis, be sure to rally the team and use these questions as a guide to get everyone on the same page. The overall value of the monitoring program will be significantly higher.

Last Friday, Jeff and I were heading from Chicago to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, to visit Ryan and catch up on some Loudpixel software development in person. When we arrived at Midway about an hour and 20 minutes before our flight, we realized, to our immediate horror, that our flight was out of O’Hare.

About 45 minutes and a few forehead slaps later, we arrived at the correct terminal in time to make our flight. To abate the embarrassment of arriving at the wrong airport, we decided to dive into Radian6 to find out how many others had made a similar mistake in the past 30 days.

137 people in the U.S. have told a story about going to the wrong airport in the past 30 days.

• 80 Twitter posts
• 51 blog posts
• 3 Facebook posts
• 2 Comments
• 1 Mainstream News articles

According to eMarketer, there are 26 million adult Twitter users (8.38% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). So extrapolating this out, let’s say that 926 people go to the wrong airport every month. Now we don’t look so bad, right?

And if that doesn’t make us feel better, here are a few more stories that have popped up in the past 30 days that make our arrival at the wrong airport pale in comparison.

• Ryanair Strands Passengers on Wrong Island, Wrong Airport
• Pilot Suspended After Landing Plane at Wrong Airport

At Loudpixel, we like to take the time to look beyond brand-specific research and point our talents toward greater cultural trends. In this case, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at what people are giving up for Lent this year. So we analyzed a sample from 27,786 posts* from Wednesday, February 17 to see what people had to say.

The following are the top 10 sacrifices posted online during Ash Wednesday

• * Posts sampled from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, videos and comments using Radian6:
• Undecided (looking for recommendations): 14.3%
• Junk Food: 10.9%
• Technology: 9.8%
• Negativity: 4.5%
• Alcohol: 4.2%
• Swearing: 3.5%
• Sex: 2.4%
• Meat: 2.1%
• Smoking: 1.3%
• Coffee: 1.1%
• Other: 45.9%

Some of our favorite sacrifices:

I’m giving up the 140th character for Lent. All tweets between now and Easter will only be 139 characters. That’s the kind of Catholic I am —@timhammer

I thought about giving up procrastination for #Lent but decided I’ll do it next year. —@joenobody