A Buyer s Guide for: Social Media Monitoring Technology. >> What you need to know to make the right technology investment decision

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1 A Buyer s Guide for: Social Media Monitoring Technology >> What you need to know to make the right technology investment decision By Jim Berkowitz CRM Mastery, Inc. October CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 1 of 15

2 A Buyer s Guide for Social Media Monitoring Technology "If you want to be successful in your business, or with social media for that matter, you need to start with one thing first: listen. Wim Rampen, SCRM Expert. Start By Listening Why should you listen? In the old days (a short couple of years ago), businesses listened to customers primarily through and customer service phone calls and occasionally using surveys, focus groups, faxes and letters. Today, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn along with blogs, online communities and forums have dramatically changed the way that people can communicate with each other. People are openly talking on the web about their positive and negative experiences with your company, your products and your services and are playing a significant role in shaping the purchasing decisions of others. Are you listening? Do you really think you can afford not to? There are three inter-related components to an effective social media monitoring program: listening, analyzing and engaging. This first section in the Buyer s Guide is about listening; the ability to find, collect and view comments about your company and its products and services from the web and internally. Quite simply, you should be scouring the web for the who, what, when, where and why on any subject that's relevant to your business: * Who is saying what? And how influential are these people? * What's being said about your, (or your competitors'), brand? * Is what's being said good, bad or indifferent? i.e. sentiment * What keywords and trends might make for an effective marketing campaign, * Where is it being said? i.e. where are these people congregating? * What's triggering the conversations? 2010 CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 2 of 15

3 What should you listen for? Successful listening programs will uncover how your customers and others perceive your brand and could help you to identify the extent to which you're delivering on your promises. When customer experiences are out of line with customer expectations -- either positively or negatively, they become increasingly likely to opine then when expectations are simply met. So be sure to listen for compliments, complaints, problems and unmet needs. You may also uncover suggestions for making improvements to your products and services or conversations regarding negative press, misinformation or a potential business threat. To be good listeners, youʼre going to need a new set of skills, best practices and tools to make sense of all the chatter. If you are a small B2B organization, maybe you're thinking that there's no need to monitor the rare mentions of your brand. You need to think bigger. You can monitor the discussions going on about your industry or cause as well as what people love or don't like about your competitors. Think about it. Some times, "listening" to people who aren't familiar with your company but are knowledgeable about your industry (market influencers) can provide you with a wealth of insight into how you can create better and more relevant product and service offerings; suggestions that can give your company a competitive advantage. But, to be good listeners, you're going to need a new set of skills, best practices and tools to make sense of all of the chatter. Just defining the right keywords for your social media search requires knowledge and experience. After all, you don't want to filter too much out or you may miss valuable insights; but not filtering enough can yield way too much distracting, irrelevant noise. What types of technology solutions are available to help you listen? Social media monitoring solutions provide the means to "listen" to what people are saying on social networking sites by extracting filtered data ("scraping") from one or more sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, blogs, online communities, online forums, traditional news media and just about any other place that people congregate on the internet or provide feedback to your company. Listening is definitely the strongest area for the leading social media monitoring vendors CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 3 of 15

4 As far as the social media monitoring marketplace goes, it's the wild west out there. There are lots of products currently available with new ones seemingly being announced on a weekly basis. Some of these tools offer free trials, some are targeted to PR firms and digital marketing agencies and some can be quite costly. Every product seems to have a different set of features and measurement tools. And since there is currently no single solution capable of meeting every aspect of social media monitoring, you'll very likely have to select more then one tool to meet all of your listening, analyzing and engaging requirements. So, to be successful, it's critical that you carefully define your social media monitoring goals and strategies and fully understand your underlying objectives BEFORE beginning your technology selection process. There are a number of free social media, online news, forum and blog listening tools available. Here is a list of some of the most useful tools: Google Alerts BlogPulse Twazzup socialseek Addict-o-matic Samepoint Social Mention However, these tools are essentially search engines and offer very limited, if any, analyzing or engagement functionality. You'll have to pay for more robust social media monitoring solutions. But, many of these for pay tools capture data from a much wider set of web and internal sources, help you to learn how to listen better and offer a variety of analyzing and engagement features. But, buyer beware, given that this marketplace is so new, there is little similarity in the feature sets offered in each product or, consistency with which the various analytics (sentiment, influence, etc.) are calculated. Products that sound and look similar can indeed be very different from each other. Next up we'll explore how social media monitoring tools can take you beyond listening by offering functionality that can facilitate understanding and acting on what you've discovered. Understanding and Acting On What You've Discovered As Stephen Covey so succinctly stated in his classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, "seek first to understand and then to be understood." In the first section of this guide, Start By Listening, we discussed the ability to find, collect and view comments about your brand from various customer feedback sources. In this section, we're going to discuss the two other inter-related components to an effective social media monitoring program, analyzing and engagement CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 4 of 15

5 Remember, listening is cool, but if you can't meaningfully aggregate, analyze and interpret all of the data and as a result, you aren't able to take appropriate and timely action, then listening is pretty much a waste of time and resources. To be successful with Social Media Monitoring, you're going to need processes for gathering information, categorizing and segmenting it based on your needs, communicating internally about responses and engagement, and having up-to-the-minute notification of happenings in social media that are relevant to you. Although your chosen technology solution may include analytic dashboards and reports, only people who are knowledgeable about your company and its social media strategy and have been adequately trained on the social media monitoring tool will be able to use the analytics to understand what the data means, answer the tough questions and (most importantly) know what the appropriate action/response is. Real social media intelligence is the combination of social media monitoring technology and expert insight by knowledgeable people. How should should you use social media (and social media monitoring) in your company? When developing your social media strategies you've got to think people and process, before technology. Start by identifying who in your company is going to use social media, for what? Here's an outline of some of many ways you could use social media and social media monitoring. If you're looking for some type of ROI from your efforts, start by identifying the areas in your company where you currently have quantifiable problems that you believe can be improved upon by implementing social media strategies. SALES can use Social Media for: * Competitive Analysis - Keeping track of what your competition is up to. * Monitoring Industry Trends - Keeping an eye on industry trends right along side your brand and to be able to craft messaging around tomorrow s trends. * Generating New Leads - Responding to people interested in your products and services CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 5 of 15

6 MARKETING and PR can use Social Media for: * Buzz Tracking - Tracking the spread of a marketing campaign, press release, product launch, industry event or other communications initiative in real time and be able to determine what the full (buzz) life-cycle is for each. You could also find your market's most powerful media outlets and key influencers and track the most active social media topics and conversations. * Brand Reputation - Implementing a strategy for improving your brand's reputation. This could start by getting a handle on how your brand is currently perceived and understanding how customers rate your product versus your competitors. * Fostering Dialog and Promoting Advocacy - Identifying and engaging key industry influencers so you could build positive spin for your brand with these people. * Crisis Management - If there s a conversation swirling around or about your company and it s centered around negative press, misinformation, or a potential business threat, you not only want to know about it, but you want to be able to respond - to prevent and mitigate negative coverage. CUSTOMER SERVICE can use Social Media for: * Customer Support - Uncovering and responding to customer service questions and issues. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT can use Social Media for: * Market Research - Gathering feature-level feedback from experts and consumers for product planning. * Competitive Differentiation - Capitalizing on competitor weaknesses in product positioning. * Market Research - Assessing potential consumer reaction to new products and services * User Feedback - Collecting insights on product quality 2010 CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 6 of 15

7 How and when should you engage? "Listening is the first step, but engaging with the customer and providing a return on their feedback is closer to becoming a social entity." Esteban Kolsky, SCRM Analyst. Engagement in social media is different for every business. And getting started can be daunting, especially after you ve spent a lot of time listening. Taking meaningful action will almost always require real change within your organization. There are varying ways to engage using social media depending on what you're using social media for and the type of information you've uncovered. You can answer a question, share some information, offer to be helpful to someone and show interest in the needs of your prospects and customers. Remember, engaging successfully requires understanding what to do with social media intelligence once you have it, making sure the right people on your team get access to it and finally, that each item requiring engagement is responded to appropriately and on a timely basis. Most importantly, engagement does not usually end with a social media response alone. Taking meaningful action will almost always require "real" change within your organization. Meaningful customer-focused engagement must include making changes to the way you're doing things; changes to your policies and procedures, changes to how your employees interact with prospects and customers and changes to how you collaborate. This is true outside-in exchange of value that can offer a measurable return on your social media investment. A Few Words About ROI The following has been extracted from a presentation by Kathy Herrmann, a CRM and SCRM ROI Consultant: Social media monitoring investments can, and should be valued. As with any investment in technology, you need to be able to quantify the gains, (how much revenue can be increased and current costs reduced) versus all of the costs you're planning to spend related to social media monitoring. On the revenue side of things start by looking at how social media engagement can extend your organization's: * Impact (who's paying attention) * Reach (how many people are connecting with your organization) and * Yield (how much your customers spend with you) You can then project increases in revenues as "Impact X Reach X Yield." 2010 CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 7 of 15

8 Couple these expected revenue gains with cost savings that you expect from: Consumer Insights - by substituting real-time social media monitoring for the more expensive costs of surveys and focus groups. Early Warning to Crisis Situations - by significantly reducing the revenues that can be lost and the costs to recover from bad PR, press or other negative communications. Lower Costs of Marketing - by lowering your lead generation costs and shortening your sales cycles. On the expense/cost side of the equation you should consider the following: The cost of people who will be involved with your social media efforts - internal people like managers, strategists, community managers, social media engagement people and third parties like your PR and marketing agencies and consultants. The cost of any technology investments - the cost of any technology tools, including any monthly fees as well as any maintenance, support, implementation and training fees, etc. Once you have estimated your revenue gains over two to five years, and your costs over the same period, you will have what you need to calculate the ROI for the project; the net present value of the difference between the gains and the costs. Next Steps 1. Form a social media monitoring solution selection team made up of representatives from all areas of your organization who will be expected to use this tool, or the information it produces. 2. Decide what it is you want to accomplish with social media monitoring. What are your social media strategies, goals and objectives? 3. Complete the Social Media Monitoring Needs Analysis included in this guide. The most important features should be the ones that will be critical to accomplishing your social media strategies, goals and objectives. 4. Using the CRM Mastery s Social Media Monitoring Directory, select 3 to 5 tools for evaluation. 5. Using the CRM Mastery Vendor Comparison Spreadsheet, contact each selected vendor and complete the comparative analysis over the phone. 6. Schedule and complete a very brief function & feature overview demo for each product focusing on your most critical needs. 7. Select 3-4 vendor finalists and schedule a comprehensive demo with each CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 8 of 15

9 8. Prepare a demo script to be used by each vendor finalist that outlines what you want them to show you during the demo. Note: At this point, you should be comfortable that each finalist has the functions and features you need, so the demo script should focus on the processes that you anticipate using social media monitoring for. You want to be able to evaluate what each tool will be like to use. 9. Have all of the people in your organization who will be expected to use the social media monitoring tool participate in the demos and provide feedback as to which tool they liked best and why? 10. Get proposals from each vendor finalist that includes the service s cost plus the cost of all training and support services. 11. Select the solution(s) that will best meet the needs of your entire organization and hopefully, is the one that everyone would most like to use CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 9 of 15

10 Social Media Monitoring Needs Analysis Use the following form to identify how important each of the following functions and features are to your organization No Need = 0 Not Important = 2 Nice to Have = 4 Important = 6 Very Important = 8 Critical = 10 Listening - Function / Feature Priority Comments Real-time or near real-time monitoring Multi-language enabled Automated language translation Online Listening Sources: Microblogs Social media sites Online news sources Blogs & blog comments Online communities Online forums How often is the data aggregated and indexed? Do you need to monitor conversations in different languages (English, German, French, Spanish, etc.)? The ability to translate a mention into the default language. What online sources do you want to monitor? Note: You may not know the complete answer to this until you listen for a while to see where you are being mentioned. Twitter, Google Buzz, Plurk, Tumblr Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, HI5, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LinkedIn CNN.com, Reuters, Associated Press, Google News, MSNBC WordPress, Moveable Type, Blogger AARP, Xena Online, FastPitch, Motley Fool Google, Gaia Online, 4chan, RuneScape Internal Listening Sources: What internal sources do you want to monitor? Customer survey results Customer service cases & SMS messages Web forms 2010 CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 10 of 15

11 Function / Feature Priority Comments Review sites Epinions, CNET, TripAdvisor Listening - Continued Flexible search structure Comprehensive filtering to remove irrelevant data Automatic filter-out of aggregator blog sites to reduce duplicate results Mention categorization tagging Mention Segmentation Prioritization and assignment of mentions Can individual mentions be manually assigned to pre-defined categories? How is mention segmentation performed; manually, automatically or both? Can individual mentions be prioritized and routed to the appropriate person for follow up CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 11 of 15

12 Analyzing & Reporting- Analyzing: Function / Feature Priority Comments Geo-mapping / location analysis Influencer analysis: Customizable influencer scoring Influencers by media type Share of Voice (reach) Audience Engagement Sentiment (and tone) analysis News-cycle analysis Blog momentum analysis Reputation scoring Competitor benchmarking Where in the world are people talking about your brand, product, etc.? Who are the most influential people related to your brand, market, products, etc? How is influence calculated? Is the influence scoring calculation customizable? Who are the most influential people by media source (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, News, etc.)? From where (i.e. which and how many media types) are the conversations coming from? The proportion of blog posts that elicit comments and link-backs. Tone deals with Positive, Neutral & Negative mention analysis. Can the sentiment dictionary be customized? How is sentiment calculated? Can the calculation be customized? How information moves between mainstream media and blogs, etc. Changes in blogs covering your brand, market, products, etc. over various time intervals. What is the reputation of your brand and your competitors? How is reputation calculated? Can you compare competitors against each other as well as your brand? Credibility analysis Author tag analysis Theme and topic analysis How the authors of the mentions tagged their content. Charts, etc. that help you to see what people are discussing when they talk about your brand, market, products, etc.? Also analyses that explore what the most talked about topics are CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 12 of 15

13 Function / Feature Priority Comments Analyzing & Reporting - Continued Reporting: Real-time metrics, reporting Real-time alerts Theme Clouds Compare Dates Domain Reporting Example: Automatic notification of negative mentions of your brand. A cloud or bubble chart showing the volume of whatʼs being talked about, (words that frequently occur) Can you compare things using two different time frames? Or two different things over the same time frame. Where (URLs) are the conversations taking place? Custom Charts & Reports Builder Report scheduler Automatic delivery of reports via or RSS. Drill-down trend analysis Custom Dashboards Trend analysis Demographic analyses Comparing metrics over various timeframes. Example: By gender, age, etc. of the author of the mentions. Function / Feature Priority Comments Engaging - Workflow routing marketing Automated response triggers The ability to assign and route mentions to other people in your organization for follow up and the ability to then track the response / engagement. An system for implementing targeted marketing campaigns. The ability to automatically reply to a mention based on the mentionʼs content CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 13 of 15

14 Function / Feature Priority Comments Other Technical Capabilities - Social media data warehouse Integration with enterprise systems (ex. BI, CRM, CMS, Contact Center and ERP) How and where is the data stored? For how long is the data stored and searchable? (ex. 30 days, 6 months, 1 year) What systems does the monitoring tool integrate with? APIs for connecting to internal enterprise systems and web services 2010 CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 14 of 15

15 Report Publisher, Copyright & Disclaimer This CRM Technology Research Report has been prepared by CRM Mastery, Inc. CRM Mastery provides independent, unbiased CRM (and SCRM) technology research and analysis to the small and mid-sized enterprise (SME) marketplace. CRM Mastery also offers SMEs the following services: Independent, unbiased CRM (and SCRM) software evaluation and selection assistance, Diagnostic assessment solutions for isolating and prioritizing specific opportunities to profit from CRM, and Uniquely affordable, CRM planning and implementation guidance services Published by - CRM Mastery, Inc All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by using information storage and retrieval systems ( ), without written permission of the publisher. Please direct any comments, questions, or suggestions regarding this report to: CRM Mastery, Inc. PO Box Telluride CO Or: info@crmmastery.com Disclaimer: The information, thoughts and conclusions contained herein have been developed from sources, including articles and weblogs, research, interviews and other sources that are considered and believed to be reliable, but cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, because of the technical nature of this material and the fact that what is known about Oracle s Fusion app plans and strategies are not static, but ever changing, the assistance of a qualified professional is recommended before making any decisions based on the content of this report. Jim Berkowitz; CRM Mastery, Inc.; and its employees specifically disclaim any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence of the use and/or application of the content of this report CRM Mastery, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 15 of 15