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As social media marketing continues to grow, all sorts of concepts and practices are being tossed around: listening, monitoring, analyzing, engaging, segmenting… One could drown in this sea of buzz words. I could probably go on all day with this, but what matters most is what you are doing, or rather, what you are striving to do. The idea of social media marketing is still in its early stages. I would say it has graduated from infancy and is now in its terrible twos. This is why the practice of social media marketing can be such a headache. So put on your water wings, as I teach you how to swim through the sea of social media, so your brand is no longer just treading water.
For a brand attempting to get into the social media marketing pool, it is best to start in the shallow end. A brand’s initial foray into social media marketing should be as simple and basic as possible. For these individuals, the idea of tweeting and getting a retweet is still foreign, and they are likely unfamiliar with setting up a Facebook fan page. So before you go out and create a twitter account, a Facebook page and start writing a blog, it is best to understand what’s already being said. This is where a social media monitoring tool comes into the picture. Alterian SM2 is one of the many solutions that help you understand the disposition of your brand, company and products online.
Alterian’s SM2 tool is continuously being upgraded and modified to allow users to do pretty much anything their heart desires in the social media universe. With the latest release of Alterian SM2 4.7, users now have the ability to create reporting dashboards based on automatic and manually defined categories. This is about as beginner as it gets in tracking and analyzing your brand online. These reports can be viewed by any date range, going back more than three years in order to see trending analysis over time. This includes sentiment, demographic and geographic analysis, and these visualizations are sharable across users. What this means is that users can listen and monitor by creating dashboards and accessing them in a browser with one click of the mouse. These dashboards update regularly and give the marketer a sense of how their keyword searches are performing, without having to navigate through an overwhelming amount of data.
OK, so you are beyond simple visual reports explaining your brand’s presence in the social media landscape and are looking to swim out a little deeper. Alterian SM2 has been collecting and indexing all conversations that have been occurring in the social media universe for more than three years now. Since Alterian began as a database marketing software company, one could say we know how to handle large amounts of data. This social media warehouse of ours contains roughly 10 billion conversations, going back three years. The power of this data lies within the user’s knowledge and understanding of the extent of online channels. The depth of the data allows users to cut and slice it. The extent of this dissection is really limitless, with the ability to drill into segments on the fly. A user also has the power to put conversations through a workflow, flag and benchmark social media campaigns for tracking, and really get a detailed granular view of the communities and authors basically doing marketing on their behalf. The second phase of social media monitoring is dissecting the conversations in order to determine what is being said, where it’s being said, who is saying it, and understanding why. These are tools designed for a more intermediate user of social media solutions.
So you’ve swum a few laps and are intrigued by the thought of cannon balls off the diving board. Before you were just sitting in the pool, watching what was going on around you, but now you are looking to take action and risks. The most common buzz word you will hear from Alterian surrounding the future of social media marketing is engagement. This concept refers to the ability to not only listen and monitor what is being said online, but also the ability to connect and respond to individuals discussing your brand. Alterian has built a suite of tools called Social Media Engagement Solutions, which includes the Social Media Console to capture and respond to messages in Alterian SM2, across different social media channels. For example, a Twitter user tweets that they had a great time at your food and beverage establishment last night. You can immediately reply to them with a thank you, here’s a coupon for your next visit. This feature translates perfectly for customer service, crisis or reputation management and defines the idea of engaging and interacting with your customers and prospects.
After a few springs off the low-dive, you are eyeing the high-dive, a full social media marketing campaigning solution. So you went ahead and built a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a branded blog, a message board, a YouTube feed, and you enrolled in foursquare. Why? Because someone said you should. Now what do you do?
Another highlight of Alterian’s Social Media Engagement Solutions is the Social Media Publisher, built upon Alterian’s already acclaimed Web Content Management Solution, which enables the publication of consistently branded social media content to all of these different channels. Similar to doing Email or SMS marketing, there are now newchannels for running campaigns. This content can be tailored and formatted to each unique channel: sending a video to YouTube, a 140 character tweet to Twitter, a photo to flickr and a post to a Facebook fan page, all at the same time. When a follower, fan or any audience member of these channels replies to a message, you can engage in a conversation with them using the Social Media Console. These conversations and the data surrounding them are collected and brought back into the Alterian SM2 reporting tool for further data analysis. This summarizes the concept of 360 degree marketing for campaign creation, benchmarking and tracking.
So if a company starts off in the kiddie pool and understands the steps that are involved to reach an advanced and sophisticated social media marketing process, then their brand won’t be in need of resuscitation.
