The third Social Media panel of the day is moderated by Marshall Sponder of Monster.com and features Breanna Wigle of Military Advantage, Edmund Wong of ICrossing, Todd Parsons of the Allen Parson Project, Dr Evil’s giant Space Laser, jk he is with BuzzLogic.com and Rob Key of Converseon
The topic at hand is measuring and tracking your Social Media campaigns.
First up it’s Rob Key pointing out the 5 of the top 10 most popular sites are Social Media sites.
When building a Social Media Strategy you need to Listen->Engage->Measure/Optimize according to Key. To expand on that this will help you deliver a great user experience on any level.
You don’t have to invent a Facebook to take part in Social Media, you can join networks such as FB that have already been invented and although you might feel your service or product isn’t a very good fit for these mediums you would be surprised to actually find your competitors there already
Do you want to out step your competition or dive blindly into something that they have already done? The key to effective business planning is to always be ahead of the curve.
Key is now talking about using Tag Clouds to identify the keyterms or words that people are using to either find you or words that they use when they talk about you online. Collect these terms and create a Tag Cloud to see what terms are used more.
Tag Clouds are an easy visual that lets you see the ‘weight’ of a word. If one word is used more than any other word it will look larger in a Tag Cloud
Create your own Tag Cloud here
Tag Cloud Visual from Wikipedia
Breanna and Todd are up next presenting together on the May 2008 launch of Military Defense and Acquisition Journal on the web. They wanted to find the influencers in the marketplace that drove conversations. Buzzlogic came in to help them not only find but isolate that data in order to manipulate it to give them a better marketing campaign.
Their first step was finding the conversations about the Military. They then used the keywords they found for the Military and targeted blogs that were already having conversations about the Military. Using this new campaign they were now able to measure the incoming traffic using analytics and noticed that the Buzzlogic ads performed 6.2% better than any other advertising they were doing.
Edmund Wong rounds out the panel with an ongoing case study in utilizing Social Media. They had a high-tech client facing brand and sale challenges. Clients of the high-tech company were dissatisfied with technical problems and iCrossing worked to identify , monitor and develop an engagement strategy to help the company solve their problems in a productive way.
To get an idea on where the company stood in the community they monitored online forums and other forms of ways that their clients would voice their concern. Once they had this data they were able to address the areas of concern from their client base and not what someone in the company thought.
For a company that is experiencing ‘Flaming’ or people speaking badly about the company online you need to address this right away in a very ethical and transparent manner. Online forums are an amazing search tool for Long Tail search terms and in this new world of online Public Relations Google is not only a way to search for something but it is also an online PR management tool. If you are experiencing anyone flaming you get on Google and see if other people are having a conversation on the same topic
Yes Social Media is a little tricky and needs some high level analysis but if used correctly it can help you expand your brand into areas of the world it may have taken you years to get into in the past
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com