Charlie Lee, COO, Experian Techlightenment discusses the importance of social media monitoring and how to successfully engage with consumers

1. Powerful Relationship
Building through
Listening & Action
Charlie Lee
COO – Techlightenment
Charlie.lee@techlightenment.com
@charliemlee
@techlightenment
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2. The Rise and Evolution of Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Monitoring has seen huge changes in the last few years
as Social Media has evolved. Today, Monitoring is heading towards
more custom qualitative analysis to inform brand strategies and
segment consumers.
2005 2007 2009 2011
Improvements to
social media More human/
Social Media
monitoring tools. qualitative
monitoring tools
Search articles/ More accurate analysis -
evolve with
blogs for related automated cluster analysis,
basic automated
keywords e.g. sentiment and informing
sentiment e.g.
Google News dashboards strategy,
ScoutLabs/
developing. consumer
Radian 6
Quantitative, brand segmentation
focus
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4. Why Companies Need to be Listening
5 key reasons to listen:
1. Unprompted conversations by real consumer provides
valuable insights
2. Measure yourself against competitors
3. Understand your audience: what are people saying &
what interests them
4. Negative sentiment/ complaints: customer service,
crisis management
5. Where the conversations are taking place & how you
can engage/ get involved
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5. “The rise of social media is changing
consumer behavior and expectations, with a
knock-on effect on research. ‘The more
people see two-way engagement and being
able to interact with people all over the
world, I think the less they want to be
involved in structured research’.”
Proctor & Gamble
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6. Social Media Monitoring Basics
In order to start Social Media Monitoring, there are a few things you must do…
1. Choose a monitoring tool/ service
There are various free and paid-for tools on the market, and they
vary in capability depending on coverage and price
2. Track mentions of your brand
Using one of the monitoring tools, track mentions of your brand on
social media. Pay specific attention to negative sentiment and where it
is occurring. Benchmark yourself against your competitors.
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7. Social Media Monitoring Basics
In order to start Social Media Monitoring, there are a few things you must do…
3. Engage in the conversation
Create communities on Twitter and Facebook, and use
them to encourage advocates, answer questions, and deal
with complaints.
4. Create a strategy for social media engagement
Before you can grow levels of engagement on social
media, guidelines need to be put in place to ensure
engagement remains effective.
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9. Next Steps
Once you have the basics, it’s time to develop your social media strategy…
5. Augment your quantitative approach of counting posts/ tweets
with a more analytical, qualitative approach
Through moving away from simply counting posts/ tweets, it is
possible to use social media monitoring as a tool for informing
business decisions.
6. Use insights from social media monitoring to inform strategy
It is possible to understand your consumer and what is important to
them through listening and engaging on social media. Use consumers’
comments to help inform content strategy, new product development
and messaging.
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10. The Next Generation
Social Buzz Analysis Community Benchmarking
Social media analysts and Our Social Brand Index measures
sociologists mine and analyse social size, growth and engagement
conversations – complementing all against 100s of brands’ presence
quantitative analysis with across Facebook, Twitter and
qualitative assessments and YouTube.
interpretation.
Influencer & Conversation Mapping Audience Archetypes
Techlightenment analyses Facebook, Using a combination of social
Twitter and forums using proprietary ethnographic research alongside
tools to identify conversation clusters digital and offline analysis,
and map key influencers; revealing Techlightenment develops rich
how users are connected on social profiles of your core and prospective
media. audience archetypes.
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11. Social Buzz Analysis – More than Just “How Many?”
Rather than conventional social media monitoring, carry out social buzz analysis
– looking at how conversations on social media affect your brand, and how you
are performing in relation to competitors.
-Focus on trends/ the story behind the
numbers, rather than fire-hose approach
-Benchmark yourself against competitors
-Human analysis of sentiment and topics:
what do people think & what interests
them most about your brand?
-Recommendations on how to improve
your online presence; inform strategy/
focus for products and services
Example Buzz Analysis Report
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12. Social Buzz Analysis – So What? Who Cares?
- Companies need to be aware of what people are saying about
their brand. Why?
- Customer service – listen and respond to your consumers
- Understand real-time consumer preferences, sentiment and
intentions
- Joining the conversation in the right places can bring more
credibility to your brand
- Companies need to understand what interests customers,
advocates and detractors to figure out what the market actually
needs
- Taking a step back and viewing the conversations on social media
as a whole, can often highlight more strategic opportunities to
make improvements and gain insights
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13. Community Benchmarking – Keeping up w/ the Jones?
When building your presence on social media, it is vital to know how your communities
are performing against the industry and competitor benchmarks.
Facebook Fan Page Benchmarking vs. Custom brand index
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14. Community Benchmarking – So What? Who Cares?
- Companies should know how your communities are
performing in relation to competitors/ their industry.
Why?
- If your community is performing below your industry
average, changes need to be made to improve
- Find out what are your competitors are doing well
- Measure the size, growth and engagement of your
communities to help optimise your social media
presence
- Many social media metrics are meaningless without
industry and sector-wide benchmarks
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15. Influencer and Conversation Mapping – A Picture Is Worth...
In addition to Social Buzz Analysis, in-depth influencer and conversation mapping
provides a strong visual of the conversation. This custom approach for Twitter,
Facebook and forums helps to understand how conversation about your brand
flows through social media, and who is influencing the conversation.
Current period Historic data
Week of Weeks
Questions Page<>Fan Persist- first since last
User Name Activity Popularity Asked Interactions Weekly Activity ence Activity Activity
Paul Smiley 18 0.2 2 1 0.3 16 10
Wael Farouk Ahmed 16 0.2 0 1 0.6 11 8
Anthony Phoenix Burke 14 0.4 0 1 0.3 21 4
Brian Fernandes 14 0.4 0 0 0.9 11 2
Krzysztof Chmiel 13 1.0 0 0 0.1 25 3
Ashkor Hussain 13 0.6 2 0 0.6 25 2
Wil Claveria 13 0.2 1 0 0.8 15 0
Nadia Bennett 13 0.2 0 1 0.4 26 7
Calvin How 12 0.6 4 1 0.5 25 5
Karl Klemm 12 0.5 0 0 0.8 16 1
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16. Influencer & Conversation Mapping– So What? Who Cares?
- Companies should identify who is influencing the conversation
on different social networks in order to listen/ engage
- Are they advocates or detractors? Influential advocates can
really help to promote a brand online, whereas influential
detractors can be extremely detrimental to the brand
- Find out how conversation flows through Twitter. The
dissemination of information is vital in ensuring an effective
online presence
- Identify key conversation sources/ threads, and understand
what creates a lasting impact
- Identify keywords which resonate best with your audience,
which can help inform content, messaging or targeting
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17. Audience Archetypes – Turn Insights into Action
Go beyond the conversations about your brand on social media, segment
consumers in your industry; to better identify your current and prospective
consumers and how you can reach/ engage with them.
Social
Listening;
Facebook
Stimulus
Testing;
Social
Survey
Research
+
Digital
Behavior;
Offline
Research;
Socio-
Demographics
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19. Audience Archetypes – So What? Who Cares?
- Companies need to know who their consumers are
on social media. Why?
- Understand your consumers’ needs in order to
make yourself more relevant to your customers
- Inform content strategy, targeting/ messaging,
new product development and more
- Identify prospective consumers and how you can
reach them
- Ultimately increase brand awareness and sales
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20. Social Research Platform – Don’t Just Listen, ASK!
Ask questions on Facebook via a social survey, and build a profile of the gender, age,
likes, interests, locations (and many more attributes) of different poll respondent
groups.
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21. Social Research Platform: Understanding the likes of your
audience % Audience Demographics
Popularity of the Like
Indexing vs.
Facebook
Like & Category Ave.
Understand Likes
for your
Total Panel /
Audience
AND
by Answer Group
or any other
variable
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23. Social Research Platform– So What? Who Cares?
- Companies can ask their Facebook audience questions about their
brand/ industry, a previously untapped source of segmentation data
- Through users’ profile data, it is possible to build up a profile of the
types of people who answer certain questions. Why?
- Gain a deeper understanding into your consumers in terms of
their gender, age, likes, interests, locations and much more
- Understand and compare how different consumer groups
respond to different questions
- Hypotheses can be tested using Facebook Ad Stimulus testing
- Feeds Facebook advertising parameters directly
- Identify co-branding and cross-media Advertising opportunities
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24. What to do with good or bad news?
Good news Bad news
You have a high % of positive sentiment, You have a high % of negative sentiment
loyal brand advocates and plenty of and few brand advocates.
conversation.
DO:
DO:
 Respond to questions or complaints about
 Engage with and encourage your audience your brand. Apologise if necessary
through positive responses
 Reassure consumers. Be sympathetic,
 Answer any questions understanding, thankful and polite
 Use your existing community to try and build  Try to be proactive and helpful – the
your presence online consumers will appreciate good customer
service
DON’T:
DON’T:
ˣ Patronise your consumers
ˣ Overreact/ try to have posts removed
ˣ Overreact to a negative post – your positive
community will probably deal with it. ˣ Ignore your consumers
ˣ Patronise or argue with your consumers
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25. Good/ bad social media responses
Nestle
Starbucks
Greenpeace attacked Nestle first on YouTube and
Starbucks have created a strong online then on its FB page about the source of its palm oil.
community on Facebook and Twitter through Nestle handled this badly, mostly because it was
listening, responding in real time and asking caught off guard by the viral nature of social
their consumers what they want. media.
Nestle tried to have the YouTube video
25,783,160 fans removed, so protests moved to FB
1,776,575 followers Nestle threatened to delete comments left
by individuals, which only adds fuel to the
fire
Nestle responds rudely to protesters on
their Facebook page:
Finally…
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26. Techlightenment, a part of Experian
Charlie Lee
Charlie.lee@techlightenment.com
@charliemlee
949.683.7040
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