Identifying the right social media tools

@rachelhawkes #ENGAGE2015 #SOCIALTOOLS
Identifying the right social tools
Rachel Hawkes
Director of Social & Content
OMD International

Disclaimer
Not an exhaustive list of tools or features etc.
Does not include paid tools
All opinions are my own and not my employers

It can be a minefield!
Just doing a Google search for social tools can make your head spin
Often people know what end result they want, but not what type of tool can
help them get there
There’s no one-stop-shop when it comes to social tools (they all dabble in
other areas but no one is winning in this space)
When you know what kind of tool you need, how do you work out what
features are must have or nice to haves and how to you shortlist down the
tools that can meet those needs?

Make sure you (or your agency)
has this in place with each vendor

What role do you think agencies
play in tool selection?
identifying needs and shortlisting vendors
(sometimes) better pricing
access to new releases / features
exclusively (or FIRST)
knowledge gained through other clients
support, training and roll out
reporting

Should agencies be vendor neutral?
some vendors offer agencies payment for signing clients
should this be declared or passed back to the client?
is this (or anything else) impacting the recommendation?

Full transparency

A quick case study: a clients
search for a social tool

Select the best social listening
tool for this global B2B client to
roll out across Europe

Get buy-in from time poor markets (who have limited to no dedicated social
resource)
Test quality and quantity of data in multiple languages
Build out the businesses use cases across multiple areas (e.g. marketing,
sales, PR etc)
Challenges in doing that

Selected the top 5 EU markets and involved the key social person from the outset
Built out a two month test and learn exercise
Weeks 1-2 a training call with the five shortlisted social listening tools
Weeks 3-7 a weekly task for each market to complete on each of the tools
Week 8 markets feedback was pulled into a report to share with the central client
with feedback and priorities identified for each tool
A hands on approach

Why did we do it this way?
It’s vital that the people that are going to be relying on and using the tool the
most are part of the decision making process
Even if their preferred tool was not the one selected, they felt heard and that
their opinion was considered and respected
Market involvement from the outset has really helped the client identify the
tool that is going to best work for them across the region
Early buy-in means that the markets were excited to adopt a new tool and
were the ones driving it forward

Why is it so complicated???

Analytics tools want to do
social listening and publishing

Social listening tools want to
do analytics and publishing

Content publishing platforms want
to do social listening and analytics

Specialist social service
platforms seem to be happy
being social service platforms

Closer than most are….** that doesn’t necessarily mean they are best in class in each of the areas

Then there are the happy bed
partners*. For e.g.
* that play well with other tools. E.g. Hootsuite and Brandwatch and Synthesio and Salesforce

Things to consider when choosing a tool
Do they have an API and do they pull in other APIs?
Can you get a free or low cost trial to get actual hands on experience?
Where is their customer support based (and in what languages)?
What is the product roadmap? How often do they do new releases and how
ahead of the competitors are they?
Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better – don’t rule out hungry start-ups

Where are social tools headed?
The holy grail……….. one awesome tool that is equally strong in all areas
Paid media identification
Emoticon sentiment
Better geo-location based functionality
Image recognition and search
More intelligent recommendations (e.g. flagging trends before they trend)

Some of my favourite tools
outside of Analytics, Publishing,
Listening & Customer service

Identifying location based conversations
• Helps you to understand social chat in a specific location and respond in
real-time
• It lets you see what platforms lead your chat, and where, narrowing it down
to the street level (providing their location is on)
• Think of outages or events!
• (many social listening tools also do this)

Crowdsource video and image content
• Set a brief and send it out to a database of hundreds of thousands of
photographers and filmmakers and source exclusive content to use across
owned channels

Sourcing true UGC content made easy
• Pro-actively source UGC content that
people post related to your industry,
get their permission to use it and
send it to your content publishing
platform… quickly and easily.
• Mobile app to get rights offline as
well

Getting the whole-picture in real time
Allows you to
compare things
such as:
•Sales v social
mentions
•Site visits v
sales v
engagement
•PR coverage v
SEM v social
reach

Encourage and reward your employees

Smarter marketing through imagery
• People increasingly
communicate through images
• Integrate UGC images in your
ecommerce store and find out
the REAL value of influencers
by seeing the monetary value
their image contributed in sales
• Drive revenue through
Instagram with Like2Buy
• Identify images where your
brand appears from across the
web with visual social listening

Questions?

Gamification

Your agency has just landed the exclusive brand launch of the next big thing! You need the Super
Social Tool
You need to listen
You need to analyze
You need to publish
You need to hear the customer
You need to identify leads
You need to ensure you are getting your ROI
You need to impress Rachel
Don’t forget the fun!
Building the Super Social Tool

Identifying the right social media tools

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