Social Media Monitoring and Management

"Momentum" is the name of the book by two advertising popes. Advertising creations that Holger Jung and Jean-Remy von Matt must have explicitly thought of in 2004: And what they implicitly advised: to deliver relevant content to the right target group via the right channel to the right device at the right time. 20 years later, we can see that what has remained are Hüppi, Sutter, Lovely and, according to the Nielsen 2013 Global Survey, a confirmed consumer preference for advertising with humor and topicality. Otherwise, the tide has turned. Influential users now hold the levers of media and opinion power. They post, like, comment, rate and tweet their experiences about people, brands and products in real time on the social web. They do it more and more frequently, increasingly constantly. According to the 2011 Nielsen Report, the credibility of their actions is twice as high as that of companies. If we want to stay in business, we have to follow them on their social tours and engage in the decision-making process with the right arguments and incentives at the right momentum. And this is where professional monitoring and management tools come into play: they help us to bring individuals and trends together systematically, i.e., recurrently, in a well-dosed manner, but at the most receptive moment. The management and measurement of this new form of individual marketing, interspersed with many different messages, sent at completely different times to users with varying media habits, is only possible thanks to such tools. How does it work?

The process

Monitoring and managing social media activities is a demanding process with four clearly defined steps.
 
#1 Monitoring (listening, tracking): Whether on Google, Facebook, Twitter, online portals, blogs or sharing platforms - the goal is to capture all relevant discussions, content and results on the social web as seamlessly as possible and bring them to the screen in real time via a dashboard.
 
#2 Analysis (measuring): This is followed by the search for conspicuous features and insights. At best, these are positive statements (sentiments), opinion leaders who come out as supporters, top issues, favorable competitor comparisons, and results from ongoing campaigns that could provide impetus for interventions and the material for new stories.
 
#3 Reporting: This is followed by the visualization of the data in charts. They create transparency and serve the management as a basis for decision-making for continuous optimization of activities.
 
#4 Engagement: We now know who the influential users (key influencers) are, what makes them tick, what their interests are, and what impulses and topics we can use to activate them in the momentum. They are what social media is all about: Third-party influencers who share their positive experiences in their networks.

The fields of application

Thanks to social media applications, more and more areas of business are being offered opportunities to increase efficiency. In communication with a more favorable "reach" through more targeted addressing at the moment of need as an alternative to watering can advertising. In sales with more favorable "visitors" as an alternative to SEA traffic or more favorable "leads" as an alternative to classic direct mailings. In service through shorter processing times, because inquiries end up directly with the right specialist - which also has a positive effect on customer satisfaction. In development, because the range of products and services can be kept attractive and at a high price level by constantly receiving suggestions for improvement. Recording these ROI parameters is the task of the monitoring team.

The most important parameters

New platforms with new parameters are entering the social web at an ever faster pace. In addition, the established players around Facebook are having the performance of their growing advertising offerings evaluated down to the last click and like. One can divide the many metrics into 6 Ws: What are the content and topics that keep people engaged and around which the most animated discussions revolve? Are there new "trending topics" that are slowly spreading, that bring up new terminologies and views, and that you should definitely not miss the start of? Is your own brand itself the subject of discussion?

What is used to convey the content? Most social media networks give preference to visually prepared content. Whether presentations via Slideshare, videos via YouTube, infographics via Pinterest or photos via Instagram - visual content, especially that generated directly by users, performs excellently. When do most discussions take place and with what intensity? Are there particularly suitable times of day, days of the week, events, or current events? To what extent is real-time communication an issue - for example, during live events? Where are the users' preferred discussion spaces? Where - geographically - can exciting topics of conversation be identified? In which social networks do the posts and likes go off? Who is discussing and expressing themselves? Are users with a lot of influence, i.e. many dedicated followers, involved? These include important authors, bloggers and Twitter users, always with a strong connection to certain topics, brands or key terms. Tracking them down and providing them with exclusive insights is an exciting approach, especially for your own new launches. Especially if the dream of a viral campaign is finally to come true, tracking down potent influencers is at the top of the monitoring list. Who tends to be passive, following the discussions but not engaging? Their activation can also be a goal.

Why do discussions take place at all? Are they positive or negative? How do they influence the perception of one's own brand, or how do they influence the climate in the market in general? Being able to recognize the origin and direction of discussions at an early stage can lead to major competitive advantages.

To answer all these questions, we have an arsenal of tools at our disposal. At www.goldbachinteracitve. com you can find the Social Media Monitoring Tool Report 2013 with quite a few recommendations. The tools can generally be divided into three categories:

1. there are the social media platforms' own tools with in-depth analysis and tracking options. Some well-known ones are Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Webstagram for Instagram images or LinkedIn Directory for groups, plus of course all the tools from Google. They all belong to the standard equipment, provided that one has the corresponding tool actively in use.

2) There are tools specialized in monitoring. As a rule - and this applies to all tools - there are free versions with basic functions and paid subscriptions with extended functions. The amounts vary depending on the tool and the possibilities between 20 francs per month and several thousand francs per year. In the low four-digit range, we find two domestic offers. Those of the traditional brands Argus and Mediafocus, both of which are making quite a splash with new offerings. Argus.ch's Social Media Package Switzerland allows users to search Twitter, blogs, Facebook and YouTube for content. A foreign version is being planned. Mediafocus' online monitoring measures content that spreads within the web. This allows trends to be identified as well as places and people with frequently shared content on specific topics. The sampling includes 250 million sources worldwide and around 50,000 in Switzerland. My personal favorite is Topsy. On Topsy.com, all content shared on Twitter since the beginning can be accessed with a click. Comparisons among brands and tracking trends are exciting. It's a gimmick, but it shows the dimension, scope, and real-time and simplicity of the brave new world of analytics.

The third and last category are the all-in-one tools. Adobe's Marketing Cloud is representative of this. With these tools, you can, as Adobe puts it: "(...) measure, personalize and optimize campaigns and digital content". The future belongs to these cloud solutions, because with the shift in media use from paper and plasma to pads and smartphones, the forms of delivery are also changing. Smaller, more compact content that is above all adapted to the usage situation is in demand.

Beat Hürlimann

What tools do you have in use? Discussed at www.huerlimanncc.com.