EVENEMENT INCONTOURNABLE POUR LES PROS DU MARKETING/RP & DES MEDIAS SOCIAUX

Sur la lancée du succès des précédents évènements à Londres, San Francisco, Boston et New York, Influence People organise le 10 décembre une conférence d’une journée sur la surveillance des médias sociaux.

Monitoring Social Media (Paris) réunira les principaux experts des marques, des RP et du marketing pour échanger autour des dernières analyses, tendances et techniques de surveillance et mesure des médias sociaux. Des présentations, échanges animés par des experts et des tables rondes permettront d’explorer les enjeux majeurs auxquels font face les marketeurs et les professionnels des RP dans leurs volontés de surveiller leurs interactions au sein des médias sociaux.

Certaines conférences seront en anglais, d’autres en français.

Les sujets qui seront abordés :

• Outils et services de surveillance des medias sociaux
• Gestion de marque et de la réputation
• Qualité et filtrage des données
• Comment identifier et se connecter aux influenceurs
• Au-delà de l’écoute : mesure et ROI
• Le futur de la surveillance des médias sociaux
• Etudes de cas et meilleures pratiques

La conférence sera interactive avec différentes présentations, études de cas, séances de questions & réponses et tables rondes. Une zone dédiée sera accessible avec des stands présentant les outils et services de surveillance et mesure des médias sociaux les plus performants. L’entrée comprend le déjeuner (optionnel), les boissons, un livret et un apéritif « networking » en fin de journée.

Réserver votre billet ici

Attendees at Monitoring Social Media Boston 2010

This is a quick round-up of the key points raised at Monitoring Social Media Boston on 5th Oct, the presentations for which are mostly here. I’ll be following it up with a review of the afternoon sessions:

Katie Delayhaye Paine kicked off the day with some fantastic examples of how social media can provide ROI. Apparently Sodexo cut their entire recruitment budget ($300k) by recruiting via Twitter, and USO – a charity that supports American service men and women – saw revenues rocket after recruiting a Community Manager who engages with supporters via social media. She also reiterated her belief that AVE (ad value equivalency) the traditional method of measuring PR value, has been made redundant by social media. Engagement is the new currency and measuring it require creating an Engagement Index (in Katie’s case, a Kick-ass Engagement Index).

Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) of Radian6 then took to the stage and said that The American Red Cross listens to it’s users and changes it’s website every day. This is part of a trend for organisations to use monitoring to reflect the actions and interests of their users. Amber likened this, neatly I thought, to humans “mirroring the body language of a suitor”. Ever prepared to provide actionable advice, Amber also said that if you want to outdo your competitors, you should create searches for “really wish [product] had [x or y]“. These expressions appear frequently and are obvious feature requests. Similarly if you’re responding to a complaint online you’ve got around 10 mins to act on Twitter before it’s too late. With a blog post you have 1 hour. Kinda scary really.

Keith-Woods Holder of Glide Technologies, a UK-based monitoring tool provider, pointed out that the key issue with sentiment analysis is perspective. Good news for you is bad news for someone. So accurate sentiment analysis requires you to gather feedback and teach the system about your perspective.  Because of this he said that if you are serious about monitoring, you shouldn’t get a “black-box” solution that doesn’t allow you to tinker with it’s sentiment settings.

Stephen DiMarco of Compete then presented a case study showing how AMEX increased their page impressions from 50k per month to peaks of 1.5 million per month by launching their community site Open Forum. He also explained how Best Buy have replicated their website within Facebook. Now 75% of the people visiting their Facebook page also visit their website within 1 month and 4.5% of Best Buy’s traffic comes from Facebook. That’s pretty impressive. Later during an example involving Old Spice he also invented the word “scentiment”. Less impressive ;)

The irrepressible Mark Schmulen of Constant Contact then leapt onto the stage to explain how small businesses should be taking advantage of social media – quoting from Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness” about how successful modern companies should becompeting to make their customers happy. (Having recently travelled on RyanAir, that’s a refreshing concept!) He then presented a case study of Dingo (a dog food company) which offered people a $20 to “like” them on Facebook and sign up to their newsletter. They increased their Facebook “likes” from 330 to 6,000 and newsletter sign-ups from 9000 to 14000. Wow!  Especially since they did it in 3 days. Double wow! Sales rose 22%. Similarly, Glamour Nails, a local salon in the US publicised a “secret password” on Twitter and Facebook, offering discounts for people who use them in the shop. Another neat trick that increased profits.

Seth Grimes, the New York-based analyst and consultant then gave a detailed review of the pitfalls and opportunities offered by sentiment detection and analysis. He explained how Google is already using automated sentiment analysis in it’s star-ratings (taken from reviews written by web users) and how sentiment analysis couldn’t account for wrong facts – of which the Internet has many. We then finished the morning session with a discussion of monitoring tools – of which the upshot was: the tool you choose is only as good as the person who’s going to use it.

Tickets are on sale now for Monitoring Social Media San Francisco, New York, London and Paris – Don’t miss out.

Social CRM is seen as the answer, but that simple term belies a panoply of troublesome issues that companies are going to have to overcome before the “social” and “CRM” can truly be integrated. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the CEO of a national car dealership… First off, how can you track and store the millions of conversations going on around the world, or (much harder) in a specific town? How do you know that @snoop_dog5 is, in fact, John Dixon of 5 New Way, Cambridge, who bought a top-of-the-range BMW from your company last year? How do you capture that forum conversation about optional extras that BMW drivers most desire? What tools and solutions should you be using and, critically, which department of your organisation should be driving your social CRM strategy?

The first of these question is the easiest one. There are hundreds of social media monitoring solutions on the market and they are all seeking to either integrate with existing CRM solutions (such as Salesforce or Oracle’s Siebel) or develop their own CRM features. Somewhat predictably many are also being acquired by CRM companies). So you really need to be looking for a top-of-the-range monitoring solution that integrates nicely with your existing CRM solution. Alternatively you could migrate to a new CRM solution that does social better. Of course, that’s not going to be easy.

The issue of identifying your customers within the socialmediasphere is rapidly becoming less daunting than it first appears. Alongside social media monitoring, the social data mining industry is booming and there are lots of innovative companies – such as Dan Martell’s Flowtown – which can analyse your database and, for a fee, identify the social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook etc.) of your customers. If you’re looking for new customers, there are equally clever companies, like Chase McMichael’s Infinigraph, that track social media engagements around specific industries or topics and enable you to connect with people who are likely to be interested in what you’re offering. This isn’t CRM as we know it. If anything  it’s predictive CRM. As Chase points out, many of the conversations people have about your products never mention your company or related keywords (it’s an inherent failure of keyword-based monitoring), so contextual monitoring has a major role to play in social CRM.

Although many don’t, lots of the leading monitoring solutions enable companies to record and store the conversations they find. The fear of conversation overload is genuine, but usually exaggerated. At our London monitoring Bootcamp earlier this year, Giles Palmer (CEO, Brandwatch) explained how one major client received 100,000 mentions over a 6 month period, but that only 4500 were worth reviewing and less than 2% required a response. That’s manageable within a CRM system.

When it comes to choosing  tools and solutions – while you might find your monitoring/CRM solution enables you to listen, monitor, analyse, respond and store your social media engagements, the chances are it won’t work for ALL your objectives. Even the best monitoring tools aren’t as good as TweetDeck or Hootsuite for engaging in real-time conversations and managing multiple Twitter accounts.  You’ll probably need to accommodate some third party solutions within your social CRM strategy.

Possibly the hardest question for anyone implementing a social CRM strategy is “who should be driving it?” Social CRM has the potential to impact heavily on sales, marketing, communications, research, development AND strategy, so there are endless possibilities for inter-departmental scuffling and territorial hot potatoes. To help companies overcome these issues, Accenture helpfully published a social CRM report earlier this year that, rather unsurprisingly, suggests you hire in a Management Consultant to help you work through this thorny issue. If it’s anything like the adoption of social media – which, in order to succeed, requires patience and enthusiasm in equal measure – I would suggest allowing the team that’s most committed to making it work to drive your social CRM strategy.

So, implementing social CRM isn’t going to be a bed of roses. Equally, however, it’s likely to be easier than we might fear. The hardest bit (as with social media in general) will be convincing the nay-sayers that there’s value in it. Until we can measure ROI end-to-end, from Tweet to receipt, the question of value will continue to hamper progress. In the end I suspect that this in itself will be the greatest hurdle to the successful adoption of social CRM within companies.

We’re going to be discussing Social CRM in San Francisco on 17th September at Social Email Marketing. We’re also going to be looking at the integration of social media monitoring solutions and Social CRM at Monitoring Social Media (Boston), Monitoring Social Media (San Franscisco) and Monitoring Social Media (New York) later this year. See all our social media marketing events.