Archive for: February, 2011
Social listening is a hot topic, but despite the large volume of information and chatter about it we find that many companies are still not really sure what is it, how it is done, how it is used and where it’s going. That’s why we are happy to support the Advertising Research Foundation in its effort to provide research-based answers to these questions and equip business leaders to use listening better or become listening champions in their own companies.
This comprehensive webinar series is presented by Stephen Rappaport, author of Listen First! Turning Social Media Conversations into Business Advantage, and is held over 10 weeks. Any or all sessions can be attended; they’re short and to the point, 30-minutes each from start to finish, including Q&A. This series is designed to “teach, learn and apply,” not merely “tell and sell.”
The webinar schedule is outlined below. To register for this series please head over to http://my.thearf.org and log in with your credentials. If you don’t have them yet, you can register for free on the site.
Webinar Schedule (webinars scheduled for 12 pm ET)
Part 1 – What is Listening and How is it Done
- February 28: Listening – What it is and it’s strategic value.
- March 7: Listening Tools: The 4 Types
- March14: How to plan and run a listening initiative
- March 28: Creating Organizational Frameworks to Scale Social Intelligence (Converseon co-presentation)
When people use social media to find insurance products, nearly two-thirds of their online posts are written before they select an insurance provider. The remainder of their posts (35%) are written after selecting an insurer (see chart right ).
In a recent study of the online behaviors of auto, health and life insurance-seekers, Converseon also identified the predominant online venues that insurance seekers use at each stage of the purchase funnel. Specifically, consumers tend to begin their search on Facebook, where they post status updates that express their need as well as requests for help from people they trust. Then, as they seek out more detailed information and guidance to help them compare plans and providers, insurance seekers are most active in forums (see chart below).
While some business managers have questioned their SEO process or provider after the recent NY Times report of JC Penney buying links to manipulate search results (and the subsequent reduction in Google search results), many managers are unsure of how to inform any decision. Ultimately, business leaders simply need to understand realistic expectations about SEO performance and the process of improving that performance, which are listed below.
For JC Penney, the NY Times article led Google to to take “manual action” that lowered JC Penney’s rankings in search results. Then JC Penney fired their SEO provider of nine years, and a torrent of commentary flooded the web.
Managers at JC Penney should have foreseen these events. Their SEO process reportedly focused on a simple metric of ranking for various keywords, rather than addressing the foundations of the web site.
Instead, business managers should expect the following from their SEO process:
- Your SEO process should begin with a detailed audit of the technical foundations of your website.
- Such an audit does not usually lead to a quick fix. It can require 6 quarters or more to resolve everything that an audit uncovers. During that time, more advanced SEO actions can also begin, but those actions will not bring the fullest possible results until the foundation is handled.
- To evolve a stable and truly agile SEO process, a company’s internal communications may also need revamping. New reporting and collaboration structures may be required. Certainly, new governance processes will be needed for that amount of change. It all requires time and internal resources, even when SEO is outsourced to a consultant or agency.
Social intelligence and digital media metrics are becoming more and more critical to the success of any marketing strategy — not just something to measure at the end of a campaign. In fact, the right metrics can help a brand to define when and where to start planning, who to target and even the messages and conversations that will have the best chance of resonating over time.
Last week, Converseon hosted a panel during Social Media Week, wherein our SVP of Enterprise Analytics, Mark Kovscek explained that many marketers use social media analytics to measure the very basics of social media programs, such as Facebook fan counts or the volume of brand mentions across the social graph.
Instead, brands should understand that significantly more meaningful and actionable metrics are available to inform social media strategies and to optimize marketing performance.
Take the example of Hennessy Cognac, presented by Steve Rappaport of ARF Knowledge Solutions. “Hennessy was able to revamp their entire marketing strategy based on the insights provided to them through basic SEO analysis.”
Years ago, it was SEO that taught the CEO of Hennessy the brand’s old fashioned French values and branding was not transcending the American Market. They saw that their website traffic in the US was suddenly originating from urban music websites and communities. The American customer was very different. That finding sparked more research and eventually an entire rebranding effort for the American market.
While IBM Watson’s correct Jeopardy answers are remarkable in many ways, we can learn even more about the state of text analytics when we examine the wrong answers. Specifically, if you use a computer to analyze text and inform business decisions (e.g., social listening) you need to ensure that you have people in the process who review the computer’s output before you use it to make decisions. And, if you expect to achieve significant business outcomes through social media, then you need to make sure those people are supported by appropriate training and continuous process improvement.
One of the great ideas of Watson’s presence on Jeopardy is that the show exposes Watson’s “thoughts”. In addition to showing us Watson’s correct answers, we also see the runners-up. Often, the incorrect answers are “howlers” — answers so dumb to you and me that we can’t understand how a computer could even consider them.
In fact, many of Watson’s incorrect answers are so bad that you know they are wrong when they are given, even if you don’t know the right answer. For example, when Watson was given a category of ‘decades’, he didn’t always guess an actual decade. While you might not have known the right answer, you knew Watson’s answer was wrong.
Watson is a state-of-the-art pile of computing that is tuned to solve a very narrow (but challenging) problem: winning on Jeopardy. Bigger text analytics problems, such as listening to social media, have even more howlers, because:
- the problems we intend to solve through social intelligence are more open-ended than Jeopardy questions
- social media text varies a lot more than Jeopardy questions, and
- the answers we seek from social media vary significantly more than Jeopardy answers.
According to the National Labor Relations Board, companies can not fire or discipline workers who criticize the company or their supervisor in social media.
The New York Times reports that the National Labor Relations Board agreed Monday to settle a case with a company that fired an employee after she posted disparaging remarks about a supervisor on her Facebook page from a home computer.
While her employer, American Medical Response, claimed that her statements did not qualify as protected activity, the National Labor Relations Board — for the first time — asserted that companies can not discipline workers who post criticisms on social-networking sites.
According to the NLRB, this employer will:
- Revise its “overly broad rules” to ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work, and
- They will not discipline or discharge employees for engaging in such discussions.
Based on this clarification by the NLRB, I know a lot of companies who will be changing their social media policies right away.