Giles Palmer, CEO for social media analytics company Brandwatch, offers his advice on what you really need to know about the digital world and how to bluff your way through the rest.
You’ve got a healthy number of connections on LinkedIn, you are promoting your company on Twitter and you no longer think Snapchat is a childhood card game – so you’re feeling pretty on top of the social media sphere.
And yet, when barely a day goes by without the industry heralding the next big digital thing, in no time at all you once again find yourself desperately trying to follow a boardroom conversation about the latest app that you’ve never heard of.
It doesn’t seem to matter what your role in the company is anymore. You remember a time – barely twelve months ago in fact – when social media was the exclusive domain of the CMO but now everyone is expected to have an opinion and show that they are using social media to their advantage.
So aside from spending every waking moment pouring over the latest industry articles and reports online, what can you do to come across to your boardroom peers with digital authority? When knowledge is power is business, how do you convince others that you have enough to make them take notice?
As someone who has been in the business of social media for the past decade, even I know that there is no way you can learn everything overnight – and there is no reason you should – but by being able to drop a few key phrases into the conversation here and there, you should be able to do enough to keep your head above water.
I would break down the process into three stages:
1. The beginner
Beginner-level digital chat is all about knowing enough of the right buzzwords and tools to convince those that don’t know what they are talking about – i.e. most of your colleagues – that you do. A little goes a long way, and in the boardroom, where everything is about accountability, you’re in luck because digital is all about being counted.
To be the guy that everyone thinks of as ‘getting it’ just work the right sound bite into your next meeting. Something along the lines of, “We all know it used to be that 50% of marketing worked, but no one knew which 50% and that’s all changed with Google analytics and social media analytics…” should do the trick.
2. The intermediate
Your next step is to actually understand how social media works and what it means for your specific part of the business. You’ve managed to persuade people that you are digitally savvy enough not to double click to open an app but where do you go from there?
Bear with me here, but it is all about a little thing called attribution. What the hell is it? Well the CMO might have some idea but no one will really know enough to question you. Both complex and simple at the same time, the simple answer is that attribution tells you what actions were responsible for causing a certain outcome. The complex answer would be demonstrating which particular advert led to the customer buying your product.
So for example, “”Our social media investment was over £17,000 for January, but as you can see from the attribution modelling I have conducted, it has delivered over £36,000 in direct sales, not to mention the impact upon visibility.”
You can look insanely clever by talking about the merits of this or that attribution model. Plus your colleagues will all want to look like they ‘get it’ too so they’ll all nod furiously even though you’re just spouting total nonsense.
3. The advanced
Mastered that? Now your challenge is not only knowing the ‘what’ of social media but everything that surrounds it – who are the competitors for each platform, what are the emerging tools in the space and do you have an opinion on them? Welcome to the geek-o-sphere.
Make it your mission to find out the difference between Snapchat and WhatsApp, Instagram and Pinterest, and Path and Medium – what are their valuations, business models, and marketplaces? Then for extra points select a favourite ‘platform’ that you can casually throw into conversation that no one has heard of. Jelly is, of course, my current favourite.
About the author
Joel is the marketing manager for EMEA at social listening vendor Brandwatch, where he spearheads efforts across the marketing mix in Europe, helping to drive growth to one of the most exciting tech companies in the world. From humble beginnings in Brighton, Brandwatch has grown by over 100% for five years running, with a current workforce of over 250 staff helping serve over 1,000 clients including British Airways, Verizon, Papa John’s, Sky, Pepsico and Whirlpool. Joel’s background is in community management, journalism and gaming; a career that has included contributing to sites like the Guardian and Bloomberg, appearing on the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and speaking at dozens of prestigious events around the world.
Mounting a social media campaign
While virtually all organisations are touting themselves as more social than the next, the energy sector, with its fair share of rules and regulation, has traditionally been one of the last to shout out.
Yet when barely a day goes by without someone like me going on about how beneficial social media can be, the onus is on energy companies more than ever to up their game and kick start some effective social business processes.
After some Olympics-esque manoeuvring, many companies have now taken their first tentative listen in to social media to suss out what on earth is going on. But what next? After you have set up your basic listen and respond model, how do you move your activities up a notch?
We have outlined five major social media monitoring focus areas for financial services companies, providing tips for each on how to take your activity to the next level.
Campaign measurement
Financial services corporations spend billions of pounds on marketing every year and need to prove the ROI for every penny. Enter social media, where broad metrics such as reach, sentiment and conversation volume are often used to demonstrate the impact of a variety of marketing campaigns.
But shouldn’t we be aiming for better than broad? Sure, your campaigns are stimulating online engagement, but can you differentiate between superficial engagement and profitable business impact?
1. Establish objectives of your campaigns and use social metrics to monitor the success in meeting them
2. Categorise your social data to gain deeper understanding of the performance of each marketing initiative
3. Use advanced Boolean operators (relationship between words) to dissect the meaning behind the response to your campaigns, such as ‘intent to purchase’
Customer service
The domination of Facebook and Twitter as customer query channels shows no sign of abating and many financial services companies are already adapting to this, but it can prove a real headache maintaining service levels when battling a flood of customer enquiries and striking the balance between a quick yet personal response – and doing it all within legislative boundaries.
So how do you make sure your enquiry process is a cut above the rest and not just an endless fire drill?
1. Create flexible but compliant protocols for customer support representatives to adhere to when handling queries
2. Monitor for customer comments beyond owned social profiles and empower your team to assign and respond in real-time
3. Implement enterprise-grade social media monitoring and engagement technologies that offer workflow functions, allowing multiple teams and functions to respond
Reputation management
Maintaining a positive image has always been a tall order for energy brands. Luckily, with the right research, social media can be an excellent reputation management tool, allowing companies to see exactly what consumers think of them and react to pre-empt crises accordingly.
Here, monitoring Facebook and Twitter is not enough – there are dozens of influential forums, that disgruntled customers flock to for peer opinions and that you can’t afford to overlook.
Simply watching these forums is important, but there is also a real opportunity to take action. Targeting such spaces with considered (and compliant) engagement strategies could return hugely positive benefits.
1. Monitor the web for specific conversations about your brand and associated services
2. Set up monitoring alerts to trigger when mentions spike
3. Create a robust process that allows for instant reaction to any potential crises, with automatic elevation and delegation to relevant team
Research
Social media is a brilliant channel for gaining an understanding of what the marketplace thinks of you. Tracking both awareness levels around, and perception to, each of your company’s products, helps you tweak less popular or well-known ones to ensure that they meet customers’ expectations and tastes.
Further research into the market demography, comparisons to competitors and regional variances etc. can reveal even more to help you optimize the ways you create and market services. So how do you start your investigations?
1. Create targeted queries to accurately comprehend what is being said about specific product offerings
2. Use metadata, operators and filters to isolate conversation by location, platform, demographics and other criteria
3. Share insights with product development teams before, during and after product launches to refine the quality of services
Command centres
If you’ve got it – flaunt it! Similar to displaying stock prices and other fiscal data in your lobby to indicate the organisation’s health, social media command centres – multi-screen display systems – are being deployed to showcase social media results beyond the marketing and customer service teams. They serve to internally broadcast the success of campaigns or events in real-time, can help with timely crisis management, and can publicly track and compare a key competitors’ online presence – giving senior executives to junior staff better insight into online public opinion.
1. Install highly-visible monitors displaying useful social media data across physical departments of your enterprise
2. Customise and automate the data displaying for each team to streamline the extraction of relevant insights
3. Use agile notification and administration features to present the story of your data to executives as and when is most valuable
Summary
Food for thought? Social media shouldn’t be a scary realm for energy organisations – the first step is always the hardest but you’ve already taken that so why not push your monitoring further? There’s no time like the present.
