Business Analytics

Taming Social Media Data

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Business Analytics, Marketing Musings, Social Media

I’m a Business Intelligence Analyst. I’m also a data geek. So when a client recently asked me to oversee the development of a comprehensive Social Media report, for monthly presentation to their upper management, I was both excited and wary.

Excited Me: Cool! The latest thing! A vast untapped resource of dialog and opinion straight from customers!

Wary Me: This stuff is mostly free-form! How are we ever going to glean relevant, actionable data from these sources? It’s like the Wild West out there…

Some basic social metrics are easy to gather and interpret. How many Facebook likes did we add this month? How many unlikes? How many Tweets were made with a hashtag we might expect, like #ProductName? How many people liked our client’s latest Facebook post? It’s a good start, but our client’s management wanted more in-depth insight.

There are several tools available for social media analytics. Visible Intelligence, Radian6, Sysomos (MAP and Heartbeat), Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, Crimson Hexagon, etc. They all offer valuable insight but go about it in very different ways. Instead of picking a tool and prying out what we could, we worked backward from our client’s requirements. We tried various tools, analyzed the results, and chose the solutions that provided the most relevant analyses for their needs. Here’s a partial list of some of the in-depth analyses we were able to generate:

Buzz Volume: Using keyword searches across Facebook, Twitter, and select blog, video, and photo sites, we came up with a “buzz” volume that we could track over time. This is good to watch for overall social interest—for example, to see the buzz from rolling out a redesigned website or a new product version.

Sentiment: Some tools are quite good at classifying posts by sentiment: positive, negative, or neutral. Tracking counts of posts by sentiment month-to-month proved to be very useful, particularly around new product version releases and press releases. For further insight we picked out specific sample posts, positive and negative, and provided links to the actual posts.

Topics by Media Type: This breaks out a percent of posts by where they occurred: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Watching shifts in these volumes proved valuable. For example, we knew that discussions in this client’s forums tended to be mostly about troubleshooting technical issues, so an increase in forum buzz proportionally to other sources could indicate an emerging technical issue.

Top Contributors: We identified the URLs of forums, URLs of blogs, and handles of Twitter accounts providing the highest number of posts in the month. This provides a nice short list for further investigation of who is “buzzing” about our client’s product the most and might be worth approaching for a more formal relationship. For example, a person who frequently blogs about usability of the product might be an excellent person to have as a beta tester.

Competitive Analysis: Why just track buzz volume for the client’s product? We track buzz volume for competitors’ products as well, then combine and track over time to see how our client stacks up. The percentage that our client’s buzz contributes to the overall buzz in their category could be termed “Share of Voice” and is a good metric to track. When our client releases a new version, does their Share of Voice go up? If not, do they need to retool their launch marketing efforts?

Website Visits by Referring Domain: Most common web traffic tracking tools can report the domain from which a visitor came. Because many of our client’s social media posts include a call-to-action to click on a link to our website, we can track referrals from twitter.com, linkedin.com, etc. to determine how much web traffic is being driven by their social campaigns.

Success Events by Referring Domain: Going one layer further with web analytics, we worked with our client to define specific “success events” we wanted to track. These were desirable actions taken once the visitor landed on the client’s website, such as watching a video, reading a whitepaper, or downloading a software trial. Analyzing these success events by referring domain allowed us to see the level of engagement of visitors from social sites. Combining Visits and Success Events, both by Referring Domain, we calculated a “Success per 100 Visits” metric-another good way to see how effective our client’s social media posts are at engaging customers.

Blog Traffic Analysis: We used standard web analysis tools to track interaction on our client’s blog. Initially, their blog showed entire articles on the main page. To enable more detailed analysis, we drove changes to their site structure so that the home page shows only the first several lines of each article with a “Read more” link. This way, each full article receives a unique URL, and we’re able to track how many in-depth reads each article is receiving.

Blog Traffic by Referring Domain: Again, it’s interesting to see how people are getting to our client’s blog. This analysis reveals some noteworthy sources of links to their blog articles, and it can also identify sites that could be approached for a more formal relationship.

In its infancy, the process of analyzing social media data can yield some very helpful insights for marketers and managers. It’ll be exciting to see how the tools evolve—no doubt providing richer and more accurate data in the future—and to discover how we can further leverage this rich source of customer feedback data to benefit our clients.

Picture of the Week: Hello, Webtrends!

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Business Analytics, Company, Marketing Musings, Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Friday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the week and share its story here.

10:42 June 14, 2011 - Eric Larson in Portland to meet with Webtrends

This week it was hard to choose just one favorite—we’ve seen pictures of the Inc. Leadership Conference, an adorable baby, and the art near our lovely downtown neighborhood.

But Eric’s picture from Portland was irresistible, because we’re very excited about our new partnership with Webtrends (which is based in Portland). You can now find us on their partner page, and we can’t wait to see how their analytics tools enrich our ability to help clients with customer intelligence. (Not to mention giving us an excuse to visit Portland more often!)

Master Data Management for Marketing

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Business Analytics, Marketing Musings

Projectline recently released a white paper on Master Data Management (MDM) for the healthcare industry. Although it’s packed with content, much of it may not seem obviously applicable to our more marketing-based thinking. But it does offer some great ways to think about data, and we’d like to pull out two of those points from the white paper and apply them to the difficult process of measuring return on investment in marketing.

Point 1: People, Process, and Technology:

“The Projectline approach has three core dimensions, which revolve around people, processes, and tools. While many consulting firms focus primarily on tools and processes, Projectline believes the role of people is just as important because they possess the institution’s collective knowledge and are responsible for implementing information tools and processes. These core dimensions are Data Stewardship, Data Governance, and Technology. All of them must be taken into account as an organization undertakes a project to discover its master data and to design, build, and implement a solution.”

As in healthcare, new marketing measurement initiatives often focus on process or tools, but underplay the vital role of people in getting good data that leads to valuable insights. Without full participation from marketers, the data going into the system will always be flawed—and the stories the data tells will always be untrustworthy. People need to trust the technology and understand the process. In turn, the technology needs to be created in a way that honors existing processes. And the processes need to be developed with a full understanding of the technology and how it fits into people’s work.

Point 2: Quick Wins:

“Develop effective implementation plans for ‘quick wins.’ Quick wins are particularly important because they lead functional areas to recognize the importance of MDM and accept it right away.”

When you create a long-term system to optimize marketing by measuring marketing initiatives, it can be easy to get focused on crafting a pure system or shifting ingrained behaviors and taxonomies. But to gain the confidence of teams—and executives—it is vital to define early success and make it achievable. It will be much easier to justify continued investment in a program if you can point to success within the first quarter after implementation, rather than pointing to numbers far into the future.

Marketing Metrics matter (but they don’t need to take over your vision)

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Business Analytics, Customer Reference, Marketing Musings

A few weeks ago, I ran the Warrior Dash, a demanding obstacle race. After months of anticipation leading up to the event, I came and conquered…well, not really conquered, but the event exceeded my thrill-seeking expectations.

The one thing that I had not expected was a weekend full of discussions with my friends about the event’s numbers. With close to 90,000 fans on Facebook, Warrior Dash has sold out ten events across the country. The Dash I attended drew almost 10,000 participants in one weekend, at sixteen heats per day and 350 people per heat, and I started to wonder: How do they keep track of their success? How do they measure repeat attendees? How do they keep their unique event vision creative and still mind the numbers?

In my working life, I often think of numbers in terms of success measures. Especially now, with tightened purse strings, metrics are essential for validating customer engagement programs. Often executives ask questions like: How many references are in the program? How often do they participate in requests? What opportunity dollars are associated with the reference activity? Are there gaps in the available reference pool? And it’s up to you to supply the answers and validate your program.

As proven by the Warrior Dash, metrics don’t have to stifle your creative, thoughtful vision. Use the metrics to your benefit. While parameters should be defined, metrics shouldn’t be restrictive in the creative sense. When thinking about metrics for your organization:

  • First, consider what makes your program stand out among other reference programs. By knowing the unique identifiers for your program, you can keep the program integrity intact and align your metrics to your distinctive program.
  • Second, ask yourself what metrics really matter and focus your energy on achieving the relevant numbers without compromising the program vision. For instance, if your program vision is get dynamic customer references across all verticals, assign a goal for each vertical and then report on how you’re tracking against that goal.
  • Third, consider automation. By automating the reporting functionality of your efforts, you can spend more time on the program itself. Having the extra time to keep current program participants engaged and enlist new references will not only help you achieve your goals, but also give you time to carry out your program vision.

When you think about success measures as a tool for protecting your program creativity, you can not only meet your program mission, you can also achieve measurable results.

To find out more about how to maintain your true program spirit and creativity and obtain the metrics you need to support your vision, visit our page on reference marketing.