our process

• Overview
• Track
• Extract
• Interact
• Measure

The “who, where, when and how much” components of social media tracking ConsumerSphere uses a state-of-the-art proprietary base tracking platform. In addition, we have assembled an arsenal of the best in breed vertical tracking capabilities and integrated them into a potent integrated tracking suite. Unlike traditional tracking companies, it is our philosophy to be constantly looking to improve our tracking suite capabilities as new technologies emerge versus committing extensive resources in creating, managing and selling a single “house” platform.

The “how, what, why” of the tracking data. Our tracking capabilities are designed to feed our insight analysis engine. We use a combination of highly advanced analysis software coupled with analysis by brand strategists for validation, qualitative assessment and insight development. Our analytics protocol provides analysis for the full range of social media activity: short term content extraction and topic analysis, medium term trending and long term deep dive brand and category analysis.

This is where we guide clients in answering the all-important “so now what” question. We will work with our clients to define the optimal strategic engagement plan designed to achieve brand objectives. We will also provide production and implementation guidance for social media initiatives. MEASURE o Social Media is measurable. Users of social media share a lot more than just their opinion. Those who enter the social media domain leave behind a lot of clues about who they are and how they think via information found in social bookmarks, comments, engagement, influence, friends, followers, downloads, favorites, views, votes and links. From all of these user actions, we can measure what's important, what ideas are gaining ground and who, or what, is having the biggest impact on your brand. o We create new metrics :Virality/advocacy/velocity/connectivity

Social media tracking now provides a wealth of new marketing metrics that correlate with marketing spend in social media. These metrics include: velocity, virality, continuity, sentiment, topic density, and brand advocacy. We work with our clients in defining the appropriate “engagement” metrics and monitor results on a regular basis.

“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.” - Forrester

Noted strategist and emerging trends thought leader, Seth Godin, asserts that social media will have a profound effect on brands and must be a primary marketing consideration. We fully embrace Seth’s CPG social media “truisms” including:

q Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based discussions, forums, reviews, social networking) are quickly proving how well they work.

q Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

q Brands that manage to deal directly with their end users have a competitive asset for the future.

Consumers, customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, industry and competitors right now in social media; with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. ConsumerSphere’s mission is to equip brands to effectively leverage social media to protect and manage their reputations, meaningfully converse with consumers to drive brand loyalty, uncover emerging opportunities, stay competitive and avoid crisis.

The most critical benefits of Social Media to CPG brands include:

Accelerating Brand Advocacy – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be about brand performance, quality or superiority. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Potential consumers and customers are looking for reassurance on a product decision love to see what others think of your brand. ConsumerSphere helps brands to identify and nurture brand advocates and enable them to share positive buzz/testimonials about consumer brands and products.

Greater Insight – Social media offer marketers real-time, cost effective, and unique insights that traditional qualitative focus groups don’t necessarily provide.  Social media provides a new laboratory to listen and dissect consumer opinions. Our solution process is specially designed to listen to and understand what consumers are saying about your brands. Our “Extract” process digs deep to uncover the “Gold” in brand discussions and identify the key implications and opportunities for your brands.

“What’s Hot!” – Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds. There is a lot to be learned in the discussions especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who has opinions. It also may point out a topic that you will need to monitor going forward. Tracking a topic’s viral nature and how long it lives can give you an idea of its importance. Our clients don’t miss the action because our 24/7 brand alert capability provides our clients with the reassurance of “always on” monitoring.

Targeting Influencers – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain their power either from conversation frequency, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people commenting and how engaged visitors are to their posts. The swarm forms around an influencer helps spread brand opinion and therefore carries significantly more weight. Knowing who these influencers are, and their opinions of your brands helps you determine who to reach out to for help as brand advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view. The unique influencer detection capability integrated into our tracking suite gives marketers the ability to know their brands “who” and “where” of social media influence.

Reputation Management – Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes main-stream. By using advanced tools, you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellations” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on an ongoing basis will help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues. Our 24/7 brand alert capability is constantly monitoring for any developing issues.

Measuring Success – There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successfully measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered on the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon, there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. More specifically, by tracking the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign and isolating positive words associated with a particular brand, you can gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time and thereby gauge consumer reaction to any given brand initiative (ie: promotions, advertising, online efforts). We work closely with each client upfront to establish the optimal metrics to fit their specific measurement needs.

360° Social Impact– With so many social media channels available, conversations often become splintered. A discussion can start within one channel and quick leap into another making it difficult to follow. Comprehensive and integrated monitoring can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. These various related inter-channel discussions can then presented as a cohesive connected conversation. Our 360° suite of tracking tools was created to effectively track and integrate them into an intuitive, and easy to understand social media brand assessment.

Ultimately, a brand represents the sum of all conversations (consumer and customer) surrounding the brand. We can assess a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or mentions, uncover advocates, and uncover the channels that contain the most discussion. We can thereby pinpoint opportunities for reaching and influencing the most valuable and engaged audiences. Identifying the strategic implications of our social media analysis is a paramount objective of all ConsumerSphere client engagements.

Social media is having a profound effect on advertising and marketing and this video says it all!

10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs

1. To report back from an event or conference
Example: Patricia Jones, manager of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s Environmental Justice Program, is blogging from the Fourth World Water Forum on the UUSC blog, Hotwire

2. To involve staff and take advantage of their knowledge
Example: The Walker Art Center’s blog contains postings from art center staff and others describing recent and future community programs and educational information about exhibits at The Walker.

3. To involve volunteers and document their work
Example: The surgical volunteer staff who do reconstructive surgery all over the world for Interplast, upload posts to the blog from their worksite.

Example: The Urban Sprouts blog is written by one staff member and one volunteer.

4. To provide resources and information to constituents
Example: AARP’s blog is an online resource for a variety of aging issues such as retirement security, health and volunteering.

5. To provide resources and information from constituents
Example: The Best Friend Network allows its supporters to create blogs around animal and animal adoption issues that they care about.

Example: NetSquared’s blog is a community blog that anyone can post to about resources, events and information related to how nonprofits and NGOs can use the social web for social change.

6. To give constituents a place to voice their opinion
Example: Ann Arbor District Library System Uses a blog for the front page of their site. Library users can ask questions and make suggestions about library news, announcements and events in the comments of each post.

7. To give constituents support
Example: March of Dimes’ Share Your Story blog allows families with children in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) to share their experiences with one another.

8. To create the media coverage constituents want
Example: When the men accused of murdering Gwen Araujo, a woman they beat, bound and strangled after they discovered that she was biologically male, went to trial, the Community United Against Violence decided to use a blog to document the trial.

Because many of CUAV’s volunteer bloggers were more knowledgeable about issues such as the trans-phobic tactics that were being used by the lawyers, they were able to address many issues that the mainstream media missed. The blog also kept people informed during the second trial, when media coverage had diminished, and eventually drew attention to the trial when the blog got news coverage.

9. To give constituents the power and tools to create change
Example: Human Rights Watch doesn’t have a blog, but specifically offers RSS feeds of human rights news to supporters so that they will blog about human rights issues.

10. To reach potential donors
Blogs are not replacements for paper newsletters or e-newsletters, they are an additional way to reach a certain audience. Check out these stats from an article entitled, “Blog Readers Spend More Time and Money Online.” I added the bold.

Fifty million Americans, or 30 percent of all American Internet users, visited a blog in the first quarter of 2005, according to a new report from Comscore, and sponsored in part by SixApart and Gawker Media. Traffic increased by 45 percent from the first quarter of 2004.

The average blog reader viewed 77 percent more pages than the average Internet user who doesn’t read blogs (16,000 versus 9,000 for the quarter), the report found. Blog readers average 23 hours online per week, compared with the overall Web user’s average of 13 hours.

Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000. Similarly, blog readers are 11 percent more likely to visit the Web over broadband either at home or the office.

Blog readers tend to make more online purchases. In the first quarter of 2005, less than 40 percent of the total Internet population made online purchases. By contrast, 51 percent of blog readers shopped online. Blog readers also spent six percent more than the average Internet user.

According to an NTEN survey of nonprofit techies, 20% said that they published a blog and 20% said that they didn’t (but they want to). Don’t you want to get yours up, before they get around to it?

Why Us

We help companies understand the influence and impact of social media on business and provide them with the tools, strategic thinking and capabilities necessary to act upon that learning.

more reasons

Our Clients

complete list

Categories

• B2B (1)
• Branding (3)
• CPG (3)
• Non-profits (1)
• Social Media Optimization (1)
• Social Media Strategy (3)

Archives

• August 2008
• July 2008