In social media there are ‘those that talk’ and ‘those that do.’ Josh Hallett and Voce Communications are ‘those that do.’ In this session, Josh touched on the day-to-day operations of several successful social media programs using examples with Voce Communications clients – brands like Disney Parks, eBay, PlayStation to name a few. This session was not about “why” you should be doing social media, but rather it was a bigger look at strategy and tools/tactics. He also focused on measurement and ROI that make up the work.
The 4Ps are an essential part to social media. Review what makes up the 4Ps below and consider how your social media program incorporates these:
Preparation – discovery & planning
Publishing – Facebook, YouTube
Participation – watching, flagging & responding
Performance – web analytics, sentiment, influence, engagement (for example, feedback to a Facebook post), revenue, authority, share of voice
It was interesting to understand the day-to-day actions that are taken in what Josh considers, The Daily Grind. A set of “to do” items that are completed daily, beginning with a “Sweep” using Radian6 and a variety of tools. The team is looking for what’s been going on in the past six hours. They’re also using CoTweet to see what’s going on around Twitter and identify on all platforms what’s actionable and what’s not actionable. Not everyone’s opinion and conversation is important. Keep in mind that you can only act on what is actionable.
Josh also touched on the issues flagging system that is in place, where they basically submit a ticket for an action item, an e-mail is then sent to the team member and action is taken.
Additionally, the team reviews the editorial calendar (they use Google docs to manage the ed-cal) and get started publishing content, etc. For larger brands, they also keep a separate Twitter/Facebook ed-cal. This is even useful for historical content.
Another tool used is Yammer for client/team communications – a private group chat. The questions are pinged to a person’s smart phone so they can answer since as Josh puts it, if they are e-mailed, “e-mail is death.”
WordPress is the blog format used by Voce clients. It’s simple and easy to use.
They’re also using tools like Flickr for photo content and for video content turn to YouTube and Viddler (great analytics). He also pointed out the use of tools like spredfast that do automation of content delivery, but cautions that there’s pros/cons to using these. Shortened URL services are essential – they prefer to use bit.ly for link tracking. Bit.ly is great – of course there are pros/cons to using it but they get instant feedback. Measurement – use Google stats and Google spreadsheets to collect data and then analyze.
Measurement is a hot subject in social media and one that Josh narrowed down to the Big Buckets:
Reach
Engagement
Influence
Revenue
The bottom line: How am I saving money? How am I making money?
He also discussed the blended model of measuring stats from a web perspective.
- Using the old: Traffic, circulations, hits, placement, message penetration, delayed response, spread; and
- The new: links, subscribers, posts, search listings, word of mouth, instant response, authority.
- More Measurements include: Share of voice, SEO, Risk avoidance, Audience value (you may not have ads on your corporate blog, but if you did this is how much advertisers are willing to spend to reach your audience), Conversions/sales, Efficiencies/comparisons, Insights and Old standards.
Some challenges discussed in regards to measurement were:
- Getting the data
- Working outside normal departments
- Exposing holes
- Education, education, education
- Planning, planning, planning
Getting started:
- Set measureable goals
- Align measurement tools
- Stats tracking sheet
- Benchmarking
- Reporting frequency
- Measure, rinse, repeat
Josh ended his talk discussing upcoming trends such as more integration and customer services; location-based tools (Foursquare, Gowalla); commerce; and enhanced measurement & analytics.