A few weeks ago, I was asked to share some of my favorite social media tools with iMedia Connection. Here is a re-post of that article and a few of my favorite applications - some free and some paid - that are worth their weight in marketing gold.
Article Highlights:
- Social Mention gives a great snapshot of blog, forum, and microblog buzz, sentiment, and keywords
- Radian6 and Alterian’s SM2 offer solid analytical tools, easy-to-use interfaces, powerful data retrieval, and more
- Quantcast and Compete are both free resources for basic metrics such as site/blog traffic, user demographics, page views, and unique visitors
In many ways, 2009 was the year of the “a-ha!” moment for social media marketing. While many people long-involved with social media and word-of-mouth marketing knew it was only a matter of time for the masses to embrace this type of marketing, others were just starting to get their arms around the importance of establishing and leveraging their social footprint to build engagement, dialogue, and awareness.
As more companies, brands, and individuals are building their social media presences, the universe of online tools — which used to be somewhat more limited — continues to expand on a daily basis. Not only do we have more choices in how we place content and measure social media, but the tools available to us also change and improve just as frequently.
To provide a little background on me: I run a social media marketing agency (KARMA Media Labs) that helps organizations and individuals connect with their target audiences and build word of mouth in the communities where they live. In order to find these audiences and strike a chord, it’s important to be armed with the right tools to listen to what is being said, find the right influencers, communicate with your audience in a way that is relevant, and provide content that is likely to be shared.
The following is a list of some my favorite tools and sites — some free, some paid — that have been worth their weight in gold in not only finding that desired audience and key influencers, but also putting the right content in front of them to build conversation and word of mouth.
Read the rest of this entry at iMedia Connection
To recap our previous entry on measurement salvation for social media marketing, we recommended these important steps:
- Identify what measures can be used to define success for your campaign.
- Do this for every separate campaign, do not use the same measures for expediency’s sake.
- Assign benchmark values to each measure as a threshold for success.
- Select measurement tools/methodologies.
- Do a pre-campaign assessment on all measures to use as a baseline.
- Track changes over the course of the campaign but also compare post-campaign values to pre-campaign values.
- Do a post-campaign analytical evaluation of the tools, their accuracy, ease of use, etc.
- Feed that freshly acquired knowledge and experience into your next campaign’s analytics strategy.
To help implement the steps above, here are some of the tools, both free, and for-pay, that we have tested and endorse.
FREE TOOLS
FEE BASED TOOLS:
- Radian6 for thorough coverage of all social media activity, sentiment (coming soon) and influencer identification, as well as workflow tools.
- Andiamo Systems for the same type of coverage as Radian6 but with the addition of human involvement in tracking and configuration vs. Radian6’s self-supported and fully automated system.
- Collective Intellect for the same type of coverage as Radian6 and Andiamo Systems but with additional bells and whistles and deeper analytical support, for a much higher price tag…
- Meteor/Fyreball to track word of mouth dissemination and virality.
- Divinity Metrics for video analytics across multiple platforms including demographics, and influencer identification.
Every day, there are new tools and ways to measure the impact of your campaigns, just remember the most important measurement tool needs to be balanced against the overall goal.
Not a week goes by without my seeing yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured or touting a new, “revolutionary” way of measuring word of mouth (WOM).
I really enjoy this lively debate but my own experience at KML and beyond has made me a believer: social media marketing can be measured and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis.
There are several issues that I believe create the brouhaha around metrics and social media marketing.
- Most companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms to determine what their success metrics are. And many times, agencies are just as guilty. As one often says, you cannot manage what you do not measure and you cannot measure what you do not define.
- Every social campaign, even for the same brand or product or property, will have different metrics attached to it. Because the objectives of campaigns and the environment and circumstances in which they are implemented will differ, so should their metrics. A campaign may need to focus on conversions to measure its ROI, another may be all about buzz and awareness with yet another’s success measured on time spent engaging with a specific tool or piece of content. And too often, we see marketers using the same old, and usually irrelevant, online metrics of pageviews, unique visitors, etc.
- Here’s an ugly little myth: “even if you can figure out what to measure with WOM/social media marketing, the measurement methodologies are so unreliable as to make the results meaningless.” Nonsense. Word of Mouth, social media, non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics, but because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been codified into accepted standards. And there are sometimes several ways or methodologies to track one specific metric. This, however, does not make these measuring tools inaccurate but it does make them more likely to be influenced by subjective interpretations.
- Social media marketing measurement tools are developed and released on almost a daily basis and existing methodologies are being constantly refined which will give our industry trustworthy tools much faster in its lifecycle than any other advertising or marketing field before.
Stay tuned for part 2 which will list some of the free and paid measurement tools that we are huge fans of at KARMA Media Labs.