Truth & Lies About Social Media: Professional’s Secrets about E-monitoring

Thanks to Social Media Specialist Theirry Cellerin for this guest blog post. Silicon Beach Training offer a wide range of Social Media Training in Brighton, Sussex. We also offer Facilitating Focus Groups Training; a great tool for generating creative solutions for business problems. However for market research, e-monitoring offers a better solution…

I used to work for many years for a “classic” ATL advertising agency. We used to propose our clients some communication concepts based on a focus group with random people representing the targeted audience. Then we made several assumptions out of which we presented our “Big Idea”. Will it work? Will it reach consumers? Will it answer their needs? Will it make them happy and love the brand more? We didn’t have any clue. But our self-confidence and our flashy presentations were generally enough to influence the client. So now that I am working in digital and marketing 2.0 it is time to open you the truth about some secrets of advertising business:

Truth 1. Offline Focus groups are worthless for market research.

A focus group is supposed to be a representative group of your targeted audience that is gathered on a special purpose: to provide insight about a client’s product. It is generally 8 to 12 persons. And it is useless. First how seriously can 8 persons in a room be completely sincere about a product? They influence each other and will necessarily tell you what they think you are expecting from them. Second, the way we ask the question will always determine the answers. Third, as Gregory House likes to say “everybody lies”. How is that possible that when picking up 8 people random to ask there opinion about toilet paper, they all happened to be natural enthusiasts about a product that nobody will never ever think about in real life unless you don’t have any left? Fake answers + wrong assumptions = un-adapted marketing message. E-monitoring at the opposite will provide you with genuine consumers’ insight.

Truth 2. Professionals have no idea how to estimate the ROI on a social media campaign.

The same problems as offline advertising: How could anyone possibly could tell that 1 specific TV commercial or 1 Billboard will bring X $ back to a company? It is just impossible. But as TV channels gives companies the number of GRPs they buy and billboards provide an enigmatic “number of reach”, everyone is happy with it. The truth is that GRPs and number of reach are nowhere close to any concrete idea of a return on investment. On the Internet every thing is way more targeted and marketers can have many different possibilities to evaluate their campaign: number of views + CTR + CPC + CPA … but how to evaluate the ROI for a company’s social media activities? How much10.000 brand fans are worth as income? Are un-clicked banners absolutely worthless or do they help building brand awareness anyway? How much a good recommendation from an influential bloggers will push people to choose a specific brand? No one really knows, and there is a chance that no one will ever know, but you understand that in such cases, ROI is not the company’s direct benefit. E-monitoring is the only qualitative metric that allows you to understand a marketing campaign’s perception by consumers.

Truth 3. Consumers are criticizing your brand everyday.

Companies spend millions of dollars in brand building. Coca Cola’s brand is worth 50 Billion dollars thanks to massive advertising investments. How many marketers are really ready to hear consumers criticize their brands? Don’t ask for an online E-monitoring Audit if you are not ready to accept critics. The truth is that however you want it or not, people are already discussing your brand online, in positive and in a negative way. Those can be discussions, point of views, conversations, testimonial s and critics in blog posts, forums, articles, comments, pictures or videos. Researched showed that there is usually an average of 6 positive opinions for 1 negative (cf. graphic bellow, TalkTrack, Keller Fay Group, 2006). If you have more positive, chances are that you have a “love brand” that people are naturally enthusiastic about. If you have more negative then chances are that you have a problem. As a marketing professional, you should actually take negative opinions as a chance to know what people dislike about your brand and what you should improve. Only Internet monitoring will provide you with such information.

Truth 4. E-influencers’ opinions are the only one that matters.

Millions of people are enthusiastically recommending your brand online? You are probably Steve jobs then. In marketing we generally agree that 10% of consumers are influencing the 90% left. So what ever your social media strategy is targeting at, your goal will be to have those 10 % of e-influencers being positive and recommending your brand. Question is how do I found them? The truth is that being an influencers and being active online are not quite the same. If you have a Facebook page and you are regularly checking for your ‘wall’ you might see that 2 or 3 users are the most active. It doesn’t mean, and this is quite often true, that those people are influencing the other group’s members. Online authority is a technical automated calculation that determines a users influence level (C.f.: Technorati). Those are the real people that shall matters to you because one word from those e-influencers will have much more impact than your ‘wall’ activists. By monitoring blog platforms, the Buzz Audit will inform you precisely about which of those influencers mentioned your brand, how many reaction he gets and the polarity of the engendered discussions.

Truth 5. E-monitoring is the only one “must have” tool from the marketing 2.0.

The marketing 2.0 graph (C.f.: picture below) is just huge and growing everyday, this is why marketers’ questions about what they should use is completely legitimate. Nice to have or Must have? As professional I could spend hours explaining any one why they should go digital, be active on social media, implement a strategy, show videos on Youtube explaining why Social Media is not a fad. But the truth is the only real must have in the Web 2.0 tools landscape is the E-monitoring. First, because it has a direct impact on your offline activities as well. Will you continue communicating on how reliable your product is if everyone is just making fun of your quality on the Web? Will you improve your service if everyone is complaining about client relationship? Of course you will.

Second, because for any activity you plan to have online, you first should know where people are having conversations about you, what are they saying and which one are the most influential voices. Third, because regular e-monitoring is the only possibility to know and to prevent the development of a bad buzz about your brand. It could take just few hours to make a bad buzz grow big and spread over the net. If it happens, you should be the first to know about it, and thanks to the data you have gathered, you will be able to react addressing directly to the right place and to the right people.

Conclusion.

Thanks to new technologies and the popularity of social media networks, people are more connected day after day. New theories and instruments come to life everyday, promising to guarantee you with astonishing results and ROI. iPad, iAds, Twitter, Android,… every social media professional has opinions but nobody can tell you for sure what the future will be. I am not even convinced that Facebook will be still existing in 5 years! You disagree? Just remember all the ex-number 1 : Altavista, Napster, Myspace, Hotmail… But even if the platforms’ name will be changing, people will continue anyway to have conversations over the net. Being more and more connected, the number of people having access to Internet will continue to grow, which means that there will be more and more conversations about your brand. If you are in business, ignoring those conversations is not an option anymore. Trying to develop any business without listening what the groundswell is saying about it is like driving a car in the dark with no light: you know that you are moving, but you will never know if it is in the proper direction.

By Theirry Cellerin

Social Media Specialist, Conference Speaker.

Contact me to know more about our E-monitoring solutions.

W.: www.buzzfactory.ru

B.: http://buzz-factory.livejournal.com

T.: @buzzfactory_ru

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buzz monitoring, course, e-monitoring, focus groups, guest blog, influencers, roi, social media, social media campaign, social media course, social media for business, Social Media Training, Social Media Training sussex, Social Networking, sussex, training, Web 2.0

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