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How to Choose a Social Media Listening Platform for B2B Marketing
Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
There are a number of factors you’ve left out (having evaluated most of them)
1 what percentage of the total mentions are you comfortable. Some vendors only get about 75%, others get closer to 90%.
2. What level of accuracy are you comfortable with? Most sentiment analysis is only accurate about 65% of the time.
3. Can you add in missing mentions? If your boss comes across a blog that your listening platform misses, can you add it in?
4. Does your listening platform learn and improve over time? If so, how long does it take?
5. How important are the processing tools, the sentiment analysis, blogger management and charting to you? You may not want to pay for all the extra doodads if you aren’t using them.
Just a few thoughts..
@Katie – first off I am honored that you commented on my blog so thank you – I think you raise some excellent points will be sure to include them in my evaluations going forward!
Hi Paul,
Great post. Along the lines of organizational preparedness, the company needs to know who which department will be using the insights, what they will be using the insights for. Just as important is knowing why you are monitoring, this will dictate how the information flows through the organization and what measures you use.
Also, you need to know to what extent sentiment is important to you, and how it will drive your strategy – measuring yourself? measuring your competitors?
As always, if you want to take Biz360 Community (monitoring and sentiment measurement) for a spin, ping me offline.
Maria Ogneva
@biz360 @themaria
Hi Paul,
These are all good questions to get people thinking about. I especially like your last question, “are you prepared to use a listening platform?”. In my opinion, listening shouldn’t be a passive activity. Sure, passive listening has some value in terms of research (i.e. what do customers think of XYZ), but that does very little for the customer. The real opportunity is to engage, letting customer know you are listening, thanking your advocates, helping customers with their questions or problems, building community, etc. Just like any relationship, listening is more about caring/helping/acknowledging, not just passive analysis or information gathering.
The real breakthrough is to become an engaged brand… since THAT is a brand that listens!
I think Katie makes some great points above (she always does!), and I also would emphasize the importance of a tool having comprehensive coverage. You want a tool you can trust and not have to double check every other source causing you countless additional manual effort, etc.
While you covered a great list, I thought I’d throw in a few more:
1. Scale. How does the tool help you scale a listening & response engine (team) in your company cost effectively?
Does it enable you to get more & more employees engaged & closer to the voice of the customer efficiently? Does it support engagement workflow, allowing employees to collaborate & not duplicate work effort? Does it support measurement & tracking of all your responses & conversation history? Does it integrate with other systems like case management or CRM so you can tie it into your regular customer support processes? Can you measure the team member’s efforts?
2. Measurement. Web Analytics integration, etc.
Does the system have rich social metrics enabling you to measure ROI? For instance, can you tell which social conversations are driving the most visitors to your site, resulting in conversions/sales, etc? The integration of your site’s web analytics and social media metrics into the tool can provide great insight. Are conversations about “topic X” causing more people to click through to your site than posts about “topic Y” and, when they land, do they stay longer, convert more, etc.? If so, you need to generate more content about “topic X” because it is working, etc.
3. Influence. Does the tool identify influencers? In a B2B environment, it is important for marketing/PR/etc., to identify the thought leaders and influencers for your brand, competitors and your industry. It is important to be growing a relationship and having an ongoing dialogue with influencers.
Lots more to chat about… but my comment is already too long. I love your previous post too on lead flow based on “expressed needs”… I talk about this all the time myself.
Cheers,
Marcel
CEO, Radian6
http://www.radian6.com/engagement
@Maria – Great point Maria – I am thinking of this mostly from a Customer Support perspective – we see many of our clients looking for help in handling the more negative sentiment by pushing these mentioned into the contact center. This is something I am very focused on right now.
@Marcel – Wow Katie Paine and Marcel Lebrun commenting on my blog ok I think I may pass out 😉
As far as your statement on the “the real opportunity is to engage, letting customer know you are listening, thanking your advocates, helping customers with their questions or problems, building community”
I can tell you that we have fully adopted this at Avaya over the last year (with the help of Radian6 BTW) and this has worked out really well for us – a year into the program I can safely say we have built a base of “advocates” for Avaya by listening, engaging, helping them with their questions. This is resulting in more loyal (read less likely to defect), more viral (read customer who spread good WOM) and hence higher profitability for the company overall.
As I have said before on this blog – Customer Support is the best place to build your business case and realize ROI in social media.
late to the party — I read this back when you posted and thought I’d share what we have learned going through the process. To include all points would take thousands of word and several charts. You, Katie and Marcel have a comprehensive list but for us, an uncommon but very necessary measure is reach. A few platforms come “pre-wired” but most need a plug-in of Compete or other data capture.
[Honda employee and enthusiast; opinions are my own and not those of American Honda.]
Market research is always essential for the succes of any kind of business.:**
What a great conversation. I’m going to make it required reading for everyone in my department.
Another important factor for many companies is the level of nuance and granularity a listening platform can achieve in its analysis. This is especially true when the platform is being used as a tool for customer service, product development or risk management.
For example, can the listening platform automatically understand that commenters are complaining about a product feature rather than a product in general? There is big difference between “I hate my phone” and “My phone takes fuzzy pictures.”
Another example: Can the listening platform correctly parse and classify the sentiment of complex phrases? Most systems easily understand “Brand X coffee sucks” but they don’t do so well with “Brand X coffee tastes like they brew it with gym socks instead of coffee filters!”
– Erik Cornelius
International Marketing Manager
Daumsoft
all businesses need market research to make sure that a product will succeed.`-‘
every business and investment needs some very good market research if you want it to succeed “”
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your great posts.
I have a question.
What do you think about Listening Platform ‘market size’ in US.