“Others Look, We See…”

The “Digital Eye” represents our “virtual organ of insight” enabling us to readily “foresee” or envision desired outcomes and achieved results from our marketing campaigns that best meet the online commercial needs of our clients and their customers.

These outcomes can include lead generation and increased sales, or enhanced value of the company’s most important asset—its brand.

Once we’ve met with the leaders and key players in a company and have familiarized ourselves with its products and services, we focus our “Digital Eye” on the challenge at hand.

“Seeing” with the Digital Eye involves keen use of the faculties of perception, recognition, comprehension, appreciation, imagination and clear understanding.

We discern the company’s unique value proposition—what the business offers in terms of relative worth, utility and importance to its customers without like or equal from competitors.

Then we organize the “Campaign”—a series of coordinated activities designed and implemented to achieve specific commercial goals that express the physical and emotional outcomes we’re seeking to achieve.

The Campaign is the main unit of marketing and the primary element around which Digital Eye organizes its processes and objectives.  These describe the more detailed specifics that the action and implementation plan is designed to achieve.  The objectives are SMART—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-defined.

Then there’s measuring Campaign results and Return on Investment (ROI), a particular area in which insight is valuable to the client.

ROI is the profit (or loss) expected from an investment in a Campaign. Returns on investment are usually measured only in economic terms, but any truly INSIGHTFUL analysis should also include the costs and benefits associated with human and natural capital.  This approach gives an organization a broader and more sustainable understanding of an investment.

Visually Dominated Marketing and the New Web

The ability to “see” or imagine what others often cannot is essential in marketing, which is increasingly a visual medium, particularly in regards to the Internet.

Vivid, colorful videos, animations, pictures, graphics and visualization tools (e.g., dashboards, scorecards, etc.) make strong impressions on the minds of website visitors and greatly aid in the process of converting prospects to customers.

“Visually dominated advertising provides the consumer with a perception of greater familiarity with the product,” writes author Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Rutgers University professor of marketing.

In the age of the Internet (and popular television, too), it is important to recognize that humans remember about 10 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we read, and about 80 percent of what we see. Considering this evidence, it is easy to see why we are such a visually dominated society.

“We are becoming a visually mediated society,” says Paul Lester, a leading psychologist in visual advertising.  “For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images.”

Digital Eye succeeds by “reading” people and understanding their businesses.  We know and act on the true key differences between “looking” and “seeing.”

LOOKING involves intentionally paying attention to something or someone.

SEEING involves distinguishing important details and noticing what’s significant and meaningful about what is being observed amidst an overwhelming flood of sensory information.

Looking focuses the eyes, seeing focuses the mind.

That’s the Digital Eye in action.

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

Like their print world namesakes, digital scorecards used in social media applications can provide both long-term looks at extended programs and campaigns, plus quick “snapshot” status reports of current activities and “players.”

Digital scorecards provide more than just a screen populated with fancy performance graphics. Like business intelligence (BI) dashboards (see Part I of this post), they can be full-fledged business information systems designed to help organizations achieve strategic objectives. They can help measure the past, monitor the present, and forecast the future, allowing an organization to adjust its strategy and tactics in realtime to optimize performance.

While dashboards track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and present data with colorful charts and graphs, scorecards typically are used to document strategic programs, initiatives, metrics, goals and timeframes.

The Social Media Marketing Scorecard can focus on relevant details from particular campaigns.

Netbase Insight Scorecards are designed to be used by business professionals, including consumer insights managers, market research managers, marketing managers and brand managers engaged in social media activities.

The Netbase Insight Scorecards provide three key metrics of online brand equity, shown in comparison to the competition and with one year of historical trending:

• Share of Buzz—How much people are talking about your brand.
• Net Sentiment—How positively they perceive your brand.
• Passion Intensity—How emotionally charged their feelings are.

In addition, the Scorecards track the volume of conversation around a set of key conversation drivers. These can be known brand attributes or they can be themes that emerge from a social brand audit.

Kaplan-Norton Balanced Scorecard

The Social Media Marketing Campaign Scorecard is based on the traditional Balanced Scorecard – a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals.

The Balanced Scorecard was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more ‘balanced’ view of organizational performance.

In their 1996 “The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action,” Kaplan and Norton evaluated business impact from four perspectives:

• Financial
• Customer
• Internal Processes
• Learning and Growth

Social Media Benchmarking Scorecards

A Nov. 2010 report by Forrester Research titled “The ROI of Social Media Marketing” contains a benchmarking scorecard (inspired by the Kaplan-Norton book) geared toward helping brands evaluate how and why their social media initiatives work (or fail).

According to the Forrester report, the best way to properly value the impact of social media marketing investments and assess social media initiatives is to align objectives, metrics, targets and strategies across four perspectives:

1. Financial: Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
2. Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?
3. Brand: Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
4. Risk Management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?

The benefits of a balanced scorecard will allow companies to align measurement on all corporate objectives, rather than focusing simply on sales.

“A properly designed social media marketing Balanced Scorecard validates achievement of broad-based objectives rather than merely counting dollars,” the report states.

Part I: Social Media Marketing Campaign Reporting – Dashboards

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metrics and sometimes Performance Scorecards (check out Part 2 of this post) on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view (or department). The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources.

An effective dashboard serves as a starting point from which corporate executives and their marketing team can get a sense of the big picture before digging deeper into data.  Features of an effective executive dashboard include:

• An intuitive graphical display that is thoughtfully laid-out and easy to navigate.
• A logical structure behind the dashboard that makes accessing current data easy and fast.
• Displays that can be customized and categorized to meet each user’s specific needs.
• Information from multiple sources, departments, markets or campaigns.

All these features apply in making the Social Media Dashboard such a great tool for obtaining quick reports on the progress of a Social Media Marketing Campaign.  Social Media Dashboard reporting enables marketers to migrate beyond reporting statistics into communicating KPIs that provide actionable insights into business performance.

Popular dashboard applications currently available on the market include:

• Commun.it (http://commun.it) for managing Twitter channel relationships.  Community Dashboard including graphs such as: Community Loyalty, Community Growth, Community Engagement Level, and New vs. Existing Member Visits.  The graphs are accompanied with a clear call-to-action indicators and KPIs (colored green, yellow and red, depending on the state). Community Reports functionality enables the user to view a community by engagement level, levels of desired customer service, engagement history and influence.

• Factualz (www.factualz.com) offers realtime social media monitoring dashboards with actionable insights to help in your social Web marketing, competitive analysis and client account growth.

• HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.  Recently added social analytics reporting tools provide a comprehensive view of statistics from Twitter, Facebook, Google and more from within a single tool. This real-time information should allow marketing teams to rapidly adjust tactics based on data rather than hunches, as well as more clearly understand the reasons for particular campaign results.  HootSuite’s Social Analytics consist of more than 30 individual report “modules” accessible through a re-designed launch bar. Users can select from a variety of modules in any combination to build custom reports, or for quick reporting, choose from a selection of pre-made report templates.

• MarketMeSuite (http://marketmesuite.com) is a Social Media Marketing Dashboard for small businesses.  Like HootSuite only more marketing and lead generation-oriented, MarketMeSuite was the first Twitter application to focus on proactive marketing and branding. It is highly prized by its subscribers who see it as more small business-focused alternative to TweetDeck or HootSuite.

• MashableMetrics (www.mashablemetrics.com ) provides custom, multi-channel, automated Web analytics dashboards. The collection, transformation and presentation of multi-channel data reporting is founded on the principles that data extraction should be just ten percent or less of the data analysis process and only when data is planned and procedural does it lead to action.

• Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) Social Pack is a suite of tools that adds “adaptive social analytics” to Netvibes’ Premium Dashboards. Social Pack offers a suite of live apps that each answers a different question with dynamic visualizations and interactive viewpoints covering: Who, What, Where, When and How.

• New Marketing Labs (http://newmarketinglabs.com) Dashboard is a social media analytics tool designed to provide actionable insights, rather than just data. The tool features realtime ROI calculation, as well as a focus on individual business units, brands or geographies inside a company.

• Social Report (www.socialreport.com) is a unified social and Web analytics dashboard and reporting platform to track social accounts, networks, websites, short links and blogs. It offers tools to help with discovery, marketing, conversion tracking and semantic analysis of social data, and the ability to post and track Social ROI related to specific campaigns. On the unified Social Report dashboard, all social, Web, short link and blog property performance is accessible. The best comparison would be to Google Analytics (GA). Just like you can track visitors, time on site, keywords, geography and many other aspects of Web performance using GA, with Social Report you can track membership, demographics, interests, geography, education, employment and many other aspects of your social space.

• Social Intelligence Dashboard (www.awarenessnetworks.com/why-the-hub/social-intelligence) from Awareness, Inc., a provider of on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS).  A user-friendly reporting solution for generating detailed analysis on social media marketing programs, the Social Intelligence Dashboard features report and dashboard templates that help users get started with sophisticated social marketing analysis.  Simple drag-and-drop functionality allows users to manipulate data like a pro, no coding required.

• Unilyzer (www.unilyzer.com)  Social Media Dashboard Unilyzer has a social media dashboard to unify Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts. The Unilyzer™ automatically retrieves marketing data and transforms it into the exact information you need. Unify and analyze your data with one tool.

Next:

Part II: Social Media Marketing Campaign Reporting – Scorecards

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

• PostRank—Formerly known as AideRSS, provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content.

• ScoutLabs Web based Social Media Monitoring Tool—Web-based and with an interface like Google Analytics it tracks almost all the online social media channels. It measures all the negative/positive signals and gives you reports based on the overall performances.
• Social Mention – Web based social media monitoring—A Web-based tool that finds the brand mentions on any particular channel like blog/micro blogs and gives you a comprehensive idea of how the brand is perceived by users. It also gives you idea about the general “perception” of the brand in terms positive, negative or neutral.

• SocialToo—A comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and un-follows on Twitter.
• Spiral16 – Social Media Monitoring Visualizer Tool—Spiral16 takes an in-depth look at who is saying what about a brand and compares results with those of top competitors. The goal is to help you monitor the effectiveness of your social media strategy, understand the sentiment behind conversations online and mine large amounts of data. It uses impressive 3D displays and a standard dashboard. Cost: Pricing starts at $500 for five queries or Internet searches, though there is no solid pricing
  model and Spiral16 will work with companies to tailor plans that fit their budget. Online demo available.

• Spredfast—A monitoring service and social media management, measurement and campaign tool.  A full-on social media dashboard and integrated communications client.  Enables you to pull relevant conversations from multiple networks into your dashboard, track referrals and conversions, summon up analytics and jump straight to analysis and reports.  Cost: Pricing begins at $250/month for businesses.

• Sysomos MAP – Social Media Analytics Tool—Media Analytics Program is another social media analytics
  program that focuses on the core concepts of social media – listen > measure > understand and engage. The tool provides real-time intelligence to manage products, brands and reputations on social media.
• Trendrr – Real Time Social Media Monitoring Tool—Does real time digital/social media monitoring for you. Analyzes
  social media channels for your brand mentions and puts them into perspective with numbers. Their data sources include everything from blogs to microblogs, search, social networks and even video.

• Visible Technologies: High-end monitoring and analysis.  Visible Intelligence enterprise social intelligence platform and services help clients monitor, analyze and participate in social media conversations as well as protect their executive and corporate brands online. Visible adds analyst support to their client servicing to help you understand the landscape and determine which intelligence to act on. Cost: Typically $25,000 to $45,000.

• Webtrends—Mobile & Social Analytics.  Offers services geared toward monitoring, measuring, analyzing, profiling and
  targeting audiences for a brand. The partner-based platform allows for crowd-sourced improvements and problem solving, creating transparency of their products and services. Cost: Pricing varies depending on packages and services chosen, but Webtrends is geared to big players. Social Accelerator packages start at $15,000/year, app packages start at $1,500 to $12,000/year.

• Xinureturns—Provides a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will
  receive information on Technorati, Google PageRank, Digg, and even backlinks to your website.

There is no one single ideal Social Media Marketing Campaign Monitoring, Measurement & Analytics tool. Though the sheer number of competing programs is immense, most of them do the same job of indexing and finding your brand in the discussions.  But the ones you really want to use will do a good job of teasing value out of those analytics data, and putting things in perspective.

You can experiment—mixing and matching to make use of the best of the best.

Just keep in mind that the selection of the right tool to use in gauging the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns depends on your intended goals.

Tracking social media website engagement requires a focus on traffic statistics.  For tracking a wider campaign, Twitter response and positive comments might be a more appropriate metric.

Software like Google Analytics is used to track website data such as traffic, visitors, pages per visitor, and traffic sources. But since Google Analytics isn’t designed to track social media data, plug-ins like Social Media Metrics can add a social media information layer to it, providing information on Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious bookmarks, and more for each individual page.  Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allow users to change different elements on a website through Javascript.  Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin allows you to observe social media as well as link statistics for your specific pages.

Most analytics software has custom campaigns to make it easy to track specific events. You can track a specific Twitter traffic campaign or DiggBar URL with campaigns.

MM&A

By now, most Internet marketers (and savvy business owners) seeking the answer to the question “How do I measure my investment in Social Media?” are familiar with the terms Monitoring, Measurement & Analytics (MM&A).

Social Media is about communication and discussion in their most dynamic forms, so the challenge is to track this information on a daily basis, even though the “buzz” of a campaign (or brand or event) is measured not by days but in some cases by hours.

To hit this often moving target, a plethora of software (and Software as a Service) companies have emerged in response to growing demand.

Here’s a list of MM&A tools that mostly focus on the numbers, with some attention paid to brand perceptions and engagement ratios.

Leading the list are brand monitoring services (e.g., Radian6, Visible Technologies, Nielsen BuzzMetrics) monitor online dialogues.

Radian6, recently acquired by Salesforce.com, tops most monitoring lists (though it features analytics capabilities as well).  Radian6 helps companies monitor the Social Web (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, forums and so on) in order to provide actionable insights in real-time and thus enable its clients to effectively join conversations with customers and prospects.  Radian6 helps you track numerous signals and get insights into your brand’s performance on various social media channels. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts for any important presentation.

MONITORING

Alterian Social Media Monitoring Tools—Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool provides advanced user-behavior statistics, measures and analyzes daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product.  Often a little too much detail, but a good tool nevertheless. Cost: Pricing is based on volume of results and ranges from $500/month to $15,000/month. “Freemium” trial plan allows for five keyword or phrase searches and a total of 1,000 results. Alterian also provides additional custom solutions.

Attensity360—Actionable insights.  Attensity360 operates on four key principles: listen, analyze, relate, act.  Attensity360 will help monitor trending topics, influencers and the reach of your brand while recommending ways to join the conversation. Attensity Analyze applies text analytics to unstructured text to extract meaning and uncover trends. Attensity Respond helps automate the routing of incoming social media mentions into user-defined queues. Cost: $399/month for one license. Free 15-day trial.

Attentio – Social Media Trends / Analytics Tool—Collects information from all social media channels related to brands and products, assimilate and study it to give you structured data. Its advantage is that its multilingual and has more of a brand-centric focus.  Attentio tracks global conversations taking place across social media (blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter, YouTube) and online news sites. The multilingual service offers brand reputation management, campaign/ product release impact, sales opportunity tracking and sentiment analysis along with a dashboard to track media in real time. Cost: Pricing starts at $775 per month for a one-year subscription.

Bit.ly—When you use a URL shortener, it’s always a good idea to use one that has analytics information, as Bit.ly does. This will track information such as number of clicks, traffic sources and even at what time clicks occur.

Brands Eye – Web based Social Media Measuring Tool—Picks up signals  from social media mentions and puts them into a different perspective unlike others.  It finds you details about reputation, media origin and sentiments associated to your brand.

Brandwatch—Focuses on brand mentions, trawls the Internet looking at news, blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites and finding mentions of brands, companies, products and people. Clients define keywords (brands, topics, people names, products) and receive reports and brand summaries that they can take action on. Cost: Pricing, based on a monthly subscription, starts at about $300/month.

Buzzcapture—Insights into market buzz. Provides insight to organizations on the buzz in their market.  Can track companies, products, product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, influencers, evangelists, critics and campaigns. All the information collected is analyzed and presented into understandable reports and entered into your dashboard. Cost: Typical price range is $13,000 to $91,000 for each research topic or group of products, with a standard license costing $39,000.

BuzzLogic—Uses its technology platform to identify and organize the conversation universe, combining both conversation topic and audience to help brands reach audiences who are passionate on everything from the latest tech craze and cloud computing to parenthood and politics. However, the social media monitoring tool is not available as a standalone product. It comes as part of BuzzLogic’s ad platform, requiring a media buy to connect to unique audiences through BuzzLogic. Cost: Unknown.

Next week:

Part II: More Social Media Campaign Measurement & Analytic Tools

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

In last week’s blog, we listed some best-selling tools.  Here, in alphabetical order, are some other popular applications, and a few that are less well known but still effective for managing and monitoring social media activities.

• @this moment.  Built on the @this moment platform, Distributed Entertainment Channel is a system for managing a brand’s presence across multiple online environments combining multimedia UGC, and a variety of real-time inputs which are distributed across social platforms including YouTube Brand Channels, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace Brand Communities and the iPhone. The system allows you to publish content, moderate user-generated comments and track and optimize channel performance. They also have features such as ID integration, media handling and reporting.
• Argyle Social. Social media marketing platform that helps marketers measure and justify the social channel. The system is built on a tracking and URL-shortener, giving the user the ability to track social conversations on Twitter and Facebook.
• Assistly. Social media management tool aimed to help with real-time customer service via email, self service FAQs, chat and social networks.
• Awareness Networks. Social marketing hub that centralizes social media content publishing, management, measurement and engagement. Also includes access to seven white-labeled, best- practice social networking applications.  On-demand social marketing software to help brands publish, manage and measure across social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Foursquare and WordPress.
• Buddy Media. Platform of tools allows for Facebook page management and engagement.
• Context Optional. Cross-platform social marketing solution to efficiently build, manage, monitor and measure brand presence across the Social Web.
• Conversocial. Helps increase engagement, manage interactions and respond to customers on Twitter and Facebook. It also helps plan updates and enables you to assess what type of content resonates the most with your fans and followers.
• Crowd Factory. Suite of social media marketing tools, including Social Campaign, that enables marketers to acquire new customers through simple social gestures and custom social marketing campaigns while easily tracking ROI.
• Datasift. Enables filtering and augmentation of social data to help you filter out the noise and find the information that is valuable to your business and customers.
• Direct Message Lab. Provides consulting, implementation and a platform (REACH) for centralized management of social media promotions and contests, advertising and measurement.
• eCairn. Aggregate conversations, trending topics and bookmark insights to help with your engagement strategy.
• Engage121.  For franchise companies looking to maintain consistent messaging while giving local branches a hand in social media strategy.  With few competitors, Engage121 leads in encompassing monitoring, broadcasting and engagement. The tool is customizable and can support just about any site with a social presence. Corporate managers can create a company-wide promotion message and use mail merge to broadcast it with a local store’s name and address. Permissions may be set to allow a branch to approve a message from corporate before it is distributed to area followers, maintaining a local voice and brand consistency at the same time.
• Expion.  A unified database that aggregates and tracks all employee and customer social interactions to help profile customers, identify advocates and critics, track behaviors and create best employee practices.
• Get Satisfaction. Gives a better social support experience, increases SEO and improves customer loyalty.
• Hyper Alerts. Sends an email when comments are posted on Facebook fan pages.
• Janrain.  Web-based platform of tools including: Engage to make it easy for users to connect a site with their social networks; Federate to facilitate navigation across multiple web properties and partner sites with a single log-in (currently supports 16 networks); Capture to leverage user data for personalized experiences.
• KickApps.   Self-service social media web site authoring and social content management system supporting video, social networking, social graph and activity streams, apps and analytics. Enables Web publishers and marketers to develop branded communities, social applications and interactive widgets on their websites and across the Social Web. Solutions for small and large businesses.
• MediaFunnel. Offers a Business Social Media platform for Facebook and Twitter supporting multiple users per profile and editorial review.  Includes monitoring and integrates with Salesforce.com. Offers brand monitoring, scheduling, multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts.
• MutualMind. Primarily to help PR and marketing teams analyze and monitor the Social Web, the tool also has an engagement platform with an integrated response system.
• Objective Marketer. A social media marketing and campaign management solution to engage and reach users on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social channels.  It aims to make it easy to manage multi-channel communications while providing comprehensive analytics and reporting.  Offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management, multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.
• Offerpop. End-to-end, white label campaign tools for Facebook and Twitter.
• pop.to Social Marketing.   A social marketing suite, including feed-enabled social gestures and widgets, social dashboard, segmentation tools, influencer identification, conversion tracking and built-in friend casting.
• Posthelpers. An enterprise social selling platform for localizing news, deals and offers across an organization’s multiple Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles.
• Postling.  Local business social media marketing platform to create content, stay organized and reach customers. Currently free for small business or personal use.  Allows for blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts to be managed from a single system.
• Seesmic.  Web and desktop tools to manage social marketing activity on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Buzz and LinkedIn plus a plug-in marketplace for more social management options.
• Sendible.   Social media marketing platform that supports 30+ networks and services offering management of: accounts/profiles, messages and content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content and promotion, monitoring and analytics. Also offers a white label version for agencies.  A platform for engaging with customers, measuring results and monitoring your brand across multiple social media channels at once.
• Shoutlet. Manages social media marketing communications with one platform for building, engaging and measuring social media. Includes multiple account and platform support, social CRM and ecommerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile features.  Offers a multi-user application that helps build, engage, and measure social media marketing communication via one platform.
• Skyttle. Facebook analytics for community insights and measurement.
• SocialVolt.  A complete social media management platform that integrates the tools needed to engage with clients on the social web.
• Spredfast, Enterprise social media management system that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its voices across multiple social media channels. Also offers a white label option for agencies.  Spredfast aims to position their product as collaborative campaign management and offer features such as scheduling content, and features that integrate with events and social stream like features similar to Friendfeed.  For agencies managing social media for several companies with high ROI demands.  Spredfast’s biggest advantage over other SMM tools is analytics.  Measurement is determined by the amount of content distributed, how many people were reached and whether the intended audience was engaged. Spredfast integrates analytics from clicks by tracking bit.ly links as well as data from each social network. This information is formatted in presentation-ready graphs, which is ideal for agencies bringing clients up to speed on outreach progress.
• Sprinklr. Sprinklr’s SIREn (Social Intent Revelation Engine) platform is a comprehensive enterprise grade SaaS social media management system.  Social media marketing platform and consulting services for consumer and B2B marketers as well as agencies. Provides social media audience research, acquisition, content promotion and measurement tools.
• Sprout.   Cloud-based visual authoring software used to build interactive Engage Ads and Engage Apps that deliver rich, interactive, and social content across the web and mobile devices.
• Sprout Social.  Affordable social media dashboard, monitoring, team workflow, influencer and contact management, performance metrics and daily or weekly email summaries. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare.
• StrongMail.  A traditional email marketing platform that tracks the multi-stage sharing activity of a campaign all the way to conversion and provides feedback on Facebook fan page wall posts.  StrongMail Social Studio is a comprehensive social media marketing platform with a referral marketing platform, social sharing tool and campaign management application
• Stuzo, Dachis group-owned social media management tool that enables cross-platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) social experiences and allows clients to manage multiple social programs from one unified interface.
• Syncapse. Product portfolio includes SocialTALK, a hosted SaaS solution that helps enterprises create, publish and measure their social media content strategy and posting schedule.
• Valuevine. Social media and location-based marketing and analytics software for multi-location brands.
• Wildfire Interactive. Platform for easy creation, implementation and management of branded interactive campaigns, including sweepstakes, contests and giveaways.

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Manage your Social Media Marketing campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

There is no shortage of tools available for social media management, so the challenge for marketers is to figure out what they should actually be measuring and what is considered success. For example, do you want clicks on your links, retweets or transactions?

And what channel is the most efficient and cost-effective—mobile, Facebook, etc.

Ultimately, the tools are only as good as your ability to process the data in a meaningful way.

That being said, here’s a list of popular tools being used to manage and monitor social media marketing campaigns:

• Google Insights for Search. A free service from Google similar to Google Trends combined with Google Analytics. It provides insights into the search terms people have been entering into the Google search engine.  It offers a lot of options. You can view search trends individually or by comparison. You can see worldwide, countrywide, and regional breakdowns of searches. You can drill down to see related searches.  The difference between Google Insights for Search and Google Analytics is that Google Insights shows overall search trends while Google Analytics shows specific trends for a single website. Anyone can use Google Insights, while Google Analytics must have a tracking component placed by the website owner.

• HootSuite: Social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.  One of the few tools that currently allows users to integrate and update across 10 social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare etc.  Like SocialOomph, HootSuite will automate tweets. But it’s most useful feature is how it juggles multiple social media accounts. Not only can you create a dashboard that lets you monitor your Twitter accounts, but you can add your Facebook (this includes Facebook pages), LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress blog, MySpace and Foursquare accounts. This is so integrated that you can write one update that goes to any and all of those social media timelines/pages.  HootSuite offers three packages — Basic, Pro and Enterprise — that are targeted toward small or medium-sized businesses and others who need control and analytics for their online activity.

• Social Oomph. This website offers many free and premium services to help you manage your Twitter account—you can schedule tweets, send automatic messages to those who follow you and follow all your followers automatically.

• Ping.fm.  A free service that allows you to “ping” or update multiple social media accounts and transmit the same data or message to various accounts. Ping is designed to provide the easiest way possible for users to post to their social networks all at once. It’s a simple service that eliminates the middle man when it comes to posting information on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Blogger and other networks.

• Sprout Social. Affordable social media dashboard, monitoring, team workflow, influencer and contact management, performance metrics and daily or weekly email summaries. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare. A social relationship manager designed to help small businesses and brands manage multiple social networks from one place. Prices start at $9.99 per month under Sprout Social Professional, which lets you manage up to five identities.  Sprout Social Professional can monitor Twitter, Facebook (fan and personal pages) and LinkedIn. This means you can search, monitor and cross-post to networks, schedule messages to be posted, as well as track links and referrals.  For $49.99 per month, Sprout Social Business lets you manage 10 identities or locations. You also get additional metrics, more advanced tracking data, Foursquare and Yelp support, geo-targeting ,and the ability to create daily specials or offers.  This cross-platform social media management tools enable you to find new customers and to grow your business.

• Involver.  Used by Facebook’s internal marketing team, Involver offers four packages: Basic (free), Professional ($99/month), Business ($549/month) and Enterprise ($2,749/month).  The basic package consists of a number of social media tools, such as RSS Feed, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc., from which you can choose two that will be added to your Facebook page. Each succeeding plan offers more tools like analytics, an account manager to set up your accounts (comes with Business and Enterprise), multi-media publishing (images, audio, video and text across multiple networks) as well as tech support. provides marketers with a “social markup language” (SML), an engagement platform and customizable social applications from which to create and monitor content.

• CoTweet. Users can choose between CoTweet’s free Standard plan or its new paid option, Enterprise. The Standard plan is aimed at individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to manage their conversations. CoTweet Standard offers Tweet scheduling, email notifications, multiple account publishing, click tracking, message assignments, and some analytics reporting. It does not include Facebook account access or have a native iPhone app.  Last year, CoTweet added a paid option to its standard plan, which provides additional analytics and tweet history and starts at $7,000 per year. The Enterprise plan includes more detailed analytics resources, a lifetime archive of customer interactions, faster Twitter updates, and help with account management from CoTweet’s team.

• TweetDeck. A personal browser for staying in touch and connecting you with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. TweetDeck is a free tool that has been ramping up its features. In addition to managing Facebook and Twitter accounts, users can also update their Foursquare, LinkedIn, Googlebuzz and MySpace accounts, share photos on Flickr, watch YouTube videos and more.

• Vitrue. Offers three main components — Vitrue Tabs, Vitrue Publisher, and Vitrue Apps — to help businesses personalize their social media networks. With Vitrue Tabs, users get a content management system for creating a Facebook fan page and custom homepage. Tabs let users manage as few as one Facebook page and one Twitter stream to multiple streams. Vitrue Apps helps you create custom videos, photo slideshows, polls, surveys, coupons and other marketing tools for Facebook.  Vitrue Publisher allows you to post scheduled messages and apps to Facebook and Twitter as well as monitor responses to your posts.  Vitrue offers a month-to-month license in three price plans, beginning with a $300 entry-level package.  Works with clients and agencies through a Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform offering Facebook tabs & applications, a publishing feature for Facebook and Twitter and mobile solutions.

• Gist. Integrates all your contacts to one location from Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and other sources onto one dashboard, which you can divide among people and companies. It pulls news and updates from the various networks onto one newsfeed automatically. Gist also recently added Tungle to its list of integrated profiles.

• Nutshell Mail. Brings social networks to your email inbox for free, enabling you to keep track of all your Facebook, Twitter, and other email accounts by sending scheduled, consolidated email alerts. Nutshell Mail sends one email updating you on multiple social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, without clogging up your inbox. It’s ideal for those who have several accounts but aren’t heavy social network users.

Part II: More Social Media Management Tools

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Manage your Social Media Marketing campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

For example, consider Gamify (www.gamify.com).  The company offers game mechanics as a service—plug-and-play widgets with no programming required, simple installation of reward programs, streamlined addition of points, levels, badges and leaderboards to products.  Gamify emphasizes a key best practice in gamifying a business website:

“Monitor your results in real-time and conduct A/B testing (split testing or bucket testing)—a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. A classic direct mail tactic, this method has been recently adopted within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails and landing pages.”

Bunchball 11 Gamification Tips

Bunchball (www.bunchball.com) is the leading provider of online gamification solutions used to drive high- value participation, engagement, loyalty and revenue for some of the world’s leading brands and media.  In October of 2007, venture-backed Bunchball was the first company to provide game mechanics as a service—on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, the community site for the NBC-TV show The Office.  San Jose, Calif.-based Bunchball’s Nitro gamification platform is a scalable cloud-based service for gamifying websites, social communities and mobile applications.

Bunchball has distributed a whitepaper, “Winning with Gamification: Tips from the Expert’s Playbook.”   Here are some highlights on developing a sound gamification strategy:

1. Map your goals with your user’s interests.
2. Prioritize the actions you want your users to take.
3. Develop a point scale system based on the value of the action.
4. Use levels to keep users coming back.
5. Make visually appealing badges and trophies that impress.
6. Add rewards and prevent users from gaming the system for them.
7. Use real-time feedback on progress.
8. Leverage groups and teams so folks collaborate and push one another.
9. Post leaderboards.
10. Integrate social media.
11. Mobilize the effort.

Gamification Overload Inevitable

No matter how well a Gamification strategy is implemented and best practices pursued, the effort to stay on top of developments will never stop.

Gabe Zichermann is the head of GamificationCo, chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops and co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing.”

Will consumers be overloaded by points and badges from every angle?

“The short answer: yes, but not yet,” Zichermann says.

According to Zichermann, on the surface, the natural outgrowth of (the proliferation of game mechanics) will be thousands of different point systems and millions of badges that could eventually become unmanageable “social clutter” – as suggested by Phin & Shane in their Mashable post on game mechanics.

Badge Trash?

A huge panoply of badges being issued could clutter up newsfeeds and create confusion.

“The best badges – from a design and social meaning standpoint – will get through the ‘badge firewall,’” Zichermann predicts.  “While others will be blocked, much as email spam is today.  Additionally, I’d look for ‘meta-badging’ systems that will start emerging this year to help users keep track of their achievements across sites/companies.  While we don’t yet know if Badgeville or Big Door will offer these features, one would hope they’ve got the message.”

Zichermann’s viewpoint:

Clutter is a Fact of Life, but in the world of gamification, we’re at the dawn of the industrial era. Our factories are just beginning to hum – and while we haven’t figured out all the details just yet, you’d be well advised to gear up your assembly line. Consumer engagement is an arms race, and worrying about future confusion isn’t going to get you the virality and satisfaction you’re looking for today.

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Gamify Your Website: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

“Dipping your toes in before diving in headfirst is an effective way to gamify your experience,” advises Roy Schmidt of BigDoor, the company that enables non-programmers to gamify their websites.

BigDoor ‘Five Tips on Gamifying Your Website’

Founded in June 2009, BigDoor (www.bigdoor.com) provides gamification technology to non-gaming websites.  BigDoor’s “virtual economy” platform is designed to help web developers and digital publishers add customized game mechanics to their sites to increase user loyalty, better monetize user interactions, and more effectively target new and existing customers.

BigDoor’s website offers “Five Tips on Gamifying Your Website, Before You Even Begin” (originally a guest post on Gamesbrief.com on Oct 12, 2010).

Gamification of a website is a lot more than just adding badges to a site. It’s about finding the right motivators for your audience and promoting desirable behavior in an enjoyable way without getting in the way of the core value of your service.

So as you start thinking about how to gamify your service, be sure to take a moment to think through the goals of the project rather than just jumping into a solution that may not be appropriate for you.

Here are some things to think about when starting a project:

1. Get some feedback on your ideas

It’s easy to forget to put yourself in the shoes of your users and review your service from their point of view.  When it comes to a gamification project, it becomes even more important, especially when you are adding a game layer to an existing service with an established user base. Think about what that transition will be like and plan on addressing questions and negative responses. Try to get direct feedback from your most valuable users and friends who aren’t afraid to tell you the truth. If appropriate, try to create parallel mechanics that motivate different types of users (some of your users may be motivated by social rewards while others are self-driven by accomplishment only).

2. Focus on the key actions

Don’t try to boil the ocean right away. You can’t create a full World of Warcraft universe around your foodie blog, and your users would hate suddenly being forced into a complex metagame that has nothing to do with restaurant reviews. Identify the key actions you hope to see from your users and find a way to encourage that limited set of actions. If you can’t improve results on a few user engagement goals, you will fail miserably trying to implement a huge game layer with tons of complexity. And if you really aren’t sure, just try with one action. It’s a nice baby step to see how users respond and whether or not you are providing the right experience to promote that key behavior.

3. Take the time for context

Throwing up predefined solutions is a good way to test and iterate, but as you start to see results, you may realize the potential for a custom fit to drive even better returns. If users are presented with a basic badge system, the novelty may work initially but long term success requires a smooth integration authentic to the core experience. If I’m visiting your blog about gardening and you reward me with just basic points and random trophies, I’ll eventually get annoyed. But if my site participation results in a virtual plant or garden that I can nurture, and my ongoing efforts result in rewards that enhance my experience and promote my blossoming expertise, I’m more likely to find a better value in your service.

4. Commit to the game layer like a new product offering

If you think you add some game mechanics to your experience and walk away, then you aren’t really thinking about your users. It’s kind of like expecting users to keep coming back to your news website without updating the homepage content. The users will realize that the game layer is stale at some point unless you are proactive about monitoring how it impacts your key user actions and make extensions and enhancements to continue to evolve it for the most involved users. You’re building on the relationship, so be ready to learn from the analytics and adjust and optimize as needed. Be active in support of the tool or it will just become a gimmick.

5. Don’t jump immediately into redeemable currencies

If you want to keep things simple and grow as you learn, don’t start with a redeemable currency with a promise of vast virtual rewards in exchange. Figuring out the right prices and items takes a lot of planning, so it’s better to focus on activity and experience points. You can always add the idea of virtual redemption later as you see what it most useful to your users. But if you try to start that way with no clear idea of where it will lead, the whole experience may confuse users and actually might de-motivate their participation.

Hopefully this short list will give you some things to consider before you get too far into your gamification effort. Of course there are situations when you should jump into a huge integration where the game layer becomes a core part of the service offering. But we’ve found that for most, dipping your toes in before diving in headfirst is an effective way to gamify your experience.

Next week—Learn best practices and the mistakes to avoid when gamifying your website.

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Gamify Your Website: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

Social media marketers, whose industry is being so heavily impacted by the video game industry, need to join the game industry in comprehending and embracing change.

As more parts of our daily experience (both tasks that were traditionally online and those that are now just being connected with social networks) are tied to the community around us, gaming mechanics will play an increasingly important role in the customer experience.  Even if you are not seeking to implement a gaming system around your campaign, it’s worthwhile for every marketer to have a basic understanding of both the general economics affecting business decisions and the technical processes for designing effective games.

Video game industry leaders are responding to the social gaming challenge.

In March 2011, Electronic Arts (EA) announced that their “EA Partners” group will be offering publishing services to independent social and mobile game developers. Small devs will now be able to sign up with EA and access their marketing and development resources.  In the Facebook gaming world, small developers have great ideas and talent, and it’s in the best interest of a gaming giant like EA to try and recruit them to share some of their profits in exchange for a little push for the indie developer.

In December 2010, Sony Online Entertainment introduced another Facebook game that set the bar for future detective games.  Catch a Killer, based on James Patterson‘s novel, puts the user in the detective realm with all sorts of obstacles to overcome. The user not only investigates crime scenes, but also examines evidence, interviews witnesses and works with Alex Cross to solve the crime.

In November 2010, Microsoft introduced new social features in Microsoft Game Hub that included a unified social system across all its web-based gaming platforms, an overhaul of MSN Games, international expansion for Bing Games and a deal with social games publisher CrowdStar.  The new social features include leaderboards and Facebook integration.  Microsoft’s goal is to connect users with social gaming friends regardless of whether they’re using MSN Games, Bing or Windows Live Messenger—they don’t have to use the same portal as their friends to play with them or see their profile data.

One thing the video game industry clearly understands is that, despite its rapid growth, social gaming on Facebook is still in its infancy.  Nonetheless, video game industry executives can count and they see the future.

For example, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, one of the most successful traditional online games, has 12 million-plus players.  It also cost in excess of $100 million to make.

FarmVille at 48 million players has estimated development costs of between $200,000-$500,000 (though because Zynga is still private they aren’t forthcoming with real numbers).  So, while only 12 percent of Facebook’s user base is currently playing Zynga’s game, there are hundreds of millions of additional potential players on Facebook alone.  And with development costs for a social media hit game estimated at a fraction of the cost of a successful traditional online game, the numbers for a social media game look very attractive to a game company deciding whether to make their next game a social media game or go the traditional route.  Once the decision is made to make a social media game, the method to make it profitable is developed.

This process begins with knowing one’s audience.  According to Appdata.com, there are around 211 million users playing games each month.  These numbers cover a much larger age demographic today  than ever before, especially among women who are always a desirable consumer for any business.  With that many eyes on the screen, games provide potentially limitless areas for businesses to place advertising.  Customers can earn virtual currency or goods in return for making purchases at an e-retailer, subscribing to a monthly service, completing a survey or watching a video ad/movie trailer.  It has also been proven that gamers are more likely to click on ads due to the residual credits earned, versus the average online consumer who only clicks based on his or her actual interest in the product/service advertised.  Plus, gaming advertising can fit more organically within the construct of the game itself.  Instead of popup ads in the margins, the player is literally walking by virtual billboards and sales signs.

This “advergaming” is nothing new.  Pepsi Invaders was an advergame commissioned by Coca-Cola developed in 1983 by Atari for the Atari 2600 platform.

Demetri Detsaridis, general manager of Zynga New York, feels that the line between modern advergaming and social mechanics has shifted.  Creating a project with game mechanics is not very different from creating a pure-play Facebook game, he says.

In-game advertising (IGA) refers to the use of computer and video games as a medium in which to deliver advertising.  Increasing Internet connectivity has led to the growth of dynamic in-game advertising.  Unlike the fixed advertisements found in static in-game ads, dynamic advertisements can be altered remotely by the advertising agency.  Advertisements can be tailored according to geographical location or time of day, allowing for the delivery of time-critical advertising campaigns like those publicizing a movie launch. Information can be sent back from the player’s machine regarding advertisement performance.  Data such as time spent looking at advertisements, type of advertisement and viewing angle can be used to better formulate future campaigns and also allows the advertising agency to offer more flexible advertising campaigns to their clients.  In 2005, spending on in-game advertising totaled $56 million, with organizations like Yankee Group predicting this value to grow to between $732 million and $1 billion by 2014.