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Immediacy Matters in Social Media

New York-based strategic communications firm Fortex Group specializes in public relations, reputation management and business development for a client roster that spans media, technology and health services. Fortex not only delivers client services, but also operates its own community and news properties, such as Play the Music for the digital music industry.

An important part of the firm’s focus on best-practice planning and measurement includes a keen awareness of emerging market data sources and the tools and technologies that put them to good business use.

When social media began to reveal itself as one of the richest sources of market data yet, it came time to start shopping for a social media analysis platform. True to its data-driven nature, the firm explored a number of solutions and in the end became an enthusiastic participant in the Scout Labs Beta program.

“We’re always looking for new tools that are easier and faster—and Scout Labs is one of the easiest and fastest we’ve seen yet,” said Ephraim Cohen, Fortex Founder and Managing Partner.

“Scout Labs data sources are as good or better than any other vendors. On a price to performance basis, Scout Labs is a clear frontrunner—easy to use, easy to set up, very cost effective.”

Fortex Group uses Scout Labs for customer service, brand monitoring, competitive analysis and crisis communications, turning searches on and off around their campaign calendar and using Scout Labs as their primary tracking tool. “Scout Labs is one of the few reports we look at and include in client reports on a daily basis,” said Cohen.

Mr. Cohen cites ease of use, robust data and the clean user interface as among the reasons for his enthusiasm for Scout Labs, but also enjoys its immediacy. Just after the recent, sizeable launch of an iPhone app, the firm was able see results immediately in Scout Labs. “Two days after the launch, we were able to go into Scout Labs, pull charts and quotes, cite metrics and compile a nice visual representation of how the market received the launch.”

Right on the heel’s of Margaret’s post about why agencies use Scout Labs, we bring you this case study from NordicClick Interactive.

Mike McAnally is one of the founders of NordicClick, a leading web strategy and interactive marketing agency in the Midwest. Mike helped to build the agency with a strong focus on metrics, A/B testing and optimization for their sizeable roster of clients including large consumer brands and manufacturing clients.

When Mike started steering the agency towards a social media capability, like so many, the team grappled with an unwieldy mix of tracking tools. Cobbling together RSS feeds and Google alerts to harness social media activity across a variety of clients and industries was “terribly messy,” says Mike.

The NordicClick team began actively seeking a single solution that would first give them all the social media data they needed—which in an agency environment can be considerable. NordicClick needed an application that would allow for multiple users and multiple searches across a large client base that covered a dozen or more industries. The social media analysis platform they chose not only needed to be comprehensive, but also needed to help to make their practice more efficient and more effective.

“We weren’t going to make an investment in a social media practice that was just about listening,” Mike says. “Our agency motto is ‘Listen, learn and share’. We needed a platform that would let us learn about a client’s business in meaningful ways and let us share that information easily.”

Mike and his team reviewed several social media analysis platforms, but found them to be “over-engineered.” They were immediately attracted to Scout Labs as “an aggregator of all social media channels”, a collection of data from thousands of sites, but mostly to the fact that his dashboards are organized in intuitive, meaningful ways. “The interface is clean, simple and intuitive and the graphs are perfect for client-facing PowerPoints. We routinely pull screenshots from Scout Labs into our client presentations to demonstrate the insight we’re getting from social media.”

Indeed, NordicClick harvests a great deal of value for their clients from the Scout Labs platform. They routinely use Scout Labs to conduct keyword research, competitive analysis, buzz tracking, SEO audits, sentiment searches, for soft selling customer services and reputation management just to name a few.

Since the agency began using Scout Labs, “we log in at least every day and whenever we get alerts,” says Mike. “Everyone’s been trained on it, our contractors use it. We typically provide monthly and quarterly social media analysis reviews for most if not all of our clients.”

NordicClick’s approach for landing social media strategy business is to sell a social media analysis capability to all of their clients up front. Even if they don’t sign on, the team automatically sets up a workspace for the new client brand, resellers and competitors “so when we open up the workspace and they see the amazing data, the immediately sign on for the value. It’s a no-brainer.”

“I would describe Scout Labs as one big user group,” says Mike. “Excellent value for the money, it’s great for stress-testing all kinds of strategy, from keywords, to Twitter campaigns to PR.”

It was such an honor to have James Smith, VP of Advertising for Disney Online (Disney.com, Family.com, FamilyFun, Kaboose and BabyZone), up on stage with me at Web 2.0 in New York talking about one aspect of “operationalizing” social media - measuring campaign effectiveness and real-time optimization. His deep-dive case study had the entire audience sitting up straight and taking frantic notes.

James eloquently walked through data and graphs showing how he and his team use social media data from Scout Labs throughout the lifecycle of major Disney Online campaigns.

• Pre-sales. Disney uses Scout Labs to offer a new dimension to the traditional media metrics firms. According to the old-school metrics, Disney and competitor properties were “equal”, but when you looked at the social media metrics for Disney properties, they won hands-down. Disney’s properties are clearly earning more social media buzz and attention than its competitors, which if great data to share if you are trying to close a big deal!
• Mid-campaign. Of course, Disney doesn’t rest on its laurels once its won a big media partnership. It launches a major media campaign and aggressively tracks buzz, sentiment, sentiment trending and even customer quotes to understand the impacts its efforts are having out in the real world. They have developed a smart methodology of creating benchmarks of key social media metrics before launch, then measuring lift and optimizing tactics throughout the campaign to ensure maximum impact and effectiveness.
• Post-campaign. At the end of a promotion or campaign, everyone wants to see metrics. Thanks to a continuously updated dashboard, at least on the social media side, there are few surprises at the end. But Disney takes the all-important step of combining e-commerce and other “hard” business success metrics with the social media impact data (as well as quotes from customers during the campaign) to give a more complete picture of campaign success.

Disney is a marvelous example of a company that constantly evolves its marketing discipline in keeping with the marketplace. They embrace new tools and technologies and look to new and deeper sources of market data—like social media—for success metrics. And you don’t have to be one of the biggest and most beloved brands in the world to have access to this kind of data and to engage in real-time campaign tracking and optimization. You just have to be as smart as Disney to choose Scout Labs ;-)

You all know Heelys — the roller skate / shoe hybrids that are beloved by “kids” of all ages. Well, Heelys and their savvy agency partner, 358 Communications, are using Scout Labs to get a real-time beat on who’s wearing Heelys and what product or communications issues might exist they can solve. For instance, they noticed a number of people asking whether the shoes come in adult sizes (which they do!), so Heelys is now looking at campaigns to get that message out. They have also used Scout Labs to find the all-important celebrity sightings. Right now Heelys is seeking endorsements and partnerships with a number of celebrity Heelys fans.

Jott Networks operates a voice to text service that helps users capture notes, set reminders and calendar appointments, and interact with web sites and services. Since fall of 2008, the company had been offering both free and paid service levels to users, with about 30% of users converting from the free to the paid service.

In January 2009, Jott announced an end to its free service and the introduction of a new voicemail to text service. Jott has an active community of users who blog and tweet about the convenience and ease of the service and the company was not expecting all of them to welcome the news. As an internet startup, the marketing team is small and Doug Aley, the VP of Marketing, was handling public perception of the announcement and launch pretty much solo:

“We have a small marketing team here at Jott, which makes it all the more important to have efficiency tools like Scout Labs to manage web communications. Making sure we are on the pulse of what our customers are saying helps us be more responsive in everything we do, from product development to pricing.” — Doug Aley - VP Marketing and Business Development, Jott Networks, Inc.

Scout Labs helped Jott to find all the mentions of Jott that came up during the critical time period, prioritize items for response, and track which posts had been responded to. The Scout Labs application is still helping Jott do the work of converting users of a free service to paying customers by helping them find instances of social media they need to respond to. Jott also continues to use Scout Labs to monitor key competitors and provide insight into the personal productivity and voice to text space.

OpenDNS, a leading provider of free recursive Domain Name Service (DNS) with Web content filtering and phishing protection, has some very savvy social media folks on board. They are very active in the blogosphere and have an avid (and vocal) fan base.

They have been using Scout Labs for the last few months and have really been enjoying the comprehensive email alerts that we push to them daily.

“This is fantastic!” — Allison Rhodes, Director of Marketing at OpenDNS

OpenDNS is getting creative with its searches, as well. In addition to tracking OpenDNS and its DNS-guru and founder David Ulevitch, the team is looking for people out across the Internet who are having problems with web content filtering or those looking for a better solution. Helpful tips and information from proactive OpenDNS team members are delighting potential customers.

The team over at Focus Features have had their eye on social media buzz for many months now — keeping a close eye on the conversations around their critically acclaimed film Milk. For months, they have been using Scout Labs to watch Oscar-talk about Milk and Sean Penn building, so the five Oscar nominations last week were hugely exciting — best actor, best picture, best original screenplay, best original score, and achievements in editing! But the celebration was short-lived as they now tune their searches to best picture picks and Oscar predictions. We’re crossing fingers for you, Focus Features!

Photo Source: Celeb9.com

I was at Organic today and was very impressed by the team and the work they are doing to help brands think outside the traditional marketing boxes. They are encouraging companies to work to earn their brands and to do so across as many channels as possible.  At Organic, insight always starts with listening to customers, so they were very excited to get their hands on Scout Labs, which can help them systematically tune in to the voice of the customer out across the Internet for all their clients.

UPDATE: Organic is now using Scout Labs to deliver on its promise of listening, empathy and insight. In doing so, has discovered a whole new revenue stream. Their social media monitoring offering is a growing part of their revenue mix and allows them to add value for clients on an ongoing and strategic level.

Marketing is not the only thing in the throes of revolution. The old customer service mentality of waiting for the customer to come to you needs an update as well. StubHub is a beta user of Scout Labs and they are definitely taking a fresh approach to customer service.

Service is incredibly important to StubHub and they have a huge team of reps ready and eager to take care of calls and emails when they come in. But inbound call volume have been dropping in recent years, even while customers and revenues increase. The reason? Customers have additional channels for expressing their frustration these days. If someone buys tickets that are invalid, customers are starting to turn to blogs, Twitter, and message boards before they pick up the phone. Now, by seeking out complaints and problems expressed in social media, StubHub’s service team is proactively solving customer problems — a move that is surprising and delighting customers.

Scout Labs experiences this ourselves — no matter how often we give out our customer service contact information, we often find user questions and problems on blogs or on Twitter first.  Of course, by using our own product, we find them right away and take care of them, but it’s a brave new world indeed.

Photo source: www.gatorboosters.org

In a research-obsessed organization like Netflix, there is no such thing as too much data. The company relies heavily on traditional market research, but wanted to augment it with social media insights because the net that social media casts is wider, and the results more immediate.

The company now uses Scout Labs to monitor many topics. They have searches that are broad (Netflix, main products, new features, competitors) and searches that are specific, like “I wish Netflix would…” to keep a real-time pulse on priority customer features and fixes. They have been surprised to find some very juicy feedback coming via Twitter!

Social media is not just something to count. In the aggregate, we call it “buzz” but it’s actually the voices of many real and potential customers, and they are often offering feedback to product teams and hints to marketing teams. We just need to tune in. Social media monitoring — its not just for PR any more.

Photo source: www.ruralitybytes.files.wordpress.com