Tag Archive - engagement
Sow Well Today and You Will Reap Tomorrow
This quick story I received by email from a very dear person, reminded me of the base spirit needed to succeeding in social media. It relates to a previous post titled: “Is Twitter Stuck Into Mental Masturbation Mode?“
— Photo Credit: mackelundberg —
His name was Fleming, he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to earn a living for his family, he heard a cry for help from a nearby swamp. He dropped his tools, ran up and found a young boy down waist deep in this swamp, frightened, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and cruel death.
The next day, a stylish team appeared at the farm. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had helped:
— I want to repay you, said the nobleman. You saved my son’s life!
— I can not accept payment for what I did, the Scottish farmer replied.
At the same moment, the farmer’s son came to the door of the hut.
— Is it your son? Asked the nobleman.
— Yes, the farmer replied proudly.
— So, I make you a deal. Let me give your son the same education as my son. If the son is like the father, I am sure he will be a man whom both will be proud.
And the farmer agreed.
Farmer Fleming’s son attended the lectures of the best schools and the grand finale, he graduated from the School of Medicine, St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Bearing a big draw, he continued to be known worldwide. The famous Dr. Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin in effect.
Years later, the son of the nobleman who had been rescued from the swamp was suffering from pneumonia. Who saved his life this time? … Penicillin. Who was the nobleman? Sir Randolph Churchill and his son, Sir Winston Churchill.
Someone once said:
- Everything that goes comes back …
- Work as if you did not need money.
- Love like you’ve never been hurt.
- Dance like nobody’s watching.
- Sing like nobody’s listening to you.
- Live as if Heaven was on Earth.
One might add here:
- Tweet as if no one will ever reply.
- Share information as you promote your own
What analogies others might you add?
Spending Too Much Time on Facebook? Get Stalking!
How likely would you be to start stalking your Facebook friends if it were to save you time and allow for a more meaningful experience on the social network?
So Facebook is twiterizing… again. Mashable and AllFacebook are both calling it “HUGE”. Although the new feature offers some interesting engagement opportunities, it’s actually not that new. But let’s look at the “HUGEness” first. The scoop resides in a test feature Facebook is currently running and dubbing: “Subscribe”. Note they didn’t call it “follow”, it’s got to look genuine.
Soon you’ll be able to ‘subscribe’ to friends activities on Facebook and be notified about every single move they make. If all goes well, you’ll soon be able to see under the avatar of everyone of your friends this little link:
Facebook Subscribe Feature
With this nifty feature, every time you get on Facebook you’ll have notifications about everything the subscribed to person(s) did and you’ll be able to clamor your attention to the chosen one(s), making them feel good about how “interesting” their post was that it prompted you to comment and show how much attention you pay to them by the same token. Notwithstanding the little thrill you do now get when you comment on a post in the minute following its publication when, by pure chance, you ran into a post about which you had something to say from someone you actually care about .
“Chance” is the key word here, because up until now with your ever growing stream of friends and liked pages filling your timeline with their updates. Only Chance could hook you up with posts you actually cared about. With an ever bloating timeline one wonders how many are loosing interest in even looking at it; expecting it as so many times before, to be filled with the same old posts from that childhood classmate you just cannot come to terms with dropping or hiding.
Facebook Subscribe Notifications (Credit: Mashable)
Not anymore, assuming you are willing to have your notification box filled to the breams, you’ll now be able to create your own “nichework”, to hone in on and cultivate as well as your stalking abilities. Will that equte to less time spent aimlessly scanning your Facebook timeline? Will that mean more and better engagement?
Facebook Subscribe via SMS
The feature is in effect not entirely new since you can already subscribe to, or stalk, friends by clicking this little known link title “subscribe via SMS”. This action gets you an SMS about everything a friend initiates; i.e. will not notify of likes or check-in, as the new feature won’t either as reported by AllFacebook and so far confirmed by a Facebook statement to them:
“This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes).”
The new feature would be a boon for businesses from an engagement standpoint allowing them to react to their fans activity in a timely fashion, and in particular if users can also subscribe to activities of pages; how often do you, if ever, check your “updates” section on Facebook?
This will certainly modify the flow of communication on Facebook and make it closer in speed, and potentially in volume, to Twitter’s. Isn’t that what Facebook is looking for? It is very similar to creating Twitter lists or saving searches but with the added bonus of notifications allowing for a faster response and maybe better engagement.
This indeed constitues further Twiterization of Facebook since the micro-blogging platform allows notifications about:
Credit: TheOatmeal.com
- Specific people you choose via SMS but those quickly get drowned by DMs notifications, which turns on automatically if you “subscribe” to certain people
- Mentions of yourself, if you use certain clients such as Echofone on an iPhone, via “notifications”
- Direct messages (DMs) via SMS — feature they should allow to turn off as most of it is spam or auto-reponses — which is the equivalent of Facebook messages
Could this really mean a better, more meaningful Facebook experience? Or will it mean more people turning into “Rashes” and “sucking at Facebook“?
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What do you think? Will you use this feature?
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Why Influence is Bliss but Not Popularity
Both Brian Solis‘ statements are very true but what is this rarity really? ‘Influence’ is one of, if not THE holy grail of social media. In plain English, social influence: it is the ability for a brand to make people do things they want them to do through using social tools.
It is defined in the same way as in real life; i.e. the ability to effect a change in behavior in another person, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship to the influencer. Except that this influence exerts itself online.
Thus the higher level of social influence a brand has, the more ROI it will extract from its social activities; i.e.not only have people act upon what’s asked of them but have them further spread the request or even happily ‘work’ on that brand’s behalf.This is why it’s not only important to have a large audience and provide it with value but also to engage it, to be viewed as approachable and personable so that the audience can relate back, be influenced as well as have influential people on its side.
A level of social influence is calculated by factoring in different elements which vary depending on who you talk to. Klout is one of the forerunners in the field of Twitter influence measurement (they recently raised $5 million), defines it as a score over 100 that combines the following 3 factors:
- “True Reach” which is the size of the “engaged audience” size: total audience minus spamming and inactive accounts, overlaps of friends between accounts, among others
- “Amplification probability” which is the likelihood the brand’s content will be spread and acted upon: consists mainly of retweets and @ mentions
- “Network Influence” Klout uses this to basically reinject its own sauce into the equation and measures how influential are the people who follow, retweet, mention, list, … the brand.
You can see more details about your current Klout score. For context you can check FasTake’s Klout score details, which I’ve been nursing over the past year. Good news is that Klout provides very helpful hints to improve and don’t forget to refer back to this excellent article from @EFulwiler, I previously shared.
You can also see more details about the KScore calculation. There are others that dabble in this field but this one is the most prominent.
So next time you hear “Klout Score”, think: size + reach + entourage. Keep this equation in mind as you go about your daily activities as well as they do encompass the elements that drive your social activities if you are looking to generate actual ROI from it.
But is Klout the ultimate way to measure influence? What’s been your experience ? Have you used other scoring systems?
Jazz For Social Conversations
Tying Social Engagement To Financial Performance
Higher social engagement equals better financial results. That’s the basic conclusion the Wetpaint/Altimeter ”ENGAGEMENTdb | Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands” report reached. With references to correlations to hard Wall Street numbers, this could very well be true.
The debate on the value of social media for businesses is on its death bed. Its successor will have a much longer life, sitting at the table with other marketing channels veterans: TV, radio, print, PR, mail, email and the likes; all for whom ROI calculations methods are still being debated, tangled and clouded by all the confounding factors that make up and affect the precise measurement of any marketing mix.
Take TV advertising, notwithstanding that many argue this veteran itself to be on its way out and without questioning its certain impact, companies are still making billions every year touting they own the secret formulas to figuring out the perfect concoction of dollars, channels and time slots to obtaining a maximum return at the lowest cost.
Along the same lines but with the newbie that social media is, Wetpaint and Altimeter have made quite a smart move in touting there own business with the free release of the ENGAGEMENTdb report. An age old tactic but it does contribute to hastening the last breath of the debate on the business value of social media, an excellent thing in an of itself. The report delivers some excellent insights and raises the REAL question, at least for those of us who have already left the death bed side of the previous debate: “OK, social media is valuable. But how do we use it?” The simple answer is: ENGAGE! ENGAGE! ENGAGE!
Nebulous answer at best, I’ll concede. The difficulty with this concept is that it is very simple and super elusive at the same time. Before social media, the only place where social engagement really mattered was whether it fit on one’s calendar or not. Now, it is a business resource to reckon with and the holly grail in planet social. Elusive for still in its infancy and thus “plagued“ – for it to really succeed its soon to be ancestor – with crippling questions: What is it really?, How is it done? and above all, how is it measured?
The report provides plenty of engagement scores, with Starbucks as company and Media as industry, topping the 100 strong list of companies and among 12 industries. And since money talks, it also correlates financial performances to their engagement score.
To start off, the entire analysis is structured around two main axis: engagement (high to low) and channels involvement (few to many). Out of these 2 beacons and using a simple 4×4 matrix, 4 main groups emerge: the selectives, the mavens, the butterflies and the wallflowers.
A valuable way to segment brands by their social engagement level
Guess whose financial performance correlated best with their social media activity?
Looking at revenue growth, not a bad start
Plenty of great insights, specifically best practices and how interestingly exciting it is to see the differences between companies, some for whom the value question debate is alive and well it seems. But kudos to them nonetheless for, as the report very rightly puts it, ”start you must, or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience“.
One grip from me is the publishers evasiveness on describing the exact 40 attributes used to get to the engagement scores. Another secret concoction brewing? But that will be the subject of a separate post.
To download and read the entire report here: ENGAGEMENTdb | Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands Enjoy!
Your Social Audience, Super Size it or Engage it?
Type “allintitle:buy followers*” in Google and you will get around 7,000 results for Twitter and 1,400 for Facebook; small numbers by today’s standards but these alternatives do exist.
Yes! Size does matter but only relatively to objectives. Is audience size the key metric to social success? And if so, when can you say “we made it!”? Answers to some preliminary questions are crucial to hope finding an answer and avoid the all so frequent unfocused and thus fruitless approach to using social media a marketing channel. I address the objective setting issue in a separate post.
But back to size. Say you are all happy and proud that your Twitter page is showing 13,204 followers, above the 9,900 average according to Twitalyzer. Great! Now what is it you are doing with these followers? Are you:
- Shelling out 1-way communication mainly about your products and services Stuck in the old way with a new tool, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?
- Like a deer in headlights, unsure what to do and mainly retweeting in hopes to get a return?
- A cruising bot only relying on automatic feeds?
Have you established a following of quality? Or is it mainly composed of stuck-in-the-old-ways characters (some call them spammers)? Are you paying attention to what your audience is saying and showing you care?
More important than the size of your audience are the objectives you have set for yourself and your social media campaign. And almost more important than size and objectives is the engagement you are establishing with that audience or at least some form of conversation.
Although still a murky term and an “art” in its infancy, social engagement from a strict marketing standpoint, the term does apply for other purposes, could be defined as:
Creating conversations with customers and prospects that can morph basic sell-buy transactions into help you-me relationships.
The latter relationships morphing in turn, into better and more buy-sells.
The old saying went: “a satisfied customer will tell one person, a dissatisfied one will tell 10” but things have changed. Today, anyone can “report” or “praise“ your product / services to thousands, even millions with a few taps on a screen and it doesn’t matter whether you have a social presence, one will be made for you if you don’t. The good news is that Social media has increased that ”one satisfied customer“ by hundreds of folds and the ensuing ROI can be fantastic.
Conclusions?
- Building a sizable social audience is not the hardest but THE entry ticket and takes time
- Getting one that is of quality that will show a return is harder and requires even more time
- Engagement though is the magic glue without which size and quality will hardly retain any value much less any return
So, the next time you worry about your audience size, do something about it and snap out of it, but do spend your time improving upon its quality and leveraging what you already have to its fullest extent by engaging deeper.
*allintitle:buy followers, for those who don’t know, is a nifty Google code that will only return results for documents of which the title contains your keywords instead of anywhere in the document. Thus increasing your chances to find what you’re looking for faster
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