Community Management

Creating Positive Engagement

Community management has evolved tremendously over the years as businesses are now interacting with audiences in new social media formats and platforms. Today’s fast-paced online conversations have become more sophisticated with technologies and tools that provide social updates and video uploads in real time, which have real-time impact on social conversations. As strategies are shaped around organic online growth, it’s important for companies to understand that the focus still needs to be on creating a positive experience for the people who actually comprise these communities.

Building Brand Loyalty

As social media channels proliferate, businesses can benefit greatly from adopting a social media management system (SMMS) that can effectively track and evaluate all of the company’s social media efforts. A comprehensive social media strategy, combined with an SMMS, will successfully position the business to build upon brand loyalty. A company can continue to grow loyalty by interacting properly and in real time with key influencers, target consumers, and potential customers.

Sharing Valuable Content

Businesses can improve their brand community by providing valuable information to their consumers and target market. Although it’s tempting to use social media channels to be self-promotional, businesses attract more customers by offering tips, ideas, and pieces of beneficial information. A well-planned strategy should encompass a variety of trusted sources that consumers can actually use in their daily activities. By recognizing needs of customers, a brand community will successfully continue to grow.

Enterprise Workflows

Identifying, Establishing, and Aligning Goals

It’s critical to start by working closely with your company’s executive team to ensure everyone is in agreement with all the necessary social media goals and objectives. The key players should agree on how the corporation’s goals are reflected through communication channels. The discussion should cover the over-arching mission, marketing plan, customer service, sales, as well as external and internal communication.

Mapping Out A Process

Establishing a cohesive process is necessary to create an effective workflow. Interviewing your company’s executive team about their existing workflow and specific business goals will allow those individuals to provide input and valuable feedback. Once all suggested processes are analyzed and evaluated, you can develop an enhanced workflow that will meet the growing needs of your business.

Training Your Staff

When launching a new workflow process, don’t forget to implement corresponding training and education sessions for employees involved in any aspect of the social media process. This should include real-time testing for flagging, tagging, and sharing messages, which will ensure the proper follow-up is managed correctly. By simulating these actions, including potential crisis situations, the teams will gain hands-on experience to deal with the newly introduced workflow process.

Social Influencers

Engagement Levels Brand Ambassadors

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Understanding Social Influencers

Influencers are found across all social media platforms and provide trusted information and insights to their followers. Influencers are sought out and respected by their audience because of their point of view on specific messages and comments.

Dependent on a variety of factors, influence can be neutral, positive, or negative. From topic relevance and perceived expertise, to absolute reach, influence can be attributed to individual people, websites, blog posts, or even a thought-provoking comment.

As more organizations use social media to reach out to their customers, they are seeking to develop and execute a strategy to engage regularly with influencers to generate value, resulting in increased interactions with customers on a more personal and relevant level.

Engaging With Influencers

Engaging with individuals who can influence your online reputation can help your company gain real value from social media. It’s important to know that influencers will be operating at different levels of involvement with your brand. Understanding an influencer’s level of engagement with your brand is key to successful interactions, but engaging often encourages them to be more active. Influencers can add value to your brand no matter their engagement level: Inactive, Brand conscious, word-of-mouth amplifiers, brand advocates, or brand ambassadors.

Developing A Strategy

When engaging with influencers, develop a plan that closely aligns with your social media strategy, target audience, and business objectives. When developing your influencer engagement strategy, identify your goals, listen to your target audience, carefully select social media monitoring tools, and understand your influencers.

Most importantly, build an honest relationship with your influencers to create successful engagement. These individuals are potential partners who can promote your brand because they both speak to and represent your target audience. By treating your influencers with respect and consistency, you’ll help provide them with a key position in conversations about your market. So be sure to expand conversations beyond your specific products, brand, or messages, to industry and market-wide topics.

Social Media Proliferation

Controlling Corporate-owned Accounts

Most enterprises average an overwhelming number of corporate-owned accounts that require on-going management. Based on a report from the Altimeter Group, a survey of 140 major companies in Q2 of 2011 found that they average 178 social accounts each, including company accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, as well as blogs and accounts on forums. That number doesn’t include employee accounts or Google+ accounts because those numbers weren’t available. But those numbers are available now. Altimeter recently reported that 77 of the top 100 brands now have Google+ pages, so the social media overload problem is likely getting worse for many of these companies.

The Altimeter study also found that 48% of the companies surveyed have a coordinated approach to managing all these social media accounts. Despite the overload, 70% of the respondents said that social media marketing efforts are helping the company meet business objectives.

Since social media is part of today’s business world, and most employees are involved in some form of social media, it’s important for companies to address both the personal and personnel aspect of social media in the workplace.

Today, a growing number of major corporations now have a sprawling public infrastructure of hundreds of social accounts, all being run on behalf of the brand. In addition, it’s essential for those organizations to understand the corresponding compliance risks of brand-owned social infrastructure, which is susceptible to everything from being hacked to being the source of liabilities from poor content handling.

Focusing On Governance

In today’s fast-paced business market, companies will benefit by focusing on social media governance, including developing a process for approving content and establishing rules for identifying unacceptable content. Involvement from the corporate legal team to create specific guidelines can also help reinforce an established procedure for such issues.

In addition, it’s important for companies to establish access management rules that limit the sharing of passwords. Developing a process for handling any unauthorized social media accounts, and tracking any and all incidents until resolved, is also a governance best practice.

Crisis Communication

In the world of social media, any news can go viral in minutes. When a crisis occurs, companies with a detailed social media crisis management plan in place can be properly prepared for the worst. A 2012 Gartner study reported that “75% of organizations with BCM [Business Continuity Programs] will have public social media services in their crisis communications strategies by 2015.” With effective goals and proactive processes in place during a crisis, social media is an ideal tool to quickly address the issue.

Staying Aware

Today’s customers expect companies to fully engage in social media. It’s in your company’s best interest to monitor influencers and messages on major platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and blogs. You should utilize social media tracking tools to remain up-to-date in all areas of the business, including products, services, website, events, and even competitors.

Listening Actively

Awareness is the cornerstone of crisis communication, but listening to your customers is equally important. Demonstrate to your customers that your company is empathetic and helpful. As you would in the non-virtual world, respond to negative comments and social media mentions in a timely manner. Addressing your customers’ concerns and issues quickly and professionally will result in a more positive experience for everyone involved.

Embracing Transparency

Your company and your customers both benefit when the issue or problem is acknowledged as quickly as possible. After thanking the consumer for their feedback, provide statements that address the problem and clearly show what is being done to solve it, as well as how it will be prevented in the future. Be sure to provide a direct line of contact to a person at the company who is working on solving the issue.

Communicating Feedback And Resolution

Providing feedback is necessary in handling a crisis because it helps provide closure. At the feedback stage, it’s all about helping customers feel appreciated and informed. In addition, consider posting updates on the situation to your broader audience via updates on social networks.

At the resolution of a crisis, acknowledge the individuals involved and thank them for their feedback and patience. The final communication should flow through all social media channels, outlining the solution, apologizing, and reassuring customers that steps are in place to avoid a similar situation in the future.

Analytics & Reporting

Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites, and analyzing it to make business decisions. You can use social media analytics to support the objectives of marketing, customer service, sales, and other areas of your business. Typical objectives include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, obtaining feedback on products and services, and improving public opinion of a product or business division.

Identifying Sentiment

Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a type of natural language processing for tracking the public’s mood about a particular product or brand. It involves collecting and examining opinions about the product or business made in blog posts, comments, reviews, or even tweets. Automated opinion mining often uses machine learning, a component of artificial intelligence.

Opinion mining can be extremely useful to evaluate the success of a campaign or product launch, determine which products or services are popular, or identify demographics. An opinion mining system is often capable of extracting knowledge and incorporating new data to improve the system’s performance over time. The process can be as simple as learning a list of positive and negative words, or as complicated as evaluating grammar and sentence structure.

Analyzing Text

Text mining is the analysis of data contained in natural language text, and text analytics is the application of text mining techniques to solve business problems. Your company can successfully use text analytics to gain insight into content-specific values such as sentiment, emotion, intensity, and relevance.

Text mining helps you derive potentially valuable business insights from text-based content on the web. Although mining data can be challenging due to inconsistent language, syntax, and semantics, effective text analytics software can result in structured, analyzed data with valuable information.

Setting Key Performance Indictors (KPIs)

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization. KPIs are applied in business intelligence to track business trends and advise tactical courses of action.

Ultimately, these indicators include quantitative metrics, such as process tracking and progress measurement, and help an organization assess progress toward declared goals. Before setting KPIs, define organizational processes, document clear business objectives, include quantitative and qualitative measurements, and adopt an active approach to finding and remedying variances.

Understanding Unstructured Data

Unstructured data is another area that requires robust analytics in order to reap tangible benefits for your business. Unstructured data describes any textural or non-textual information that is not in a database. Textual unstructured data is generated in media such as email messages, PowerPoint presentations, word documents, collaboration software, and instant messages. Non-textual unstructured data is generated in media like images and multimedia files.

Reporting

In today’s complex social media landscape, accurate and consistent reporting on social media monitoring has been an ongoing challenge. In fact, most companies that require accurate reporting have been forced to pull information from a variety of platforms to create reports, which can be an extremely time-consuming process.

To resolve this issue, your businesses will benefit by adopting a social media management system that enables data to be pulled simultaneously from a variety of social media channels. For best results, look for the ability for complete customization of graphs, charts, and other valuable information to clearly illustrate the performance of your company’s social media outreach.

The most effective reporting tools will also provide the ability to access granular metrics on the efficacy of your company’s social media programs. This will determine a great deal of essential information, from identifying which messages result in the highest number of conversions, to which channel provides the greatest return.

Summary

Enhanced social media management systems (SMMS) have opened a new world to organizations that understand its over-arching business value. Social media management provides companies with access to unprecedented volumes of seemingly limitless and worthwhile information that can positively affect business growth on a variety of levels. Use social media analysis to shed light on customer buying trends, provide insights on public opinions, and foster unique engagement opportunities.

Not surprisingly, the largest challenge today, which confronts everyone from data giants like Facebook to small businesses active on social media, is how to harness and process all of this information and turn it into effective actions.

Emerging systems for analyzing the robust amounts of data flowing in from social media can now effectively and accurately track multiple social stats in real-time, from “tweets” and “likes” to overall customer sentiment. These new social media management and tracking capabilities can radically improve customer service and predict future buying patterns, as well as streamline internal communication and increase productivity.

In addition, as more companies begin to increase social media education for their existing employees, the workforce will continue to gain an added level of social media knowledge, with those skills becoming basic business literacy in the digital age. Perhaps most critical of all will be social media compliance training, to ensure that workers in various industries from finance to healthcare uphold regulatory standards while taking advantage of social media’s benefits.

In 2013 and beyond, companies that have taken an active role in enhancing their social media management will continue to reap rewards across all areas of the business. Through improved social media technologies, innovative engagement, and most importantly, comprehensive tracking and measurement processes, those forward-thinking organizations that have embraced social media management will continue to see an expanded customer base around the globe.

[Download PDF to see Chart]