Ryan MacMillan

A couple of posts ago, I described what some of us here at R*M term Social Media Footprint, and talked a little about what might be termed Social Media Footprint Analysis. In this post I’ll elaborate on what Social Media Footprint Analysis might be, why we all need it, and how this relates to a more detailed picture of the Social Media Footprint.

As previously mentioned, social media allows us to engage with, and gather information about, consumers, markets, users and communities. We can also identify and engage with principal individuals within these groups, such as commentators, influencers, evangelists, or critics. Information from what are in effect customer satisfaction surveys and focus groups can be collected for your own - or competitors’ - products, organisations, or causes. In some cases this information is available for free (if the data is public and if you have the appropriate tools to interrogate the data). However, some social media data (for example, much of Facebook’s) is private and protected by passwords, and therefore not accessible to search engines. Like traditional top-down media, social media should be monitored and managed, but this needs to be done differently. A large part of this is using the right tools for the job, and this is something we are developing through our Social Media Footprint Analysis (SMFA, for short). Not that organisations need to change the media that they operate in (we all have favourite examples of companies needlessly turning online for no good reason), but that even traditional media can take advantage of consumer needs and perceptions derived from social media. This is our thinking behind the Social Media Footprint Analysis: its aim is to be a service that can make existing - as well as new - media strategies more effective.

I’ll now elaborate a little more about how our ideas of a Social Media Footprint have been developing. In my last post I noted that this is more like a carbon footprint than a lesser-spotted-yeti-footprint. My reasoning for this was that like a carbon footprint, a Social Media Footprint is evaluated so that it can be better managed in future. However, another reason why they are similar is that we cannot choose whether or not we have a Social Media Footprint or carbon footprint, we just have them. In daily life, we have a particular image and others build up perceptions of us: if they don’t know us very well, then often they will fall back on stereotypes, based on our broad characteristics, or who we associate with.

Now forgive me for getting a little poetic here (allegorical, if you will…), and I’ll elaborate further on the Social Media Footprint. In the previous post, I compared the Social Media Footprint to that of a satellite’s coverage of the earth. Here, the satellite is the brand, the earth is the web and the footprint is all of the times that the brand, its products services and associated terms are mentioned online. This can include web sites blog posts and comments, forums and groups’ video/images and comments. In other words a brand’s social media footprint is its coverage on the web. The key to this idea is that we are not concerned with the behaviour of the brand itself, but rather the impression, or “Footprint” that it leaves in social media space. We also develop this footprint metaphor further: while the Social Media Footprint relates to the social media presence of a specific brand (e.g. blogs talking about Laphroaig), we also talk about “Ripples” around the Social Media Footprint, which relate to similar brands or products (e.g. Lagavulin’s social media presence would provide Ripples for Laphroaig whisky) or which might result from the more general social media presence of “alcohol” in its broadest sense online (or even Thin Lizzy for that matter!).

So back to being practical - why should we, or anyone else for that matter, bother with their Social Media Footprint? Well, firstly because we need to! Like a carbon footprint, everyone has a Social Media Footprint whether they want one or not, large or small, directly (that is, via direct references to the brand) or indirectly (as a result of Ripples from other brands or the market area generally associated with the brand). Basically, if you don’t fill your Social Media Footprint, the void will be filled by others - for better or worse. The first part of managing your Social Media Footprint is to understand it.

Secondly, because Social Media Footprints enable us to contextualise a brand and can offer competitive advantage. This is where we engage and wrestle with social capital (for more on this topic, see Leo and Dan’s Contagious description of social capital in the context of KUDOS). It offers amazing opportunities to gather information about markets, users and consumers; commentators, influencers, competitors; evangelists and critics. All in the context of what they think, feel, or believe about the brand. To some extent, here we measure existing social capital. Effectively, these are fantastically willing focus groups… both for our own brand, and for *competitors*! By better understanding our Social Media Footprint we can begin to engage with these groups directly, opening a conversation to help improve the direction our brand is taking and future developments. In doing so, building social captial.

So what would we want a Social Media Footprint Analysis service to do?
Well, in addition to helpings identify *what* is being said, for example, whether it is positive or negative, it is also important to gauge a brand’s ’share of conversation’ online (and the proportion of those respective views). The accuracy of this kind of analysis will depend on the amount of data surveyed and the volume of public conversations about that brand online. Additionally, how might R*M use this Social Media Footprint Analysis service, or how can we bring our “animal expert” (or zoologist, or cryptozoologist - thanks Dan;) marketing expertise to add value? Primarily, the use of Social Media Analysis information will be to provide competitor, consumer and company research that can fuel marketing insights, and that will also on an ongoing basis provide benchmarks against which we can measure the effectiveness of our marketing activities.

The expertise that R*M can bring to these type of analyses is an understanding of what data sources can be interrogated, and an understanding of all the tools that we can use to do so, and what data, trends and patterns they might uncover. This is particularly important in the fast-changing social media world (such as the service recently launched by Google), and we will continue to highlight new tools in this blog. Additionally, our experience will enable us to use social media effectively to generate a quick snapshot, or a thorough audit - or anything in between - and also how to relate this to other third-party and company research. In the next post we will describe these tools and expertise in a more detail. In the meantime, do please give us suggestions if there is a particular aspect you would like to be discussed…