Learning from the Social Media Footprint
By Maggie August 20th, 2008
In Stories
The information gathered using various free and paid-for tools across the internet all help map out the social media footprint of a brand. However, it is how you organize this data that makes the footprint a useful snapshot of your brand. A brand can use the social media footprint to answer questions about online activity that can provide insights for their future marketing strategies. In general, the tools available can provide information on three different levels: audiences, topics and issues, and influencers. Here I’ll briefly describe how they relate to the social media footprint, and highlight the relevant tools and social media data available:
1) Your audience
Who is your audience? The audience in the social media footprint is made up of different types of users whose online behavior affects your brand’s footprint in specific ways. See more on how to identify audience needs online and audience segmentation to get a better idea on how audiences fit into the overall picture. For example, types of audience include people who write blogs or upload content relevant to your brand, people who are rating your product through forum discussions, commenting on blogs, or submitting reviews. Or maybe they are just exposed to your brand via online activity, like visiting your brand web site, reading a corporate blog, viewing an ad on YouTube, or using a widget associated with your brand.
One key question is: What activities are occurring online around your brand, and how does this distinguish your audience? It is therefore particularly important to disentangle the audience of the social media footprint. By finding out not only who is doing the talking and where, but by knowing how your brand’s strengths are part of these passionate conversations, your brand can tailor more specific and effective social media communication so that it is meaningful to your audience.
The raw data from audience research of social media can include forum posts, comments on blogs, blog posts, site visits, membership on a social network or web site, video views/uploads/ratings, etc. For example, Google Groups provides a way to search online groups, member discussions, group categories, and the activity level of individual groups by keywords.
A brand that makes cell phone applications, for example, could find that there is a significant amount of conversations around GPS services on a cell phone, and that university students, not business travelers, have the most activity around this discussion.
2) Topics and issues
Topics are any point of discussion that occur around your brand (like the discussion of music, TV shows, headphone brands, etc. around iPods), while issues are the specific needs or concerns that matter to your audience (like battery life, iTunes song prices, environmental concerns of e-waste, etc.). What issues are being discussed in relation to your brand? What topics spark the most discussions? By looking at the conversations that occur *around* your brand (not just discussions *about* your brand), you can get a clearer idea of what topics and issues spark online activity, which means you’ll know what your audience cares enough about to share, interact with, post, comment on …
These topics and issues are a key part of the social media footprint because they are indicators of the areas your brand can make the biggest impact by engaging with your audience on their own terms. For example, by offering something interesting to talk about, facilitating the conversation, or providing a useful service or tool to solve one of the issues. A tool like BlogPulse, for example, compares the number of blog posts on any keyword, and graphs the data over 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months, providing a useful snapshot of trends in the discussions for a brand, or related brands or topics (what we term the “ripples” around the social media footprint of our brand). Data you may get in topic and issues research can include include blog posts, news items, forum posts, topical groups, etc.
3) Influencers
Who and what will influence your audience to be active online? Influencers have more of an impact in the social media footprint, since they tend to have a bigger share of the conversation and bring about more online activity. Influencers can be a popular blog that can have an impact on popular opinion, like the social networking blog Mashable. However, it also can be things like relevant news items (e.g. a celebrity DUI arrest influences users to talk about drunk driving) or simple word-of-mouth from friends, like on Facebook. A tool like Alexa can give a basic indication of influential sites by showing their traffic rank over time, for example. Relevant data may include blog posts, blogs, news items, specific web sites, site visits, search engine rankings.
But before going and collecting output from the many tools out there, it is useful to remember that in general, asking the right questions — about an audience or issue — is key to gaining useful insights, rather than gathering a mess of raw data. The social media footprint is comprised of hundreds — if not hundreds of thousands — of sources; data from this research can be anything from the number of YouTube videos for a particular topic, the number of posts or activity level of group members in a specific forum, or the number of blog posts on a topic.
At R*M, our process starts with a clear strategy for what elements of the social media footprint we want to examine as part of our project, and using the data from this research to hone in on to specific online activity around the plan. Above all, the social media footprint is best put to use by being able to pinpoint the information you need most to create a complete picture. The tools listed above are intended to be examples of the tools we use most often to perform general research in the three areas of the social media footprint . We are exploring the use of both paid-for and free tools as part of our overall research process and piecing the data together to form insights about online behavior. In future posts we plan to compare the different tools out there and highlight their pros and cons and suitability for measuring different aspects of the social media footprint. Please let us know of any in particular you would like to see covered.
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