Our role is to help brands find ways to listen to, and learn from, these conversations and exchanges, plan effective ways to be involved, actively participate on their behalf and measure the effect over time.
Listen
Audiences are online, talking about their interests and needs, discussing and debating issues – including issues around brands and businesses.
We use conversation – or ‘buzz’ – monitoring tools to enable us to gather data on these discussions and exchanges. These tools enable us to:
- Very quickly sift through millions of locations and conversations
- Pinpoint those that are relevant to this brief
- Do so in real-time, and therefore on an ongoing basisReveal trends & patterns to inform our plans
There are three key types of data we gather; we call these the three ‘P’s of social media.
- The conversation topics and talking points – and the detail, volume and sentiment around these topics
- The online places where they choose to do this
- The people, groups, other businesses and brands involved – and who is most influential among them
Plan
We use our social media research to identify trends and patterns in social media ‘points’, ‘places’ and ‘people’.
Understanding – and meeting – both the brand’s objectives and the audience’s needs is critical in forming a social media strategy. We define a role for the brand in these social media conversations and exchanges – a way for the brand to help its audience create and share knowledge, opinions and content.
Having developed a strategy we work with the brand to define the ideas and activities that will make it come to life.
Our proprietary planning framework, “KUDOS”, helps to guide the creation of the best social media ideas, activities and talking points – ones that provide Knowledge, are Useful, Desirable, Open and Shareable.
PARTICIPATE
Creating content, information, tools and services will help define and develop a role for the brand within the conversation. But most importantly, the brand must actively participate within conversations. It must:
- Respond to the points that are directly relevant, or refer, to the brand
- Engage with audience members when it has something new or noteworthy to contribute
- Enlist its real fans to speak on its behalf, by giving them the talking points, content and tools to allow them to effectively advocate the brand’s thoughts and opinions.
Measure
Finally, we measure the effect of our activity – looking at changes in the level of coverage, audience engagement and actions connected to the brand’s social media activity.
Social media has myriad potential data sources – making it a challenge not only to gather the data, but also to interpret it and produce meaningful analysis. This analysis not only provides a measure of the impact of our activity, but also informs and evolves any subsequent activity.
We develop a simple, but meaningful, set of variables for each activity that can be monitored and analysed over time.
To help us gather and analyse data we have a developed a prototype activity measurement dashboard. This enables us to review results, to see trends and patterns in the data, and develop marketing insights.