There are a few social media monitoring tools out there these days. You get the basics out of tools like Facebook’s Insights or LinkedIn’s company page statistics. There’s a variety of good tools from many vendors offering more than the basics. And then there’s some being bought up by the likes of IBM, Cisco and Oracle. The market has matured enough that there are tools for just about every social business maturity level.

And here’s another one…

Sprout Social, which already offers a good social media management and engagement tool, throws another one into the game. This one, though, is unique (…and free!). No matter your organization’s social business maturity level, Sprout Social’s new #BePresent experiment offers an insight I’ve not seen in any other tool: engagement.

There are other tools out there that try to crack this nut. Dachis Group’s Social Business Index (SBI) and NetBase’s Brand Passion Index (BPI) each take a good look at brand equity in the social space. These tools are very good at helping you understand your place in the social world, but they don’t offer immediate hints at what you might do different.

What I like about out Sprout Social’s new #BePresent initiative is the easy-to-understand hints around how you might improve your org’s social engagement and where you might fit amongst peers. The cues are a bit more actionable than either the SBI or the BPI from those other vendors and they provide a simple benchmark to get you on your way.

Here you can easily get a sense of how you’re performing with some idea on how you might improve. That’s subjective, of course, but that’s where Sprout Social’s flagship product can provide more insight. But here you can see how well I engage with my fellow tweeps:

My 64th percentile ranking… is it good? Not sure. That 5-hour response time? Seems decent. 24 replies? Well, I’m not ignoring folks

Or to look at things a bit differently, here’s where I map on a quadrant. I’m more to the right, but not quite on the “upside”, but all-in-all I seem to chart well:

Take a look. At the very least you might gain a new perspective into how well (or not so well) you think you’re engaging with your social audience. Take what you see and make necessary course corrections. But do so with a grain of salt and with some consideration of your own style and willingness to engage. And if so convinced, follow-through with the call-to-action and give Sprout Social’s SMM tool a try.

PS – One criticism overall… for a social listening company, Sprout Social might have chosen a better hashtag. #BePresent isn’t unique, but perhaps they’ll to make me eat my words with a terrific Twitter campaign.

For those wondering how I scored overall, here’s a PDF version of how “BePresent” I am:

This infographic from Solve Media walks us through the latest online buzzphrase, “native advertising,” which roughly applies usability science to content marketing and social engagement.  To toss-in another buzzphrase, we’re looking at an application of  the “intention economy.”

Let me ‘splain. People are wary of the general bombardment of information they experience at all moments of their daily living. Paradoxically over the past decade, we’ve learned how to cut through the noise and how to find the best shortcuts around the information highway. It’s need based. Consumers are asking for specific help, they want solutions providers to deliver meaningful options to them. Think of the fabled “want” button on Facebook and what the use of such a button could mean for buyers and sellers.

Engaging in “native advertising” requires a marketer to understand the audience and anticipates how that audience wants to be engaged. You’re going to need to bring together web analytics, marketing automation, social analytics, ERP and CRM contact histories to build data-centric user personas. It’s going to feel creepy at first, but messaging via “native advertising” will put your content into the minds of those who seek it.

For the big data set, this is marketing Shangri-La. Or is it the other way around?

Depending on your listening tool, your results might be skewed by aggregator results. Some questions to ask:

• It the reported site on topic?
• Can you filter them out?
• Attribute to the original source?

That being said, there is something happening that can be measured, but it’s time we think differently about which “measuring cup” we use and how we use it. Susan Etlinger (@setlinger), Andrew Jones (@andrewjns) and the folks at @AltimeterGroup have taken to explain how ROI can be looked at, both qualitatively and quanitatively, through a social media lens.

I couldn’t agree more with the thesis that an effective toolset indeed has ingredients within a larger recipe.

6 Ways of Measuring Revenue Impact of Social Media

Despite promises made by any number of social measurement vendors in this market today, none, and I mean NONE, of them can report on any sort of true representation of what you might call ROI for your social investments. There certainly are a lot of fascinating startups out there trying to crack this nut, but looking at how audiences interact with brands and each other, there currently don’t exist and unique keys to this puzzle.

Top-Down

Altimeter offers a great model on how to approach this problem which should meet in the middle for both sides of the ruler (see figure 5 below). The Top-Down approach looks at conversation and how it begets more conversation and thus correlation to peaks and valleys in your reporting matrices. This is very important in understanding what drives awareness, thought leadership and influence. There is no hard and fast way to measure the impact of such activity, which understandably creates some angst in organizations accustomed to proving points through data.

Bottom-Up

The bottom-up approach is where you can use metrics to help tell your story, or to at least ask the question, “And then what?” as you review successes and challenges. I call these metrics the “how manys” and have served well to capture the attention of managers. This opens the door to conversations around content effectiveness, message alignment, and so on, which then circles-back to the Top-Down measures looking for the best possible correlations to demonstrated behaviors across social channels.

Put these together and you can create powerful metrics models to prove your efforts are working. Can you call this ROI? Absolutely. But don’t lose sight that social media marketing is still very much in its infancy while related market forces are indeed changing social media’s growth cycle.

Here are a few points to consider as you ponder the question “And then what?” These should lead you through conversations that help you prioritize tactics for achieving social media ROI. If you can attach these measures to what your doing on Twitter or Facebook, you’re doing it right.

Hopefully this report from Altimeter gets you as hungry as I am to try new recipes to cook up some social ROI. It’s still anyone’s game to claim the title of social media “Top Chef.” Use these insights to develop the menu that works best for you.

It’s easy to recite the old gem, “Figures lie and liars figure” when watching this video. It’s easy to doubt any stat you’ve ever seen. If you don’t doubt ever stat, then you’re in the 96th percentile of dumb people.

(I just made that up.)

My point is, consider stats and ask why they mean what the writer says they mean. I bet you’ll come away with more questions than answers.

1

Why Social Listening, Social Monitoring, Social Analytics, or Sentiment Analysis? Pick one. They all mean more or less the same thing to a lot of people. Better yet, these phrases mean almost nothing to 43% of professional marketers (I made that up, too). If you’re engaged in any social analysis project, your first question should always be “Why?”. Your second question should likewise be “Why?”. Your third question should be… wait for it… “Why?”.

Asking “Why?” when looking at social metrics — what I fondly refer to as the “how manys” — is especially important if you wish to make reasonable business decisions based on those numbers. Engagement rates are all well and good, but are you using that math to glean insight into WHY those engagement are successful?

Example engagement rate formula (borrowed from @CMSwire):

2

Decide ahead of time what you’re measuring against. If your goal is simply audience acquisition, then that’s fine. Use a basic spreadsheet to track those numbers over time. At the most fundamental level, you’ll have some understanding that your social media efforts might be working. This metric, albeit fairly shallow, is the perfect number about which you ask… “Why?”

3

Document an action plan. Month over month, your social metrics and analysis should provide you a very actionable task. But you have to be asking “Why?” to get here. Let’s assume that during May, your organization was mentioned 1,000 times on Twitter. Great. That’s a lot of voices interested in you. But why? Is there a customer service issue? A popular product? A scintillating ad campaign? Why are those folks compelled to mention you? What can you do about it? Even if a positive stream of content, there is something you can do. Think about it.

Don’t forget to ask…

Why?

Consultant Analyst
– Marketing Science Lab

Apply Today!

Job Description
Marketing’s Big Data Science Lab is designed to share insight with our partners by serving as a catalyst, consultant, analyst for marketing-wide decision support using advanced analytics. Our charter is to apply rigorous data mining and data-backed reasoning to real-world issues to better understand marketing effectiveness, customer buying behavior, segmentation patterns and more. The Marketing Science Lab will have three pillars: (i) data scientists who will use advanced econometric modeling techniques to detect patterns in big data, (ii) data archeologists who will provide a lighter version of analysis for a more comprehensive understanding of campaign performance or marketing trend variance discovery, and (iii) a data quality management effort to continually evolve customer data quality.

If bringing your passion for analytics, big data and marketing to architect a new capability for EMC seems like a positive step for your career, we ask that you apply today.

Brief Description of Role
The Consultant Analyst (Req ID – 86635BR) of the Marketing Science Lab will be a part of a larger EMC big data analytic community but report directly into the Director of Marketing Sciences. This position will partner with the marketing leadership team, the Global Campaign Teams, Field Marketing, Sales and Voice of the Customer to understand business opportunities, problems, and trend variance to identify analytic assignments to deliver actionable insight. In an analytic capacity, this position will leverage data from a variety of social and traditional platforms to deliver actionable insight for business decision making and monitoring. The primary focus for this analyst will be to understand social trends and sentiment tied to EMC’s product footprint, as well as evaluate and monitor the overall heath, engagement and traffic patterns for EMC’s Community Network.

Technical/Functional Qualifications
The candidate must be passionate about learning new platforms to access data, be exceptionally inquisitive to explore trends and have the technical ability to combine data for ad hoc analysis. Although not required, interest in learning about more advanced statistical methodologies is a plus.

• Bachelor or MS in economics, statistics, marketing or a related field with a strong interest in iterativeanalysis for marketing, media and community behavior optimization
• 3-5 years experience working in BtB CRM environments (client and service side) across marketing and sales. Keen understanding of how business processes curate data and to navigate through data using a variety of tools, including Jive, Access, Omniture, Attensity among other social tools
• Experience and/or awareness web analytics and user behavior trends
• Ability to synthesize findings with executive ready presentations of findings and recommended outcomes
• Discplined approach to identify key performance indicators that may not currently exist in the business, especially around community and social, and report out on a regular cadence
• Skilled at understanding high-level business questions, objectives, and needs in order to develop a thoughtful and robust analytics strategy
• Brings a highly creative approach to quantitative analysis and problem solving and is able to comfortably think outside the traditional methodologies to analyze data and render findings
• Comfortable with the integration of external third party data sources (e.g., market research, demographic, macro-economic data) with internal transactional data to model and understanding consumer behavior and their response to marketing exposure
• Proven ability to communicate, both written and oral, effectively with individuals from various aspects of business, from Senior Executives to line level employees and external business partners
• The candidate should be able to clearly synthesize and communicate technical analytical results to increase our business partners’ understanding of the findings and their confidence in our capabilities

EMC is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that values the strength diversity brings to the workplace.

EMC does not accept unsolicited Agency Resumes. EMC will not pay fees to any third party agency or firm that does not have a signed “EMC Agency Fee Agreement.”

RELATED: How Much Would You Pay For A Fan? (@CMSWire)

Storified by Keith Paul · Wed, Apr 18 2012 02:23:17

Ah-ha, indeed. Without giving away @EMCcorp’s secret social sauce, here’s some insight into how we’re transforming social listening into business intelligence, oh, and figuring out the whole social selling thing, too

Let’s look at some of the ingredients to that secret sauce: Attensity, Traackr, HootSuite, Jive, Omniture, Salesforce, Aprimo. Dizzying, I know. Each of these plays a huge role. And those are the bigger spokes on our social analytics journey. There are other tools, there are other players, there are a bazillion other factors.

For the past 2 years, EMC has been actively looking at social listening to answer a number of questions. We started with this question, as I suspect most of you did:

What the heck are people saying?

And the second question:

How do I begin to comprehend this stuff?

The advice I’ve been giving to folks asking these questions across EMC is surprisingly apropos, 24 months into this journey: Start small.

We’re lucky to have a framework in place that gives us some context to help folks start small. We aggregate what I call the “how manys” for our social champions. That’s the followers, likes, fans, friends, tweets, posts, blogs and so on that marketing managers like to count in order to show that their respective needle moves. These are important numbers to do some valuable engagement math, but in and of themselves, not valuable. They’re not valuable until given a contextual layer. About nine months ago, the EMC Social Team made the decision to separate social metrics from social listening. We found great variations in the understanding of either data set. Today, we use those “how manys” to lead our marketing brethren into conversations about the context and value they provide social audiences. Awesome stuff to see someone else’s ah-ha! moment when they realize numbers are good, but words are better.

Don’t get me wrong, these metrics reviews are great for executive dashboards. Social listening provides the context that informs what the numbers mean.

Correlation or Causation?

A fun topic. This also helps me help folks engage with the numbers to, well, engage with people. That’s the entire point behind any of this… creating social intelligence from the conversations and interactions between a wide cross-section of audiences. They all relate. They all contribute to the bottom line, however it’s defined. No matter what your particular goal might be in developing a social voice, it’s rooted in the connections you make with audiences. We’re part of a great shift in marketing thinking today… truly developing REAL Social CRM as we go. Are you loving the ride? (Say yes.)

Taking Action

That’s the foundation of EMC’s social journey. Oh, and this fun video:

The message in this video is the cultural foundation we’ve put into place across the company to help folks ease into social, or even validate what we’re up to. (Here’s a bit of additional history.) It’s all about the journey for us, building upon each achievement level before tackling the next. (Hmm… do I smell “gamification?”)

We’ve been methodical from the beginning. We started inside-out, getting employees comfortable with EMC|ONE our internal Jive-based community, then expanded to the EMC Community Network, also on Jive to enable our customers and partners and give them direct access to EMC thought-leaders. Then we explored the blogs and Facebooks and Twitters of the world. Have I mentioned it’s been a fun journey? We have cross-functional teams literally redefining how we connect and collaborate.

Connecting the Dots

Remember the tools I listed above? They each play a supporting role in supporting our journey to social intelligence. We have heavyweight analytic and BI tools, we have lightweight social interaction tools. We’re plugging them all into each other. The end goal is a scalable and repeatable model by which social media fuels the engine that keeps EMC’s funnel swirling. We’re not just taking stock of who’s saying what. We’re taking careful looks at that data to decide how best to interact. Should we route to support? To sales? To PR? Who responds to which tweet? Sometime obvious, sometimes not.

Last fall, I put together a hub and spoke model for our social listening efforts. With the help of some (tiny) friends, I interviewed a number of stakeholders throughout EMC which help define 5 primary use cases where listening could provide tremendous value to our business. These use cases continue today to help us define the plumbing through which our social BI flows.

Some of the implementations seem obvious… for example, we weren’t doing a consistent job of connecting social traffic to EMC.com, measured with Omniture. We’re getting better at that as it’s literally the foundation upon which you start to build a monitization framework. Get the leads. Simple, right?

Sort of.

So we think we have a “social lead.” What do we do with it? Again, EMC is extremely lucky to have the industry’s best social team housed WITHIN our inside sales org. These folks are doing bleeding edge work connecting with customers and partners, helping them find the answers and solutions they need. This team is leading the charge into putting putting Benioff’s money where his mouth is. We’re starting to make Salesforce part of this process. It’s a huge cultural shift. How do we change the habits of very successful sales people who are used to booking big deals old school style, often with a Blackberry as the technology of choice.

The Grail

Aprimo? Oh yeah… getting social there, too. Our social intelligence workstreams all point to the holy social CRM grail. Our 2012 vision has our social conversations treated as true business intelligence. When we see it through, EMC will truly be drinking its own champagne. We’ll look at social BI as one data source feeding one of our sexy Greenplum DCAs. And we’ll share it with data geeks across the EMC globe, Facebook-style.

Can’t wait to see where this takes us, but social’s day is certainly coming.

Over the past few years the social media marketing or social media business (pick a phrase) marketplace has seen a number of social media monitoring tools enter the space. Likewise a raft of social media management tools. This year, the debate will continue on the notion of unified stacks bringing the two together. Not sure that’ll happen as has been predicted, but any of SMM categories will need to do a better job of aggregating common data that industry folk like me can easily consume and compare.

All the while, a number of new groups and associations are popping-up to support the notion of educating and credentialing Social Media Professionals. I’m honored to play an advising role for one such group, the National Institute for Social Media.

The rise of the social consumer, wonderfully illustrated as a social media decision process by Brian Solis, makes the idea of a social media analyst all the more important. The space is grown far beyond social media managers posting stuff on Facebook and Twitter. It’s grown far beyond blokes like me listening to the chatter. Like our direct marketing cousins, social needs a champion to dive deep into the insights and be a sherpa through the mountains of social data.

So what does all this mean?

Social analysts are coming. If for nothing else, than to support the products Adobe, Infegy, SAP/NetBase, IBM and SAS are pumping out. As with any data analysis group in any org out there, I see a new cadre of social analysts coming, all charged with solving these challenges and meeting these opportunities:

• Capturing comprehensive data sets, both organic as well as those that are a product of social marketing activities.

• Analyze & interpret the data appropriately, and tell the story from an objective point of view.

• Help stakeholders understand the data, where it comes from, and the actionable insights embedded within.

• Work with stakeholders on what they are trying to accomplish, e.g. what problem they wish to solve.

• Make stop/start/continue recommendations on social engagement strategies and tactics.

• Inform and enable the way an org communicates, engages and collaborates with our social audience.

• Help orgs look to social channels as primary research and engagement channels for conducting business.

Earth shattering, right?

</sarcasm>

I jest, but only in the notion that social analyst types are out there. They just might not know it yet. They’re traditional data geeks who haven’t yet made the social connection, they’re advanced social listeners who can pull valuable business intelligence from social activity and trends. Most of all, they know social and they know it can drive business decisions.

For all of this I put forth this strategy, or manifesto if you will. It’s a cheeky play on the old push/pull marketing debate. It goes like this:

PULL-PUSH-PULL

1. Ask the customer
   Do you know what your customer is looking for? Looking to share? Whom to share it with?
2. Inform the process
   Are you measuring success? Failure? Is the data telling you to act?
3. Iterate engagement
   Wash, rinse, repeat. Engage in as many ways as possible. With the data. And your customer.

There you have it. Get out there and manifest your social destiny.