Stage Two's blog

Twitter’s attraction in the past year or so has been quite intriguing. For most companies, there’s probably still some confusion as to what it’s good for to generate leads, sales, profits, etc., but this number is slowly dwindling as the months go by. And in a sure sign of Twitter’s growing popularity, a study conducted by the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) found out that in 2009, companies listed in the Fortune 500 were eagerly signing up and jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. It seems that these large brands like General Motors, Exxon Mobil, US Steel, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and Boeing are finally understanding the potential Twitter can play across all spectrums of the communication channel.

Here are some other interesting statistics:

• AdWeek reports that 35% of the Fortune 500 companies on Twitter had active accounts – meaning that they had posted something within the past 30 days.
• With the top 100 companies, 47 of them actually had a Twitter account
• 22% of all the Fortune 500 brands only had “public-facing corporate blogs”
• 4 of the 5 top corporations consistently post to their Twitter account – Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and GE
• Insurance was the industry with the largest Twitter presence – 13 Fortune companies participating
• 19%  of Fortune 500 corporations were using podcasting and 31% using video blogging

So what does this mean? From the standpoint of companies and brands, it shows that now the large companies are starting to pay attention to social media. In its infancy, social media was probably viewed by large corporations as something that couldn’t scale. However, more companies are now embracing it and what may have started out as a small experiment within brands like Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and GE has exploded into being a major part of their marketing channel.

But why is Twitter becoming the medium of choice to communicate with customers instead of blogging? Sure, blogging will get you to post your own thoughts and get your message across, but when you compare the potential audience on Twitter versus the one currently visiting your blog, there’s a big difference. For one, you can send out a tweet to anyone  - just a random thought on Twitter and it’s not limited to being seen by the people following you. Secondly, you’re going to be able to see how viral your message can really get through retweets and commentary. Without wanting to sound cliche, you’re going to be able to join in the “conversation” in near ‘real-time” as well. Imagine being in a large reception area where people are talking about different things. You being there is representative of you being on Twitter. In walking around, you might hear something said about your company, brand and/or product OR something else not-related, but interesting. By you interjecting to be a part of that discussion, you’re engaging customers. You can’t necessarily do exactly that in a blog, or at least not in real-time. This is probably what companies are discovering and find that Twitter lets them relate to their customers on their level, NOT from the customer. This is pretty much the same thing with all other forms of social media.

So what is the power behind this social media and what is its appeal? It seems pretty clear that companies are starting to think more “outside the box” and seeing a little less clutter in social media than there are with other mediums like traditional advertising, radio/broadcast, websites, etc. Also, the statistics shown above are saying that these Fortune 500 companies are thinking that if they want to get involved with customers, they’re going to have to find a new way of reaching them – essentially going to where the customers are spending their time.

Source: AdWeek and iMediaConnection

Just because social media is practically free does not mean that companies can run with a program and hope that it makes them millions of dollars. In fact, it seems that the fact that it’s free means that you need to take it a bit slower and look closely as to the right application of the service and make sure that it doesn’t hurt the message that you’re trying to send out.

In an eMarketer report on February 11, 2010, it is reported that social media has essentially plateaued. By this, I mean that it has reached a point of maturation where marketers can no longer simply stand idly by and let social media programs run on their own. Moreover, it is becoming even more readily apparent that marketers are also understanding that it’s not a matter of whether social media should be part of their marketing mix, but how and where should it reside. Bottom line here? In order to run a great marketing campaign, thorough planning must be necessary.

Public relations thought-leader, principal of FutureWorks PR and author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, Brian Solis wrote in a Mashable article a pretty good summary of this issue:

Instead of researching the best ways to engage, many businesses create accounts across multiple social networks and publish content without a plan or purpose. However, businesses that conduct research will find a rewarding array of options and opportunities.

Just automatically setting up things you think you’d need versus sitting down and plotting the objectives, goals, plan of attack and measurement of success won’t lead you to the ROI you so desire. Instead, don’t rush with social media. Look at your audience, what’s being said about you and what tools are available that maximize your reach. Don’t think that all tools in social media must be used, because they don’t have to. As highlighted in the eMarketer.com article, if you have a strategy, you’ll be taken much more seriously than someone who sprays and prays with social media. It is believed that customers think most, if not all, companies should be savvy in using social media so having the knowledge and information lends more credibility and authenticity.

As a benefit of planning and organizing your social media efforts, you’ll be able to look even more closely at the purposes for your web 2.0 needs. In the above chart, you can see some of the top reasons for using social media by US Executives. Over 80% of the respondents indicated that they wanted to use social media to build their brand while over half indicated it was for networking opportunities. Regardless of your needs, you can see that through planning and organizing your thoughts, you can build a strategy that can be integrated with your other marketing channels and help accomplish your objectives, whether it’s research, business development, networking or simply generating awareness about your company.

The message here: don’t operate things in a silo. Social media is nothing special that necessitates it being separated from the rest of your communications channel. Plan for social media like you do your other marketing campaigns and you’ll reap all the rewards from it.

For a lot of people, the one thing we know what Twitter is used for is conversation. For businesses to possibly get at least a hint of usefulness, we’d need to look at metrics. Now with social media, the metrics we look at and analyze are different from other online metrics – which is to be expected. In this area, we’re going to be looking for influence, because that’s one of, if not THE, main measurements of assessing the return on investment. Sure, with Twitter you could track all your links using Google Analytic tracking, but keep in mind that not all tweets will have a link. What’s more, you’re not interested in links. You’re going to want to be interested in evangelists and people who you believe are really passionate about your product. Once you’ve found them, you’re going to need to gauge their influence over others. So how exactly can you do this? Well currently it doesn’t seem possible with Twitter directly, but there are several tools that can help shed some light on this area for you.

In this blog post, I’m going to look at three well-known Twitter influence analyzing tools: Klout, Twitalyzer and Twitter Grader. Each one will be dissected to look at their offerings and whether it’s really interesting enough to look into further. I’ll also be exploring the applicability of each as well.

WHAT ARE THESE TOOLS?

Klout is a social media influence tool that not only focuses on you personally, but looks at brands and industries to help assess influence. In a way, Klout will show you your social graph and assess just how influential you are along with who is influencing you.

Twitalyzer is dubbed the “serious analytics for the social media expert” which may lead some to believe that it’s going to provide you with much more relevant analytics to make you have a superior web 2.0 strategy. Twitalyzer will offer you more visualizations, easy-to-read statistics, integration with Google Analytics and is free.

Twitter Grader is a tool straight from the guys at HubSpot. Perhaps one of the early influence metrics out there, Twitter Grader assesses your influence by location and gives you a percentage as a score. It too is also a free tool and will display word clouds in your past tweets along with other pretty interesting metrics.

SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH THESE TOOLS?

After using each of these applications multiple times, I’d like to think that there are some differences amongst all three – some major and some minor – that would give pause to any company interested in using either one.

In the first place, if you’re talking simplicity of style and information, then I would go with Twitter Grader over any of the other two. Why? It’s because you’re just asked to provide a username and it spits out a score with no explanation or description of what it means. From my understanding and observation, it seems that quite a few people have received percentage scores of over 90%, but then what really separates me from, say, Chris Pirillo, Brian Solis, Jeremy Toeman, etc.? It seems more irrelevant, right?

The one redeeming feature with Twitter Grader is that it gives you a ranking as well – so my ranking is 12,037 out of 6.1 million people. Now, that’s only 6.1 million people who have entered their username into the search query, NOT all the Twitter users in the world. To have that number would be truly impressive. But going back to simplicity, Twitter Grader offers us the option of looking at a more geographic setting so we can see who the top “influencers” are by city, state or perhaps even country.

If you want more metrics and statistical analysis, then perhaps you might be interested in Twitalyzer. Out of the three tools described in this post, I’ve seen more metrics provided on Twitalyzer than any other. You’re going to be able to measure the impact of a person’s influence, their ranking in terms of engagement, influence, generosity, and clout. I think that this specific tool would be perfect for large companies who want to assess their influence and report back to their supervisors, then Twitalyzer would be a good metric to have. If you just want to know the basic information, then you might want to stay away from this because it’s too much for what you’d like to do. I do like how Twitalyzer has links to definitions so you’ll be able to easily understand what each metric means instead of wondering whether that 5.0 is a good or bad number.

But what if you want more topical or categorical influential data? Then that would belong to Klout. While all three of these tools clearly understand how to assess influence in the real-time stream, one thing that separates Klout from the other two is the fact that they understand how to segment all the influencers out in the stream into different buckets of information. So why is this important?

Imagine that you’re a business that is interested in seeking out influencers to review your product or perhaps help you promote it. If you’re a consumer electronics giant like Sony, Boxee or Panasonic, you’re going to want a way to filter out all the noise to get to the information. Through Klout’s algorithm, they’ve already done the work for you. You’re going to be able to sort through a list of influencers with respect to consumer electronics, technology,etc. A preview of one such list is to the left showing you the top influencers that talk about technology according to Klout, along with their Klout score – almost like it’s Digg for Twitter, only there’s no voting to increase the score.

ALL THE NUMBERS ARE DIFFERENT – HOW CAN WE TELL WHAT’S IMPORTANT?

One thing that you’ll encounter is that the numbers offered on each of these tools are completely different from one another. Their algorithms can vary across the board so you will never have the same results. In order to properly evaluate someone’s influence, you should look at not just the number, but in fact who they are, the types of content they are producing (tweets, blog posts, video podcasts, etc.) as that will be a good gauge of what you might need. Each of these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt – measuring influence isn’t a true science and is often subjective.

To show you the difference between the three, below is a chart with the information on several popular individuals on Twitter:

• Jeremy Toeman is an avid user of Twitter and is the founder of Stage Two – understands and tweets about gadgets & consumer electronics.
• Adam Burg is a semi-frequent user of Twitter.
• Chris Pirillo is a well-known Twitter user and tech “geek”.
• Rafe Needleman is a member of the media who reports on technology trends & uses Twitter pretty often.
• Deb Schultz is an analyst and uses Twitter somewhat frequently.
• Veronica Belmont is an Internet celebrity, host of Tekzilla on Revision3 and has a huge Twitter following.
• Ken Yeung is a prolific Twitterer and social media enthusiast.

As you can see from the table above, there is not a single uniform measurement out of three social media metric tools available on the Internet today. So what do these influence number really mean? Like I said, it’s subjective. IF you choose to use these for a benchmark project, I would recommend being uniform in your execution. Do not choose to use Klout and then use Twitter Grader as that will skew your results and leave you with questionable reporting. It’s similar to web analytics – a unique visitor could be calculated differently from one analytic tool to another, leaving you with inconsistencies that may not paint a complete picture.  In the end, there aren’t any easy solutions on assessing one’s influence. You’ll need to really dig deeper to find out how motivating that person can be in persuading their friends & family to do something.

Every PR person/NMD will tell you that should be taking part in the ‘conversation’, but as Mark Redgrave points out, the first ingredient to taking part in this conversation is listening. No service has more ears positioned against its doors than Twitter, our 140 character friend. The character limit makes it easy for consumers to spout off succinct complaints, praises, and questions (or status updates about lunch, changes in weather, and most recently tax hatred). The length also makes it easy for companies like @NYTimes, @comcast, and @biritemkt to listen to what customers are saying. Below you’ll find some advice about monitoring Twitter along with two tools we use to keep track of Stage Two clients like @boxee, @BugLabs, @Splashtop, @LegacyLocker, @Pogoplug, and @12seconds.

Searches

The first element of monitoring Twitter (and using the tools below) is constructing the right kinds of searches. The most obvious is just searching for the company name, but even that can be problematic. As an example, Bug Labs twitter search is ‘“bug labs” OR buglabs‘ (similar issue for Legacy Locker). On the other hand, boxee’s service includes the option to automatically tweet based on usage, so our search changes to “boxee -watching -likes -recommends“. Building effective searches can be quite a challenge, and you might even want to make specific ones regarding positive/negative feedback (for example, if you were in charge of monitoring conversations about Sony, I would set up this search).

Beware the mob…

One other tip on Twitter issues we’d like to share: beware the mob. Due to the rapid-fire nature of Twitter communication, there’s a certain degree of FIRE, AIM, FIRE, FIRE, AIM, READY? If something starts going wrong (ahem, Domino’s… Amazon…), it tends to go very wrong. How you react in these moments can either pour gasoline on the fire, or put it out completely. Like everything, there’s no specific “do this” or “don’t do that” when it comes to disaster control. But you need to be ready for when it happens and be ready to move quickly, before it has the chance to escalate wildly beyond control.

Tools

Rather than spend all day at the Twitter Search web page, we use tools to passively monitor tweets in realtime. The tool we use most is Tweetdeck. Its columned layout lets you monitor a twitter account (including direct messages and replies), 12seconds videos, and multiple twitter searches on the same screen. Tweetdeck can also send tweets and record 12seconds videos.

I currently have a twitter search set up for each client, along with my twitter account (@academik), 12seconds account, and Facebook status updates (outside the realm of client monitoring, but worth mentioning). From the same interface I’m able to see everything that’s being said to me and about my clients, quickly answer questions and reply to complaints. It’s the swiss army knife of Twitter. My only complaint is that I can’t monitor two Twitter accounts (@academik and @s2) at the same time, but that’s also the number one request on Tweetdeck’s User voice page so I’m hopeful it’s in the works.

When we need more robust search functionality we use Yahoo’s Sideline application. Advanced search options allow you to monitor tweets with “all of these words”, “this exact phrase”, “any of these words”, or from a specific person, to a specific person (tweet starts off with @name), or about someone (tweet mentions @name). You can combine these searches into one twitter stream and monitor it in Sideline or separate your searches into different tabs. I prefer Tweetdeck’s columned approach so I can see it all at once without having to switch between tabs, but for a single product Sideline’s search depth makes it a valuable complement to Tweetdeck.

Regardless of how and what you’re tracking, remember that while Twitter is now almost ‘mainstream’ (@Oprah!), your main focus should still be on the things that add value for your customer, of which Twitter plays only a small part (and despite media hype, is unlikely in our opinion to ever truly be used by the masses). A great customer experience starts with setting a consumer’s expectations, delivering a product that exceeds those expectations, and finally making sure their interactions with you over the phone, via email, in chat, in person, and lastly, yes via Twitter, fulfill their needs in a way that makes them an evangelist for you.

This morning at 7AM PST a press release went out on the wire through PR Web.  We issued the release on the behalf of our client, Sellit.com.  The focus of the release was the announcement of their partnership with CafePress, a user-generated commerce site based here in San Mateo, CA.

Sellit has developed a distribution platform for ecommerce marketplaces.  In English, that means ecommerce websites like CafePress can partner with Sellit to let their merchants distribute their stores all over the web using flash widgets.  Merchants place their widget (called a ShopBOT) on social networks like MySpace or Facebook, on blogs, and on other sites across the web that accept html code.  Sellit users an also opt-in to the Sellit Ad Network; for as little as $10 / month their ShopBOT will appear as an interactive advertisement on thousands of sites across the web.

What got us excited about the product and excited to work with the Sellit team is the idea of shaking up the traditional ecommerce model.  For many years ecommerce has been about destination websites.  If I wanted to buy a book then I went to Amazon to look for one.  Sellit is changing the destination model into a distributed model, where stores and shopping experiences can really take place anywhere on the web.  This is cool stuff.

A number of of media outlets have covered the story.  Below is a running list – we will update throughout the day:

• New York Times
• BNET
• Center Networks
• Inquisitr
• Ecommerce Guide