Social MediaAssessment Workbook2011 edition

www.vocus.com/social-media-strategy

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Success in social media doesn’t come by chance – and it certainly doesn’t come

over night. It all starts with a plan; and the Vocus Social Media Tool will help you

formulate the perfect one.

Start with this worksheet. Work through it and identify your goals, find out where

your organization currently sits on the social media spectrum, and learn the

challenges you’ll have to overcome and tactics you’ll have to employ to achieve

your objectives and experience consistent success in social media.

Custom Report Generated for:Tom Humbarger

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STEP 1What Do You Want To AccomplishThe first step to any strategic plan is defining specific objectives for what you want

to achieve.

Defining measureable and targeted objectives is also the only way to win over the

social marketing skeptics who control the budget. The best way to accomplish this

is to align objectives with metrics traceable back to financials such as ROI and

sales conversions.

Later in this workbook, you will align these objectives with target audiences and

corresponding metrics. This alignment is important because it enables an organization

to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI whenever practical.

Seemingly obvious, this step is often overlooked.

Source: ©2011 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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STEP 1Part 1: How You Ranked Your Objectives

IMPROVE BRAND OR PRODUCT AWARENESS

IMPROVE BRAND OR PRODUCT REPUTATION

INCREASE SALES REVENUE

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STEP 1Part 2: Good to KnowWinning financial support for social marketing is no different than winning support

for any other business initiative – you have to prove its value to the organization.

Chart: How organizations perceive social media marketing at budget time

Considering that social marketing is at a very early stage in its lifecycle, it’s outstanding

that it received a 7% confidence rating indicating it produces measurable ROI and

should be funded liberally.

Conservative budget increases by half of all organizations at budget time, based on

the promise that social media will eventually produce ROI, demonstrate another vote

of confidence in the tactic for the longer term.

The 17% of organizations who still believe social media marketing is basically free –

and should stay that way – are destined to get what they pay for.

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STEP 2Determine Where You Are In the Social Media Lifecycle

1. How often do you gather research about your target audiences, social media use and

competition?

Sometimes, but not regularly.

2. Do you have a process for defining your social media goals and aligning them with

your target audiences and measurement strategies?

It's an informal process. I make it up as I go.

3. Do you have a process for creating social marketing strategies with a tactical plan of

action?

Occasionally, when a new initiative comes up.

4. Do you select platforms that fit within social marketing architecture and tactics?

Yes, but it's on a case-by-case basis.

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STEP 2Part 1: See How You CompareSee how you compare with others who took part in the MarketingSherpa survey.

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STEP 3Understand & Rank ChallengesKnowing the challenges you are likely to face when developing a social media

strategy can help your prioritize.

Here is how you ranked your challenges.

IMPROVING BRAND AWARENESS OR REPUTATION

CONVERTING SOCIAL MEDIA MEMBERS, FOLLOWERS, ETC. INTO PAYING

CUSTOMERS

INCREASING WEBSITE TRAFFIC THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

INTEGRATING SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING AND ANALYTICS INTO A SINGLE

DASHBOARD

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STEP 3Part 2: How You Stack UpHere are the challenges you and your peers reported.

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STEP 3Part 3: Some Things To Consider When Looking At Your Challenges

Why aren’t audiences engaging? • Are you using social media channels for “push marketing/PR?”

• Are you sharing information that isn’t timely or relevant?

Why can’t you convert fans?• Are you selling a commodity or an experience?

Why do you have an ineffective social media strategy?• Have you completed audience research?

• Do you understand how your market uses social media channels?

• Have you tried to align your social media planning with organizational goals

and objectives?

Why can’t you measure ROI?• Did you set up proper metrics for each tactic and/or campaign?

• Do you have analytics set up properly?

Why are you struggling to get budget for social media?• Have you educated management internally?

• Have outside resources been brought in for educational purposes?

• Are there perceived risk challenges that can be addressed?

Why can’t you find solid social media practitioners?• Is there a perception that social media is for kids?

• Are you hiring people who don’t have a solid PR or business background?

Why is your management resistant to sharing information online?• Have you developed social media policies?

• Has key management and personnel been trained in social media best practices?

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STEP 4Monitoring Target Audiences and Ranking by Social Media Behavior

A huge part of a successful social media strategy is doing the research up front to

determine who to monitor, and understand their role within the industry and social

media space. Continuing to monitor your target audiences will help you gain a

better understanding of the audiences in your social space, and what they are

saying about your company, brands and competition. Monitoring will help you

establish more defined metrics that are aligned to your public.

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STEP 4Part 1: What To Monitor – A Sample and A Worksheet

Start by creating an inventory of the details, keywords, and people you should be

monitoring in the following categories. A sample is below.

WHAT DETAILS KEYWORDS /PHRASES PEOPLE TO WATCH

EX: Industry Experts

MarketingSocial MediaPR

Social Media Online MarketingPublic RelationsCommunity RelationsEarned MarketingContent MarketingWord-of-Mouth MarketingSEO

David Meerman ScottBrian SolisDeirdre BreakenridgeScott StrattenLee OddenAnn HandleyBeth Harte

Sample

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STEP 4Part 2: Worksheet

WHAT DETAILS KEYWORDS /PHRASES

PEOPLE TO WATCH

Industry Sectors

Technologies

Companies

Brands

Products

Services

Key issues

Industry experts

Key employees

Fill in the following worksheet with the details about the people/groups you are

trying to reach, and the topics that interest them.

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STEP 4Part 3: Good to Know! What to Look for When Monitoring

• Social Voice (or strength) Determining the likelihood that your brand or search phrase is being discussed,

based on a comparison of how often mentions are made.

• Sentiment Determining the amount of positive, neutral and negative commentary about

your brand or search phrase, or the ratio of positive to negative mentions.

• Passion

A measure of fewer individuals mentioning your brand or search phrase more

often as opposed to more individuals mentioning your brand or search phrase

fewer times.

• Unique Authors Number of unique individuals mentioning your brand or search phrase.

• Social Reach A measure of unique authors divided by the total number of mentions.

• Top Users Identification and ranking of authors most frequently mentioning your brand or

search phrase.

• Top Keywords Ranking of the keywords used most frequently in searches linking to your brand

or search phrase mentions.

• Content downloads An indicator of subject matter interest, engagement and relevancy.

• Content sharing How often content is being shared is another key indicator of subject matter

interest, engagement and relevancy.

• Reviews and Recommendations The level of positive, negative or neutral reviews about your brand, products or

services is a strong indicator of individual opinion as well as an identifier of

potential brand ambassadors.

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• Platform Preferences Identifying which social media sites your prospects and customers prefer to use,

and how they use them, will tell you which social media platforms to deploy. For

example, will the primary social network for your technical prospects be a LinkedIn

group or a Facebook brand page? Or does this audience prefer to participate in

a privately-branded forum or discussion group?

• Audience Segments Segmenting groups and individuals by their social media behavior and influence

will help you determine content types and topics most relevant to targeted

segments. More on how to segment target audiences appears in a later section.

Source: ©2010 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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STEP 4Part 4: Vocus Can HelpVocus can help you reach and influence more buyers across social networks, online

and through the media.

To show how Vocus software works, we have analyzed news, blog and social media

coverage of a major airline company during a strike.

1. Determine who is saying what and where they are saying it

Let’s look at the news results, blog coverage and social conversation summaries for

our airline.

Based on these word clouds, journalists were talking about the impact that the strike

had on unions. Bloggers, however, didn’t discuss the strike, and across social

networks the strike was not particularly prominent. All this data provides an excellent

outline on how to address each audience based on what they are interested in.

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2. Find influencers

In our airline example, we see in the pie chart that Twitter is the biggest communica-

tion channel for this company at this time (and the channel that was least concerned

about the strike). We can also see that Social Forums (blogs, industry forums) are a

very active communication channel. These detailed charts highlight which channels

are getting the most traffic.

Drill down, and you can pinpoint individual tweeters and bloggers to see who you

need to follow, engage and watch.

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3. Understand Tone

Not only do you get insight into who’s talking, what they are saying and where they

are saying it, but Vocus also provides a quick snapshot of tone – positive, negative

and neutral. This is a far better indicator of how you are achieving brand awareness,

customer satisfaction and sales goals.

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4. Segment and Prioritize

Vocus helps you really narrow in on your audiences. And sometimes you may learn

things you didn’t realize. For example, this company can now see that their main

contributors of positive and negative content are employees (blue bar).

They can also see from the pie charts that traditional media is still keeping watch on

their industry.

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5. Track

You can track influencers and media to get a detailed history of how they have

talked about your company in the past. This screen shot shows the contact

information of a journalist and all the stories/tweets he wrote about the company.

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6. Engage

Vocus lets you engage influencers right from your console. Need to tweet to an

individual? You can. Need to send an email to a journalist? We’ve got you covered.

Our record media database of 1.4 million journalists, editors and bloggers includes

contact information and editorial opportunities of almost everyone in the business

– and is kept up to date by a team of researchers (most of whom were reporters

themselves).

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7. Activate

Too often with social media, companies do not interact or engage with their

audiences. Vocus offers a suite of Facebook applications that allows you to solicit

donations, sell services, provide coupons and promotions, showcase services and

engage right within your Facebook page.

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STEP 4Part 5: Segmenting Your AudienceOne of the primary benefits of social media for marketing purposes is the viral

effect – exponentially increasing the reach of the message beyond your immediate

audience through conversation and content sharing. Understanding how different

segments of your target audience use social media will help you determine the

audiences to target and the content most likely to be shared with friends and peers.

This model is an example of an effective, yet simple way to segment target

audiences by social behavior and influence. The segments are called the Silent

Majority, Vocal Minority and Social Authority.

The Silent Majority and Vocal Minority can be characterized as information

downloaders and information uploaders, respectively. These opposing roles are

important considerations because, in terms of their impact on friends and peers for

marketing purposes, the Silent Majority has little influence while the Vocal Minority

has a strong influence.

The Social Authority is a different breed that often dominates a niche with

extraordinary influence. It deserves a one-to-one relationship approach, just as

traditional publicists would approach the editors and subject matter experts in

mainstream media.

Source: ©2010 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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Sample

Here is a sample of how a financial services organization segmented its audiences.

BRAND/PRODUCT/SERVICE MARKETED

KEY TARGET AUDIENCE/SOCIAL INFLUENCE LEVEL

WHERE DO WE FIND THEM?

HOW ARE THEY USING SOCIAL MEDIA? WHAT

INTERESTS THEM

Financial Services

Asset Managers / Silent Majority

Individual Investors / Vocal Minority

Financial Advisors/ Social Authority

Facebook, Twitter (Ex: Vanguard)

Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Blogs

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums, Blogs

Sharing brand information, Lack of conversation,Subject to regulations

Shares relevant and timely information, Engages in conversation around investing, Etc.

Generates content to drive business & SEO, Shares relevant information from Asset Managers, Etc.

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STEP 4Part 6: WorksheetNow it’s your turn. List your key influencers and targets, where to find them and

what their key interests are.

BRAND/PRODUCT/SERVICE

MARKETED

KEY TARGET AUDIENCE/SOCIAL INFLUENCE LEVEL

WHERE DO WE FIND THEM?

HOW ARE THEY USING SOCIAL MEDIA? WHAT

INTERESTS THEM?

Silent Majority

Vocal Minority

Social Authority

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STEP 5Aligning Objectives and Measurement

Part 1: Defining targeted and measureable objectives for social marketing purposesDefining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle.

The other half is aligning these objectives with target audiences and corresponding

metrics. This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure

its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.

In the previous section, we discussed profiling social media audiences to determine

which segments you want to target. Now it’s time to determine what you specifically

want from each of these segments. Do you want to increase the number of Vocal

Minority members in your user network? Do you want Social Authority bloggers that

are covering your industry to be more aware of your products?

The metrics you use to track progress in achieving objectives will depend on your

unique business. If your company is driven primarily by B2B leads, your metrics

should include lead generation, qualification and nurturing factors resulting in

success. If your organization is B2C and eCommerce-driven, then website traffic

origination, consumer reviews and sales conversions may be your focus.

Metrics related to financial objectives like ROI are the most beneficial, but are not

always practical to track. While it may be practical to track the ROI of sales

conversions on an eCommerce site, tracking more granular metrics, such as how a

blog referred customers to the site and contributed to ROI, will require substantially

more effort. It would require mapping the cost of blog traffic to the eCommerce site

and the resulting revenue. Balancing what is possible with what matters should

be considered.

Source: ©2010 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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CATEGORY OBJECTIVE-WHAT WE WANT TO DO

TO ACHIEVE WHAT

BY DOING WHAT

WHO TO REACH

WHERETO FIND THEM

HOW TO MEASURE

Brand Awareness/ Thought Leadership

Promote our brand

Monitor our brand

Increase awareness

Establish us as leaders

Engage in communities

Improved brand awareness

Increase search engine rankings

Increase Web traffic

Improve brand or product/service reputation

Improve PR

Deliveringneeded insights and know-how

Providing details about our products/services

Identifying, listening to and engaging

Silent Minority

Prospects

Twitter

Facebook

Increase downloads by...

Increase social voice by…

Increase placement by...

Increase sharing by…

Increase visitors by....

Improve sentiment by…

Increase top social users by…

Improve reviews and recommenda-tions by...

Customer Support/

Customer Advocacy

Provide customer support

Create customer advocates

Other

Improve customer support quality

Reduce customer support costs

Monitoring the community

Servicing customers that need help

Creating cus-tomer service channels and establishing response processes

Thanking loyal fans

Other

Customers

Sales/LeadGeneration

Generate interest at all levels of the sales cycle

Lead generation

Other

Increase lead generation

Reduce customer acquisition costs

Increase sales revenue

Use social media channels for sales and promotional campaigns

Coupon offerings

Other

Objectives Alignment Worksheet Sample

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CATEGORY OBJECTIVE-WHAT WE WANT TO DO

TO ACHIEVE WHAT

BY DOING WHAT

WHO TO REACH

WHERETO FIND THEM

HOW TO MEASURE

Brand Awareness/ Thought Leadership

Customer Support/

Customer Advocacy

Sales/LeadGeneration

Now it’s your turn. Complete the worksheet below to align your objectives with your audiences.

STEP 5Part 2: Worksheet

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STEP 5Part 3: Metrics that MatterFor this process, we are highlighting the four main social media platforms – blogs, microblogs, social networks and multimedia / content sharing sites – and the

metrics that matter in each.

• Blogs: In terms of measurement, blogs have the advantage of being able to utilize

many of the traditional Web analytics. As with a website, code can simply be added

to a blog to track visitor traffic, source, behavior and other metrics. However, there are

many social media metrics not applicable to traditional websites that provide a more

relevant indication of blogging success:

• Comments – tracking both the number and sentiment of opinions shared

• Subscribers – growth trends by email or RSS subscription

• Conversions – depending on your specific definition

• Inbound links – an indicator of blog authority

• SERPs – search engine ranking position for key terms on major search engines

• Blog Authority – blog ranking in relation to similar categories on blog directories

• Microblogs: While microblogging refers to the practice of blogging with posts of 140

characters or less, microblogs have more in common with social networks than blogs.

Like social networks, the value and focus of microblogs is on the network of friends or

followers. Metrics are, therefore, often related to social networking:

• Followers – the number of those opting-in to or following a microblog

• Downstream followers – the number of those following the followers

• Posts – referred to as “tweets” on the most predominant microblog, Twitter

• Velocity – the growth rate of the follower network in a given period

• Passion – the ratio of number of posts to number of followers

• Social Networks: As the name implies, social networks are primarily people-focused.

However, businesses have learned to adapt the features of social networks for the

purposes of marketing. This trend has not gone unnoticed by networks originally

intended for personal use, which have transformed their features into commercially-

viable marketing platforms like Facebook Fan Pages. While metrics are sometimes

limited by the data social networks decide to share, there is plenty of tracking-worthy

information available, including:

• Community – the number of fans, group members, contacts, etc.

• Demographics – profile information on community members

• Referrals – tracking the click stream from networks to content and conversion hubs

• Discussions – tracking both the number and sentiment of group discussions

• Applications – usage of widgets and social media applications by the

network community

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• Multimedia Content Sharing Sites: This category covers a number of multimedia

sharing sites for video, photography, documents, presentations and audio content.

These sites aggregate content and enable you to share it without having to rely on

IT via links posted on blogs, social networks, email campaigns and other commu-

nication channels. When it comes to content sharing, the metrics that matter most

are related to the viral impact of content distribution, including:

• Views – the number of content downloads

• SERPs – search engine ranking position for key terms on major search engines

• Subscribers – the number of those opting-in to the multimedia content stream

• Referrals – tracking the click stream from content to conversion

Source: ©2011 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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STEP 6Finding the Right Tactics

Part 1: Dissecting a successful social marketing architecture

The number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not

important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that

supports your tactical plan of action.

Many of the most successful social marketing architectures have a common structure

based on a hub and spoke design. In a hub and spoke design, the sites at the center

of the architecture are destination points for content and conversion. The surrounding

sites are for building communities, engaging friends, fans and followers, and directing

them into the hub of the architecture to obtain content – eventually converting them

to a lead or customer.

The following is a dissection of a very successful social marketing architecture

developed by Cisco Systems for their Collaboration solutions.

ExampleThe hub and spoke architecture for Cisco’s Collaboration solutions

©2010 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Survey

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STEP 6Part 2: Worksheet: Constructing your social marketing architecture

Define the purpose of platforms and brands selected and roll-out sequence.

HUB SITES PURPOSE OF HUB SITE ROLL-OUT

SPOKE SITES PURPOSE OF SPOKE SITE ROLL-OUT

Note: Your hub site does not have to be a web site, it could be a blog or Facebook page.

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STEP 6Part 3: Sample Sites to Choose From

• Website

• Blog

• Microblog

• Social Network

• Multimedia Sharing

• Bookmarking / News

• Community / Forums

• Partner / Third Party

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STEP 6Part 4: Worksheet: Constructing your social marketing architecture

Use this worksheet to create a tactical plan of action. Be realistic. Over-communicating

is fine unless you have nothing to say, which may contribute to losing fans/followers.

Q1 WEEK / FREQUENCY

TACTIC / TASK RESOURCE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Blogging

Microblogging

Social Networking

Multimedia Content Sharing

OTHER

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Resources

Your Social Media Fix: 50 Social Media Podcasts

5 Social Media Best Practices for Business

Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing

Risk-takers and Strategists: Jeremiah Owyang on Long-Term Social Media Planning

16 top podcasts . social media, marketing and more

5 Tips for Finding Time for Social Media

12 Steps To Hiring A Social Media Manager

Social Media Time Management: Resource Allocation

Answering the Social Phone

How to Answer the Social Phone

How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day

5 Objectives for Social Media Measurement

Social Media Planning & Measurement

8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring

10 business blogging best practices

Top 10 YouTube tips for small businesses

How to use YouTube to drive business

Social Media + Multimedia = Social Multimedia