define: Social Listening The act of listening to the chatter in social media about your brand, industry and competition.

The latest question for online businesses seems to be to what degree do they step into social media and commerce. Regardless of what the outbound marketing strategy is, you should be using social media to hear what you’re customers are saying, because they’re most definitely talking about your brand.

The successful companies have been the ones most in-tune with their customers. In the desire to segment and splice our customers into different marketing groups, we create internal dividers, but rarely think to ask our customers who THEY think they are.

Five Six Ways to listen:

1. Set up Google Alerts. Set up alerts not only on your brand, but your key business terms too. If you’re a manufacturer this means setting up alerts on on your product lines. If you’re a B2B marketer, it means setting up alerts on relevant buzz words. And don’t forget your competition, you should be listening to them too. If you’re not, you’re going to have a hard time analyzing market threats in your SWOT analysis.
2. Stalk the industry chat boards. Chat boards and forums are notoriously search engine unfriendly, they’re gateways to registration prevent most most threads from getting picked up in Google, and thusly not picked up in your Google Alert announcement. It’ll take a little time and research to identify the relevant forums where your customers are talking about your industry, but once you find them it’s a gold mine of free market research. And once identified, you potentially have a new advertising outlet for your banners and content co-sponsorship. If you’re having a hard time identifying good boards, try identifying affinity relationships in Del.icio.us (below) and ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS.
3. Ask your customers. Inexpensive tools like Survey Monkey and Wufoo make surveying your customers painless and cheap. You don’t want to go to the well too often, as your customers will tire of answering questions over and over from you. But don’t be afraid to use your customer profile to ask IMPORTANT questions. The key is of course asking a question that elicits an answer that you can do something with. Asking “do you like our new redesign” isn’t very helpful because you’re not going to get actionable information, and you’ve also set yourself up for failure – would you really rollback to your old design? What you should ask BEFORE that aforementioned redesign is “What don’t you like about our current site?” If you have a handful of customers, set your survey up for narrative responses. If you have thousands of customers to poll, consider a mix of quantitative questions that quickly format into charts but still keep the verbatims - you want that free story.
4. Join relevant Facebook Groups. With a 150MM+ people on Facebook there truly is a group for everything. Be a part of the discussion. Even if you just observe and listen, you’re getting a lot of value from the community voice.
5. Search Twitter. Twitter’s micro-blogging format is unfortunately the perfect method for people to rant… about your brand. This is edging on engagement instead of just listening, but not everyone wants to call your customer service department. Some people just like the immediacy of complaining in the digital space, and that gives you three options: not listen and ignore, listen and try to improve, engage and diffuse. You’ll notice there’s a hierarchy in that last sentence – think about following it.
6. Track your Brand’s affinity to other brands with Del.icio.us Social Bookmarking. If you visit Del.icio.us you can search for both URLs and by brand names. The gist is pretty simple, at the most basic level search for your brand and/or domain. Look at the people who are linking to you, then look and see who else they’re linking to. It can give you a sense, especially if you start calculating aggregates, where people who visit your brand also visit. You already have an idea what people are doing when they’re on their site, but a good marketer should be concerned with what you’re doing when you’re not on their site.

Got better ideas on how to listen? Post below, in the comments - share with your people!

At the OMS one-day conference I heard a very dangerous question: So my boss keeps asking me where the ROI is with these social media outlets, am I right to keep telling him to ignore the revenue?

So my boss keeps asking me where the ROI is with these social media outlets, am I right to keep telling him to ignore the revenue?

Even more disconcerting than the question, was the speaker’s answer who suggested that it’s right to not look directly to revenue and return on investment and think in terms of link-backs, number of followers on Facebook and Twitter, etc.

It’s one thing to suggest, the ROI and revenue to be gained in social media is an unknown, but unless you’re in the business of just making friends you need to rethink you business goals, in buzz speak, your key performance indicators. But to argue that “meh, it’s not really a prerequisite” is an extremely dangerous practice for any business.

The issue may simply have been we don’t know how to track the efficacy of social media (because that is a very real problem) or how to forecast it’s effect. But that just means you need to find other ways to analyze your campaigns.

As a business if you’re entering the world of Twitter, the general argument may be our revenue goal isn’t in terms of generating new demand, but improving customer service through positive interactions you could look at reduction in return rates, reduction in call center phone volume, etc.

With user generated content, like reviews, you have a better chance of looking at direct conversion rate improvements as volume of reviews increases. But there again, metrics like return volume (better reviews, usually offer buying advice on whether a shirt runs large or small, whether a particular cell phone requires a 2nd battery, etc), customer call volume, and even purchasing decisions (a bevy of negative reviews may suggest it’s time to stop carrying a product).

But the day you stop measuring revenue in some facet or another, and tying your initiatives back to revenue (new demand, lowered returns, cost-savings) you’ve forfeited the notion that you’re in business. If you’re measuring friends, followers, link-backs exclusively you’re essentially just socializing.

Whether you use a paid search vendor to execute your pay-per-click programs or you manage the channel internally, there’s a good probability your cost per acqusition model is probably off – especially if you’re in a subscription or continuity business.

To illustrate the point, let’s create a coffee company that manufacturers coffee grounds packaged in monthly shipments that ship every month to the consumers. Having gotten a name on GoDaddy and starting Black Beans Burn and created a Google AdWords account, we’re in business. For every bag of coffee we charge $40 for the month supply and is priced as such on the product detail page. As the manufacturer and distributor, you’re fortunate enough to enjoy a 50% gross profit on your product. In compiling your CPA and return on investment strategy, you think:

I have a 50% margin on a $40 product, leaving me approximately $20 to acquire a customer and be break-even and get one more unit in the marketplace.

So in hopping on AdWords, all of your campaigns are adjusted to hit a high water mark of $20 for cost per acquisition. Unfortunately, the mail order coffee vertical is pretty crowded and you’re struggling just to stay on the first page of Google and your ROI is reflecting that.

And here’s the problem. The math is being calculated prematurely. This is a continuity business and the revenue from the entire program is being measured off the first purchase instead of the life-time value (LTV) of customers on that product. Turns out BBB Coffee is a pretty excellent, so excellent customers are staying on the program an average of 18 months. All of a sudden we realizing that customers buying $40 bags, eighteen times comes a nice $720 LTV per customer. So let’s change that revenue input from $40, to $720. Similarly, we’ll need to scale our gross costs by a factor of 18. That theoretically means we can afford a maximum CPA of $360 on AdWords and still be break even, which is hell of a lot more wiggle room than $20.

The Lesson

Don’t undervalue your business model and make sure your search engine marketing partners and employees are indoctrinated into your business model so they can calculate smart CPA and ROI goals.

As an intro, I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) one-day session in Boston today and got to a hear a really great collection of ideas about the state of the union of online marketing, and of course the omnipresence of social media. Before I continue, as a plug to OMS, they are really putting on solid, dense, NON-sales events… and they celebrate alcohol. To encourage engagement and participation with the last panel of the day, if you ask a question the founder of OMS bought you a cocktail. Nice. [/end plug]

So after a well-framed question (goal of a martini AND knowledge achieved), I ended up continuing elements of the discussion with Christina Howe from Avid, who was on the panel. Reading a little bit into why they had avoided massive engagement with YouTube and the ilk, I gathered that there was a general desire to avoid non-professional video outlets with the brand perception that they were about professional video. Disregarding the immediate notion that they’re abandoning a market that grows into professional products (think Apple’s iMovie and it’s big brother Final Cut Pro), I suddenly got hung up on the idea that Avid should’ve invented YouTube. Ten years ago, they were THE name in non-linear editing software. So it would’ve made great sense to extend the horizontal from video editing to video deployment.

I wish I could remember the webinar, because I’d like to award credit to the great idea, but someone had noted that had AOL really had a thoughtful strategy and leveraged their at-the-time dominant community expertise we’d all be on AOLBook instead of Facebook. But of course they didn’t, and are still sending CDs encouraging people to switch to bonded 56kbpm modems.

Most of us are likely not situated at the helm of a dominant industry player, with the finance to crush challengers, but there’s a lot of opportunity to logically extend our brands that *sparkles* with corporate strategy.

I got a martini.

Gory Details on DMNews: http://www.dmnews.com/USPS-testing-new-standards-for-slim-jim-catalogs/article/95657/

Horrific insight found at MultiChannel Merchant: http://multichannelmerchant.com/ecommerce/news/0324-online-sales-survey/

After reading the litany of articles, indicating 2009 is finally the year to add product reviews and you’re rightfully feeling proud of yourself that you already have a review system. But you have the sneaking suspicion that you could be doing more to increase your review volume. Well, if you haven’t already deployed a post-purchase review solicitation email in place, you’re only one trigger email away from increasing your review volume ten-fold or more – the case study below saw a 1,600% lift in review volume. And if you don’t have a review system, read up on our “make versus buy” review on, well, reviews, next week.

So the question is, how do we improve this great feature that we all use to provide an even more valuable contribution? The answer is easy enough: deploy an automated post-purchase trigger email campaign.

What is a post-purchase trigger email?

Simply this means, firing out a trigger-based email to every customer several days or weeks after they’ve ordered from you. For most markets, you should be able to manage with sending one email for every order, soliciting a review for every product purchased.

When do I send my post-purchase trigger email?

When to send it is a matter of determining how quickly a consumer can get your product out and use it. And because, meaningful reviews are prized over raw quantity it’s also an important question. For consumer electronics you can safely assume your product will be opened immediately and can schedule the email to send 3-4 days after arriving. If for example, you sell mountain bikes, it may be worthwhile to schedule the email to run 2-3 weeks after purchase to allow your consumer to the trails. This needn’t require a complex analysis, guestimate a good delay – you can always test and refine the send. Whatever you do though, do not send it before your customer has received the product.

Building a post-purchase email

Your interactive department can stew for days on what the creative should look for review solicitation, but frankly, you can start with your order confirmation page and just change the copy and add a big button to “Review this Product” next to each product. Next, you coordinate with your IT team to schedule a new email job based around your delay rules.

Case Study

The retailer in this case study had a review program that was operating with a monthly average of a 150 reviews per month through all of 2008. In realizing, that they had a double that figure in orders per day it was readily evident that an update to the review marketing plan was needed. The plan for 2009 boiled down to three key initiatives:

1. Overhaul the technical review system to be nicer for customers (Executed in January of 2009)
2. Announce the new review system to customers via a one-time email (Deployed February)
3. Deploy a post-purchase email program (Deployed March)

Referencing the graph below, February saw a nice 317% lift compared to the 2008 average as a result of a customer-wide email announcement asking customers to review their recently purchased products. However, that figure receded fairly heavily in March without a supporting email campaign. Then with the launch of the post-purchase trigger email in April, we have to completely recalibrate the graph to account for the 1,600% increase in review volume (which is more than all of 2008 added up). The lesson here: a one-time announcement will produce a small burst of activity, but creating a sustainable boom in review volume requires a post-purchase trigger campaign.

So the first thing that stood out is of course the skyrocketing review count, but the interesting byproduct with the trigger campaign is that the proportion of 5-star reviews is now higher than when reviews were passively submitted.

Recognizing that there is some seasonality to the business in this case study, let’s compare April 2008 against April 2009, the latter of which enjoyed the benefit of the automatic review solicitation email program.

In soliciting reviews, we’ve seen a decent increase in both 5-star reviews and 4- and 5-star review combinations with a sizable reduction in 1- and 2-star ratings. Without having causal data to support a position, I think a reasonable theory is that in a passive review model, the people that tend to write a review are pretty disgruntled, while happy customers think nothing beyond the purchase.

All of the other methods to drive review volume (contests, notoriety, etc) simply cannot compete with the mass of reviews this simple trigger campaign drives. The old marketing adage, “you can’t sell what you don’t show” can be retooled here, “you can’t get reviews if you don’t ask for them”. Go get asking.