Topseos.com has published its Top 10 List of Best Marketing Automation Software – May 2012.

The Girardbrewer.com team thought we’d share this list because of the increasing use of Marketing Automation software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation (originally called email marketing automation) is used to streamline the operations of sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.

The primary focus of Marketing Automation is to move leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads at the bottom of the funnel.

Marketing Intelligence tracks activity in social media, email and webpages, while Advanced Workflow Automation encompasses internal marketing processes like budgeting and planning.

Topseos.com’s Top 10

Net-Results, HubSpot, Aprimo, Neolane, Pardot, Genius.com, SilverPOP,  SalesFUSION, Marketo and LoopFuse.

1) Net-Results – Net-Results’ marketing automation solution is designed to nurture quality sales leads and manage demand generation campaigns. Features include: Email Marketing Management, Lead Scoring, Market Segmentation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Management, List Management, CRM Integration, Net-Results API, Reports & Dashboards, Web Form Mapping, Web Analytics, Visitor Identification and Social Integration.

2) HubSpot – HubSpot’s All-in-One Marketing Software offers to help customers nurture leads, drive conversions, measure results and improve inbound marketing through Search Optimization, Blogging & Social Media, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Email Automation and Marketing Analytics.

3) Aprimo – Aprimo’s suite of Integrated Marketing Management software gives customers the ability to automate marketing processes and optimize allocations of resources, whether on-site or cloud-based. The company’s Data Management offerings provide a single integrated platform that delivers segmentation, flexible deployment and a 360-degree view of campaigns and performance. The Demand Chain management tool forecasts consumer demand and then helps synchronize inventory to match it.

4) Neolane  – Neolane’s conversational marketing technology is designed to enable users to plan, target, execute, and measure cross-channel marketing strategies.  Neolane’s enterprise marketing software platform includes: a cross-channel campaign management solution, an enterprise marketing automation solution that accelerates revenue with integrated lead generation, a social marketing automation application, a real-time offer recommendation engine, a high-volume transactional email solution, and a  Marketing Resource Management solution.

5) Pardot  — Pardot Marketing Automation is an on-demand solution that can show sales teams exactly where to spend their time in order to maximize ROI.  Pardot Mobile for iPhone allows users to access assigned records on iPhones.  LeadDeck is a desktop application that provides real-time alerts on visitors and prospects

6) Genius.com – Genius.com provides Marketing Automation, Demand Generation and Email Marketing solutions designed to enable both marketing and sales users to quickly identify and connect with their best prospects.  As soon as the prospect shows “qualifying behavior,” sales is alerted and the database is updated.

7) SilverPOP — Silverpop’s Engagement Marketing suite of Web-based solutions is designed to enable companies to build relationships with customers and prospects through the creation, automation and delivery of relevant online messaging. Solutions include Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Reporting and Analytics, Data and List Management, Surveys, Landing Pages, Transactional Emails, Social Connect, Lead Management, Lead and Contact Scoring, Lead Nurturing, Lead Generation, CRM and Web Analytics Integration and Multichannel Marketing.

8] SalesFUSION — SalesFUSION 360 provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. This is made possible through the SalesFUSION 360™ suite, which complements Sales Force Automation applications by adding an on-demand enterprise lead management service. SalesFUSION 360 aims to increase lead quantity, lead quality and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process.

9) Marketo  — Marketo provides Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions.  Marketo’s marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions are designed to transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. Marketo also offers Spark by Marketo™, a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest segment of today’s economy.

10) LoopFuse — LoopFuse offers a B2B marketing automation platform that tells who is visiting websites, helps capture their information, sends lead nurturing emails, scores the best opportunities, and integrates it all into a CRM system with advanced reporting.

In late 2011, IBM began implementing a “Social Business” initiative.

The team at Girardbrewer.com always wants to share insights into the future of our industry, so enjoy the following report.

“Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business. With Social Business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and apply the insights derived to a wide variety of different business processes.”

This explanation of the concept of Social Business came from Ethan McCarty, IBM’s senior manager of digital and social strategy, in a Sept. 2011 FastCompany article by Drew Neisser — “Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business.”

Now, David Armano, EVP, Global Innovation & Integration at Edelman Digital, has written about “Social Business: Where It’s Been & Where It’s Going” in a recent Logic + Emotion post.

“Not unlike how Digital Media evolved into Digital Business—-Social Business takes the foundation of Social Media and begins to build new economic models on top of it,” writes Armano.

Here are highlights from both articles:

Fast Company

1. Social Media will be dwarfed by Social Business.  While social media has helped many companies become more customer-centric, it is treated primarily as a modestly effective marketing tool.

2. People do business with people, not companies.  One of the notions behind becoming a Social Business is that your employees should be front and center in your digital activities.

3. Your employees need to be digital citizens, too. Becoming a Social Business means recognizing the need for your employees to become “digital citizens” and providing the training for them to manage their digital reputations.

4. You don’t need to eat the whole Social Business elephant in one bite.  When asked, “How do you eat an elephant?” the sage pygmy replied, “One bite at a time.” And so it is with Social Business initiatives.

5. A Social Business can be a good business, too.  The same tools and processes that go into creating a Social Business can also be put to use for social good.

6. Enough already with the useless email chains. Most companies rely on email as the primary means to share information among employees, despite the havoc it often creates. Social Business needs to employ more collaborative digital work tools (well beyond email) that are asynchronous, enabling a geographically disperse team to do great work together.

7. It’s okay to fail as long as you do it quickly. Since not every Social Business initiative will take hold, it is important to try lots of approaches and move on when one doesn’t work.

David Armano  

1. Digital: The Interactive Revolution.  The digital revolution initially begun by replacing the analog world. Things like music converted into digital formats.  Organizations, businesses and industries had to evolve along with it. Most did and the ones that didn’t were outperformed.

2. Digital Media: Information Goes Online. The “corporate” Website was born—essentially a glorified brochure for your organization.  However, the business world began to wake up to the fact that not being on the Web was perhaps risking being irrelevant. This sentiment is important to take into account as compared to today’s social media.

3. Digital Business: The Transactional Era. As the Internet, fueled by digital media and a wealth of information became more pervasive, the Internet evolved yet again, creating new ecosystems resulting in new companies (Amazon, eBay, etc.) and creating opportunities for existing companies to extend their business models.

4. Social: The Human Web. With digital now established as transformational business tool—the Internet and the world began to evolve again. Early incarnations of a “Social Web” such as message boards and forums gave rise to early social networks and the “blogosphere.”  Networks such as My Space or Friendster introduced the concept of managing a social profile on the Web while blogs began to disrupt the media landscape by empowering anyone to act like a journalist or publisher.

5. Social Media: Global, Local, Mobile Connectivity at Scale.  Today, we live and interact with a digital world which is not only about finding information but is about being “connected.”  Huge amounts of data, or “social data,” is currently flooding the current global digital ecosystem. This sets the stage for an era that’s already begun, but is still in it’s infancy (Social Business).

6. Social Business: Connected, Adaptive & Intelligent. Despite much of the chatter around “Social Business,” the reality is that most organizations are currently dealing with the realities of social media and only a few truly recognize the potential of Social Business. In the immediate years to come, the amount of data available to the average business will be infinite, however the data will be meaningless without the ability to interpret and act upon it.

7. Winners & Losers: Navigating Today And Tomorrow’s World.  Today, digital has become embedded into the lives of millions of people and a generation who has never known life before it pours into our workforce and gradually rises in the ranks. Tomorrow’s business models must not only be able to adapt to change, they must help drive that change.

Social media can be a huge contributor to a company’s lead generation efforts in both B2B and B2C.  But how efficient are the various different social channels in directly driving leads?

It doesn’t matter what your business is, LinkedIn is the best way to attract leads when it comes to customers, investors, business partners, sponsors, affiliates and more.

In a recent study of more than 5,000 businesses, HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74 percent, almost three times higher (277 percent) than both Twitter (.69 percent) and Facebook (.77 percent).

LinkedIn’s conversion rate also outranked social media as a channel overall.

In other words, of all the traffic that came to these business’ websites via social media, .98 percent of that traffic converted into leads, compared to LinkedIn’s 2.74 percent.

So why might LinkedIn be the most efficient social channel for lead generation, and how can you use that to your advantage?

People join LinkedIn to showcase their careers and work expertise, and find content and information to improve their professional lives.  So, businesses that target other businesses will naturally find a higher concentration of their target market on LinkedIn.  Also, when someone visits LinkedIn, the person is most likely in a business-focused mindset, helping business’ content perform inherently better.

HubSpot has published a free ebook “Learning LinkedIn From the Experts: How to Build a Powerful Business Presence on LinkedIn.”   In it, five LinkedIn specialists provide insight into how you can use LinkedIn to successfully grow your network and business.

Tips for Generating New Business via LinkedIn

In “10 Ways To Increase Highly-Targeted Leads On LinkedIn,” influential blogger Lewis Howes offers ideas on ways to optimize LinkedIn to generate new business:

1.  Be Specific — If you don’t tell people who you are, whom you help, and how you help them in the most basic of terms, then you will confuse those who land on your profile.

2.  Add Websites — Customize your website section.  Instead of “My Website,” rename it “Best Marketing Tips.”

3.  Be Creative — Add a video that automatically plays when people land on your profile.

4.  Ask to Connect — Want more leads?  Believe it or not, you can just ask for them.

5.  Add Contact Info — LinkedIn is the only major social networking site that actually allows you to export your connections (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace and others don’t).

6.  Answer Questions — Give the most informative answer you can, add a lot of value, and try to be a resource for the person asking the question, then send a private follow-up message.

7.  Discuss in Groups — If you haven’t figured it out by now, you can build a business around Groups on LinkedIn.  Or start your own group.

8.  Create an Event on LinkedIn — Create a business networking event in your local area and use the Events application to promote it.

9.  Introduce Others — Referrals are a great way to get quality leads.

10.  Recommend Others — When someone has a great product or service and you get a lot of results from it, make sure to write a nice recommendation.

As content on the Web grows exponentially, our ability to make sense of it is inversely proportional.  We at Girardbrewer.com see this as a critical dilemma that any effective inbound Internet marketing program needs to resolve.

We are fast being overwhelmed by the staggering amount of content constantly pouring onto the Web—according to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (Web links, news blogs, etc.) are shared each month on the social network.

As a result, all of us who regularly go online have ourselves become, of necessity, de facto “curators” of content.

Think not?  If you ever passed around some interesting content via email or shared a Facebook post, then you’re doing content curation.  Ever retweet?  That’s curation.

Simple enough, but things can always get a bit more complicated: millions upon millions of people now purposefully curate Web content.

Curating content basically means that – out of all the content you find on the social Web – you pass on what you consider to be the most valuable stuff to your network.  Curation involves finding, storing, enhancing, publishing and otherwise making it easier to share valuable news assets.

A slightly more focused definition of someone who curates content comes from marketing expert Rohit Bhargava:

“A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares online the best and most relevant content about a specific issue.”

If you want to go all in on this increasingly important subject, read “Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators,” by author Steve Rosenbaum.  Distilled nugget:

“Attention is the new economy.”

Curating Now Key to Social Media Marketing

All this activity means that the term “content curation” has permanently entered the social marketer’s lexicon and, if you’re planning a social media campaign anytime soon, don’t leave home without it.

According to a recent study, nearly half of U.S. marketing professionals surveyed are now curating content as part of their strategy, and another 42 percent — though not participating — are familiar with the practice.  Even among the latter group, 85 percent had done at least some content curation for their clients.

Professional curators of Web content like Orange County social media marketing leader Digital EYE Media have available to them a variety of tools to help with this inbound marketing process.

One provider Digital EYE works with is Infinigraph, which provides brands with an “intelligent” way to source relevant content curation while harnessing consumer social behavior to create “smart” interest graphs for Facebook ad buys, content optimization and intelligent media planning.

“The main objectives of content curation are establishing thought leadership and improving brand buzz,” explains Chase McMichael, who heads up the Northern California firm. “The major challenges are how to sort and filter through all this content to make sense of it.  We’re also challenged with how to make the content actionable to drive consumers to calls to action while creating authentic engagement.”

Meaningful content is the social Web’s “currency” – what people search for but all too often fail to find.  So they look to curators to deliver what’s desired.  The benefit for a network regularly supplied with relevant curated content is that friends, connections and followers don’t have to plow through masses of Tweets, blog posts, news feeds and search results to find quality content.  You – or your professional marketing surrogates – have already done that for them.

Understanding and utilizing content curation is important for brands because as users streamline their reading, eliminate the chaff and pull out only what’s most interesting to them, brand messages can get missed or lost.  So how do you improve a company’s chances of getting seen and of engaging with fans?

Curate.

Bring the best of the Web in your niche or vertical directly to your followers and fans.  A steady stream of good stuff coming at your fans and followers can catch a lot of eyes. Smart content curation can build a great resource that can attract customers and potential customers alike.

Here are some more tools that might make the job easier:

• Redux – www.redux.com – a mix between BuzzFeed and Delicious.
• Scoop.it – www.scoop.it – create topic-centric information.
• Curated.By – http://curated.by – Twitter integration.
• Keepstream – http://keepstream.com – organize Tweets and updates as “collections.”
• Qrait – http://qrait.com – curate your content into “molecules.”
• PearlTrees – www.pearltrees.com – individual URLs are “Pearls,” bringing together websites under a particular topic area.
• Equentia – http://eqentia.com – indexes hundreds of thousands of articles a day, analyzes them for semantic patterns (to categorize them) and then performs social analytics on the articles.

Watch for this comer in 2012 – Cadence9 – http://cadence9.com

Part I: Content – Is it Really King?

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: 657.229.8394; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

“Content is King” is a well-worn meme that has been transmitted as received and accepted wisdom across the Web for so long and so often that people often repeat it without considering that the idea behind the phrase just might be completely misunderstood.

After all, if even the best content on the Web cannot be found, then it rules an invisible (and inaccessible) realm.

By comparison, in an increasingly ROI-oriented world, “conversion” (e.g., sales, lead generation, even captured email addresses) is certainly a major contender to wear the Web crown—or at least be recognized as a real power behind the Web dominance throne.

Content with your Content?

Content has been described simply as “the stuff in a website.”

Web content is the textual, visual or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include, among other things: text, images, sounds, videos and animations.

In “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, “This may include documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more.”

Content can mean blogs and microblogs, e-newsletters, e-books, e-zines, e-vites, white papers, articles, case studies, testimonials, webinars/webcasts, videos, magazines, (custom print and digital), mobile apps, online media newsrooms, content platforms, online games, infographics, web forms, wikis, guest books, polls, etc., etc.

Many people involved with creating and managing websites are now touting “content in context” as it relates to the overall customer experience—content plus design plus ease of navigation plus interactivity plus ease of communication and other features.

If the goal of using the Web is to find what you’re looking for—or if not that then something as equally compelling in the process—then content cannot work alone.

Too big a job.  Too much information (TMI) – according to WorldWideWebSize.com, the Indexed Web contained at least 13.23 billion pages as of Wed., August 31, 2011.

So, where does the help come from?

“Content is King, Search is Queen and Filters Are Their Offspring,” wrote Raymond Blijd in the January 26, 2011, Intelligent Solutions Blog.

“One obvious filter is to ask a person – usually a peer or colleague,” says Blijd. “Filters currently serving this purpose at a grand scale are Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S. for 2010.”

Blijd also advocates bookmarking.  Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

The main message in his post addresses content providers, who fight in the digital space for user face time, which makes it increasingly difficult to be exceptional.

“Although good branding and premium authors help you stand out on a bookshelf, additional features on top of content will tip the scale in a digital environment. Content providers should therefore move towards providing solutions instead of just information.”

Since few people possess programming schools, an entire industry has risen up to help meet this need.

Content Management Tools

Digital information has a definite life cycle—from generation to publishing to sharing to management to updating to archiving.

A content management system (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment.

A Web content management system (WCMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of Web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. A robust WCMS provides the foundation for collaboration, offering users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation.

A great deal of Web content derives from content management systems that are used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation.  This includes open source software like PHP: Hypertext Processor, a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.  This blog that you’re reading right now is created in WordPress, an open source blog tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL.

Here is the 2011 Top 10 CMS Vendors list from Business-Software.com:

• iAPPS Content Manager – Bridgeline Digital – www.bridgelinedigital.com
• SDL Tridion Content Manager Solution – www.sdltridion.com
• Sitecore CMS – www.sitecore.net
• dotCMS Enterprise Edition – www.dotcms.org
• CrownPeak CMS – www.crownpeak.com
• Platformic Web CMS – www.platformic.com
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – www.microsoft.com
• Centralpoint – Oxcyon – www.oxcyon.com
• Clickability On Demand WCM Platform – www.clickability.com
• Autonomy Interwoven – www.interwoven.com

Watch for this comer in 2012 – Cadence9 - http://cadence9.com

Content may or may not be king, but making it easy to find and use, relevant and up-to-date throughout your organization and by your customers / stakeholders is surely an important source of Web command and control.

Next week:

Part 2: Content “Curation”

Reporting on social media marketing activities remains a major challenge for most companies.  In 2011, Altimeter Group found that measuring social marketing activities was the primary goal for social strategists.

Marketers are exposed to an overwhelming amount of data – from marketing automation systems, CRM, email marketing, Web analytics platforms, and all the different social media outlets they engage with.   This condition often leaves marketers and their clients and bosses confused and wondering how to find the real value in their social media marketing activities.

At some point, most companies need to manipulate data into customized reports to suit their specific needs.  Maximum reporting flexibility requires strategic social media data analysis.

A key question that all marketers promoting a Social Media Campaign are trying to answer is “How should the budget be spent in order to maximize return?”  (Return can be in online sales, level of online brand interaction, online-offline interactions, etc.)

Here’s a small list of some commercial applications with strong social media reporting features:

• Next Analytics for Excel (http://excel.nextanalytics.com) brings social media, Web and corporate data together in one set of reports, fully automating the reporting cycle.  Next Analytics for Excel is an add-in to Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010 that pulls data from a Google Analytics account, performs a number of analytical operations, and then delivers the data into an Excel workbook.
• Raven (http://raventools.com) Social Media Tools help prove that your social media campaign is producing measurable website traffic results via easy PDF reporting.  Quickly build professional, branded PDF reports to share with management. Schedule the reports to e-mail out automatically to save even more time.
• SayItSocial (www.sayitsocial.com) Social Media analytics reporting tool measures Facebook and Twitter campaigns, Foursquare, email, Google Analytics integration and more.  Social Management Suite tracks social media accounts and reports on various metrics, including fans/followers over time, engagement, klout, sentiment and more to determine ROI.
• SMInetwork (www.sminetwork.com) platform provides, in addition to data visualization functionalities that allow you to quickly assess your footprints in social media, extensive reporting features for you to customize what you want to see and when you want to see it in detailed breakdowns of your engagement history, measurement of your brand’s reach, and vital stats on your brand’s social media footprints.
• SoDash (http://soda.sh/static/technology.php) focuses on providing more channels/platforms and the automation of more specific reporting, especially to cover internal factors such as response times to messages.
• Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com) allows businesses to manage and grow their social presence across multiple channels and turn social connections into loyal customers. The Web application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics and more.
• TrackPal (www.trackpal.co.uk) for Social Media Automated Reporting, search and social media metrics at the push of a button: TrackPal provides automated search and social media reporting and data collection for marketers, researchers and analysts.  Automated reporting templates, Excel, PowerPoint and Word reports—SEO and analytics reports build themselves.
• Xeesm (http://xeesm.com) Social Network Relevance Report.  While many think if the top social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter as the only ones that counts, looking into reports can show how relevant other networks are.  Xeesm users help their contacts to share all the networks and sites they frequent.  The Social Network Relevance Report shows how often users actually visit those networks and sites. It is a key indicator for understanding how much time and energy you may want to invest in other networks.

What’s the Story?

New online “social narrative” tools like Storify.com and Storyful.com are adding depth to reporting done on social media.  A “reporting team” can gauge reaction to local news while expanding its circle of sources to turn a sometimes incomprehensible stream of information flowing through social media sites into clearly edited (and tastefully presented) stories sourced from the social networks.

• Storify (http://storify.com) is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.
• Storyful (http://storyful.com) uses the power of social networks to create an innovative, interactive and socially useful journalism.

Part I: Social Media Campaign Reporting—Getting from ‘Fact’ to ‘Act’ in a Glance

Contact DigitalEYE Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: 657.229.8394; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

That which will be known and understood must first be reported.

Your Social Media Marketing Campaign is kicking it and everyone wants to know how it’s working.

Management, familiar with KPIs, is interested in top line improvements, leads generated, lifts in offline purchasing, etc.

Marketing looks to success markers like overall brand effectiveness measures and attitudinal shifts, or the number of coupons downloaded, 18-24 year olds who’ve become fans on Facebook, CRM signups, etc.

In either case, no one wants to be overwhelmed with data and have to sift through tons of data in order to get timely assessments of the progress of the campaign.

Today, it’s all about quick looks and prompt feedback.

But Social Media Marketing Campaigns produce almost an overabundance of data metrics and statistics that need to be collected and analyzed before results can be properly determined.

Data metrics (facts) have to be interpreted in a meaningful way in order to create valuable information, which becomes knowledge only through a clear understanding of its underlying significance.

Actual knowledge derived from reliable information provides executives with the foundation for exercising sound judgment in forming relevant opinions, making appropriate decisions and acting wisely.

But in business, few marketers are philosophers or mathematicians with the large amounts of available time necessary for taking regular deep dives into parsing online metrics.

Still, marketers need to know the meaning of all that data in order to proceed in a logical manner and understand if their campaigns are effective.

Typical metrics to follow in order to get a relevant measurement of your post-campaign performance on, say, Facebook include:

• Total number of fans (are we popular?)
• Stable positive growth (are we losing fans?)
• Number of user wall posts and interactions (are we compelling?)
• Total engagement rate on your Page (is it dropping?)

Yet simply getting from “fact” to “act” can be an overlong (and often confusing) process.

Rather than just being provided as a data dump, campaign results need to be rescued from all the minutiae and presented to management in a concise and informative way, with accompanying actionable insights and recommendations

Enter the Social Media Marketing Campaign Report

Reporting for Duty

A report is a formatted and organized presentation of data and statistics that describes in detail the results of a campaign and objectives met.

In addition to being a collection of data, the report should be a gathering of insights with an evaluation of the campaign and a record of performance and accomplishment regarding all coordinated activities.  A comprehensive report:

• Shows all the points of interaction with users – the clicks, the shares and retweets, the comments and likes on Facebook, subscriptions and views on YouTube – all the actions that users have taken in response to your messages.
• Shows numbers and stats indicating how well your messages resonated with your audience.
• Shares access to the meaning of customer touchpoints so this data can be mined to identify trends and patterns.

Various reports can be used to measure the performance of your campaign initiatives.  You can view and/or share by generating them as pre-formatted PDF files or by using comma-separated values (CSV) file downloads (a popular format for transferring data from one application to another because most database systems are able to import and export comma-delimited data).

Closed loop reporting is a capability for measuring the effectiveness of a particular campaign on the Web by tracking which viewers of which promotion actually bought which product, requested a catalog, or took other specific actions on the website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA)—the most widely used website statistics service—generates detailed data about website visitors, tracking traffic from all referrers.

Integrated with AdWords (Google’s main advertising product and main source of revenue), GA enables users to review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals) like sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, etc.  With GA you can create, save and edit custom reports that present the information you want to see organized in the way you want to see it.  A drag-and-drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it.

But GA has its critics.  “In everything from wording (bounce rate is a bit vague) to layout (in order to get a detailed analysis of how your marketing is doing, you need to visit multiple screens), it’s not very user-friendly,” according to Cloud Marketing Labs.

There is an alternative to analytics limbo.  To avoid digging through reports, you can put all the information you need on an email-able custom dashboard.

Dashboards—Get the Picture?

In information technology, a dashboard is a graphical user interface (GUI) that, somewhat resembling an automobile’s dashboard (though it’s more likely to be interactive), organizes and presents information in a way that can be easily read by even the most casual observer.

The purpose of the dashboard GUI is to quickly inform marketers and management as to the meaning of data derived from monitoring business performance and show them how a campaign has made the company brand stronger and the bottom line better.

Dashboard GUIs provide users with quick access to information or common tasks.  Via the use of charts, graphs, and maps, reports are often shown in the dashboard to provide a quick and easy overview of current business performance.

The aim of such data visualization is to integrate information from multiple components into a unified display.

When regularly measuring and analyzing Web data for your website, the dashboard is an important resource that can either stand alone as a deliverable for actionable insights or as an addition to an analytics memo.

The dashboard GUI is most effective as a single page of information which helps decrease the clutter effect caused by adding charts in text.  In an effective dashboard, there should always be an obvious balance of behavior, experience and outcomes (achieved results).

The dashboard is a highly visual display of data presented in an insightful way that standard metric analytic software usually doesn’t provide for the untrained eye.  As a result of this limitation in monitoring software, a number of Social Media Dashboard applications have hit the market.

Part II: Social Narrative Reporting – The Art of the Story

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: 657.229.8394; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

The Social Media Newsroom / Media Center (SMN)

The Social Media News Release needs a place to call home on the corporate website, and that would be the Online Social Media Newsroom / Media Center.

In a July 2010 Washington Post article “Social Networking: 10 Mistakes Organizations Make,” Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, recommended that organizations and companies using social media maintain a hub on their primary website where users can find links or feeds to blogs, photo galleries and other third-party social sites. This gives journalists, bloggers, customers and other constituents a single go-to URL.

The online newsroom is the perfect place to do this, yet a look at the sites of the top 30 companies listed in an EngagementDB study revealed that only 55 percent had social features and links to their social content in their online newsroom.

For firms that would prefer an alternative to a “home-grown” newsroom, a good choice is the Vocus Online Newsroom (www.vocus.com/content/prnewsroom.asp). Hosted by Vocus, the newsroom maintains the exact look and feel of the rest of the client’s website including all of the graphics, colors and fonts.

But some Online Newsroom software vendors are taking their Media Centers social:

• Press-Feed (www.press-feed.com)—The Press-Feed newsroom makes it easy to add news content and social media content to your website — newsletters, press releases, updates and articles.
• iPressroom.com—iPressroom’s Online Newsrooms include a content management platform for Web publishing, media contacts management, press release distribution, statistics and tracking, and the latest in new media and social media tools and services such as blogs, audio/video podcasts and RSS.
• PitchEngine’s Newsroom for Facebook (www.facebook.com/pitchengine?v=app_128081650581869)—This app integrates the PitchEngine platform with user Facebook pages, adding a “Newsroom” tab to the user’s Facebook page, allowing visitors to access news releases and other information from the site.  Can be added to a new or existing account for $499.

A social media newsroom makes it easy for journalists, bloggers and site visitors to find and share your ready-to-use news content (especially images and video).  Benefits include:

• Offer links to all your social content. (A recent analysis of Fortune 100, Inc. 500 and Entrepreneur Hot 100 sites shows that less than 20 percent of the companies that are active in social media have links to this content on their websites.)
• Publish all news releases in social media format on your own website (or a dedicated microsite).
• Add all multimedia assets to your newsroom.
• Add these to your press releases.
• Optimize your news content for search so it can be more easily found .
• Syndicate all news content in RSS feeds.
• Provide embed codes with images and video so bloggers or journalists can easily use your content.

Examples of Social Media Newsrooms:

• Society for New Communication Research – http://news.sncr.org
• Scania, a manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses as well as industrial and marine engines – www.scanianewsroom.com
• Cisco’s Technology News Site – http://newsroom.cisco.com
• Microsoft – www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.mspx
• Google – www.google.com/press/index.html

Where Should the Newsroom Reside?

Some companies place their Online Newsroom as a section on their main website, visible to all visitors as a link on a menu bar or other navigational element.

Others build entirely separate websites just for the media—journalists, bloggers, writers, analysts.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.  Making your newsroom part of your main site enables a journalist to roam your site, absorbing more of the feel and culture of your company and its products.  It also makes it easier if the reporter wants more information about a particular product than can be found in your media materials.

Creating a separate Online Newsroom website or microsite allows you to tailor everything to suit the needs of reporters and prevents the possibility of confusion for potential customers visiting your main site. Journalists however, need to be able to quickly access the main site.  Provide clear links to your main site throughout, and code them so that they open in a new window, allowing the reporter to see your main site without having to backtrack to the Online Newsroom.

Never require journalists to register or sign into the Online Newsroom for access. They’re busy, so always make life as easy as you can for them.

Be sure to offer journalists the opportunity to enter their e-mail addresses if they wish to be kept up-to-date on the latest news from your company.

Remember, it’s a lot of hard work pulling all the content, multimedia and social news sharing capabilities together in an Online Newsroom and making it appear well ordered and comprehensive.

Properly administering an Online Social Media Newsroom / Media Center means tasking an employee with this (nearly full-time) job, or completely outsourcing it to the PR firm.

Since the bottom line is always the bottom line, remember that creating or re-designing a newsroom for today’s informational needs (buyers, customers, media and analysts) means you have to justify the costs to the CFO.

Part I: Social Media Marketing Campaign PR Tools—News Release Distribution Services

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: 657.229.8394; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

Ok, so you have deemed your idea or product to be newsworthy and of benefit to many people, and now you wish to promote it as part of a Social Media Marketing Campaign.

Publicity is one of the most important success factors for almost any website or business.  You’ve written a press release and optimized it for social media with links and keywords—it’s a Social Media News Release (SMNR).  This dynamic document speaks to online business and trade media, bloggers and consumers, offering up information in a variety of formats that include embedded audio, video and graphics along with relevant news bites, quotes and other information.

And now you want to distribute your SMNR.  Press release distribution helps you create buzz, increase online visibility, and drive website traffic.

Distributing SMNRs Online

News release distribution services requiring payment can range from the modest to the very costly.  Pricing can go anywhere from $80 to $3,500, depending on news release length, images and distribution (local, regional, national or international). The advantage of a paid service is that media and blog contacts are kept current and you will often receive specific instructions that pertain to how each individual recipient likes to be approached and contacted.

Additionally, you receive access to syndicated newswires like the Associated Press, Reuters and others that aren’t typically available through free services. Newswires are the official method of communication used by most media outlets to receive news content.  Top-of-the-line paid newswires include:

• Marketwire—Social Media 2.0 service offers social media features like tagging and bookmarking options.  Users select from up to 50 social media bookmarks and tags, in-release performance statistics, Digg and Technorati feedback to see what people are saying about the release.  All Marketwire Social Media 2.0 releases are engineered to maximize social networking opportunities.
• PR Newswire—Your message delivered to the print and broadcast newsrooms, journalists, bloggers, financial portals, social media networks, websites, content syndicators and search engines that reach your target audiences.  Distribution services include SEO, social media tagging, complimentary reporting, free trade distribution and posting on high-traffic industry websites.
• Business Wire—Global-Mobile-Social-Measurable (GloMoSoMe) platform posts your news to leading global mobile apps, provides dual-platform SEO enhancement with social media sharing and RSS features and provides valuable measurement data.
• PRWeb—Online Visibility Engine features an SEO and social-media enabled distribution platform that provides the tools to optimize releases to make them easy to find by interested people and to rank higher in search engine results.

A 2010 CNN study about the news consumption and sharing habits of the network’s international audience found that 43 percent of online news sharing occurs via social media networks and tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, followed by e-mail (30 percent), SMS texting (15 percent) and instant messenger (12 percent).

The study re-confirmed the idea that a small group of “influencers” is generally responsible for driving the spread of news. The study found that 27 percent of frequent sharers (those who share at least six stories per week) account for the online distribution of 87 percent of all news stories. The average consumer of online news content shares 13 stories per week and receives 26 stories via social media and/or e-mail.

The commercial online news and press release distribution services have been adding social media elements to their news release distribution, intelligence and monitoring, and media portal website services.  Two that do are:

• RealWire—A press release distribution company that specializes in online media.
• PRUnderground—Social Media Press Release Packages – Copper / $19.95, Gold / $49.95, Platinum $199.95

Not all distribution services optimize press releases for social media.  Nonetheless, many provide an opportunity to spread the word about your company’s products and services in an affordable manner.

Part II – Leveraging DigiPR — Integrated Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Contact DigitalEYE Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: 657.229.8394; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.

The team at Girardbrewer.com has decided to join in on the St. Paddy’s Day celebrations with a bit o’ social media fun to keep things interesting.

Discovery Research Group  has conducted a case study of St. Patrick’s Day using social media research (SMR) techiques to quantify unstructured text content for analysis and reporting.  Titled “Going Green: Social Media Research,” the case study utilized many online resources, such as blogs, forums, social networking sites and websites to collect content related to St. Patrick’s Day. This large amount of content was then reduced and sampled through random selection. The sample was then analyzed for sentiment and themes.

St. Patrick’s Day is a time of tradition — traditions that are meant for personal and social enjoyment.  Each tradition associated with certain holidays engenders varying levels of enthusiasm, sentiment and mention.  Because millions of  individuals continually and freely provide details and information in their online (e.g., Facebook) profiles, SMR is a strong and effective method for tapping the mind of the consumer via content analysis, quickly and inexpensively.

SMR

Blogs, forums, social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), along with website responses and other online sources all feature content from persons freely sharing their thoughts and knowledge with others.  SMR is more than just “listening” to these comments.  Its proper use requires that an empirical scientific process be followed to gather and accurately analyze social media data.

Although there are websites that allow interested parties to view or listen to social media content, this capability does not constitute true SMR.   Understandably, there is a great urgency and desire to monitor the pulse of consumers, interpret their content and make predictions about their spending potentials.  Without a reliable methodology and analytical plan, though, the findings and implications are not likely to have the desired effect or give answers to the questions marketers may be asking.

Use of social media as a research tool can be implemented as a standalone method or in conjunction with other traditional research methods.  Listening to the consumer is only part of the equation, however.  To ensure that appropriate conclusions can be drawn, the SMR process requires following proven research principles.  Precision measurement and an understanding of the online community are also vital components.

Although always in flux and constantly changing, much information about social media users’ mindsets on particular topics at a given point in time can be quickly gleaned  and then used to answer business questions in ways that give better understanding of overall consumer preferences.  This acquired insight can be used to help drive business growth.

For the St. Patrick’s Day case study, Discovery Research Group researchers implemented a rigorous process with the aim of generalizing the research findings referencing a larger group, in this case online users.

Results  

The St. Patrick’s Day case study produce the following findings:

•  2 out of 3 participants surveyed indicated that they “enjoy” the holiday.

•  There’s not much general anticipation for the holiday – most comments occur on the day celebrated (68.3 percent).

•  Businesses generate a significant amount of content related to St. Patrick’s Day (31.9 percent).

•  The most discussed activities related to the holiday center on eating food and drinking alcohol (24.1 percent).

None of this information is exactly surprising, but it’s always good to have opinions confirmed by data.  When you’re planning an expensive marketing campaign, you don’t want to base your decisions solely on assumptions about your market.

Enjoy St. Paddy’s celebrations…go green!