How to Choose a Social Media Management Tool

Thank Heaven that there are lots of companies trying to make the process of managing and analyzing social media presences better. As more and more brands recognize the importance of social, most have also concluded that they cannot effectively deliver positive social experiences manually. They need automated tools to make the process easier, more dynamic, and easier to track.

The need for powerful and efficient management tools is there whether you have one presence or hundreds, whether you’re only on Facebook or have outposts on 50 different platforms. Since we’ve helped a number of companies with social media program management, I thought it might be useful to share some of what we have learned with a larger audience. So here’s a summary of some of the most important features to look for as you choose a social media management platform to deploy across your clients or company.

1) Content Management System Features

We often think of a “CMS” in the context of a major corporate site, but it’s just as important in a social media management platform. Perhaps even more important. Because the need for constant updating is so acute in social. Here are some features to look for as you weigh alternatives.

• Ability to deliver content to lots of social platforms. As with anything else, you are going to want to work with a versatile platform. Because social is so dominated by FaceBook/Twitter, it may be OK to work with a Facebook/Twitter only tool now, but make sure they are planning to cover more platforms in the future. Because if there is one certainty in social network history, it’s that market hegemony isn’t forever. Ask Compuserve, AOL, Napster, Friendster, and MySpace. Further, you should be able to choose social media destinations for each piece of content. Because what you send to Digg should be very different than what you send to FaceBook. The easier it is to decide where a particular piece of content goes, the happier you’ll be in the end.

• Ease of Content Creation: Some platforms allow you to create content right in the platform. Is the process easy, or is it complex? Intuitive, or convoluted? Easy is going to be important to any social manager, but for people managing multiple brands, or multiple presences for a single brand, it’s going to be critical. The number of steps required for content creation is important because social managers are going to spend only a small portion of their time creating content. Most of their time should be spent on listening and responding.

• Page Aesthetics Tools or Helpers: Some social media presences open themselves to more custom tailoring of page appearance. Having ways to quickly and easily alter the aesthetics of a page can help brands reinforce messaging with their proprietary look and feel. Some services offer very easy to use tools, others don’t. If you don’t have designers on staff, easy to use tools can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that you won’t have to involve a designer every time you make a small change. A curse because most nondesigners have a knack for shocking colors and turning on the wet floor, shadow, outline, and ripple effect simultaneously. Ask our team what it’s like to deal with two color blind partners. LOL.

• Post Aesthetics and Content Helpers: There’s probably a cooler name for this. But what I am talking about is the ability to post content and ensure that a screen shot or key image are posted, not just a link. And the ability to change the text of a post is also useful. Similarly, an automatic URL shortening tool helps immeasurably. Instead of making trip after trip to Bit.ly, you can just have the platform do it. Some solutions also let you customize the shortened urls to give you an additional level of brand impact.

• Collaboration: Two things to look for here. The first is the ability to create, edit and manage content across people within an organization. Ideally, a platform lets content developers input their work, and then manages the flow of edits, updates, and approvals across an organization. Permissions capabilities are going to be important here for many companies, especially those to the left of the “risk-o-meter”. Obviously, the need for failsafe procedures and processes varies somewhat depending on the size and type of organization. For example, a large company in a highly regulated category like pharma would probably want features that prevented posting of content without prior approval from legal, etc.

• Multimedia capabilities: You’ll want to be able to post a variety of file types. Text is so cheestastik. Actually that’s not true. But brands cannot build by text alone.

• Prefab applications: Every social program I have worked on benefitted from interactivities that tackled the challenge of making passive likers into brand participants. A platform can make that much easier by offering built in applications that work on at least some social media sites. A drag and drop poll. Virtual gifts. Ecards. People are far more likely to respond to “apptivities” than to make freehand comments or take it upon themselves to spread your message virally. Most of the current social service offerings provide these features primarily for Facebook.

• Provisions for scheduling of posts: I’ve seen a lot of data on the relative effectiveness of pre-scheduled posts. By which I mean the use of a platform that allows you to specify the date and time of future posts. From the anecdotal info I have seen, it appears that for many brands advanced scheduling can be just as effective as managing everything in real time. Of course there are exceptions. If you are BP trying to message during the worst ecological disaster in North America, you aren’t going to want to “set it and forget it.” But if you are in a fairly sleepy category and realistically don’t have a plethora of posts to make every day, scheduling tools can reduce the time commitment necessary to operate an effective social media program.

2) Listening, Response, and Analytics Tools

Listening to fans, followers, and likers – really really listening – should be the primary task brands assign to social manager. We all talk about the 20/80 rule – the principle that a small number of users purchase the lion’s share of your product is well known. So, if you accept that your social media “fans” are in the 20%, then shouldn’t you take loads of time to listen and understand what folks are saying in the aggregate? In my view, there are two kinds of listening that are critical.

Identification and escalation of “acute” response needs: For this challenge, you are going to want a service that makes it easy and fast to review site posts and comments. From policing profanity and personal attacks, to responding to questions and requests for information, to quickly identifying and escalating complaints or other acute problem posts.

Aggregated insights into all of the commentary: Simply responding to issues and problems only scratches the surface of the value you can glean from social media fans. By pairing the richness of being able to see real commentary with the ability to use quantitative analysis to assess the overall tenor of discussion and topics, brands can get ideas and feedback that can fuel a host of marketing initiatives.

As you evaluate platforms, consider whether or not the alternatives offer the following:

• Automatic escalation of posts and comments containing profanity, or posts and commentary that have been flagged for review. Keeping a “clean” group generally helps grow brand connection and group participation.

• Console showing all recent commentary from users so the social manager can scan posts for items needing immediate follow up. Obviously a service that includes these follow up needs within its CMS would make things easier for all parties.

• Platforms that flag competitor names and keywords to make it easier for the social manager to spot and address the comments, or escalate them to appropriate team members.

• Ways to respond to the comments from the CMS rather than having to manually find the comments within the social media presences.

• Tools that provide insights into ALL of the commentary on a group. Measures like sentiment, KW analysis, themes, etc. can help a brand gain insight into what consumers are really saying and needing.

Many of you may find this last point a bit of overkill, especially if you are already monitoring social through a listening or analytics platform. But remember that some of the most popular social platforms, including FaceBook, are very challenging for social listening tools to monitor.

3) Metrics Considerations

While most brands still find it difficult to track social media activity back to sales, we can do better at using surrogate indicators and other admittedly “softer” metrics to assess impact. Many of the platforms available today are quite effective at providing this sort of information. I suggest you look to insure that the platform you select be able to track the following:

• Clicks on Posts
• “Likes”
• Clicks on Links
• Plays of Multimedia Content
• Responses to Interactivities
• Shares/Retweets
• Time Spent

Further, the ability to get reporting on these measures in real time or near real time will help you make timely decisions on how to alter or augment your social activity with regard to a piece of content. For example, you may post a video to one Facebook presence, and see that it gathers significant views and shares quickly. This could help you decide whether to expand the reach of that content across more sites/presences.

4) Price/Value Concerns

Social media management tools can have wildly different pricing, from free to quite dear. Cost of services broadly relates to the extent to which they make tasks, easier and more intuitive, as well as the availability of “drag n drop” apps. In working with clients on this challenge, I have found it helpful to do some simple calculations to identify money versus time tradeoffs. Social media management has both direct and opportunity costs, and it’s relatively simple to compare the cost per year of one service versus another if you have taken both for a test drive.

Final Thoughts

The number of social media management tools out there is mushrooming. One rule of thumb I suggest people use is a simple annoyance test. Take the platforms you are considering for a test drive. If you find some aspect of it unintuitive, talk to the seller about how you can address it. But do talk to them. Because something that is annoying to do once is rage-inducing when performed 192 times a day.

There are certainly very good platforms that don’t do every single thing I have mentioned above. I suggest you work closely with your marketing and social media teams to identify the features that are going to be most important to your business. This is definitely NOT a decision to make in an afternoon because the effectiveness and efficiency of what may well become your most frequent consumer connection is at stake. What’s also at stake is the sanity of your social media manager. Choose wisely.

Special thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.

Silicon O'Valley

Recently I had the good fortune of getting to go to Le Web, the biggest digital conference in Europe. As I wandered the booth section, I came across an interesting participant: Enterprise Ireland and some of the start ups they are helping to support and promote. Enterprise Ireland is the Irish State Development Agency.

EI reports that The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Ireland 17th in the world in digital activity. Not impressed? Well, consider that it’s 4.6MM population ranks it 119.

As a deeply committed Hibernophile who actually once turned down a trip to Hawaii to vacation in Cork -- in February -- I am never above giving shameless publicity to Irish things. So I thought I’d give some ink -- err, electrons to some of the interesting companies emanating from the Emerald isle. There are clearly some sharp people working away every day there.

PinPoints

Pinpoints is a mobile application from Limerick-based Cauwill Technolgies that automatically programs your mobile phone’s navigation software to provide turn by turn directions to a destination. It converts a given location to a shortened url, and when you click it, it uses the native GPS in your phone to plot your starting point, your end point, and the best available route. It works on all smartphone platforms.



Teamwork PM

TeamWork PM is a web based project management platform that I found very easy and powerful. Simple, intuitive, and graphical, it offered great usability versus other platforms I have tried. Pricing ranges from a free limited features edition to an enterprise version costing €149/month. From the nine year old (that’s 63 in Internet years – a testament to good products) Digital Crew Developers in Cork.

Feed Henry

FeedHenry offers a development and deployment platform that makes it easy to create and distribute apps across all types of smart phones, and across the organization. “Build once, deploy to all.” Further, it makes it easier to integrate with existing business systems, report and optimize, and defend via enterprise quality security.

Gruupy.com

Gruupy.com is a Groupon-style deal a day site focused on offering Europe’s best deals on electronics and gadgets. Discounts of 50%+ seem to be the norm, though it’s a bit challenging to evaluate because most stuff is cheaper over here, what with VAT and all. What interests me here is the vertical play – that with Gruupy you will generally know what sorts of things to find ad you go back every day. And because the deals are relevant across Europe, it’s focused on goods rather than local services.

Louder Voice

Louder Voice is a tool that adds reviews, ratings, and commenting to a web site in just a few minutes. With offerings for everything from SOHO websites to enterprise ecommerce sites, Louder Voice is focused on improving sales for businesses by including personal endorsement and recommendation in more selling experiences. Integrated with FaceBook profiles, registration for consumers is easy, which increases the number of comments on a site. The reviewer also has the opportunity to send their review to their own FB page or twitter stream. The tool also offers SMS and Android review tools.

LouderVoice Customer Reviews Overview from Conor O'Neill on Vimeo.

Me really likey.

Weedle.com

Weedle is a massive network of “people with skills.” You join, quickly create a skills summary web page, and connect it to pages and profiles of people you know. Photography, web development, catering, you name it. The personal networks feature is important because it serves to highlight your profile when someone looking for your skills is just a degree or two of separation away from you. Their studies indicate that, not surprisingly, these sorts of connections can be very valuable ways of improving your close rate.



There are lots of other companies – these are just a few of the ones I felt qualified to briefly describe. It appears that there is also a robust sector for enterprise security and SaaS offerings in the snake-free land. While many of the companies are in Dublin, there are also a surprising number in the other cities and towns.

The economic news from Ireland has been rough of late – but it appears that whatever happens to the budget and relationship with the IMF, Ireland’s tech sector is going to continue to perform well.

The Companies That Interest iMedia Agency Summit Attendees – Part Four of Four (Tra-Z)

Thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.

In this fourth installment, I’ll continue to provide capsule descriptions of the companies that iMedia Agency attendees expressed excitement about in a recent survey. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, its’ because you were listed in at least one survey response. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.

TRAFFIQ: Traffiq is a web based media management platform that automates many of the processes of planning, buying, reporting, and optimizing digital media. Using TRAFFIQ you can:
• Discover the best sites for your effort
• Distribute and manage RFPs
• Buy inventory
• Bid on audiences in real-time
• Deliver and serve campaigns
• Analyze performance
• Consolidate billing

Transis: Transis also promises to simplify the media planning, buying and reporting process. A significant area of focus for Transis has been automating the RFP and negotiation process by eliminating the emails, faxes and spreadsheets that fill a planner’s day and inbox.

Tube Mogul: Tube Mogul offers a variety of video distribution services, from content to advertising. All the services share a foundation level of tracking and analytics that helps provide marketers greater understanding of the impact they are driving with their efforts. TubeMogul's core business is a video DSP service that they say offers greater analytics and transparency than other video options available. Many know the company as a video distribution platform that helps brands distribute their own content across the web. The company offers both a free distribution service (OneLoad®) and an ad network (Playtime) that generates views of brand videos by featuring them as standalone content on players across the web. Both services offer extensive analytics to understand who, how, and where videos are being watched.

Visual IQ: Visual IQ is a marketing analytics and intelligence products company that promises to improve marketing performance. Their Visual IQ Marketing Intelligence Platform is an online based set of analytics tools that help transform raw marketing data into actionable intelligence.

The Companies That Interest iMedia Agency Summit Attendees – Part Three of Four (N through Tra)

In this third installment, I’ll continue to provide capsule descriptions of the companies that iMedia Agency attendees expressed excitement about in a recent survey. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, its’ because you were listed in at least one survey response. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.

Qponomics: A location based mobile couponing application that enables smart phone users to explore relevant offers available in their areas. To use the coupons the consumers presents their smart phone and the bar code is scanned. The coupons work on iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Android (Google), Windows Mobile and Palm platforms. A slide show how to lives here.



RocketFuel: A network platform to help manage, run, evaluate, and optimize online campaigns, the foundation of RocketFuel is what they call “progressive optimization” – a process by which automated testing and user level targeting are deployed. Rocket Fuel claims to combine a host of types of data to help deliver more relevant ad experiences at the user level - demos, behaviors, dayparts, creatives, etc.

Shazam: A mobile music discovery engine that lets users identify and purchase music they hear while on the go. For the life of me I cannot figure out how brands might participate with this, but it is cooler than dry ice.

Track Simple: Track Simple is an open platform that accepts data from multiple sources and enables users to combine and examine that data easily and effectively. For agencies, this automates the collection of data (no more Control C Control V into Excel) and then enables point and click analysis. The system then generates easy to use and interpret live reports, and offers an optimization engine that lets an analyst runs scenarios and assess the impact of their decisions on results. Data can come from search, display, rich media platforms, social, mobile, video, email, online couponing, site side, ecommerce, and proprietary brand data sources.

Why all brands need to get social...

Bravo Owner IQ: This is How B2B Viral Is Done!

Ralph Lauren 4-D Kicks Digital A**

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience - New York from Ralph Lauren on Vimeo.

Seems like only yesterday that most fashion houses were barely willing to build web sites.

The Companies That Interest iMedia Agency Summit Attendees – Part Two of Four (D through M)

Thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.

In this second installment, I’ll continue to provide capsule descriptions of the companies that iMedia Agency attendees expressed excitement about in a recent survey. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, its’ because you were suggested in the survey. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.

DataLogix enables DR marketers to connect online and offline data for more effective targeting. They do this by applying the offline data to their Affiniti™ tags. This enables a marketer to target based upon “real world” behaviors. In addition to offering their own ad network which touches 210MM consumers monthly, they also work with a variety of networks and exchanges to make access to this connected data easier.

Efficient Frontier is a leading digital media optimization engine that improves the performance of auction based online media buying and execution. Results are optimized based upon the key metric that is most desired by an advertiser, and are optimized across engines or platforms, not piecemeal. They are most known for their SEM optimization offerings, but also can optimize auction based Display. Here’s a vid on their Search service:



InviteMedia is the DSP platform acquired by Google for $81M earlier this year. Their Bid manager® service enables you to buy across multiple exchanges, as well as offer a proprietary exchange practice. The Google acquisition reflects the desire to make Display media buying more like search.

Media Mind: Eye Blaster has changed its name to Media Mind to reflect a sea change in its positioning and capabilities. Once content to bill itself as a turnkey solution to deliver richer rich media, it now messages as an everything platform that serves, delivers rich media, search, standard banners, video, dynamic ads, and mobile ads and lets brands manage and execute it all on a portfolio level. Data is also a big part of their new message, reflecting the ability to target with, collect, analyze, and optimize to relevant data.

The Companies That Interest iMedia Agency Summit Attendees – Part One of Four (A through C)

Thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.

One of the new traditions of the Agency Only Day at iMedia Summit is to survey attendees about the things that most intrigue them for the months ahead. This year, we surveyed the agency leaders asking the following question:

We'd like to get the group sharing about the innovations they have found/are impressed with. Are there specific new companies/offerings you find particularly intriguing at the moment and are seriously considering for use in 2011?

In total, the group identified 21 companies they found noteworthy. The key themes seem to be analytics, automation, and simplification, which makes a lot of sense in our increasingly fragmented environment.

Because several of the companies were new to me, and on the principle that there may be others in the iMedia Connection audience who could not attend the event but still might find these companies interesting, I put together the following summary. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, its’ because you were listed in at least one survey response. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.

AdKeeper: is a virtual clipping service that enables consumers to clip ads that interest them for later review. AdKeeper overlays a “keep button” on every ad you see as you browse the web. If you are interested in the info, or video, or offer in an ad, you simply click the keep button and it is placed in your AdKeeper. Yu can later review these offers, send them to friend, and print them. Here’s the explanatory video:



Better Advertising is a privacy and choice platform for media delivered through advanced targeting. It gives businesses an easy, standard method to provide evidence of compliance with industry guidelines and provide consumers with more transparency into, and control over the interest-based advertising (another term for BT) they receive. By empowering consumers and earning their trust, businesses build their brands, participate in BT with confidence and generate better advertising results.

Clear Saleing is a marketing optimization engine that helps agencies and marketers measure the success and impact of various digital marketing efforts, and optimize the mix based upon profitability. Best suited to online purchases, the offering tracks profitability across media, ensures the impact of various media are accurately attributed, and helps optimize digital plans with a portfolio perspective. Get the sponsored Forrester report on the profit impact of Clear Saleing here.

Many of us are already familiar with Clear Spring as they have been around for a while. Their message for advertisers today is as an “Audience Platform” that enables advertisers to reach the right users at the times they are ready to act. They focus on two kinds of audience aggregation: intent-based segments at various points in the purchase cycle, and influence segments composed of people likely to share messages to social media. These super sharers help brands generate a greater virality in social media. Clearspring segments/data are available through the leading demand side platforms. The basis of their data collection and segmentation is gathered from their “Add This” button network that makes content sharing easier. By collecting data at the point of share, Clearspring gets a strong picture of people’s interests, intents, and passions.

Clovr Media is a consumer service that lets consumers send offers directly to their credit or loyalty cards. These Card Linked Offers (CLOs) replace coupons, digital coupons, and other tangible discount media. They also make the results of online promotional activity trackable with 100% attribution. There are consumer advantages, of course, but also tremendous advantages for manufacturers and retailers. The process of manually dealing with printed coupon redemption is one that resembles the children’s game Mousetrap, so having it all occur digitally is a boon for all. Here’s the vid that explains it all.



ChaCha is a mobile answers service that lets consumers ask questions from a variety of locations (mobile, iPad, PC) and receive answers quickly from human guides. Advertisements support the service and are delivered in text messages, as graphical phone ads, as sponsored online results, and as in app ads. A sponsored frost and Sullivan white paper on how brands can work with ChaCha is available from this page.