Having worked at a web analytics company, I love analytics and the trends they reveal. To me, Google Analytics is like cat nip.

I’ve found another analytics toy that I’m nearly as fond of. It’s called ViralHeat, a cost-effective social media monitoring and analytics tool that does a nice job of tracking our social media activity and engagement across Twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook, as well video views and web site mentions. It’s a clean, easy-to-use tool that has become a key part of our internal reporting for VoxOx, a free desktop software that combines voice, video, text, chat, social networking, faxing, file sharing and more into a single interface. I wanted to share five reports we use to help us measure and analyze our social media efforts, specifically on Twitter.

1. Mentions Over Time — Late last year, we made a concerted effort to be more on Twitter where our target audience lives. But how to measure our impact, beyond a simple increase in followers? We began using ViralHeat and now routinely track mentions by day, week and month. This comes in particularly handy following product launches, where we can essentially track our “reach” into the “Twitter-sphere” based on total mentions. This simple report has helped us quantify our social media efforts to executive management.
2. Share of Voice — It’s great that you receive hundreds or thousands of mentions per month on Twitter, but how does that compare to the competition? Using ViralHeat profiles, I can easily calculate the number of mentions we get over time against that of our fiercest competitors to come up with social media share of voice (for Twitter). This is an extremely valuable statistic that let’s us know how we are doing against the competition.
3. Total Reach — This is another key statistic that I routinely track and report on. Total reach, or “total impact” as ViralHeat calls it, represents the number of people who potentially saw a tweet about your company. It adds up all the followers of those who tweeted about your company over a certain time period. For example, 500 mentions over the week may have a total reach of more than 300K+ Twitter users — it all depends.
4. Top Influencers — ViralHeat shows a nifty chart of top Twitter influencers by both volume, and by impact or reach. This can be very handy in understanding who are the best people to build relationships with, including those we should at least be following and engaging with on Twitter.
5. Sentiment Analysis — This is a tricky one, as I know automated sentiment analysis is tough to tackle and something even high-priced monitoring tools haven’t figured out yet. Still, ViralHeat’s Twitter sentiment analysis seems to work relatively well and helps keep track of positive, neutral and negative posts.

A Raw Analyzed Stream of Tweets Mentioning VoxOx

Also: this isn’t a metric per se, but look at the raw analyzed tweet stream for a quick glimpse of indivual mentions. It’s an easy way to pinpoint tweets that you may want to respond to, including potential customer support issues.

That’s it for now. Do you use ViralHeat? What are your top reports?

A Sample ViralHeat Report

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Many people tend to think of using social media monitoring to either affirm positive conversations, or turn around negative ones.

But there is a middle layer that companies are beginning to focus on: the “white space.”

The “white space,” as Blake Cahill calls it, is neutral comments within social media. These comments neither disparage a brand, nor compliment it. They may just mention the brand or its products.

Blake Cahill

Such innocuous comments account for between 65 percent and 80 percent of all social media conversations, according to Cahill, SVP of Marketing for Visible Technologies, a social media management vendor that is able to parse sentiment within conversations.

Increasingly, brands are starting to mine these neutral conversations to see if they might be able to spark passion and interest, and gain brand advocates.

Once you have gotten through the positive and negative comments, “there is still a huge number of conversations that are just white space,” Cahill said during a phone conversation to promote the company’s newest TruCast product version. “It represents an opportunity – you might be able to move them into your camp.”

“Moving them” begins with listening, followed by bringing them into the conversation in some manner.  Microsoft, for example, uses TruCast to pinpoint conversations among IT folks who may be on the fence about switching to the company’s upcoming Windows 7 OS, due out for the enterprise in August. Microsoft has a small team that engages and provides links to relevant information on Microsoft web sites (this case study will be featured in an upcoming MarketingProfs.com special report).

Regarding TruCast’s new version (2.8), the main capability involves geo-mapping, or targeting English-language conversations in different countries or regions. Cahill said this is valuable for big brands that want to monitor the differences in conversations and perceptions in different markets.

For more information, read the press release.

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The buzz words and phrases being tossed around by many social media and PR professionals these days typically revolve around “listening,” “engaging,” “monitoring,” and “starting a conversation.”

Fine words all of them, but seemingly lost in this barrage of Web 2.0 lingo are words like “ROI,” “measurement” and “leads” just to name a few.

Why is that?

Case in point: I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego this week – a really nice, intimate conference with lots of great content. During a session about digital PR, the speaker (someone who was very knowledgeable) told the crowd that public relations isn’t about measurement and leads, it’s about influencing people. The speaker told the crowd that if your CEO asks about your bottom line impact, then you should tell him (or her) that’s not what PR is about (paraphrasing here).

When I followed up afterward with a question about how one tracks and reports success in the new direct-to-consumer PR model, the speaker talked about conducting pre- and post attitudinal surveys.

Sorry, but I just don’t believe that’s going to sell in the executive suite, especially during these extremely tough economic times. It’s also the wrong approach for marketing-focused PR professionals (not corporate communications) who need to embrace measurement, not continue to deflect or ignore it.

One of the problems to date is that PR traditionally has been a black box of measurement – quite impossible to track effectively. But with the rise of digital media and innovative new measurement and monitoring technologies, that is beginning to change. The effectiveness of PR and social media initiatives can now be tracked like any other online marketing campaign: in terms of traffic, conversions, leads and sales. That’s a new world, and one that most PR professionals aren’t familiar with yet.

One of my ROI-minded clients recently asked me whether all the press activity we’ve been generating recently has driven any traffic. It’s a fair question and one I can’t answer with, “well, PR isn’t really about generating traffic or leads.” In this day and age, that just doesn’t fly anymore. My client knows some of the intangibles of PR, but in these times, he also wants to see some bottom-line results for his money.

So, I’m currently piecing together a comprehensive report showing traffic and conversions from different online sources our agency has leveraged, including PRWeb, online articles, blog posts, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook and more. Through new technology, I’m able to show traffic from both click-throughs (direct from a referring link in the story) and view-throughs (visitors who read an online article that contains no direct referring link, but still came to the site later on).

Because digital PR has such a profound impact on search engine results, I’m also showing rather dramatic monthly increases in organic traffic from Google and other search engines.

Is online PR as effective as search engine marketing – from a pure cost standpoint, probably not (I say probably because this is new territory), but it does generate significant results. Best of all, this data can now be placed in context of other online marketing initiatives, helping PR and social media gain credibility at the executive table, and also leading to actionable decisions that improve overall PR results.

I love the power of social media for its ability to engage people in entirely different ways.  Engage is, after all, the name of the business. However, just don’t let terms like “measurement,” “value” and “ROI” get lost in the ever-growing blitz of new buzzwords. These are words I’ve grown up with my entire professional life, and believe me, they never go out of style.

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Burger King scores with its new Facebook application

I’ll admit I was skeptical. When @kenburbary first Twittered about Burger King’s new Facebook application, Whopper Sacrifice, the first thing I thought was great, BK, like most Facebook apps, wants me to spam my friends. I even sent off a snarky reply.

Well, upon further examination, I revise my opinion. Whopper Sacrifice is actually one of the better social marketing apps I’ve seen in quite some time. It works likes this: delete 10 friends from your Facebook account, and you get a free Whopper. Each time you permanently delete a friend, you get to watch a picture of them burn. That friend also gets notified of your sacrific (OK, so they do get spammed).

The application works because it’s fun, counter-intuitive, and actually forces you to make decisions on who remains your friends. It took me a little bit to pinpoint that ninth and 10th sacrifice. So what’s been the response?

• As of last count, 183,749 friends had been sacrificed on WhopperSacrifice.com (that’s 18K coupons)
• CNET’s Caroline McCarthy’s story was “dug” more than 5K times on Digg.com

My only complaint about the marketing program, is that I have to wait 2-4 weeks to get my free burger coupon. Though WhopperVirgins.com was a bit controversial, WhopperSacrifice.com is a great example of true viral marketing application.

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