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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I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego earlier this week and was once again impressed by the quality of the sessions and panels. Started by Aaron Kahlow, the OMS is dedicated to online marketing education spanning email, search, social media, and much more. I went for just one day (the first day on Tues.), but was able to pick up several nuggets that I wanted to pass along from different speakers and people I met.

1. The single most read email your customers will EVER receive from your company is their welcome email. It’s not even close. You need to optimize this email as much as possible to drive results. Source: Ann Holland, MarketingSherpa.
2. Content marketing — content to attract and retain customers — is hugely important, but how do you cut through the massive clutter of content on the web (my question to the panel)? The answer: by 1) having the best and most original content of any of your competitors, and 2) by being creative, including multimedia content, animation, etc. Source: Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner.
3. Instead of wondering about the next Facebook or Twitter, look for connecting technologies (like VoxOx) that allow people to streamline and aggregate their communications and social updates.
   
4. Stop talking about features and solutions, and start addressing your customer’s unique pain points as it relates to your solution.
5. Every organization should be a metrics-driven organization where decisions are made based on quantifiable data. Source: Holland, MarketingSherpa.
6. The big bigger brand wins the click, wins the conversion — every time! Branding should not be under-estimated. Source: Holland, MarketingSherpa.
7. Increasingly, marketers are publishers — every company needs to set up a publishing arm to create and promote unique content that engages and converts potential customers. Source: John Battelle, Federated Media
8. A blog is a great hub for your content strategy. Source: CEO, Compendium Software
9. Consider putting a retweet link in your PDFs. For instructions on how to do it, go to Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-add-retweet-buttons-in-your-pdf-documents/#more-639. Source: Stelzner, Social Media Examiner.
10. In marketing, the worst thing people can say about you is nothing. Source: Tom Hoehn, Kodak.
11. Fail fast — it’s OK to fail, but do it fast, learn from it, and move on. Source: Hoehn, Kodak.
12. Thanks mostly to search engines, 80 percent of all blog traffic is first time traffic. They don’t know you. Write your blog content with this first time visitor in mind.

Did you attend the show? What did you learn?

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I went searching for an old French colleague on Facebook the other day in hopes of holding a seamless chat conversation in French. Later on, I went looking online for my long lost Swedish relatives in hopes of speaking with them in their native tongue.

Impressed? Don’t be. I don’t speak a word of Swedish or French. I was simply emboldened by the VoxOx Universal Translator, a new capability of the VoxOx unified communications service that enables instant, seamless foreign language translations across SMS, email, chat and social networks (specifically Facebook Chat, MySpace Chat and Twitter @replies).

It really is a wonder: I select my language, my contact’s language, and then begin chatting, texting or emailing away. The VoxOx Universal Translator provides instant translation for both parties … to them, it looks like I speak perfect French or Swedish (or Cantonese or Portugese or dozens of other languages I can choose from). The best part is that only one person has to be using VoxOx to make it work. The service is also interoperable with every major IM client.

To Trekkies, the “universal translator” is a (plot) device that Spock and Kirk used to communicate with alien species. While instant voice translations may still be a way off, instant translations through electronic communications (chat, sms, email) is now here.

Watch the VoxOx Universal Translator in action below or download the service here. You can also read a write up in the popular blog, Gizmodo.

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I’m a big Flip video fan from way back in the day – OK, only a couple of years ago, just before the company released its second major product version (which I waited for and purchased at Best Buy). I always admired Pure Digital Technologies, the Flip manufacturer, for its singular focus: making it easy and simple to upload your home videos to YouTube (through the use of a built-in USB plug). That’s all anyone in this social era wanted — at least for non-technical folks like me.

I digress, but not too far, because the other day I got an email advertisement from Flip (now owned by Cisco Systems following a $570M acquisition) promoting its holiday lineup. Something at the bottom of the email caught my eye: an offer to get an immediate $15 discount if I joined Flip’s Facebook page. So that’s how much a Facebook friend is worth, I thought.

It may not be as simple as that, but Flip is clearing investing in its Facebook and social media presence. The company, thanks in part to its promotion, is now up to 102K fans on Facebook – that’s a pretty large opt-in list of folks interested in engaging with the Flip brand.

I particularly love the company’s new “Do You Flip?” campaign, where they invite Flip users to upload their videos to their Facebook page. Then they display selected videos in their news feed. It’s a great strategy and a no-brainer — too few companies realize the value (and relative ease) of using social media to cultivate a community of brand advocates. It works in part because Flip is properly promoting its Facebook page across different marketing channels, such as its e-mail newsletter, and using incentives to get them there.

Flip Video's Facebook Page

From personal experience, the numbers back up social media investment.

For example, using Tealium social media analytics at my current job, we’re able to compare the behavior of all web site visitors versus those who just come from our social media initiatives (blog outreach, social networks, etc). In almost every category, from time spent on site, to page views per visit, to goal conversion rate, social media visitors are a far better source of traffic. It only makes sense – they are engaged.

Social media is the right marketing investment — perhaps even at $15 per fan.

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When it comes to showing how something works online, it’s hard to beat a good video screencast. This is my new favorite content type.

I first realized the power of a good video screencast when I watched real estate investor/social media practitioner Chris Record‘s video on how to best utilize Facebook events. It was a perfect video on how to use a particular capability. I sent Chris an email asking him what technology he used. He graciously responded: Screenflow for the Mac (which I have).

I quickly shelled out $99 to download a copy and went to work creating my first screencast for a blog post at work. I had been planning on doing a post on how to utilize certain features of our universal communications software, VoxOx. Instead of writing the instructions out using well-placed screenshots, I could now easily record a short video. After a few practice tries (I did it in one take), here’s the final product.

Do you have a cool screencast to share?

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Last month, the venerable Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today posted an interview we did together back in May at eMetrics San Jose (when I was consulting). I was just coming off writing a 30-page special report for MarketingProfs.com and my head was filled with all the great case studies I had researched. Here’s the video:

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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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Nice thought leadership piece in Adotas.com last week by Andrew Edwards of Technology Leaders, an Engage client, on what happens when Google, as Edwards anticipates, upgrades its free web analytics tool to enterprise-class status. The industry ramifications will be deep, for vendors, consultants and everyone involved, he said. Here’s an excerpt:

“On the vendor side, everyone will be affected. But I might be willing to place a bet that Omniture will be the most impacted because they have a SaaS-only offering and a more marketing-focused constituency. Of all the vendor, theirs is probably the smallest group that is deeply concerned about privacy of data. This may be offset (partly) by their European operations, where privacy is much more sacrosanct than it is in the “free”-wheeling USA.”

Read more …

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Learn How Businesses Are Using Twitter to Further Their Marketing Objectives

Ever wondered how businesses are actually using Twitter to drive their marketing objectives?

Now you can read 11 detailed case studies on the topic thanks to a special report recently published by the good folks over at MarketingProfs.com, a trusted resource for more than 320,000 online marketing professionals. The report, which I wrote in April, provides specific details and examples of how diverse businesses — from Disney to Souplantation — are leveraging the micro-blogging service. The report contains exclusive survey data, the best tools to use, and seven tips for getting started with Twitter.

After reading the package, you’ll have a great understanding of how you can use Twitter for your business. One of my favorite case studies is how Red Door Interactive uses Twitter to drive in-store traffic on behalf of Souplantation, a salad buffet restaurant chain. Another is 12for12K, a social media charity, which cleverly uses Twitter to help a number of great and worthwhile causes.

Sign up for MarketingProfs today and get your copy of Twitter Success Stories. I’d love to hear what you think as well!

Enjoy.

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I love this contributed article in MobileMarketer.com from one of the executives at Digitaria, an Engage client, because it’s sole purpose is to be useful, without a hint of promotion the company’s considerable capabilities in this area. It succeeds on every level. The article, entitled “Which iPhone App is Best — Web or Native,” walks readers through different scenarios in determining which type of iPhone “app” — a software application or an iPhone-optimized web site — might be better for their business. The differences are significant. The article was inspired by real-world questions author Michael Brown receives from clients. Read on.

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