Thank you for your interest and participation in our research.

Lately, we have been busy analysing the experience of companies in the Netherlands, concerning social media analytics and its value for them. We decided to ask You- the professionals we consider most knowledgeable and experienced about your opinions and experience.

You filled in our survey and some of you had a talk with us and shared needs, challenges and ideas connected to the topic. We are continuously processing the outcomes of our research and discovering interesting facts and trends. We would like to share these findings with you and further discuss on them.

We will greatly appreciate your input, so feel free to share experience, give suggestions or ask questions. You can do this in both English and Dutch.

We hope to help your business discover the value of social media analytics, meet the challenges of this new environment and benefit from it!

Let’s start discussing and discovering
Enjoy!

P.S

If you would like to participate, but you haven’t filled in our survey, you can still do so on:  http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=5izuociaf569ovo967294

Follow the discussion updates on Twitter and Facebook

Cheers, Edwin
Founder & Director of Jibe

Researcher: Betty Stefanova

Wij willen alle vrienden van Jibe bedanken voor de inspirerende samenwerking!
Namens het hele team hele fijne feestdagen en een gezond en succesvol 2011 gewenst!

The next important objective of companies participating in our research is to improve or manage their image and reputation on social media.

Social media is proving to be a truly innovative channel to improve image by managing customer relationships. This is because it is having high influence on the decision making process and buying behavior. Before purchasing  a product everybody just checks the reviews on social media and asks friends’ recommendation.

As well as recommendations, though social media is a good place for complaints. And bad news spread fast.

 By monitoring social media you can easily track the cause of the complaints and idetify the issues they refer to. Moreover, customers always appreciate it when their complaints are addressed fast and solved by companies themselves.

Usually, it does not matter if you are on social media or not, people are still talking. So, companies that join the conversation are able to provide the most relevant answers and thus manage the issues and their image.

If you want to prevent being in one of the many ‘’most hated’’ list, be proactive and monitor conversations around your company or brand.  What exactly to measure and focus on?

Sentiment is the metric that can show you the prevailing attitudes of your community at any time. It can also help you check what your current online image is. By tracking the changes in sentiment you can evaluate what is going well and what could go better in your online activities.

In the time of economic crisis people are spending much less and are much more careful on what they buy. Having a great website is still very important, but in the current market situation you should not only look good, but  look like you can deliver what you promise.

Social media gives the opportunity for that. You can be open and friendly to customers in a direct conversation. You can promote your product/service while discussing and  offering  tips or advice. In this way people will learn more about the positive sides of your company without the forced exposure to advertisements they do not trust.

By gaining customers’ trust, you can have an advantage over competitors

In the best case you would like many people to be positive about you and to be actively talking about you. But you can do even more.

 By determining your true ambassadors and enthusiasts and talking to them, you will be able to get relevant and valuable feedback on your activities.

If your fans on social media like you and trust you they will share your content and messages creating buzz around your company or brand. But how many people do you finally reach and who are they?

Next week we will focus  on measuring and proving the reach of social media activities.

Do you know who reads and reacts on your messages?

So far, we discussed the two most important objectives for using and measuring social media, ranked by the participants in our survey. These objectives were: Getting insights in their online community and improving their brand awareness.

This week the focus is on the next important objective that came up in the ranking: Improving brand dialogue.

 When you already know your public and they know  you continue communicating and engaging in activities and campaigns.People start commenting on your messages, liking or sharing them, visiting your website or web-shop. These conversations and opinions spread across channels  and many more people are able to see and participate in them. That is why it is very important to be able to oversee this entire buzz.

Knowing how many messages have been sent everyday will allow you to track the conversation and know what topic (at what moment) triggered most discussion. It would be even better to know on which channels (Facebook, Twitter, Hyves) people are talking about you most. This will help you choose the right channels for your messages.

What is the attitude of your fans is determined by a metric called Sentiment. It is useful for many aspects of communication and PR. This is a kind of alarm bell to signal when something has triggered very good or very bad reactions.

A valuable and enjoyable dialogue forms an enthusiastic and loyal community. This community creates a stable and ‘healthy’ environment as well as new opportunities of a company or brand to grow and attract more customers. So, being smart and proactive, as well as having a good overview on the social scope is what pushes companies and brands in the future of online marketing and communications.

Next week we will explore how to use social media to manage and improve the image of your company, product or brand.

 Join the discussion and share your experience or difficulties in managing your brand dialogue on social media.

Continuing the discussion about objectives connected to social media, we move one place down in our respondent’s ranking to focus on the next most important objective: Improving brand awareness.

As discussed last week, knowing your influencers, approaching and engaging them to reach broader public is a basic step in the process. But, there are more useful things to know in order to build a good strategy and effective tactics for improving your brand awareness.

 For example:

• How many people do you really reach with your social media activities?
• How many people can you possibly reach with your campaigns or messages?
• Who are they (age, gender)?
• Where do they come from?

 Social Brand Builder report:

Based on this knowledge you can start your campaign, contest, discussion or event, in order to reach more people, tell them about your company, product or brand and engage them in your conversation.

But then, you would want to know the result of your work and efforts:

•  How effective your campaign was?
•  Did it attract new fans and how many?
•  In which moment did it create most buzz and interest?

Social Brand Builder report: 

This information will give you a good overview on:

•  Where you stand on the path to your goal
•  How effective your campaigns are
•  Signals if something must be changed or improved
•  At what moment you should to react

Through a good social dialogue and campaigns people enjoy, share and talk about, you can make your brand much stronger and well recognized.  

 Next week we will focus on how to improve the dialogue with your community by monitoring and measuring social media.

So, stay in touch for more interesting insights.

Back to our top 5 most important objectives from last week.

Hereby, we will focus on the top objective on the list:  Getting more insights in your online community.

We approached marketing and communication professionals and asked them: Why is this objective rated so high?

Their answer is that it is important to make fans-friends. So, the better you know who they are the easier it will be to talk to them, engage them and build a relationship.

Knowing who your influencers are is the most important part.

Why are influencers so important?

• Their opinion is important and sometimes it highly depends on their review if people will like you or buy from you.
• They are more trusted because they are not paid to speak well about you, but share their own experience.
• If you are mentioned by these influencers that builds trust in the communities they are in
• They can give you good tips about product development
• Establishing a lasting conversation and relationship with them, contributes to your brand/company image

How to identify influencers?

Various monitoring and analytic tools can tell you how many followers or fans you have. The more important information, though, is who of them are the most engaged with your company or brand, who are the influencers and ambassadors, how trusted their opinion is and how many people are following them.

More sophisticated tools can even tell you who of your fans buy your product/service and how much money they spend on it.

This is a lot of data!

That is why it is essential to have one tool that summarizes all in a clear and actionable way.

Social Brand Builder Reporting

Social media can actually influence a very wide range of business areas, like PR, Marketing, Advertising, Branding, Sales and even Product and service development.

The confusion comes when these effects must be proved- and this is where social media analytics steps in.

By monitoring and measuring social media you will get data which can be used to improve and control various areas of your business, so that finally, it gets to the return on your investment.

We asked our respondents to rank their objectives in using and measuring social media according importance.

 And these are the 5 most important objectives:

-         Get more insights in their community on social media

-         Improve brand awareness and brand dialogue

-         Improve reputation and Image

-         Increase reach/value

-         Increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns

In the next few posts we are going to  discuss  these objectives in more detail .

So, stay in touch.

Is the famous Dutch saying relevant in terms of social media?

It very much is! And the knowledge that social media measurement provides can be very valuable for every business or brand. In what way? This we are exploring and discovering step-by-step in our research and findings.

The focus questions this time are: Have Dutch companies measured social media impact so far and are they interested in doing it?

According to our findings most of our respondent companies have not thoroughly measured or analysed social media impact before, either because they did not see the need for it or they did not know how. Many of them have been using a combination of analytic tools already available to monitor social channels and others tried to do it with web analytics like Google for example.

Things have changed  and currently almost 48% of our respondents are already actively monitoring social media and trying to measure its effects, and 30% are still not doing it but are interested.

This change in the approach towards social media comes because companies have realized how influential this medium can be. If a company is not on social media that does not mean it is not affected by everything that is being said about it. Customers (potential and actual), competitors and partners are there – discussing products and brands, creating communities and forming positive or negative attitudes.

That is why not only companies actively using social media are showing interest in monitoring it. Measuring for their clients, monitoring their competitors or simply checking what of their website or blog content is being shared and commented on. All this information can be of great use and all of it can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, blogs etc.

Social media can also be the perfect place for dialogue, getting to know potential clients or partners better, learn their opinion and finally engage them in various campaigns and activities. So, analysing social media is not only about knowing what is going on there, but being able to influence it.

All in all, Dutch companies are monitoring social media to some extent and in their own way. But they have realized how important it can be and are searching for tools to help them do more and go deeper into the social media analytics.

What data can be measured on social media, what it can be used for and what tool provides this data, we are going to explore this in further details in our next posts.

So, stay in touch for some more interesting insights.

Although the focus of our research is social media analytics, how companies approach social media in their marketing activities, is still the basic question.

Various comparative researches are stating that the Netherlands is behind on using social media for marketing, compared to other countries like the UK and US. Companies in the Netherlands see social media only as an additional channel to use for promotion or communication. That is why they use it in combination with traditional activities and channels (for example TV, Radio, newspaper, outdoor, online advertising etc.)

Here is what we found out:

• Participants in our research say they are mostly combining social media communication with their website or blog activities for sharing content.
• Small companies in the Netherlands are the most active on social media, mainly on the three most popular channels Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Mid-size companies are still adapting to these new media and are not so active on it.
• Big companies and brands have difficulties to adapt but they are active and using wider range of channels for their marketing (including YouTube for example).
• Most social media active companies are from the marketing and communication, media, events and entertainment and non-profit sectors.

No matter, if Dutch companies actively use or are still adapting to social media, they think it is an important aspect of their marketing and communication strategies.

That is why the value of social media per company should be discovered and proved.

Are you using social media for promotion, communication or other marketing activities? Which social media channels do you use and how active are you on them?

See also: The predictive value of Online Reputation

Follow the discussion updates on: Twitter and Facebook

For some time, we are monitoring popular Brands and people, to get some insight in their Online Reputation.
On http://www.rankingz.com we also compare them to their peers in order to gain more insights in the mechanisms that influence this reputation.


Another very interesting insight we are trying to develop, is the predictive value of these reputation insights.
For the last months, we are monitoring the DJ’s that are ranked by DJ Mag top 100.
DJ Mag is a British magazine about electronic dance music and DJ’s and is famous for its DJ Mag Top100 contest.
Yesterday, the contest results where announced.
We where very curious how that would relate to the ranking based on online reputation.
Also see this blogpost for earlier posts on this topic.

Below the results and see for yourself!