Power is the ability to act or capacity to perform or act effectively. Power is most often used to control or influence. Without a doubt, Social Media has a great deal of power! Social Media is exerting a great deal of influence over traditional marketing, advertising, and communication channels. Social Media has also given a great deal of power to the average consumer as has been demonstrated time and time again. One single individual with a single post or tweet can change an entire company’s product offering, policy, or strategy. Consumers and individuals clearly understand the power of social media and they are not afraid to use it. On the other hand businesses have not gained power from Social Media as quickly as individuals have. Why is that? It is because of knowledge.

Knowledge is defined as awareness or understanding gained through experience, observation, or study. The average consumer doesn’t need to have a great deal of knowledge to take advantage of the power of social media over businesses. All they need to know is ‘I state my case (whether it is valid or not) and if enough people hear or see it then businesses react and I win.’ This Power of Social Media is many voices (consumers) and the influence of one (business).

This formula works for consumers because it does not take much for a consumer to know what triggers a business to act. However, businesses on the other hand have to know the many triggers for the many individual consumers in order to influence them to act. For businesses there are many, many, many more data points to be collected and analyzed.

Knowledge is acquired through analyzing data. When it comes to Social Media this is called “listening”. In words that Marketing Execs and CEOs will understand, this is called Market Research, better put: Market Research on steroids. Instead of surveys or focus groups this is raw, uncensored potentially unsolicited viewpoints of real people. As you listen, you learn how to use Social Media to your advantage. Gaining power when you use what you have learned from listening.

What can you learn through listening to Social Media? Businesses can learn how to select profitable new markets to enter, create a “Blue Ocean.” Through Social Media, businesses can learn how to select and attract the customers who best match their organization. Businesses can also reduce the risk and severity of bad customer service claims. These are just a few of the many things that businesses can learn from listening to Social media. The next step is to put these learnings to use.

So to harness the power of Social Media you need to understand that many voices to become the influencer. For businesses this means that you have to get many voices to influence others that you feel are worth doing business with. To do this you must listen, learn and act. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not power. Power is the wise use of knowledge!

Kevin Dean
Social Media Analytics
ManoByte

Three million happy customers telling the world about your brand – can you think of a better scenario? P&G, Walmart, The Coca-Cola Company and even the tasty chocolate and hazelnut spread Nutella have all cracked the code. Coke and Nutella have attracted over 3million fans to their Facebook pages alone.

Several of these companies had the time and resources to test out social media early. They funded big programs just to see what would happen. Each made mistakes along the way (good thing since the rest of us got to learn from them), and they used their learning to build better programs, and to institutionalize the optimal techniques and approaches to social media.

Although I kicked off this post naming big brands such as Coke, social media isn’t just for consumer companies. With the right strategies and tactics deployed, social media can be used to change any company’s competitive landscape. But that only happens when a company understands that social media is more than a set of tools and tactics. It is a set of behaviors and approaches to communicating, interacting and engaging your customers.

attribution to http://www.kyb.mpg.de

The opportunities to leverage social media are wide-ranging. It can be used to attract new customers (generate leads), increase brand affinity, increase brand evangelism, manage brand reputation online and learn exactly what your customers are thinking at any point in time.

For many companies, social media is still relatively new terrain. In fact, most companies today are in one of four stages in their social media development and deployment.

1) Listening and Learning
Most companies in this phase are reading about social media and developing an understanding of how it fits in their company with their target audience. They are using free tools to monitor what’s being said about their company and brands online. Management may not be on board yet.

2) Dabbling
These companies are encouraging internal champions to start a project, and test the waters. Social media work is on top of the champion’s full-time job. Management is tentative about social media but feels compelled to get started.

3) Investing
At many companies, management has made a commitment to social media and they have tasked specific people with social media responsibility. They have overhauled their website, implemented blogs, and are monitoring the Webosphere to understand sentiment and respond to complaints.

4) Mastering
These companies have implemented social media and they are using their experiences to learn and drive better more strategic projects going forward.

At each of these stages there is more to be learned and mastered. Marketers need best practices for blogs, wikis, podcasts, viral campaigns and more. They need to employ the tools and planning to accurately measure programs. And they need to determine a clear strategy that social media programs are designed to support in order to ensure success.

It can takes months or longer of reading blogs and attending conferences to learn what you need to know to implement social media well. I attempted to encapsulate all of the items marketing needs to plan for in the post, 19-Point Checklist of Social Media . Even with this list, each company is unique and programs need to be designed as a good fit.

Kevin pointed out the power of knowledge in his Techrigy post, Knowledge, Power & Social Media . As strategists, we’re still spending a significant amount of each day continuing to learn about what works and what doesn’t in social media. As most companies have discovered, the learning can take as much time as implementing.

So I find ways to make the learning easier. I transfer knowledge to companies in a variety of ways including my book “The Age of Engage,” the Engage Daily blog, strategic consulting and through training. Yet, to make learning faster and more effective, I’ve developed a social media training program called Remarkable Marketing. And I’ve partnered with Kevin to add his expertise to the program.

These training workshops are customized for each company and delivered onsite. For social media, one size doesn’t fit all. Customization is critical. Each training session begins with an overview and a company needs assessment. Then the program takes folks through fundamentals, best practices, ideation sessions and more to ensure they are ready to get started on successful social media projects the next day.

Training is a particularly cost-effective way to get your company started with social media and new marketing. Well implemented social media programs may be one of the best opportunities to help your company outperform your competitors in this difficult economy and prepare your company to see significant returns when the economy comes roaring back.

No matter what stage your company is in, one of your goals should be to give your teams the tools and knowledge they need to ensure the best possible outcomes. What else will ensure their success with social media?

About Denises Shiffman

Denise educates companies on using the social Web to better manage brand online, increase value, and reshape customer experience. You can learn more by visiting her Engage Daily Blog, www.ageofengage.com, and you can reach Denise at denise@ageofengage.com.

Axel Schultze, founder of the Social Media Academy wrote and interesting post outlining a common scenario that is being played out over and over again in corporate America. By doing a simple search on LinkedIn a company learns information that they use to their competitive advantage. The title of the post is “A Social Media War Story”

This article highlights the fact that businesses today are in need of two big things when it comes to doing business in this age of engage. Those two things are Insights into conversations that are taking place on the Social Web and Education on how to deal with the insights that they find.

For those who want to “dabble” there are plenty of free tools and hours worth of blogs that they can comb through. However, this does not scale for larger organizations. Larger organization will need to know what is happening not just on one single site, but what is being said anywhere about a topic of interest. Therefore, they will need to partner with organizations such as SOMA and ManoByte to help them gain insights, learn, and act.

For about a year we have been working closely with the Folks at Techrigy. Last week we did a guest blog on their website. As always it was great working with Aaron Newman, Connie Benson, Jim Reynolds and Team.

Check out the article Knowledge, Power, Social Media and enjoy!

On February 13, 2009 ManoByte President Kevin Dean will be speaking at the Metrics Reporting Alumni Group. Kevin Dean will help the top Michigan businesses understand some of the current best practices with Social Media Marketing.

ManoByte continues to lead in educating organizations regard the power of Social Media Marketing to grow businesses as well as Social Media Analytics best practices.

Social Networking is not new, for millenniums Word –Of-Mouth has been the most effective means of marketing your business. The problem however has always been that historically businesses have not been able to be a part of the conversations that have always been occurring regarding their company. Until NOW! Social Media Analytics now gives businesses the opportunity to analyze what is being said about their organization and use that information to make business and marketing decisions that align with their customers’ needs and wants.


Previously we outlined the 8 levels of Social Media Analytics as being:

1. Standard  Reports
2. Ad hoc Reports
3. Query / Drill down
4. Alerts
5. Statistical Analysis
6. Forecasting
7. Predictive Modeling
8. Optimization

In this blog post we will discuss the second Level of Social Media Analytics Reports, Ad Hoc Reports. In the realm of Social Media Analytics, Ad Hoc Reports should help you define When & Where are the conversation occurring?

The Where

Knowing “Where” conversations are occurring is extremely important. This information can help you identify the appropriate Social Media sites where the majority of conversations that are of concern to your organization are occurring. Once you know where there conversations are occurring; now you can participate appropriately. Remember Social Media involves two-way communication and active participation.

The When

Knowing when conversations are occurring helps you determine if customers are responding to new product or service releases? Decreases in conversations over a certain time period can identify a PR or Marketing issue. Analyzing when conversations are happening can help to answer why increases or decreases in sales are occurring. Effectiveness of Marketing and Adverting campaigns be identified by comparing online chatter happening during comparative time periods.

Type of Level 2 Reports

Reports that would fall underneath the category of Level 2 Social Media Reports would include:

• Conversations by URL
• Conversations by Domain Name
• Conversations by Social Media Type (I.E. Photo Sharing, Blog, Microblog, Video, Forum)
• Conversation by Date
• Conversion Comparison of Date
• Conversations by URL by Date
• Conversations by Domain Name by Date
• Conversations by Social Media Type by Date

Taking your organization to the next level with analyzing data collected from across the Social Web means putting it into context of when and where. Having this king of Social Media Analytics can help you in making better marketing and advertising decisions that connect you with those who are truly interested in your products or services.

To start looking that Level 2 Social Media reports click here to register to monitor conversation that matter most to your organization. Also register to see what some of the above mention reports look like.

When it comes to Social Media Marketing there is a lot of talk about the lack of measurement in the field.  It has been said that “Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data.”  Social Media Analytics are critical for the success of social media as a sustainable business communication platform. In my article “What is Social Media Analytics” I point out 8 levels of Social Media Analytics as being:

This article I would like to begin a dialogue regarding Level 1 Standard Reports. Standard Social Media Analytics Reports should focus on what conversations are occurring. This will help solve the problem of know what your customers or potential customers are talking about.

List of Standard Reports

1) Post by keyword search - This should be a list of post that are found across the social web by keywords. Perhaps the most common report that can be easily found today by using Google Blog Search or Social Mention

2) Count of Tags – Each Social Media Post can be tagged by the author or others once a post has been identified in your search grouping how each post is tagged can be extremely beneficial.  You can identify tags from any post using the tag cloud generator.  The tag clod should be include in this standard report. The report should also include averages.

3) Keyword comparison – No doubt you are interested in more than one keyword. Therefore it would be good to compare which keywords are performing better then others. This would be similar to what you can find using Google’s Adsense Keyword Tool with the difference being that you are looking at data returned from your data collection process that was used for the other standard reports.

4) Posts by Person - Social Media Analytics Standard Reports must include who. Keyword by person and Tag by person. After all what is Social Media without the people.

Connect the Social Media Analytics databases

Through the use of the many search tools available you can perform a keyword search to find what is being said across the Social Web about what is of concern to your organization. This is the first step. Those who are serious about Social Media metrics for their organization are going to quickly come to appreciate that they are going to need a Social Media Data warehouse. There are tools that assist in the collection and reporting on of this information, however as I will discuss these tools though sophisticated do not complete the picture. All of this information then need to be tied back to your CRM (customer) and ERP (sales) databases.

In this article Social Media Analytics Maturity Level 1 – Standard Reports I mention 4 reports that should be included at this level. I will discuss what I feel should be included in the other levels later. Please provided much feedback!

2008 was a great year!! Started strong and ended stronger! I was featured in the Grand Rapids Business Journal and WZZM News

We talked about Social Media Strategy and Social Media Analytics

We gradually refined our look and Image.

We worked with WordPress, Ning, .NET, Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media Tools.

We had good times, bad times  “You know I’ve had my share”

ManoByte 2009 – Byte or get Bitten!

On Monday morning December 22, 2008 WZZM News ran a story about Social Media where they quoted ManoByte’s President Kevin Dean. ManoByte is a Social Media Analytics company.

In the December 2008 issue of the Grand Rapids Business Journal there was a feature article about Social Media. The Grand Rapids Business Journal interviewed Kevin Dean the President of ManoByte and printed a very nice article. Here is a link to the article. “The Essential of Social Media Marketing.”

Social Media Analytics Company

ManoByte is a Social Media Marketing company the specializes in Social Media Analytics, Brand Monitoring, and Reputation Management