Connie Bensen

Everyone wants to maximize the return on their efforts in social media. In my day job with Alterian SM2 (previously Techrigy). I have spent a lot of time working with agencies and brands in identifying how to maximize the most return on their monitoring efforts.

I shared that information last week in a webinar that covers best practices for social media monitoring & reporting.  I included:

• Common Applications of Social Media Monitoring
• Search Design
• Dealing with Noise and Spam
• Reports and Analysis
• Actions Based on Insights that Result in ROI

Here’s the slide deck and the recorded version of the webinar is available.

And you may also be interested in the webinar that Surresh Vital of Forrester presented on how social media monitoring is impacting marketing.

I have a growing library on SlideShare on the topics that I speak about (building community, monitoring, measurement, etc). Check out the widget on the right side of my blog.

Please ask if you have questions.

Michael Leander Nielson of Oslo  invited me to present a webinar on Business Objectives for Social Media Monitoring. It’s a popular topic and we had great attendance!

I covered the following:

• Which objectives to consider when defining your social media monitoring (SMM) strategy
• What types of tools are available
• How to make sense of the data that is gathered
• The ROI and benefits of social media monitoring

During the webinar it was interesting the exchange of Twitter usernames transition to  requesting to continue the conversation in a community. It underlined how people with a similar affinity will want to gather! Everyone is welcome to join our Community .

One of the challenges that I have in presenting webinars is that I feel like I’m talking to an empty space. But that wasn’t the case in this one. There was a lot of conversation happening in the chat box. I had 5 poll questions and that generated more conversation on the side as well making much more interactive. Here are the results:

Many of those that chose ‘Other’ posted their background in the chat.

I found this to be very interesting that the majority were B2B’s!

This explains why we’re so busy. Social Media monitoring isn’t mainstream yet. People are still learning.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, and there were a lot of questions about language capabilities.

It’s really important to know what your objective is for listening.

I will post a link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.

This week at Marketing Prof’s Digital virtual marketing conference, I presented a case study of Techrigy’s use of Twitter for lead generation. Many question the value of spending time on Twitter, but it has proven to be invaluable for the growth of our startup! Here’s our story. I started with the numbers first.

Here’s some additional commentary to go with the slides:

One year ago I was contracted for a few hours a week. Two months later I went full time. As a community manager, I relied on social media marketing. We had an ambitious team of 5 and no marketing budget. (I learned new words like ‘boot strapping’).

When I started demo’ing SM2 there was a huge learning curve if the attendee didn’t know about wikis, twitter, etc. So, after doing some ‘listening’ I realized that people on Twitter were early adopters and had achieved a certain level. In addition many were asking, ‘What should we be using for social media monitoring?’, How do you do it?, and the pro’s and con’s are debated.

Twitter was ideal because users are:

• early adopters & understand the basics of social media
• actively seeking information and options
• specifically interested in our service
• happy to share information with others which builds word of mouth
• very happy to see a listening tool actively engaged

To use Twitter for lead generation, listen for people expressing a need for your product or service. In our case I monitor for the phrase “social media monitoring”. If you’re a financial institution, then you may want to monitor for “mortgage calculator”. And a photography software company may monitor for “taking photos” and join the conversation.

After the presentation I hung out on Twitter and chatted. I saw my colleague, Jim Reynolds, confirm that we quit cold calling. He joined Techrigy two weeks after I did and is avidly involved in the conversation on Twitter.

And I caught this testimonial by @GavinThomas. Our goal is to provide value and we’ve made a lot of friends there. This underlines the idea that people don’t mind the connection on Twitter.

The whole Marketing Prof’s conference is available for 90 days. Enjoy!

At the end of the presentation I listed a number of business objectives that can be realized using Twitter. What have you found effective?

This is the presentation that I did at NewComm Forum. The first part outlines how to establish what to measure. The metrics are based on your strategy & driven by your business goals.

The second part is a case study on my work with Techrigy which is primarily B2B. Kellie Parker provided a case study on her work at Sega which is B2C. Both of us have been with our respective companies for six months.

For my case study I used screenshots from SM2 to show the increase in conversation around the brand since I started working with the brand (slide 15). At Techrigy my community isn’t on a hosted platform. We have our customers, our Freemiums and the extended community on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook.

*update* I see that Slideshare did a bit of reformatting. Here is the text

What questions do you have?

Here’s a link to all of the presentations at NewComm Forums.

More presentations are coming. On Monday May 11th we’re doing a day long workshop on How to be a Community Manager at Community 2.0 in San Francisco. And I’m also doing a presentation on the role of the community manager from both the employer’s & employee’s side. If you’re there definitely say ‘hi’!