By Social2B Analytics Unit

Before social media was “social”, brands relied on traditional marketing techniques to reach their target audiences and strengthen their foundations. Today, in an age of thriving social media interaction, businesses are able to harness online tools that allow them to sift through perspectives that connect customers to their products and services. Brands are utilizing social media to drive traffic to company websites and increase leads for business development. But to be truly effective in social media, it is your job as a brand to learn how to listen to your customers, provide topics of interest to a diverse population and distribute information freely and wisely. Here’s how it’s done.

Are You Listening?

Use your social media platforms to identify people who might be interested in your product or service, then monitor and interpret their conversations. We personally like SocialReport (www.socialreport.com) for their ability to ‘actively listen’, which means that the platform can not only monitor the conversation, but also can convert it and act on it. And since reading and monitoring every tweet, facebook post, status update, tag and comment is nearly impossible, SocialReport does a great job of aggregating social media marketing activity into a number of manageable dashboards, with unique capabilities to do more.

SocialReport’s process is involving semantic analysis of every social media message you get and extracting useful information, such as:

• City (i.e. Sacramento, New York, Cairo)
• Company (i.e. Dow Jones & Company, Inc., Apple, Google)
• Country (i.e. Canada, United States, Egypt)
• Entertainment, Award or Event (i.e. the Oscars, Sundance)
• Holiday (i.e. Memorial Day)
• Market Index (i.e. S&P)
• Medical Condition (i.e. pancreatic cancer)
• Medical Treatment (i.e. acupuncture)
• Movie (Iron Monkey)
• and many others……

SocialReport is a unified social and web analytics dashboard, integrating many of your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, YouTube, and many others) and blog posts with ease.

SocialReport takes the art of ‘social listening’ a step further, tracking not only followers, but immediately giving you statistics on daily increase in following, direct messages per day, campaign results (we will mention these later), and overall activity behavior. You can also see where the response is originating from globally.

Pay close attention for mentions of your brand, and pay attention to what people are saying about your competitors brand as well as what is going on in your industry. Social media not only provides an open door to audiences of all types, but also an in-depth way to which you can interact with people. If you listen to what your audience is saying and listen to customers at their point of need, you can begin informing and engaging customers about your brand.

Join the Conversation

Once you are ready to join the conversation, you have the ability to do so by not only creating content and posting it via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MeetUp, and other social media network profiles, but you can do so via Campaigns, which are measurable and justifiable.

In the example of SocialReport, you can setup a Campaign and even assign the cost of the conversion to better track ROI of your social media activity – down to the ‘tweet’ level.

Clearly, marketers and product managers need to know the value of each transaction and cost associated with it.

Naturally, you have to reach people where their attention is focused and inspire them to take an action. You have to gain an understanding of what your customers are looking for and collaborate to answer questions, give advice or make changes to existing problems, even before they buy or have intentions to do so. A customer who loves, or hates, your brand has the ability to broadcast your qualities to the world and you can track that via tools, such as SocialReport.

Close the Deal, Not Your Relationship

Knowledgeable buyers usually base much of their decision making processes on proposals presented by the quality of care and type interaction they receive from a brand. It is important to create and maintain a good relationship with each customer, prospect and buyer you encounter to ensure that your brand is topic for future mentions and referrals.

More and more people are using social media as their primary information source and many people are using social media to express their feelings, get opinions and look for answers. Brands that are connected to customers by listening, engaging and maintaining relationships through social media are on the right track to expanding their clientele and improving their image.

Converting from positive sentiment has always been a primary goal of many marketers and online sellers. Doing it through social media engagement, while measuring and building your relationship is the next frontier in social media marketing.

1. Be authentic.

It’s kind of obvious… I know. But, are you being authentic with your audience? Your topic should be something that you’re well versed in. For instance, parenting advice is best given out by other parents. Not a parent? It wouldn’t be authentic for you to lead your readers to think that you have been there and done that. Stick to what you know and you’ll always be authentic in discussing it.

2. Be genuine.

Being genuine is very similar to being authentic. When building an authentic community, being genuine is key. Most people can smell a fake from miles away. When you say “It’s going to be an amazing day!” your readers should feel your enthusiasm. Your message should match you. If you’re typically a reserved person… it’s not going to fly for you to adopt raucous personality. Be real. Trust me on this one.

3. Be knowledgeable.

What’s your expertise? Everyone has one. Whether it’s fixing cars, selling houses, or being snarky… everybody is an expert on something. Share with your community what you know. And don’t make it a one way street. When they ask questions… answer them! The best way to grow a community is to engage the people in it! (more on that later)

4. Be engaging.

I touched on this a moment ago. I’ll go ahead and say it again… The best way to grow a community is to engage with the people in it! Sharing quotes is nice, giving facts and figures is helpful, and posting links is informative, but the bottom line is… you must also be responsive. What are your followers experts in? In order to get feedback… one must also be prepared to give it.

5. Be you.

Don’t try and adopt a personality. It won’t work. I promise. There’s only one you and you’re the best at being you than anyone. Embrace it. Share it. Live it. Give it.

July 24th, 2009

Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless. You can follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/KentHuffman

The Company

Greenlight360 describes itself as an “Internet television network” that will produce and air original episodic Internet TV and films. The startup is based in Boston and intends to provide a platform for emerging talent to gain exposure and monetize their art while providing great original television programming to their viewing audiences.

You may want to think of Greenlight360 as the next HBO or Showtime . . . but online.

The Challenge

With most startups, one of the main obstacles to success is the lack of brand awareness. Greenlight360 was no different.

Since it was to be primarily an online operation, Greenlight360 executives needed to create a buzz on the Internet. And they wanted to do it quickly. So they decided to focus on several hot social media platforms, including Twitter.

The Solution

Marci Reynolds, COO and VP of Sales & Marketing at Greenlight360, developed a carefully planned strategy to build a quality following on Twitter. Her approach began with creating “buyer personas”—detailed profiles of the targeted users—in order to accurately define the types of followers that Greenlight360 wanted to attract. Keeping those personas in mind, Reynolds identified a number of tweeters (using various tools such as TweepSearch.com, Twellow.com, and HootSuite.com), followed them, and read their tweets for several days.

She then began tweeting about topics that would be of interest to those same people, including publishing a variety of content written specifically for them. In addition to quality, relevant tweets, Reynolds ensured the content was sent on a regular basis: approximately 5-7 tweets each day. She also sent tweets at times where they would receive the most exposure, such as the coveted lunchtime slot: 11:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.

The Results

Within 60 days, Greenlight360 had developed a loyal following of almost 600 quality people on Twitter and experienced a lift in Web site traffic originating from the content of the tweets and the company’s Twitter profile.

“I am very excited about the success we’ve experienced using Twitter. Our follower base is very targeted and continues to grow every day. Our content is re-tweeted on a regular basis. And, this past Friday, we had our highest number of #FollowFriday recommendations — five different Twitter users recommended us to their audiences,” said Reynolds. “Twitter has been a very effective tool in launching our new brand name online!”

“We have also learned a lot about our targeted audience through reading their tweets and understanding what content they find interesting and relevant,” Reynolds added. “We will continue to use Twitter as part of our pre-launch buzz strategy and to build momentum and television viewership post Web site launch.”

Kent Huffman, Advisory Associate at Social2B, said, “The process that Marci Reynolds developed and followed at Greenlight360 is identical to the process that I wrote about in my recent Social2B blog post. It’s straightforward and effective, and it can be applied to almost any situation on Twitter.”

Follow Marci Reynoldsand Greenlight360 on Twitter.

Follow Kent Huffman and Social2B on Twitter.

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