This week’s guest post by Kyle Flaherty who writes a blog using insight, lessons learned and horror stories from his nearly 12 years in high-tech public relations, communications and marketing. He is currently Director of Marketing and Social Media at BreakingPoint Systems and of course you can find him on Twitter.

Listening: Why it is So Important to Social Media Results and 3 Easy Ways to Find the Time to Do It

What’s the first rule of social marketing? Listen!

What’s the second rule of social marketing? Listen!

I first started thinking deeply about the concept of listening when I came across the term “lurker” at an event featuring Jackie Huba of “Church of the Customer Blog” and Society for Word of Mouth. The conversation came up in relation to stats that say 90% of folks involved in your social media activity are lurkers and 10% are active participants. Immediately the idea of lurkers turned into ‘listeners’ for me; people who are reading a blog, quietly joining a LinkedIn Group, reading Twitter and much more. Listeners are often your most dedicated readers and for your company they often become the most educated about your product and service and when they are ready to participate it is most likely as a qualified business lead.The best comparison is the person who walks into the auto dealership with a ream of printed materials from automotive websites, collected over a few weeks of ‘listening’, versus the person who walks in and just wants to talk with someone about their cars. The former is already in negotiating mode, the latter needs to go through the research stage in real-time, with a sales person who just wants to close. Which situation would you rather have, not only for selling, but for the customer experience? Well, what if the auto company was listening at the same time and had the new features and financing options that people had said they wanted on all of those sites. We just may have a match!

1. Listening is inspiring. Listening to your prospective community base will be the inspiration for the social media tools you use. Listening to our community on their blogs and microblogs led us to learn Ning and Facebook was of no value, for them, but rather LinkedIn was the key and we know spend a lot of time in that social network.

2. Listen before you jump. You must always listen to people first, for an extended period of time, before you jump into the conversation. For example; I have hundreds of searches within Twitter sent to me through RSS every morning, based on the pain points of our potential customers. I end up listening to these people on a daily basis, but often time take no action immediately.

3. Often silence makes the loudest noise. A great personal example is a person I listen to through his blog and his LinkedIn updates. Over the past two months I’ve learned about his pain points at work, his background, his skill set and more. He recently joined our LinkedIn group for network engineers and I could now easily reach out to him, set up a time to connect and listen some more.

4. Listening makes you a better communicator. I learned this one when I was actually in PR when my manager would tell me first to listen to how a reporter answered the phone. Was the reporter’s greeting a “hello” vs “yeah” or was the tone “speedy” vs “thought out”? I would then adjust my introduction accordingly.

2) RSS Is Your Friend: Each morning part of my routine, as a social marketer, is reviewing thousands of RSS feeds, most based on Twitter search terms. It all starts over at Twitter Search, where you can put in any term that you want and generate an RSS feed to track in your reader. For any business this is a critical tool in tracking the conversation about your own company, your competitors, partners and more. One recommendation when setting up these searches is to use the same keywords you have gathered for SEO purposes or the terms people are using to find your website. You will end up refining this over time for sure, but getting these set up now will help you get in on the conversation as soon as possible.

Shannon Paul’s had a post yesterday that included very good advice for PR pros who want to plunge into the social media world (make sure you look at the presentation she’s embedded in the post).  Shannon suggests that PR pros need to start thinking about how they can make their content searchable and sharable in order to make the leap.  Kudos to Shannon for raising an issue that the clients of PR agencies have been demanding - make it easy to find the information - focus on keywords, SEO and links.

Given that the intersection of social media, PR and SEO is a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts here at BuzzStream, I thought I’d expand on one of the topics in Shannon’s presentation - keyword selection.  Picking keywords is incredibly important, and not just for press release optimization…do it right and it will help all of your marketing activities.

For our SEO-oriented audience, most of this will be fairly basic.  For those of you in PR that are new to this, I’m hoping it will give you some good ideas about how you can more effectively identify keywords, and do it in a fast, inexpensive fashion.  There’s no one right way to select keywords, but we like the approach I’m going to describe because it helps you identify keywords that are closely aligned to the terms your customer uses to shop for or to find information about products in your market (as opposed to simply finding keywords based on things like overall keyword popularity).

Keyword selection can feel pretty daunting when you’re just getting started, but it’s not as tough as it seems.  Here’s how we do it at BuzzStream.

Don’t START with Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool!

Note that I didn’t say “don’t use the keyword suggestion tool.”  It’s valuable as a supplemental tool, but in my opinion there are a lot of reasons not to rely on it as your starting point.  The problems are similar in many ways to the problems with relying on shotgun blast media pitches for your media and blogger outreach efforts…it’s broad-based, but much of what you get is irrelevant.  Additionally, it doesn’t help you identify the long-tail search opportunities, which have a ton of potential value.  Instead, you need to start by trying to put yourself in the customer’s shoes (if you’ve developed personas and a positioning statement for the company, it’ll be even easier).  In order to do this, the first thing we do is brainstorm on the following topics …for each, I’ve included some of the more general terms we’ve identified for BuzzStream’s customer to serve as examples:

1. Who is the product for? - e.g., small business, SMBs, DIY
2. What type/category? - e.g., marketing, word-of-mouth, SEO, public relations
3. What is it? - e.g., software, service, tools
4. Verbs/adjectives? - e.g., improve enhance, better
5. What does it affect? - PageRank, publicity, lead generation

For each of these, start with the most general terms and progressively drill-down.  So, for example, you might have “marketing” as the most general term for “category,” and from there you might drill all the way down to something as specific as “microPR.”  The more general terms will have much more traffic, but they’re harder to rank on and they don’t convert as well.  It’s the exact opposite for the more specific terms, which is what makes them so valuable.

Once you’re done, you’ll end up with a bunch of keywords in each of the five categories.  Then you start putting the terms together - e.g., “small business marketing software,” and “tools to improve search performance.”  You can do this in Excel, so that you don’t have to manually create the combinations.  You’ll need to eyeball the combinations and remove the ones that don’t make sense…you don’t have to spend a ton of time doing this because the bad ones will mostly be thrown out when you test your keywords (I’ll cover this in a minute).

Check out the competition

You can supplement the concept-oriented keywords you created by looking at your competition to see what they’re doing.  There are lots of tools to help you see what others are bidding on and to see their ads.  This is valuable because you get to see the language they use in their ads…it also helps you identify competitors that you weren’t aware of.  Some of the tools to look at include adgooroo, spyfu and keycompete.  All of these tools include a free trial period.

Competitive keyword searching still won’t tell you which terms are working and not working though.  For that, you need to test.

Test, test, test!

Once you’ve generated your keywords combinations, you can test them with an Adwords campaign.  Setting up an adwords campaign is easy to do and it’s inexpensive.  You can take a very large list of keywords (thousands) and get a good idea of what your customer really care about for less than a $1,000.  The information you’ll get back is incredibly useful because not only do you find out what people are clicking on, you can determine what converts into blog subscriptions, email signups, leads, revenue, etc.

Other resources

This is really just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a ton of good resources if you want to dig in deep into keyword research and selection.  My favorite is Search Engine Guide’s series on keyword research, selection and organization.  Aaron Wall has great training information on keyword selection as well.

If there are specific areas of keyword selection you’d like us to drill into in future posts, let us know.

One other thing - keyword selection is as much art as science, so feel free to jump in here…PR and social media pros - what’s working well for you when selecting keywords?

Chris Brogan had two posts over the weekend about a guy named “Bob” at a Fortune 500 company who tried to engage with his customers and was cut off at the knees by management.  By themselves these posts are interesting reads, but for marketers at small and mid-size business, they’re even more interesting when read with Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about Balsamiq.  I’ll get to that one in a minute, but first let me get back to Chris Brogan’s posts…

There’s a good discussion in the comments to Chris’ posts about whether or not Bob should have done this without the company’s approval and whether or not the company has legitimate reasons not to participate.  My take - I’d bet a dollar that the conflict stems less from the specifics of the situation and more from the fact that it’s a big company with a culture and org structure that’s not designed to support this kind of participation. I wrote a post a few weeks back about the social media advantage for small and mid-size businesses and Andy Angelos from Zocalo Group pointed out in the comments that often big companies want to participate in the conversation, but they’re simply not built for this.  They’re designed for deliberate, structured decision making and they’re optimized for preventing bad decisions from being made.  This just doesn’t work when the name of the game is speed and independent decision making.

So, as Einstein said, “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” and in this case, Mister or Miss marketer at a small or mid-size business, the opportunity is yours.  If you doubt this in any way, go take a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ReadWriteWeb about Balsamiq.  The post describes how the founder of Balsamiq has leveraged social media to build a kickass small business in a really short period of time.  We use Balsamiq here at BuzzStream to create all of our low fidelity mockups and we love it…what were we using before Balsamiq?  Microsoft Visio (i.e., the big company product).  Why did we switch?  Because Balsamiq solves a specific problem really well, we liked the way that the product was evolving, and we got great support from them.  On top of this, we just liked the mentality of the company and, even though we’ve never actually met him, we liked the founder, Peldi Guilizzoni.

So how do all these things relate to social media?  Peldi uses social media as the underpinnings for virtually all of his communications with the market.  Why does the product solve a specific problem so well?  Peldi blogs and uses twitter actively and gets tons of feedback on the needs of the market.  Why is support so good?  Balsamiq’s Get Satisfaction support community is very active and Peldi is heavily involved in the discussion (also great for driving product direction).  How did we find out about Balsamiq?  Word-of-mouth, resulting from his participation on blogs and twitter.  And what was it that made us like Peldi, even though we’d never actually met him?  Take a look at his blog…you can’t help but root for him.  When I use Balsamiq, I don’t feel like I’m using some product built by a nameless, faceless team of engineers…I feel like I’m using a product built by a human being who loved building it and is really excited about growing his business.  I wouldn’t feel that if it weren’t for Peldi’s social media participation.

As I’ve said before, we’re in the middle of the single biggest shift in marketing since the advent of television.  Few big companies are going to really embrace this in the near term.  As a marketing or SEO manager at a small or mid-size business, this is a huge opportunity for you.  If you’re thinking about participating or if you’re just dabbling,  now is the time to get in the mix.

Jason Falls blog, Social Media Explorer, is right near the top of the list of my favorite social media blogs.  Jason had a post last week about social media measurement that led to a pretty lively discussion in the comments, on twitter, and on a number of blog posts that linked to the original post.  For some reason, I can’t seem to get this one out of my head…there was a lot I agree with in the discussion, but also a number of things that just don’t ring true to me.  In no particular order, here are some of my thoughts:

Like it or not, ROI matters

Based on what I saw in the conversation that followed Jason’s post, people’s views about ROI measurement seem to fall along a continuum.  On one end is the group that argues that measuring ROI might be hard, but it’s not impossible, and, given that the end goal of social media participation is to grow the business, social media marketers are either going to figure it out or they’re going to get screwed.  Dan Thornton makes the argument pretty effectively in his comment when he says that engagement metrics are important, “but you still need to figure out where engagement sits for the rest of the business, and how it’s integrated into other areas. If it’s contributing to natural search results, for example, then without any measurement of other outcomes, the results are all attributed to SEO work, and engagement is disregarded.”

At the other end of the spectrum is a group that, at best, is ambivalent about the idea of trying to measure social media ROI in terms of financial metrics.  Shannon Paul’s comment is indicative of this:

“I understand that businesses make decisions based on the bottom line, but isn’t social media engagement all about humanizing organizations? Ultimately, businesses are made of human beings and most human beings I know are motivated by a number of things in different measure — profit is only one such motivator.”

Shannon is another one who’s writing some really good stuff on her blog, but I’m with Dan on this one (just in case the title of the post didn’t tip you off).  Peter Kim summed up my feelings about this best when he said “I have and will always believe that the purpose of marketing is to sell stuff, whether direct response or 30-year sales cycle.  Marketers who don’t believe that their job is to ultimately sell something should become receptionists instead, if all you want to do is talk.”

Yes, metrics that indicate the quality of conversations are important and, yes, people should get more out social media participation than financial gain.  Frankly, I don’t think you can be successful without these things.  But at the end of the day, if participation isn’t going to result in revenue for the business, the initiatives aren’t going to get funded and it’s all for naught.  Marketers can get away with this now because we’re still deep in the early adopter phase, but this won’t last long.  Particularly in this economic environment, companies are going to move quickly from exclusively measuring things that indicate level of participation to measurements that tie to revenue.

You can’t determine the right metric without first identifying the goals

Katie Paine talked about letting your objectives drive your choice of metrics in the video interview that accompanied Jason’s post (watch this video…the ROI on the 11 minutes you’ll invest to watch it is very high ).  Paraphrasing her comment, “in order to determine ROI, you need to know what the R is.”  In other words, you need to decide what you’re trying to achieve.  I think this is exactly right and it a point that gets missed often.  The metrics for measuring word-of-mouth effectiveness, for example, are going to be very different than the metrics for brand loyalty.

Incidentally, as part of this discussion, I’ve seen a number of tweets/comments saying that social media isn’t for attracting new customers, it’s for building relationships with existing customers.  Maybe I’m just misunderstanding what people are saying because, at face value, this doesn’t make sense to me and there are plenty of word-of-mouth case studies that refute it.  Some examples: 1) NetQoS’ viral video campaign - two of the primary goals were to increase traffic and drive leads.  The net result of their campaign was that it added $500,000 into the pipeline, 2)  Caminito Steakhouse, where they’ve seen a 30% increase in sales concurrent with a significant improvement in search engine rankings on key terms…they haven’t drawn a clear line that shows the link between participation, improved PageRank and increased revenue, but I guarantee you that it wouldn’t be hard to build a model that shows clear correlation, and 3) Martell Home Builders - take a look at the comment from Pierre Martell (the owner of the business).  Lead gen is a key part of their strategy and according to Pierre, “from an ROI point of view, because of the real estate fees were saving, it didn’t take many sales to justify this approach from a pure dollars and cents point of view.”

Traffic still matters

Katie argues that traffic doesn’t matter.  I disagree.  By itself it doesn’t, but in conjunction with other metrics, I think it’s still valuable.  Give me two blogs that are equally relevant to my customer, have the same average number of comments, have the same PageRank, etc.  Are you telling me that, even if one of these blogs has twice the traffic as the other, it’s no more valuable for word-of-mouth than the other?

Small and mid-size businesses have different measurement capabilities and needs than big businesses

Note the mention of ROI in the NetQoS, Martell Homes and Caminito Steakhouse word-of-mouth case studies.  For all three of these SMBs it just isn’t that difficult to measure ROI because the marketing mix isn’t that complex and the customer touchpoints are easier to track.  Very different than a big company, where measuring ROI requires fairly complex modeling since there are so many more possible drivers of revenue.  Do the metrics that the small business uses encapsulate all of the benefit provided by social media participation?  Definitely not, but it doesn’t matter.  Despite the fact that some of the value generated doesn’t get captured by the metrics (e.g., for NetQoS, prospects that become aware of the company as a result of the video campaign, but visit the site through organic search), there’s still enough measurable value to clearly justify the investment.

Measurement on the front-end is very different for the small business as well.  Big companies might think it’s important to conduct detailed analysis to determine influence, but small companies have neither the time or money for this.  While traditional metrics have problems, they’re simple and, when combined with engagement metrics, they’re good enough for small businesses.

So what does your social media dashboard look like?  What are your social media goals and what are the metrics that you track most closely to determine your success?

I posted this last week, but an IE bug was causing problems with it.   Turns out the original image was causing the problem (a photo of Gary V…who knew he’d take our blog down ;-).  here’s the repost.

I just finished watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video explaining how word-of-mouth marketing is changing and what this means for brands today.  Great stuff…totally entertaining and Gary does a great job of explaining word-of-mouth in a simple, powerful way.  He describes the change like this:

Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful (form of marketing)….But here’s where it gets (even more) powerful.  Word-of-mouth has fundamentally changed in the last three years, because of social media.  Twitter and facebook and other products like that have allowed your voice to go extremely viral.  So let’s just say Chris Mott over here was the biggest socialite in New York City and he just went to every event every night.  He was the biggest yenta in town.  How many possible people could he tell about your service?  Five hundred?  A thousand, if that’s all he did for a month?  Well now, one press of the button on twitter and tens of thousands of people are going to know.

Gary goes on to say:

Plus, understand word-of-mouth.  So now you tweet something else.  Well then somebody blog posts about it.  Somebody StumbleUpon’s that.  Somebody digg’s that.  The tail of word-of-mouth is the power of what the Internet has created.  As soon as you understand that, the sooner you’ll be able to build brands on the Internet.

Exactly right…and the beautiful thing for small and mid-size businesses is that big companies still aren’t participating to any great degree, which gives you a great opportunity to establish yourself in the marketplace.  According to research conducted by Ross Mayfield and Chris Anderson, only 12% of the Fortune 500 are blogging, which is WAY below the average for private companies.  Given the low level of participation on blogs, you can only imagine what the numbers must look like for social services like Twitter, facebook, digg, etc.

Why aren’t big companies focused on social media marketing and word-of-mouth?  Simple…they don’t feel the impact of not participating, so they don’t think they have to be.  They can skate leveraging traditional channels and relying on the brand equity they’ve built up over years.  We’re in the midst of the single biggest change to marketing since the advent of television, and as a small business it’s almost impossible not to feel the impact of this.  Big businesses won’t feel it for years though, so inertia keeps them from acting…momentum keeps a supertanker moving forward for a long time, even after the engines have been turned off.

At this very moment, someone in a Fortune 500 company is in a windowless conference room walking his boss and peers through a 42 slide PowerPoint about how social media marketing is “for real.”  When he finishes, everyone will congratulate him on the great work and they’ll all agree that “this is something we really need to keep our eyes on.”   As anyone who has worked in a big business knows, this is code for “I’m not doing s**t until someone tells me I have to or until it shows up in my bonus plan.”  For small and mid-size businesses, this provides a great opportunity to use twitter, your blog, comments and all sorts of other social tools to build the brand, pick off customers with long-tail searches, engage with the new influencers in your market, etc.  By the time the big business finally realizes that it needs to get off the dime, you’ve already established yourself…and the competitive advantage is sustainable because as easy as it is for the supertanker to rely on momentum to coast, it’s equally as hard to get it moving again once it stops.

Update: Jason Falls has a great case study up that demonstrates how one small business is incorporating social media into their business.  My primary focus in this post is on lead generation whereas Jason’s case study focuses more on the value that this business is getting in the middle part of the sales funnel (brand preference and consideration).  Definitely a worthwhile read.