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Alex - Alexandros Poulos is Covisio's Managing Director and co-founder. He enjoys technology marketing, innovative thinking, and living by the sea.
Alex is the main contributor of the On the Scene marketing blog.
Learn more about me here.
Social Media Monitoring Stories from 2009
This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.
So here are our most telling stories:
Disgruntled user group on Facebook. One of our clients was operating under the not-so-uncommon assumption that: “Our firm is not yet doing anything on social media, so there shouldn’t be anything on us out there, right?” Unfortunately, wrong! For this particular client, there were a number of LinkedIn groups of current and ex- employees, a few product and promotional videos (that our client did not know they even existed) on YouTube, and at least two groups (with memberships at the thousands) dedicated to complaints about the client’s product on Facebook. A very basic listening campaign picked all that up and helped direct and prioritize our client’s social media efforts to remedy the developing bad reputation.
PR agency miss. One of our clients was very proud of one particular feature of their product that differentiated themselves from their competitors in the marketplace. A leading US newspaper published an article on the impact this particular feature had on the market and invited our client’s top competitor to comment on it (without even mentioning our client in the article). Our client’s PR agency completely missed this opportunity both before and after it was published. Now, the newspaper also published a post on their technology blog about their article, which our listening campaign picked up. Based on this information, our client had to revisit their relationship with their PR agency, but, more importantly, they were able to post a comment on the newspaper’s blog with their own view on the particular feature, which it turn generated some excellent traffic on their own blog where they discuss in detail their differentiating functionality.
New sales opportunity. Our listening campaign picked up a blog post of a CxO that was explaining in detail their immediate need for a specific product that one of our clients provides. The blog post included a thorough analysis of requirements and a good qualification of the opportunity in terms of influencers, competitors, and timeframes. Our client was able to jump in the opportunity and they are now in the final shortlist.
Sensitive material on YouTube. Actually, something that’s very common. Our listening campaign revealed a couple of product demo videos on YouTube with sensitive information about the technology of one of our clients. The videos were posted by an implementation consultant with the best of intentions, but our client was uncomfortable with the information disclosed, so the videos were quickly taken down in agreement with the consultant.
Competitive intelligence. A wealth of information here:
- Figuring out what blogs from our client’s competitors are working and what not. Examples: We came across a competitor blog with tremendous engagement level and we learned a lot from it. But we also came across a competitor blog that does not allow commenting (which, in general, is against what we consider best practices) and we learned a few things from it as well.
- Uncovering “black-hat” SEO techniques our client’s competitors were using by publishing duplicate content in multiple social media outlets just to build links to their site.
- Discovering aggressive and unsolicited tweets from our client’s competitors to infiltrate conversations on Twitter and blatantly promote their product.
- Identifying new competitors in our client’s field based on their activity on social media.
PR pickup on Twitter. How many followers did our client’s press release reach via tweets and re-tweets? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? A useful number we have been able to benchmark against on behalf of our clients.
SEO hints. One of our clients is providing a technology solution in an emerging market. Despite a well-coordinated SEO effort, our listening campaign found out that some of their keywords were not used in the context that was initially assumed, so they had to be reevaluated.
Positive mentions. This is an important one. Our listening campaign for a specific marketing program of one of our clients found out a number of ongoing positive mentions on blogs, Twitter accounts, forums, wikis, social networks. It made a huge difference for our client to be able to identify these mentions and thank people for their feedback.
Conversations spanning multiple media. A very influential blog post generated a tremendous amount of discussion in the form of comments, additional posts on other blogs, new topics in forums, and opinionated conversations on social networks. The ability to consolidate all this information and get a global understanding of the issue at hand and all the different stakeholders involved was very valuable for our client to decide on how and when to engage in the conversation.
Inside information on industry events. Before, during, and after major industry events there is a lot of activity on blogs, social networks, and Twitter. Although part of this activity is mainly for event attendees to connect to each other and socialize at the event, we have found some great insights about the topics covered in the event for one of our clients that was not able to attend.
These are actually true cases we came along throughout year and not theoretical scenarios. Feel free to share your own social media monitoring stories from 2009.
2 Responses to “Social Media Monitoring Stories from 2009”
Tweets that mention Social Media Monitoring Stories from 2009 | On the Scene -- Topsy.com says:
December 29th, 2009 at 7:27 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alexandros Poulos, Covisio. Covisio said: Latest off our "On the Scene" blog: Social Media Monitoring Stories from 2009 http://bit.ly/69YKit [...]
Social Media Monitoring Stories From 2009 | on the Scene says:
December 30th, 2009 at 9:29 am
[...] This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily.This Post [...]