Step 1: Monitoring

Social media has become the personal journal of everyone since it is very easy for anyone to publish information on channels such as blogs, discussion boards and opinion forums. Unfortunately, not everyone can be pleased all of the time.

The Internet is a great way to judge what people think of a particular service or product. People tend to be more honest; the only downside is you are more likely to get negative feedback rather than positive ones. People who received very good service will rarely write about it, whereas people who received bad service will tell everyone and also write about it.

If you want to know what is being said about your brand, you must monitor these online conversations. However, the size and complexity of the Internet coupled with the speed at which news travels means it is difficult to continuously monitor all that is being said. To tackle this problem, you need an early warning system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so you may remedy when needed. There are several social monitoring services available that do the work for you.

Examples of Social Monitoring Tools

1. Google and Yahoo! Alerts – Receive email alerts every time someone mentions brands that you are tracking. Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.
2. Social Mention – Social Mention tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video and audio. Searches can be saved as an RSS feed, so you can easily stay up-to-date.
3. Radian6 – Radian6 is a powerhouse that gives you the ability to slice-and-dice your data until your head spins. This social media monitoring tool offers integrated workflow, alerts, sentiment, monitoring across blogs, forums, news, Twitter and more.
4. HootSuite – HootSuite is a popular tool that can be used to manage multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and LinkedIn. You can push updates to one or more profiles, track click-through, deploy timed updates, monitor your social media buzz across multiple web services and assign tasks among team members based on roles.
5. Technorati – This is one of the largest blog search engine directories that can also be searched for keywords related to your brand (or those of your competition).
6. Addict-O-Matic – This tool has a consolidated page with search matches across sites like Twitter, Flickr and more. Featuring an appealing interface and one-page dashboard, Addict-o-matic is one of the best free tools available for summarizing your entire “buzz” in one place.
7. ReputationDefender – Created for the specific purpose of helping you preserve and restore your reputation in social media, Reputation Defender offers a robust monitoring service that will help you keep track of your brand. A feature called MyEdge helps you deal with the results that Google serves up about you.

Once you have adopted a monitoring system for your brand you should also track other information, such as competing brands and organizations, industry terms as well as general industry news. Monitoring gives you instant notice if bad information appears. You may want to include positive and negative modifiers like “fail,” “sucks,” etc. This will help to target your search.

Monitoring is an essential and useful tactic for controlling bad information within the search engine space. Unfortunately, monitoring by itself is not enough if it is too late and damage has already been done. The best outcomes occur if you proactively control your space and what people read about your brand. It is important to analyze your current space in order to take action and control it.

Step 2: Analyzing

Although monitoring systems are in place, the work is not yet over. It is crucial to analyze your social reviews to improve your brand. The analysis part consists of going though all the key comments, feedback and identified concerns that are being expressed online.

Healthy Conversations Comprise of Both Positive and Negative Feedback
Once you have learned what is being said about your company online, you need to evaluate the impact this has or will have on you. You need to understand that healthy discussions comprise of both positive and negative feedback. This feedback (negative/positive) will bring about many opportunities to formulate new and upbeat changes for the better.

Let your audience know that you have been following them and their feedback has helped you enhance your product/service. Invite them to give more feedback to enable you to provide them with a better product/service. Let your audience know about the new improvements you are making and ask for their advice. Make your audience feel involved and let them know you are listening to them.

For instance, if someone left a negative comment or review about your company, they’re giving you a chance to change the conversation and make things better. They did not silently vow to never do business with your company again or trash you to their friends. They told you what happened, why they are disappointed, and now they are looking to you to make things better. Instead of just deleting the comments, listen to what they are telling you. Understand their problem and where the communication has failed. Do not fear the biggest critics. You just need to know how to handle harsh criticism in a positive and subtle way.

Step 3: Influencing

Let’s assume you represent a well-known company whose leader has just been photographed engaged in an illegal action. Do you merely release a statement, or quickly take to the Internet to defend your company’s interests?

Although this situation is somewhat overriding to the idea of public relations, the advent of social media is quickly changing the way this sort of crisis is handled. Since business organizations can connect with its audiences quickly, it is possible for them to deal with such situations rapidly and digitally.

Respond to a Negative Comment with a Positive One
One of the most applied theories to counter attack a negative comment is to attend it with a positive one. As mentioned earlier, you can influence the results by participating in the conversation and eliminating negative online conversations by being actively involved in them. Your participation in such conversations will give you the opportunity to improve the perception of your brand.

We all know that Customer Is King. It is only the opinions of your customers that count, so let them be the judge. You should establish a good relationship with the blogger or the customer that complained about your service on any social media platform. A simple comment like the below can do wonders. Of course, comments need to be followed by actions. “Thank you for your feedback. We are working on resolving this issue.”

You should take an active part in your industry conversation by becoming a regular contributor to blogs and forums. Lead the conversation about your brand. Respond to comments or feedback; engage in conversations already happening or start your own. As you do so, be honest and transparent in your approach. People like the fact that you are paying attention and are actively participating in the conversation, not just being talked about. You should always be prepared to act. If negative feedback occurs, you ought to respond immediately. Even if you don’t participate on a regular basis, you should always be prepared to manage digital disasters.

Select the Right Social Technologies
Giving positive feedback to negative ones is not always sufficient to influence the public. You will have to try a little harder to mark your presence among your audience. The Internet is immense and to be able to reach your customers, you will have to segment your audience.

Due to the numerous quantities of social media technologies on the Internet, many businesses favor the most popular ones like Facebook, Twitter and so on. Nevertheless, many of them complain that they cannot reach their audiences. Just because Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social sites does not necessary mean that your audience is on these specific platforms.

According to statistics, mostly people of age group 18-34 are engaging in Facebook. Assume that your company’s target audience is middle aged. Will you still focus more on Facebook or will you move to another social media with an audience that matches yours?

Selecting the right social media platform is important to build and promote your online reputation. To be able to access the right social networks, you must focus more on your target audience. You may also classify your audience in terms of demographics or geographic to have a better idea of the type of social network they are using.

To provide better customer service to your audience, it is important to engage in the right social network appropriate for your industry. You may also consider building your own social network if you want to hit the most appropriate community.

Let Your Company’s Tone Show You Care
Once you have elected the appropriate social network suitable for your business organization, you can easily receive and give feedback to your audience. But you should remember that a two-way conversation must not be an official one. You must have a particular way to confer to your audience and it should go well with your company’s tone of voice.

You may also consider establishing a team blog where there is less focus placed on a single individual and more attention on your employees. Your employees are the people who will represent the brand and image of your company. Bloggers and the online public prefer to hear from those working in your company as their opinions are considered authentic and similar to “public opinion”.

Participate in Related Discussions
To be able to influence your social community, you should make yourself noticed. Why not comment on other blog posts or discussions related to your business?

You can create interesting dialogue by sharing well-crafted and insightful responses to topics that are relevant to your customers. This also positions you as an expert in your field.

Read relevant blogs to understand what is going on in your industry, but only comment on events, articles, posts, etc., where you can add value. Commenting on everything will not increase your visibility or reinforce your image as an expert. Unless you bring value, you will just be adding to the noise. Define your expertise narrowly and go deep. Never be afraid to take a risk with an opinion, no matter how controversial you think it may be – as long as you approach it carefully and professionally.

There are essentially three conversations taking place online today.  All three of these conversations should be addressed as part of your digital marketing strategy. The conversations are:

1. SEARCH – Consumers SEARCH online.
2. SURF – Consumers SURF online.
   
3. SOCIAL – Consumers SOCIALize online.
   

SEARCH represents a Consumer to Business Conversation. SEARCH is the #1 resource consumers use when looking for a local business.  Consumers have a specific need and are initiating the process with businesses. People only spend around 5% of their online time doing SEARCH. However, these consumers are looking for information, product, businesses, etc.  Having visibility online at this stage is critical for local businesses and the return is high.  If you own a local business, it is now critical that you’re being found in search.  Here are three simple to ask yourself? If you cannot answer YES to all three, then you should quickly address any deficiencies.

• Do you have a professional web design that is setup to convert / sell?
• Are you being found for your key services and product?
• Are you measuring your results and return so that you can continually improve them?

SURF represents a Business to Consumer conversation. SURF is often overlooked even though consumers spend more than 40% of their time online SURFING.  Many people today use the internet as their primary source of news and entertainment. The opportunity for businesses is to create awareness of your brand so your business will be the one they remember when they are ready to buy. Display advertising can be a cost effective method of brand advertising. The return is more difficult to measure but the intent is to be where the eyeballs are online.  And yes, you can target display advertising locally.

SOCIAL represents a Consumer to Consumer conversation. SOCIAL Media is a very important method of marketing, sales and branding for many businesses. It does work, and is a communications medium that should not be ignored. Consumers give and get referrals through online conversations and reviews on tons of social sites like Yelp!, Google Places, City Search, Merchant Circle,  Trip Advisor and more.  Some simple objectives with SOCIAL should be to leverage social sites to promote your online referrals, create brand awareness and manage your online reputation.  A simple way to measure your return and progress is through customer reviews and referrals.

So what?  Where do you start?

The simple answer is — your website. I know that sounds obvious but I see too many businesses getting caught up in the euphoria of SOCIAL media while they neglect SEARCH and SURF. Your website is your storefront and often the first thing consumers see about you. You should absolutely have a strong web presence and be found for consumers doing SEARCH.  These consumers have a need and are looking for a solution. The return on investment is very measurable and generally much stronger than SURF and SOCIAL.

Once you have your web presence in order, then you can address the SURF and SOCIAL as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Internet marketing, digital marketing, and interactive advertising revenues are expected to grow to $62.4 billion in the US by 2012 according to a forecast by The Kelsey Group. This represents a 21.3% annual rate when compared to 2007 revenues of $22.5 billion for the US.

Compare this with traditional advertising and marketing, such as the Yellow Pages and you will you notice that they are expected to decrease by 1.4% annually over the same period. It’s not surprising that Yellow Books are now trying to aggressively get in the online game.

Forrester Research is projecting similar growth rates for digital advertising in their projects through 2014.  Forrester claims that interactive budgets will grow at the expense of traditional marketing.  Sixty percent of the respondents said they will grow their digital marketing budgets by shifting funds away from other marketing channels.

Newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio ads, yellow pages, outdoor and telemarketing advertisements are all expected to decline while internet  marketing is expected to grow.

Categories expected to grow the most (Data from the Forrester Research revenue estimates for 2014)

• Search Marketing : $31.6 Billion (15% annual growth)
• Display Advertising: $16.9 Billion (17% annual growth)
• Social Media Marketing: $3.1 Billion (34% annual growth)
• Email Marketing: $2.1 Billion (11% annual growth)
• Mobile Marketing: $1.3 Billion (27% annual growth)

Search marketing will be the major marketing area that companies will be investing in to market their business online.  This will be a combination of SMM (social media marketing), SEO (Search Engine Optimization) organic search and PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.  Overwhelmingly, companies are moving their advertising funds from traditional marketing to online marketing methods.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding the growth of internet marketing.