eBook 1 - Plugging In: 9 Best Practices for Becoming a Successful Social Brand

Brandwatch ebook 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

eBooks
Designed to help you get the most out of social media,
plugging in
whatever your goals might be.

Today, the social web is transforming how the

9 best practices for becoming a successful social brand
world communicates and shares information.

Brands that understand and use social media in
a targeted, productive manner are realizing true
competitive advantage.

9 Best Practices for Becoming a Successful
Social Brand covers all the essentials needed
to get your brand ready for social media.

9 best practices for
becoming a successful
NEW social brand
1 www.brandwatch.com

contents/
Welcome to the first of our series of eBooks designed to help you get the most out of
social media, whatever your goals might be.

In the following book we’re going to cover all the essentials needed to get your brand
ready for social media:

Foreword: The Social Media Imperative for Brands
And how are leading brands responding?

Best Practice: #1: Make Being Social an Enterprise-Wide Revolution
#2: Establish Social Media Goals Before Jumping into the Fray
#3: Listen Well
#4: Monitor Broadly but with Focus
#5: Broaden Your Internal Audience
#6: Engage and Respond to Add Value
#7: Customize Social Media Monitoring by Discipline
#8: Measure What You Have Heard
#9: Continuously Improve through Measurement

We hope you find this eBook a valuable resource as you start to take on the exciting
new world of the social web!

Thanks,
The Brandwatch Team

plugging in/ contents 2 www.brandwatch.com

foreword/
the social media imperative for brands
Today, the social web is transforming how the world communicates and shares
information. Brands that understand and use social media in a targeted, productive
manner are realizing true competitive advantage. In fact, brand companies with
leading social media programs grew 18% from 2009 to 2010 while social media

quote
laggards declined by 6% – in terms of revenue, margin, and gross profit1. Consider
these recent statistics regarding the use of social media by YOUR customers,
prospects, and brand influencers:

• As of June 2011, 59% of US adult Internet users access at least one social
media site.2
“With digital technology, it’s now
• 30% of active Internet users worldwide became a fan of a brand through social possible to have a one-on-one
media in 2010, and 72% of them said they thought more positively of the brand relationship with every consumer
as a result.3 in the world.
• 53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets,
and 48% of them actually purchase the products they are intent on buying.4 The more intimate the relationship,
• 81% of social media users said they’d received advice from friends and followers the more indispensable it becomes.
relating to a product purchase.5
We want to be the company
• 55 million mobile users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. accessed that creates those indispensable
social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices in September 2011.6 relationships with our brands, and
• More than 72 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on digital technology enables this”.8
their mobile device in August 2011.7
Robert McDonald
President and CEO of PG

plugging in/ foreword 3 www.brandwatch.com

foreword/
how are leading brands responding?
More and more brands recognize the need to “join the conversation” over social
media and are establishing their presence on social media sites. A recent study by
the University of Massachusetts found that 62% of the Fortune 500 has a substantial
number of followers on Twitter, while 58% of them maintain Facebook pages. The Inc.
500, which represents the fastest-growing private companies in the US, is even more
involved. 71% of Inc. 500 companies are on Twitter, and Inc. 500 companies have
established twice as many corporate blogs as the Fortune 500.9

It isn’t just Facebook, Twitter, and corporate blogs that leading companies leverage.
They recognize that their social communities exist in a broad range of social
networking sites and forums and are following them to stay in touch, relevant, and
top of mind. In fact, a 2010 study by Altimeter Group found that the average large
enterprise has 178 official social accounts.10 178! The number sounds astounding
until you reflect upon the vast array of social media channels that online communities

fact
use.

Of 10 social marketing tools studied
in an Etailing 2009 survey, 5 were
already in use by at least half of the
companies surveyed.11


/cont...
Here is just a sampling:

• Networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+
• News sites – BBC, Fox, CNN
• Media-sharing sites – Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo
• Niche forums – gaming, parenting, cars, movies, etc.
• Technology and product user groups

It’s easy to see why brands have jumped into social media in a big way. Given the
variety of social networks and platforms, there are sources relevant to nearly every
part of the enterprise.

This eBook presents nine best practices for launching your brand into social media.
We hope you find it a valuable reference tool as you start to make your organization
social.


best practice #1/ make being social
an enterprise-wide revolution
People often mistakenly view social media for brands as merely another marketing
channel. Yet, social media interactions often involve people from a variety of
disciplines, such as customer service, new product development, marketing, PR, etc.

Take PG for example. Well known for its stellar brand management practices,
PG strongly reinforces that reputation through social media. PG’s CEO Robert
McDonald explained in an interview with McKinsey that PG truly integrates social
media across all parts of the organization. The company scans the universe of social

stats
media comments, categorizes them by brand, then puts them on the screen of the
relevant individual. According to McDonald, “This allows for real-time reaction to
what’s going on in the marketplace, because we know that if something happens in
a blog and you don’t react immediately—or, worse, you don’t know about it—it could
spin out of control by the time you get involved.”12
60% of 18- to 34-year-olds say they
Imagine having an automated system for transforming tweets about customer issues want to give product improvement
recommendations over social media.13
into trouble tickets that customer service can act upon within minutes, or funneling
cool product enhancement ideas from user group forums directly to your new product 45% of all companies now use
development teams, or even gaining word of a competitor’s looming crisis and social media assets for product
preparing your sales teams to swoop in to attract their customers. development.14

The Bottom Line: Being social across the enterprise makes your brand and 93% of CMOs plan on leveraging
company more agile and adaptable as it attempts to keep pace with the demands of user-generated content to inform their
6 product and service decisions.15
today’s social consumers and communities.

plugging in/ best practice #1 6 www.brandwatch.com

best practice #2/ establish social
media goals before jumping into the fray
Starting a social media program can be easy, but success requires discipline from the

comment
outset. You must set goals and focus your efforts around those goals. Otherwise, you
risk weakening your brand by stretching your social media team too thin, sending the
wrong messages, improperly responding to inquiries and postings, and potentially
irritating the very communities you hope to benefit from.

Know your purpose. Are you seeking to achieve one of the following?
Make your target audience
want you.
• Gain mindshare for a specific product or service
• Improve customer service Customers value brands that relate
• Build brand equity well to them and help to solve their
• Gather market intelligence problems consistently. So regardless
• Find new customer leads of your goals, you must always guide
• Increase social mentions your social media efforts with actions
that improve the lives of your target
community members.
Having a clear purpose enables you to identify your target audience and begin to
listen for them over social media. This will uncover who they are and what motivates Keep in mind that 70% of consumer
them to be social about your brand or industry. When you understand these two loyalty and spending decisions are
things, you can quickly uncover the social media destinations where they gather and based on emotional factors, which
the most effective ways for interacting with them. means your social media efforts need
to connect with community members
in a way that has them saying, “Wow,
these folks are very helpful.”16


best practice #3/
listen well
Listening represents the single most important thing a brand can do in the social
media world. You simply cannot succeed in social media without a comprehensive
and structured listening process. It helps you understand how and what your most
important audiences think about you – and why they feel that way.

Of course, what you listen for depends on the objectives you set for yourself. Clear
objectives will help you focus on what you need to hear and how to appropriately
respond. They will also help you down the line when you need to measure results and
provide upper management with the “so what” impact statements and data of your
social media success.

quote
Social media monitoring tools enable you to know who is saying what about you,
where and when they say it, and why they say it. This allows you to form the optimal
strategy for when and where to reach out to your targeted communities with
messages and actions intended to win them over.

Leading social media monitoring and analysis tools can benefit almost every area of
“Listening, learning and adapting is
your business. You can use the information they gather to discover findings around
where the real value of social media will
market research, campaign-monitoring, customer service, crisis management, and show its true colors. Listening leads to
multiple other disciplines. a more informed business.”17

Brian Solis
Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group


best practice #4/
monitor broadly but with focus
As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know – and this has never been
truer than in the fast-changing world of social media. Conversations about your brand
can take place almost anywhere, so make no assumptions about where you will find
the most crucial ones.

As you start out with your listening process, it is best to do so broadly across all kinds
of social media first. Then, after you’ve obtained a solid grounding in the “who, what,
when, where, why, and how” behind the conversations about your brand, you can
narrow your focus on the key sources you’ve found.
tip
Types of keywords to monitor:
Homing in on the social media sites that matter to you most is vital as your monitoring
becomes an ongoing process. It can be easy to suffer from information overload, so • About your own brand:
make sure you prioritize properly so that your team’s time is well spent. Once you get brand names, services, products,
comfortable with your results and the process for acting upon them, you can then events, campaigns, etc.
• About your competitors:
expand your search terms.
Their keywords and brand names
as well as special campaigns or
Remember, the terms that you monitor should not only reflect your brand, they should events that affect their business.
reflect the areas of your business that relate to your high-level social media objectives • Industry terms and trends:
and goals. For example, if your social media goal is to improve customer service, These will help you to keep a
then monitor keyword terms related to both customer service and your brand name(s) pulse on the broader industry
together. Equally, if your goal is to better understand your consumers, consider on behalf of your organization and
to identify key influencers whom
looking at wider terms related to your typical customer – perhaps around their
you should engage.
interests and brand preferences in other sectors.


best practice #5/
broaden your internal audience
Gone are the days when most brands monitor social media strictly for marketing
communications and PR purposes. With the majority of brands bringing multiple
departments into the fold, social media teams now commonly include managers,
directors, and VPs from such areas of the enterprise as customer service, market
research, sales operations, field marketing, and product development.

You should assign owners from each functional area of your organization that is
likely to be called upon to assist in social media efforts. Using an enterprise-level
social media monitoring tool, you can unify disparate team members by establishing
collaborative workflows and processes within the tool. This streamlines your response
time to “social situations” and makes a tremendous difference to the customers and
prospects who engage your brand over social media.

While owners from each functional area control the workflow and messages that go
out, you can use a social media monitoring tool to deploy an enterprise-wide process
for the ways in which information is gleaned, tagged, escalated, tracked, handled and
reported in a timely manner to the people who need to know.

Each area’s Outbound messages should stick to your company’s guidelines for tone
and branding. But keep in mind that stiff-sounding, patented responses do not go
over well with social media audiences. They want authenticity. Bring together different
disciplines and develop a social media policy that guides you in dealing with various
scenarios. Adhering to the social media policy, each team member can still use his/
her own voice while responding in a manner that is consistent with your brand values.


best practice #6/
engage and respond to add value
Unlike the consumers in social media forums, brands have much less leeway to
operate. For one thing, brands are not always welcome participants. Many consumers
of both B2B and B2C products and services don’t like the feeling of being watched
by a company, so you need to put them at ease with the best behavior possible.

comment
Here’s a list of best practices for engagement:

1. Be transparent. This helps community members see your brand as something
more than a company logo or product. If you tell them your motivation for helping
them, many will approve of you as a person who is accepting a degree of brand
accountability. A frequent business traveler
2. Add value. People use social media to learn or solve problems, so help them do commented over social media
so if you can. If you cannot, get out of the way and don’t hurt your brand reputation that he was disappointed by his
by wasting their time. stay at the Four Seasons Hotel in
Palo Alto, California.
3. Be realistic. Don’t have a PR person answering customer service or product
development inquiries. Better to wait for the right person to respond. Within an hour, Four Seasons customer
4. Inform and educate without selling. Make sure the content you share really service contacted the traveler and
helps answer questions versus promoting your product/service. provided him with an apology and
5. Never lie. If unsure, check and double-check your facts before posting anything to special discounts for future stays.
a social media site. Remember that your gaffs will live on in perpetuity.
He instantly became transformed
from an online detractor to a big fan
of the brand.18


/cont...
6. Adhere to a social media policy. Avoid rogue posts and always ask yourself if
the item you are about to share completely complies with your policy.
7. Converse. Once you participate, be ready to field responses to your postings.
Social media participants despise having their comments and feedback ignored.
8. Participate in others’ forums. Assuming you have established your own online
forum, show that you respect others’ opinions by participating in some of their
forums.
9. Sustain your social media effort. Nothing says “we don’t care” about the
community more than an on-and-off presence in social media.


best practice #7/ customize social
media monitoring by discipline
Advanced social media monitoring tools enable customized dashboard views per
department, making your social media efforts more effective while increasing user
adoption. After all, product research teams have vastly different priorities from PR
teams, just as customer service managers need data in formats that do not resemble
marketing campaign data.

Customized dashboard views make work easier and more intuitive for users across
the enterprise. Let’s take a look.

By Topic (by weeks): 120
Customer Service
100
Online Banking
80
Security/Fraud
60 Changes/Fees
40 Interest Rates

20 Branch

0
16 Jan 23 Jan 30 Jan 6 Feb 13 Feb
• Branch • Interest Rates • Charges/Fees • Security/Fraud • Online Banking • Customer Service


/cont...
By Country: 2000

1500

1000

500

0
Japan France Brazil Canada Germany

As you can see above, this social media team segmented their data by country.
Following are some of the most common segmentations that leading social
brands implement:

• By mention-type: complaint, referral, sales lead, customer inquiry, review, etc.
• By author-type: past/present or prospective customer, advocate, detractor,
influencer, etc.
• By topic: customer service, product/service by name, product feature, etc.
• By sentiment: positive, negative, neutral continent, country, state, etc.


/cont...
Once your dataset is segmented in these ways, you can start to find patterns and
glean powerful insights and answer questions that affect your organization’s growth
and prospects for the future, such as: Which part of your brand is most complained
about? On what basis do people refer or recommend your products or services? In
which country do you have the best reputation for customer service?

The insights gained from listening can give the social media team a “seat at the table”
when it comes to corporate strategy for brand companies.


best practice #8/
measure what you have heard
A common knock against some social media programs has been a lack of sound
measurements of progress. Anecdotes are great, but you need to know where your
brand discussions are going and how they are doing along the path to Shangri-La.

When it comes to your brand, you can easily track both brand sentiment and brand
reach. Social media monitoring tools incorporate sentiment-gauging functionality so
that you can parse the favorable comments from the negative ones. First establish a
baseline of sentiment as soon as you can, and then measure weekly or monthly to
see the delta in both negative and positive sentiment. You can do this for your brand
in general or for specific product names, individual campaigns, and even your own

quote
company’s executives.

Measuring brand reach can be real simple at first. Track your growth in Twitter
followers, Facebook friends, and other metrics of community members engaging with
or about you (e.g. volume of third-party recommendations and number of people who
re-tweet your tweets).
“Those who hold the keys to the
kingdom want to know the ROI [of
social media]. They want to know
how you’re going to measure this
new-fangled thing.”19

Larry Chase
Best-selling author


/cont...
Having a goal of improving product development is great, but ask yourself, “What
are the smaller measures that will get me there?” For example, you can measure
the volume growth in feature requests from user communities, the number of social
product feature ideas your product development teams actually adopted and how
successful these were, or the number of new engineers you recruited through social
media sites. By drilling down to this level of data, you will be able to backup what
everyone intuitively knows – that being engaged with your communities through social
media really pays.


best practice #9/ continuously
improve through measurement
The ability to measure allows for continuous improvement. You will quickly see which
efforts are meeting your expectations and which are not. Then, as you gain comfort
with the basics, you can expand the universe of keywords and terms that you monitor.

The likely result will be one or more important discoveries in areas your social
media teams never considered. Perhaps your entire industry is shifting. Maybe new
competitors are creeping into your territory. Whatever it is, finding out as early as
possible will help reap the rewards of becoming social media-savvy.

You should also measure the influence of different channels over time. Audiences can
shift social venues fast and frequently, or they can gravitate toward certain channels
for certain needs. You will want to understand these behaviors so that you are
prepared to listen and engage your community based on the different scenarios facing
your brand in the future.

Adhering to a continuous social cycle that starts with listening and eventually leads
to adaptation makes a company agile through social media. Like never before,
your social media teams will build awareness of what your customers, prospects,
and influencers are doing and saying at all times. By being so “plugged in,” you will
naturally make your entire organization more responsive and higher performing.


/end
We hope you’ve gleaned some useful insights into the realm of social media
and the ways in which social media monitoring tools can help you undertake
your first social steps.

By following the best practices we outlined in this eBook, you’ll be well on your
way to adopting a social media strategy that quickly becomes a win-win
proposition for you, your customers, and your prospects.

about brandwatch/
thank
you
Brandwatch is one of the world’s leading social media monitoring tools, with offices
in the UK, US, Germany and Brazil.

Innovative brands and agencies all over the world use Brandwatch for:
Research – Understanding the market
Sales – Identifying leads
to see how brandwatch can help
Customer Service – Responding and engaging quickly
give your business the edge in social
Marketing – Targeting new networks
Reputation Management – Limiting negativity and building on positivity media, visit the website and book a
live demo with our team.

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 License
brandwatch.com/demo
Please feel free to copy, share and reference this e-book. All we ask is that you acknowledge
Brandwatch as the source and link to http://www.brandwatch.com when citing the publication.

plugged in/ end 19 www.brandwatch.com

references/
1. Altimeter Group, New study: Deep brand engagement correlates with financial 10. Altimeter Group, Survey for Social Media Program Managers, Q1-Q2 2011. Accessed
performance, July 20, 2009 online December 4, 2011 from the following source: http://www.web-strategist.com/
blog/2011/07/29/number-of-corporate-social-media-accounts-hard-to-manage-risk-of-
2. Pew Research Center, Social networking sites and our lives, June 16, 2011 social-media-help-desk/

3. Universal McCann, The Socialization of Brands, Social Media Tracker 2010, October 11. Bazaarvoice, Social Commerce Statistics, Accessed online from the following source
2010. Accessed online November 26, 2011 from the following source: http:// December 4, 2011: http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/stats
socialcommercetoday.com/social-media-stats-global-for-branding-social-networks-not-
websites-rule/ 12. McKinsey Company, McKinsey Quarterly: Inside PG’s digital revolution, November 2011

4. ROI Research, ROI Research for Performance, June 2010. Accessed online November 26, 13. The Nielsen Company, How Social Media Impacts Brand Marketing, October 14, 2011.
2011 from the following source: http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/stats Accessed online from the following source December 4, 2011: http://blog.nielsen.com/
nielsenwire/consumer/how-social-media-impacts-brand-marketing/
5. ClickZ, Reach Your Customers While Social Media Peaks, January 28, 2010. Accessed
online December 4, 2011 from the following source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/ 14. Business 2 Community citing Forrester Research, Social Media Online Courses – Where
column/1699974/reach-your-customers-while-social-media-peaks Are They?, February 8, 2011. Accessed online December 4, 2011 from the following
source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-online-courses-
6. PCWorld citing comScore study, Social Networking Use Among Mobile Users Grows %E2%80%93-where-are-they-014117
in Europe, November 21, 2011. Accessed online December 4, 2011 from the following
source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/244399/social_networking_use_among_mobile_ 15. Bazaarvoice, What’s the real value of the customer voice?, January 26, 2011
users_grows_in_europe.html
16. Loyalty 360, Engagement is the Journey, Loyalty is the Destination, November 8, 2011
7. comScore press release, Social Networking On-The-Go: U.S. Mobile Social Media
Audience Grows 37Percent in the Past Year, October 20, 2011. Accessed online from 17. BrianSolis.com blog, The End of Social Media 1.0, August 29, 2011. Accessed online from
the following source December 4, 2011: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_ the following source December 4, 2011: http://www.briansolis.com/2011/08/the-end-of-
Releases/2011/10/Social_Networking_On-The-Go_U.S._Mobile_Social_Media_Audience_ social-media-1-0/
Grows_37_Percent_in_the_Past_Year
18. Mashable, 9 Ways Top Brands Use Social Media for Better Customer Service, October
8. McKinsey Company, McKinsey Quarterly: Inside PG’s digital revolution, November 2011 28, 2011. Accessed online from the following source December 4, 2011: http://mashable.
com/2011/10/28/social-customer-service-brands/
9. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, The 2011 Fortune
500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America’s Largest Companies Reached a Social 19. Chase Online Marketing Strategies, 10 Things to Know About Measuring Social Media,
Media Plateau? November 2011. 2011. Accessed online from the following source December 4, 2011: http://www.wdfm.
com/marketing-tips/jim-sterne-social-media.php

plugging in/ references www.brandwatch.com

eBook 1 - Plugging In: 9 Best Practices for Becoming a Successful Social Brand

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eBook 1 - Plugging In: 9 Best Practices for Becoming a Successful Social Brand