Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Keiva

Here’s wishing you a Fun and Merry Christmas.  From your team at The Execution Group!

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What Can LinkedIn Ads Do For Your Business?

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Keiva

Imagine reaching over 175 million people, globally, with your business ads!  What would you advertise?  Who would you want to reach?  How would you measure the success of your ads?  LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the internet, offers Ads that are supposed to reach prospected targets with measurable results.  With the ability to directly put your message in front of key decision makers or influencers (5.5 million – High Tech Managers; 2 million – C-Level Executives – all LinkedIn members), the opportunities are immense.  It’s an efficient way to utilize advertising dollars while targeting the right audience.

LinkedIn Ads claim to do the following:

  1. Define your target audience
  2. Quality Assurance Testing
  3. Drive potential customers to your business
  4. Pay for only Ads that produce results
  5. Create Ads in languages other than English
  6. Campaign Analysis

Define Your Audience

Carefully crafted Ads can be designed and marketed via LinkedIn for specific target criterion such as job title, geography, industry, seniority or within specific LinkedIn Groups.  With such specific filters, your Ads will reach the audience that it was designed to reach.

Sample of LinkedIn’s Target Audience criterion that allows for segmentation based on members’ profiles:

  • Industry
  • Job title
  • Geographical location
  • Job function
  • Age
  • Gender
  • & More

LinkedIn’s members can also be reached on other websites through the LinkedIn Audience Network.  Per LinkedIn “This allows you to reach the LinkedIn members you are targeting, even when they are visiting other websites.  Partner websites may include those in the Google double click Ad Exchange.”

Quality Assurance Testing

LinkedIn provides the opportunity to create up to 15 ad variations to test which image and text performs best.

Drive Customers To Your Business

With Ads crafted to be placed on highly visible pages on LinkedIn, and calls to action behind them, the likelihood of a target circling back to your website, your profile, or you is greatly increased.  According to LinkedIn CEO, Jonathan Lister, LinkedIn has a follower ecosystem, a product that allows members to follow organizations, and in turn, for the organizations to message those members allowing for increased followers and more direct communication with them as desired (in the form of direct or indirect messaging)..LinkedIn displays Ads are social in nature.

Pay Only For Ads That Work

No contacts, no commitments and paying for Ads only when members click them… it’s was a Linked promotion they ran for their Ads - a smart testing entry into LinkedIn Ads and a LinkedIn sales driver.  LinkedIn Ads allows for the creation of to 15 ads with all running initially to allow split-testing (to determine which Ads perform best) and a “pause” tool (to end low-performing ads from running any further).

Campaign Analysis

According to Lister, LinkedIn provides “post-campaign work that helps advertisers identify, very specifically, who’s interacting with a campaign.  By profession, by industry, by company who is interacting with an ad campaign. That’s information and insight that advertisers can’t get anywhere else.”

Setting-Up Ads

 

Some of the major players using LinkedIn Ads are:
(Notice the Ads in each)

American Express – Area of Focus:  Small Business Category

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cathay Pacific – Area of Focus:  Target and engaging with high-end business travelers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cisco – Area Of Focus:  Recruitment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cost

The cost varies.  Advertisers set a daily budget and either pay per click (pay a set amount per Ad every time member clicks on the Ad) or per impression (pay a set amount for every Ad, when viewed), which you can set to whatever amount your marketing campaign allows. Once an advertiser’s daily budget is reached, their ads cease to run.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on Social Ads  that provides detail on the cost structure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sample of LinkedIn Cost Analysis

LinkedIn’s 2012 Q3 revenue was $252.0 million, an increase of 81% compared to $139.5 million in Q3 of 2011.  And their Marketing Solutions products, – which their Ads fall under – has shown a 60% increase in 2012 Q3 as opposed to Q3 of 2011.  Their growth strategies are working and the new look for business pages make them even more attractive.

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Deciding on your blogging style!

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Keiva

So what’s your style? 

Have you ever noticed that if your think of a person, place or thing, a certain image or feeling seems to be associated with them.  It’s almost like their imprint in your mind.  Think about it, the businessman on Wall Street – pin striped and tailored, Paris – sophistication and panache, or a Bentley– luxury and opulence .  True isn’t it?  Almost everything has a “style” and impression that precedes it.  This should hold true for what you write.  Give your blogs their own consistent characteristics so that your readers can get to know you the blogger and company and what to come to expect from you in your delivery.

Defining your blogging style

When defining your blogging style, take the following things into consideration.

  • Blog Content
  • Blog Tense
  • Blog Tone
  • Blog Architecture & Length
  • Evaluation

Blog Content

What type of content are you going to share with the public?  Is it informational, inspiring, though provoking, interactive, fictional?  What can the public come to your blog for?  What can they expect from your blogs?  Sounds simple enough right?

Let’s look to an example on a popular blog posting platform,  WordPress.  If you were to visit WordPress and look for a blog on photography, Serenity Spell’s blog might show up.  In this blog, you will expect to see photography but their blogs are specific to a certain type of photography, “Wildlife In Florida And Exploring And Photographing Florida’s Threatened Ecosystems, Wildlife And More.”  And so, on her blog, you find relevant pictures and accompanied content.  Their blog has a distinct style!

As a part of your blog’s content, use pictures.  Images tell stories of their own, and creates dynamism to blogs.

To keep you focused of the type of content that you want to produce, creating a blog calendar will be extremely helpful to you.  Not only will you have foresight on planning for the future but it takes a lot of guess work out of what to write and when.

They key to your content is consistency.  If you write more of the type of content that you decide on, this will be the type of content that your audience will come to expect from you.  A word of caution, keep your blogs less self serving and geared more toward what the demographic of your target audience wants to know more about and you will easily increase your blog subscribers!

Blog Tense

How are you going to address your audience?  Are you going to speak to them in first person, third person, will you speak in present past or future tense or a combination thereof?  Again, be consistent in what you choose.

Blog Tone

How do you want to come across to your audience?  Will you be the gossip of the town spreading all sorts of juicy secrets, be factual, almost documentary like in your delivery, give off a sense of care and concern for others?  What type of blog do you be known for and how do you want that delivered?  Whatever you decide…be consistent!

Blog Architecture & Length

Now, down to the not so fun, but oh so important, technical stuff.  In any type of writing, it’s wise to have uniformed font sizes, header placements, colors, layouts and flow.  Decide on what these will be for you and keep that as your placeholder.  In our blog “deciding on your branding standards”, you will find a roadmap for these decisions.  About.com has a blog about blogging style that focuses on the length of a blog.  This might serve interesting in deciding on your blog’s length.  Finally, you have read it throughout this blog… whatever your decision, be consistent in it’s application.

Evaluation

The last step in deciding on your blogging style is to evaluate what you have been doing.  Solicit feedback from your audience.  See if they are understanding what you are writing, find out what they would like to learn more about and get suggestions for future blog.

It’s easy to get caught up in the routine of blogging without taking time to reflect on what you have done to see what can be done better.  Take the time to evaluate and always proceed with a plan of action first!

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See how LinkedIn’s new design for company pages can affect your company’s profile

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Keiva

It’s no denying that HubSpot is a tremendous educator and resource for businesses to improve, qualify and quantify their social presence.  With LinkedIn being one of the major social players in the business realm, keeping up with any new developments from the social site will be beneficial to your business.

Learn how LinkedIn’s new company page redesign can affect your company’s LinkedIn presence http://bit.ly/Pj6Jxx.

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The ROI of Social Media

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Keiva

Tweets, likes, shares, posts, pins…the social media idioms alone can be enough to confuse much less be deciphered for measurable ROI.  Businesses today are ever more cognizant of their spend and aim to show measurable ROI on their investments.  According to Marketing MO, the calculation for business ROI is:

(Return – Investment)
Investment

Marketing ROI, based on a few types of ROI measurements.  Some of which include:

  1. Gross Profit Measurement

    Gross Profit – Marketing Investment
    Marketing Investment

2. The  Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)- a measure of the profit generated by a single customer or set of customers over their lifetime with your company.

Customer Lifetime Value– Marketing Investment
Marketing Investment

        3. Profit – Marketing Investment – *Overhead Allocation – *Incremental Expenses
Marketing Investment

 

Measuring social media (social) ROI however takes on a set of unique metrics.  In social, ROI can be gauged via a subset of measures fused together.  There is the financially quantifiable, the non-readily financially quantifiable and a combination thereof.  So how does all fit in?

Social allows for instant communication, engagement, and the creation of awareness.  Among it’s many variations of uses, it can ultimately shape peoples views, attitudes, actions, convert people into customers and create brand awareness.  But how do you measure such variables to show a return on investment?  Be aware that for any social campaign to gain maximum success, it should work in tandem with complementary marketing vehicles for more powerful effectiveness.  If for instance Coca Cola is running a promotion to giveaway an all expense paid vacation for 4 to a 5 star resort in the Caribbean in the middle of the winter, they may want to not only advertise it socially but cross market it with print, email, radio and any other marketing campaigns that they are using.  This will drive an even deeper awareness of the social campaign.  To varying degrees, analytic tools are inherently inbreeded in most social management tools.  Software such as Wildfire, Argyle Social, and a slew of others on the market allow for measurement of targets like performance metrics, semantics, fans numbers/followers, conversion numbers, brand evangelists, brand bashers and topics of interest.

A brand or organization must first decide what ROI looks like to them.  Below is a list of 8 ROI measures to consider.

ROI Measures

  1. Greater collaboration – Are people engaging in your brand and conversations about your brand.  Who you’re your major influencers?  Who are your consumers?  What are the conversations?  Who are your brand evangelists and what are you doing to keep them and your existing base happy and engages?  What are your fan numbers growing to?  Benchmark them and events around growth, decline and steady numbers.  What would be the cost associated with communicating with your fan-base via alternative methods to social?
  2. Lead nurturing – How many leads did you get within a certain period of time?  What were the social and non-social events around that?  Where did the leads come from?  How many leads converted into customers?  If you were to gain leads from non-social means what would that equate to lead for lead?
  3. Brand recognition – Are your sales numbers increasing?  Track the growth within a certain period of time and learn what social and other marketing initiatives were running at that time?  How many of your customers are on your social channels?  Who are your brand evangelists?
  4. Risk Management & Waste Management – How are you handling any negative press?  What is the number of negative feedback?  How many followers agree with the comment?  What are you doing to remedy the problem?  How would you have handled negative feedback otherwise; what is the cost associated with that?  According to a Actiance report, “Petco.com …found that products with reviews had return rates 20% less than those without reviews. By reducing the return rates, Petco.com was able to reduce their shipping and restocking costs.”  What are some of the key drivers to minimizing waste?
  5. Your position vs. your competitor’s – What is the fan count on your competitors vs you?  Where are their fans?  How are you both engaging with your fans?  How does the engagement result in sales for you and for your competitor?  What is the number of customers lost?  What is the average spend per customer
  6. Recruiting – What would be the normal recruiting cost vs a social recruiting effort?  What jobs or recruiting activities are people talking about?
  7. Higher employee productivity – What are employees talking about on social media channels?  Are employees on social media channels on company time?  Can employees communicate together via internal social channels such as Yammer?  What is the employee productivity levels and morals like as a result?
  8. Customer retention – What are the retention numbers on customers within specific periods of time?  What are the topics that engage them?

In taking into consideration the measurement factors above, here are some tangible social ROI measurements by an Actiance whitepaper – Social Media ROI for Distributed Teams, embellished by us.

1.    Assign values to your benefits (Some “Benefits” include)

    • Costs saved by not using a recruiter
    • Cost of posting a job on LinkedIn
    • Number of lost customers
    • Average spend per customer
    • Shipping costs as percentage of customers
    • Product return rates
    • Sales increase due to specific loyalty programs

2.    Add up costs of social media marketing campaigns (“Investment” such as)

    • Salaries of specific social media marketing staff and time spent by
    • “Other” employees on social outreach
    • Cost of social media management applications (e.g., monitoring, listening, compliance, marketing, etc.)
    • Any third-party costs (e.g., marketing agencies, graphics designers)

 

www.actiance.com

 

Now go out there and realize your social ROI!

 

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Online Brand Identity

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Melody

Online brand identity

A key approach to gaining more market share for your particular brand is to have a strong online presence.  It is vital though to have both your offline and online brand strategy match.  Through various online marketing methods, you now gain an online presence and can form an online brand identity.  An online brand identity is the extent to which the public is familiar with your brand via your online presence.

There are a variety of online methods that a company can use to create or improve their online brand identity.  They include:

  1. Company website & landing pages
  2. Social media
  3. Search Engine Optimization:  Organic and paid search engine visibility
  4. Online advertisements (such as banner ads, etc.)
  5. Email marketing

The goal is to select the right set of tools and methods to consistently gain, create, and upkeep an impactful experience for the public to create loyal brand users.  You will need to plan details such as:

  1. Proper website management and strategy – How often will you create new content?  What key words will you input into your website to optimize it.  Make the brand appear more prominent on every web page.  What information will you present on your website?  How is the readability on the site?  Brand your website with social media contact methodology.  Is the page properly optimized?  Will you pay for key words on search engines?  Etc.
  2. Landing page optimization – Do you have call to actions on your landing pages?  Are your landing pages properly branded?  Are you choosing the right key words on the landing pages for visibility?  Are your landing pages easy to read?  Are they broken down by lists?  Will you pay for key words on search engines?  Etc.
  3. Online advertisements – Will you pay for advertising?  Will you do banner ads?  Where will you place ads (complementary websites to your line of business is a good start)?
  4. Blogging and social media – Decide on the social media platform/s that you will utilize.  How often will you blog, tweet, chat, etc?  What are your policies around social media?  What topics will you address on your social media platforms?
  5. Online articles – You may also want to look into a reputable reporting agency to do an article on your offering/s.  For example, if you are a technology company, you may want CNET to do an article on you.
  6. Email – Initial email contact and responses should be carefully crafted and branded before sending to the public.

Whatever online marketing vehicle or combination thereof you utilize, be sure to have a concise plan of execution before delving into the online marketing to have a positive online brand identity.

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Understanding Wildfire – SMM Part 3

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Keiva

There are so many social media enhancement tools on the market right now that just trying to get a handle of it all can leave your head spinning like a fly circling a locked room!  Luckily, we are doing this series to analyze a few social media management (SMM) tools (tools to manage and carry out various marketing functions to multiple social media channels from one location) to help you in the process of selecting a SMM that best suits your needs.  This article gives a synopsis of Wildfire!  Even the name gets you thinking of a few things, right!

Wildfire (www.wildfireapp.com)

For starting just 4 years ago, this company is on fire (pun intended)!  In the words of Wildfire themselves, they are “an easy-to-use yet powerful tool to grow, engage, and monetize your audience on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn”.  But this is just scraping the surface.  They recently announced that they have joined Google!  And, they were the SMM of choice for the 1st ever socially driven Olympics (London 2012 Olympics).  It enabled Olympics sponsor firms to create campaigns and promotions on various social channels and track fan growth and engagement. Read Reuters’ Natasha Baker’s post to learn more on how Wildfire helped noted brands during the Olympics.

Their product suite includes the following:  “Promotion Builder”, “Page Manager”, “Messenger”, “Analytics”, and “Monitor” – a marketer’s dream in connecting, managing and delivering social ROI!  This SMM allows both your brand and your audience to connect via written copy, pictures, or videos with ease!  The icing on the cake is with their client services.  There is an account specialist on hand for your service throughout the life of your time with them at NO ADDITIONAL COST to help you with things like planning out a campaign, ideas for what might work leveraging their best practices, doing your analytics reporting etc.  Here’s a breakdown of the product suite in charts per information on their website:

Promotion Builder

This allows you to build your promotions so you can track back and see what was a success and what was not.  If you are looking to do:

Sweepstakes Pick Your Favorites Sign-up Forms
Contests Trivia & Quizzes Build custom entry forms
Coupons Instant Wins

…then this is your tool because it can do this and a few more marketing tricks!

Page Manager             

The “Page Manager” provides options upon options for design, layout, presentation, audience reach, and content.

Swap out images, content, colors and fonts Creating a new template or choosing from existing
Publish pages to multiple channels and mobile devices Foreign language, geographic and age based targeting capability
Option to use CSS if desired – Not mandatory to know Edit and clone in our simple online markup editor.
Library of plugins Access their coders and designers
See audience and engagement analytics Permission based software ability

 

Messenger

“Messenger” gives you the power to communicate at any location to any location in various languages to various demographics!

View your posts’ insights Manage conversations in multiple social networks
Simultaneously Publish messaging to your fan pages Manage multiple contributors for shared social properties
Shorten URLs similar to a bitly Publish photo albums to your Facebook wall
Monitor and respond to users’ interactions with your posts Review previously sent or scheduled messages
Target messages by country, state/province, and city Create in-stream flash, coupons, videos and other engaging content

 

Analytics

“Analytics” is really what the rest of your organization might be primarily interested in.  What is their return on your brand’s social media investments?  Well here you can get results on the size of your audience, learn what they are engaging in, and tie it back to what the rest of the organization is doing. Track, measure and report!

View engagement data on each message or post made to a page Track referral sources
Add and manage social properties View entrant demographics
Enable standard or extended permissions Compare your social properties to one another across all major metrics
View aggregate, actionable data for all of your Facebook pages Search and compare your page’s Facebook and Twitter presence vs. your competitors
Fully integrated with Facebook Insights View metrics on your promotions
View fan and follower growth over time Track analytics for any tabs published on your Facebook page
View the daily performance of your tabs over time View side-by-side comparisons of all of your social properties
Access aggregate data for all tabs View industry benchmark reports to see how you perform within your brand’s industry

 

Monitor

Whether you are looking to learn the growth of your fan base or your competitors’, get trends that pertain to your business or just check out what the top social property leaders are doing, “Monitor” will help you in that quest.

Measure your performance Track your competitors
Receive alerts Scout the leaderboards

 

Benefits

With the wide range of offerings and uses it might be difficult to pick one or two benefits but at a high level, their benefits will be it’s ease of use, not having to know and rely on any coding, their Facebook relationship allowing for numerous integrated plusses and their leading service (with an as needed, complementary account strategist).  Not to mention that their joinng Google presents mass soft benefits that Google offers (such as better ranking, paid advertisements, greater optimization etc.).

Target Audience

Wildfire’s target audience is medium to large size businesses.

Cost

An annual contract is required with a fee of $3,500 per month for each social property.  There is more favorable pricing for agencies.

With a global presence (offices in California, New York, Illinois, Munich, Paris, and Singapore), Wildfire is one of the names to look into when analyzing the heavy weight contenders of the social media management space.

Here are some quick facts about Wildfire as found on their website:

  • The largest social media marketing company in the world.
  • Over 250,000 social marketing campaigns powered by the Wildfire Suite.
  • Comprises 8 global offices with nearly 400 employees.
  • Customers include 30 of the world’s top 50 brands.
  • Named one of the Top 10 “Best Places to Work” in 2011 and 2012 by the San Francisco Business Times.
  • Named one of the top 250 global private companies in 2010, 2011, and 2012 by AlwaysOn.
  • The only social media marketing company to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund (2x winner).

 

 

 

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The power of social media in the Olympics – use it for your business!

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Keiva

Is your company on any social network yet?  If not or if you’re not fully committed to utilizing the power of social channels, this story might change your mind.  Imagine this…over 50 million people virtually coming to one place in the course of 17 days.  What if it were your website or your micro site?  That’s the power of social media!  The above figure was the recorded number of tweets throughout the course of the 2012 summer Olympics (Olympics)!  According to the Olympic Committee, spokesman, Mark Adams, “I don’t think we would seek to control it, nor could we,  more than 15 million fans are following and participating in the Olympic experience via Twitter and other social media platforms, not to mention a good proportion of the 10,800 athletes. Used the right way, we embrace social media, and if you look at the guidelines, we positively encourage it.” – London, AP.

It all comes down to the numbers… Below is the London 2012 Social Media Dashboard:

http://www.london2012.com/social/

According to figures from the Google acquired social media management firm Wildfire (look for our next blog on Wildfire in continuation of our SMM series), the SMM tool that powered the Olympics, reports from Twitter and The Associated Press, these were some of the results for some social media channels.

Twitter:

  • 50 million Olympic tweets – 80,000 per minute…after Usain Bolt (Bolt) won the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint – How did this translate to Bolt’s twitter account?
  • Michael Phelps and Tom Daley – the Most Tweeted About list.  Starcount reported the Phelps added 1 million Twitter followers.
  • Gabby Douglas over 650,000 followers.

Facebook:

  • Facebook went from 100 million users 4 years ago to 900 million now, after the Olympics.
  • Gymnast Gabby Douglas had 14,358 followers on July 27 and 540,174 less than 2 weeks later.
  • German gymnast Marcel Nguyen leaped from 7,567 to 179,441 in less than 2 weeks…ending with 194,000 followers.
  • Camille Muffat 124,000 followers by the end of the games .

Video Streaming:

  • According to PR Newswire, 63.1 million live video streams downloaded, up from 14 million in 2008.
  • Total number of video streams downloaded, live or otherwise, was 154 million, doubling that of Beijing.

Translation to NBC (the official network of the 2012 Olympics)

Sometimes when something is still growing, it is easy to underestimate it’s power or value.  Even the NBC executives initially underestimated the power of social media to drive their viewership which they benchmarked by the results from the Beijeing Olympic games.  Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC sports reported “We believed it would be a positive for us, and people would dialogue about the games even if they knew the outcomes.  But every day in social media is a learning experience, not just for us but for every business.  Yeah, I think maybe we did underestimate it.”   The end result was approximately 31.1 million viewers per night to the network, a 12% increase from the 2008 Beijing games.  Don’t underestimate how social media can drive your business!

Although, they somewhat underestimated it’s power initially, NBC partnered both Facebook and Twitter before the games began and even had it’s official IOC Social Media, Blogging and Internet Guidelines for participants and other accredited persons at the London 2012 Olympic Games. 


Your brand and social media

You need to be on multiple platforms!  Some people prefer one over another or just don’t have the time to check multiple (utilizing a free social media management tool such as Hoot Suite might be helpful in this scenario) but this is why you should be on multiple!

Brands really do gain in many ways (notably of which is recognition) from social media.  In analyzing some of the brands that gained recognition as a result of the Olympics, Reuters’ Natasha Baker reported, “Some of the official sponsors of the Games, which included Proctor and Gamble, Coca Cola and Visa, saw their fan bases grow by millions of followers, and a doubling of their engagement levels throughout the games, according to Wildfire data analyst James Lancaster.  “Olympics on social media had a huge role for brands. Not only were fan bases growing by huge amounts but fans were really interacting with brand pages,” he said.”

 

 

 

 

Image from Pew Research Center

 

 

 

 

The chart above and other research begs the question “does age have something to do with the use of social networking, hence influencing the type of content to present?”  That is a topic for another blog but according to Pew Research “Young people under the age of 30 are much more likely to have followed Olympic coverage on social networking sites than are older Americans.  About three-in-ten (31%) of those ages 18-29 have followed coverage on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, compared with 11% of those 30-49, 6% of those 50-64, and just 2% of those 65 and older”.  Give people something to talks about, let them know that it exists (via marketing and other means) and they will engage!

People enjoy collaborative agreement or disagreement and they love that they can be heard!  In this case it was the Olympics.  Sure, there was other media involved to promote the push to social.  But that’s the beauty of it.  Have all of your marketing, PR and promotions aligned with your social media efforts and the social push to influence can take on a life of it’s own.  Use it to promote your brand.

For related topics and Olympic figures, visit blogs by the following:

Fast Company,David Bauer of The Associated Press, PR Newswire.

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Understanding Argyle Social – SMM Part 2

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Keiva

In our recent blog “The need for a social media management (SMM) tool for effective communication – SMM Part 1″, we referenced that there are vast amounts of social media management tools on the market and even more social media platforms.  With so many choices of social media platforms available, effectively managing the ones that you choose to be a part of can become a challenge for you and your business.  With so many social media management tools on the market, this adds another layer of complexity to the task.  This article will analyze the social media management tool “Argyle Social”.

Argyle Social (http://argylesocial.com/)

Argyle Social is a social media management tool that powers marketing programs.  This tool allows marketers to manage and measure campaigns and activity on your Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and Google + pages from one interface.  According to Argyle Social, they are the industry’s leader in helping measure social media’s impact on businesses – http://bit.ly/KWHBvZ.  One thing is for sure, Argyle Social is truly a data driven social marketing tool.  It runs on a cloud infrastructure and allows for a 99.9% of data uptime; it also allows social media team members and other members of an organization to collaborate with each other.  Argyle Social provides implementation, onboarding and training support, and has solid security features for password and other protection.  It is important to note that Argyle Social is not a listening platform (like a “Radian 6”), nor does it offer custom Facebook contests, or games.  It does however, monitor for mentions and keywords on real-time streams like Twitter and Facebook.  Argyle Social ties all activities to specific campaigns.   What gives them an edge is their social media analytics dashboard that allows marketers to provide actual numeric returns on campaigns providing for measurable ROI.

Who is Argyle Social’s beneficial to?

Argyle Social’s primary target audience is small to mid-sized businesses that view social as a strategic channel; therefore the offerings and pricing reflect that target audience.

Benefits

Argyle Social specifically handles social site presence only.  It’s enormous benefits are its ability to fully track and tie back all specific social media activities to campaigns (from a tweet, to a shared link to a post to a download and the list goes on), to learn and track what social media activities are working toward more profitability (such as the activities around a specific topic or a newsletter) and to track a social media activity to a sale conversion.

Cost

There will be a cost of time, and quick training required for learning the system, however, depending on the package purchased, there is also a dedicated account manager that will guide you along the way.

As an expense, the cost of varied packages follows:

Marketer – Starting at $300 per month
Professional social media marketing teams – Starting at $ 400 per month
Enterprise – Advanced users and teams – Starting at $1100 per month

Packages’ details


Analytics and measurement

http://bit.ly/AaMtZ1

Vs. just vanity metrics, Argyle Social tracks and measures social media metrics that are of substance to businesses through utm parameters (tags added to urls).   Metrics such as audience size, clicks, interactions and conversions all tie into campaigns to allow for accurate measurement of what worked and what didn’t work to convert into eventual sales.  Argyle Social’s automated social ROI technology behind their analytics dashboard, ensures that the links on their system accurately denotes referring traffic.  For instance, if there is Twitter traffic, it will be easier to see who the tweets were from, where they came from, if they were a result of a call to action, newsletter, etc., what campaign it was tied to and so on.  This allows marketers to know what campaigns are working, what is driving more activity and what is helping for greater sales conversions, even down to the price of an individual item purchased.  Marketers will be able to tell what transactions a business is driving and where they are coming from.

http://bit.ly/KxSMfS

Management

Although this social media management tool is designed to manage, measure and analyze your social media activity, it still all comes down to management.  Who is going to handle the influx of social media activity?

Regardless to if social media management is handled internally or by an outside entity, it is important to have social media activity properly managed.  Ensure that whoever is handling your social media engagement is a social media expert.  Sometimes, depending on the extent of your social media engagement, a whole social media team is needed.  After all, this is your opportunity to reach your target directly, intimately and immediately; you want to do it right and not make your audience discontented with you as you interaction with them.  Analyze your goals and plan your management accordingly.

Argyle Social’s capabilities summarized:

Argyle Social’s specialties lie in social sites’ presence.

  1. Log into social media platforms from one interface
  2. Industry leader in measuring social media impact on businesses
  3. Allows for social media team collaboration
  4. Available enterprise support including phone support when there is a problem
  5. Cloud infrastructure for over 99% data uptime
  6. Password and other security
  7. Dynamic analytics dashboard that can translate into social ROI
  8. Social CRM tying into other existing CRMs

Argyle Social’s Future Direction

In learning more about Argyle Social, we gathered that they are taking an active responsibility to alter the function of social media.  They are working on having social media be a part of the entire organization (from marketing to management), not just the marketing department.

Argyle Social is currently in the beta process of creating their “Social CRM” through which organizations can augment their CRMs with social activity data.  It’s designed to work in tandem with organization’s CRM databases (such as a Salesforce for example) by adding social activities to the CRM’s tracking.  The end result is better tracking and mapping of social actions all the way to a sale.

Some of Argyle Social’s direct competitors are Shoutlet, Wildfire and Sprout Social.  Here’s a nice detail of how they compare to other companies via this Argyle Social link:  http://argylesocial.com/compare.

Look for the next blog “Understanding Wildfire” in this series of social media management tools.

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