Last week, the Old Spice Man video marketing campaign was the talk of the Internet. It was timely, original, perfectly executed, and frankly, it was funny as hell.

On Friday, we used our influence-ranking algorithm to find out which Old Spice man videos were the most influential in spreading the brand message. Today, we take a look at some of the bigger-picture lessons that can be learned from the brilliant marketing campaign that went viral and spread like wildfire.

Here are the Top 5 Things for Marketers to Learn from the Old Spice Man:

1. Target influencers

Marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy were very specific to reach out to high-profile Internet celebrities that they knew would spread their personalized video responses to the widest possible audience and that’s exactly what happened. Whether it was Digg’s Kevin Rose, Twitter maven Alyssa Milano, or talk-show queen Ellen DeGeneres, Old Spice knew right away when their invitation to message the Old Spice Man had been received positively, and they knew exactly how to proceed from there. Which leads us to…

2. Speak the language of your customers.

Old Spice made sure to tailor make each video to the personality traits of the person it was meant for. In the case of the denizens of the underground message board 4Chan, they knew enough not to mention them by name and stick with “Anonymous.” Old Spice also knew that a video full of absurd non sequiturs would appeal to their non-conformist sense of humor. In turn, the audience to whom the influencers spread these videos would be sure to like them as well.

3. Be genuine (and funny doesn’t hurt either)

Even knowing that this is all a marketing ploy with an actor and some (very good) writers, the novelty of getting a genuine response from a fictional character like the Old Spice Man was too good for even the most jaded Internet celebrities to ignore. Even if it’s not directed solely at them, a personal touch in any campaign will be perceived as genuine.

If your campaign is genuinely funny, even better. Some ads can go viral for merely being self-reflexive and funny. You can get away with murder as long as you deliver it with a self-knowing wink and a smile. It’s almost like its not even an ad at all.

4. Use a call to action

This is about the finest example of engaging your audience that we’ve seen lately. Think of how many people were out there tweeting questions for Old Spice Man on the small chance that he’d reply. Every tweet is a brand reinforcement.

You can do this a number of ways. It doesn’t have to be a fictional character interacting directly with people via almost real-time videos — it could be as simple as asking customers for advice or opinions about a topic related to your business. (Don’t forget to have #2 taken care of before you start this.) Think of things that others would like to spread to their friends via social media: Start a contest or giveaway!

5. Make your content easy to share

Not only did they keep the videos short, which makes them very easy for even the most casual viewer to watch, but Old Spice used YouTube, the most familiar and widespread video site around, as a launching pad. YouTube has a whole host of sharing options built in and its owned by Google — which means it dominates the top of any video results page on the hugely influential search engine. Anyone who typed in “old spice” during the company’s two-day video-making blitz was sure to get a direct link to one of the response videos on YouTube.

Make sure that your audience is only one click away from spreading your message to all of their networks.

I decided to put our proprietary influence-ranking system to the test this week by looking at the now-legendary Old Spice campaign, which produced over 180 short video responses on YouTube in just two days and was spread all over the Internet.

These conditions are factored into our influence algorithm and then measured against the other results in the study.

Inbound links – This is the number-one ingredient in Spiral16′s influence ranking. The more inbound links, the more influential a URL is deemed.

Domain influence –  We measure the number of times specific domains appear in your relevant results.

Age and Persistence – Newer posts will generally have more recent links, however, an older URL that continues to be linked is more influential.

Search source abundance – Even though duplicate URLs will be rejected, this relates to how many internal sources returned the URL as a result. The more search sources that find the URL, the higher influence it has because its more likely to be seen by someone searching for the topic.

Position – This is based on a URL’s average position in search rankings and also takes into consideration any change in position.

1. The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

This is the Super Bowl commercial that introduced the character back in February. As of this writing, it has almost 14 million YouTube views. 2% of all the URLs relevant to this campaign link to this YouTube video. This video was a good jumping off point for people to talk about this character.
Comments: 18,318
Favorites: 113,121
Likes: 57,855
Dislikes: 923

This is a 3D visual map of the URLs relevant to the Old Spice Man campaign. The YouTube channel is in the center of the screen. Click to enlarge.

2. Questions

At over 7 million views since June 29 when it debuted on YouTube, this video is just plain funny, and it was strategically designed to get people talking about the Old Spice Man again before they launched their social media campaign. 1.93% of all URLs link to this video. Considering its been up for less than 3 weeks, that’s pretty impressive.
Comments: 9,300
Favorites: 33,930
Likes: 34,697
Dislikes: 440

3. @jsbeals, The Marriage Proposal

A Twitter user asked the Old Spice Man to ask his girlfriend to marry him and the writers jumped on it–smart move. It’s at 460,000 views, was linked to by 1.01% of all relevant URLs, and is the most influential response video of the bunch, just barely beating out …
Comments: 639
Favorites: 1,397
Likes: 2,954
Dislikes: 28

4. Re: Anonymous

This is the infamous and perfectly calibrated 4Chan response. It has over 600,00 views and speaks to a very specific audience. Many users may not completely understand the cranky and anonymous group, but they are powerful influencers and this video plays to their absurdist sense of humor. It may have been watched and commented on more times than the marriage proposal, but only .094% of URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 3,276
Favorites: 5,297
Likes: 6,738
Dislikes: 137

5.@kevinrose

At nearly 450,000 views, this video is widely considered to be the video that kicked off the social media explosion. The founder of Digg wasn’t feeling good so he tweeted the Old Spice Man, who responded with this video. Rose’s response to his personalized message immediately went out to the over 1 million people who follow him on Twitter: “”Holy sh*t, best get well video EVER from Old Spice.” .06% of all URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 486
Favorites: 800
Likes: 2,066
Dislikes: 39

6. Re: @Isaiahmustafa

A very clever meta video with 140,000 views where the Old Spice Man talks directly to a tired Isaiah Mustafa, the actor who plays him, and tells him to stay on target.
Comments: 136
Favorites: 317
Likes: 743
Dislikes: 2

7. Re: pandarr
A guy on Reddit asked for an answering machine message, so Old Spice Man responds with everything he thinks “pandarr” would need to edit into a great message. 360,000 views so far.
Comments: 722
Favorites: 4,287
Likes: 4907
Dislikes: 26

8. Re: Alyssa_Milano 4
As a back and forth flirtation, Old Spice Man asks where to take the relationship from here. Alyssa Milano famously responded that he should donate $100,000 to a New Orleans oil spill relief fund. That is being referenced, and therefore linked. 395,000 views.
Comments: 210
Favorites: 480
Likes: 990
Dislikes: 8

Well, “We’re Quitting Facebook” Day is fast approaching, and although there has been plenty of coverage for it, as of this writing, only 12,053 Facebook users have committed to this mass exodus.

The reason for this is two-fold:

• As the Web has become more social, people have gotten used to the idea that engaging in social media on the Internet is a bit of a game-changer when it comes to the way they used to live–and they are OK with that.

• Facebook provides a ton of value to people as a way to form real relationships and share interesting information with their friends and colleagues–and people have gotten used to it.

Wake-up Call

Look, anyone who thinks the Internet hasn’t been tracking their every online move since they logged onto it doesn’t know much about the space. If anything, this whole Facebook privacy issue (which really started when the company rolled out their Open Graph API idea on April 21) may be remembered best as the moment everybody woke up: The information you put on the Web is saved.

As providers of an Internet monitoring platform, we deal with this every now and then. I’ve heard the term “Big Brother” thrown around more than once, but the big difference is that our tool only collects publicly available information. It doesn’t spy on anyone or hack your email account and sell it to marketers.

The fact of the matter is this: the social Web is fundamentally changing the way people interact both online and off.

Managing Expectations

Some of the issues people have with Facebook stem more from the strategy (or lack thereof) the company has used to roll out changes (which were automatic) and how difficult it is to reset privacy settings back.

In our office alone, there are differing opinions. (I couldn’t write this post today in the office without hearing them!). Ken Miner says the company is “misaligned with its users over privacy and has breached the trust of many Facebook users.” He added: “When a company is aligned with clients and client expectations, it grows and prospers.”

Good point. And a business-related one, too. That’s an important perspective to have. YouTube celebrated its fifth anniversary this week and has yet to turn a profit. I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten tremendous value out of YouTube and Facebook and I don’t mind if those companies find a way to make money with the data I have provided them while using their tool.

Our Data Analytics Manager Aaron Weber wants to re-frame the argument: “With the culture that coming of age on the Internet, I wonder how long you can diminish a user’s ability to control their own data in order to monetize without giving up something in return. I would argue the outcry isn’t necessarily about privacy, but about Facebook deciding what we can and can’t do with our profile data and settings. Even a ‘free’ tool has to understand that its usefulness is limited to its ability to maintain a client base.”

Customized Web Experience

Maybe its the unmaksing of Facebook’s long-term intentions that has offended certain users so much. Having my online world custom-tuned to my likes, dislikes, and relationships is exciting. I’m more than happy to be the victim of targeted marketing. What a dream!

Whenever Pavement has a new compilation album coming out or have booked a reunion tour, I want to know about it. And if my recorded online data tells Facebook I’m a fan of Pavement, that also means I won’t endure any ads from, let’s say, Nickelback.

My outlook is a sunny one, but Paul Venezia put it way more bluntly in his InfoWorld.com blog The Deep End:

“Unfortunately, technological reality dictates that there’s no way to prevent this sort of data collection. If you use Facebook or any other Website, you’re contributing that information no matter what. The code on the site just needs to collect and store it, so all the bellyaching in the world isn’t going to change anything. Unless strict legislation curtails what information can be gathered and stored, and constant monitoring is instituted, Facebook and others can continue on their merry way.”

Yikes, is that the alternative? Strict legislation by the government? How far off is that?

Here are some resources to help you manage the new Facebook privacy settings and maximize your experience:

A guide to privacy on Facebook

Facebook privacy settings: how to control them

5 Essential Facebook Privacy Tips

Where do you fall on this debate? Is it as simple as choosing one or the other: privacy or relationships? I don’t think its as cut and dry as my headline makes it out to be, but in my dreams I imagine a world where my tastes are saved all over the Web and I never have to see or hear from Nickelback again. What a wonderful world.

The unofficial “industry” that Spiral16 is most often referred to as being a part of is the social media monitoring industry.

But that’s not really accurate, is it?

The whole enchilada: General, News, Shopping, Social, Blogs, Video categories about one topic. Click for a larger image.

Let’s call it Internet monitoring instead.

Internet monitoring tools enable you to be a social media trailblazer, but in reality you’re still following a path beaten into the ground by those who got to the space before you.

Who influences the influencers?

When companies dive into the online space, more often than not they’re simply gathering up voices and listening to what people are saying, and not taking into account what information might have influenced those voices in the first place.

How much time and energy should be spent collecting what people are saying if you’re ignoring the non-social sources that are typically our first destination when looking up material online? When you search for products, names, or topics online, how often is a site like Wikipedia the most prominent non-sponsored link in the results? More tellingly, how often are you ignoring the “why” of an opinion to focus on the “what”?

Look at the graphic above. This is the FULL spectrum of relevant URLs on one topic.

This includes Blogs, Social media sites, and Video sites, but it also includes the News, General, and Shopping categories.

Below is a good guide for categorization of different site types, although there will always be exceptions to the rule. (Example: A press release, normally categorized under News, may be reprinted on a blog.)

• Blogs – Non-traditional publishing with a focus on commentary or opinion.
• Social – Public-facing microblogs (Twitter), social communities and networks (Flickr), forums, and social bookmarking sites (Reddit).
• Video – Any audio/visual content (YouTube, Vimeo).
• News – Traditional news and editorial content, press releases, and event reporting.
• Shopping – Commercial and retail-oriented sites (Amazon, Target).
• General – General online content, reference, or user reviews (Wikipedia, Ask.com, Yelp, About.com) that falls outside of traditional news or blogs.

The same topic, but with only the Social, Blogs, and Video categories. Click for a larger image.

As you can see, looking at Blogs, Social, and Video gives you only about half the picture.

What’s the point of mapping blogs and social media sites if you are ignoring News sites and General sites? Are the Social sites and Blogs the place where information originates from—or do the bloggers and tweeters start looking somewhere else before they actually voice their opinion?

If that information isn’t linked as a reference in an article, there’s no way to track it back to its source, but that doesn’t mean its not being viewed by people and it isn’t relevant. It’s both.

There is tremendous value in finding the posts where the bloggers and social media users are getting information about you. When it comes to influence rankings, a page more likely to be viewed by your potential target audience should be ranked higher than one that is not.

This is a broad generalization, but in some respects, it gets the point across:

The Blogs and Social categories are the scorched Earth. The News and General categories are the matches that lit the fire.

What do you think?

This morning President Obama named Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nomination to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. I have to say, it wasn’t much of a surprise.

We’ve been monitoring the search for Justice Stevens’ replacement using Spark, our comprehensive Internet monitoring tool, and without even being a search-term keyword, Kagan was mentioned in no less than 17 out of the top 25 most influential posts about the topic, from as far back as April 12.

She was also the highest-ranked name in the insight outside of the word “Obama,” with “Kagan” appearing in 34.5% of all URLs related to the topic. On a sidenote, the word “gay” appeared in 17% of all URLs.

The posts containing “gay” are in relation to two things:

First, she is a strong gay rights advocate. She signed a brief arguing that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bans gay troops from serving openly violates the legal profession’s anti-discriminatory policies. In a an email to faculty and students, Kagan called the policy “a profound wrong – a moral injustice of the first order.”

Secondly, rumors about Kagan’s own sexuality continue to swirl, much to the White House’s chagrin.

Some people, however, believe Kagan is too far to the right. Either way, if she is confirmed, Kagan would be the youngest justice (she’s 50) on the nine-member court. If her nomination is approved, Obama would be leaving a lasting legacy on the makeup of the Court.

Click on the semantic cloud to the right to see the other top 99 words related to the new Supreme Court nomination in a bigger image.

Photo from news.harvard.edu.

It looks like around 162,000 Hummer H3s are being recalled because of dangerous detachable hoods and at least 40,000 Corvettes are being recalled because of steering column problems.

Let’s hope that General Motors has its social media strategy in order. As of 5pm CST, no comment had been made on the GM Twitter feed or company blog.

Compare that with the number of people already tweeting about “GM” and “recall” right now.

Toyota has ToyotaConversations, a site powered by Tweetmeme that aggregates the company’s Twitter feed (under the heading “Toyota Responds”), tweeted news, and images and video about Toyota.

If a company provides helpful service and support using social channels, it can project an outward genuineness that is key. Traditional methods of customer service will still be important during this crisis, but there should still be a plan in place for PR people to deal with customer complaints and recall issues via social media.

Today, companies in crisis can’t afford to hide from the public. The amount of people who will hear about a recall is exponentially larger than the number of people who are actually affected by it.

Is your social media crisis management strategy in place?

Yesterday, Spiral16 attended the Free State Social, which was held 30 minutes west of us in lovely Lawrence, Kan. at the Oread Hotel on the KU campus. There were some great speakers and some good information about social media trends and ways to approach social media from a business, personal, and philosophical standpoint.

Here are some takeaways from the conference:

Chris Brogan – Adjusting your marketing spend and tactics for social media

As much as we all love being on top of the newest gadgets and trends, Brogan stressed that importance of concentrating on how you use them. “It’s not really about the tools, ” he said.

Adopting social media into your company is a culture change. Rather than having a social media department, everybody should be using social media to reach the goals of their respective departments. You should be thinking about the basics: “What can I do for my customers? How do I equip them for success?” Use social media tools to support that. A call to action is necessary. A question to ask yourself: How does what you’re doing in social media relate to your business?

A key thing to remember about social media is this: People want to feel like they are inside. He used the example of the movie “Fight Club.” There’s that scene where Edward Norton is flying all over the country and people with bruises on their faces wink and nod to each other, knowing that they are all secret members of this club. “You can’t buy your way in, ” he said. And that’s an empowering feeling once you’re in.

What’s wrong with PR today? Chris said there is a severe loss of friendship-making skills, something that can be accomplished with the right social media strategy. PR today is too direct and transparent, he said, and it sometime feels like the person who is greeting you for the first time is shoving their tongue down your throat.

Another question: What is more effective–great service or a marketing campaign? He said the service component wins every time.

He talked about what he terms The 3 Buckets of Social Media and said that if you only have two hours a day to concentrate on your social media initiatives, you should spend approximately:

• 30 minutes on listening (seeing what others are saying)

• 60 minutes on connecting (commenting on others’ blogs, conversing through social media channels)

• 30 minutes on publishing (creating original content)

Trends Chris sees for 2010 are integrated social CRM (something Jeremiah Owyang mentioned as well), the widespread use of mobile devices, and the spread of private or niche social communities.

Shawna Coronado spoke about building a personal brand and unifying your message. She also stressed the importance of having conversations with people online rather than just broadcasting your opinion.

When approaching personal versus corporate branding, Shawna says that you should work your personality into everything you do. The danger of this, of course, for companies, is that when someone leaves a company, they take their relationships and followers with them.

To build a personal brand, one should:

• Define your target market

• Define your key brand message/values

• Define your product

Sarah Evans spoke about How to Make Your Brand Stand Out Online.

• Find an opportunity to showcase your strengths

• Hijack a conversation and give others an opportunity to share – This means when you say a conversation starting online, create a way for discussion to flourish and integrate your brand into that discussion.

• Generate quality content – This is kind of a ‘duh,’ but Sarah stressed this the multimedia aspect of this and spoke about guest posting for as many other blogs as you can.

• Do it for a good cause

• Give freely, give often – Share, acknowledge, give, retweet, comment, post, and engage.

• Think like those you’re trying to reach – Our relationship with news is portable, personalized, and participatory.

This sparked a number of other ideas from the audience to expand your online brand, including aggregate content, forming offline relationships, translate news to others and show them how it applies to them, and helping connect like-minded people with each other. A lot of these audience-generated ideas are certainly easier of you have a big following already.

Jeremiah Owyang was the last speaker of the day and his presentation was Influence and the Future of the Social Web.

Jeremiah comes at things from a research and analytic standpoint. He began his talk by going over what he calls the Rings of Social Influence, which you can find a more in-depth explanation of on his blog. Jeremiah says he is experimenting with offering his research on a “freemium” model this year. Works for us!

Aside from explaining this framework, he stressed one of his main forward-thinking points and put it in a way everyone can understand it:

We are now empowered to never make mistakes again.

What he means by that is that with the proliferation of smart mobile devices, your friends are with you all the time. They are in your pocket and, having been to a restaurant or reviewed a product or been to a local event before you, you can now take their opinion into consideration before making your own decision. It’s true, although I see one limitation: I don’t always always agree with my friends.

Another presentation was the third in his trilogy of social strategy and was called Getting Your Company Ready.

Like Brogan, Owyang mentioned social CRM and stressed the need for focusing on business objectives. Figure out how your customers are using social media, he said, and then focus on your strategy. I shared Jeremiah’s detailed Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management report last month, which contains 18 helpful use cases for businesses.

When putting together your company’s social media strategy, don’t just say “We need a Facebook page” and make one. Always ask why. What strategic purpose does it serve? And make sure your company is prepared for it with a workflow in place for what happens once negative comments start pouring in. You need to know how you will deal with things before they happen because people will want a company response immediately. One of the scary new trends Jeremiah sees in social media is this: Real-time is not fast enough.

One big idea to think about that he mentioned was this: How will websites will integrate with social networks in the future? And a complementary idea that blew my mind: Will URLs/domains even matter?

There were so many valuable insights in his talk that you’d do well to check out the Getting Your Company Ready slideshow below.

Data visualization is all about communication. You can interpret large data sets and communicate those ideas to others quicker with visualizations than you can with a big list and a bunch of columns.

(Not convinced? Check out our slideshow about The Value of 3D Data Visualization.)

Ever since Betty White was picked by the denizens of the Internet to host “Saturday Night Live” (which is happening this Saturday night, by the way), we thought it would be fun to track the meme of Betty White visually and see what it looked like with each URL representing a data point.

Everybody knows the story by now:

A Facebook page was launched in Dec. 2009 by a fan to convince Lorne Michaels to let the 88-year old actress host SNL. By March 11, 2010, after a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild, a Super Bowl Snickers commercial, and an ensuing Internet frenzy, the show relented.

This is what it looks like on the Web.

Overall View

The full view is too huge to even put in a blog post. That, and it is full of tons of disconnected URLs just floating all by themselves at the edges of a virtual space.

What we see to the right is a high-level view of most of the URLs that make up the connected portion of the “Betty White Saturday Night Live SNL” universe.

(Click on the picture for a bigger version.)

To help make sense of it all, let’s drilldown and highlight some of the key findings.

Each sphere represents a relevant URL and is scored for average sentiment (green for positive, red for negative, gray for neutral).

A green connecting line between two spheres is interlinked. A red end of a line represents an inbound link, while a blue one represents an outbound link.

Incestuous Cluster

Looking at this closely clustered visualization below, you intuitively get the idea that these URLs are all by themselves, save for one exception. And you’d be right. Each URL in the main cluster is part of the domain http://livefromnewyorkitssaturdaynightlive.blogspot.com/.

What’s happened here is that many of the posts on this SNL fansite link to each other by way of a list of archived posts. Also, a sidebar list of “Upcoming Shows” lists Betty White as the host of the May 8 episode.

The only link outside of the blog is one from New York magazine’s Vulture blog that was referred to in another small post. That’s the neutral URL out on its own with just one inbound link.

So from a linkage standpoint, you could determine that, while there is a lot of content on the “Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night” blog, it doesn’t really get spread outside of its own little grouping.

Lots of Inbound Links

Below, however, is an example of a healthy and influential URL. This is the number-one most influential URL in the “Betty White SNL” insight. It’s the one smack dab in the middle, highlighted green, and it’s the USA Today story from March 11, 2010 that confirmed the fact that White would indeed host the show.

(Click on the image for a bigger version.)

There are 74 sites linking into that URL and many of those sites are gateways that were also linked to by other URLs. That’s why the spider web continues to grow and live outside of this particular URL.

The number of people that could find their way back to the USA Today page is staggering, considering how many sites that link to it also have second-order and third-order connections.

Gateway URL

The last visualization (below–click to enlarge) is what I like to call a gateway URL. The URL, highlighted green and off to the right a little, has 16 inbound links and one outbound link and is this story from the NY Daily News.

It also appears to be off in its own little cluster, but it is positioned in a way where you can clearly see that it is the gateway to all of these other URLs, each with their own significance. In fact, only two of the URLs that link to this URL even lead back to the main hub in any way.

This kind of visual influence mapping can be invaluable to a business, giving you the ability to visually track and measure the reach of a particular message, I hope this post has helped illuminate the value one can get from this tool.

And, by the way, are you looking forward to watching Betty White host SNL as much as we are?

A recent post from Jay Baer on his Convince and Convert blog talked about five ways to use social media. What I found particularly enlightening, though, was how he divided practical social media applications for businesses into three categories:

1. Focusing on prospective customers and building awareness
2. Reaching both prospective and current customers
3. Building loyalty among your existing customers

I like the way these are laid out. It’s a very simple way of dividing up your strategies based on who you are trying to reach.

Even at this stage in the evolution of this industry, people still ask us how Internet monitoring can be valuable to their business. I’d like to expand Baer’s examples based on some recent feedback we’ve received about how our clients are getting the most out of our Internet monitoring platform.

Here are some of the most useful, practical applications and where they fit in based on the list above.

Find influencers and engage them
This one can apply to any of the above categories, but its more than likely going to be in number one. Sure, “influencer” is a made-up word that may be overused, but it’s apropos. Here we are using it to describe someone, whether it be a blogger or member of the media, who has a large number of eyes looking at his/her web page or articles.

Find the biggest voices in a space that you’ve identified as important to your brand and use semantic analysis to figure out what words they are using and how you can join the conversation. Whether you are simply introducing your brand or using an interactive strategy (contests, promotions, charity fundraising, etc.), converting influencers is hugely important.

Measure campaign success/product launch
There are a lot of different metrics you can use to apply here. First, set your goals and business objectives. What exactly will determine success for your campaign or product launch? Frequency growth? Positive sentiment scores? What if the keywords you are using in your campaign start showing up in the semantic cloud? What if they’re not? If other words are popping up more frequently instead, it’s not too late to adjust. This example falls squarely into the first category of building awareness.

Crisis management
Falling in the category of reaching both current and prospective customers, crisis management is a particularly effective way to utilize Internet monitoring. If there is something nasty brewing on the horizon for your company, knowing exactly what people saying and where they are saying it is crucial.

This is one area where a company can really benefit from a depth of relevant data. Tracking the linkages between URLs and watching the spread of a message is very valuable in developing a strategy to head a particularly negative message off at the pass. This way you can combat misinformation and set the record straight. Make sure you have the plan for implementation ready. There is such a thing as social media crisis planning and its absolutely essential.

Social media customer service
This also falls in the category of number two above, and like crisis management, it is a field that is rapidly being transformed because of the immediate power of social media. Entire company branches are being reorganized as they struggle to deal with the fact that customers are sick of waiting on hold for an hour to talk to a customer service representative when they can get satisfaction quicker online. The challenge as a company is in figuring out how to strike the right balance publicly while making the changes internally.

Discover trends
This falls under the zero-step category of “active listening” and should continue through all three steps. Semantic analysis is perfect for recognizing trends. First, look at the words that people are using the most in URLs that are specifically relevant to the content you are interested in. Decide which words are of the utmost interest to your company.

Now, drilldown as far as you want to find the context and sentiment attached to these words. Once you have a full view of the kinds of conversations taking place, you’ll be able to make better strategic decisions. Visual mapping can help you see visually what may not be as easy in list form.

Prepare sales presentations
Let’s get away from brand monitoring for a second. How can having an Internet monitoring platform at your disposal help your business grow? For one, you’ll have access to proprietary data that you can export however you see fit. Not only can this information help your clients, but it can make your sales presentations more personal and more dynamic. Once again, this falls in the category of all three steps, depending on the presentation.

How is your company using Internet monitoring?

Now that the term ‘social media strategy‘ is about as mainstream as semi-secret Justin Bieber fetishes, it’s time to address something:

Simply put, there is no “easy button” for social media.

Strategy

Social media engagement for businesses should always be coupled with strategy, and none of that comes cheap. It is a huge investment in time and resources.

Anyone can monitor social media. There are a ton of free tools out there and each of them will do one specific thing. But first you must set up measurable and actionable goals. As long as the use of these tools is tied into a bigger social media strategy, you will be able to see results.

Listening

The first step, of course, is listening. As Robert Patterson, Director of Social Media and Web Analytics at MMG Worldwide, said in a Twitter conversation with us the other day, “How can you set objective goals without understanding the space and opportunities?”

Stephen Johnson, Regional Head of Digital Innovation at DraftFCB Australia, agrees: “I’d go as far as saying that listening is the single most important message for businesses seeking to engage with consumers online. Firstly, by talking less and listening more to the opinions people voice online–for example in social networks, blogs, and forums–a business is able to adapt using the anecdotal insights so that when they do engage, a heightened sense of affinity and relevance already exists between them. By listening we are also better equipped to foster and maintain meaningful dialogue with potential customers, thus creating further opportunity and leverage. It’s common sense really, yet so many businesses fail to understand this vital interplay. Whilst a myriad of listening tools exist to choose from, only a select few provide tangible depth and true insight.”

Depth

Depth. A good word; not used often enough in the “social media space.” That said, is monitoring social media enough?

Should you limit the breadth of your tracking to social media-based sites alone? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get depth of data from the entirety of the Internet to help you narrow your focus, gather business intelligence, and develop strategies?

Obviously these questions are rhetorical, but they bring up a good point:

Yes, there is a need out there for “real-time” updates and quickie brand monitoring. I realize that a nice graph showing the daily growth of online chatter about a product or brand is something that many CMOs may require. But there should be more to gathering business intelligence than that.

Why Gather Research Data?

The online space is a perfect place to gather all kinds of transparent intelligence for your company. Here are just some of the ways that Internet data gathering can benefit your business:

• Identify influencers/engagement targets
• Identify/qualify strategic partnerships
• Measure campaign success
• Measure product launch
• Measure consumer sentiment
• Discover trends
• Gather competitive intelligence
• Crisis management
• Engage in social media customer service
• Create communities/brand evangelists
• Plan new product development
• Identify sales prospects
• Prepare sales presentations
• Monitor corporate/brand identity
• Monitor executive/personality brand identity

With all that at stake, do you really want to half-ass it? It’s time to drilldown and dig in, folks.