How do national polls and exit polling compare to what is being said on the Internet about the Republican presidential frontrunners?

This weekend, Newt Gingrich landed a decisive victory in the South Carolina primary, giving the GOP presidential candidate 40.4% of the vote, with Mitt Romney a distant second at 27.8%. But he’s still got more work to do if he wants to overcome doubts about his electability.

Why did Newt Gingrich win in South Carolina? Perhaps the state responded to Gingrich’s aggressiveness in the debates. Or maybe it was South Carolina sending a message to the rest of the nation that this race is far from over.

According to the exit poll, 45% of South Carolina voters said the most important quality in a candidate was that he could beat President Obama in November. This was the number-one concern. 51% of voters who were concerned about electability voted for Newt Gingrich, while only 37% of those voters went for Romney.

Mitt Romney has a 4% larger share of positive sentiment in relevant online posts (a total of 24%) than Newt Gingrich.

But South Carolina isn’t in line with the rest of the country. An average of recent national polls shows that Mitt Romney is still more electable than Newt Gingrich. If the presidential election were held today, Obama would beat Mitt Romney by a narrow margin of 1.9%, while Obama would clobber Gingrich by a whopping 11%.

NewsOK agrees:

Recent national polls by Fox News and PPP show that Barack Obama’s average fav/unfavs are 49%-48%, Mitt Romney’s are 40%-45%, and Newt Gingrich’s are 26%-58% — lukewarm numbers for Obama and Romney, dreadful numbers for Gingrich.

But what does the Internet say?

According to data collected through the Spiral16 online monitoring platform, Newt Gingrich still has a bit of an uphill battle, though the margin of difference between he and Mitt Romney is significantly smaller.

Newt Gingrich has 3% more negative sentiment than Mitt Romney, for a total of 18% across the web.

Looking at all relevant web data across news sites, blogs, video sites, and social media since the beginning of 2012, Romney edges out Gingrich with 4% more average positive sentiment than the former Speaker of the House. Gingrich also has 3% more total negative sentiment on the web than Romney.

Romney’s sentiment rating is 24% positive and 15% negative, while Gingrich has 20% positive and 18% negative across unique web pages pertaining to each.

Average sentiment is calculated by the platform after looking for overtly positive or negative words that appear in the post. If sentiment is not determined to be overt in one direction or the other, it is classified as neutral.

Since many results come in from news websites, and not every web posting contains positively or negatively skewing sentiment, it is not common for a large percentage of the whole to be classified as neutral. Romney has a total of 61% neutral posts, while Gingrich has 62%.

Social media monitoring is important, but why limit yourself to social media?

I was talking to a journalist yesterday about the opportunities that companies have to improve their search ranking by integrating with Google Plus (yes, we have been getting results from Google Plus since day one) and she asked me a very pertinent question:

“What do you guys do again? Social media monitoring, right?”

Well, yes.

But there’s so much more you can do with our platform. We scour the web and allow YOU to set how wide or narrow your search will be. And we are NOT limited to social media results. (Facebook and Twitter aren’t even in the Top 5 when it comes to purchase intent — companies need to look deeper than that.)

We search the publicly-available web as whole, not just social media. Most social media monitoring systems only cover websites with a social media component, but a more well-rounded view of the web is necessary in order to build any digital strategy. Spiral16 imports RSS feeds directly and uses trusted data partners like other systems do, but we also scour the web like a search engine, indexing the most relevant content for each client’s needs.

We’re in the midst of redesigning the site and refining our message now, but let me put it this way:

Spiral16 scours the Internet and brings back the most relevant data for your company on any topic. Then we spit that data out in customizable charts and visualizations that fit your specific needs and help you drive business.

We offer a comprehensive web monitoring tool with the flexibility to suit your needs and a high quality of data that saves you time. (Why pay for spam and irrelevant results?)

Our goal here at Spiral16 is to bring in the best possible data from all over the web to help our clients realize their objectives.

Simply put, we believe in this:

Better Data, Better Decisions.

One of the biggest challenges we face here at Spiral16 is that there are so many things you can do with the platform. There isn’t just one application.That’s why we offer assistance with setting up your searches to match your business goals and help with interpreting results.

The info you need is out there on the web right now. You just need a way to bring it in and make sense of it for your company — simple social media monitoring by importing a couple of feeds won’t do.  Here’s a list of just some of the things you can do with web monitoring:

• Gather competitive intelligence
• Benchmark your web presence and set measurable goals
• Generate leads based on strategic keyword searches
• Measure campaign success, make changes as you go
• Identify high-profile sites, posts, and authors for your vertical or brand
• Manage a crisis — see a larger scope and prioritize your efforts
• Develop a web strategy around your data
• Do targeted market/product research
• Understand web sentiment and measure customer service efforts
• Identify pathways that lead to and from important web pages that affect your brand
• Answer questions that traditional business data cannot answer

Track the corrosive reach of one negative blog post and target the pages that spread the message.

Another way I like to look at the Spiral16 web monitoring platform is this: It’s the ultimate question/answer machine. It gathers the most relevant web data for your goals and then you ask it all kinds of business-related questions and it spits out the answer. It even allows you to narrow and refine your searches as you go, so you keep getting better data.

Spiral16 is easy to use. Our dashboards are customizable for every project, there are multiple ways to slice up data, and easy exporting options keep you focused on what matters. Spiral16 helps you make sense of your relevant web—it’s not just social media monitoring.

And we won’t leave you high and dry. We’re not just a web monitoring tool, we’re a research partner.

That’s a big difference.

How many hours a day do you spend on social media for your company?

Efficiency is everything in marketing. Saving time is saving money.

Every company needs to figure out how they are going to plug social media into the different components of their business, but it’s pretty clear that this late date that companies need to be active. (Jeremiah Owyang has some great advice on how to scale social media for business right here.)

In 2012, more companies than ever will be experimenting with social media and trying to figure out how much time they can spend doing it. Much like the heated social media ROI debate, the answer to this question of how many number of hours or minutes a day you need to dedicate to social pursuits will be different for every business.

That’s because each company will have different goals and objectives for their social media presence.

According to a poll of 3,300 social media marketers in the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 58% of marketers spend six or more hours per week on social media marketing activities.

This post from social media manager Rachel Strella mentions everything from 18 minutes a day to 20 hours a week.

Whatever the number is for you, your efforts can probably be divided into three categories:

Listening – You need a social media monitoring solution that will collect and analyze accurate data from across the web and allow you to figure out make sense of it for your business. This step is a constant one, and whether you are doing product or brand research, lead generation, or competitive intelligence, you need to have a tool that you can customize and mold into an efficient machine.

Communicating – Now that you know where conversations about your brand are happening, you need to join in. This is tough. Sometimes its easier to simply gather business intelligence and become paralyzed by the data. But you’ve got to get in there and start building relationships and carrying out your communication strategies.

Creating Content – Whether you are blogging for your company or working with a team to build a web service or application that allows people to interact with your company, you should be doing this every day as well. Where the other two steps can be done in smaller doses, content creation usually takes more strategic thought. There are ways to streamline this, though, especially if you have a system for aggregating helpful links and you are spreading your own resources for multiple outlets and formats.

So what are you going to do in 2012? How are you going to follow through with all of the great social opportunities on the web and become your company’s hero?

Images: ChrisAnkele.com, LifeFitness4Me.com

What’s New for Social Media in 2012?

It’s reaching the end of the year and people will be looking to new studies that point the way to trends in social and business for 2012. Two recent studies point the way to some of the trends that companies should watch for in the coming year.

The new report from Pivot is called The State of Social Marketing 2011 – 2012 and it has some interesting findings. Along with The Hudson Group, Pivot surveyed 181 brand managers, agency professionals, and experts to find out how they plan to reach their social consumers in 2012. The results can serve as a benchmark for leaders to assemble their business strategies over the next year.

Pivot asked if respondents had a clear picture of who their social consumer is. According to the report, “an astounding 77% said yes.”

This is interesting because it is all perception on the part of the companies. This means that the majority of these professionals have some sort of web and/or social media monitoring tool and have set up a listening program to figure out what their customers are saying online. That step is absolutely essential. I’d also like to stress how your listening program should cover a wider perspective than simply what is being said on Facebook and Twitter. Organic searches and links from other websites are still driving more traffic to blogs than anything else.

Another one of the best ways to figure out who your social consumers are is simple: Ask them. When the Pivot team explored specifically if respondent organizations asked social consumers what they expect from engagement,  53% said they haven’t really asked. Almost 35% said they had asked, which is a lot different from the 77% who said they had a clear picture of their social consumers. Does that mean 42% of them are involved in web and social media monitoring?

100% of respondents say increased sales is a primary goal for 2012, but there are many other practical applications for social media that also ranked highly.

As business leaders plan next year’s social marketing programs, 100%, agree on the need to increase sales, but social media programs and campaigns can affect so much more than that. As we have found here at Spiral16, there are all kinds of ways that businesses get value out of social media. Not surprisingly, consumer engagement, lead generation and brand lift are also towards the top of the list. According to Pivot:

Influencing consumer behavior is at just over 60 percent, establishing points of influence at just under 60 percent, and discovering points of relevance shown at 40 percent spotlight how new touchpoints will play a role in driving desirable outcomes and experiences. The overall sense of the responses is a tilt away from “soft” benefits toward harder edged benefits that drive the bottom line. Surprisingly, improving customer service and support was toward the bottom of the list, but it is promising to see that the research does show that businesses are placing it in the upper half of 2012 planning.

My feeling is that one reason customer service ranked so low here is that many of the respondents feel like they are already addressing that concern sufficiently. Customer service is one of the first social marketing applications that active brands can do, especially if they have an active consumer base on Twitter.

Meanwhile, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs published a popular study on B2B content marketing put out their B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends report, which looks at the specific kinds of content that B2B businesses are creating to attract customers.

Just as they found in last year’s study, “article posting and social media (excluding blogs) are the most popular tactics and are currently used by 79% and 74% of B2B marketers, respectively.” The tactics that are seeing an increased adoption rate this year are:

• Blogs (27% increase)
• White papers (19% increase)
• Videos (27% increase)

B2B businesses are seeing results from all kinds of different social content marketing tactics. Expect this trend to continue into 2012 as more businesses catch on.

It’s no surprise, all signs point upward for social marketing again this year and the studies show that more and more marketers and agencies are figuring out how to find value online. How far are you in your organization?

The social consumers are out there. Have you been able to make gains using social media? The first step in any program should be listening on the web – have you started?

It’s been a big week here at Spiral16, and we’ve been hearing a lot of feedback about online marketing and social media monitoring  — and the pain points people are experiencing — and we’re determined to learn more and help as much as we can.

We’ve been working hard to build up this blog as a helpful resource for how social media monitoring and online marketing can help businesses, and got a little recognition or “seal of approval” if you will, from Alltop, who is now featuring our blog in the Social Media topic. Alltop contains online content that represents the best of the web. Go read this review of Alltop by Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb. (I visit Alltop every day for my own online marketing tips, and if you don’t you should.)

More great news that has further informed our direction: Our new Builder tool (allowing users to create hyper-targeted DIY web searches) is in beta testing, new clients are just now getting their hands on the platform, and a new Spiral16 case study from the 2011 Pivot Conference was just released that examines the intersection between social terms, Pivot, and its curator, Brian Solis.

We had a great experience at PivotCon and are excited they declared that Spiral16 is a web monitoring platform for major players. What we heard form our testers and the people we met in New York is that social media monitoring simply isn’t enough.

To compete in today’s online marketing environment, its important to get a wider perspective about how your company is perceived and be able to understand the needs of your customers from the public web information that’s available every day. Social media monitoring is one part of the equation, but web monitoring can open up a whole different view.

Taking that perspective into consideration — and knowing that every company will have different listening needs — we’ve designed the platform to be flexible enough to support all kinds of practical applications.

Currently, clients are going beyond online marketing, doing everything from lead generation to brand management to market research with the quality data they’ve received from Spiral16. And we are committed not just to quantifying results that save you time and money, but also to giving people the active consultation and analytics help they need to get to the next level.

In addition, Spiral16′s Aaron Weber was interviewed by MarketingProfs this week. Aaron is the chief of data and analytics here at Spiral16.  I personally think he is one of the smartest guys on the planet, so it makes me happy when others recognize him. Aaron’s entertaining and enlightening podcast interview is featured on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog — check it out when you have a minute.

Anyway, it’s been a busy week and we just wanted to say thank you for all your feedback either online, on the phone, or in person — we’re listening. And improving.

In web and social media monitoring, separating the useful web chatter from the irrelevant stuff is not easy to do.

The latest episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast from Marketing Profs is called “Social Media Monitoring Feeds on Brains,” and that’s an apt way to describe the process of filtering out the noise. (It also sounds like a really weird zombie movie, but that’s another story…) Being able to determine context and sort your results in their own separate data sets for comparison and measurement is essential.

Our data analytics manager Aaron Weber has been doing that for years, and he is the featured guest interviewed by Matthew Grant in the newest Marketing Smarts Podcast, which went up yesterday.

From the Marketing Profs website:

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk to Aaron about what makes content popular (the big thing that people often forget, he says, is that “a lot of it is pure luck”), how effective algorithms are at parsing the Web’s information (turns out that, somewhere along the line “you need a human brain” to make sense of what you find), and how best to connect with the people who are actually talking about you on the Internet (the precious “signal” so easily lost in the “noise”).

On this last point, Aaron is adamant: Developing connections means remembering that all content on the Web is produced by “someone sitting at a machine carving out their world.”

Unfortunately, he adds, ”To the suit who wants to push product, that voice on the Internet is just a distribution method.”

To learn more about mining the Web for business intelligence, the seasonality of content, and how we consistently bring technology down to our level (rather than letting it elevate us), give our entire conversation a listen. You may do so here.

You can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Podcast in iTunes.

Spiral16 CEO Tracy Panko will present a healthcare case study that showcases the opportunity for all providers to turn web data into business intelligence you can use.

On Tuesday, November 1, the Kansas City American Marketing Assosciation‘s Healthcare Special Interest Group is sponsoring Tracy’s talk, entitled How to Monitor Online Conversations and Why it’s Important to Healthcare.

Social media is often a challenge for healthcare providers because the CMOs are often one-man bands, so to speak. This means that access to quality web data is important, and having an ability to extract context efficiently is essential.

Tracy will give some examples of hospitals and healthcare centers who are doing this effectively, and talk about the different uses for social media and web monitoring that will make improvements in their communications efforts.

Here’s the synopsis from AMA-KC:

How to Monitor Online Conversations and Why it’s Important to Healthcare

Registration here.

Online listening and measurement isn’t just for brand management anymore. Healthcare firms are finding out what their patients (and the general public) are really saying about them and learning how to better communicate and measure consumer awareness about their services, manage crises, and measure campaign sentiment. Spiral16 specializes in web monitoring and research in business intelligence platforms.

Healthcare marketers and planners from physician groups, hospitals, payers and pharmaceuticals will benefit from this educational and networking event.

PROGRAM

3:30-4:00 Registration / Networking / Refreshments
4:00-5:00 Presentation by Tracy Panko and Q&A

Thank you to Lion Share for providing refreshments!

STUDENTS

There are a limited number of scholarship seats for students.  Contact Executive Director, Cynthia Edmunds at staff@ama-kc.orgto register. Student fee is $5 if not paid for by scholarship.

ABOUT THE VENUE

Companies understand they need to be active on the web. In the U.S. alone, social networks and blogs reach nearly 80% of active web users and represent the majority of Americans’ time online.

And the term “social media strategy” gets thrown around a lot. Increasingly, there are employees who are being tasked with making social media “work” for their company. Many of them will start by opening up a Twitter and Facebook account and set out trying to get as many followers as possible. That’s great, but what are you going to do with those followers?

Here’s the important thing to remember: Social media is an essential part of any campaign or program, but its just that: A part. One cog in the wheel. One component of a multi-spoke strategy.

This Saturday, at Podcamp Topeka 2011, I’ll be leading a session that will help businesses start thinking about how to build the foundation to an effective social media program. If this important step is skipped, your entire project could be on shaky ground.

The workshop is entitled “Tying Business Objectives into Social Media,” and recently the Podcamp Topeka folks caught up with me on video to make me explain the concept a little more (and to see how many times I could add the word “uh” into my sentences).

Watch the video below to see what we’ll be covering. We’ll get a great discussion going and hopefully cover a lot of ground. If your social media program is tied into your companies business goals, you’ll be able to measure and quantify its success as it goes forward and after its completion. Then you’ll have useful benchmark information to use for next time.

The whole ‘un-conference’ itself is only $10 and the learning is worth WAY more than that, so hopefully I’ll see you there!

ShareLikeBuy, a conference hosted this past week at the world-renowned Fairmont Hotel in the digital city of San Francisco, was packed with a variety of experiences that included entertainment, humor, education, and networking with people you can’t help but follow on Twitter, connect with on LinkedIn, and become a friend on Facebook … all in honor of the connected and online millennial generation.

The conference objective was to address an unmet need: to understand and communicate with the most enigmatic generation in American consumer history … the generation driving our future-millennials (defined as age 16-34).

Congratulations to Barkley and Fishbone Marketing for putting on a great conference that included diverse speakers, such as millennial comedian Jabari Davis, whose humor was educational and relevant. He entertained us with thought-provoking intellect and true-life failures combined with undeniable logic that transcends cultural barriers and social classes. Jabari is a millennial – but just barely. Jabari was a nice touch, a millennial comedian who entertained yet reminded us about wanting our own voice, being an individual.

As one of the millennials in the audience tweeted, “I am what I share.” Well said and communicated multiple times by all of the presenters was this critical message: If you choose only one thing to be, choose to BE AUTHENTIC. Authentic defined is to share the sense of actuality and lack of falsehood or misrepresentation.

Rudy Wilson, Vice President of Marketing at Frito-Lay delivered that and more with a touching connection to himself, his wife, and how the lessons he has learned in making his marriage successful carried over into wins for Frito-Lay. That include multiple victories in consumer-created Superbowl advertising campaigns and a rejuvenation to exponential sales growth for the classic Doritos brand. Rudy’s advice, “Make sure you’re early on the adoption curve of the trends, not at the back end of it as trends change.”

A tremendous benefit to attending this conference was the receipt of a comprehensive study of millennials conducted by Barkley, SMG and Boston Consulting Group. A few insights from that study:

• Millennials rely on friends and family for advice prior to purchases—even when choosing a restaurant, millennials are likely to connect with others via texting and social sites to confirm their decisions.
• Millennials place significantly high importance on being a success in life and feel more than older generations that this success is largely in their own hands.
• Achieving status in a rewards program is desirable for millennials—they tend to align their shopping loyalty to brands that offer awards programs.
• Millennials eat out significantly more often than non-millennials.
• More than older generations, millennials consider themselves health fanatics and live a lifestyle to back it up—they work out more regularly an care more deeply about their physical appearance.

The knowledge of millenials’ passions and values are as critical as the stats. I was part of the “Tapping Millenial Passion” panel. Millennial passions include things like adventure, travel, information, protecting the environment, and socializing. They are optimistic, freely expressive, value the opinions of their friends, and have high expectations of those they choose to connect with. No wonder the most successful brands gaining traction with millenials are those that are embracing qualities like honesty, kindness and humor. Qualities that are most often described as human. In fact, it was repeated by many that altruism is the most authentic thing a brand can do because it is the most uniquely human and therefore, it is in our DNA to react to it.

Listening, another human quality we all aim to get better at, was also discussed at length. Today, the foundational truth of your brand is what your consumers tell you it is, so you better pay attention. With good news like the fact that milliennials are willing to share more information comes the reality that they also understand there is value to it – so they expect something in return. Steve Knox, A 33-year veteran of Procter & Gamble who led TREMOR, P&G’s word-of-mouth marketing agency, and is now with Boston Consulting Group, creatively challenged us with the question “What’s the gift you’re giving your customers and expecting nothing in return?”

Again, the good news according to Steve, is that if you have a relationship with even 2 percent of your target market, you can influence change.”

If millenials are the first crowdsourcing generation and going against the crowd is no longer cool, are you prepared to attract this crowd? Are you planning how you are going to connect to this powerful generation of millennials in a way that lets them “Be the me I want to be?”

Do you agree with the prediction that the future is the deep integration of the physical and interactive world? At 80 million strong with direct spending power of $200 billion, the time is now. Relationships take time to build, develop and grow. They don’t happen overnight.