Last week, several members of the Spiral16 team attended the monthly meeting of the KAIROS Analytics Group. I was outnumbered by our resident technology and analytics geeks, but being on the marketing side of things, I was particularly interested in the presentation, which focused on social media strategy.

Mike Brown from strategy consulting firm Brainzooming was the speaker, and his reasonably titled talk, “Social Media Will Neither Save Nor End the World As We Know It,” was very different from others I had seen before. (Plus, the title had kind of an old-school R.E.M. feel to it, which I’m totally down with.)

First off, due to the venue, Mike had to present without a computer at all. No powerpoint, no video, nothing. He adapted rather creatively with a big tablet of cartoon drawings on an easel, to which he kept drawing on top of to make his point.

Second of all, it was easy to remember. It seemed like common sense.

One section, it turns out, has already been shared on his blog, and its a chart that I really enjoyed that lays out a method for getting your social media strategy closer to that elusive ROI. By planning for and capturing both the easy-to-measure quantitative (“left-brain”) metrics and the more slippery qualitative (“right-brain”) returns, you can get a more “whole-brain” picture of your strategy.

See the full-sized chart at Brainzooming.com.

What I like about this is the fact that its easy to conceptualize and relate to. There’s no complicated formula to gum up the works. (If there’s anything I hate more than Nickelback, it’s math.)

In your campaign, either you are 1) Initiating Activity, 2) Interacting with your customers, or 3) Receiving Returns based on your efforts. It’s as simple as that. Separate those into left-brain/right-brain and you’ve got a complete picture.

Common sense, right?

When planning your social media strategy, you’ll be able to see how comprehensive it is by looking at how you are or aren’t filling the chart out. Saying this is kind of the big buzz right now, but this makes it even more clear:

Social media without strategy is like shooting in the dark.

Do you have an easy way to lay out your social media strategy? What helps you organize your plan?

Lately I’ve had a bunch of people come to me asking advice on how to get started on Twitter and it got me thinking: As second nature as it seems once you get going, it’s a little daunting at first to get started.

This list of 15 Dos and Don’ts has been created with that in mind. I’m sure there’s a ton of other Twitter “How-To” guides out there, but this one is for those who want to form meaningful relationships online, not just those who are interested in “collecting” followers.

1. Use your own voice. Bring your own personality to the forefront. Say what is on your mind.

2. Be personal, but don’t alienate. Don’t tweet or write about the worst day of your life. That said, no one is happy or perfect all of the time. Be real, but don’t complain nonstop. No one wants to listen to that.

3. Your avatar matters. Don’t let it blow your credibility, but also let it reflect your personality. Remember this is the one thing people will associate you with every time they see a tweet from you.

4. Be who you are. Don’t use pseudonyms or false screen names. It’s all about transparency and honesty. Especially if you are tweeting about your work, use your real name, and be clear who you are.

5. Make a good bio. Let your bio reflect who you are and what kind of conversation people are in for if they follow you. Also, don’t make your tweets completely dry and about business only. Knowing a bit about your personal life or interests will help establish a relationship between you and your followers.

6. Thank people for RTs and have conversations. A one-way Twitter account is nothing but a newsfeed. Generate discussion about topics you are interested in and watch your followers grow. Thank followers for retweeting (RTing) your comments or links and let them know you appreciate it. Mix up your tweets with replies, general tweets, and links.

7. Follow the right people. Use Twitter search to find people tweeting about the subjects you are interested in. When reading a blog you find interesting, track the author down on Twitter. Find people to follow looking at who others are following. Seek out Twitter lists that pertain to your area of interest—the people you follow will probably have some very cool lists.

8. Don’t follow a lot of people all at once. Build up your Twitter stream first. After you’ve posted at least about 20 tweets, start following about 10 people. Keep it going at that level and remember to interact.

9. Be mindful of your and others’ ratios. The ratio of followers to who you’re following is important. If only a few people follow you, but you follow a ton of people, Twitterers will assume you’re a spammer. Build slowly and organically.

10. Provide value. Link to things you find valuable. Ask questions you really want to know the answers to. Twitter is a knowledge pool. People you interact with will read your Twitter stream and want to see what useful or interesting information you provide.

11. Be a leader. Stick to your area(s) of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on in your world. Qualify statements when you’re not sure about them.

12. Use hashtags. There’s two ways to use hashtags: 1. To add a #punchlinetoajoke. 2. As a discussion subject. If you see a comment that interests you and has a hashtag, do a Twitter search on it. It’s probably happening now. To join the discussion, simply add that hashtag to your tweets. This is a good way for people to discover who you are.

13. Be consistent, but don’t overdo it. If you tweet 30 times an hour, that’s probably too much. You don’t want to take over someone’s Twitter feed. Stay active but don’t go too far. If you’re responding to people, that’s better, but save some of your thoughts for later.

14. DMs are for private conversations. Duh. Everyone can see everything you post on Twitter, except for direct messages. Don’t forget that.

15. Use the @ correctly. If you want someone to see that you’re tweeting about them, referencing them, or retweeting them, use the @ symbol before their Twitter name so your tweet shows up as a “mention.” It is important to know that not everybody will respond to you, however. Just because you mention Ashton Kutcher doesn’t mean he’ll start following you.

Find me on Twitter here.

This week we’re headed down to Austin, TX for the annual SXSW Interactive festival–the place where early adopters, tech geeks, and social media gurus head for their dose of emerging technologies, networking galore, and free food and alcohol.

You can keep up with what’s going on with us at SXSW by following Spiral16 on Twitter, our analytics guru Aaron Weber, and the newest addition to the S16 team, Ken Miner.

Earlier today, at the Social Media Marketing for Your Business panel, speakers President of 10e20 Chris Winfield and MySpace‘s Tony Adam described social media as a “a giant conversation online.”

For beginners who are just getting into the power of social media marketing, Chris mentioned it can:

• bring a wider audience
• create or improve reputation
• enhance credibility
• attract evangelists
• spread a PR message
• attract traffic to your site

Tony talked about the importance of understanding your ROI and setting goals and creating a plan to achieve those goals.

Both presenters talked about the importance of finding your audience online. Here at Spiral16, we always stress the idea that you not only need to find out where your customers are online, but you need to speak the same language they do in order to engage with them.

It’s always interesting to look at word clouds that aggregate site terms and see what the words are that your target audience are using. (Like this one from our recent Oscar Best Picture study.)

What’s even crazier is when you can see patterns and/or new slang emerging. The company that stays on top of that will always have the edge!

More from SXSW soon…

One of the most frustrating elements of any Internet listening project can be setting up the search terms that will result in the most relevant data. If you’re not careful, valuable time can be wasted on a bad query while irrelevant results pour in. (For an example of bad queries, look at this post.)

Your search is more than just a search. It’s the first step of a research project. Our job is to make your project successful, so we’ve had a lot of experience setting up and testing search queries to give clients the best possible statistics.

Here are the steps you need to take to define and refine your query:

1. Know what you’re looking for—have a defined topic.

If you went into a library and told the librarian you were looking for stuff on history, the first question any good librarian would ask is “What kind of history?” Otherwise, you’d be poring through the entire breadth of human history just to find information on poodle skirts.

It’s all about narrowing down the field. If you want to find out whether a used 2003 Ford Expedition truck is a good buy or not, you’re one step ahead of the game because you’re looking for a specific make, model, and year. A search for “Ford” isn’t going to do you any good. You have to define what you are looking for specifically because the search won’t do that for you. It gives you everything.

2. Think like a machine—narrow your topic into a concept.

Let’s say you want to run a query about politicians who put a lot of political pork in the bills they submit to Congress. A machine doesn’t know what “pork” means. Machine language would happily spit back recipes for baconated grapefruit with the same enthusiasm as information about a spending bill. You’re liable to get a lot of irrelevant results unless you bear that in mind.

3. Search for what people are saying, not what you want them to say.

This is a common pitfall. If you are looking to define what customers who frequent movie concession stands are saying about the products there, don’t search for “concessions.” Chances are, few of the relevant URLs will contain this word. Use common language. You’ll get better results if you think about how people actually talk.

People are more likely to be talking about the popcorn, hot dogs, or Cokes that they had at the movies. They may also talk about prices. All of these are important words to consider.
Another example: Use “laid off” or “lay off” before you use “unemployed.”

4. Find them and learn their language.

Sometimes you have to do a little research before you start. You wouldn’t go to a mommy blog to find out what people think of the public option. Do a test queries to find out where the conversations about your topic are happening.

Now it’s time to find out specifically what’s being said and how it relates to your concept. Read the blogs that cover your topic. Even better—use a tool like semantic analysis to learn the language that your targets are using. Now that you know the lingo, it’s time to refine your queries.

5. Know that you may not find what you’re looking for.

Expectation management is important. As shocking as it may be, there probably aren’t a lot of people talking about your original Cap’n Crunch/James Bond fan fiction or the rubberized oscillating spammer widget that you marketed to the Amish.

That could mean many things. Are you not getting the right results because you haven’t used the right terms to find them or because the results you want aren’t there? If nobody is talking about your widget, look at it as an opportunity! Running a query on popular Internet widgets might reveal to you that the Amish aren’t real big on computers—and that’s valuable information.

A new ebook compiled by Seth Godin is being passed around the Web right now, and it contains some really useful and reflective thoughts. In our workday, we often get bogged down by heavy workloads and sometimes feel like there’s never a time to look up and take stock of what you have and what you’re doing with it.

The end of the year is the perfect time to slow down and consider this.

The book is available as a free download and is entitled What Matters Now. It features contributions from forward-thinkers like Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mitch Joel, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, and new tech thinker Kevin Kelley.

Each author was asked to pick a provocative word and riff on it for a little bit. Besides deep thoughts on business and life in general, there is also useful information for brands looking into the future. This quote ties into the idea of giving away an ebook for free:

When talking of the shifting concept of ‘social media’ customer service, Vaynerchuck’s quote was particularly interesting: “I believe the ‘thank you’ economy will become the norm in 2010 and beyond, and brands that fail to adjust will be left out in the cold.”

Have a great holiday and please download or browse What Matters Now below:

As humans, we make sense of the world around us by observing relationships and making judgments.

We are spatial beings—it’s as simple as that.

Show me a long list of data with a lot of numbers and statistics, and I’ll eventually be able to make some sense of it, but show me a picture that relates to my 3D world and I’ll instantly be able to understand what you’re talking about.

IKEA has the right idea. Ever looked at one of their instruction booklets? (See right.)

Mapping influence is an important part of any company’s brand management. Finding out the most influential portals where people are talking about your brand is essential.

Beyond merely keeping track of the conversation, companies can engage with the most relevant communities and create advocates, loyalists, and evangelists.

A virtualization of the online conversation surrounding your brand draws on your spatial intuition. Instead of looking an endless, flat list of URLs linked up to a damaging customer complaint, for example, you can actually see all of those sites spatially gathered around the offending URL and intuitively understand the big picture.

Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus works the same way in mapping word relationships. (See right.)

For companies, there’s no more efficient tool for analyzing a campaign or customer service response. Let’s say an angry blogger started a chain of negative sentiment that spread throughout the Internet like a wildfire.

With a virtualization, your company can identify the URL as a top influencer and stop the negative sentiment in its tracks by making things right before it blows up to a crisis proportion.

This kind of chronological progression of a message is something that is hard to see in a flat list of sites. The virtualization is showing you more of your data in a more manageable way by wrapping it into 3D dimension that is immediately familiar.

One can even step outside the realm of social media and map offline databases to visualize connections in areas such as call center transcripts, point-of-sale data, unstructured market research, campaign metrics, and beyond.

In Spark, each sphere represents a single URL in your brand’s ecosystem and is color-coded to reflect the average sentiment of that web page. (Green, red, and gray represents positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.) Each connection is color-coded to reflect inbound (red), outbound (blue), and bi-directional (green) linkage.

Highly influential sites are pulled towards the center of the network, while less influential sites are pushed outward. High traffic communication channels are easy to pick out and tightly interlinked sites are clustered close together.

A virtualization takes this massive amount of data and maps it into a spatial model that makes sense. To see details, click on any sphere to see the title, URL, number of inbound/outbound connections, and influence ranking. You can delve into the virtualization further by adjusting the view any way you like.

Spark’s Virtualization

Click the image below to view the virtualization for local event Old Shawnee Days.

We gave a presentation at the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association luncheon on Tuesday at Figlio Tower. It’s a basic introduction to social media and the many ways to measure the metrics associated with it. We’d love to hear feedback, so please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Do you know the influence of your company’s official website in your online community? In this video, Whitney shows us how a company URL can be the center of your ecosystem.

Learn more about the Miller High Life one-second Super Bowl ad by reading our case study. You can also view this video on our Facebook page.

How many of you follow Southwest Airlines on Twitter? They’re on of the most engaged brands we know of, so we interviewed one of the women behind the curtain for @SouthwestAir and the company blog – Christi Day.

Christi is full of insights on working in social media for a large brand. Here are three of our favorite takeaways from our interview:

• “[Southwest] wants us communicating where our customers are.”
• “Our goal [with social media] is to provide great customer service.”
• “Measuring relationships will provide a better outcome for you as a communicator.”
• “A lot of our content is re-purposed and used in several different places.”

In Part 1 of our interview, we focus on Southwest as a company, including how they approach strategy, how their social media presence was born, and what to do in a crisis.

Part 2 focuses on Christi’s individual contribution. She tells us what she handles on a daily basis and how her job at Southwest is more of a “lifestyle” than a career.

Part 1

Part 2

As a social media monitoring software provider, we are often asked “Who is best suited to manage social media for a company?”

There are several logical options, so we want to know your opinion. Over the next 30 days, we’ll keep this (unscientific) poll posted. We also highly encourage you to leave comments about how your company approaches this topic, or expand on your poll selection. If you think we left out an option, leave it in the comments, too.