Dan Soschin

Procedures for Handling Negative Social Media Posts

If you’ve read my posts about handling negative buzz, or even attended one of my presentations in San Francisco, Boston, Las Vegas or Washington, DC., then you’ve probably heard me reference the Air Force’s social media response assessment chart. Recently I had my own social media team at American Public University System make some updates to the chart. I’ve embedded it below. Feel free to download and use.
Social Media Enablement and Deployment

I’m excited to be joining the Altamont Group’s upcoming event:

Social Media Intelligence ATL:
Social Business Optimization Summit

November
12-13th, 2012
Atlanta, GA

More info here: http://www.altamont-group.com/description.php?cid=21

I will be delivering the keynote on day 2 of the conference at the lovely Intercontinental Hotel in Buckhead, GA.

The topic of my keynote is:
Social Media Enablement and Deployment
Align social media to strategic objectives and develop a launch plan

I’ll be tackling some tough topics head-on, such as understanding the key objectives in your organization and how to translate them into a social media strategy; how to win over stakeholders who are social media novices; and understanding how to report and measure. I hope to post my slide deck and some notes here after the presentation.
How to Handle Negative Buzz on Social Media
Tomorrow (Thursday, October 25), I will be joining the Social Media Strategies Summit hosted by the good folks at GSMI, in Boston, MA (go Bo-Sox!).

Here’s the overview:

Social media – When to Respond to a Negative Post and How to Triage/ Escalate in your OrgANIZATION

You’ve got tools to monitor social media, a 20-something spiked-hair communities manager, and even a CEO who knows how to use Twitter. But then it happens: someone, somewhere says something negative about your company online and suddenly the world around you comes to a screeching halt. I will walk the session attendees through real case studies of how to monitor for, triage, and address negative buzz.

But you no longer own your brand. Ownership is split between what your customers say and how accessible that content is on Google. So your processes and how you interact with customers will affect future business opportunities more than marketing collateral or paid search ads.

You’ll come away with:
- How to monitor
- Tools (free and paid) for monitoring
- Processes for monitoring, triage and escalation
- Review of a case study
If you cannot make it; or if you are attending; and you would like a copy of the presentation materials, including a sample case study and a great flow chart for triage and escalation of social media issues, please send me a Tweet!
Facebook to eliminate fake likes

Mashable is reporting that Facebook will start removing fake likes from pages. I see this is the first step, but not the last step in combating fraud on Facebook. Click fraud is rampant, and that must be addressed as soon as possible.
Twitter to replace “followers” metric with “influence score”?

The Washington Post reports that Twitter is mulling over the idea of lessening the importance of the “followers” metric and potentially augmenting or replacing it with a more accurate measure of reach or influence.

Most of us in the social media world are quite familiar with Klout, which has devised a proprietary algorithm for measuring one’s social media influence with the objective of measuring reach and influence more scientifically than simply counting up one’s followers or fans.

I, for one, think this is a great effort on Twitter’s behalf — one that will ensure the platform’s relevancy as an important and influential tool in the social media ecosystem. I can’t wait to see what they release.
Next Stop: SMSS San Francisco – September 25th
Just a quick programming note, I will be in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 hosting a session at the Social Media Strategies Summit.

Here’s the session description:

Measuring & Reporting on Social Media

Social media, everyone is doing it, and you finally decided to join them. You’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, and you have even managed to create some cool pinboards. Then your boss sends you and email that asks, “what is the value of all of this?” So, in an effort to help you keep your job, I will walk you through some no-cost, no-sweat methods for measuring the impact of social media on your business. You’ll walk away with some tools and processes you can begin using immediately, including information on:
- Defining relevant metrics and KPIs
- Sources for data
- Facebook Insights
- Earned media
- Google Analytics
- Excel dashboards
Facebook Click Fraud Issues

In a recent publicized report, thanks to Facebook having to keep its business in more of a public eye due to the company being publicly traded now, we learned that 8.7 percent of Facebook accounts are “fake”, more more than 80 million. We already knew this. Why? Because most Facebook advertisers who know what they are doing have been measuring the performance of their ads and have found that they get billed for more clicks then they really received. And most likely, these clicks are from fake accounts and bots.

In fact, a company called Limited Run reported that 80% of its clicks were from bots!

My own research from clients puts this number at closer to the 1-in-3 or 33% range, still horrendous by any measure. And, that’s based upon about $1.5 million dollars worth of clicks analyzed.

It’s the cost of doing business with Facebook. In other words, if the ROI you are obtaining from your ad campaign is tolerable, then the click fraud is just part of that campaign’s cost. Obviously, we would all love to higher higher ROI (via a lower cost). Facebook is not motivated to put systems in place to do better at weeding out click fraud. Google is much better – having been sued several times into improving. So, maybe its time to start forming a class against Facebook so that advertisers can obtain rebates for these fraudulent clicks. Its to Facebook’s long term sustainability and advantage to not bill clients for these clicks because that lowers client’s campaign ROI – making them less likely to run more campaigns over the long run. So, if Facebook rebates these fraudulent clicks, ROIs go up, costs go down, clients are happier and keep pouring money into Facebook, and in the end Facebook generates more revenue.

Until then however, make sure you allot about 1/3 of your budget to “sunk costs” of click fraud – clicks that will generate no value for your business whatsoever.
More on Measuring Social Media
Nick Cifuentes over at ClickZ penned a great piece on measuring the impact of social media, breaking it down by translating five traditional metrics:
- Return on engagement
- Return on participation
- Return on involvement
- Return on attention
- Return on trust
While calculating these metrics is no easy feat, it creates a framework for applying traditional valuation and measurement models on a non-traditional space that is evolving rapidly – and it therefore a great place to get started once you’ve mastered the basics.
Chief Marketing Technology Officer – the CMTO

Fellow technologists who run marketing practices will probably all agree that we split our time between technology and marketing pretty evenly. As a manager of a large marketing practice for an online company, I turn to technology to help grow our opportunities and create scalability as we tackle new challenges.

I’ve often been asked which path in the organization I will take – will I continue with my database architecture and CRM roots? My analytics systems and business intelligence experience? Or demand generation and brand marketing?

Why not have it all?

Well, Laurie Sullivan wrote a fantastic article about CMTOs – the Chief Marketing Technology Officers. Those marketing heroes who build the systems that make marketing practices successful. I could not agree more with Laurie – that this vital role in the organization should have a seat at the c-table alongside the CIOs and CMOs of the world.

What do you think?
Putting an End to Hate on the Internet

I’ve long opined on how virile the internet has become – giving a platform for anyone to anonymously spread hate, lies and misconceptions about anyone and anything.

I believe in order to post on the internet, you must reveal your identity – from a verifiable source. I realize that this may limit free speech in the “Arab Spring” sense of the term, and I’m sure were the concept of verification introduced to the web, there would be a happy medium.

Perhaps we are seeing a small turn towards ending anonymous hate based upon some recent events.

Take the game-winning goal scored by Washington Capitals hockey player, Joel Ward, a black man. His heroics lead to a barrage of racist comments on Twitter. Deadspin collected these posts into an article to “out” the racists. The result was that these racist people receive a significant amount of negative publicity and many deleted their accounts after being shamed publicly.

When the supreme court upheld the constitutionality of the healthcare reform act, many people tweeted they “couldn’t deal with the USA’s socialist agenda” and were therefore “moving to Canada to escape the socialists in the USA”. Of course anyone with half a brain knows that Canada provides free health care to all – far more “socialist” than the USA’s health care act.

Perhaps these events and other acts of internet Darwinism will lower the volume of hate on the ‘net.

I recently came across a POWERFUL post on the topic by Erin Kissane which I am compelled to share. It’s a long read but worth every moment of your time. Erin discusses the issue of hate on the internet, specifically pertaining to women. However, her points are applicable to the internet as a whole and I encourage you to share this article with EVERYONE YOU KNOW. Erin addresses the issue head on with suggestions on how to combat hate on the net. Her post inspired me to share my thoughts in this post today. Thanks Erin!

Social media – When to Respond to a Negative Post and How to Triage/ Escalate in your OrgANIZATION

Measuring & Reporting on Social Media