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How to Use Social Data and Research in Strategic Communications
- 1. Using Social Data and Research in Strategic Communications: How to Draw Meaningful and Actionable Insights #PRSAwebinar
- 3. Agenda 1. How one technology company used research and social data to increase the brand's impact and engage influencers 2. How McDonald’s could have use social research to protect its social brand 3. How MasterCard used social data to identify trends, apply insights and use them for better business decisions #PRSAwebinar
- 4. Standing Out in a Crowded Market Research Act Comm. Evaluate • Business intelligence shows what doesn’t work • Social data reveals corporate priorities ▫ Their customers come first ▫ What are they talking about online?
- 5. I was so scared I thought I’d get fired Nobody told me what to do There has to be a better solution #PRSAwebinar
- 6. #PRSAwebinar
- 7. Influence Your Influencers • Focus on the issues they care about • Grassroots safety campaign • Constantly adjusted strategies ▫ Let’s talk offline ▫ My friends are on Facebook ▫ I need CE credits ▫ Let me share my story #PRSAwebinar
- 8. Stand-out Results Insights • Meaningful: Safety is a top priority • Actionable: Create a demand for safety, which can lead to a demand for our device Activity • 10x Twitter growth • 20 custom Facebook apps • 1,394 unique blog views • 5,000 visits to company website • 129 million media impressions Engagement • Hundreds of influencer posts, videos and blogs • Partnerships with 9 major industry organizations • 11,974 pledges from a highly target audience • Top in Google search #PRSAwebinar
- 10. Where’s the Data? #PRSAwebinar
- 11. #PRSAwebinar Social Data Driving Revenue
- 12. Social Insights http://bit.ly/mastercardmm #PRSAwebinar
- 13. What’s Next Move beyond activity Build your research foundation Stay informed Start to evaluate your data #PRSAwebinar
- 15. Chi-Chi Millaway Social Media Director, PRIME Research @chimillaway @USPrimeResearch
Editor's Notes
- Thank you Judy. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. I’m really excited to be here. To begin, I want to start today with a few questions: How many of you use social media in your personal life? How about for your employer or your clients? I’m sure I’d see a lot of raised hands if we were in the same room There’s a point where you really start to feel overwhelmed by all this social media If you take a look at just a few of the recent stats: 190 million tweets per day 2.9 million minutes spent on YouTube each month 70 BILLION pieces of Facebok content uploaded each month If you haven’t already gotten there --- you will. With all of this info and content and data, how do you pull out something valuable?
- Consider this image for a moment. Most of you have probably seen this before, it’s Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism. It doesn’t include every social network out there, but it’s a good representation. So when you look at all of these networks – how do you choose the right channel and the right content? This is where social data and research come into your strategy. Social media channels are content creation monsters. You heard the stats. But while it can be overwhelming, it also gives you a lot of very useful data. Data that can be used to inform your strategies Data that can be used to develop insights And data that can show you what insights to act on
- So, today, we’re going to look at a few case studies on using social data and research. The cases are a couple of campaigns I’ve worked on as well as one example I just really like. First we’ll look at - How one technology company used research and social data to increase the brand's impact and engage influencers Second - How McDonald’s could have use research to protect its social brand Finally - How MasterCard used social data to identify trends, apply insights and use them for better business decisions
- Now here’s our first case study – standing out in a crowded market If you’ve taken a communications or PR class you know the acronym RACE. There’s a reason communication starts with research. So how does research and social data actually help to increase a brand’s impact? Well, a couple of years ago I was working with a medical device company that needed to raise brand awareness. For those of you not familiar, with that industry, the medical device market is actually very competitive. Reports estimate it will become a $434 billion industry in the next few years. So, unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of great technology and a lot of innovative new products However, there’s a very small target audience of customers to buy those products. This was a challenge for us because our client had really amazing technology. And they had designed features no one else had at a great price point. However, while they were earning media coverage and they were sending out marketing materials and advertising, it was having a limited impact. They weren’t really getting the attention of that very targeted audience. Which raised the issue of how we could help them stand out in such a crowded marketplace. Our internal business intelligence – tracking impressions, hits, leads and so on, showed we needed to do something new. So this is where we started to integrate research and social data. We started out by researching their target customers – pharmaceutical corporations. We needed to find out what they cared about. Clearly the functionality, the features and the price of the devices matter. But was one factor more important than another? What else played into purchasing decisions? We found out that what also played a key role was the customers of these pharma companies. What did their customers, the healthcare and medical organizations using the devices, want? The pharma industry is very slow to change and adapt something new – to adapt a new device. But our research showed that if there is a strong enough customer demand for something new, that could create an opportunity for change – an opportunity for our client. So we had done our initial research, now we needed to figure our what the customers of our customers wanted. And we did that through social data.
- We used traditional searches across the web and social networks as well as some great online tools to see what these customers were talking about online. Social Mention Google trends Twitter Advanced Search LinkedIn Groups We wanted to answer 4 key questions: What channels are they engaging on? Who are they talking to? What topics are important to them? What do they care about? When we analyzed the data we found out that a major hot topic was safety. Healthcare workers have to deal with accidental injuries all the time. Thousands of workplace injuries occur every day. That’s really scary. It makes employees worry about their health or getting fired for making a mistake. And it makes organizations worry about possible lawsuits and expensive testing and care. So great, our research showed safety matters, but what could we actually do with this information? We had pulled this great insight from the social data – that safety should come first – but how do you act on that?
- We took an in-depth look at the social data around this specific topic. You have to answer the basic questions of: Who is talking about the topic? Where are they talking? What are they saying? Why does the topic matter to them? There’s a full range of tools out there that help you look at this. You can get a fully customized, full data solution for your company – that’s something PRIME Research does. Or depending on your needs, there are also free tools you can use to kick off your research into the social data world so we could find out who is talking about safety. Sites like twellow and wefollow – as well as Klout– offer very useful lists of influencers on key topics. You can then follow them on their social channels to see where they are leading conversations. After that there’s tools like Newsle which send you an alert any time the influencer publishes new content. So it’s a great way to track what they are saying if they are actively creating original content. And beyond looking at the data from these conversations, hashtagify.me is a tool I love to use to better understand a topic. The image on the slide is from hashtagify.me. It’s a tool that lets you input a hashtag and visualize how it connects to other topics on the web. So bringing all of this back together. We pulled all of this social data and found that the conversation around this topic was really being driven by a core group of key influencers. We had answered the basic questions, and now we needed to make our campaign for safety something hat would matter to them.
- Our next step was to figure out how we would engage these influencers. Our team developed a grassroots campaign that focused on the safety hot topic. Our strategy began with in-person guerilla marketing. We attended events across the country with the goal of directly engaging out target audience. We supported those events through local media outreach and social media giveaways. And all of our marketing, traditional PR tactics and social media activities fed into one another. We would promote the campaign through a local newspaper, then speak about the cause at a conference and take pictures and videos to share on social media. We would then engage our social audience, grow the following and use that success to “sell” the next journalist on the cause. It was a continuous cycle of engagement. And throughout it all, we used our social data to continually inform and adjust our strategies for the most impact. For instance, we found that our audience didn’t like to engage near the workplace, so we started attending more industry conferences, where we could chat offline, away from the office and engagement went up We also thought Twitter would be a great tool, it’s usually an amazing source of conversation. But while we saw activity there, we found that the real engagement took place on Facebook because that’s where our audience shared content with their friends and co-workers. So we moved more of our content to Facebook and created over 20 custom apps to promote sharing and engagement If you ever want to create an app, ShortStack is a great tool for this. There were lots of additional insights. Further social listening revealed that our audience, as part of their job, needed to earn Continuing Education credits every year. This was probably one of the most useful insights we drew. Getting CE credits was something they found difficult and time consuming and sometimes expensive. So we developed partnerships that allowed us to create a webinar that offered free CE credits. It was actually really amazing, because we saw a massive number of registrations and over 1,000 people actually tuned into our webinars – so this was a huge, engaged target audience that was exposed to the topic and messages we were promoting. And, as we tracked our influencers and continued to engage them, we found that they wanted to share their stories. The majority of these influencers became interested in this safety topic because they had a close call of their own. This was why the topic mattered to them. They wanted to share their stories to educate others and show them they are not alone. And this turned out to be a great, and unexpected source of blogs and videos and other great content. And, because we were promoting a cause, a need in the marketplace, the community wanted to know what sort of progress we were making, so we started a pledge to the cause that users could take and share with their friends. And we encouraged this social sharing with incentives and monthly giveaways. So as you can see, we were really using the social data to draw and act on insights. Now you might be wondering, what was the result?
- Drew some key insights. Insights Meaningful: Safety is a top priority Actionable: Create a demand for safety, which can lead to a demand for our device Used our insights to inform our activity and drive engagement Activity 10x Twitter growth 20 custom Facebook apps 1,394 unique blog views 5,000 visits to company website 129 million media impressions Just to name a few results… And all of this fostered deeper engagement in the form of… Engagement Hundreds of influencer posts, videos and blogs Partnerships with 9 major industry organizations 11,974 pledges from a highly target audience Top in Google search Most importantly we helped raise real awareness and support for a key issue. And keep in mind, the cause, while important, was not our primary goal. We wanted to get the attention of our target pharma customers… Not totally responsible, but a year later, our client landed a new multi-million $ pharma contract.
- So continuing on to our next case study, we’re going to take a quick look at how McDonald’s could have used social media research and data to protect its social brand. Full transparency, I have never worked with McDonalds, this is just a brief example that I think is really interesting and is a good lesson for the social data and communications industry. In the PR world we talk a lot about the different models of communications. Social media offers communicators an unprecedented opportunity through real-time, engaged, 2-way communication. However, with all the opportunities social media provides, there are just as many new threats. If you really wanted to you could probably find a daily social media crisis to entertain you. I think there are really three types of social media crises. There are real-world, channel or brand crises. First -A real-world crises is when you are facing an issue, in the real world, and it leaks over to the social conversation and may actually gain more steam there. Second - A channel crises is when the wrong person is given the keys to your social channels and the wrong post goes out on the wrong page. Third - A brand crises is when a company makes a social media misstep because they don’t have all of the necessary social data and research that they need when they are making decisions about the brand’s social interactions. This last type of crisis is not usually a major crisis, it might hurt your digital brand a bit, but it won’t destroy the company. So the case I’m raising is about the misstep McDonalds made with their 2012 hashtag strategy. They wanted to start a crowdsourcing campaign that would let people share their stories and experience about McDonalds. (See posts above) It sounds like a reasonable idea right, people love McDonalds – don’t they? I’m sure they’ll share touching stories about their first Big Mac or favorite Happy Meal toy. McDonalds forgot that when you ask people to talk about your company, they’re not always going to say nice things.
- You can see some of the posts here This is not what you want. A promoted trend costs around $___ and you don’t want to pay that much for negative publicity. This is where social data comes into play. With the right data and insights, I think they could have avoided this misstep. Few people probably know that the campaign included the use of two hashtags - #meetthefarmers and #mcdstories. #meetthefarmers was used for the majority of the day and was very successful in raising awareness of their Supplier Stories campaign Farmers and suppliers, the people who make a living from McDonalds, support the brand – that’s not very surprising However, #mcdstories clearly did not go as planned. It was promoted for only two hours before it was pulled. If we look at the actual data, there were about 1,600 mentions when the conversation was at its peak. Keeping in mind that McDonald’s got almost 73,000 mentions that day, the hashtag was only 2% of the conversation – so, again, not a major crisis for the company. They did meet the goal of increasing conversation around McDonalds. However, all of this negative conversation could have been avoided. If they had done their research they would have found that these sorts of campaigns have not worked well historically. For example, in the previous year, Wendy’s promoted a #HeresTheBeef hashtag that yielded a steady stream of inappropriate comments and innuendo. If they had used social data they could have also identified the trends in conversation around McDonalds, the key influencers to reach out, etc. Social data could give them actionable insights to avoid such a campaign or even make it a success.
- So now we’re going to look at how MasterCard used social data to identify trends, apply insights and use them for better business decisions. So I, unfortunately, cannot actually see you raise your hands, but let me ask you anyway… please raise your hand if you have a credit card issued by Mastercard. Did you raise your hand? So I definitely raised my hand the first time I was asked this --- and I was wrong. None of you actually have a credit card issued by MasterCard. MasterCard’s business is actually transactions between merchants and banks. The more transactions, the more revenue and profits are generated for the company. So this case study is the story of how social media data and analysis revealed real opportunities for MasterCard. Last year, MasterCard released its first mobile money study. PRIME Research’s analysis of MasterCard social media found that everybody loves mobile payments. But the people who actually tried mobile payments had less positive things to say than the people who had not tried it. This is not good. It showed that people are excited about the product --- until they use it. MasterCard needed to motivate user to try mobile payments. So we started some deeper research, looked at all the social data and we found two areas of concern.
- First – there was concern around Acceptance – people were concerned that merchants might not accept the mobile payments. Second – there was also concern around Data Security – people didn’t think their credit card information would be safe. In the acceptance related social data, we found complaints were focused on cab drivers and fast food restaurants. These merchants were having trouble accepting the mobile payments. While there’s a communications element to it – a need to better communicate usages, etc. – this is an issue that impacts the whole business. If there are fewer acceptances, that means there are fewer transactions and ultimately less revenue for the company So we shared these insights on the acceptance concerns and it became a straightforward matter of product development. MasterCard enhanced the technology for merchants who had trouble accepting payments – resolving one key concern. They also increased communications and marketing to reinforce their merchant relationships. And, since data security was another top concern, all the marketing materials had a particular focus on the data security story. As an interesting sidebar, while we were using social data to identify these trends and apply the insights, MasterCard was also conducting a survey on mobile payments. The survey cost a few hundred thousand dollars it took a much longer time to conduct and it came back with the same exact findings. It was important to conduct the survey as it offers a higher level of certainty, but overall it was great validation for the use of social data. I think the key takeaway from that is that social data accurately reflected the voice of the customer. We could in fact use social data to identify a problem and develop guidance much more quickly than with traditional tactics. ---- So we applied our insights and improved some of the communication and decision making. At least that’s what we thought, but how could we be sure? MasterCard recently issued their second mobile money study and they found no problems related to these two concerns from the first year. MasterCard used their data to eliminate communication barriers, leading to more transactions and ultimately driving more revenue. This all goes to show that research and communication really works.
- So, in summary – what’s next in the world of social data and research? Recent conversation has really moved beyond should I be on social media – to what is the return on my social media investment. This is where social data and research plays a role in strategic communication. I think you need a solid research foundation to inform your strategy and decisions. And then you need social data to find the trends, understand your audience and develop meaningful insights. Then, when you take action on these insights, that is when you see a return on your social media investment. And each of you can start to leverage research and social data in your strategies. Begin by looking at your channel analytics or using some of the many free social listening tools available. Join one of the many Meetup or LinkedIn groups on this topic. Meetup: Social Data and Analytics LinkedIn: Social media measurement & Analytics Or continue to learn more by attending a conference on this topic. Speaking of which…
- If you enjoyed this webinar, you don’t miss the PRSA and PRIME Research Strategic Corporate Communications and Research Conference from May 15 to 16 in New York. Speakers will include: Gary Sheffer - VP or Communications and Public Affairs for GE David Tovar – VP of Corporate Communications for Walmart Andrews Bowins – SVP for MasterCard as well as other veteran corporate communicators. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to prove and improve your return on PR investment through strategic communication and research. You can register now at prsa.org – slash conferences – slash corporate communications or get all the latest news at hashtag PRSA PRIME.
- So that brings me to the end of the webinar. Thank you so much for participating. Let’s keep the conversation going through PRIME Research’s social channels – you can follow us on Twitter at US PRIME Research or on Facebook. And definitely connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or pretty much any other social network.