Emerging Best Practices

Social Media Monitoring,

Engagement & Measurement
 Table of Contents

Purpose & approach 2

Executive summary 4

Findings

Triggers: why companies initiate monitoring & engagement 6

Guidelines for responding, engaging, working with legal, staffing 8

Measurement 12

Biggest surprises 13

Most common mistakes 14

Advice 16

Next steps 18

© Beeline Labs 2009 ”Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 2
Purpose & approach

Purpose
• To understand why and how innovative major corporations are monitoring social media
conversations on blogs, forums, social networks and microblogging platforms, e.g.,
Twitter or Friendfeed.

• To uncover emerging best practices and policies that these companies are using to guide
how employees engage in social media conversations – both responding and initiating.

• To find what organizational functions are actively monitoring and engaging in social
media and what business value they are realizing.

• To gather insights and helpful advice on how to succeed, overcome obstacles, and
navigate likely speed bumps.

Approach & interviewees

During March and April 2009 Beeline Labs, a marketing strategy firm, conducted in-depth tele-
phone interviews with people in several major corporations responsible for social media monitoring
and engagement, including Best Buy, Cisco, GE, IBM, Intuit and UPS. Some were in corporate
communications, others in marketing, and some in customer service. We also interviewed execu-
tives of four of the leading social media monitoring services – Cymfony, Market Sentinel, Radian6
and Visible Technologies - to get their frank views about emerging patterns among their client
bases. We also included experiences and advice gleaned from publicly available speeches and
case studies.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 3
Executive summary

It depends
Given the constant drumbeating from analysts and thought leaders about the need to monitor so-
cial media to manage reputation and glean consumer insights, we were surprised to find few con-
sistent best practices among companies.

While companies acknowledge that social media monitoring and engagement are a “must,” most
are in the early stages, adopting the tools to monitor and listen. Fewer have created strategies,
policies and processes for responding to and participating in social media conversations on behalf
of the company. Almost all are wrestling with how to most effectively staff, scale, measure, fund,
and demonstrate business value.

Based on the interviews, we thought a good sub-title of this study might be “It Depends,” as most
of those we interviewed stressed that creating standards and processes for social media monitor-
ing and engagement largely depends on a company’s culture and values, business priorities and
needs, and the readiness and interest of different functions, like customer service, to embrace so-
cial media as part of their business processes.

We did, however, find several patterns:

The decision to monitor is easy; engaging is more complex

Most companies start by adopting a tool that can monitor social media posts and tweets about
their company, their competitors, their industry and their issues. More complex – and not adopted
as widely – is determining how to engage in conversations. Who should respond? What is “re-
sponse worthy?” And what is the value of the time spent doing this?

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 4
Early efforts are natural extensions of existing functions, not new functions
The corporate communications function most often initiates monitoring and engagement because
these two activities are a natural extension of PR’s existing mission and approved legal guidelines –
monitoring what’s being said about the company, responding on behalf of the company, training
others to speak on behalf of the company.

Education is as important – maybe more – than guidelines and policies

Companies gaining the most value from monitoring and engagement are focused more on educat-
ing than policing. They are dedicating resources to helping the organization understand how and
why social media works, how it fits into the company’s existing business practices, and how exist-
ing corporate values and communication policies should serve as the basis for employee social
media engagement guidelines.

Biggest surprises
The first is how few conversations about the company and its products need a response. Many
fear that they’ll have to hire legions of people to respond and participate in social media conversa-
tions, but in actuality fewer than five percent of tweets and posts require a response. The second
surprise is the value of the insights from a systematic monitoring approach, especially for customer
service, sales, product innovation, brand management, and corporate communications.

The next questions

Once monitoring systems and employee engagement guidelines are in place, most companies
wrestle with three questions: How to scale company-wide
and institute work flow processes so the right people are
alerted to conversations relevant to their functions; how to
roll up and analyze the data to guide business decisions;
how to make a business case to get funding for the right
internal talent and technologies.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 5
Findings

1. Triggers: why companies initiate monitoring

Companies initiate formal monitoring and engagement programs for different reasons, but the six
most common reasons among those we interviewed were:

Reputation management and crisis communications: the need to monitor is a natural exten-
sion of what PR and corporate communications teams do in analyzing traditional media.

Customer insights, especially for Net Promoter-driven organizations like Intuit, where word of
mouth and referrals are a key measure of business performance.

Customer service: companies are beginning to see that social media is a new way to help
customers. Many are analyzing the volume of conversations relevant to customer service and
developing business case analyses to determine company resources, training and expected
return on the investment for incorporating social media engagement into this function.

“Get me one of those”: marketing and corporate communications organizations see monitoring
tools as a “must-have.”

Cost reduction: listening and engagement can be a more cost effective way to tap into consumer
insights than traditional research, and a more effective way to engage directly with customers as
part of a CRM process.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 6
Campaign planning/product launch: social media research provides companies with helpful
insights for planning – how to position within market context, which bloggers to reach out to,
and what communities and forums to participate in.

Trigger Business value

Managing risk, reputation, crisis

Early warning of problem; pinpoint influencers; inform action
management (extension of traditional
plan
PR role

Customer-centric strategy to gain market insights that ex-

Product launch and campaign plore potential interest, improve positioning, inform imple-
planning mentation plans. “Helps us understand where the conver-
sation is now, and how people prefer to interact about this
topic.”

The new “social phone” for hearing and answering con-

New customer service platform cerns; improves response time, flags emerging issues; re-
duces cost as customers help each other

Continuous data on conversation provides a jump on peri-

Part of WOM/Net Promoter strategy odic NPS reports. “Why wait a year to find out what you
need to work on?”

Cost effective research, brand en- Shifting/cutting resources from traditional advertising with
gagement strategy for recessionary potentially greater impact on engagement, brand experi-
times ence.

Executive urgency accelerates projects and funding, but

GMOOT – “get me one of those”
can compromise business value due to weak objectives

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 7
2. Guidelines for responding, engaging, staffing, working with legal

All the companies we interviewed have guidelines in place for how their employees should think
about engaging in social media conversations. Some are short, others more detailed.

More varied are company policies about who in the company should respond to what types of
posts/tweets. The one constant, however, is that agencies should not be responding on behalf of
the company. Here are details:

Social media engagement policies

• Employee social media guidelines/policies: Every company interviewed em-

phasized that the starting point for developing social media guidelines is the com-
pany’s existing values, culture, and codes of conduct. Social media guidelines
should be an extension of these, they advised.

For example, the first point in IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines is “Know and fol-
low IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines.” The subsequent guidelines are a combi-
nation of rules from the legal department, e.g., reminders about confidential infor-
mation, copyright, etc., and advice for successful online participation, e.g., “Re-
spect your audience,” “Try to add value.”

Similarly, Cisco’s guidelines are connected to its Employee Business Code of Con-
duct, and every Cisco employee is required to annually re-affirm their agreement to
the Business Code of Conduct. This code of conduct advises employees to
“Communicate in a respectful and professional manner. Avoid disclosing proprietary
information. Keep applicable policies and regulations in mind.”

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 8
 • Policies on who can speak on behalf of the company: The greater the corpo-
rate culture of trust and collaboration, the more companies encourage employees
to freely engage in social media conversations on behalf of the company. “The real-
ity is that employees are going to participate whether it’s sanctioned or not,” ex-
plains one Fortune 100 corporate attorney. “We can make rigid policies around who
can engage and what they can say. But that wouldn’t be effective. If you’re trying
to affect behavior, focus on educating employees…we haven’t had any bad experi-
ences. Our corporate culture is the reason why.”

• “How to” handbooks: Many companies are creating educational handbooks for
the whole company that are less policy and more “how to” advice on how to en-
gage and participate in different types of social media. “We want to empower peo-
ple to be company representatives,” explained one corporate communications ex-
ecutive. “These guidelines are based on our general spokesperson guidelines.”

Tips for collaborating with legal

!
"he organizations interviewed have overcome legal obstacles to social media, and offer
these suggestions for working with legal:

Involve legal from the beginning: show the legal team the business value of participating
in the online conversation and the risk of being silent. Use specific examples, and enlist
them in creating ways to protect the business while gaining advantages of social media en-
gagement, e.g., establishing social media guidelines for all employees. One company has a
“blogging board” comprised of a cross section of people from communications, business
units and legal groups to periodically revisit policies and practices.

Consult on thorny issues: For thorny issues, consult with legal as you would consult with
them around other potentially controversial or material issues. In one company, the corpo-
rate communications team is distributed across business units, and communicators are
paired with a member of the legal team. This fosters relationships built on experience and
trust, resulting in faster response times based on best available understandings.!!

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 9
You can’t respond to every post and Tweet: questions for prioritizing

Companies realize that they can’t possibly participate in every conversation or respond to every
tweet or post about their brand. The cost of doing so would be exorbitant – and many posts simply
are not relevant. One of the technology vendors interviewed estimates that only five percent of the
online activity mentioning a company really requires a response. It’s another case of “it depends.”
To determine what is “response-worthy,” companies are asking these types of questions and mak-
ing judgment calls:

• How influential is the source?

• What’s the volume? How many are talking about the topic?
• What’s the potential business impact? On the brand, sales, the stock?
• Is it urgent and driving the news cycle?
• Does the post/tweet have inaccurate information about our prod-
ucts/services/company or values – and can we correct this inaccurate information?
• Can we add value to the conversation?
• Can we resolve a customer’s problem ASAP?
• Can we turn around a negative or unpleasant customer situation by acknowledging
the issue and offering help?

Most companies have people so involved in the monitoring that they get a sixth sense of what’s
unusual or potentially troublesome. Or they have ad hoc methods of deciding among a small
group whether or how to engage. Or they know whom to contact elsewhere in the organization --
by subject matter or function – and ask them whether they think it’s worth engaging. One large
corporation has a policy of responding if it will: help the customer; fix a problem; or correct an in-
accuracy that matters.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 10
Who does the responding?

In the early stages, the people doing the monitoring are generally the ones to engage when they
discover a “response-worthy” event, but this is changing as companies put tools and workflow in
place to scale engagement.

When it comes to responding, here again there is a range of practices, and it depends on com-
pany culture and on objectives. But these are the four most common approaches:

• Corporate communications: Generally these professionals are the primary re-

sponders in all but customer service situations, acting in a traditional role as corpo-
rate spokespeople, collaborating with company experts to inform responses or do
the actual responding.

• Subject matter experts with their own relationships and followings often partici-
pate in relevant conversations. Most companies have experts and spokespeople
with some degree of visibility and who may already be blogging or regularly reading
and participating in online sources.

• Customer service/relations: Where the primary objective of social media moni-

toring and engagement is customer support – no surprise – the customer service
organization takes the lead because it’s already their job.

• Anyone and everyone: Some companies allow anyone in the company to partici-
pate on behalf of the company as long as they follow the corporate guidelines.
However, beware too much of a good thing, says one interviewee. “Having every-
body out there responding to everything can create confusion.”

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 11
 The role of outside agencies responding/participating on behalf of clients
All those interviewed advised not to outsource engagement to agencies. If a customer or
observer is talking about the company, they want to hear from a real person from the
company – or each other – not an intermediary. Also, many companies find that agencies
don’t have deep enough context to efficiently and effectively respond, even if being trans-
parent about doing so.

Most companies keep their everyday monitoring function inside as well, for two reasons:
they want to know first hand what’s going on as it happens rather than rely on reports
that lose immediacy and nuance; and second, they prefer to use agency resources on
special projects using social media-based research, for example, to understand an
emerging issue or to inform plans for a product launch.

3. Measurement: what’s the value?

It truly is the Wild West – no one has figured out an ideal way to measure the value of monitoring
and engagement. “There is no one size fits all measurement approach,” said one marketing direc-
tor. “The best approach may be to ask, ‘What measures are meaningful to my program – or busi-
ness objectives?’”

Companies interviewed all acknowledged that they are actively working on developing more mean-
ingful measurement approaches. In the meantime, many are using:

• Quantity & quality of commentary about the brand, product, issue

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 12
 • Sentiment and tone – how are we changing the sentiment of conversations from
negative or neutral to positive?
• Influence and relationships – are we engaging with more of the bloggers, Twitterers
and media who matter? Are they reaching out to us more in addition to our out-
reach to them?
• Competitive comparison – what’s our share of social media voice?
• Insights – are we learning things that improve how we plan, what we offer, how we
communicate?

Related to measurement is reporting, which also varies from company to company.

One company interviewed does a daily social media report, similar to its morning media news clip
report, and shares that with managers in the company. This corporate communications team also
holds a daily morning meeting to discuss what they’re watching in social media and mainstream
media. Every Friday the group compiles a more comprehensive “week in review” report for senior
management, covering how key issues are evolving and how the company is participating in those
issues in social media and from a mainstream media perspective.

Another corporate communications team develops a monthly report assessing how the company
compares with competitors – share of voice, sentiment, and message pull through. They analyze
both individual posts and the threads to distinguish between emerging brand advocates and one-
off anecdotal events. They also analyze themes that are resonating and where those conversa-
tions are happening.

4. Biggest surprises

Customers want to advocate: Companies have been pleasantly surprised to see just how
much customers advocate and recommend their products and companies. When companies di-
rectly communicate with customers, offering help and giving thanks, those customers help even
more.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 13
The value of early warning and speedy response: Companies interviewed have seen value in
being able to “hear” about emerging potential issues and change decisions ASAP. One company,
for instance, saw a tweet about an ad of theirs being in bad taste due to a breaking news event.
The company removed the ad immediately – before any other negative tweets or blog posts oc-
curred.

Better planning: Tuning into what’s being talked about is becoming an important and valuable
part of the planning process, providing much needed insight on how to position new products, en-
hance service offerings, and directly connect with customers and influencers in ways that are rele-
vant, authentic and helpful. “With listening at forefront, we see things in a different light. We have
found new value for doing pre-announcement prep work to better understand the issue, and why
and how influential people are tweeting about the issue.”

“No bad experiences”: Almost all companies said they were surprised at how few, if any, nega-
tive experiences had occurred from engaging in social media. While legal and management are
often concerned about “what if someone says negative things about the company,” this has rarely
been an issue.

5. Most Common Mistakes

Ill-defined purpose: Monitoring technology providers report that many companies come to them
with no objectives or objectives that are much too broad or vague. “Companies want to know
what people are saying about them, but they don’t know what they’re going to do with that data. If

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 14
there’s no purpose, it’s difficult to analyze the data, get funding, and develop the right measures.”
Another mistake is assuming that the technology will provide meaningful insights. “The technology
doesn’t bubble up meaning automatically,” explains one technology vendor. “You have to come to
it with a business hypothesis and look at the data from that lens to glean the actionable insights.”

Disconnected silo: Another mistake is looking at social media in isolation. These conversations
need to be looked at within the overall context of what is going on in the business, the industry,
and mainstream media.

Denial: Some companies report that management is unwilling to accept bad news that comes
through social media; they want to wait for "more convincing" confirmation from more traditional
sources of intelligence to take action. Yet social media has become one of the most accurate early
warning systems.

Just another “channel”: Some in organizations mistakenly believe that social media is just an-
other way to “get our messages out there.” Too few people understand that this isn’t a new push
channel, but instead a way to open doors, create relationships, learn, and help people get to know
the people behind the company in a transparent, authentic and human way.

Not using the right talent: Don't assign someone with no experience and who doesn’t have the
right disposition. “You can't just grab someone with a Facebook profile and put them in charge of
social media engagement,” stressed one marketer. Some companies use an “elite hybrid team”
of people who have public relations and marketing communications skills AND who have customer
service and support experience, or at least empathy. Moving into social media should come out of
individuals’ roles in the company.

Listening but not acting: This happens most often when there is not enough senior level access
or support for social media monitoring and engagement.

Over-engineering a process or workflow: Once a tool with engagement capabilities is in

place, there is a danger of introducing too much automation while trying to ensure coordinated re-
sponses. This can result in losing relevance and the human touch that are at the heart of effective
engagement.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 15
6. Advice for succeeding

Start with a modest objective that’s tied to a priority: For example, initiate monitoring to gain
insights for planning a new product launch, or focus engagement on solving a customer service
issue. The scope will be manageable, you’ll be able to measure the impact in ways valued by oth-
ers in the company, and it will be easier to gain cross-functional collaboration for expanded initia-
tives.

Involve your agencies, but don’t outsource to them: This was one of the hottest topics
across all interviews. “Don't leave this to an external agency. Get your own social media experts.
You need to own it; it's your lifeblood,” stressed several of those interviewed. The role of the
agency is more to answer specific questions, e.g., what's the conversation [on an issue or product
category], where are conversations are taking place, who are the most influential bloggers around
a particular topic. While people cautioned against outsourcing to an agency, they did note the
value of keeping the agency informed of what you’re learning so they can factor those insights into
their advice and plans.

Don't just jump in: Begin by spending time listening. This will provide context and help you un-
derstand how to effectively engage.

Education beats “legislation.” At many companies, the team most responsible for monitoring
and engagement spends significant time educating and coaching others in the organization, both
formally through quarterly events, published guidelines and “how to” materials, and informally as

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 16
issues and opportunities arise. Use social media tools like wikis and forums internally to share
case studies, emerging best practices, and tips and techniques.

The human element is essential: Technology providers and companies agree that tools alone
won’t work. You need human analysis by the people closest to the business to extract business
meaning from the social media conversations. Technology cannot analyze emotional relationships
between a brand and a consumer. And while everyone seems to agree that there’s a vital role for
human analysis, exactly who does it and how is an evolving question.

Share the data: The goal (and challenge) is to coordinate incoming information and insights and
get it into the right hands quickly. Most companies are now looking at technology platforms with
workflow capabilities so the right people across different functions see relevant posts as they hap-
pen. They also see the need for new types of reports that provide meaningful insights to different
corporate functions vs. simply providing overall data.

Invest as if it matters: “People need to get over the idea that ‘it’s free!’ -- that it’s dirt-cheap and
you don’t need any resources,” said one marketing executive. Effective monitoring and engage-
ment that delivers business value requires tools and talent, especially as companies look to scale
their early experiments into ongoing business processes.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 17
Next Steps

There seems to be universal focus on four big challenges as companies look to gain increasing
business value from social media monitoring and engagement. Here’s what companies have on
their radar for the next 12 to 18 months:

Scale it up: For some, this means adding global capabilities. Most are looking at ways to create
a central “hub” with “spokes” that help share what’s going on and coordinate engagement across
business units and functions. Companies are now adopting technology platforms that facilitate
internal communication, offer different views of online conversations and automate some aspects
of engagement as a key step toward scaling monitoring and engagement beyond the group that
initially championed it.

Bake it in to business processes and workflow: Again, enabling technology is key here. Also
important are policies, guidelines, and education that equip and empower more employees to get
involved – and goals and incentives that focus and reward their participation. One technology
provider envisions that soon social media findings will flow into business data streams like sales
and margin data.

Get a better handle on meaningful measurement. And by measurement, we mean both

what’s getting analyzed and how the value of the monitoring and engagement effort is measured. It
will take some leadership by technology providers and the willingness of pioneers to share their
experiences to make headway in establishing new measurement best practices.

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Emerging Best Practices” 18
Keep learning, finding new value: Companies are digging deep to find new ways to reduce
costs, increase efficiencies and delight customers, especially in this economic climate. Compa-
nies’ early efforts are showing them glimpses of how social media impacts the business. Next
steps are exploring how engaging in new ways – and acting on insights from listening – can re-
shape business processes in ways that influence revenue and cost.

About Beeline Labs

Beeline Labs is a marketing strategy firm that helps companies innovate business programs,
practices and organizational culture to realize the benefits of Web 2.0 and social media. We
help companies create enterprise-wide monitoring, engagement and measurement services,
including:

• Social media policy and guidelines development

• Employee training and educational materials (Our most popluar program/handbook

is “Upping Your Social Communications IQ: 10 Essential Business Communications
Skills for a Social Media Age.”)

• Technology resource evaluation and recommendations

• Business case analysis: resource requirements, ROI projections

• Social media monitoring and engagement implementation services

• Engagement measurement & analysis

To learn more, please contact partner Lois Kelly: 401-333-5464, lkelly@beelinelabs, or

@LoisKelly (Twitter).

© Beeline Labs 2009 “Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement: Emerging Best Practices” 19