Steve Sponder's Blog

This is the first in a series of posts that explore the new creative toolkit.

It is clear that brands now exist in a world with a growing number of communication and media channels. Each mutation of channels presenting new creative communication opportunities for creative teams that are skilled in the use of the toolkit.

Words and pictures were the original tools in the toolkit, working well for the broadcast media of the time. These were enhanced by William Bernbach in the '60s who had the insight to join these two skills together therefore creating the copywriter/art director teams which became the de facto model.

We fast forward to the late '90s with the introduction of the Web when we gained a new tool, interactivity, a tool that the majority of traditional agencies found difficult to get their creative teams to learn or to collaborate with interactive specialists, whilst the young digital agencies adopted it as their own and showed brands how powerful it could be.

Today, things have got a whole lot more interesting, we have three new tools that enable us to craft creative concepts; data, location and time. And agencies are again finding it difficult to get their creative teams to learn or collaborate with specialists who are skilled in these new tools.

To illustrate the use of these new tools I've looked at various case studies over the last few years. Some are well known others are not, some had large budgets others did not. Most case studies have used multiple tools however they have a dominant one.

The data tool is alien to most traditional creatives as it can be seen as cold, sterile and intangible. However it is a very powerful tool and increasingly so, as more and more of our daily activities take place via digital platforms leaving a data imprint, the sea of data that can be mined and used to craft creative concepts is mind-blowing.

To find out what the reaction to your content has been you need to ensure you have set-up your active listening tools. What conversations have you started? What conversations do you want to join? How are you tracking against your objectives, targets and budgets?

As we move from tactical social media activity to a more strategic approach we’ll need to start thinking about how we are going to build social brands.  

Well, I think we need to focus on three core principles, the first of which is listening to our stakeholders and markets.  This is obvious and many organisations have already started listening although I wonder how many are actively listening? Wikipedia defines active listening as the intent to 'listening for meaning' which I think is more aligned to what we want to do. I’d like to go even further and suggest that active listening should be considered as a systematic, comprehensive process, starting with monitoring and finishing with action.

1. Monitor - Ongoing monitoring of conversations via keyword searching is the most basic of these activities. You can do this by using one, or a combination of, paid-for or free tools. Some of these free tools are platform or channel specific like Twitter Search and Google Blog Search, whilst others have a broader search net like Addictomatic and Socialmention. It is also possible for you to build a fairly comprehensive 'monitoring system' as explained by Chris Brogan's excellent 'Grow Bigger Ears' blog post.

2. Measure - Next you should be looking to identify some appropriate metrics, with these in place you are then into the activity of measuring. These metrics should have some targets and be linked to some business objectives - see this post for more info ‘7 Steps Social Media Analytics Strategy'.

3. Track - Closely linked to measuring is tracking, where trends can be discovered over time. For example you could be tracking the sentiment around a brand, the number of comments on a blog post or the number of retweets. What we're interested in here is tracking the velocity and acceleration of any changes as this will start to turn the data into information which we can respond to. Nathan Gilliatt provides further detail around tracking velocity and acceleration in his blog post 'Derivatives in media measurement'.

4. Alert - In order to respond to a real-time online crisis, or opportunities for that matter, it is important to consider setting up your alerts. These alerts can be based on a volume threshold for some of the metrics that you're tracking or be based on the mention of a specific phrase that you may be monitoring such as 'Brand sucks' or 'Brand FAIL'.

5. Insights - Over time you are going to be building up a huge volume of data, all of which could provide a wealth of insights. Depending on how you're collecting and holding this data will depend on how insightful and how easy it will be to mine. Currently I believe that appending information manually to the data collected provides the best results. These insights could be applied right across the organisation from product development to customer service, from HR to marketing.

6. Disseminate - Obvious although not happening comprehensively enough from my experience, the output from all of the five active listening activities above need to get to the right person within the organisation at the right time.

7. Act - And lastly, to ensure that the listening has been Active Listening we need to ensure that the business responds to what has been heard either through immediate action or by informing future strategy.

So are you monitoring, actively listening or somewhere in-between? It would be great to hear about your approach?

Having learnt a lot from the first two editions of Age of Conversation, I'm chuffed to be an author of the new edition which is being published in April 2010.

Formulating a content strategy can be a difficult process partly due to the many considerations and partly due to the number of stakeholders. So, to help our clients we have a simple 9 step systematic process.

I've been keen to get this presentation finished for some time now as I feel there is a need for a presentation that explains the importance of social media in a logical, structured way.

So this is the Disruptive Briefing - It tells the story of how social media, as a set of tools and platforms, is having a disruptive impact on business models. The chapters of the story build on top of the previous and is supported by a few facts, stats and case studies plus a healthy dose of viewpoint and experience.

The chapters of the story are:

1. Disruption is not always obvious
2. Social media are the disruption drivers
3. People are sharing their views and experiences
4. People can easily discover others' views and experiences
5. People are now 'in the know' and in control
6. In this transparent world, brands are forced to change their approach & behaviour
7. The payback?

After reading a huge amount about social media measurement over recent months I thought I'd add my five pennies worth to the conversation. What follows is a 7 step process for helping brands put in place a robust social media analytics strategy.

1. The first consideration is whether the conversation has been started by content produced by the brand or the community. This is important as it will have an impact on the approach and some of the specific actions as we move through the process. 

So to give some context to this, brand initiated could be a video uploaded to YouTube or a blogger out-reach programme. Community initiated conversations could be the beginning of a crisis or the start of a positive groundswell response to your new product launch.

2. For brand initiated activity, clarifying the objectives may reflect a tactical approach (increase the number of Twitter followers) or a more strategic one (build our brand influence). For community initiated conversations the objective could be to identify how social the brands' marketplace is or maybe to protect the brands reputation.

3. With the objectives clarified it is now a lot easier to identify the appropriate metrics which when measured will tell us if the objective has been met. It is important for clients to understand the options and complexities around different metrics by exposing them to all the choices available together with the pros and cons of these. To help our clients we have a metric toolkit which includes 50-odd different metrics across 4 key categories.

4. For brand initiated activity we can now set some targets. Obviously, the more social media activity you have under your belt the more data you have to set realistic targets.

5. Active listening is the term we use to cover social media monitoring, measuring, tracking, alerting and data-mining. So, with the appropriate metrics identified we can then select the right monitoring tool and implement our active listening plan. 

Interestingly we estimate that the commercial social media analytic tools (SMATs) can only measure circa 50% of the possible metrics within our toolkit and therefore need to be augmented with other grassroot tools. 

6. For brand initiated conversations this is the point at which we can start the activity or programme.

7. Lastly, we actively listen based on the plan and the brand would respond in accordance with the engagement policy. 

This process has evolved over the last year as the SMATs have evolved and as I read and digest others blog posts and whitepapers although at the moment it is serving us and our clients well.