Over the course of the past few weeks, we’ve been monitoring several blogs, Indian as well as from across the globe,  to understand the commenting trends and almost everywhere we have come across this phenomenon. It seems that now, with the advent of so many social media platforms, there are a hundred different avenues through which blogs are commented on and discussed, including the blog. A simple tweet on twitter like ‘Read interesting post about wordpress 3.0 by *** and totally disagree’ can trigger a conversation on twitter rather than on the blog. If the blogger would like to be part of this conversation, it becomes her job to track where her story is being shared and discussed and get there as fast as possible with her reasons and opinions to continue the conversation. For instance, this blogpost may be retweeted by 10 different people on twitter, each marking the tweet with his/her thought [which takes the place of the comment] along with the url. In this scenario, it might simply be a better solution to add to the comments box a continuously updating list of mentions on the social web thus allowing you to connect with those who have thoughts about your ideas on their platform rather than bringing them to your blog and expecting them to drop a comment. So if the lack of comments is really getting you down, hang in there! Someone, somewhere is tweeting about you. You just need to find them and engage!

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social media for NGOs

Organizations need a variety of online supporters. They need customers who buy their products, evangelists who promote their brand, mavens who add intellectual value, their own employees who speak out and increase the goodwill towards the brand and a silent audience of undecided’s who fall in none of these categories. Large organizations are blessed with followers and fans instantly. Their timelines and fan pages are bombarded with complaints, compliments and a lot of spam. Small organizations need to work harder and smarter to achieve their social media objectives. But what about NGOs? How does one leverage social media for NGOs?

Traditionally, a commercial enterprise like, say, Starbucks would look at engaging with its customers and looking to improve their overall experience at their outlets. NGOs on the other hand have the unenviable task of converting their followers and fans into donators or volunteers. No value offered besides educating a girl in Zaire or feeding a family in Cambodia. Listed below are a few steps which we @iridiuminter think can help you meet your social media goals. But before you start, a word of advice. Do go through our previous posts about building your social media presence. You need a certain stand with your number of online connections and quality of tweets/posts/links before you attempt these. Running any of these ideas with a fan page of 6 and a twitter timeline of 50 isn’t going to get you anywhere close to your goals. If you are serious about using social media for your NGO, be patient and be prepared.

#1 Build your audience

Your potential supporters are scattered all over the internet. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook all have a plethora of individuals who could be of extreme value to you. You could drill down and find networking sites catering to niche audiences and create strategies to engage them. Mind, the word “engage” in the social world means not to bombard but to politely involve followers and followees into conversations they are interested in. You are involving yourselves in a conversation so be nice and keep at it. Post interesting stuff on your blog, related to your mission, and see how you can keep this relevant to the world in general. Keep your tone positive if you can, gritty if you must and cynical never. Be consistent, be patient and your audience WILL grow.

#2 Connect with Influencers

Influencers are those people who figure on thousands maybe millions of lists and whose words and actions have the highest chance of being replicated by others. Now, connecting with them is a bit like getting to hang out with the cool gang in school. Your NGO thus needs to be at a certain social media standing (x no. of followers, fantastic blog, gazillion fans etc) before you approach them and involve them in your conversations. You should, obviously, be doing great work in your field. Engage them again and work towards building a relationship where you could count on them to help you socially. Approach them with a plan where they could tangibly help you, hope they agree and then hold on to your seat as you see your campaign take off. Continue engaging.

#3 Innovate

If you have that respectable presence on the social media sphere and are connected to several influencers, it is time to innovate. As part of your NGOs social media efforts you could : Create contests if you can offer something exciting, start a donation countdown with a real time view to donors as to where their money is being spent, start a donor marathon with your influencers pledging to support you with x amount of money or resource or commodity, anything in fact. You never know what may click. And continue engaging.

#4 Tell a Story

All great, big or small mission work starts and ends with a story. No matter how much we overdose on technology, humans remain humans. We feel connected with a story. Social networking sites offer you a perfect place to connect with humans who could be interested in stories such as yours.There is a 3 x higher probability to be accepted as part of the social community, engage and influence your audience, when you share authentic, real-time stories with them. You will be surprised when you see who begins to rally behind your NGO and how quickly you can expand your mission reach. So stay real and tell stories just as they happen.

This process and the ideas mentioned are definitely not exhaustive. What thoughts do you have for NGOs trying to use social media?

Image source: UNHCR on flickr
Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Strengths

• Analyzes what is being said about your company. This produces value for the company.

• Decoding the noise and chatter of user generated content which is of great relevance to a company and its brand.
• Encourages direct consumer interactions.
• Allows companies a real time view on consumer perceptions about their brands.
• Helps develop a marketing plan from consumer interactions and conversations.

Weaknesses

• Limitations of technology, ultimately requires a human touch to it.
• Huge volumes of data to process from numerous sources and innumerous languages.  Difficult to make a one stop technological solution.
• Its such a huge media space which is rather intimidating to a beginner.
• Ongoing disagreement between the data compilation over being comprehensive and insightful, which is rather difficult to achieve both successfully as yet.

Opportunities

• Potential to become a hygiene factor for every company with more technology improvements making monitoring more effective.
• Monetization of social media. Many companies have profited from social media and many more to yet to venture. This medium offers immense opportunities.
• SME’s who felt left behind due to their lack of resources to spend on advertisements can now capitalise social media without any penny spent to advertise their brand.

Threats

• There are no defined industry standards, will make it difficult to benchmark success and outcomes.
• Many new entrants/ board room level executives do not really understand the how to take advantage of user generated content.

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Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanlouis_zimmermann/3055864480/

“If you cant measure it, you can’t manage it.” as rightly quoted by management guru, Peter Drucker.

This is exactly what social media monitoring attempts to do. There are millions of conversations happening and by now if you have been reading my blogs, the message is loud and clear. If you cannot measure them with a predefined set of benchmarks then you cannot [do brand management] manage what is being said about your company and brand. Today enterprises, including those that approach iridium, face a bold challenge of managing their business in extremely dynamic webs + weeding out the conversations and dialogues in the humanized web networks. The crux of any good social media strategy is the Return on Investment or may I say ‘Return on Influence’. Sentiment Analysis and quantitatively measuring social media conversations gives an understanding of the business impact. Lets find out how.

I will point out the tangible benefits to any business or ROI from social media monitoring:

1. Gather consumer and competitor perceptions of a brand, then work towards changing their perceptions for the better.
2. Create avenues to let your consumers know that they are being heard.
3. Provides you with proactive crisis management and planning.
4. Provides warning or red alerts for defensive or reactive public relations.
5. Identify your real influencers.
6. Understand the environment of your business operations and the ecosystem it operates in.
7. Improves customer services which inturn leads to higher sales.
8. Reduces costs as this is the most cost effective way to touch base with a large volume of customers.
9. Reach the right customers faster and better.
10. Drives better decision making with the information aggregator tools.
11. Aids product development with live consumer inputs.
12. Enhanced SEO diminishes the need of paid searches.

These are some essential benefits anybody can avail from social media monitoring which iridium also provides. Await my next blog as I will talk conduct the SWOT analysis of Social Media Monitoring.

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Image Source: farfromtimid.com

“We have seen a clear evolution in demands from our customers. They are better informed and far more sophisticated in their expectations and requirements.”- Mark Redgrave of Hapax.

True!! With the advent of social media they now have their own platform to express their views and opinions. The main intention behind social media monitoring is to track these conversations as I have mentioned earlier. Determining if these conversations are positive or negative is called Sentiment Analysis.

Listening to the sentiments behind a customer’s voice is very important for any company that wishes to act upon these opinions. According to me, sentiment analysis is very important to any social media monitoring initiative. It is vital to analyze whether good or bad conversations are driving your brand in the social media space. In fact, tracking sentiments is one of the real reasons why businesses enter social media. At iridium, we use several tools to do this.

Automated sentimental analysis tools are generally used to give numbers to these customer sentiments. It is good if you dig deeper than the statistics to get a clearer picture. Also you will need to compare sentiments across several brands over a time period.

If the consumers have positive sentiments with a brand, its all good, but when there is negative sentiment it makes the analysis interesting when you have to uncover the reasons behind this particular sentiment. Sentiment analysis coupled with social monitoring tools make this study even more interesting. It is more like stepping into your consumer’s mind and understanding what drives their thinking about your company.

I would not like to confuse you further, so I conclude by stating that sentiment analysis is nothing but social media monitoring with a qualitative twist.

Social media includes blogs, forums, wikis, tags and any user generated content. This is where consumers and users saw the opportunity to share their opinions and thoughts with so much ease.

Word of mouth marketing saw unprecedented growth which it never did before. Listening to these conversations on companies has brought about the importance of social media monitoring and the various tools invented to track and measure the zillion conversations happening online.

Social monitoring tools monitor:

• All websites
• Every possible social network
• Social news
• Blogs
• Forums
• Microblogs
• Images
• User generated content
• Tags
• Videos
• Almost every possible thing on Web 2.0

Social Media Monitoring tools will provide you with all the statistics. But it is sheer analysis that will give some sense to the random numbers and graphs these tools generate.

In my next blog I will talk more about these tools and provide you with more examples especially from my experience at iridium Interactive.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Also known as social reputation management, or online reputation management, social media monitoring serves more than gathering metrics on your social media initiatives.

There will be a lot of metrics that can be gathered but making some sense out of these numbers is what is required.  In fact, I would say social media monitoring should not be done after you enter social media; this can be done even before you enter the social media marketing. By this not only will you have awareness about your brand, you will have the right intent to begin your social media initiatives.

Here are some basic reasons to monitor social media in case you are new to this terrific listening tool and its scalable capabilities:

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

People by their very nature are social. Companies, businesses thrive on people and their opinions. No surprises then, that Social media has it own reasons to evolve with more and more social networking sites mushrooming every single day. Whether you like it or not, accept it or not, there is so much being said about you- with or without you. If you choose not engage, you are simply giving up the ability to manage and influence what’s being said…

It has become an imperative need to listen to what your stakeholders are saying about you in this social space before planning any marketing strategy. In a recent global CMO survey, over 90% of companies confirm that they are allocating over 25% of their marketing mix budgets to social media / digital marketing initiatives. They are understanding this critical need to participate in continuous consumer interactions that engages users with opportunities to share their opinions.

There are so many online social networking sites from facebook, twitter, orkut, flickr, digg, technorati, myspace, linkedin, picasa and so many more. When you search for Social Media on Google you get 210,000,000 results. Whaoo!! This can be rather intimidating for someone who is just looking at implementing this very popular phenomena people just cant stop talking about in the business context.

@iridiuminter, having the depth and breath of social media for over a decade, @iridiuminter digital strategy team enjoys placing the social footprints for our clients everyday with a robust relevancy and reach that delivers tangible online growth engines for them.So, it is time to question your marketing plans and explore the new dimensions of online growth opportunities right now.

In my bid to share the knowledge and experience on Social Media Marketing and Monitoring, I will take you through these stories in my upcoming series and help you set your fortress of Social media.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Kolkata, India, Jan 22^nd, 2010- INFOCOM 09/10- India’s largest ICT (Information Communication Technology) Expo that was held in Calcutta this year saw IT experts, corporate world gurus, business users and policy makers meet at this conference with the sole objective of leveraging businesses with IT applications.

Sriram Bharatam, CEO and Founder of iridium Interactive was invited as a key speaker to share his insights on the growing influence of social media on the corporate world. He presented his views in the media panel on “Creating Measurable Returns through Social Media Monitoring”

“There is a conversation going on online, with or without you. If you choose not to engage, you are simply giving up the ability to manage and influence what’s being said. Your stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, and media) are already engaged in social media”, as said by Mr.Bharatam while stressing on the importance of Social Media Marketing to the corporate players at the conference. He then explained Social Media Marketing as the “process of being aware, taking reactive and proactive measures on conversations /content flowing in social media for corporate objectives aligned with marketing, PR, Customer Service, and Business intelligence”.

He also emphasized on the importance of businesses to proactively keep pace with swiftly evolving technologies and trends to create a quantum leap towards business transformation. He then concluded the discussion stating “Social media and mobile revolution hold incredible opportunity to most businesses”.

About iridium Interactive:

iridium Interactive specializes in building world class  Interactive solutions  with proprietary frameworks  in Healthcare/Pharma, Higher Education, Media & Entertainment, Retail and Non-Profit Sectors. With an   established practice in Digital Strategy, building new media solutions, Creative development and Digital marketing solutions for web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, iridium has serviced over 300+ clients across 3 Continents and  facilitated measurable online business growth for  its clients across nine verticals.  Iridium’s differentiator lies in providing a unique integrated approach of digital strategy, creative excellence, technological support and digital marketing solutions.  As one of the Top 100 IT Innovators in India Iridium’s core strength lies in applying the principles of innovation and creativity to the Internet and Mobile medium creating “disruptive” strategic value adds to the business.