“How do we report on all of this stuff?” is a question frequently heard from all corners of the sandbox.  Customer service wants to know how their activities on the social web can tie back in with their existing metrics, sales wants to see how it impacts their lead times, sales cycles, and other sales-related metrics, and marketers want to know how to get the information out of the system (as a first step) to funnel to the other groups, as well as know what information they should be looking for as a department.

Phew. That’s a lot of wants!

To help you break it down, here are some steps to help you get started with your marketing and communications-focused reporting plan:

What programs are included in your strategic plan over the next 6 or 12 months?

Social media reporting shouldn’t JUST be used to report on social programs.  Identify which campaigns you’ll be running, shows you’ll be attending, and other activities you’ll be starting (or continuing) over the next 6-12 months. What are the keywords associated with these activities? Do people pick up on things and talk about them on the social web before/during/after? Are they reacting positively or negatively to your campaigns or events? Do you see correlation or cross-pollination from offline program to online channels?

What keywords are associated with your brand?

It may sound simple, but a lot of people track things like @ mentions, Twitter followers, and other statistics, but don’t track keywords associated with their brand.  What does your mission statement say? What are your brand attributes? How are you ranking both for share of voice and share of conversation for these keywords, as well as your market?

Conversation volume.

How many people are talking about you during your reporting period? Is this number growing? Do you notice the same people talking about you week after week or month after month? Can you track sentiment over time and see if a growth in conversation volume also corresponds to a growth in positive sentiment?

Be creative.

No report is going to be “standard” or the same as everyone elses. The key to is to make your reporting plan reflect your business goals, objectives, and tactics.  What is trackable? What do you currently report on? Start there and the social metrics will become apparent far more quickly than starting from “what metrics should we track” and working backwards to applying those to your activities and objectives.

Thank you for joining us today as we talked about community management. We had a great turn-out and lots of questions asked. As a matter of fact, there were so many awesome questions from today’s webinar that we’re going to write up an in-depth blog post that will answer them all for you – so stay tuned for that!

Our Community Management webinar was the first in a three-part series. Today our community team talked about the many “Hats” of a community manager:

• Ambassador
• Storyteller
• Face of the Brand

During the webinar Lauren Vargas, Teresa Basich, Katie Morse, and Lauren Fernandez took each “hat” and explained how that part of the community management role has taken shape in the past, present, and what it will most likely look like in the future. But I think you’ll find that the key take-aways are the action steps that go along with each “hat”.

Ambassador Action Steps:

• Act as a bridge across the organization: A community team isn’t meant to be on an island somewhere operating independently, but rather touching and supporting many of the other areas of the organization to deliver content, provide insights and feedback, deliver subject matter expertise, and act as a bridge both inside and outside the organization.
• Be the communication hub: The way we’re structured, the community team really is the home for everything communications related (rather than having separate marketing, PR, and comms departments).
• Create a listening grid: We have set up what we call a “listening grid”, or a system for capturing, routing, and responding to posts – answering the Social Phone – that helps us scale our engagement across the organization. Right person; Right time; Relevant response.

Story Teller Action Steps:

• Align communication objectivers with business objectives: The community team needs to be working toward larger outlines business goals. It’s important to have measurable objectives aligning with overall business goals to show and emphasize relevance of online engagement.
• Develop progress reports: Invite key leaders and stakeholders to the planning table and ask them what actionable items they want to see out of your community efforts. What does success look like to them? Pay attention to what they ask for and establish methods for measuring progress toward those things (yes, they can be measured). It might be tedious connecting the dots, but if you deliver, you’ve won loyalty and support of that department.
• Establish emotional investment: Go beyond reporting hard numbers and share the feel good stories and relationship building occurring through two-way dialog. Charts and hard analysis are important, but they won’t connect as strongly as putting faces and names to the people in your community.

Face of the Brand Action Steps:

• Develop a playbook: We’ve created a Radian6 Playbook that outlines specifics like workflow, procedures and protocol, and response guidelines. That way, our entire team can work under the same set of expectations, and any new hires will have a great resource to refer to, to integrate seamlessly into the team.
• Move beyond ego-centric discussion: The Radian6 community managers all do proactive listening and engagement to get involved in broader, relevant industry discussions. Our purpose isn’t to sell anything or pitch our product, but to be there to listen, absorb, learn, and contribute expertise when we can. Paying attention to what’s happening around our brand is critical to us understanding how our company and industry fit into the bigger picture.
• Establish offline relationships: Attend industry events, large and small, and get out to talk with clients and prospects in person when possible. We go to numerous events to learn about the issues our customers and larger community are facing and build relationships face to face.

This is just a quick overview of what was discussed. Due to some technical difficulties, the webinar was not recorded properly, but our team will be re-recording the presentation — as well as answering the questions that came through afterward — later this week, and we’ll be posting that recording here as soon as it’s ready.

In the mean time, please feel free to download the slides from our webinar, and let us know if you have any questions!

There are 2 more webinars coming up in the series:

• Webinar 2: Day-to-Day/Tactical Pieces of Community Management
• Webinar 3: Big-Picture Community Development

Be sure to join us again soon for Part 2 — we’ll give you loads of advance notice so you can mark it in your calendars.

For additional resources on community management, be sure to take a look at a series we put together on how our team operates and is structured (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4), another post about how we feel community management as an industry has grown and changed, or just sift through the Community category on our blog.

Also check out our Director of Community Amber Naslund’s independent post about how her role has evolved over the past year, and head over to The Community Roundtable for an even deeper base of content and discussion about community management.

We finally have it. A way for public relations professionals to not only prove qualitative metrics, but quantitative metrics as well. We chatted last week about basic reporting templates, which goes hand in hand with what you need to measure and best practices.

Social media has opened up a door for those in the PR world to prove value and worth to the C-Suite – when normally, it’s the first department to be cut when budgets are tight.

Traditionally, PR professionals focus on “impressions” which can be inaccurate when reporting to clients. Impressions are based on the opportunity to see, not the actual number of people who are reading and absorbing. Many use multipliers to define pass-along readership, but it varies by brand and agency. It’s dubious at best.

Brand and reputation are now up there with media relations since social has been on the scene. So how can you begin to break it down? Every agency and brand are specific to a few things: agency dynamic, brand objectives/goals and client expectations. There isn’t a magic button to tell you what to report in.

We now have online discussion, social media discussion and anything a consumer might say about your brand offline. The last one can be based on in-store promotions, WOM opinion or when experience is related. Makes it a bit tough, right?

There are four areas you can focus on, then make specific and applicable to your clients and/or brand through an analytics approach:

Presentation: What type of exposure has your content and message gained? Is it more so than competition?

Engagement: How are people interacting with the content? What platforms are they identifying with? Who is interacting?

Influencer: How has presentation and engagement altered perceptions and attitudes? Is it positive, negative or neutral? What’s the sentiment? What degree of influencer is this?

End Result: As a result of approach and campaign execution, what has your target demographic done? How did they respond?

What areas would you add? What questions would you focus on? What type of metrics is your C-Suite requesting? Let’s discuss in the comments section.

Creating reports can be addictive. All of those pretty graphs and charts…the color palette! But are you reporting information that is valuable to the organization? Better yet, are you reaching out and analyzing data for specific department involvement, buy-in and alignment with overall measurable business objectives?

Just like any other business channel, your social media strategies require business processes. Reporting will make or break your social media efforts. Go beyond a campaign and turn your social media successes into a business program.

1. Endorsement of Senior Managers – Effective communications, including reporting, require the endorsement of the organization’s senior leaders and managers. Why would anyone else pay attention to the data being reported if the C-suite does not find the insights credible or actionable?
2. Consistent Reporting – Ask for feedback and ensure you are reporting on items that are in sync with the needs and desires of the C-suite and other key departments within your organization. However, avoid too much tinkering or excessive graphics in your reporting from week to week. Be consistent in the data you are reporting and the manner it is presented. Let the limelight shine on the insights, not the fancy layout.
3. Attention to Detail – Do not measure or report for the sake of checking that off the list of responsibilities. Invite key leaders and stakeholders to the planning table and ask them what actionable items they want to see out of the social media efforts. What does success look like to them? Pay attention to what they ask for and desire. It can be measured. Perhaps it will be tedious connecting the dots, but if you deliver, you have won loyalty and support of that department.
4. Communicate with Line Manager – Do not rely on the cascade process to communicate important findings to the larger workforce. It is easy to get lost and bored in a sea of data. Meet with the managers to relay the business urgency and information that is crucial to their department goals and only relevant to them. Make the department feel exclusive. Meeting with them to convey findings gives managers a chance to ask questions, understand the findings and become invested in the outcomes.
5. Integrate Internal and External Communications – Go beyond reporting hard numbers and share the feel good stories and relationship building occurring through two-way dialog. Pretty graphs and charts may speak volumes, but will not connect as strongly to the organization as the emotional bond formed when putting faces and names to those people participating in your communities.

Determine how much is too much (or too little) on a team report and which levels of analysis and interpretation should be delivered to which internal stakeholders [team leaders, executives, etc.] by paying attention to the needs and desires of your organization. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social media strategy, you must the attributes that are relevant, important and unique to your organization’s objectives. Do not report for the sake of checking a box. Report findings that will spur action inside and outside your organization.

When: Monday, June 28th
Time: 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Click here to register.

We chew over the concept of community management quite a bit here at Radian6. It’s a huge part of what we do and how we’re structured as a company, and we’ve found that the definition of community management – once centered around forum moderation and issue resolution – is changing with the growth and development of businesses around these new online social channels and larger fundamental shifts in communication.

You can take a look at our series of posts on the way our community team is structured, read through our Director of Community Amber Naslund’s take on how community management is changing, and download our ebook about building and sustaining branded communities to help frame out your own perspective on what community management really entails.

And if you’d like some more food for thought on the subject, we’re going to be hosting a webinar at the end of this month discussing just how much community management as an individual role has changed, and break down how community management as an essential piece of organizational operations is changing the structure and flow of business as we know it.

You’ll hear from our Senior Community Manager Lauren Vargas; as well as Katie Morse, our Community Manager for our Corporate clients; Lauren Fernandez, our Agency-side Community Manager; and me, Teresa Basich, Community Manager and content maven around here. We’ll talk about everything from how the original role of a community manager was defined to how this new role is impacting business processes and company structure.

But first, we want to hear from you. What do you think community management entails? Have you seen the role of community managers change over time, and if so, how? What are your burning questions about the individual role of community managers and the development of a community team? And if you are a community manager, tell us about what you do within the confines of your community and company.

This is your chance to tell us what you think, and give us the fuel we need to speak to your direct concerns about all things community management. Share with us — we’d love to hear your thoughts.

And after you’re done sharing, feel free to register for our webinar in a couple weeks. We’d be thrilled to have you join us.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about social media governance, but what does this actually mean and what impact does it have on businesses? While governance is often shied away from in our online world of unstructured information, increased control or ‘governance’ of social media is not necessarily a bad thing. Controls are needed, whether this is with regards to what you say on paper, in emails or within social media, should be irrelevant. The question is; how can companies manage social media governance effectively and efficiently?

Social media governance simply put is the control a company has over social media usage by itself or its employees. While the FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) 10-06 Regulatory Notice on social media involvement for regulated businesses has created some buzz, social media policies, procedures and guidelines are gaining in popularity all around. The benefit of effective social media governance transcends industries.

Social media can be daunting for companies; potential record keeping requirements would easily tip the proverbial scale when it comes to approving a business case for it. As a shared medium, often across an entire organisation, social media initiatives understandably require a certain degree of consistency.

Ensuring this means infinite record keeping and tracking: what have employees said, to whom and where. The perfect controls call for a balancing act that mitigates risk whilst allowing the social media brand ambassadors enough flexibility to properly do their jobs. Inexperience in addressing this has the potential of becoming a very time consuming Excel driven affair. Realising that there are tools out there that can help track and record is often half the battle but not always considered.

As social media governance and compliance becomes more prominent in the UK it has the potential to help rather than hinder businesses, regulated or not, to adopt basic rules of engagement for social media as well as effectively manage ongoing campaigns. Clients and consumers will benefit because this will mean that social media participation steadily increases amongst businesses.

The act of uniformity and on brand engagement however should not become a burden which ultimately prevents companies from conversing and engaging, especially smaller ones for which using social media is not only a competitive advantage but part of their business model.

Olivia Landolt

Marketing and Community Manager

@6Consulting

Community management isn’t what it used to be.

Once upon a time, managing a community meant hanging out in an online location – be it a forum or a chat room – and moderating chat. Approving comments. Handling some support issues. Dealing with trolls, helping people with questions. That kind of thing.

But community management, at least the way we approach it, isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off.

Folks are sometimes surprised to learn about how large our team is, or how it’s structured, mostly because they’re thinking of community management as it’s always been. But we’ve got it threaded into our organization a little differently, based on what we think community management should be about in today’s business. Let’s take a look at some of the touchpoints.

Online Engagement

This is the area you probably think of first when you think about community management in today’s world. Doing the listening and monitoring, and getting involved in discussions online in the form of responding to mentions or questions, routing support requests, managing a Facebook page, anything directly related to helping manage your brand online. But that’s not where online engagement ends.

Community involvement also entails contribution of content, initiation of discussion around interesting issues, and more general presence and participation online (not always about your business, or even business at all). We’re all listening for broader topics within the industry and adding our voices and expertise to the discussion when we can. Here, it’s about being invested in and part of the community that you’re seeking to connect to in more ways than just being the online host or hostess for your brand.

Business Development

Make no mistake, community management is part of the lead cultivation process. In addition to our presence online, we attend plenty of events in our industry as well as those that are focused on communications, marketing, and PR in the agency and corporate worlds. We’re there sometimes as sponsors, sometimes as speakers, and sometimes just as attendees.

We’re there to meet our customers and prospects in person, learn about the issues that they’re discussing and dealing with, and build relationships face to face. And while the goal isn’t always and singly lead generation, it’s an important indicator of the impact and value of our presence at these events.

Occasionally, we’re also asked to assist in the sales process with some subject matter expertise, like sharing some social media best practices or knowledge we have to help frame a listening strategy for prospects. Sometimes our customers need a little insight or input on what’s cooking in the social media industry, and we can add a bit of our perspective to their work and tag team with our account managers to help them frame out the big picture.

Internal Communication & Collaboration

In our business, community is what we call a bridge role. We bridge communication from the community into our organization: sharing product feedback with our product team, trends and industry insights with our executive team, helping get sales and support inquiries to the right place for response from those teams, offering input about needs and overall social media challenges that our customer markets are wrestling with.

We’re also in a unique role internally, working closely with all of our departments as if they were our internal customers. We help take the executive vision and translate that into content and communication materials that can help our sales and support folks. We work with our training team to offer social media subject matter expertise for both internal and customer training. We stay connected with product, marketing, support, sales, and management to be sure that our outreach strategy lines up with each department’s objectives, and we’re even shepherding a project to set up an internal social network to share information and communicate more openly inside our own walls.

Content Creation

Case studies. Blog posts. Whitepapers and ebooks. Webinars. We’re the central hub for our content strategy, and other than specific product marketing stuff, it’s created from within our department. We’re listening internally to what our sales folks need to help illustrate the importance of social media as a whole, listening specifically, and how Radian6 fits into the picture. We’re tackling the questions and topics that our customers are interested in related to social media, even if its not just about listening.

We also work with our PR firm to develop ideas for thought leadership contributions to media properties, interview and speaking opportunities, and other initiatives along with our product marketing team. Our whole purpose is to make community a central resource for information and intelligence that can help people do their jobs better, whether it’s our own company’s content, or contributing to external sources. We’re the B2B content marketing epicenter of our company.

Measurement and Reporting

Our group keeps track of our own engagement dashboard, monitoring our own online communication activity. But we also look at trends among our competition. We look at our Share of Conversation, we look at lead generation through community efforts, we look at the engagement around our content and event participation. We look at sentiment trends around our brand, what percentage of our activity is around support issues (and what they are). For more detail on what we measure and why, have a look at this post.

We share that information internally with our teams and management so they can get a snapshot of how the community team is contributing to the bigger picture, and where we can change, adjust, or do things better to have even more impact.

Our Stance

To us, this role is a hybrid discipline – a mix of sales and customer service and communication – and is really silo agnostic, functioning as a hub for many different disciplines inside the company. Online engagement is part of the role, but so too is the integration of that online world with offline efforts, business strategy, and even the culture of our organization.

Our vision of community professionals is that of spokespeople, communicators, networkers, brand ambassadors, and representatives of their community all wrapped into one. We believe it’s a role businesses should take seriously, and hire and incorporate community professionals that have a broad set of business and interpersonal skills. It’s not just the online forum moderators of yesterday.

The folks over at the Community Roundtable (we’re a member) put together an interesting report earlier this year on the State of Community Management. It’s worth a read, as it reflects a lot of the realities today (to the good and to the challenging) as well as a glimpse at what tomorrow might look like. And at Radian6, we put together an e-book on Building and Sustaining Brand Communities that gives our take on what these roles and functions look like inside an organization.

What Do You Think?

Is this what you expected? Is this how you’ve seen community management, or does it get you thinking about it a little differently? What questions do you have for us? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Social media is not a band-aid approach for the brands you work with and for. Strategy, tactics, objectives, and reporting are specific to the client and their particular needs, and which outcomes are most relevant to goals presented.

However, you can base your reporting off of five simple questions and cultivate to specific cases. In elementary school, many of us were taught the 5 Ws of the introduction paragraph — all items that needed to be addressed at the start of any paper. The 5 Ws are: Who, What, Where, When and Why. These serve as a solid foundation of questions you should automatically ask when creating a reporting template.

Every brand and C-Suite wants to see results and proof of those results. This is where reporting comes in and why it is so important.

Your brand and company should determine the capacity and resources necessary before asking these questions and throughout implementation. Also, figure out which departments will be handling these questions, delving into who the point person will be.

1. Who: is your report going to?

Tone, semantics, and the way information is presented play an integral role in the beginning stages of reporting. If it takes a couple reads for the person to digest the first impression of information, change the approach. Overwhelming brands with reports will only cause further questioning and bewilderment at what you do all day. Crafting it in language that is easily understood is key.

2. What: information should be conveyed?

Depending on the brand and size, you could be reporting any number of qualitative and quantitative metrics. The type of information shared should be reflective of the brand’s objectives and end goals. This should also include any benchmark information that a brand can utilize.

3. Where: will it be distributed?

Chances are that this report won’t just stop with the direct contact of the brand or, if on the corporate side, your boss. Customer service, the C-Suite, Sales, and General Marketing might see it as well. That consideration should also play into the “What” — information is great, but if it doesn’t apply to them, they won’t get it.

4. When: does it need to be delivered?

Each brand has different needs and wants. Most will ask for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reports. A healthy compromise can be daily monitoring and alerts for any big positive or negative mentions, with monthly reports as well. Be prepared to insert this information into quarterly reports.

5. Why: is the specific reporting beneficial?

If the report is a jumble of numbers, it will mean zilch to the company. Value and quality play a major role in this question, because it’s a waste of time otherwise. Questions will be asked no matter what, and a person must be prepared to answer them. Presenting solid proof and results for why things are happening to a brand is just as important as the information you are providing. If there is no value behind the numbers, it loses its pull.

How would you answer these specific questions? Are there any you’d like to add? What makes sense for your brand?

Let’s chat.

Vancouver, BC – June 16th, 2010
Calgary, AB – June 17th, 2010

We’re thrilled to be a part of the next two Executing Social Media events happening next week in Vancouver and Calgary.  Along with many other great presentations, you can catch Rob Begg, Director of Marketing here at Radian6 as he presents:

“When Community Floats Your Boat”

What does social media really mean to your organization?  It’s not a another channel for blasting messages or a cheap way to get eyeballs and click-throughs.  It actually is a way to find your community – the people who are as passionate about your “raison d’être” as you are. But is your organization listening to your community?  Is it engaging with them, learning from them, helping them, sharing their content?  Does your brand live within its community or does it still look over the wall at “the audience”?

Rob will challenge your thinking around what defines “marketing” in the age of the connected consumer. Their expectations of brands have changed. They hope you want a relationship. They want to deal with people not logos, both accessible and transparent. They want brands to line up for them, not the other way around. They want something different, and they want it now.  Find out how to transform your company into one where community is its biggest asset.

You can catch Rob’s one hour presentation in Vancouver on June 16th, at 9:45am at the Empire Landmark Hotel and in Calgary, June 17th at 2:00pm at the Holiday Inn Calgary MacLeod Trail South.

For more information about both shows please visit:   http://www.acuityforums.ca/?page_id=3

As a team, we’re structured rather uniquely. In the past few posts, we’ve covered:

• The Radian6 community team’s goals and purpose
• Our community team roles and players
• A bit about our listening setup and strategy

Today, in the final post in the series, we’ll discuss something we’re often asked about: what we measure to determine our success.

First of all, it’s important to recognize a few things about measurement and reporting.

1. It’s always a bit of a moving target. We’re constantly tweaking and refining our reports to get a little different information, or something that helps us better understand the impact of our efforts.

2. Measurement itself is not the goal. The measurement is the diagnostic tool to tell us how we’re doing.

3. The most important thing you can do as a result of measuring is let it inform your strategy and execution. Do you need to keep doing what you’re doing? Change something? Stop altogether? If you don’t act on the data you collect, it’s a waste of time, really.

Okay. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s run down some of the key metrics we track as a team.

Weekly Post Volume

As an overall guide, the post volume shows us the overall chatter about our company and brand. We watch for significant spikes or dips, and investigate those to see what might have caused either, and whether they’re emerging issues, or something we were aware might happen (like a product announcement). We also watch for the variance in this number from week to week and month to month.

Overall Sentiment

As we’ve talked about before, sentiment metrics work best when they’re viewed in aggregate, as a trend line. So we look at larger sentiment trends by week and month, all the way up to a six month view. We look at the correlative events around positive or negative sentiment spikes to try and understand what might have caused them, and whether it was something we initiated, or an external event.

Engagement Statistics

Within the realm of our active online outreach, we look at a few things. We keep track of what percentage of the overall post volume we actually engage with and/or respond to, to see if it’s consistent from week to week and month to month. Significant changes are reason for further investigation.

We also look at what media types are carrying which proportion of conversation about us and the topics we’re tracking, to make sure we’re targeting our outreach activity and content stuff in the right places.

Of the discussion, we also look at the proportion of chatter that is generated by our own team vs. external sources as well as our partners around the globe. And we break down the external dialogue into categories – like product reviews, job postings, or content sharing – so we know how our community tends to talk about us, and it what context.

When it comes to content sharing, we also break it down a level further to see what content is being shared and discussed, whether it be our blog posts, ebooks, newsletters or otherwise. This is one we can’t wait to dig into more.

Support Requests

Again within the overall dialogue, we look at the profile of support requests within a given time frame. We can learn a bit about what types of support issues are cropping up, whether we’re dealing with isolated questions or recurring ones, and help inform our support team and work with them to always make our support even better.

Sales Leads

Lead generation is an important consideration around our online activity, so we track this carefully. Using both our dashboard and our integrated SalesForce stuff, we keep an eye on how many leads we’re tracking and capturing through social networks, how many of them make it into our sales database and pipeline, and eventually, how many of them move and convert to customers.

Industry Discussion

An important focus for our community team is to participate and engage in discussion over and above our brand, and into the broader markets and industries we serve. To help us understand where the hotbeds of discussions are, the topic trends, and where they’re happening, we drill down into those metrics so we can get a sense of how people talk about things like social media monitoring as a whole. That kind of dialogue absolutely informs everything from product development to content strategy.

The Competition

While it’s important not to obsess too much about what the other guys are doing, we do watch the trends around our competitive mentions. We keep track of our Share of Conversation, the overall buzz around the broader competitive landscape, and some of the topics and discussions that are driving their awareness. We look for predictable spikes in competitive mentions – like acquisition announcements – as well as how much of competitive buzz is being created by the community versus the competitors themselves (and how our ratios look against that).

What Are You Tracking?

This is a high level overview of some of the stuff on our dashboard, and we’re continually looking for metrics to add or refine that can give us more actionable insight around our brand and industry. And we’re always seeking to answer the question “okay, so what does this TELL us?” when we look at the data. Without that, we’re just looking at pretty charts and graphs.

We’d love to hear from you. What are you tracking, measuring, or struggling with? What do you think or notice is missing in here (like, say, Twitter followers)?

Let’s chat about how measurement can work in your favor.

image credit: Nick Sayers

We don’t usually use the “101” term around here, but when it comes to analytics reporting, and more specifically the reporting of social media analytics, it seems appropriate for how we’re handling our blogging endeavors this month. You see, we’re getting down to the very basics of reporting in June, providing tips, tricks, and advice to help you construct a social media reporting format that works for your team and goals.

With the 101 theme running strong in June, we’ve also created a social media listening, measurement, and engagement primer eBook to help you or your clients get started optimizing these new communication tools to achieve business goals and objectives.

We’ve broken the broad topic of “social media listening, measurement, and engagement” into sections that detail the benefits of these various stages in social media use, and also tackle them in the context of brand-, competitor-, and industry-focused listening, measurement, and engagement.

At the end of the eBook we’ve provided a basic grid of resources from our content library for you to reference at any stage of the game. Our hope is to make this a regularly maintained piece of the Radian6 content puzzle for you to access at any time.

In the months to come you’re going to see us take a few steps back and focus on some more brass tacks-type topics. There’s still a strong need for how-to’s and breakdowns of fundamental social media use for business purposes, and it’s important we revisit these basics now and again.

Have questions about reporting that you need answered? Comments or feedback on our eBook? Let us know!

The Radian6 community team is growing yet again, and I couldn’t be more pleased to share that Lauren Fernandez will be joining our crew as community manager.

Lauren’s PR background and keen social media skills are the perfect blend for a community manager supporting our agency clients. She’ll be doing outreach and engagement on behalf of Radian6 like the rest of our team, and she’ll also be dedicated to creating content, providing subject matter expertise and guidance, and – in concert with our account teams – helping support and meet the overall needs of our agency customers and clients.

Our connection with Lauren is yet another testament to the networking potential of social media; I’ve known Lauren as a savvy and enthusiastic professional on Twitter for some time now, and that’s where I found her. She’s got a dynamic blog, helped start the Twitter chat for professionals under 30 (connect with her on Twitter here), and has a strong voice online that really showcases her enthusiastic grasp of the social media sphere. Read her thoughts here on joining the Radian6 team.

Our community team continues to grow and evolve, and we’re learning tons from each other about how best to support the businesses we work with at Radian6. We’re approaching community as a holistic, communication-and-education driven part of our business, not just online issues management or chat moderation. As we build that out and illustrate new models for how community can tuck into today’s business framework, I know Lauren will be a great addition. Please join me in welcoming her to the team!

2010 is speeding by at such a fast pace that we’re thinking it’s time to slow things down around here and get back to basics. The content you’ll be seeing around here in the months to come is going to be a bit more brass tack-ish as we return to the fundamentals of social media listening, measurement, and engagement.

We’re starting the slow-down with June’s eBook, a primer to help get you started with social media listening, measurement, and engagement. We’ve broken down these categories of social media application into listening, measurement, and engagement for your brand, your competitive landscape, and your industry.

As is mentioned in the eBook itself, although we take a corporate angle with the content, the explanations and advice we provide is applicable in agency, non-profit, and higher-ed situations, too. The foundations for doing anything on the social web are the same; it’s at the tactic level that things need switching up.

At the back of the eBook we’ve also provided a grid of content from our archives that you can reference for additional details or perspective at any point in your social media involvement. Just click on through and read up, and let us know if you’ve got any questions about what you’ve read – or what you haven’t read.

And on the Radian6 blog this month we’ll be chatting about reporting, taking on finer points like why there is no one best way to report social media analytics and insights, questions you should be asking to determine which stats to report and how, and the nuances of various departmental reports and reporting methodologies.

Questions for us? Feedback about our eBook? Ideas and suggestions to share with your peers about the practice of reporting and what it entails? Let’s kick things off around here; we’re ready for June and hope you are, too.

The Corporate Social Media Summit
New York, NY
June 15th – 16th, 2010

Radian6 will be hanging out in New York on June 15th and 16th for the Corporate Social Media Summit taking place at the Helmsley Hotel.  Feel free to drop by for a product demo, a business card and a handshake.  You’ll be glad you did.  Senior Biz Dev Manager, Tom Hasselman and the always charming Community Manager, Katie Morse will be in attendance for this one so feel free to shoot them a message and set up a time to meet.

About this event:

Social media has changed marketing and communications for good - Find out how by attending the corporate social media conference of 2010

• Learn corporate social media best practice from companies that have ‘been there and done that’ – 20 of them, including McDonald’s, Adidas, PepsiCo, Dell, Johnson & Johnson and Nokia
• Practical advice on all the most critical marketing/comms issues surrounding social media for business – in 12 interactive and tightly-focused workshops
• Build your support network and fill your contact book - with 12 hours of networking opportunities with confirmed attendees like Hertz, Canon, BAE Systems, Merck, Air France, NASCAR, Union Pacific Railroad, General Mills, Timberland, Merrill Lynch, Sears, BASF, Halliburton, US Bank and Polo Ralph Lauren.

The opportunities social media offers are simply unlike anything that has come before. It can enhance engagement, increase ROI, boost brand recognition – and make you more money.

The Corporate Social Media Summit is the only event that will show you how to do just that.

To register or for more info, please go to:  http://usefulsocialmedia.com/

nextMEDIA and Banff World Television Festival
Banff, Alberta
June 13th-16th, 2010

Come and meet Rob Begg, Director of Marketing and Business Development: Media and Entertainment for Radian6 at this year’s nextMEDIA and Banff World Television Festival.  If you’re planning to attend and looking to understand more about what we do at Radian6, be sure to catch Rob’s short presentation during the technology showcase taking place on Monday, June 14th at 3pm.

nextMEDIA is a series of digital conferences designed to develop, discuss, track and showcase the changes and innovations in the field of digital media. The conference attracts Content Producers/Creatives, Broadcaster/Online Publishers, Distributors, and Advertisers/Marketers.

To register or for more information please go to:  http://www.nextmediaevents.com/banff/index.php

Radian6 has signed on to be a part of the 12th annual MARCOM Professional Development forum.

If you’re in the market for a Social Media monitoring, measurement and engagement platform then please check out our booth on the show floor at MARCOM 2010 in Gatineau, Quebec.  Our Director of Marketing, Rob Begg and Senior Business Development Manager, Tom Hasselman will be there to demo and talk about all the great things we’ve been working on right here in New Brunswick, Canada.

About MARCOM:
The premiere educational forum that understands the daily reality in your world of marketing; where the focus is more about how to make large-scale changes with limited resources than conceiving of multi-million dollar campaigns. MARCOM takes a look at the trends and topics that matter most to public sector and not-for-profit marketers and communicators.

For more information, please visit: www.marcom.ca

Join us this Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 12:00pm ET/9:00am PT as Lauren Vargas teams up with the folks at Unica and the Web Analytics Association to discuss best practices of combining social media monitoring and web analytics.

About this webcast:

Measuring social media success is a coin with two faces:

1. What are participants saying about you outside your website and sphere of influence?
2. What is the influenced behavior that results on your websites, Facebook presence, Tweets, ads, etc.

But neither web analytics nor social media monitoring in isolation from each other would be able to bring together these two faces of the coin. That is why it is so critical to combine and integrate analysis from both sources.

This unique event brings together leaders from social media monitoring (Radian6) and web analytics (Unica). Tune in to learn:

1. A practical framework for social media measurement that helps you avoid analysis paralysis
2. The Why? and How? of combining social media monitoring with web analytics
3. How to go beyond social media analytics to increasing viral reach and social relationship success

For more details or to register for this free webinar, click here.

Kicking off Internet Week in New York is the Conversational Marketing Summit happening June 7th and 8th at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel.  If you’re planning on attending and would like to hook up with someone from Radian6 to chat, our Director of Marketing Rob Begg will be there to answer your questions.

About the event:
Join the leaders of digital marketing for two days of thought provoking case studies, insights, and conversations with major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies.

For more information or to register please visit: http://cmsummit.com/Info

Traditionally, the customer service department has been labeled as a cost center, pushing organizations to work endlessly to shorten call times, streamline customer responses, and do as much as possible to reduce the cost of a seemingly never-ending monetary black hole. In doing this, though, all personalization of company-customer contact has been stripped from interactions, and as we’ve mentioned numerous times before, the time has come when that’s just not acceptable to the general public anymore.

Taking the steps to reconnect with your customer base can be tricky, though, when you’ve outsourced your customer response, but there are some strides you can make toward reconnecting without pulling your entire program in-house.

Transactional vs. Relational Customer Service

Customer service representatives are most often tasked with the responsibility of solving customer support issues and resolving complaints, and that’s all they’re asked to do. There’s no push to chat further with customers about pain points, ask them for additional feedback about the company and/or products, or even recommend products for future purchase. In this regard, customer service-based interaction is purely transactional – a customer requests help, their problem is resolved, and the case is closed.

While that tack is certainly effective – and a necessary part of any service and support strategy – there’s a higher level of interaction that an organization can participate in to further develop customer relationships. That type of interaction is what we call “relational customer service”, and it’s based in the idea that proactive interaction on a more human level will develop trust, and trust is what gets people talking about, recommending, and returning to brands.

Relational customer service can’t really be outsourced, though, because a deep understanding of an organization – its culture, business propositions, service and product offerings, and expertise – is needed to succeed in it. That depth of knowledge can’t be sent outside the walls of a company.

Making Room for Relational Customer Service

Your transactional customer service can still be outsourced without damage to your brand, but in addition to developing a thorough response guide and policy for your external customer response team, you must also create strategies for determining when a relationship should be taken in-house, and lay out how your internal teams will handle customer outreach on a relationship-based level.

Here are a few tidbits to consider when making room for relational customer service:

1. Select a few in-house representatives to steward relationships from outsourced customer service channels to the proper internal groups. These people should have an eye toward customer service, be strong representatives of your brand, and come from a variety of departments within your organization. By creating a team to play these roles, you’ve created a sure path for communication and removed any possible confusion as to who should be responding. This is also a great way to start the culture shift necessary to make customer service a bigger part of your company culture.
2. Establish what sorts of customer-initiated outreach requires contact from someone inside your company. Sit down with your customer-facing teams and create a comprehensive list of reasons your customers reach out to you, then bucket those reasons into transactional and relational categories. Not only will this exercise get you started developing a relational customer service strategy, it’ll provide perspective as to what sorts of information your customers are looking for and get you thinking about how you can fulfill additional needs of theirs.
3. Consult with your executive team and find out if they want to be accessible to customers via online social or traditional communication channels. Some executives – like ours here at Radian6 – have an online presence that allows them to share expertise and talk with the community directly, but not all corporate cultures are (or will ever be) ready to have their C-Suite that connected to customers. If a few of your executives want to get involved on a more proactive, relationship-oriented level, and are willing to find the time to do so, work with them to target where and how their interaction will be most valuable.

The key to making a relational customer service program successful is establishing criteria for what are transactional and relational customer comments and inquiries, mapping how those comments and questions will be routed into your organization, and constructing an internal team that has the customer service chops and a true understanding of your brand to handle that direct customer interaction.

This is just the tip of the relational customer service iceberg, of course. Don’t be afraid to bring some of your customer interactivity back into the walls of your organization — the opportunity to build relationships through direct connection is huge, and it’s an increasingly important piece of the customer purchasing (and loyalty) puzzle.