ObjectiveMarketer Blog

Every time we add a new feature to ObjectiveMarketer, we ask a simple question – “How does it tie to Metrics”? And we make sure it does, for every single feature that gets incorporated.

We asked the same question, when we added our Engagement Streams.  Engagement streams are usually referred to as ways with which you can listen to what others are saying, and possibly engage in a conversation with them. We have seen quite a few variations of engagement streams – sleek (some call it “sexy”) way to group and organize the conversation of your interest.However, when we designed our Engagement Stream, we did more than add a fancy UI to the monitored keywords/mentions. We made them measurable. And this is how.

ObjectiveMarketer’s Engagement Streams are associated with campaigns, and helps you answer the following:

2. How many conversation happened with originator or with a retweeter?

3. What is the impact of this Retweeter for my overall campaign (is he/she an amplifier?). For my account?

4. What are the stats from RTs that I do for a particular keyword?

5. If I share the tweet of a keyword on other channels, how does it match up?

As can be seen, over and beyond the ability to use your groups of messages by keywords, ObjectiveMarketer allows you to get more insightful about the actions that you take on these keywords. This is because, all the actions on the monitored keywords are completely tied to the campaigns in ObjectiveMarketer.

Listening, when accompanied with measurable actions, makes it a complete engagement process.

If you are interested to learn more about ObjectiveMarketer, sign up for FREE 30 days trial at http://app.objectivemarketer.com or email info@objectivemarketer.com for demo or other inquiries.

 

[Press Release]

March 09, 2010, 3:20PM

Redwood City, CA based leading social media marketing provider, ObjectiveMarketer partners with Canada based internet marketing agency, MarketingHits to provide a full range of services to small and medium sized businesses that are using social media as a strategic communication channel.

ObjectiveMarketer offers sophisticated technology that helps social media marketers to manage, execute and measure campaigns across multiple social media channels.  The comprehensive platform is integrated with contents, including landing pages, polls, media gallery, distribution lists etc, provides seamless integration with Google Analytics, and link tagging with Omniture and Coremetrics, besides advanced analytics, thus offering an end-to-end integrated product for businesses to efficiently manage social media  campaigns. With features that offer effective management of channels, and resources, insightful analytics and opportunities to expand brand presence, ObjectiveMarketer makes it easy for social media marketers to execute their social media campaigns, and to gain visibility into the returns.

According to Amita Paul, CEO of ObjectiveMarketer, “The partnership of ObjectiveMarketer with MarketingHits will further strengthen ObjectiveMarketer’s offering and help interested customers to leverage the services of the agency in planning, and formulating their social media campaigns.”  “The strategic partnership of MarketingHits & ObjectiveMarketer will help us to deliver the tools small / medium sized businesses need to find new customers within social media”, adds Brian Yanish, CEO of MarketingHits.

ObjectiveMarketer is using the association to promote its technology solution to businesses in Canada, as it has a very high adoption rate for social media, and is growing at an equally fast rate. “We have brands ranging from fortune 100 companies to small and medium sized businesses using our product; and from across the globe. When robust technology meets high quality services, businesses benefit and that is what we aim to achieve”, adds Ms Paul. To contact ObjectiveMarketer for partnership opportunities, visit the company website at http://objectivemarketer.com/objectivemarketer/partners.html

About ObjectiveMarketer

ObjectiveMarketer, based in Redwood City, CA, provides a web based solution for creating, managing, and measuring social marketing campaigns. Amita Paul founded the company in 2009 to meet the growing need of marketers to tap the power of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels. Guy Kawasaki and Marylene Delbourg-Delphis are board members. To sign up for 30 days free trial, visit http://app.objectivemarketer.com or send an email to info@objectivemarketer.com for more information about the product and pricing.

About MarketingHits

MarketingHits is a growing internet marketing firm providing Internet Branding, Website Design, Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing solutions to North American companies.  Contrary to its competitors, MarketingHits has been successful by focusing on the Marketing Objectives first, and building platforms to achieve those objectives.  MarketingHits also has a dedicated research initiative to ensure that all aspects of the marketing plan are in line with the project goals, and incorporate new off the shelf, and specifically invented software.

MarketingHits has been working with Social Media Strategies since 2008, and has always studied social media trends, and identified potential business applications.  The goal is to use social media messages to harness the power of these new marketing and communication channels.

- – - – -

Media Contact:

For ObjectiveMarketer:

Amita Paul

650-587-5185

amita@objectivemarketer.com

website: http://objectiveMarketer

For MarketingHits

Brian Yanish

1.888.535.9139

ideas@marketinghits.com
Website www.marketinghits.com

###

Social Media is redefining communication. Probably, the only other invention that had a similar impact on the way we communicate was when round tables were created that allowed people to sit around and talk.  Well, this post is not about "Why Social Media" .. it is in fact about "Social Media Is. Now what?".

Businesses are embracing Social Media as a strategic channel to reach out, or meet their customers. What is yet to be seen in Social Media, is its acceptance or rather, adoption as a process.   The 4x5 primer listed below, emphasizes the process approach of social media, and suggest what organizations must do to make social media, easy and effective for them. So, keep your checklist ready! 

Step 1: Assessment 

1. Audience - Start with identifying your user segments, and the persona across multiple channels.
2. Channels -Your understanding of your audience will give you a very good idea of where they hang out the most. Instead of trying to build your brand across all the channels, it is very important to apply the 80-20 and focus on the channel that you understand the best, and are most likely to find your audience.
3. Internal Staff - Social Media is an external facing, very strategic function. It is important that from early on put a person on the social media staff someone, who understands your business, and is great in relationship / and building connections.
4. Approach - Define in the beginning what your approach will be- Set the tone for your brands and your approach to reach out. Whether pro-actively sharing information, or responding to a query - your approach should determine your strategies during the campaigns.
5. Goals / Metrics - Define your success - A baseline goal that can be extrapolated and tied up to strategic goals.

Step 2: Planning 

1. Campaigns - What campaigns do you plan to run? Will it be promotional or informational? Does it need to be viral, and what is the goal of your campaign? How long will it run? A campaign creates the stream of communication a brand makes with audience - and it should be well planned.
2. Content - Each channel has its unique characteristics and limitations. How best can you make your brand, and message visible within those unique / limiting conditions. Identify content that can be integrated with your messages, get creative - if pictures work better, use them. Or create videos, or Polls .. Extend the reach of your campaigns with content that resonates with your audience.
3. Schedule - How do you time your campaigns? What is the right time to start running a campaign, and what interval is the best. Plan, modify and plan again - until you have found the schedule for your campaigns that get most visibility.
4. Workflow - It is very important to decide upon the workflow, before execution. How the trends should be monitored, what actions need to be taken etc. A coordinated and collaborative team is key to the success of social media.
5. Rules and Policies - If you have not, create a one-pager code of ethics for your social media team. Do not go over board, but, ensure that your team understands the do's and don'ts. Remember, your reputation is stake, each time a message is shared - and damage control may be very expensive.

Step 3: Execution 

1. Release - Be ready to receive all kinds of reactions, including none (which, is the worst). If you have followed the 10 steps above, releasing a campaign is a small task. Just keep prepared for the follow-up actions.
2. Monitor - Constantly monitor for mentions of keywords that relate to your business. Understand the trend, and the underlying pattern. Identify the impact of your campaign on the trends.
3. Engage - This is one step that cannot be missed, whether or not, you have run a campaign. But, if you have run a campaign, say, about product launch - you must have your staff ready to respond to product questions, answer support calls, or be available when your audience needs you. It is not necessary to be available 24x7, but, predictable pattern of response and engaging in an 1-1 communication, can be very rewarding.
4. Influence - Your audience is looking up to you for information that they do not know, or to understand your ideas and vision. It is very important that your messages have an attribute and tone to influence your audience.
5. Manage - It is very important to have a common vision and integrated way to manage your planning, execution and evaluation.

Step 4: Evaluation

1. Performance - Great that we had the best video remixed, and shared. Did we meet our goals? To understand how your campaigns performed, and what you need to modify in future, it is important to measure the performance in great detail, evaluated next to the goals and metrics set in the beginning.
2. Issues - How did you respond to the issues? What were the problems in running the campaigns, is the workflow not working? Spend time to note down and understand why, if there were any, these issues arose and how could they be reduced.
3. Influencers - Know and keep your influencers close. Social Media offers a great way to promote your brand via your nfluencers. Identify the hub and the network of  influence.
4. Workflow - As the workflow is important in planning and executing a campaign, it is equally important to setup a follow-up workflow. The key function will be to work with other channels, and build the bigger picture of integrated marketing channel.
5. Benchmark - Once, you have measure the performance of your own campaigns, set them up as your benchmark. This allows you to chase your own goals, and modify them to do better.

The above list very concisely covers the 4 important areas of social media process. If you believe, something is missing, feel free to comment. And, if you have examples, do put them in comment or send us an email atinfo@objectivemarketer.com More on the detailed analysis, in subsequent posts.

 

ExactTarget’s acquisition of CoTweet heralds the beginning of the growth of Social as an integrated marketing channel and is nothing short of being historical. And this is why:

1.       This confirms social as legitimate, mainstream, and permanent. For all businesses that have even an iota of doubt, this announcement puts a stop to all the questions raised about the legitimacy of social media as a viable marketing channel

2.       Integration and not silos will make Enterprises invest in social media. The acquisition of CoTweet by ExactTarget announces the beginning of an integrated marketing experience for enterprise and users alike.  

In last one year, Twitter has evolved as a primary and viable marketing channel. The success of early adopters like Dell and small innovative businesses like Kogi Barbeque has caused even the traditional marketing giants to adopt social media in a big way.

The biggest problem with social media today is that it is still an isolated function –one that is not a part of the bigger strategic picture, is still very ad hoc, and lacks result driven processes.  All this year being a marketer, the biggest challenge has been to reach the customers on the channels of their choice without being too pushy. And in absence of an integrated platform, brands end up having disjoint strategies, thus causing either fatigued or confused user.

ExactTarget's acquisition of cotweet is one step towards the goal of unified view of the customer. In the near future, it will be interesting to see how solution providers for different segments – small and medium (like Constant Contact) and large providers (like SAP, Unica and Aprimo) respond to this.

As the Social Media landscape gets defined and redefined, it will be of particular interest to see how different players in this space evolve, and what trends emerge. At ObjectiveMarketer, we have range of customers: some who heavily rely upon campaign management, and analytics, thus happily using ObjectiveMarketer, to some who prefer both CoTweet and ObjectiveMarketer. As, enterprises reveal their success stories and we know of more use cases that work, the social media landscape will become more solid, and will be a part of the integrated marketing solution. 

The latest update from ObjectiveMarketer announces the integration of Ping.fm. This will allow users of ObjectiveMarketer to publish their messages to a larger network of social sites. This will particularly benefit those users who are active in channels other than Twitter and Facebook, and were looking for options to publish to multiple channels, along with the comprehensive analytics and insights that ObjectiveMarketer offers. 

Social Media Campaigns are becoming more and more complex with multiple channels, distributed segments, different personas - and so the solutions to manage these campaigns effectively are becoming more than essential in order to reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right message.  As the new channels emerge, the strategies and the implementation of these strategies have to be completely aligned to the nature of the channels. ObjectiveMarketer going in this direction has developed the most powerful, and industry’s first campaign management platform that helps organizations to manage, monitor and measure different kind of communications across multiple social media channels. With ObjectiveMarketer, traditional marketers can easily transition to the new channels, and at the same time adopt to the new rules of the game, effortlessly. 

Objective Marketer today is the market leader in management of Social Media thanks to a meaningful product that provides relevant features to manage and measure marketing campaigns: 

1.     Integrated goal oriented campaign management system 
2.     Comprehensive Analytics - Multiple dimensions (Tags, time, geography, historical, trend, browser etc) 
3.     Content Integration - Polls, Landing Pages (Patent Pending), Tags, Distribution List, media library 
4.     User Management - Roles, permissions and access control 
5.     Automation / Scheduling / RSS Feeds 
6.     Buzz monitoring - trend, context and sentiments (NPS) 

ObjectiveMarketer constantly thrives to give you the best solution to manage and measure you campaigns. As you run your campaigns through ObjectiveMarketer, you find ways to create your own benchmark, and set yourself for success that is achievable, and repeatable. If you want to take the guess game out of Social Media, then ObjectiveMarketer is your player. 

Now, you can avail the 30 days free trial. To sign up for the free trial, visit http://app.objectivemarketer.com or send an email to info@objectivemarketer.com for more information about the product and pricing.

Marketing campaigns through social media are not new phenomena, they are already here up and running. So now the point and the focus starts to shift from how to use Social Media in marketing to how to measure effectiveness of actions conducted through these social media.

According to Michael Stelzner Social Media Marketing Industry Report (http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/smss09/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport.pdf), among top three social media questions marketers want answered, ranked number two there is “How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?”

This is totally aligned with new social media users’ pain. Marketing budget have already moved their focus from traditional marketing channels to Social Media but as pointed out, now the issue is to measure effectiveness and stickiness of this new marketing tools.

As attention to analytics and measurements is becoming more and more strict, companies such as ObjectiveMarketer are becoming very popular and are growing day after day acquiring huge number of customers. ObejectiveMarketer is the leading social media campaign management platform that helps organizations to manage, monitor and measure your communications across multiple social media channels.

Objective Marketer reporting includes advanced analytics and reports for trend analysis and ROI validation. It provides analytics at 2 different level, campaign level and individual post level. Some of available measurements enclose:

• Comparisons of Posts v/s number of Click-Through.
• Buzz Score.
• Trend of Click-through on different Time dimensions.
• Multi-Channel Distribution , Percentage of CTRs by Post
• Retweet Stats / Influencer / Amplifiers
• Source of Traffic – Direct, Website Name
• Most / Least Popular Posts
• Time of day Heatmap
• Google Analytics Stats
• Competition Matrix
• Product and Brand Monitoring and Net Promoter Score 

Whatever metrics you choose, and measurements you apply to find the effectiveness of your campaigns, they should be tied to the goals and overall strategy of your organization. Results are good, only if they are relevant to you. We, at ObjectiveMarketer constantly thrive to give you visibility into data in a way that you can take action upon them. 

Interested in ObjectiveMarketer? To sign up for 30 days free trial, visit http://app.objectivemarketer.com or send an email to info@objectivemarketer.com for more information about the product and pricing. 

As social media practitioner, it is imperative that you have a solid Channel Strategy in place. Social Web represents a complex, multi-directional flow of communication, and it is very important to understand the behavior of your community, the ways to engage with them and evaluate the strategy that makes your social media campaigns most effective.  Though complex, social media networks also represents a well-segmented constituent of population, as the members themselves opt-in to participate in social channels of their interest, and decide when they want to interact.  So, the question is "What message to send, and where?"  The key is in finding the right balance to make the best of your social media presence.

LinkedIn - Adding to your social media marketing mix
ObjectiveMarketer integrates multiple channels as a part of the entire campaign strategy and not just a social media stream.  Whether you are planning a campaign to run across multiple channels simultaneously, and want to measure the performance of your campaigns by channel, or whether you are running different campaigns on different channels, we help you implement and execute your channel strategy effectively - so that you have a clear visibility into the success of your campaigns, by channels. With LinkedIn integration, we help you bring LinkedIn into your social media marketing mix. With 40 million plus users, and a network that is the most organic, LinkedIn forms an integral part of your channel strategy. With ObjectiveMarketer, you can:

• Add multiple LinkedIn Profiles
• Plan and schedule your LinkedIn campaigns (status Updates)
• Execute your campaigns to LinkedIn simultaneously with other channels
• Measure campaign and channel effectiveness
• Prepare a better, informed strategy for on-going, future campaigns

If you would like to try ObjectiveMarketer for your organization, please signup at http://objectivemarketer.com, or email us at info@objectivemarketer.com to request a demo.

PS: image courtsey blog.appboy.com

ObjectiveMarketer: Helping managers execute the process of Social Media
Today, blogosphere buzzed with the news of Google's URL shortener goo.gl and many of them had a tone similar to the one in this blog, "The Google Monster has once again inched closer to world domination with the introduction of its very own URL shortener" - this and several other discussions made ObjectiveMarketer well-wishers to write to us and ask us about our plans and the future of om.ly. And, our answer to this, or any such service is very clear: "ObjectiveMarketer is not in the business of URL Shorteners". With Google starting the service of URL shortening, it has actually embraced microblogging as a business concept that is here to stay. ObjectiveMarketer is built on the premise of offering social media professionals the following three key benefits:

1. Efficiency of use
2. Collaboration
3. Management of Processes

As can be seen, om.ly, or the URL Shortener is one such means in the big scheme of things that defines ObjectiveMarketer.

Users who interact with your post, do they also purchase? ObjectiveMarketer helps you answer.

Social Media ROI could be a reality!
With integration of Google Analytics, Omniture and Coremetrics tags, ObjectiveMarketer adds yet another dimension to their social media campaign analytics. The SAAS based campaign management service now allows users to create campaigns and associate them with web analytics tags, which can be then used to get more insights into whether the interactions on social channels actually culminate into a purchase or not. A deeper insight into the buying behavior helps companies in justifying the return from social marketing, and at the same time allows them to plan a better strategy for repeatable and increased returns. With holiday season on its way, businesses are engaging like never before with customers on channels like Twitter, and Facebook Fan Page. With a suite of solutions integrated seamlessly, ObjectiveMarketer provides businesses a platform to strategize and execute their social media campaigns, with complete visibility into the performance. With Web Analytics integration, ObjectiveMarketer users now have the ability to attribute sales to social campaigns. Simply put, with ObjectiveMarketer, a message can be traced until the conversion / purchase made by a customer, who first clicked on the URL in the message.
ObjectiveMarketer integrates Web Analytics Tags
According to Amita Paul, founder/CEO of ObjectiveMarketer, “A large number of our customers and users asked us for this feature, and we are happy to enable it”. ObjectiveMarketer provides an easy way to manage, execute, measure and optimize campaigns on social channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. The patent pending landing page integration with posts provides a unique way to increase brand awareness, and drive traffic. “Our customers have benefited immensely, and they have acquired new customers through call-to-action phrases on the landing pages. With the already existing robust features, and the recent integration with Web Analytics Tags, ObjectiveMarketer provides a marketer all means to be successful on social channels”, adds Amita Paul. About ObjectiveMarketer ObjectiveMarketer, based in Redwood City, CA, provides a web based solution for creating, managing, and measuring social marketing campaigns. Amita Paul founded the company in 2009 to meet the growing need of marketers to tap the power of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels. Guy Kawasaki and Marylene Delbourg-Delphis are advisors. To sign up for 30 days free trial, visit http://app.objectivemarketer.com or send an email to info@objectivemarketer.com for more information about the product and pricing.