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Insight

PR News’ Measurement Conference: How to Turn Data into Meaningful Insights

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Earlier this week, The Motherhood team attended PR News’ Measurement Conference in Chicago to dig deeper into the topic of measurement and how to create an effective and accurate strategy that determines campaign successes. A number of prominent speakers from the world’s top brands and agencies shared valuable insights on how they measure PR and social media campaigns and create the case for C-level executive support.

Throughout the day, the biggest recurring theme was: turning data into insights is crucial to a measurement strategy. Here’s a look at some of our key takeaways from the event:

When Your Goals Are Clear, Your Results Are Clear

Before you begin a campaign, spend time discussing the desired results and clearly define goals and performance indicators. Also be sure that standard measurement practices are in place. Ask yourself which target audience you want to reach, what success looks like, and which key performance indicators (KPIs) can be used to measure success. Doing so will lead to shared understanding across the board and better reporting.

Invest in People, Not Software

Each day there is a shiny new platform for social analytics or influencer engagement, and these tools can be great for tracking and reporting success. However, they need to be supplemented with expertise in order to turn facts into insight. Creating or hiring a team that can communicate real analytics and insight from the mounds of data collected will lead to greater success.

Actionable Insights Move the Needle

Create a system of measurement that resonates with your team. Always ask “so what?” when reporting metrics, to move from simply reporting vanity metrics to reporting on outcomes with context. This process will help create informed data, which then leads to more actionable and insightful results.

Check out the #powerofPR hashtag on Twitter for insights and conversation shared during the conference.

Want to find out firsthand how The Motherhood creates valuable insights from campaigns? Let’s work together!

Who is Really Celebrating Halloween? The Answer May Surprise You!

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Did you know Americans will spend $6.9 billion on Halloween in 2015?

It’s true, and just when you thought Halloween was a holiday you had outgrown, you may be surprised to learn that you may just be at your prime!

Consumers ages 25 to 34 are accounting for a good portion of both the spending and celebrating, spending nearly $100 on average on Halloween festivities, making them a key Halloween demographic.

Leading up to October 31, the conversation online — be it on blogs, Twitter, Facebook or other social platforms — is very much about the spooky, fun-filled holiday. Starting in September, your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and most likely your Instagram, too, were filled with Halloween-themed posts that included costumes, recipes, crafts and more!

Knowing the aforementioned demographic is doing most of the spending, it was no surprise when The Motherhood found that women ages 25 to 34 are most actively discussing Halloween on Facebook, and they’re most often the ones sharing Halloween-inspired crafts and recipes.

So, what stood out this year?

Research by The Motherhood revealed that the majority of the most shared Halloween-themed content is from blogs, accounting for 40 percent of the top links, and more than 20 percent of the top links were specifically mom/family-focused blogs.

Interestingly, many of the most popular recipes and crafts being shared are from previous years, a true testament to the power of evergreen online content.

Sources:
The Motherhood Nuvi Research, September 2015

Social Listening and Insights: What It Means for Brands

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As social media evolves, and continues to generate vast amounts of data, the question is no longer, “Should I be collecting this material?” but rather, “How can I turn it into valuable insights for my brand, company, or product?” Consumers share opinions, experiences and preferences online on a daily basis. Are you listening to what they have to say?

Social listening can have a variety of useful applications for brands:

  • Customer service
  • Understanding brand health
  • Source of relationship building
  • Inspiration from real customers
  • Competitive benchmarking
  • Evaluating campaigns
  • Understanding when, why and how your customers make purchasing decisions

There are thousands of fantastic social listening tools to choose from to implement any of the above applications. However, most companies still struggle to anticipate what their most valued customers will do next.

It is crucial to understand the context around individuals posting about your product or brand and to always keep in mind who your key demographic is. Companies must put in place effective strategies and clearly defined goals for managing social listening and data analyzation to create valuable insight.

Social Listening
Image Source: Crimson Hexagon

There have been some exciting developments in the world of social media listening and insight recently; here are a few highlights!

In a continued push for privacy, Facebook shut down access to hashtags through their API. Services which plug into the social network are no longer able to access hashtag data and statistics, and third-party tools are no longer able to provide public content from Facebook via hashtags at all through the API. However, Facebook will provide audience data for marketer insights through Topic Data, exclusively working with DataSift to pull in data from posts on the social network anonymously. Third-party tools are beginning to work with DataSift to bring this functionality to their own platforms as well.

DataSift’s method has smoothed the ongoing complications of searching through private posts by the more than 1.5 billion active users on Facebook. While respecting privacy, DataSift pulls in public and private posts from Facebook enabling companies to analyze everything that is being shared. Private posts on Facebook are now accessible by brands, anonymously, but this has opened up a new world of more accurate social listening.

Twitter recently announced the development of a new API that will allow brands to access every tweet ever! Thats more than 500 billion tweets over nine years! This development will exponentially increase the ability to analyze conversations on the platform.

Tumblr’s latest deal with software firm Crimson Hexagon gives the firm real-time data from the site’s more than 24 million blogs and gives brands a live view on standard information such as popular topics, brand mentions and brand sentiment.

Sentiment analysis is also a huge part of social media monitoring. While every platform seems to have a different method of categorizing sentiment, we can agree its important to know more than just the number of conversations about your brand or industry. For effective listening we also need to understand how people are interpreting messaging and in what context they’re talking about various topics.

Do you know how consumers interpret your online messaging? IBM wants you to be able to tell how your tone comes across in written communications. Recently, Big Blue unveiled Watson Tone Analyzer, you can test the demo out here!

Social data from customer conversations online provides brand, product and consumer insights that can be applied to everyday business and marketing decisions. Social media is a source of rich, real-time data, so get your customers and market talking! You might find your customers know more about your brand or product than you think.

The Motherhood is deeply tapped into moms online. For The Motherhood, data is human and data informs all we do. We pay close attention, listen to, aggregate and analyze what moms are saying, what engages them, what they care about, how and when they share, how and what they buy and the actions they take. We can learn so much from moms online by simply listening.

Do you have a strategy in place to analyze the boundless amount of information about your brand and industry available on social media?