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This is a guest post written by Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm Arment Dietrich, and Geoff Livingston, an author and marketing strategist who serves as VP, strategic partnerships for Razoo. Gini and Geoff are authors of the new multichannel marketing book, Marketing in the Round.

Online, we often talk about listening to our customers on social channels to help make content decisions in marketing. Moving to a fully integrated marketing picture for enterprise, using social media to compliment traditional market and product development research only makes sense. The very nature of uncontrolled conversations empowers customers to communicate and yield unthought-of insights and new product directions.

However, most companies are still at the basic point of simply making Facebook and Twitter work, much less mastering content for marketing or social web-wide conversations. In fact, last autumn’s Global CMO Study from IBM confirmed that most enterprises just aren’t there yet.

Consider these findings:

1. While 82% of CMOs plan to increase social media use during the next three to five years, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% are tracking third-party reviews, and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
2. 56% of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel, but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.

If you’re one of these companies, you might be wondering how to move beyond the intricacies of community management and inbound marketing to become a company that harnesses social data to drive strategy and product marketing. 

The process can be broken into two main areas: 1) building listening stations and dashboards on relevant topics, and 2) sifting through the data to find actionable intelligence.

To help illustrate these two critical areas, we asked two friends, one from a large enterprise and one from a small enterprise — Richard Binhammer at Dell and Danny Brown at Jugnoo — to open their corporate kimonos and show us how they do it. 

Dell: An Overview

Dell’s work with Ideastorm as a crowdsourced marketing intelligence center is legendary, leading to almost 500 implemented products. Going further, as one of the first social enterprises, Dell’s Social Media Listening & Command Center does more than just seek out Dell conversations to comment on. It also drives relevant reporting throughout the enterprise for strategy and product marketing decisions.

Jugnoo: An Overview

In the past two months, Jugnoo (a social business platform) used social media intelligence to drastically change its JugnooMe social automation platform’s front end. Changes included the addition of features such as social search/monitoring for brand reputation purposes (including sentiment analysis). 

By listening to its users and making product changes, Jugnoo saw:

• 270% increase in registrations from JugnooMe v1.0 to v2.0 in just one week
• 200% increase in toolbars installed
• 225% increase in social posts
• 333% increase in keywords

Build Listening Stations and Dashboards on Relevant Topics

As the IBM study shows, less than half of companies are listening to relevant conversations about them online. Those that do have built comprehensive social media dashboards to see where the conversations are happening, measure social media marketing results, gauge sentiment analysis, and respond intelligently. 

The first critical step in harnessing larger market intelligence is expanding those listening stations to include more topics to drive strategic and product marketing intelligence. For example, add relevant searches and conversation monitoring for competing products, core industry topic areas, significant competitive developments (hires, funding, etc.), key customers, and of course, conversations about your product offering.

Consider that Dell monitors more than 25,000 posts about the company every day, up 21,000 since 2006. Centralized “listening” via Dell’s social media listening command center is critical to keeping an eye on the big picture and overall social media commentary. This intelligence is divvied up into a wide variety of reports that inform the company as a whole and its consumer, small and medium business, public sector, and large enterprise and services business segments. 

Dell actively listens to its competitors’ conversation and how they impact larger macro issues. “We look at what the [competitive] conversations are about as related to our business,” says Binhammer. “This includes the conversations about competitive products and services, industry issues, and individual competitors.”

Similarly, Jugnoo has also added competitive intelligence into its online social media listening process. “The only way we can grow and improve is to see what our competitors are doing well, and how we can improve on that,” says Brown. “There’s no point in just copying – you need to improve, or at the very least integrate your product suite where your competitors may not. Companies like Hootsuite and Traackr are doing an awesome job – these are the guys we look to for best practices and where we can take our products to the next level of their benefits.”

Sift Through the Data

Using relevant conversations about your product, industry topics, and competitive offerings can provide a composite picture for your marketing roundtable and the larger executive team. In many ways, when you open the floodgates and listen to more conversations about a much wider group of data points, qualifying relevant information becomes critical. A company needs to learn not only how to listen, but also which data points to act on.

Every customer’s positive, neutral, and/or negative feedback about industry offerings is important. But repetition and general sentiment trending about product topics and service issues can provide quick touchpoints for the marketing and executive teams to make decisions.

When harnessing the new data, try to visualize it using charts, graphs, maps, and other visualization techniques. Let the pictures tell you what the top customer and product trends are.

If you’re struggling to figure out how to deliver this information, go back to marketing basics. Another method is to analyze competitor moves and offerings in the context of a traditional strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat analysis (SWOT). Simply present your social data within this commonly accepted framework.  Just a refresher on a SWOT analyses:

• Strengths: What internal assets or behaviors give your business an advantage in the marketplace?
• Weaknesses: Which internal defects and issues can prevent you from succeeding?
• Opportunities: Are there external factors you can take advantage of?
• Threats: Who and what can stop your business from succeeding?

A Traditional SWOT Analysis

Your company has an objective—it might be a specific initiative with a product, or it might be general market performance for the year. That objective is the focus of your SWOT analysis. State it clearly, and keep it in mind above all else when writing your SWOT report. While social data trends can be fascinating, if they are off-topic, they probably are irrelevant. It’s important not to become distracted by shiny objects and to stay on mission. 

Once you have developed your social marketing intelligence report for the larger marketing and executive teams, you can put it to good use.

“Because we’re a start-up where every team has access to the other, and we work in a cross-team development, [social intelligence] affects every part,” says Brown. “Feedback from our customers is relayed to customer service and our retention team, who in turn meet with the product team. Product analyzes then meets with Development, who then work with R&D to determine the feasibility of new feature requests and new technology based on user trends, etc.”

“These then get mocked up, approved by Product and Marketing, developed, and released into our platform,” Brown continued. “Our beta users then get to use, test, and offer more feedback, and then determine whether a product update stays and makes it to the public platform due later this year.”

Dell provides a series of daily, weekly, and monthly reports based on its social intelligence. Reports cover specific topical or announcement daily reports looking at the size, sentiment, locations, who was leading the conversations, etc. 

“On a daily basis, we report and assess the top-moving topics in social media related to Dell (positive and negative),” says Binhammer. “We identify critical product and service issues and have a weekly review of these. We also have an in-depth monthly report on key findings across the social Web.”

“We find our listening and tracking of information on the web is often a ‘leading indicator’ of a product issue that requires our product teams’ attention, such as the need for a new driver or software fix on some hardware issues that emerge over time,” added Binhammer. “A team follows through on these issues to bring the various parts of our business together to solve things. This fosters Dell’s being more closely connected to customers and constantly in touch in order to be a better business.”

Are you harnessing social data to influence product decisions? Share your experiences in the comments!

Today marks exactly 31 years since the death of reggae legend Bob Marley. It’s a day that an increasing number of people will recognize thanks to Marley, the documentary by Kevin Macdonald that shook up the movie scene this spring.

I saw the documentary recently and couldn’t help but draw parallels between Marley’s career and marketing. Don’t be surprised! We’ve made similar connections in the past, most notably in the book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, authored by HubSpot’s CEO Brian Halligan and Marketing Strategist David Meerman Scott.

Similarly, Bob Marley’s dedication and talent shines as a symbol of inspiration across many disciplines, including marketing. In this blog post, I’ll explore five lessons the reggae icon’s work ethic can teach us about marketing. (Recommendation: Read this blog post while listening to some reggae tunes.) 

1) Remix & Adapt

Reggae evolved out of ska, the indigenous Jamaican music that emerged in the late 1950s. So Bob Marley’s music was influenced by Caribbean mento, calypso, American soul, and R&B (phew!). The documentary shows how tunes from the Temptations, Dion and the Belmonts, and Elvis Presley impacted the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers. A few years later, British label founder Chris Blackwell introduced more changes to the character of Marley’s music. As Andrew Perry, reporter for The Telegraph notes, Blackwell “overdubbed white session musicians onto [the album] ‘Catch A Fire’ in order to make Marley more palatable to white rock audiences.” These remixes and adaptations helped Marley get visibility in front of the international audience. “After that, it was just a matter of getting people to see him perform, and word of mouth did the rest,” says Blackwell. 

The marketing world is all about remixes. In order to expand the top of the marketing funnel, businesses need to broaden the scope of their content and develop remarkable interpretations out of the raw material they have access to in a way that caters to their target audience and buyer personas. As a matter of fact, this blog post can serve as an example of a remix—it provides marketing tips by deconstructing the successes of a music legend. Marketing Strategist David Meerman Scott calls this strategy ‘newsjacking‘ – “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.” 

2) Work for the People 

Bob Marley didn’t create music for fame, wealth, or ambition. He did it for the people. He was inspired by his community, describing their struggles and beauty in his songs. This authenticity resonated with his audience and brought him international appeal.

In marketing, you need to be focused on your prospects and customers. Find out more about them, listen to their challenges, get inspired by their successes, and give them the tools they need to make their lives easier. Use marketing analytics to learn more about the behavior of your contacts, and bring constant value to them. For example, rather than simply sending them email blasts asking them to purchase your product or service, consider what it is they actually need at their particular stage of engagement with your business.

3) Have a Consistent Message 

Since the beginning of his career, Bob Marley had a message to spread. It was about where he was raised, who he was, and what he believed in. This was his ‘product,’ and it was rare and meaningful.

Similarly, your marketing campaigns need to have a cohesive message. Revisit your company’s mission—something that you are proud of and would like to tell the whole world about. Is this mission incorporated in your marketing campaigns and practices? If you are working on a trade show or some other type of event, for instance, think about your overarching message and brainstorm ways in which you can convey it effectively. For more about how to create a consistent marketing message, check out our blog post about the 7 components that comprise a comprehensive brand strategy.

4) Stay Disciplined 

While watching the documentary, I was surprised (and impressed) to see that Bob Marley exercised regularly: he’d go running in the mornings and play soccer with friends. He also followed a strict work regimen, writing music and practicing with the Wailers into the wee hours of the night. “He was so immersed in writing that he was said to sleep only four hours a night,” writes Stephen Holden in his New York Times’ review of the documentary. 

Successful marketing also requires discipline and hard work. As the industry has established, modern marketing is like a gym membership—you may have access to helpful marketing software tools, but you still need to put in the work to see results. Blogging, social media marketing, content creation, analyzing data—it all takes time, hard work, and dedication in order execute well. Make time for it if you want it to pay off. 

5) Embrace Being the Corner Stone 

Bob Marley was the son of a black woman, Cedella Marley Booker, and a white, British Army man, Norval Marley. Due to his mixed racial background, he was seen as a social outcast and was filled with uncertainty about his identity. He “attempted to forge a connection with the wealthy side of the Marley family,” writes historian Colin Grant, “only to be spurned.” This experience led him to write the song “Corner Stone,” which begins with the words: 

The stone that the builder refuse
Will always be the head cornerstone

In marketing, working with the outliers can be an insightful process. Brian Millar, strategy director at Sense Worldwide, highlights the benefits of seeking out extraordinary people in his Fast Company article “Want Breakthrough Ideas? First, Listen To The Freaks And Geeks.” Extreme customers, he argues, think differently and often set new trends in marketing. “If you’re going to get ambitious about your next task, don’t go and talk to normal people about it. You’ll only get normal answers. Get out of your comfortable little world and step into a completely alien one,” writes Millar.

If you haven’t seen the documentary, check it out and let us know if you see any other parallels between Bob Marley and marketing.

It’s a topic that is running rampant around the web. How do you measure ROI from Facebook? Is anyone (besides Fortune 500 brands with multi-million dollar budgets) generating ROI from Facebook? And if so, how?

The difficulty with establishing ROI on Facebook has typically been tracking, but luckily, Facebook recently made a bunch of updates to help marketers tackle this problem. And while Facebook is heading in the right direction, SMB marketers (and all marketers) need more, and they need it now.

So what’s the best way to track Facebook ROI? You’re about to find out. This post will show you how to determine whether your Facebook ad spend is generating you the kind of ROI you need to justify the expense.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Facebook Ads

In order to determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend, you first need to be able to properly track your Facebook connections. You can attract connections on Facebook two ways: by running paid ads, or by posting updates to your business page. If you’re posting updates to your fan base, running ads to grow your audience via cost per connection campaigns is often difficult to measure. Necessary data that Facebook provides to properly track includes:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Connections
• Cost per click

But even with this data that Facebook provides, you still need a tracking solution that tells you your cost per connection. You could calculate that manually using data from Facebook by taking your spend and dividing it by your number of connections. But since we like to do things more efficiently here at HubSpot, we use a Facebook ads tracking app that easily allows you to see all of the metrics that are available within the Facebook user interface, and also provides you with that crucial cost per connection data. This is a time saving feature that allows marketers to quickly see which campaigns are cost effective, and which ones need work.

Now that you have that cost per connection data, it’s time to start promoting your offers! You know, so you can turn those connections into leads. As you promote your offers to your audience, it’s imperative to be able to track who converts into a lead, so be sure to use landing pages that are integrated with your closed-loop analytics software. When we do this with HubSpot, for example, we can see all of the leads that were driven by Facebook with the following lead information:

• Date
• Event trigger
• Lead source
• Contact information
• Lead quality
• Sales details

Now, we can understand which campaigns and segments are more interested in our offerings, and as leads turn to sales, ROI is easily realized with every new customer. And all of that information lives within your marketing software for your sales and marketing team to reference!

To make all of this a little clearer, let’s use an example of how one might establish the ROI of a Facebook ad. We’ll use an example from one of our own campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Facebook ad that includes a lead generating offer. If you need helping creating a Facebook ad, reference this ebook for some assistance!

Step 2: Send users to a unique landing page so they can redeem the offer in your ad. Remember, this is how you’ll turn those Facebook connections into leads! And of course, we’ve written a handy guide to creating an effective landing page.

Step 3: For the sake of this example, we’ll assume the visitor converted on the landing page. The next step is to analyze the data.

Again, we use the HubSpot Facebook ads app to do our analyzing, though you can get the data from a combination of Facebook ad analytics and your own closed-loop marketing software. But regardless of which tool you use, you should look at the following data points to track your lead generation campaigns over time:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Leads
• Cost per lead
• Customers
• Cost per customer

With this additional data readily available, measuring ROI is easy, because it puts direct spend up against revenue generated to truly measure ROI on Facebook.

Trying to track ROI from social media can be a nightmare, especially if you aren’t using the proper tools. Tracking, cost association, and revenue measurement are paramount when it comes to driving new business with Facebook. Without having the ability to do those things, the time you do spend on Facebook will become a cyclical headache that just won’t go away.

How do you determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend?