Waltzing Matilda

Barry White is one of those rare artists that can make your whole room vibrate. You don’t even need an expensive sound system to enjoy his rich and powerful vibes. As we love to listen to a large body of social media buzz, preferably for free, we wonder: ‘Does a web-based version of Mr White exist?’ Yes it does and it’s called Netvibes. This platform actually is my one, my all, my everything dashboard. In real time it keeps track of tweets, comments, RSS feeds, chats, Facebook updates, photos & videos, etc. For those who can’t get enough, the list of features goes on and on. In short this ‘Walrus of Social Media’ manages it all.

Click image to view a larger screenshot.

Our Central Library created this portal to show how RSS feeds can help you keep up to date with the latest EU-related content in:

- Blogs of EU offices, agencies and institutions

- Twitter accounts of the Commissioners

- Twitter accounts of EU offices, agencies and institutions

- Twitter accounts of EU policies and projects

- Facebook pages of the Commissioners

- Facebook pages of the Institutions

- Facebook pages of EU policies and projects

- YouTube

- Flickr

- Delicious

- News

- links to useful tools for Media monitoring

This is only a selection of feeds. You can find an exhaustive list of social media accounts of EU offices, agencies and institutions on Europa – Connect with EU on social networks. Check out these videos if you like to find out more about Netvibes or need help.

Number of views: 71

Last week, we gathered information to present a state-of-play when it comes to the EU Commissioners and twitter.

In this blog post, I’ll tell you how I did the research using free tools and then show you some of my results. (I collected most of my information the 23rd of February 2012.) Then I’ll ask for comments and suggestions when it comes to what else we should be looking for and how we should be using our knowledge to communicate more effectively.

This state-of-play excludes Commissioner Füle, who opened his twitter account yesterday. How I got the information:

1. Number of Facebook likes: I visited the Facebook pages of each Commissioner and collected the number of likes.  Commissioner Georgieva is the most popular Commissioner on Facebook. She posts in English and Bulgarian (more English than her native Bulgarian.) By the way, this task would be much easier if we had access to the accounts, so Commissioners feel free to add the COMM SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM mailbox to the admins of your page.
2. Number of Twitter followers: I visited the twitter accounts of each Commissioner on the afternoon of the same day (the 23rd of February 2012.) I collected the number of followers and tweets and put them in my spreadsheet. Commissioner Kroes has the most followers on Twitter. Given the Digital Agenda and her recent tweetchat, this makes sense. With Twitter, you have to engage a lot to get more followers, and Commissioner Kroes does this (in English largely, but she does chat in Dutch and a few other EU languages - especially when it comes to her posts about the Digital Agenda.)
3. Number of tweets: This I also collected from the Commissioners’ public twitter accounts. Once again, Commissioner Kroes leads the Commissioners in number of tweets, strengthening the argument that more tweets + more engagement or tweetchats = more followers when it comes to Twitter.
4. Tweets per follower: In my excel sheet, I divided the number of followers by the number of tweets to see how many followers per tweet each Commissioner had. Some Commissioners had almost 44 followers per tweet – often because they don’t tweet a lot. Commissioner Barnier has almost 9,000 followers yet he’s only tweeted 203 times. This is not bad – Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, has tweeted only 196 times yet has 39,800+ followers and is, according to Foreign Policy Magazine, a member of the ‘must-follow’ global ‘Twitterati.’ Commissioners averaged about 13 tweets per follower.
5. Age of Twitter account (in days): This I did in two steps. I went to How long have you been tweeting? and found the age of each twitter account (see below.) I then went to Date Duration Calculator to find out how old each account was in days. Commissioner Barnier had the oldest Twitter account (1192 days) while Commissioner Vassiliou had the youngest (25 days.)
6. Tweets per day: I divided the number of tweets by the age of the account in days. Commissioners average around 2 tweets a day.
7. Followers per day: I divided the number of followers by the age of the account in days. Commissioners average a gain of 15 followers per day. Commissioner Kroes and Commissioner Malmström average the most (between 48 and 60 per day.)

Below we provide a thumbnail. Click to get a quick glance at the accounts.

Here’s another way of looking at some of the data – this is a graph rather than a chart. ‘EC’ is the European Commission’s account @EU_Commission.

I keep links to the Commissioners’ pages on Facebook and twitter accounts in a spreadsheet so that I can collect these facts about once a month. That way, we can see how each Commissioner does over time on twitter and Facebook. The goal is not to compare Commissioners against each other, but to see how each does now in comparison with his or her past performance. After all, each Commissioner has his or her own audience and uses different social media platforms in unique ways. For example, some Commissioners tweet in English and French but post on Facebook in their own languages. Some talk about their initiatives while others are more broad in what they discuss.

Some accounts are run by teams that support the Commissioner in his or her communications rather than the Commissioner him/herself, while other Commissioner accounts tweet only what has been expressly approved by the Commissioner. So it’s important to look at each Commissioner individually while still keeping in mind the overall impact of these important EU officials in social media.

In case you want to make your own spreadsheet, here are links to the different accounts:

Next up, we plan to start paying close attention to the followers and the subject matter of each Commissioner to better understand who they are talking to about what.

Our recurring question is: we’ve got some data – what does it tell us? And how can we use the information to improve communications by the Commissioners? Please let us know what you think so we can be sure to include your ideas in our discussions.

@Linda_Margaret

Number of views: 3236

As the in-house metrics ‘expert’, I’ve been asked to write about why measuring and monitoring social media is not only simple but essential.

So the point of this post is plain:

Find a tool to consistently measure and monitor social media – and online media in general – BEFORE you start your communications action (online or offline), DURING your communications action, and AFTER your communications action.

Use this tool to tell who is discussing what where with what tone and why. Determine how this will impact what you want to communicate.

Okay, if you’ve limited time, you can stop reading now. If you want more specifics, scan for the section in this post that interests you most or be old-fashioned and actually read the whole thing.

Measuring and monitoring social media – overview

Two major advantages of social media over traditional media are that you can:

• assess the state of play when it comes to your target audience and target topic online (i.e. identify where, with whom, why, and via what content your topic is discussed)
• gauge quickly and in-depth how your story has been received from the moment of its release up to the months and even years following its distribution.

Tools available

I’ve reviewed and tested over 50 different paid social media monitoring tools, not to mention the numerous free tools that are out there, and I still haven’t tried even a third of what’s available.  Suffice to say, there is no lack for choice when it comes to tools you can use to first map online discussion and then measure your impact on that discussion.

As I said, there are many measurement tools available, both for a price and for free. I like to think of them as belonging to three general categories of tools (and some tools belong to more than one category):

1. Free tools provided by the social media platforms themselves. No platform online today is built without offering metrics. Some common examples include:

• Google alerts come straight to your email (if you have Gmail or Yahoo.)
• Facebook Insights are free if you have a Facebook fan or group page.
• YouTube Insights are free for those seeking to optimise and then measure the success of a video for searches on YouTube or Google (YouTube’s owner). If you’re seeding a video, don’t forget to consider free tools like TubeMogul, which help you target video content for particular audiences (and offer their own free metrics).
• Twitter analytics are not widely available yet, but the micro-blogging service has promised to offer free analytics for users. This will vastly improve how effectively we can use Twitter. Till then, try other free tools like Commun.it or ManageFlitter.
• Bit.ly analytics are offered by the free link-shortening service.

2. Tools built using the free ‘APIs’ or application interfaces provided by many of these platforms (e.g. Klout, Tweetreach, the Archivist, etc.) Many software-as-a-service tools (e.g. Engagor, also found below in the third category) aggregate free APIs to create a dashboard where you can compare analytics across several platforms in a central location. This saves you time in coordinating and analysing your web communications, gives you great graphs that let you see how you’re doing at a glance, and ensure you’re consistent in what you compare.

3. Software-as-a-service (SAAS) tools that often have their own ‘web crawlers’ or specialised data-mining software that collects and catalogues online content to create charts and graphs about what kind of content and which particular topic is popular where and with which demographic via which social media platform. SAAS tools include Engagor, Radian6, Attensity, Heartbeat, Synthesio, Sprout Social, Integrasco etc. – like I said, I have reviewed 50+ of these, indicating it’s a growing business….

Manage your expectations when it comes to any of these. No tool is comprehensive – the web is just too big (and growing) – but all tools are good indicators – as long as you use them consistently.

Some notes on social media analytics available through online SAAS tools (Radian6, Engagor, Alterian, etc.)

As noted above, there are a myriad of paid tools (Engagor, Radian6, Attensity, Heartbeat, Synthesio, Sprout Social, Integrasco etc.) that offer the ability to combine all the analytics you have into a central ‘dashboard.’ Using keywords defined by you, this dashboard provides graphs that display up-to-date metrics measuring current online conversation and content produced that relates to your topic, institution, or issue. These metrics catalogue all relevant content according to:

• Type of online media (blog, online news, social network, video, photo, etc.)
• Language.
• Country of origin (This is found through scanning the public profiles of users who identify themselves as from a particular country, through looking at languages used, and through locating users’ servers.)
• Trending topics (keywords and phrases that are frequently associated online with your topics of interest.)
• Date of posting (when the content was posted, shared, re-tweeted, etc.)

SAAS tools also usually offer services such as:

• The ability to ‘drill down’ within the data, accessing original content (e.g. specific Tweets, blogs, public Facebook posts, etc.). In addition to examining the content via the dashboard, you should be able to export this content into Excel sheets or CSV files if you want.
• To create customised visualisations of data for specific time periods, languages, countries, type of media, etc.
• To identify influencers within specific topics, social networks, or online communities.
• To engage directly with individuals or organisations via the dashboard,
• To email, flag, or isolate posts of interest to you or others in your social media team,
• To integrate other analytics into your project, such as your website analytics, your Facebook analytics, your RSS feeds, etc.

Back to the overview on social media monitoring tools in general

For those with access, we provide more information about different tools for monitoring and measuring social media in the DG COMM’s social media wiki. For everyone else, you can see here, here, and here for lists and reviews of social media monitoring tools.

Heck (as we polite Anglophones say), just type ’social media monitoring’ or ’social media measurement’ into any search engine and you’ll get plenty of reviews, descriptions, and videos about tools and how to use them.

In sum:

1. Measuring and monitoring tools exist.
2. You should take a clear decision about which tools you want to use to measure what and why.
3. You should be measuring and monitoring using those tools.

The proper understanding and use of these tools helps in first planning and then evaluating the success of your communications – and in learning lessons for the future.

Reporting and monitoring social media

Reporting should be an important element of your social media activity. Not only does reporting help you to improve your activities, but it shows your management the value and impact of social media.

Depending on the length of your social media communication action, you may want consider a weekly or a monthly reporting exercise, with quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Quantitative metrics include things everyone can agree on – like number of followers, overall language or origin of followers, percentage of tweets vs. retweets, ratio of men to women or of Germans to Romanians commenting on a post. Qualitative metrics are those measurements you and your monitoring team should try to agree on before you start and may have to modify as you go along – stuff like tone of audience, perception of your content, and sentiment (this is a tricky one as sarcasm and humour can easily fool people and machines).

Before you start communicating online, discuss the format of your report as a part of your overall strategy. Some things to consider in building your report:

1. As always, know who your audience is and which online tools they already use and where and build this into your monitoring report. In social media, it is usually a waste of time to build a platform and then try to build an online community around that platform. Communities already exist – find them and go to them with the tools and the information that they want.  Decide which social media tools will be the most effective for which audience, why you think this, and then determine how you will prove this in your monitoring report.
2. What quantitative and qualitative indicators per social media tool are important in determining whether or not you are achieving your communication objectives?
3. List the indicators according to the tool used.
4. Identify dates that are important to the social media strategy proposed.
5. Propose benchmarks, or ask that your service providers provide benchmarks, that you aim to achieve by specific dates.
6. Verify these benchmarks using similar strategies, applications, and communication actions implemented. Most service providers can help in this. For example, if a viral video is released through specified social media channels, a service provider that regularly releases viral videos should be able to predict a minimum number of clickthroughs (number of times the video is clicked on by a user) overall. Most service providers build their business around being able to make these sorts of guarantees.
7. Figure out how to monitor your online communication efforts to see if you are reaching, not reaching, or exceeding your benchmarks. Reallocate resources accordingly to ensure that you achieve maximum impact from your social media communications (e.g. If a lot of your content is being circulated by several different users on Twitter, you may want to spend more time and effort on distributing content via your Facebook Page or blog in order to increase interest via these platforms.)
8. Determine when and how you will report on your results to your communications team. Social media and online communications can point to opportunities in offline communications and vice-versa. To ensure that you and your team are communicating as best as you can, share information and coordinate activities. Propose influencers within a topic that you have discovered via your online monitoring and identify trends and upcoming events that may benefit offline communications.
9. Ensure that your report cites ‘lessons learned.’ Learn from your work. Identify where you could improve in a future communications effort. Cite under and over-represented linguistic and geographic target audiences and figure out which issues related to your topic are important to them. Use your work as feedback into your team’s overall communication efforts.

Social media and your website analytics

First, make sure that you have set up the analytics for your home website. See what search terms are leading people there, what individual items are most popular and how long people stay. Get an idea of what your audience is interested in and with that the issues are that are most likely to resonate with your target audience in social media. Measure your site’s “referrers” to find out where site traffic comes from.

While important, site traffic is not necessarily indicative of you’re the success of, for example, a social media campaign, provided that increasing site traffic was not a specific goal of the campaign. Often, members of your target audience get the information that they want from your social media action, so they may not necessarily feel compelled to check out your home page. This does not mean the home page is unimportant – it is often the central and the official point of reference for content used in the campaign.

However, the beauty of social media is that it brings the content to the community rather than forcing the community to go in search of the content. That said, a good way to measure the impact of a social media page is to compare, for example, the Facebook Insights of your Facebook page with your website analytics. Determine which attracts the most traffic, from which sources, at which times, and which content per page is most popular with visitors, etc.

A note on web analysis and offline communications

Remember, the online world often mirrors the offline world, so don’t forget to use at least some online analysis when you plan offline events and communications. With online metrics, you can discover the names of influential speakers about a topic even if the speaker him or herself never posts anything to the web. People blog, tweet, and talk about influencers on forums. Online metrics will also let you track the birth of a new trend and the top buzz words online so you know how people are talking about a particular idea or concept.

Conclusion

You can measure the potential, the current, and the long-term impact of any social media communications campaign. Because you can, you should. So choose some tools, if you haven’t already, and get to it.

@Linda_Margaret

@EC_MatildaBlog

Number of views: 2698

Trying to get a message out on social media can feel a bit like trying to make an announcement at a crowded party. There’s music playing, a thousand conversations happening at once and it would something pretty dramatic for everyone to stop and listen. If you don’t take decisive, standing-on-table or glass-clinking action, chances are you’ll just be talking to yourself.

Sprout Social is one of a number of tools that attempts to help you overcome this problem by getting your message out, in the right way, to the right people, and thus helping it spread – without you having to grab the microphone and burst into song.

So can it make the difference?

What’s it all about?

Sprout Social is a social media management tool. Its purpose is to make the time you spend engaging with social media platforms as effective, efficient and impactful as possible – and isn’t that just the holy grail of buzzwords right there?

Basically, this tool allows you to link up your various online identities – your Facebook page(s), you Twitter account(s) etc, and control them all from one place. You can then use your Sprout Social dashboard to publish and schedule updates across all of your platforms, ideally cutting down on time it takes to keep on top of everything. You can respond to comments and questions that come in across the platforms, and keep track of your engagement. Several members of a team can work as administrators in managing this, with assigned tasks, and others can check who has done what.

Crucially, you can also monitor and analyse the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and find ways to make it better. By using the tool to track buzzwords and certain influential profiles or blogs, you can tap into the conversations that are already happening online and engage in them. You can see how far your own message is spreading and draw some conclusions as to why – who the people are that share your posts and talk about you, and what messages are proving interesting to the online community.

Why should you be interested?

Essentially, if you are an organisation or company with and need to both get your messages out and bring all of your online identities together in a cohesive, strategic way, this tool sets itself up to be your engine room. The importance of monitoring, thinking cleverly in terms of the targets of your message, and seeing how effective what you’re doing is, should not be underestimated. Just like a physical conversation, you need to know who’s listening, and be prepared to listen yourself.

It’s not  a free service, and it you want the full host of analytic tools that are on offer, it’s not cheap, but the idea is that it could save you time, allow to stay on top of what’s happening in social media, and serve to get people listening to what you have to say.

How it works

1.  Create your account.
2.  Link your online identities to the account (Facebook, Twitter, video channel etc.)
3.  Identify Twitter profiles and keywords that you wish to monitor.
4.  Use the tool to manage your online media presence, interact with your audience and to   monitor the impact of your online media identities.

There is a free 30 day trial available, but if you want to take on the tool after that, subscriptions run from 9 euro to over 800 euro per month – the cost depends on the number of identities you need to manage, and the level of monitoring and support you need.

Confused? Here’s a quick video that explains in pretty well.

The downsides

Obviously, depending on your resources, the main downside is the cost, and it also isn’t necessarily the best option if you want to monitor social media in a range of languages – this tool won’t do that for you (see Brittany’s comment below for clarification on this!)

Unlike tools like Engagor, Sprout Social does not attempt to monitor the whole online world, only the online world that it and you deem relevant to your online profiles. Sprout Social is more about seeing the online world from the perspective of your online profile(s) rather than seeing your online profile(s) from the perspective of the online world – think of it as inductive rather than inductive listening.

The upshot

Monitoring and management are both great ideas in terms of working smarter in social media. Whether or not you need this sort of one-stop-shop depends very much on the level of time and resources available to you, and the amount of identities you have to manage. If you’ve got a team of people and lots of identities to keep up, and you need to ensure that you’re doing it cohesively and cleverly, this could be a good option. If you’re working with one or two Twitter accounts, there might be other (free) tools that you can combine to get the job done.

As always, we’d be delighted to here what you think!

@AmyJColgan and @Linda_Margaret

Number of views: 1471

The term “war room” is often used in politics to refer to teams of communications people who monitor and listen to the media and the public, respond to inquiries and synthetise opinions to determine the best course of action. In today’s world, social media are ideal tools for monitoring, listening and responding to the media and the public. What big corporations and organisations have to learn is how to integrate the opinions for their best course of action, being it to sell a product or to develop and implement a policy.

Corporations and big organisations have now realised that it is necessary for them to be present in social media. Social media are the megaphone of their customers’ and stakeholders’ opinions about the company/organisation, their products and services. Do our customers like our products? What do they say about us? At the same time companies and organisations are concerned about false information and the best way to intervene. It is all about reputation management: how we are perceived by our customers.

Just as with traditional media, social media offer an opportunity and a responsibility to selectively participate and engage in on-line conversations mentioning our company or organisation. This requires on the one hand centralisation of the development of the core, unique messages, and on the other hand decentralisation of bringing these messages to the outside world.

Development of the core, unique message by a strongly controlled and centralised body has been referred to by Thierry Vedel of the political research centre in Paris as the “war room” approach in his masterclass “Les strategies de communication à l’ère de l’Internet” (3 June 2010, Brussels). He strongly believes that, due to a large number of conversations taking place in social media, an unclear and too dispersed message might result in unclear and confusing communication with your stakeholders.

Although I can go along with the idea that the development of the message should be centralised, I believe that it would be wrong to centralise the control over the packaging and distribution of the message. That would lead to a sterile push-out of information, in particular if it was done without proper intelligence from what happens out there, outside of the company’s/organsation’s “bubble”. In this case, the “war room” will not adapt the strategy to opinions, but would become a “propaganda machine” merely promoting a commercial product or shaping the perception of an organisation, a person or a brand as it is seen by the company/organisation.

Bert

Number of views: 5600