This is a summary as much as it is a synthesis of my previous posts, so I won’t focus on the great presentations by some of my friends – Ian Anderson Gray, Ian Cleary, Chris Karasiewicz, and Neal Schaffer – though it was great to see all of you in person.

Social Care  AKA Customer Service and more

It’s a crucial topic in 2016. For some, it’s even the most important aspect of all social media activities. Customer service has a great impact on general opinion about companies in social media. People are most eager to share their opinions over social media in two cases: when they are severely disappointed and it can harm a brand’s reputation, lower their revenue, and even raise their costs. However, the second case is completely the opposite – people also share their opinions when their experience exceeds their expectations, which in turn can raise a company’s revenue. This social media track was at the Social Media Marketing World conference for the first time this year.

Dan Gingiss started this track with a great presentation, during which he presented the 8 blocks of successful social care:

• Social Care Philosophy: Answering all social media questions, compliments, & complaints, in a personalised manner and maintaining a brand voice at the same time is quite a challenge for company.
• Technology Selection: Depending on factors such as the size of your company, the team responsible for social media, maturity of social care processes, and volume of tickets, he distinguished 3 types of tools:
  • Basic, free, or mass subscriptions tools, like TweetDeck, which are designed for scheduling, publishing, and offer just a limited number of options for customer service.
  • All-in-one enterprise suites, like Salesforce, designed to cover various areas of business, including customer care.
  • Dedicated customer service platforms, such as Lithium – one of the most advanced ones.
• Team Selection and Operationalizing: Finding the right people and setting up an appropriate structure. It’s important that the team should have both customer service and social media experience.
• Training: Corporations implement special programs just for that. One should remember that training for social agents never ends, as new products, tools, and problems always arise.
• Process: This block usually takes the longest and requires process integrations with other departments, e.g. PR when potential crisis situations or inquiries from media come into play, or HR with violations of the company’s social media policy and inquiries referencing specific employees and ex-employees.
• Reporting and setting KPIs: Just a quick note here – social media analytics, like Sotrender, often provide metrics of customer service. But I’ll elaborate on that later on.
• Integration with Core Business: After all, that’s what really counts. Not only replying and discussing issues in social media, but also truly improving something in the product, process, or customer journey. If done well, the company, after making improvements, should find older posts and thank people who suggested those improvements some time ago.
• Integration with CRM: To enable processes taking part in social media and harmonize with other company’s activities.

Participants of Social Media Marketing World 2016 (courtesy of Social Media Examiner)

I was also waiting for Bryan Hurren discussing Facebook Messenger. There has recently been a lot of talk about this platform, as Facebook declared its further development at a recent F8 conference. Facebook stresses Messenger use in the full customer life-cycle as a major channel of automatic and manual contact, including both post and pre purchase. It should be more like a concierge than purely customer care, and not only a cost center but also a revenue driver, thanks to better conversions and increased sales. What I find interesting, shown by Bryan’s examples, were mainly from e-commerce. If you want more to read on it, there is a plenty of info on the Messenger website.

The other hot topics regarding Messenger were Facebook Bots and using Artificial Intelligence. However, Facebook didn’t focus on this, because it requires advanced technology such as natural language processing and voice recognition. Right now, Facebook is working on integrating Messenger with current sales processes and customer care, especially using human agents.

Bryan Hurren also announced new features to be introduced to Facebook messenger soon:

• Messenger search
• Messenger button – Similar to the “contact us” button.
• Website plugins
• Checkout plugins – Including an opt-in plugin.
• Messenger links – To be added to e-mails.
• Messenger codes – Similar to dynamic QR codes.
• Matching customer phones with their messenger IDs – Similar mechanism as with custom audiences. It will cost $99 to match one customer’s ID with their phone number.
• And of course – what a surprise – ads in Messenger

Among other presentations within the track of social care during Social Media Marketing World 2016, I’d also like to mention a discussion panel about case studies of brands who excelled in this area.

The panelists agree that if a company is already good at customer service, they should also be good at social media. Otherwise, it might become problematic They also discussed measurement standards, on which I will elaborate more below. They also mentioned examples of high customer service standards, like that of Jet Blue.

Target response time on Twitter for @JetBlue: 8 mins, currently at 5.5 mins, said @LaurieAMeacham #SMMW16 #customerservice

— Jan Zajac (@janekzajac) April 19, 2016

Measurement in social media marketing

This topic kept coming back like a boomerang at different panels – which is good for a social media analytics company , like us. Especially since it was one the main topics of Social Tools Summit Boston.

The all-time classic question, “What is the ROI of Social Media Marketing?” was addressed in Mark Schaffer’s keynote speech this time. He reminded us that we’ve been having the same debate for 7 years. He took an interesting angle on the subject, claiming that proper measurement in social media marketing should include the activities phase. Measures should be adjusted year by year, as marketing goals are differ annually, and it is difficult to expect increases in sales right away. Mark distinguished 3 phases: Awareness phase, reach phase, and ROI phase. Only in the latter phase should the main focus be on sales.

I noted two extremes in measuring social media marketing. On one hand, there’s very sophisticated analytics using advanced tools, like Tableau. It tries to define the role of social media entirely through the customer’s path. As Christopher Penn, leader of the analytics track during #SMMW16, said during his talk on the data-driven customer journey: ”Marketers want clients to have the fastest route, while customers travel various roads. Marketers should be like a GPS.” To be able to do it, you should be tracking people across channels and trying to implement attribution models (first click / last click, etc.), as well as marketing automation & lead nurturing programs. You can find more about this approach as well as links to tools and trainings in Chris’s blogpost.

This approach is suitable for the bigger players, who are strong in e-commerce. However, at the conference and in social media marketing in general, there’s plenty of smaller companies that are far from introducing and implementing such advanced models. It’s possible that they will never find these models profitable. Smaller companies start measuring their marketing from Google Analytics, but quickly start to understand that it’s not enough. It’s true, you can’t work on social media while not measuring web traffic and using SEO or tools like Google Analytics. On the other hand, should we really want social media to be about soulless clicks and searches?

Social Media Marketing World brought the best professionals in the industry (courtesy of Social Media Examiner).

Between those two extremes – corporate multichannel analytics and “no analytics at all” there’s a huge and growing space for social media analytics tools like the ones Ian Cleary mentioned in his presentation. We’re releasing a new and improved Sotrender this May, and we definitely benefited from all the discussions on SMMW16. More and more companies, even the smallest ones, have started using tools for publishing and managing social media profiles, and it’s high time for them to start using analytics tools too!

In summary, it’s worth noting that we have developed standards and consistent terminology in social media marketing analytics. There’s also a general framework for analysing three aspects of social media activities: reach, engagement, and conversions (I elaborated on it in the past). We can see the same for customer service, as almost everyone on the discussion panel about brands excelling in it agreed on the most important KPIs, which are:

• Volume: The number of questions, mentions, and reactions.
• Response time.
• Net Promoter Score.
• Time spent from identifying the problem to solving it (but it’s sometimes difficult to measure).

Key takeaways from Social Media Marketing World 2016

Reaching the end of this long post, I’ll try to sum up some of the topics I found to be the most important at Social Media Marketing World 2016. Three of them appeared during the closing conference keynote speech by Mark Schaefer “Breakthrough Growth Ideas: How Marketers Can Truly Fly” – a speaker I’ve always enjoyed online and had the pleasure to listen to live for the first time.

Content marketing as a double-edge sword: Entry barriers are really low, near zero, and more and more companies are producing and curating content in their marketing activities. However, as Mark Schaefer noted, many of them create “taco content”, always looking the same.

Instead, we should take notes from the fashion industry, or even Taco Bell which uses only 14 ingredients in their varied menu. The vital question is how to create engaging and interesting content. Well, the following might be an answer.

Social media going video and marketing going live with services like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Blab, as well as Snapchat. What’s interesting is that social media platforms promote such usage, e.g., as Mari Smith mentioned, Facebook pays selected comedians & digital celebrities to stream live. Among #SMMW16 speakers many were very enthusiastic about the subject (I wrote more about it in my sum-up of the first day of the conference). However, not everyone is. I fully agree that live video streaming is a great tool for digital influencers, artists, and celebrities. I wonder, though, how brands and small business can manage it and if customers would really want this level of personalisation.

Major platforms are still in good shape, although many social media marketers tend to chase the latest technology. As Mark Schaefer noted, platforms really change slowly, strategies change quickly! 98% of social media marketing budgets still go to the 7 biggest platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. The “shiny red balls”, like Meerkat, Ello, or Path, often attract attention, but they aren’t yet becoming mainstream channels.

Building trust and connecting with small groups of your most loyal clients and most engaged users. Some people call them micro-tribes, others evangelists or  the “Alpha-audience”, but it always means the same thing – in social media it’s valuable to not only reach as many people as possible, but also having a quality relationship with the most devoted fans, because they’re the ones that spreading the word about your brand.

There’s no good conference without great organization

I wrote already that I really appreciate the work done by the whole team of organisers led by Phil Mershon. The whole conference was perfectly prepared and was full of different attractions, not only discussions and presentations. The organisers were great in engaging networking and encouraging participants to meet new people. I’d wager a guess that each of the 3000 people taking part in it made some valuable contacts. I already wrote about good practices other event managers should include in their events. Now, I want to stress the existence of a special meetup room and table talks to spend breaks effectively and the unofficial parties and dinners. Of course, it was a social media event, so there was quite a bit of traffic on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Slack, with the latter being the most useful. I want to thank the whole social media team who moderated and curated literally tens of thousands of mentions and discussions – great job guys!