Social Media and Direct Marketing, Part Deux

OK, after a very lazy summer, I have decided, with the leaves turning, to re-dedicate myself to blogging and to do that at least once a week. It will be my Friday chore before I can leave for the weekend.

Over the last several months, I have been intensely studying Social Media, by trying various social media monitoring platforms, notably those from Techrigy and Radian 6. Without trying to be a product comparison blog, I have currently settled on Radian 6 due to its data analysis capabilities. I have been using the tool to track the social media posts for several of my clients and prospects.

At the end of the day, I am trying to determine the role of social media data within the marketing database, and have arrived at several conclusions.

1. Similar to everything else we do in email and direct marketing, it is imperative to track and maintain campaign meta data. For example, if you were to post an offer on your Facebook fan page, maintain all the relevant data within your marketing database. Start date, what the coupon was for, etc. In this manner you can then tie this campaign meta data to actual transactional data to determine order curves (frequency of redemption over time versus total redemption), spikes in retail traffic by time, etc.
2. Social media monitoring using a platform like Radian 6 is also imperative. Every time you engage socially, you can determine what base effect that caused within the social community, and exactly where.
3. The Twitter network is a powerful force. One of my clients, who has an account on Twitter, only has 385 other Twitter accounts following them. However, when we look at the followers of every Twitter account that mentioned them in a Tweet over the month, the potential number of people that saw that tweet rises to over 135,000, a very large network indeed.
4. And finally, harness the power of the bloggers. A competitor of one of my clients uses blogger promotions (giveways and contests) very effectively. They generated a significant spike in social activity every time they released a new promotion to their blogger community. And, that spike was immediate (literally all day during the day of release).

I have not yet figured out exactly how to tie all of this together into the marketing mix, but new insights are dawning every day. Let me know what you think and have a great weekend all.