Participation in social networks by the general public is expanding at an amazing pace. Not surprisingly, this is spurring companies to dip their toes into social spaces fully unknown to them mere months ago!

Initially, a company or brand is typically concerned with public perception and sentiment about their company/brand on the social ‘wires’. Social monitoring is, therefore, often the first toe into the water for companies making a foray into social media. In doing so, companies quickly come to realize that finding prospects or leads by listening to social conversations is also a strong possibility, and another couple toes (or both feet) slip into the water!

Regardless of where you are at in terms of your social media use or experience, discovering valuable and relevant conversations is likely to be on your task list, so enjoy this blog post and then get busy putting our tips into practice!

How to Get Started: The JitterJam Social Search!

Effective and numerous JitterJam Social Searches form the engine that drives the number and quality of your customer relationships. Social Searches discover relevant conversations occurring on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Friendfeed. They also provide an inbound channel for SMS text messages, email and RSS feed subscriptions. If you don’t properly prime the pump (and keep it primed) by setting up and monitoring numerous, well-tuned Social Searches, the remainder of your efforts in JitterJam will not be as rewarding as they could be.

JitterJam Tip: Test Your Keyword Search
If you select a Keyword social search, be sure to test and refine your search definitions. Keep refining until you are discovering relevant conversations.

Here is a JitterJam Social Search definition screen:

When you select the option to Test your Social Search, you will be brought to this screen:

You’ll now be able to see a sample of the results found by your Social Search and you can continue to refine the keyword parameters until you narrow the results to your liking.

Discovering Brand/Company Mentions

As part of your JitterJam account set-up, you created your first Social Search; this search should be discovering mentions of your company or brand. Review the results in JitterJam’s Listen•Engage / Brand tab. Most Social Searches will need adjustment over time, so if the results are not what you expect, modify the criteria for this Social Search.

JitterJam Tip: How to Edit a Social Search
Navigate to Account / Social Searches. Click on the edit icon next to the Social Search you’d like to refine.

JitterJam Tip: Getting Online Help
For help and guidance on Social Search creation and modification, read the on-screen tips. Click on the Help icon to bring up our Help screen or click on the Video icon found when you’re editing your Social Search. Note that all instructional videos are also found under the Resources / Videos tab.

Discovering Relevant Community Conversations

Be sure to set up several Social Searches designed to discover conversations relating to:

• Your industry
• Your product category
• Activities related to your product (e.g. backpacking conversations for a portable stove manufacturer)
• Any other topic of interest that defines your target customer (e.g. conversations about eco-friendly products for an organic food brand)

The words you would expect to hear in these conversations are the potential keywords for the Social Searches you should set up. Test the waters—set up a few Social Searches around some of your hunches to see if you do, in fact, discover interesting and relevant conversations. After a new Social Search runs for a day or two, see if its focus needs to be narrowed or widened and adjust the criteria accordingly. There is a daily limit to the number of conversations JitterJam can discover for you so be sure to check these often to see if you have any run-away Social Searches.

Customer Resources

To learn more about JitterJam Social Searches, log in to your JitterJam account and check out these areas:

• Videos about “Discovery”: Go to the Resources / Videos tab; the video player has a “Discover” sub-tab that contains a few videos on Social Search creation
• Help: The context-sensitive help system is accessible by clicking on the Help icon throughout JitterJam
• Documentation and Guides: Topic-specific documentation in .pdf format is accessible from the Resources / Download tab

If you need additional help, we’re an email away (support@jitterjam.com) and are always eager to assist!

Ready, Set, Go! Establish and monitor your conversation discovery funnel and start reaping the benefits now! Challenge yourself to create four (4) new JitterJam Social Searches and you’ll be well on your way!

What possible social communities lurk out there that you should be listening to?

Diving Deeper into Consumer Interests

Part I in this series focused on the benefits of adding segmentation to the contacts stored in your JitterJam intelligent contact database and discussed segmenting by consumer interest. In Part II, we take a deeper dive into the broad category of consumer interests and cover that features of JitterJam that facilitate segmentation by interests—namely JitterJam Topics, Tags and Custom Fields.

Topics
“Topics” within the JitterJam platform allow you to segment your database and provide consumers the opportunity to specify their topics of interest when they opt-in to receive communications from you (via JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system).

Expressed Consumer Interest(s): If you have a list of interests you would like to present to people for their consideration (in a form or a pick-list, for instance), you can designate these choices in a certain type of “Topic” called a “Consumer Interest”. In the Account / Administration area of JitterJam, you can quickly create new topics; clicking on the “Consumer Interest” check box will allow you to include it as one of the interests on the Make Me Happy subscription sign-up or customer preferences forms that you can easily create and customize within JitterJam. These expressed consumer interests are stored with each contact’s record in the JitterJam database.

Implied Consumer Interest(s): Here’s another use for JitterJam Topics…Because you assign each JitterJam social search to a Topic, the search results and their authors can be viewed/analyzed by the Topics (categories of conversations) that one or more social searches roll up into. Let’s say you sell health and beauty aid products and have set a goal to increase sales in your aromatherapy line, and you’ve created a number of social searches to find social conversations about your product and market. A consumer’s online chatter discovered by one of your JitterJam social searches is assigned to the Topic of “Aromatherapy.” Once this person is added to the JitterJam contact database, we’ll track this and any future conversation by this consumer which matches any of your social searches and count the number of times they posted a public comment on the various “Topics” you’re tracking. With this data, you can assume that this consumer may have an interest in one or more of your Aromatherapy products! By understanding the time frame and frequency that a contact converses about a Topic, you’ll be able to gauge their level of interest in your product category. This is what we refer to as implied consumer interest(s) instead of expressed consumer interest(s), as described earlier.

Combining these two uses of JitterJam Topics makes analysis and outreach very interesting! If you use a JitterJam Topic as both a consumer interest and have one or more of your JitterJam social searches assigned to it, you’ll be able to segment the contacts who have expressed an interest, implied an interest (complete with their degree of interest)—or both! This is powerful knowledge. Consider the people whose conversations about “Aromatherapy” are picked up a significant number of times by your social searches and who have also given permission to market and have checked a box expressing an interest in “Aromatherapy”—these could be your hot prospects!

Tags
A second way to store consumer interest information is by tagging all contacts for whom you discover specific interests, a particular role in your community (e.g. blogger) or a note-worthy affiliation. While the Topics feature automatically counts the number of times a contact has has conversed about a subject or has explicitly expressed interest in a topic, applying Tags to contacts is a bit more manual on the part of the JitterJam user but is incredibly valuable none-the-less.

While reading and analyzing discovered conversations, you will find people who are important to you in a number of different ways. You may discover a blogger in your industry, an expert in the field, or someone asking for product references. You may see communications by your competitors or from companies which have complimentary products to yours. You may find customers who love your product and some who are not very happy. You may discover new uses of your product or a way to customize it for a greater appeal. When you review all this important information, you can tag the contacts who authored the relevant content (click on their user name to open their profile) so this knowledge is at hand when you prepare future outbound marketing messages.

Additionally, you can automatically apply tags to all contacts who fill out a particular Make Me Happy form or whose conversations are picked up by a particular social search. You can import tags with contact information you might be pulling from another system or applied to a group of authors or contacts who share a set of common characteristics.

Custom Fields
A final way to represent consumer interests is with JitterJam Custom Fields. You can create up to ten custom fields in each JitterJam account to store any alphanumeric information at the contact level. Currently, these fields can be populated manually (data entry on contact edit form) and automatically by a programmatic call to the JitterJam API or by importing these values for your contacts. This data can indicate product and/or distribution channel preferences, sales volume or anything else that is meaningful to your business and that helps you market to and service your existing and expanding customer base.

Best Use Scenarios
Each of these distinct JitterJam segmentation features is capable of storing interest data, but each has their own strengths and best-use application.

• Spend a little time thinking about the scenarios presented in this post to help you determine the best configuration for you! Think about the types of subjects which people will talk about and/or be willing to express an interest in. JitterJam Topics is the best feature for this set of interests.
• Think about information garnered from your on-line sales or point-of-purchase systems and the data you’ve gathered from surveys. JitterJam Custom Fields might be the best feature for this set of interests/preferences/patterns.
• JitterJam Tags are the best feature if you are capturing a contact’s role in your industry (blogger, expert, analyst, competitor, complimentary product representative, etc.) or relationship to your company/brand/product (competitor, employee, season pass holder, etc.). Tags are also easily applied when you are mining sets of conversations or contacts in an attempt to find commonality among people as it relates to your product space. Once you hone in on the right set of people, you can quickly apply one or more tags to this group of authors or contacts.

Once you’ve started to use Topics, Tags and Custom Fields, the data gathered is readily available as segmentation tools so you can select and communicate with groups of contacts by any of the values stored in any of these numerous fields! The possibilities are immense, so jump in and get going!  As a word of advice, don’t let the decision of which JitterJam feature to use stop you from getting started. Tags can be removed, Custom Field values can be updated and Topics can be changed. Once you get started on an approach, the best configuration may become obvious; and we’re always here to help you think things through. Just email support@jitterjam.com with your rough thoughts and a structure you’ve been thinking about; we’ll get a dialog going to come up with a plan to meet your needs!

Be sure to tune in to Part III for additional segmentation options that are NOT related to consumer interests.  Promise!

What Do You Think?

Would you find it valuable to understand which activities, hobbies or past-times your consumers enjoy or participate in? If you knew this, what would you do differently?

As Client Success Director at JitterJam, I get the straight-up job of coming up with innovative, effective, creative and efficient ways to use our great feature set in the manner best fitting each unique business and situation. I want all JitterJam clients to be wildly successful; I hope the tips shared in this blog category will set you on that path.

Segmenting Your JitterJam Contacts (Part I)

This is part I in a series on segmentation and will cover benefits and how to get started. Part II will dive deeper into additional ways to segment and strategies to consider.

Why Segment?

If you’re a JitterJam client today, be sure to take full advantage of all the ways to segment your Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email and/or blogger contacts in your JitterJam intelligent contact database. Knowing who you are talking to can have a profound affect on your communication! Think about the categories of people who might be interested in your product or service. Is your ideal prospect an outdoorsy adventurer or a cuddle-up-with-a-good-book type? Who typically purchases your product/service—a caretaker of a senior, a medical doctor or a professor, a teacher or a technician, a HS or college age student, a parent of infants, toddlers or school age kids? Is this typically given as a gift or bought for personal consumption/use? Would a city-dweller or a suburbanite be a better fit—or doesn’t that matter? Is your product/service more popular with males or females?

These are all potential segmentation attributes that you can discover and store with each contact and utilize when creating focused messages to targeted populations to your database! Think about how different—and more effective—a communication that’s focused on the needs of a parent of school-age kids would be versus a generic message about the features of your product. Segmenting your contact database will help you define and reach the right people with the right message!

If your product/service can be used by a very diverse population, you may be thinking that you are out of the woods on segmentation.  Not so fast!  Think about all the types of people mentioned above; would you speak the exact same way to every one of those people if they walked into your showroom?  I didn’t think so. Applying segmentation allows you to customize your tone and language; lets you adjust the amount of slang, sarcasm or humor; it even enables you to present a customized special or promotion to match each segment you want to engage with!

Here’s an example of interests for people involved in home improvement projects. How can you utilize what you know (and learn) about your contacts to better segment your database?

How to Discover and Add Segmentation to Your JitterJam Contacts

Start with your contacts’ interests and where these intersect with your product or service. There are a variety of ways to learn about these interests.

1. Use keywords.

Listen to conversations your prospects are having. Pick up clues using keyword mentions of activities or interests they’re involved in. This can be done in a couple of ways:

• Use a new Social Search to find conversations and tag contacts. Create a new JitterJam Social Search to discover conversations containing key words or phrases that are frequently used by people talking about a specific topic of interest. Test this search (and tweak it if necessary) to eliminate non-relevant conversations and pick up a high percentage of good conversations. When you are creating the search, specify a tag for the search. This will act as an interest “flag”; when you review the social search results, if you add this person to your JitterJam database, JitterJam will automatically apply the appropriate tag to the contact!
• Analyze existing results for common keywords. Open your brand-specific social search and run the “Analyze Keywords” function to see if the conversations reveal the interests of the authors.  If they do, select all of the contacts with a specific interest and apply a tag to all the contacts at once (TIP: use the Gear icon at the upper left corner!)  Continue to work through any other interests which stood out while analyzing the conversations and tag each group of contacts with these interests.
2. Search through social profiles, bios and descriptions.
   • Most people on social networks provide key information in their public profiles. You can search through the profile descriptions of your JitterJam contacts and utilize the keywords and descriptions within those profiles to segment your contacts. Go to Develop/All in JitterJam. Open the “Advanced Filters” window (click on white bar below the sub-tabs). Find the Smart Search section and enter one or more key words.  Click on the “Update” button and all contacts who match your entered criteria are returned. From here, you can tag one, more or all of the contacts.  And just think—this is based on data your contacts have entered and made public about themselves!
3. Ask!
   • Our Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system enables you to ask your contacts how they would like to be contacted (Twitter, Facebook notification, email and/or SMS text message) and how frequently (once a week, once a month, etc.). Additionally, you can ask your contacts to specify their interests and even some demographic information. When you let your contacts know that you will use this data to create relevant offers in a way that adheres to their personal preferences, you will have made your contacts happy!

Need an Extra Nudge?

Consider this: As a consumer, aren’t you so much more willing to receive a marketing message offering a discount on something you’re definitely interested in than on, say, a product you would notice only if you physically tripped over it?! I know I am!  For instance, if you were listening on the social web and heard me mention that I have two sons who have both outgrown their ski equipment (uugghhh!) and were to toss me a 20% off promo code to use at your ski shop, I’d love you—truly!  Remember, just as easily as your prospects opted in to receive marketing communications from you, they can opt out. Don’t give them a reason to; instead, give them every opportunity and reason to stay!

What Do You Think?

Do you have any particular segmentation by which you would like to craft communications or offerings? How do you accomplish this today? Is this data stored in systems or lists within your company? Are you using this valuable data to reach your contacts?

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

The last Creativity Coffee discussion centered around Social Etiquette. What rules do businesses and brands need to follow to ensure that they are not creating social SPAM? We had far too little time to fully cover the topic, so we continued the conversation by focusing on social etiquette for a single social channel—Facebook. Here are the highlights of the discussion.

1. A Facebook “fan” is like an annuity—a gift that keeps on giving.
• A Facebook fan provides an ongoing value stream.
• Your wall posts/updates are seen by all your fans, but also potentially by all your fans’ friends. One fan can fuel hundreds of brand impressions.
• The real “value” of a Facebook fan is an unknown. That is, until you begin to drive engagement with your fans.
2. Facebook outreach to non-fans is tricky. When is it okay? How do you do it without “freaking out” the consumer?
• As we discussed in our last session, Facebook’s closed networks and less-than-public personal updates make it a difficult platform to use for “discovery” of new brand fans. Search results are limited to those who choose to make all their status updates open to everyone.
• When you do come across a public (everyone) status update that is associated with your brand/market/product, what do you do?
• Use the context of the person’s update (and prior updates). Be respectful. If it’s a negative comment or a complaint, identify yourself and ask if you can be of assistance in resolving the situation. Remember that your posts/comments to a person’s wall is from YOU, the page admin, not BrandX, so identifying yourself is important.
• Offer value. If the status update is a positive comment, identify yourself (Facebook manager for BrandX), thank them enthusiastically for the comment, and invite them to “like” your page and opt-in for future offers. If the person tends to like offers (you can tell via their news stream), you might take the risk to provide a coupon or offer as well. This is really discretionary and should be used only when clearly appropriate.
3. There are coupon fans and non-fans. And they’re both on Facebook.
• Sometimes, it seems to be black or white, love or hate for “offers”. Listen before you engage. View the status updates from a person to see if they are amenable to receiving an offer before sending one to them. Make sure you have a plan, and a respectful one at that, for what triggers your brand to engage with a consumer on Facebook, BASED ON something they said from status update.
• Context is king. At times, people post on Facebook to be social and aren’t interested in potential “offers.” Other times, they are shopping, researching, chatting about brands and products, and it IS appropriate to engage them in your brand even further and even incent them to try your product. Use the info you know about a user, and offer them something targeted that will be meaningful to them. Send the appropriate message.
• While it’s fine to post incentive offers like coupon links, promotion codes and special “Facebook-only” deals on your fan page, make sure that these are NOT the only pieces of content you share on your Fan page. You want to draw people to engage, communicate and deepen the love of your brand. Don’t forget to be social, have discussions with fans, ask them questions, make them smile, provide them with a fun and lively place they want to visit often.
4. Let them opt-in.
• Facebook is a social network. While your fan page is a primary channel for your brand’s consumer engagement, it’s always good give your fans other ways to connect with you.
• Give your fans a way to opt-in to other communication channels (email, Twitter, mobile) and to other communication types (newsletter, coupons, events, etc.) JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing Facebook app works well here!
5. You don’t know what a fan is worth until you know.
• A fan or like you make today may not produce for months….stay the course, be patient, give to get.
• Example: Gary Vaynerchuk – the gift economy. If you don’t know someone, how to you get in their good graces..bring a gift. The same holds true for digital/Facebook etiquette. Come with a gift.
6. Make sure you’re ready for negative comments.
• Whether it’s about your product or about how you’re marketing via Facebook, make sure you’re ready to publicly handle negative comments in a positive way.
• Making decisions on what to say and how to handle potentially sensitive and explosive issues (e.g. the Capri Sun moldy drink debacle) shouldn’t be in the hands of an intern. Make sure you have a fast and effective process for escalation and resolution.
• Not everyone is going to love being contacted by your brand. Be respectful and always make sure you follow any requests to disengage swiftly. Don’t make a lost connection a bad connection.

How are you handling Facebook outreach and engagement? What have resulted in higher engagement by your fans? Please let us know!

Wonder where people find all those cool websites, videos and blog posts come from that show up as links on Twitter, Facebook and in your emails from your friends? Wonder how you can be the cool person who shares those links? Do you want to click to distraction and find wonderful content you can share with your community? Then try StumbleUpon—or try it again if you haven’t in a while.

StumbleUpon’s premise is simple—find something cool and mark whether you like it or not. That’s nice to help others that are using the platform to find neat things. But given the 10 million plus users of the service, you also have the opportunity to “stumble upon” sites that other people have rated. Click an interest, and let the site direct you to sites and content that other people have liked. It’s easy, it’s addictive (uh oh…) and it’s a great way for you to find sites and content that will wow your friends and contacts.

For you marketers out there, use these discoveries to feed your community. For instance, if you’re a food-oriented company, post links to sites that contain recipes, articles and luscious photos that will interest your current and potential customers. You’ll find that your posts will interest your followers and fans and draw new people to you on Twitter, Facebook and more.

I actually was thinking about the topic for today’s Fun Stuff Friday blog post, and I was stumped. I asked my colleague across the cube wall from me to feed me ideas, and he said, “I think I’ll look at StumbleUpon for some ideas.”

He sent me a link to a cool video, but the spark for this post was the idea that he used a crowdsourcing site like StumbleUpon to find something new. We all can use a spark of new, and StumbleUpon can give you just that.

What are people talking about on Twitter? Everything. And anything.

How do you find out what’s hot on Twitter? Take a look at what’s Trending. What’s fascinating is that real-time conversation is organic–it has its own life, and grows its own way, and the things people are talking about can sweep the globe–but also can be localized.

How do you find out what’s trending? Go to your http://twitter.com page and view the Trending list (scroll down and look below your searches and lists). What’s cool is that you can see what’s trending across the country, in various global regions or cities. You can change the location and see what’s hot in different areas. For instance, right now Waka Flocka is hot in Seattle. In London, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber. Worlds apart in geography and in music!

How does this help your social marketing efforts? It’s good to know what people are talking about. If its related to what you do, the products you sell, the brands you market…well, you want to know what people are saying in your market. If it’s not related to what you do…well, it could be just for fun.

After all, it IS Fun Stuff Friday!