I recently talked with Stephen Debruyn recently about his list of social media monitoring vendors – DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING/CORPORATE REPUTATION MEASUREMENT FIRMS and felt I might use the guide  as a jumping off point to how Social Media Monitoring grew in 2009 and I’m working on a PowerPoint Presentation, now.

Note: in the post following this one – I put out a theory that Google is the main driver of this increase – which makes sense to me since Google is the driver of so much Web 2.0 Traffic – see 400% Rise in Social Media Traffic due to Search Engines – Google for more information and the next piece of this puzzle.

Used Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 platform to monitor what was being said about each brand in Debruyn’s guide with additional queries for “social media monitoring” and “social media buzz”, etc.

I noticed a curious thing – since this summer the volume of conversations about Social Media (focusing on monitoring Social Media) increased 400% from what it was at the beginning of this year, and for all of 2008.

I questioned the accuracy of the data I collected from Alterian, as I this profile took up most of  my 200,000 searches limit and wondered if it didn’t actually complete – and that’s what I was seeing.

Used Google Insights for Search and found, more or less, a similar pattern of “Social Media” searches increasing by 400% this year – and compared it to SEO, SEM searches, which haven’t changed.

That gets me to the reason I am writing this post – not so much to find out about the 400% increase, as interesting as it is, as to see which of the social media monitoring firms, which make a living monitoring the web, are generating buzz around their own brands, and highlights of what what was being said about them.

More later, as I complete this study and try to figure out what it all means.

Thanks to a new research study from comScore, GroupM Search & M80 exploring how Social Media and Paid Search Interact we learn Social Media can improve Paid Search Performance for a brand by up to 300% (see the study, embedded below).
The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

I’ve been thinking, for a while, Social Media isn’t just a marketing channel – it’s a mode of communications, perhaps part of all the other marketing channels, much like a co-enzyme Q 10, that helps cellular respiration by supporting the rest of the body’s metabolic processes.   In fact, when I was a Board Director at the Web Analytics Association, who founded the Social Media Committee, it became clear, after the first year of the committee’s existence – Social Media supports Research, Advocacy, Marketing, Communications – often making them all work better.

And that’s what the ComScore-GroupM study shows -

Studies like this are great – they seem to reinforce common sense – and give us an idea of what we might expect when leveraging Search and Social Media, together.  Common Sense – the more a touchpoint is “nurtured” and fed with information relevent to the search query (by Social Media – especially social media that’s about the brand or term being searched for) the more likely a searcher is going to click through to the search campaign’s landing page – almost 50% more likely – once exposed to Social Media.

And, the searcher who is exposed to Social Media is also more likely to stay online longer – as the chart above, shows (72 minutes with Paid Search Alone vs 170 minutes with Paid Search AND Influenced Social Media).  However, I want to point out time spent online isn’t necessarily time spent on the Brand’s site – plus this study comes from ComScore – which mainly uses Panel Data and extrapolates it to a much larger population, and therefore isn’t 100% accurate.

The so-called  “co-enzyme” effect of Social Media is further amplified in that Consumers using social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to the average Internet user.

One other thing I’m reminded of while writing this post – that typical Paid Search operates as “interruption” media just as most other advertising still does.  The other day, I stood waiting for a bus and someone approached me, wanting to give me leaflet – I wasn’t interested – while another person, nearby, accepted the leaflet.

Now, most of the time I don’t like people just coming up to me and asking for my attention – the lady next to me, took the leaflet offered, and immediately went over to the nearby garbage can, and threw it out.    How many times is that repeated – probably 99% of the time – which explains why a paid search ad is clicked on less than 1% of the time, on average – not to mention other forms of media that fare even worse.   It’s almost as if, we, having become so exposed to media and brand messages, have tuned out – and don’t want to be interrupted – but we still want to be marketed to – just not in the same way.

Taking it another level – we often get to learn more, lower our barriors in social activity – talking and relating to one another, or a brand we’re considering buying from – it seems to me, we can’t ignore that we need to have a conversation -but that conversation needs to be about something – something interesting to us.

So the The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption tells us that……. we need to think of Social Media, not as a channel, by itself, but the fabric which connects all the other things we do – and amplifies them.   By having this level of communication Brands will have to improve their offerings and find out what people want, and respond, creating relevant conversations, but not doing so – means, missing the boat – and perhaps, cutting your sales by 200%-300% of what they could be … and if that’s not a strong example of Social Media ROI, I don’t know what is.

The first speaker, Aaron Goldman, uses Microsoft AdLabs Audience Predictor tool that I have written about quite a lot over the years.  Also, using Search for Competitive Intelligence using AdGuru (he uses the new AdGuru free tool), is something the speaker regularly does.  Also, refining your USP using Twitter to do real time search and see what other people are thinking about around a subject (ie: childcare services).   Also, using related keywords, using Quantcast, Comscore, you can come up with more ideas for services.   Using Google Insights for Search to look for Geography where keywords play stronger is useful.   In addition, using Microsoft’s AdLabs Commercial Intent tool shows a site could and should match the commercial intent of a keyword phrase.   Tweak non-search advertising creative using Yahoo Buzz!   Look for other places people go when they visiting your site.  Also, measure performance of offline ads – when a commercial airs look how the keyword traffic performs on your site (where the ad would generate traffic).   Finally, using Search to predict elections – using Google Insights.

Pier 1 Case Study –  have 1000+ stores and 1.2 billion of annual sales – 4%-6% is spent of that sales goes back to marketing (part offline/part online) and the goal was to increase sales across all store locations and spend marketing dollars more efficiently.  The goal was to prove that Search drives Offline Sales – while, normally, Search is used to generate online sales.  Ha!

The test for Pier 1 was to use Applied Predictive Technologies (a 3rd party) and used test and control stores to do this process along 52 test markets and 93 control markets.  The client did share their sales data – and this test was labor intensive since it looked at just 59 markets and happened over 5 weeks.

We did see some pretty significant results with a lift of 2% in the test markets vs. the control markets and some stores had a 5% lift in sales – and this happened last October, when the economy was tanking.  Also the ROI was 300%.

Alax from BlueKai – How does Search and Search Data apply to Online Marketing.  We know Search works because people spend 5% of their total time online yet a much larger share of sales are coming from Search than the time we spend online.  However, Click Through Rates perform 3 to 4 times better and convert 10 times better than untargeted search ads.  There’s a lot more money being spent on Behavioral Marketing (4x more than 2006) – what has changed?   Now you can apply Search Data to the online channel in real time.  Now, people are going to verticals and searching and Behavioral networks are capturing the behaviors of those searches and using it to retarget ads.  In addition, Ad Market Liquidity and Scale has improved, allowing more focused results – you needed a gigantic data set to begin with so you could filter down and still have someone left to display ads to.  While data analysis is very expensive to do – free open sourced tools like Hadoop has allowed it to get much cheaper – and we’re not at an inflection point where what is possible now is vastly more than even a year ago.

What’s next, Real Time Shopping data, including demographics and spend power, lifestyle and attitudinal data can be captured via search data of a website (and you can go buy those “searchers”).  Real Time bidding for users has accelerated and Search Engine Optimization companies are getting into a space – it’s a second level bidding system and agencies are functioning as system integrators.

Eli Goodman – Search Evangelist at Comscore –  Search is at the epicenter of a lot of go on in business – he has some small case studies  and tidbits.  Search is involved in early and LATE parts of the purchase funnel.  He suggests to lump searches together by some basic ideas (ie: if your looking at the Health Industry, lump Search Queries by Symptoms).  Also segment by “How” – the idea that a certain percent of searches are really “questions”.

He also looks for searches on “iPhones” and which sites get the traffic from that – Online Searches that focus on Questions and Answers can serve as Focus Groups to give you ideas and insight for your marketing.

What is the Brand Lift from being exposed to search vary and he suggests looking at Search Cross Visitation (using Comscore, of course – since you can not easily do it on almost anything else).

Everyone knows that search can be an effective platform for driving online traffic, leads and sales. But most people don’t realize that search can be leveraged in many ways beyond just the SEM channel. From using search to drive offline sales to mining search data for insights to build audience profiles, search has application to a wide range of marketing techniques. In this session, we’ll share actionable ways to unlock the power of search across all channels and hear case studies from folks in the trenches.