several Twitter tools, such as TweetDeck (shown in Figure 2-5) and Hootsuite, integrate search functionality.
Buzz charting: Similar to the blog search engines are the buzz charting tools. These tools focus on giving you a comparative perspective on how many different keywords, phrases, or links are discussed in the blogosphere. They search for the terms and then organize the responses into a chart, with the x-axis being time and the y-axis the number of posts. The most popular of these tools comes from Google and is called Google Trends (http://trends.google.com), as shown in Figure 2-6.FIGURE 2-5: TweetDeck.FIGURE 2-6: Google Trends.
Forums and message boards: To understand online behavior in the social web, you must be able to scan the conversations happening in forums and message boards as well. Boardreader (http://boardreader.com) shown in Figure 2-7, allows you to search multiple boards at one time. You can use it to find answers to questions that you may not find on a single board. Also, from a marketer’s point of view, you can research people’s opinions of brands or products. Boardreader is so popular that it powers a lot of the forum searches that the fee-based brand-monitoring tools conduct. Another player worth mentioning in this space is Omgili (www.omgili.com), which similarly focuses on forums and message boards.FIGURE 2-7: Boardreader.
Video and image search: Earlier in this chapter, we mention entertainment and the increasing number of people going online to watch videos — professionally created videos and personal ones, too. But how can you find the videos that are of interest to you or your brand? For video search, you have to depend on a couple of tools, because no single one truly captures all the videos created. All video searches must begin with YouTube (www.youtube.com) because it’s the largest video website, but you should also look at 360 Daily (www.360daily.com); Viral Stats (www.viralstat.com), which also tells you how much the clip is being discussed; and AOL Video (http://video.aol.com/), another notable player, shown in Figure 2-8.On the image side, you’d want to search Instagram on its mobile app, Pinterest (www.pinterest.com), Tumblr (www.tumblr.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com) and, to a lesser extent, Google Images (www.google.com/images). These tools, especially Tumblr, are valuable for understanding broader trends, your consumers, and conversations about your industry and potentially your company, too. Google Images also searches professionally produced and published images, not just user-generated ones, so you might not get an accurate picture of what people are talking about.
FIGURE 2-8: AOL Video.
Identifying Personas
After you understand what your customers do online, you can begin to define them more clearly. To do this, you can create what are known as personas. Personas are customer profiles that represent your actual buyers. Alan Cooper first wrote about personas in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (Sams Publishing). He wrote, “We don’t so much make up our personas as discover them as a byproduct of the investigation process.” That is exactly what you need to do.
Some marketers swear by personas; others find it difficult to wrap their heads around the concept. We recommend the creation of personas because they help you stay focused on the buying strategies that matter. For example, suppose you identify your customer as a 45-year-old male who has an annual income of more than $90,000, a family with two children less than 12 years old, and deep interests in chess, gardening, and wine.
When you’re developing your SMM campaign, you can stop your team from developing copy for a young woman of college age. This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to get off track when the ideas are flying fast and furious. When a fun notion pops into someone’s head, it can be helpful to look at your persona and think it through. You can remain focused and course-correct when you find you are getting away from the heart of the profile.
So what information goes into creating a good customer persona? Consider the following:
Demographics: Obviously, you want to know whether your customer is male or female, where she lives, what her estimated income is, and so on.
Photo and name: If you give your persona a name and choose a stock photo (or real customer photo), you bring life to it. When someone asks, “What would Alice want?” it makes a greater impact than visualizing a faceless and nameless customer.
Online places where your customer hangs out: This is important for your SMM efforts. Does he spend time on Facebook or a niche sports site?
Online places where he looks for product information: You need to know where he reads product reviews and what online bloggers influence him.
Job level: Is your customer a supervisor with staff to whom she can delegate? It’s helpful to know the amount of responsibility she has at work.
Children and pets: Clearly, childcare responsibility, family pets, and other home care chores play a factor in his product choices.
Hobbies and interests: Learning about hobbies and special interests helps you speak to the customer’s desire for specific products.
Analyzing Competitor Efforts
Just as it’s important to understand where your consumers participate in the social web, it’s also necessary to understand how your competitors engage in the social web. But where should you start? The following are some types of information to consider when you are planning your SMM investigation:
Keywords being used by competitors.This is something you have probably heard again and again, but its importance can’t be overemphasized. If you don’t use the right keywords, you won’t be found. Make sure to note which ones your competitors are using. They may not all be “home runs” for you, but evaluating
