Finding Revenue in Social Media

As the world of b-to-b media becomes more digital and mobile, publishers continue to seek new channels of revenue for their brands through apps, virtual events, lead-gen programs and marketing services. Now, it's time to explore the monetization of social media.

I am pleased to report that we have just added a new consulting service, Crain's Social Media, to our BtoB marketing services. This new unit offers social media training, including customized training seminars, as well as personalized executive coaching, social media audits and strategic social media planning and execution.

We have hired Tracy Schmidt to oversee the unit as director of social media training and strategy. Tracy joins us from Tribune Media Group, where she co-created ChicagoNow, a network of 350 blogs, and established a nationwide social media training program. Last year, she taught more than 2,500 people and consulted with organizations including the National Association of Realtors and National Association of Broadcasters. We will now be able to help businesses and executives expand their social footprint, improve their social reputation and train their sales and customer relations groups to use social media for business.

In every issue of Media Business we chronicle the new revenue streams of business media companies and brands, focusing in particular on new digital offerings and strategies. Our own venture is one way we have expanded in the world of digital and marketing services, and if you have a need for social training and strategy in your organization, please reach out to Tracy at tschmidt@crain.com.

Bob Felsenthal can be reached at bfelsenthal@crain.com. Bob Felsenthal is VP-publisher of BtoB and Media Business

Crowdbooster Makes Social Media Campaigns Smarter

Brands are flocking to social media to extend and strengthen their relationships with consumers. But while many are happy to work with the flood of analytics information coming from their activity on social networks, some want more than just data and web monitoring tools. They want guidance and recommendations.

That’s the bet of Crowdbooster, a Y Combinator start-up, which is publicly launching a new social media optimization platform today that pairs analytics with tailored recommendations about how to employ social media. The company, which counts the Los Angeles Times, JetBlue and Ben and Jerry’s as customers, is looking to stand out by telling customers what to do and when. And it just raised an undisclosed seed round from some respectable names to expand its business.

Crowdbooster, which has been in private beta since November, will now surface the most popular links and find the best content for cross-posting based on content and fit for a certain audience. And it will tell customers when the best times to tweet and post are. It will notify customers when influential users according to Klout follow them and will allow customers to respond to missed tweets and thank engaged users all from one dashboard. Ricky Yean, co-founder and CEO of Crowdbooster, said the recommendations get smarter over time as customers use it more.

“Social media managers frequently suffer from information overload, preventing them from effectively engaging with priority customers. Analytics provide significant insight, but they are simply not enough,” says Yean. “Our customized recommendations surface the best content to share and suggests when to publish for maximum exposure.”

The new recommendation features work alongside Crowdbooster’s other analytics tools, which tracks the effectiveness of outreach on Facebook and Twitter. Crowdbooster graduated from Y Combinator in the summer of 2010 and has just secured a seed round from investors including Steven Chen, co-founder of YouTube, Esther Dyson, Charles River Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, StartupAngel and others.

Crowdbooster is just one of many companies like Hootsuite and Socialflow trying to capitalize on the opportunity in social media marketing. Some like Socialflow are also are putting more intelligence into social media marketing tools, helping explain when they most effective times are to target users with the right message. This is where social media monitoring is going, from analytics to a lot smarter decision-making for customers.

Turning a Wide Eye

So you’ve monitored your brand for a while, you understand how to draw and apply conclusions you’ve drawn from the data you’ve gathered but you sense that there’s something missing. One thought crosses your mind – what are others doing in this space, or lets take it one step further – what exactly are your competitors doing in this space? You might be driven by curiosity or you might be driven by the annual benchmarking report, whichever it might be you’ll quickly find a lot of value in monitoring the wider industry conversations including your competition.

Making use of social data to understand your competition is important for several reasons and may at the most basic level help you benchmark a brand’s marketing, communications and general perception against that of others in a similar space. In addition to this, the data can provide insight into competitor activity online, the way in which other products are marketed in social media, online service innovations and how they speak to or with their own customers within social networks. All of this is invaluable information that you can slice and dice and think of incorporating or avoiding in your own business.

Before diving into a competitor analysis you will need to consider the right competitors to measure. You may intuitively think of your closest competitors which is a useful start, however, you should also look into third party data sources to gain a complete view on what companies, products and services compete in your market, at similar price points, or perhaps have just launched. You should also consider non-branded competitors: in banking, for example, brands compete against other uses of money – investments, pension products and so on. Remember that extra data points really add value to any and all of this analysis, though: revenue figures, advertising spend, awareness of discrete marketing campaigns, etcetera, complete the picture – correlations and causations should underlie the data returned from social systems.

Doing an industry wide assessment of the space you operate in can also help uncover up and coming competitors, ones that you may not have identified in a traditional competitor analysis. Based on this you can make predictions about what is likely to develop in the market place. Be sure to take a step back however and consider where your client is in a wider context; why does brand X have a particularly strong presence in your market? Is it due to obvious factors like a high traditional marketing spend or a strong set of social presences? Can you replicate their success? Perhaps no one in your market is particularly successful in social channels; in this case there’s a first mover advantage waiting there for you to take! You’ll be surprised at the opportunities you might uncover when you move beyond monitoring just your brand. Chances are you’ll uncover information that you didn’t actually know you were looking for but will go a long way towards giving you a competitive edge.

By Olivia Landolt Marketing and Community Manager