Services: Another popular consumer activity online is the use of services to allow a person to lead a more efficient and productive life. Whether they’re paying bills, checking bank balances, looking up phone numbers, finding jobs, or searching for apartments, consumers use the Internet as a tool to lead more productive lives. Most of today’s businesses, such as banks and airlines, provide services on the Internet. In fact, consumers now expect today’s businesses to provide their core services online or at least have a presence online. Consumers are typically very task-oriented when they’re interacting with online services; as a result, they don’t expect to participate in advertising campaigns, and especially not social media marketing campaigns, when they’re in this mode.
Business: And of course, the Internet is used to conduct business. This may take the form of companies talking to each other and exchanging information, establishing online marketplaces, and initiating brand launches. Businesses engage with their customers online by marketing and selling products and services and providing customer service via the Internet. Consumers expect these online conveniences from brands that they interact with, and they increasingly engage with businesses on the Internet. They also use the Internet to start their own businesses. Depending on the business, social media marketing campaigns can certainly help here.Critically, if there is any one significant change over the last decade, it is that consumers expect marketing to contribute to their sense of self and their personal needs (whether that’s news, communication, e-commerce, entertainment, services, or business-driven tasks and goals). Marketing that distracts consumers from what they’re trying to accomplish or how they want to feel has a much more difficult time succeeding.
Researching Your Customers’ Online Activities
When developing a social media marketing campaign or a broader, continuing program, determining what your target customers are doing on the Internet is important. You can use several tools to find out where your target customers are going online. Without this information, you can’t formulate a smart social marketing strategy. You’re simply shooting in the dark.
Tools that help you research online activity fall into two basic categories: free and paid. You can simply register for and use the free tools. Tools and services for which you must pay can get expensive very quickly. In Chapter 4, we discuss the paid tools and services, which are more appropriate when you’re planning a specific SMM campaign. In this section, we discuss some of the free tools:
Blog search engines: These search engines crawl (sort through) just the blogosphere for the terms that you input. They search for those terms in the blog posts and the comments, and the searches generally include all publicly viewable blogs on the Internet. If you just want to get a sense of the conversations in the blogosphere about a specific topic or brand, these search engines can help you do that. The most popular one is Blog Search Engine (http://www.blogsearchengine.org), which is shown in Figure 2-4.FIGURE 2-4: Blog Search Engine.A discussion on blog search engines wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the official Twitter search tool (http://search.twitter.com). Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform. Microblogging is similar to blogging except that you’re restricted to a certain number of characters per post. In addition to the Twitter search functionality, 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