Recent research asking employees what they most wanted from their employer listed 'Praise' as number two.

I was very lucky as a young man starting out in business to work for a truly inspirational boss, Arthur Shillitto. One of the things Arthur would do, and that I have tried to remember throughout my career, was this:
If you had been in a meeting with him with someone from outside the company, say a customer or a supplier or an inspector, within a couple of hours a handwritten note would appear on your desk saying: "Roger, thank you very much contribution to the meeting, it was much appreciated, Arthur."

And the result? I would read it, I would smile and my chest would go out, my shoulders would go back, and from that moment on there was simply nothing I wouldn't do for Arthur. It was such a small thing and such an easy thing for him to do but the effect on me and others who worked for him was truly remarkable. Do you praise people enough? - those who work for you, those who work with you. It is so easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that money or some material item is the only motivator. Recognition and praise are way up there and a word of gratitude to someone in front of their peers is truly worth its weight in gold.

So from now on could I ask you please however much praise you have been giving, give twice as much.

In the race to understand and effectively deploy social media, many marketers feel they're falling behind when it comes to exploiting its potential as a tool for gathering market research data. So what's the best way to tackle this obstacle?

"Half my advertising budget is wasted - I just don't know which half." It's hard to think of a better known marketing quote - even if everyone disagrees about who first said it - but it has never been so irrelevant, according to Sage pre-sales manager David Beard. "Social media and the data and insight we can glean from it mean we have reached marketing nirvana," he claims.
Beard is not alone in his belief that social media can tell us everything we need to know about our customers. Click-through rates, social listening, sentiment analysis, cost per lead and dwell time are just a few of the tools that have led to increasing claims that marketers have never had it so good when it comes to understanding the customer and what works for them.
But wave two of CIM's Social Media Benchmark Survey reveals a different reality - marketers don't appear to be using metrics from social media as much as they could and aren't sure of the rules on collecting and using data gleaned from it.
More than half of the organisations surveyed don't take advantage of sentiment analysis, Klout or any other influence ranking, CIM found, while almost half fail to exploit dwell time, user-generated content submissions, cost per impression or cost per lead. Even the most popular metrics - search ranking, numbers of fans or followers, number of comments, unique visitors and numbers of tweets or retweets - are used extensively by fewer than 30 per cent of respondents.
"But if you're not tracking these things, how else are you measuring engagement in social media?" says CIM head of insights Thomas Brown.

Hurdles

Reassuringly, the intent is there, with significant numbers of marketers saying they plan to start using more social media metrics and data collection in the year ahead. Lack of time, budget and expertise are cited by survey respondents as the main barriers, but there are still challenges in terms of the ever changing digital arena: 29 per cent of respondents say they simply don't know which tools are available.
Infectious Media director of technology and operations Daniel de Sybel isn't surprised. "The pace of change is astonishing. I've been working in the industry for 10 years and I've seen as much change in the past two years as the previous eight. We do a lot of work with Facebook and, on that platform alone, the past five months has seen more changes than the previous two years. The sky is the limit and this is part of the problem - people are used to a restricted environment, and if you give them too much choice they get scared."
Among the metrics where industry experts and leaders expect to see notably increased usage is sentiment analysis. "We do this across a range of channels, from blogs to message boards to Twitter. It means that, for the first time, we have real-time customer feedback. Accurately understanding this is the first step to improving what we offer," says RSA marketing director Dominic Grounsell. "But while the tools available for sentiment analysis have been around a long time, they are not as sophisticated as they could be, so we use an agency with a large team that manually checks every comment."
Tools such as Klout are expected to gain pace, while click-throughs look set to continue to be an important measure of engagement. And while the numbers of fans or followers and comments are also likely to be increasingly used, digital marketing trainer and consultant Daniel Rowles believes it's share of voice that will matter more in future. "Although 500 tweets can look impressive, if your competitor has 5,000, it's not," he says.

A winning strategy

But marketers need to actively analyse what's behind customer behaviour in social media, Rowles suggests: "I expect to see more traditional surveys, which marketers would previously have done in the offline space, but which get forgotten in social media. This can be particularly useful where quality of conversation is high, but doesn't link to sales."
eCircle head of sales Tom Bailey expects to see more marketers combining metrics. "Customers access multiple social sites and digital touchpoints. Businesses need to be able to pull all those different data streams into a central point to create a single customer view. This is the only way to truly engage with your customers and achieve cross-channel marketing, but at the moment, this can be complex," he says.
PA Consulting social media expert Nathan Sage says that social media data is often not harnessed because this is still viewed at board level as a tactical channel, for pushing out information rather than for gathering valuable insight.
"Just this month, however, we had a client who gained such good market intelligence that they completely changed how they built their product and took it to market," says Sage. "Marketers need to be monitoring social media in a much more strategic way."Marketers have been trained with a campaign mentality, planning and executing for one-off bursts of activity, whereas the real-time nature of social media often goes against their campaign road maps, says Euro RSCG London's head of social media Claire Adams. "As a result, investments in social media often come once a negative online story breaks or in response to a PR crisis. A further struggle for marketers is analysing and interpreting the incredible amount of social data they have at their fingertips and turning it into actionable results to satisfy pressures from the board, who are looking for tangible business benefits."
The digital industry, Adams says, is very good at inventing new metrics, but very bad at assigning values to them. Marketers are often left feeling at sea, trying to translate the value of a follower, fan or social engagement against pre-existing sales metrics, she concludes.

Technical hitches

Half of the businesses surveyed don't collect data from social media at all, according to the CIM report, which also found that those that do lack purpose - only one in five marketers say their goal is to integrate social media with CRM data.
But Rowles believes it won't be long before this changes. "The link between social media monitoring and CRM systems is set to be important," he says. "The more you know about your customers, the more you can target them and go to market in a much smarter way. At the moment, the problem is that it can be a complex, major IT headache."
Communisis Data Intelligence managing director Jon Cano-Lopez agrees. "The behavioural information in social media is rich - opinions are plentiful and social advocacy is undeniably potent, but it's tricky to automate and reliably assign the detail to existing CRM data," he says. Collecting data from social media is like herding cats.
The reliance on time consuming and expensive IT integration will end, agrees Bailey. "The focus will be more on the strategic side, with data being fed from agile software that can be plugged in easily. The growth of cloud computing as a marketing tool will certainly help businesses better utilise data to produce more personalised and targeted messaging across all channels."
Sage's Beard is among those who believe great strides have already been made. "With a bit of clever work with CRM you can have something like the Twitter feed pouring in and keeping an eye on key words. That's easy to run because you just watch out for someone shouting badly about you and turn that into an activity, driven through CRM, to process in the same way as any other customer management activity. Other companies are saying, 'We are already doing e-marketing and have campaign metrics around that - so now let's market based on, say, the profiles we've got from LinkedIn'. There's loads of good information about this online, with marketers sharing details about what has and hasn't worked for them."

Eyes on the prize

For many companies, however, all this is putting the cart before the horse, insists Infectious Media's de Sybel. "Some of the biggest problems with linking to CRM are because many people, including those at the top, don't have well defined goals. I worked with one company recently that said, 'We must do social. In fact, I reckon we should send out e-mails to everyone who responded to us on Twitter'. They couldn't have missed the point more if they'd tried. Companies need to remember they are being given an opportunity to have a dialogue with each of their customers directly. Start by working out what you want to find out and why, and then what you want to say."
Marketers should not rush into measurement and data collection because it's the "thing to do" or because their competitors are doing it, agrees Webtrends VP technical services EMEA Conrad Bennett. "Marketers also need to be realistic about the amount of resource they have for such a project - an issue that respondents to the CIM survey highlighted as a problem. The key to success in all cases is having the internal expertise or access to experts who can interpret the data to enable data driven decision making," he says.
Social media may be the latest thing, but it's not the only thing, he adds. Depending on your industry, it may not be representative of your customer base, featuring only a small proportion of your market, the rest of whom are offline.
"The online world is characterised by extremity of emotion - people either love something or hate it and it can all spiral very quickly," says Rowles. "Marketers have to adjust to that and remember that people expect responses very quickly. But rather than seeing on and offline behaviour as different, I believe overall behaviour is being changed by digital. Rather than thinking of digital in terms of being a channel, see it as a catalyst for a change in consumer behaviour that all marketers need to adjust to."
Boards can be particularly guilty of thinking in these terms and can also be slow to recognise that digital isn't only for the young. Fast growing numbers of older people are on Twitter and Facebook, yet boards often equate social media with youth.
Likewise, says Beard, not enough boards realise that small companies can gather insights just as well as large ones. "Smaller companies are more nimble and agile, so they can use social media insight to get ahead of the big guys. Many of the monitoring and measuring tools are free or low cost, and easy to use," he says. "There's another myth, often held at senior levels, that social media is for B2C. While it's true that B2C marketers tend to use social media more for engagement, B2B marketers are increasingly using it to gather intelligence."
Although CIM found that nearly half of the businesses surveyed claim to be both aware and broadly familiar with data and privacy legislation, deeper analysis around individual regulations - including the CAP Code 2010, BCAP Code 2010 and proposed European Commission Data Protection Directive changes - revealed that understanding of legislation is woeful.
Osborne Clarke data protection partner James Mullock believes smaller businesses often assume they're safe. "Because legislation is becoming increasingly complex, I think there's a feeling that they could defend themselves easily enough by saying, 'Hey, we tried'. But there are signs that regulation is becoming more punitive and companies should waste no time in giving someone in the business responsibility for understanding these areas. The privacy practitioner profession is growing, so there's plenty of external counsel to draw on, should they need it."
There's no doubt that investing in robust measurement strategies allows brands to optimise their marketing messages more effectively. You only have to look at Procter & Gamble, which gained 11 per cent market share for its Pepto Bismol upset stomach remedy in just 12 months using social data. P&G listened to people complaining about overindulging at the weekend and used social media to begin a conversation with these customers.
But it's clear there is some way to go before marketers crack the nut of listening and monitoring, a fact that certainly should have ears pricking up in all boardrooms.

by Kate Hilpern

I was amused by the above "Europe according to the Greeks"
I have other ones for the British, Turks, French and Americans.
Watch this space!

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I have found myself increasingly putting the service I receive from organisations into one of two categories either "outstanding" or " lousy" - there doesn't seem to be just 'average' any more. I've introduced therefore "Golden Helicopter"