#evalue was created in 2012 when #engagementlabs account managers were meeting with CMOs, marketing executives and social media managers to determine what service or product offerings they needed going forward. Clients wanted to know two things: Where they stood in social media and how to justify a social media budget.

Some social media consultants and agencies choose to focus on increasing fans and followers. They do their marketing à la “Mad Men”, thinking that the best strategy lies with traditional advertising and broadcasting their branded message to as many people as possible. #evalue stands out by its refusal to follow this pattern. We believe that sending a branded message to the masses isn’t what’s going to make you stand out. It’s going to make you sound robotic and passé. You need to make the right statement at the right time to the right audience. That’s where we come in.

#evalue was created to provide Social Analytics Software to companies. We all know that many other tools have been created for the exact same purpose however;  what sets us apart is our willingness to change the paradigm to fit our own social media philosophy. The essential question to answer then becomes: “How do I maximize my social media efforts so that I can convert my audience?” Our answer: Empower customers with the right tools, maximize their insights and minimize their time and effort.  That was a tall order. We regrouped with our team and determined that the best social engagement is when dialogue flows to adapt to new challenges and changes.

So, we assembled #evalue to give our customers the means to reach new heights in their social media campaigns. Our tool analyzes data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and lets you know exactly where you stand by measuring your efforts against yourself and your competition. We also designed and developed features including our Efficiency Calculator, Trend Analyzer, Optimization Library, Alerts and Social Benchmarking.

We have been in beta for the past little while. We met our users and they told us what we needed to tweak, what we got right and what still wasn’t performing the way they wanted. So we went back to the drawing board and worked our mouse balls off to present a better, shinier version and now, we feel we’re ready. We’re not going to lie. #evalue is pretty sweet.

We’re excited and proud to share this tool, our baby. We want you to check it out, play with it and see the simplicity. We want you to use the tool daily and love it as much as we do.

#evalue team

Social Media offers tremendous opportunities for organizations large and small, across b2c, b2b and not profit industries. It can help companies with customer service, reaching potential clients, sharing promotions, recruiting, and even product development. Just being social should not be the goal in and of itself though; your company should enter with commitment, objectives and a plan.

The exact focus and scale of your organization’s presence should depend on a few key factors:

How Many Platforms? It’s better to do one platform extremely well than many poorly. Leaving long gaps between posting and having unanswered questions will alienate your clients and look unprofessional. Start small and expand your presence as your comfort and success grows.

Which Social Media networks? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+? Your choice of networks should depend on where your target audience is active and the type of content you will be producing. Finding an active automotive-care group on Pinterest might be a challenge; likewise if you’ve never shot a video in your life, YouTube might not be your avenue of choice. Take a look around to see if there is an active community around your product or service and if your skills and interests match up.

Who should implement/create our strategy? This is where a lot of companies stumble. The voice on your social media channels should be the voice of the company, not that of an intern who knows little about your brand and will be out the door in 2 months. Most companies will benefit by including numerous members of their team but should ensure that someone with a firm understanding of the company and social media oversees it.

What should the tone and manner be? Ensure that the voice of your company is consistent, conversational, and that you avoid excessive self-promotion. If multiple members of your team are working on it, it’s best to explicitly note the brand’s tone along with do’s and don’ts. Many social media disasters could have been avoided with this step.

What do you hope to achieve? The goals for your social media efforts should be in line with your overall business and marketing strategy. Depending on the complexity of your company, this could require a thorough report or could be written on the back of a napkin. It’s important to keep some flexibility in your goals and to re-evaluate them periodically. If your goal is to increase your user base but the majority of your users are complaining about current offering, you may want to refrain from posting offers and focus on customer service.

Once you’ve established this baseline, it’s time to get started. An ounce of action is worth a pound of theorizing; experiment, have fun, be flexible, see what resonates and what falls flat.

If you have questions, or topics that you’d like to see covered in the future please post in the comments section or email us at contact@engagementlabs.com.

Biggest fear when it comes to social media for business?

In answer to the multiple choice question, “Which of these issues represent fears or control issues around social media in your corporate or institutional setting?”, respondents overwhelmingly chose “Time drain caused by need for rapid and continuous interaction”. This, over than the possibility of “Activist or angry consumer backlash through corporate social channels” or “Loss of control around brand message”, is what makes companies hesitate. And rightfully so! Social media management does take more time, especially when compared to pumping out a few press releases or approving a full page spread in a newspaper. While the former practices are on their way out, transitioning to an ongoing daily dialogue with consumers and stakeholders will mean more hands on deck to keep up.

Biggest stumbling block for greater social media adoption in a company or institution?

Here, the vast majority identified “Difficulty of demonstrating ROI from social activities” as the barrier to greater adoption over “Lack of proper technical skill set among internal teams” or “Extra legal work to clear all the content before publication”. Return on Investment is indeed a critical question that the VP approving a social budget is bound to probe. Many have written on this in general terms but finding numbers specific to each company’s situation is a lot of hard work. Still, as with all disruptive technology, I predict the request for ROI figures will wane as time goes on. Since we are in the early days of social media in the business setting, the adoption of this ‘novelty’ is viewed with caution. I am sure that, if we dug back through company archives in the 90s, we would find many reports on the ROI of ‘opening a space on the World Wide Web’.

True stories of social media in the workplace:

Here I handed the mike over to you. Below are some highlighted responses from respondents with some info changed to preserve anonymity.

“A platform like yammer has allowed us to bring people into social networking…a nice way to introduce people in a company… a softer way of landing people is to allow them in as individuals rather than official spokespeople…”

“Employees are theoretically empowered to speak on social media platforms (in our case a technical blog), but no time is set aside to actually do this — a good blog post can take several hours to write.”

“I worked for an engine manufacturer that embodies the characteristics of a dinosaur that does not know how to evolve. They created a facebook page to celebrate an anniversary but access to facebook (along with essentially every other social media site) is blocked from inside the company. Nevertheless, they were surprised that people didn’t visit or share their facebook page enough!”

“I work in the energy industry which has been very reluctant to embrace social media for fear of anti-industry backlash. However, there are some companies starting to leverage power of social media to spread their corporate and industry messages. In those cases they have one dedicated social media manager that has a marketing background that is given fair amount of “leash” to provide commentary/blog posts and interact on social media channels. I think handing over that control is a difficult concept for conservative industries.

“My organization established 3 years ago with 4 employees were very to adopt to various Social media. However as the size grew (we are now 300+) the control mechanism got saturated or rather diluted. Use of various medium became ad-hoc more like a corporate grapevine. Some serious concern areas have control over brand identity, corporate & marcomm, associate output work time. IN effect we had bring in some organization curbs not really cutting out everything but kind of sizing down on certain popular and specific media/forums.”

What needs to change in the corporate or institutional setting…

Again, selected responses from you edited for length and anonymity.

“Understanding not just ROI provided by effective and strategic social media execution but also the impact & advantages of involving the entire organization in using social media to communicate the corporation’s vision and values.”

“Companies need to understand that social media is not a waste of time but an essential component of life in the 21st century. This will be even more prominent as generation C (for Connected) hits the work force! The fears of wasting time are the same timeless fears that managers had when phones on every desk were becoming the norm and when email came out!”

“Legal and management review processes need to change because they don’t allow efficient interaction and responsiveness on social media. Management education on how social media could benefit the company industry and allowing senior marketing professional(s) “ownership” of social media outreach.”

“Everyone needs to understand the corporate message and believe in it. Then stay on message whenever they communicate. In the “old days” the PR dept could control the message. Not the case anymore.”

Do the above ring true with your experience? Feel free to add testimony of your own in the comments section below or email it to me with a request for anonymity at: tom.liacas AT engagementlabs Dotcom.

Corporations (and all large institutional players) desperately want to stake their claims somewhere on social media because, more and more, that’s where the party’s at. Trouble is, they suck at being human and being human is THE core competency that social media demands of its users. The crux of the matter, I believe, is that the etiquette of social media exchanges confronts the power that big guys are used to wielding in communication spaces. As a result, we routinely witness the following varieties of antisocial behavior.

The Psychopath

What kind of individual would decide that a time of mass suffering and hardship was good timing for a joke or sales opportunity? A psychopath, right? Well, this is exactly the kind of behavior that was driving the most notable social media #fail episodes of late. To wit, Kenneth Cole poking fun and selling shoes during violent Arab Spring protests or American Apparel surfing the wave of tweets around Hurricane Sandy to offer some good deals. How do such senseless posts happen? IMHO, they are products of a culture in which business is divorced from social realities… Where any group of people, even those united by suffering, becomes a good target market. Off work, I believe that the very same people who penned these tweets would never have considered doing the same from their personal accounts.

Missing social skill:

Human empathy. Those in charge of social should always consider that their posts and responses will be received by people with feelings (Yes, I feel ridiculous writing this). The urge to bomb audiences at any time with a marketing message should always be tempered by the following questions: “What do I, as a sentient being, feel in this situation? What kind of post would I publish to mark the occasion?” Trusting one’s human instincts over corporate prerogatives would work wonders here.

The Robot

If someone entered a cocktail party and began spouting one liners over and over without listening to others or answering any questions, you might well check their back to see where the batteries go. And yet, this is exactly how hundreds of corporate brand pages operate on Facebook, even today. These pages are used as bulletin boards where one-way corporate announcements are pushed out daily with either no effort made to engage with the audience or willful refusal to open any kind of dialogue. When you cut and paste a traditional broadcast operation into the social setting, you create a robot. Would you delegate a robot to represent your company at social functions?

Missing social skill:

Conversation. Social media is a two-way street. Listening to your audience and engaging with them occasionally are not just nice things to do, they are the basics of legitimacy on this medium. Neglect to converse and you will be mocked and shunned sooner or later. De-activate your online robots. Replace them with humans.

The Airhead

At the time of writing, many corporations have tackled the feat of amassing thousands, if not millions, of fans and followers on their social networks.  They now face the much greater challenge of finding something to say to their audiences, day in, day out, regarding their toilet paper, antiperspirant or kitchen mop. The result? Hundreds of thousands of words of vacuous copy and anodyne feelgood photos clogging up broadband worldwide. The amount of trite fluff out there is so vast that there are now fan pages dedicated to featuring the dumbest brand material online. How can this tide treacle be stopped? All brands, even household products, can plug into what people really want to talk about regarding the product: How to fix it if it’s broken, what the company is doing to improve its social and environmental footprint and… well, if you’re running out of things to say, is there really a need to maintain a 2 million person Facebook community around your product, messaged daily?

Missing social skill:

Time to get human!

Here is recent post from my socialdisruptions.com blog. It also speaks to where #engagementlabs came from and the strategies we apply here to create social media engagement.

I recently came across an article by the venerable Tim O’reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media) on LinkedIn. Aside from laying down some core cultural wisdom around the social media gift economy (which I think very few marketers understand), Oreilly mentioned the fact that, in his company’s early days, they hired a campaigner from the Sierra Club to do their marketing and PR and have stuck with the ‘activist’ approach ever since.

Our thoughts on engagement leading up to the Social Media World Forum in New York November 27th and 28th. #engagementlabs is sponsoring this event and our CEO Paul Allard will be presenting on a panel with other  social media thought leaders.

I think most of us planning our trip to the #SMWF will agree that, in 2012, ‘engagement’ is as towering a buzzword as ‘Web 2.0′ or ‘cyberculture’ were in their day. Heck, at #engagementlabs, who are we to point fingers? We’ve taken this buzzword and built our brand on it!

All the same, as ubiquitous as the word is, ‘engagement’ in the mouths of different speakers means so many things that the concept has gathered a lot of fuzz around it. So here’s our attempt to pin it down to some concrete principles.

In the offline world, engagement is a touchy-feely word used in Human Resources and Marketing literature to express the quality of a stronger connection between people and their peers, objects, messages etc. Its meaning is context dependent and it is most often a qualitative rather than quantitative value. It is our impression, that these offline uses of ‘engagement’ often get transposed to the digital setting and muddy the waters.

To those shaping the DNA of social networks, however, engagement is anything but a soft value. It is the heart of a crucial relevancy filter that is instrumental in fighting information overload in settings where thousands if not millions of pieces of content are being exchanged daily.

As we know from all of our stats programs, social networks attribute numeric values to the various expressions of engagement such as likes, comments, retweets etc. To judge what pieces of content or which users deserve more attention than others, algorithms such as Facebook’s EdgeRank have built an elaborate reward system based on the number of recorded ‘engagements’ that content and users were creating.

Basically, it’s all mathematics. The more you accumulate engagement points, the more you will be seen. Conversely, broadcast content without engagement and you are throwing money at an inefficient use of social networks.

For the marketer, always a numbers fan, engagement as mathematics should be a reassuring image. The only tricks are how to measure it accurately across social media platforms and how to adjust content and strategy to make sure you are getting all the reach you can out of social networks. In other words, optimising for social.

On the measurement side, there are now tools which tap into social network APIs and tell you immediately how much engagement you are generating relative to your community size. These kind of interpretive results are key because, at a certain size, all communities look like they are generating engagement. The question is, how much is enough? The answers lies in benchmarking your communities’ score against that of competitors in your sector to see if you are ‘winning the engagement battle’.

On the content side, the key is to start real social media conversations that answer to your target audience’s first order concerns and create genuine scenarios for interaction. Social networks are designed to be peer to peer conduits for multidirectional conversation, not broadcast. Brands must monitor actively and seek out the conversation opportunities that give their public an active role in the exchange. If you are a brand that refuses to listen to your audience and instead, tries to push fluff on your audience day after day, you can kiss your engagement (and a solid ROI) goodbye.

Tom Liacas.
@tomliacas is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategist at #engagementlabs

Recently, I called out on LinkedIn to get some case studies from energy professionals and I thank those that gave me a hand! This post is a selection of recent social media mobilizations against energy projects and how industry has chosen to respond (when it responds at all).

Wind Power Opposition:

I want to start with this because it seems counter-intuitive. Who’s opposed to clean energy, after all? Well, it seems that wind projects are drawing more and more heat from local resident associations who do not want turbines close by. This reminds me of the energy industry view of public desires: B.A.N.A.N.A. or Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. I hear from Dawn in North Carolina that such opposition has recently entirely shut down a wind project. Here are two other examples, one from Massachusetts and another from Ontario.

http://www.saveoursound.org
http://ontario-wind-resistance.org

Oil Company Attacks:

There are surely dozens of examples here, the most recent of which is the dual campaign against Shell waged by Greenpeace and the Yes Men. The spoof postcard campaign slamming Shell’s Arctic exploration plans sure got a lot of attention! I have written on this in a previous blog post linked here.

Anti Shale Gas and Fracking :

Shale gas is causing an energy revolution in the U.S and, as it is a new technology that captures the public imagination (not in a good way), opposition abounds online. Fears about water contamination, earthquakes and ravaged countrysides make for viral content and those opposed to this industry are also very advanced content creators.

The website below is probably the best illustration of the messaging and content quality produced by the anti-fracking movement:

http://artistsagainstfracking.com

Energy Industry Responses:

The energy industry is entering social media at different speeds. I have personally approached the wind power sector to offer assistance on this but have been told that they would like to ‘wait and see’ how things develop. On the oil and gas side of things, where opposition has been more intense, there is more activity. Here are some highlights:

• Already back in 2009, Shell was hosting live webchats (Shell Dialogues) and inviting NGOs to discuss their concerns directly with Shell reps. Archives of these chats are hosted online here.
• Shale gas player Chesapeake Energy has begun responding to opponents directly through a blog/twitter strategy. An article on this from the Nieman Lab on journalism is linked here.
• Energy in Depth, a U.S. industry-funded initiative operated by FTI Consulting, runs a series of blogs, twitter and facebook accounts featuring content that aggressively refutes activist and journalist views against shale gas development.
• Michael Binnion, CEO of Canada’s Questerre Energy, is an advanced social media user, writing in his own voice and taking on hard questions and opponents directly through his blog and twitter account.
• And finally, Shaletalk, a project we have personally helped get off the ground, funded by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers invites public and industry to exchange Q+A on shale gas through a blog platform, a Facebook Page and Twitter account.

Originally published on socialdisruptions.com, the blog of #engagementlabs Chief Strategist, Tom Liacas.

This past September, Facebook made adjustments to its Edgerank algorithm, the mechanism that determines how often and how prominently content from different sources appears on a given user’s wall. Given the fact that some global brands have spent millions buying ‘likes’ for their Facebook Pages and that the new changes in Edgerank dramatically affect the reach of branded content, they have been publicly decried by advertising execs, notably those at Ogilvy and WPP.

Tom Liacas, Chief Strategist of Parta Dialogue’s #engagementlabs division, welcomes the changes. “At #engagementlabs, we have always maintained that the best ROI from social media efforts is achieved when money is put on engagement strategy rather than paid audience acquisition. Social media is a conversational medium so it is only natural that Facebook seeks to further reward content that generates interactions between users and give less reach to promotional messaging,” states Liacas.

Liacas points to results obtained from Parta Dialogue’s eValue™ Social Media ROI Suite, a software as a service tool currently measuring the performance of over 20,000 corporate Facebook accounts. “Time and again, results show that a smaller Facebook community, if it generates high levels of engagement, can outperform a much larger community. As brands pay more and more to reach the same audiences, engagement is the only variable that can be used to measure the cost-efficiency of social media campaigns,” states Liacas.

More information on the eValue™ Social Media ROI Suite can be found at the following address: http://www.evaluesuite.com

About Parta

Parta offers Social Media and Social Learning solutions to its clients from offices in Montreal, Toronto, Paris and Mexico and is the developer of leading eValue™ Social Media ROI Suite: www.evaluesuite.com

Many visionary businesses already employ Parta’s solutions for internal and external online engagement. Among these are Renault, Orange, Michelin, Hydro-Québec, Iusacell (Mexico), Dassault Systems, Nestlé Waters and Crédit Agricole. www.partadialogue.com
PARTA is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol PAD and operates through two subsidiaries:

#engagementlabs, an all-digital agency offering a targeted range of social strategies, customized engagement platforms and analytic tools to measure performance and ROI totally focused on social engagement & optimization: www.engagementlabs.com.

edu-performance, totally focused on internal engagement and productivity, Edu-Performance offers customized Social Learning and online training solutions: www.eduperformance.com.

Other Information

Completion of the acquisition of M30 has received conditional approval from the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. but the TSX-V has in no way passed upon the merits of the acquisition of M30 and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

“Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.”

Contact Information

Paul Allard, President & CEO
Parta Dialogue Inc.
+1 (514) 831-4245
paul.allard@partadialogue.com

Tom Liacas, VP Social Media
Parta Dialogue Inc.
+1 (514) 771-5120
tom.liacas@partadialogue.com

At #engagementlabs, we have modeled the eValue Social Media ROI Suite on the logic used by social networks to calculate engagement to measure whether or not a company’s social efforts are getting the returns they deserve. See what it’s all about here: http://www.evaluesuite.com/

In the video below, you can hear our Managing Director Tom Liacas defending the necessity of social media ROI calculation at the 140 Conference in Montreal this past summer.

Back-to-school sales are nothing new. Every store has them, and they’re advertised all over each brands social media accounts. Some take it a step further by creating giveaways and contests where you “like” or “tweet” them to enter and win. All these tactics are fine and well, but does it translate into more notebooks bought? In this case, new clothes and supplies for school become a necessity, and retailers expect a boost in sales at this time every year. The market has become not a question of if they’re going to buy, but what are they going to buy?

It’s that age old question. Who are the social influencers deciding what your kids want to get in order to impress their friends at school? Believe it or not, it’s not the clothing or school supply brands, or the retailers, or even celebrities. It’s the girl with the fashion / makeup / relationship video blog your kids are watching online who decide what they need for that oh so important first day of school. You should never underestimate the power of a 14-year-old girl or a twenty something showing off on YouTube all the super cute stuff they just got at Target.

These videos, Tumblr pages, and Pinterest posts full of real people’s purchases are the best shopping guides ever made. Its hundreds or thousands of trendy young people letting millions of others know the awesome deal they just got on that perfect pair of jeans, and they have no problem with naming brand names and telling you where they like to shop. Brands and marketers have yet to capitalize on all this literally free publicity.

We live in a time where someone with a webcam, basic knowledge of iMovie or Photoshop, and an opinion on anything can be a moderate to huge internet sensation. Kids these days have become so “camera ready” that they already know to not say anything too inflammatory online to avoid getting ridiculed by their peers, or worse, turned into a meme. They also know the art of proper lighting and acoustics in a room to best present whatever they have to say to an online audience.

These are all things brands pay ad agencies for. We should use these self-promoters who promote their favorite things; because one person’s post about their favorite backpack is a brand’s extra few hundred sales. Whether its back-to-school supplies, or makeup, or what they had for breakfast, those with followings and fans on their YouTube pages and other social media accounts are the influencers of this generation. But more importantly, those millions of people watching them are buying what they are inadvertently selling.