Enjoy.

Study and post are are the result of another collaboration by Shelly Kramer & Wendy Goldman Scherer

If you’re a brand or agency engaged in the business of working with parent and mom bloggers (or influencers, brand advocates–whatever you’re calling them these days) for best results you should really think beyond the blog. What? Courting bloggers and not turning a laser focus on their blogs, their traffic, their subscribers, the other places they hang out online and the like? Those are as critical a component of success when it comes to social outreach yet in our experience these are areas often overlooked by agencies and brands when it comes to outreach campaigns.

The Digital Lives of American Moms

Let’s back up for just a minute and talk about the power of mom and parent bloggers. According to The Digital Lives of American Moms, Nielsen 2012, one in three bloggers are moms and some 27.9 million American moms visited Facebook in the month of March, 2012 (which was a whopping 72% of moms who went online from home computers in the United States). 5.4 million of them used Twitter during that same time period and some 165 million are blogging using either WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger. That’s a whole lot of purchasing power–and connecting with those influential moms is an objective for brands and agencies alike. Some additional interesting facts about these moms are below:

Source: Nielsen

And Our Mom Blogger/Influencer Survey Says

Let’s dive in a little. We work with bloggers and influencers a lot. So we ask them often about things that matter to them, about their habits and preferences and where they hang out online. Results of our recent survey demonstrate that over one third of the women surveyed spend more than 40 hours per week online with over three-quarters spending more than 20 hours per week online.

Over one third of bloggers surveyed spend more than 40 hours per week online.
So how are these women spending the rest of their time online?

How much of that time is working on her blog? Surprisingly, more than half of the respondents report spending fewer than 10 hours each week blogging.

When breaking down their time online, bloggers reported that 32% of their time is spent on Facebook and 22% on Twitter. Over 17% spend their time on other people’s blogs and participating, engaging, guest posting and sharing. Another 8% of their time is spent on Pinterest. Why should you care? Because the bloggers and influencers you’re targeting for your outreach efforts–and as potential customers–are so much more than bloggers–they are social. Period. In fact, they sometimes get the social space infinitely more than the brands and agencies that seek to engage them. And they definitely spend way more time online, knee deep in the influencer trenches, than many of their brand and agency counterparts.

Are they driving traffic to their blogs from other platforms? Yes. The chart below confirms it. Thinking about where these women are getting their blog traffic, we see the same general pattern with 31% of traffic coming from Facebook, 12% coming from Twitter, 7% from Pinterest, and 13% from other people’s blogs. Bloggers and brand influencers are networked, community minded and participating in a myriad of different ways on a myriad of different channels. Daily.

Additionally, there’s valuable engagement that stays native on Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook – engagement that you won’t see on their blogs, but engagement that also has true value for marketers.

As might be expected, bloggers with sites seeing 2,500-9,999 visits per month are the most diverse in their social media usage and those with 10,000 or more visits a month are next. And there’s a good chance that these are the bloggers represent the sweet spot, or what we like to call the “magic middle” of potential brand advocates and influencers with whom your brand would like to work.

Bloggers with 2,500-9,999 visits per month are the most diverse when it comes to cross-platform usage.

How Does Your Campaign Play Across Different Platforms?

More and more, we’re seeing (and often working with) smart brands who develop and launch campaigns that are designed to integrate with other marketing efforts and work across platforms. So part of your strategy should definitely involve asking how your proposed campaign plays across different platforms? Have you provided strategic guidance and direction, content and visuals and tools that will allow your brand influencers to be successful? Have you set up sharing for your brand and brand partners across those platforms? And equally as critical, are you working, on a regular basis, to create a legitimate presence across those platforms and not just hopping over there ten minutes before your campaign launches?
Campaign management can be a daunting task, but if you’re not developing and coordinating your outreach efforts to the folks who are playing in those channels, you’ll ultimately only realize a fraction of the success you might otherwise experience for your brand campaigns.

Blogger outreach is outdated nomenclature. We’re talking about social outreach to influencers and potential advocates who can, given the right direction and the right tools, do what it is all marketers and brands want—and that’s to drive awareness and, more importantly leads and sales. It’s critical that you take into account the diverse nature of online behavior and traffic patterns when you’re planning outreach for selection of people to work with and in developing tools and strategies that will equip them to promote effectively and help you reach your goals. And if you need help, you know where to find us.

About the Survey

The short survey, fielded in 2012, had nearly 300 respondents of whom over 90% are women with children. Over 98% are based in the U.S.

About Shelly Kramer

Shelly Kramer is the Founder and CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing. A 20+ year marketing veteran, she’s an integrated marketing strategist, brand storyteller, digital marketing pro, content marketer, speaker and corporate trainer. Recently recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 50 Social Media Influencers, she’s half marketer, half geek, with a propensity for numbers, producing results and a dash of quick repartee. Her client experience is diverse and includes working in both B2B and B2C markets. Her blog has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 20 Best Marketing and Social Media Blogs and by PostRank as one of the Top 100 Most Engaging Social Media Blogs. You have to follow her on Twitter. Find her on LinkedIn or read her blog.

About Wendy Goldman Scherer

Wendy is the managing partner of social media research firm, the Social Studies Group. Read more about her here.

The bigger the blogger, the better, right? And it’s all about the blog’s page views, unique visitors and stickiness. If you’re a brand working with an agency and doing outreach with bloggers, this is where you typically start. But this brand new study from the Social Studies Group and V3 Integrated Marketing shows you might just be missing out on reaching a bigger mom audience.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/192242/missing-out-on-the-bigger-blogging-audience.html#ixzz2JeqvmhVf

It’s a short, eight question survey for parent bloggers and it will feed our latest research project. If you haven’t taken it yet, would you? It’d be a huge favor and pop over and take it? The survey is here. We promise to share the results once the study is done!

Oh, and as an added bonus, if you complete the survey and are interested in participating, there are drawings for prizes that include baubles, books and fabulosity.

The first 2 winners (Jenny & Erica) have been randomly selected and notified. Jane, tell them what they’ve won!

There are 3 more prizes. And they’re fab, too.

We know you’d do the survey just to be awesome, but a little incentive is nice too. N’est pas?

Here’s another link to the survey. Just so you don’t need to scroll up. I’m nice that way.

Influence measurement platforms like Klout, PeerIndex, Twitalyzer and others claim to be able to identify “influencers” and, if you don’t dig too deeply, you might think they’re right. But to our way of thinking, while we have great respect for the some of the creators of these services and the tools they’ve developed, there’s still a lot missing. Numbers – or data – in and of itself, does not knowledge make. And, logically, numbers, algorithms and the like don’t in and of themselves define influence.

Hypothesis: Forget influence: We need knowledge and insights to make good decisions. Period.

How do we get there? Business analytics have historically been considered the quantitative analysis of data for decision-making. It’s nothing new. But the type of data has expanded beyond a controllable universe. And the qualitative data can be infinitely useful and can’t or, more importantly shouldn’t, be overlooked.

Data is not knowledge. Data is data. Knowledge comes from understanding the subtle and not so subtle trends and irregularities in the data. In context.

And once you have properly analyzed contextual data then, and only then, are you ready to consider things like influence.

Let’s Talk Knowledge

What kind of knowledge consumer are you? Some of us revel in the deets. (Wendy) Some of us revel in the revelations (Shelly). Some of us live for the process and some for the result.

How do you get what you need without spending your days as analysts? How do you determine what information is valuable to you, what influencers matter for a particular campaign or what contextual revelation has the most significance? We’re sure you have better things to do. Like your job. What do you need and what don’t you need?

Analytics for Better Strategy and Decision Making

Start with analytics. Please don’t overlook the importance of what you already have (or should have): website analytics, newsletter statistics, blog stats, friends, fans, etc. There’s a lot to learn by looking back to learn about profitability, customer interaction, market shifts and use to predict and plan for future success.

You can’t analyze everything. You can’t hire a big enough staff or find enough time in the day. So how do you decide what and how to consider? What are the REAL business questions? What can you take action on? What are (we know, sigh) your objectives? Well, here are the steps we recommend:

Listen 

Simply reading and hearing what people are saying in aggregate is not the same as listening. You don’t need to be a trained researcher to know that people say things for a reason – there’s context there. Understanding the drivers, the size and influence of the voices and why it matters will lead you to better insights.

What do you need to know? 

• Know your customer
• Know your company
• Know your strengths
• Know your opportunities
• Know your competitors

Why do you need to know? (pssst, this is that pesky “goals” part)

• Affect change
• Reputation management
• Become engaged
• Improve (sales, community citizenship, ROI, reputation, position)

Insights for strategy vs. insights for insights

Tools get you to the data. But the data isn’t the story. Tell your story and back it up with good solid thinking.

The Seven (or more) Stages of Social Analysis

We believe that what has so many people tripped up is that we’re all used to getting information input, categorizing it, and drawing conclusions. Well, folks, that doesn’t work in qualitative social analysis and here’s why…it’s fluid. No sooner do you have a universe of results to analyze, oops, whaddya know — there are more to consider.

Top that with the sheer volume and sets of universes that could be considered – shut the front door. Don’t get discouraged. Recognize the one true thing when it comes to data:  You’ll never have it all and you’ll never be finished. Never.

And as you’re doing all that discerning and learning, keep in mind some important considerations that can be extremely beneficial in helping you draw out useful knowledge:

• Demographics – Who is talking? What are the differences by gender, by age, by geography?
• Online geography – Where is the conversation happening? What are the differences by platform, by network? Similarities?
• Influencers – Who is affecting the conversation strongly? How can you learn from them or even involve them in your success?
• Who are those influencers connected to, talking with, sharing with?
• Content – Are people asking questions? Talking to each other? Talking to your brand? Talking about your brand? Recommending? Criticizing or complementing?
• Common themes, keywords and phrases, messaging that resonates.

It’s about context

Data alone is just data. Data combined with context is powerful. That’s what you need to be seeking – always. Mine the data, then focus on context from which that data came. We talk about this so much we’re afraid people are going to start running when they see us coming. However, context is critical. Overlook that element when it comes to listening in the social media space and your subsequent research and analysis and you’re in trouble. Especially if you’re selling those services to clients. What people are saying in the context of everyday life matters so much – and is so rarely taken into consideration.

Behavior is telling – especially when it comes to social media. People want to belong. They want to connect, communicate, share, listen and interact with their online friends. And whether you believe it or not, to a vast number of people, the relationships they have with their “Internet friends” (as Shelly’s husband likes to call them) is a really important part of their lives.

And brands and monitoring tools and practices are failing in a huge way when it comes to considering context and the context of human interaction. To our way of thinking, the only way to apply context to online interactions and the data you can get from monitoring and listening tools is to integrate people into the process. Fail that and risk the results you think you’ve ended up with being inaccurate

This means looking beyond the queries, the numbers, the semantics and the number of brand mentions. It means digging deeper. Discerning patterns, threads that you can unravel – and/or weave together, to form a pattern. This means remembering that humans comprise the social landscape. And when you make the mistake of just relying on a tool to deliver data and thinking your work is done, you’re setting yourself up for not only disappointment, but also for inaccurate results.

So do it right. The data delivery is just the midpoint. Once you’ve got the data, that’s the time to apply human brainpower and critical thinking. Don’t stop until you understand the context of whatever data it is you’re analyzing, how how that relates to your ultimate goals. If you try – just a little, you’ll be amazed at what the consumers that you’re listening to are really telling you. It’s there. You’ve just got to want it.

Things We Forget (but shouldn’t)

Articles and press releases and feed pickups are not social media engagement. Should you track them? Should you know what’s being said? Absolutely. But if you want to engage with your audience (and we know you do), it doesn’t matter a lick if there’s content that talks about changing weather patterns. Nor does it matter if it gets picked up by every RSS scraper out there.

Does it add to the overall volume? Perhaps. But in our minds, not in a way that should matter. Content, intent and people matter.

What About Goals?

Goals are the beginning point of any objective, campaign or initiative. We mentioned this above in the seven steps, but because it’s so often overlooked, we’re laying it out for you here. Whether it’s measuring success, competitive analysis, reputation management – every action in the act of listening and monitoring should start with goals.

What are your monitoring goals?

• Are you looking to gain insight into consumers’ language and thoughts?
• Are you monitoring for competitive analysis purposes?
• Are you monitoring for product research & development purposes?
• Are you monitoring to improve customer service?
• Are you monitoring and gathering intelligence for new business prospecting purposes?
• Are you monitoring for every day brand awareness and mentions, so that you can potentially get out in front of any potential crises that might occur?
• Are you monitoring a specific campaign to see what kind of results it’s delivering so that you can tweak and modify accordingly?
• Are you monitoring because you care what people think, say or need?

We hope that no matter how many of the above you say “yes” to that, most importantly, the one you’re nodding about is the last one. Successful marketing, PR or communications of any kind hinge on that last point – actually caring what people say, think, want and need. If you know those things, you can position yourself to win – just about every time.

And a Note About Tools

You need social monitoring tools. Not using monitoring tools is a sign of so many things. Arrogance. Ignorance. Cluelessness. None of them good. More importantly, it’s quite simply akin to asking for disaster to strike.  If you value your brand and your brand reputation, monitor it. Period. There’s no excuse not to do so.

That said, we hope that most everyone is monitoring their brand name in some way – even if it’s just with Google Alerts. While this is important, don’t overlook the need to monitor the space related to your business. Not only can you learn a tremendous amount about your industry and consumer behaviors and desires, you can learn about your competitors, unfulfilled opportunities, and find ways to personally engage to help position you and your company in the greater space.

The thing about tools – they don’t do the job for you – they assist. Just like surgeons use scalpels to operate and handy men use drills to make holes, the tool is just that – a tool. Operated by someone who knows what they’re doing and who knows what they’re looking for. Equally as important, they know what to do with it – in this case, data – once they find it. No matter what any one of the seemingly bazillion “social media monitoring tool” providers out there might like you to believe, social media monitoring solutions are not one-size fits all and they are NOT plug and play.

There’s a whole separate post we’ll write specifically about tools, but just know going in that there’s no one out there that’s perfect – at least not that we think is perfect. And that sometimes a combination of multiple tools for multiple purposes can be a good way to get what you need.

Technology is a Beautiful Thing

It is. We love technology. And while we’ve made incredible progress on the technology front in the last few years, data in and of itself, without interpretation – without context – isn’t really all that valuable. People drive data. Situations drive data. Context drives what that data means and what you can ultimately use it to help you accomplish.

Think less about you and more about them. Listen to what consumers say about your products, where they say it, how the say it and the context in which they say it. Pay attention to consumers. They’ll tell you just about everything you might want to know. But only if you’re listening. And putting what you hear into context.

And, as our friend (and fellow data geek) Tom Webster likes to say, ask better questions. And do the work.

Data is where it starts. Context is the midpoint. Great decisions are what follow.

About my Co-Author

I co-authored this piece with my good friend and frequent collaborator, Shelly Kramer. Shelly is the CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing, a full service digital communications agency. She is a marketer, strategist, content creator, speaker and social media savvy geek focused on digital media and all forms of digital strategy, content strategy and creation and online marketing. To the astonishment of her many mathematics professors, she’s also become partial to stats, numbers, analyses and measurement of all kinds.

She’s a brilliant strategist, brand builder, and thinker – and one of the most wonderful and geekiest people I know! If you get the chance to hear her speak, I promise you’ll learn something. Meantime, follow her on Twitter. You won’t be sorry. Not only will you get great info (she’s very generous with sharing!), but she’s very amusing. Oh, and did I say smart? Big time smart.

You can find her online at V3 Integrated Marketing, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

This article first appeared in The Social Media Monthly Magazine, in May of 2011.