Post On:January 17, 2013
Congratulations to Todd Sobrado on receiving Google AdWords Qualified Individual certification. We will be rolling out Google AdWords PPC management and consulting services in the very near future so please check back soon.
Please let us know if you have any questions, need more information or how we can try to help you software development, PPC, or social media problems.
Post On:December 20, 2012
How would a small or medium-sized business use Social Surveyor?
We have received several questions from testers as to how a small to medium sized business would use Social Surveyor. This post will look at how ‘Dave’, a typical small business owner would use Social Surveyor to run his online marketing campaigns. Dave sells a product and service in his target market, which is regional in nature covering an area of several surrounding states. He also has seven employees who work for him.
Post content online
Dave is active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a couple of other social networks, has two blogs for his business, and a couple of online newsletters. He is able to easily distribute all of his content from one place to all of his marketing channels with the click of a button. Dave is also able to monitor the results of his postings from the same place. This results in Dave being able to do things much more quickly and efficiently compared to how he used to run things.
Create a social media campaign
Campaigns and sub-campaigns enable Dave to organize his posts and content around his marketing goals and objectives. He is able to group and track the results of related postings around a common theme, such as campaigns, holidays, seasons, promotions and more. Dave is also able to see the results of all of his campaigns posted through the site and drill down to see results by sub-campaign or posting.
Schedule Campaigns and Sub-Campaigns
Like most business people, Dave is a busy guy. Running his business needs to come first before his online strategy and not the other way around. Using Social Surveyor, Dave is able to create campaigns, break them down into postings and schedule distribution to his social media platforms, blogs, and newsletters. He is able to do all of this from his Social Surveyor account. Once scheduled, the software will take care of the rest leaving Dave to run his business.
“Listen” to what customers are saying online
Using Social Surveyor, Dave can track conversations taking place online by keyword. When a keyword is used in a conversation, the conversation is picked up and shown within Social Surveyor. Dave then has the option of doing nothing, jumping into the conversation, or passing the conversation onto Molly, his office manager for follow up at a later time.
Dave is able to track conversations taking place online about the things that are important to him. Such things include his business, his products or services and his competitors. When a conversation comes up, Dave can either do nothing, jump into the conversation, or pass the conversation onto Molly, his office manager for follow up a later time.
When a conversation is picked up, the software will classify the conversation as either ‘positive’, ‘neutral’, or ‘negative’ based on the words used in the conversation. It will be up to Dave to make the final determination as to the writer’s sentiment when they wrote the post.
Molly, the office manager will often receive conversations for follow up when Dave is very busy. Molly takes whatever action is needed and Dave can track her activity through the site. Dave is also able to assign access to Social Surveyor to other employees to help out when needed.
Sentiment analysis or ‘listening’ is not only a great way to hear about what others are saying about what is important to Dave, it is also a great source of new ideas that Dave can use as content for his prospects and customers.
Sentiment analysis can also serve as an early indicator of emerging trends. Knowledgable individuals will often write about emerging trends before they become event and are picked up by bloggers, the media or goes ‘mainstream’.
Look for and address customer service issues
In addition to monitoring what people are saying about things that are important to him, Dave uses sentiment analysis to manage customer service issues.
There is no limitation in terms of what is shared using social media. People share both their good and bad experiences with the brands that they interact with on a daily basis. Sentiment analysis enables Dave to monitor for potential customer service issues. When something comes up, he can quickly address it then and there so that the issue does not become a problem.
For Dave, a negative review is an opportunity for him to turn a dissatisfied customer into a happy one. By jumping in and addressing the issue to the customers satisfaction, he is in many cases able to gain a repeat customer. Additionally, people who learn about the customer’s problem are much more likely to view the negative customer service issue favorably when it is resolved to a positive outcome.
Monitor activity being directed to the website
Dave’s goal for being online is to generate more leads for his business, which in turn generates more sales. This not only happens when a customer picks up the phone and calls him, but also when a customer visits to make a purchase or requests a contact to make a sale. Where a prospect makes the ‘conversion’ to a customer is on his website. Dave is able to view the activity taking place on his website through Social Surveyor. This enables him to see the relationship between his work generating activity through his social channels and the results on his website.
Summary
Social Surveyor has helped Dave to streamline and organize his online marketing activities. This has resulted in Dave being able to do his social activities more efficiently resulting in more time to run his business which translates into more money at the end of the day.
Click here to sign up for Social Surveyor today.
Post On:December 2, 2012
For anybody who is engaged in content marketing or is maintaining a blog, they, like most are challenged in finding sources of good ideas to write about. I for one have been and continue to be challenged by this.
In researching things to write about, I came across some great resources for ideas that I will share.
1. Write about the questions that you are regularly asked by clients, customers, friends, or family. A question that you are frequently asked can be the title and your response is the blog post. For a clothing retailer, a sample question can be what is the most popular style or color of sweater this season? For an accountant, a sample question could be what is the biggest change in the tax code this coming year? Your answer to these types of questions within your respective industry is the subject of your blog post.
2. Google Reader is a web-based news aggregator, capable of reading atom and RSS feeds. You can subscribe, select the topic or topics of items of interest and Google will show you all of the RSS feeds collected fro what it is that is of interest to you. There can literally be hundreds of different sources depending upon what you have selected to follow. This is a good way to also identify trends in whatever is of interest. When you have identified a topic or trend, write a summary or your opinion of your subject matter.
3. Use a social media content mining application or sentiment analysis tool to see what is being said on social media about what is of interest to you. There is software available that enables you to track what is being said by keyword on social media. The software will listed for keywords that you select that is being discussed in public social media conversations. The keyword you select to follow can be your company, your brand, a service you provide, a competitor or anything else you would like to follow. The software will identify and report back a public conversation that contains your keyword(s). Some software will enable you to join in on the conversation or attempt to summarize the tone of the conversation taking place. This information can be valuable so you can see how people feel about your topic right now.
I hope you find this information helpful. I would like to hear your feedback or questions or anything you have to say about this blog post.
Todd
Post On:November 16, 2012
Do you use social media or content marketing as part of your job or business? We invite you to use our software at absolutely no charge in exchange for your feedback.
Socialsurveyor.com is a social media dashboard / content marketing platform that enables users to create, distribute, manage and monitor all of their online marketing activity from one place. Key features about our software includes:
- Distribute content to all of your social media accounts
- Manage and track all of your activity as a campaign or sub-campaign
- Create and distribute content to your blogs and enewsletters
- Monitor what others say about your product, service, company or competitor, and more
Socialsurveyor.com is We are looking for people to use the site in exchange for providing us with feedback that will help build a better product.
Please go to
www.socialsurveyor.com to sign up or to get more information and send an email to todd[at]socialsurveyor.com with questions.
Post On:November 12, 2012
I am just absolutely blown away by how quickly time goes by. The Holiday Season is quickly upon once again and before we know, it will be 2013.
This past July, I posted an update opening up Socialsurveyor.com in a limited beta release. Here we are in November and we are finally ready open up the site to users.
There are several reasons for the delay. The most important reason is that we have been making some improvements to the software.
Key improvements include:
- Expanded coverage of sentiment analysis
- Coverage of your website with Socialsurveyor.com reporting and more.
We are looking to launch officially this coming week so contact us for more information or check back this coming week for additional information.
Post On:October 8, 2012
It has been some time since we made a post onto our blog. Like many of you, we have been very busy working on client projects and new directions. We are working to provide more frequent updates going forward.
Some new things that we have been focusing on include:
Drupal
We have been working with many of the more popular content management systems such as Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, ModX, ExpressionEngine and more for many years in some cases. We have stopped working with Joomla, ModX and the others in order to focus on building up our Drupal team. For as long as we have been working with Drupal, we have been thoroughly impressed with Drupal for the following reasons:
- It is a content management framework rather than a content management system. In other words, one can do so much more with Drupal than with just a CMS.
- Excellent documentation and support
- Scalability, robustness and flexibility
We are working on several very large and exciting Drupal projects now and will be writing about
E-Commerce
E-commerce has been growing in excess of 10% per year since the beginning. This year, ecommerce is expected to continue to grow at a double digit rate.
We have several years of experience with Magento, OS-Commerce, Joomla carts and even built our own custom shopping cart. In setting up e-commerce websites for clients, we have learned that selling online is really made of three different things. They are:
- Marketing: Driving people to your website.
- Website: Where you make the sale.
- Analytics: How you see where people are coming from and what they do on your site.
All three elements need to be run concurrently in order for an e-commerce initiative to be successful.
We will be writing more about ecommerce in future posts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the process of improving a website or web page’s visibility to the search engines. There is on-page SEO which are those things you can do to your own website to improve visibility such as titles, descriptions, navigation, and content. Off-site SEO consists of those things that improve visibility that is not on your website. This includes such a thing as optimizing for keywords/phrases to create backlinks.
While SEO has been around for some time, it is still very important in driving ‘conversion’s or sales to your website.
Content marketing
Content marketing is an umbrella term that relates to the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage an audience in order to drive a conversion or sale. It includes social media, blog posts, e-newsletters, infographics, videos and more. We have found that content marketing is complementary to search engine optimization nd should be done hand-in-hand.
Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, analysis, collection and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding Internet usage. There is both website analytics which monitors your website and there is social media analytics which monitors social media activity. The leading website analytics tool is Google Analytics which is available for free. However, you may have some costs associated with installing the code that enables tracking and setting up your reporting.
Information that can be obtained from Google Analytics includes
- how many people are visiting your site
- where your visitors are coming from,
- what they are doing on your site,
- and much more.
Social media analytics will reveal such information as to how your content is being viewed, shared, and used and by whom, where and in what numbers by social media.
Web analytics can be tremendously useful in monitoring the success of your online marketing strategies, social media activity, and website conversions.
In the coming days and weeks, we will be posting content on our blog discussing the above subjects and more. If you have a suggestion of what you would like to see, please let us know. We welcome your comments and we hope that you find this blog useful.
The SecureNext Team
Post On:July 25, 2012
In my last blog post, I had mentioned that we were going to be doing a beta release yesterday or today. I just wanted to give an update on the process.
I have shown some people the site and have received some excellent suggestions from some that have viewed the site. We are in the process of incorporating those suggestions into the site. As a result, we are delaying the release until this weekend at the very latest.
We apologize for the delay but we feel that it was important to delay the release until some issues could be addressed.
Please contact me at todd(at)socialsurveyor.com to sign up for the beta release, if you have questions, or need more information.
Todd and the Social Surveyor team
Post On:July 23, 2012
We have great news! We are releasing Social Surveyor as a limited beta release to 250 people tomorrow. If you are interested, please go www.socialsurveyor.com and provide us with your email address. We will send an email to you tomorrow with your log-in information to the site.
There is absolutely no charge for using the site during beta testing. However, we would ask that you provide us with feedback in order to improve the software. Additionally, we will send you an email every now and then just to follow up and see how use of the site is coming along.
Just to recap, some of the functionality in this release includes:
Distribute: Distribute your content to your social media accounts. This includes status updates, photos, videos, events, blog posts and newsletters.
Campaign Timeline: Distribute your content as a campaign and sub-campaign to better organize and track results.
Sentiment Analysis: Track what others are saying online by keyword.
Blogs: Post content to your blog.
ENewsletter: Create different distribution lists to send your newsletters out.
Google Analytics Integration: Track activity to your website from Google Analytics through Social Surveyor.
and more…
Please contact Todd at todd(at)socialsurveyor.com if you have questions or need more information. We look forward to your participation in our limited beta release.
The Social Surveyor team.
Post On:July 17, 2012
It has been some time since we have had an update for Social Surveyor. Since we last provided an update, we have increased our service offerings in an effort to stand out in an already crowded field.
Social Surveyor started as a social media management dashboard which provided clients with access to all of their social media accounts in one place. Clients were able to post, distribute, manage and monitor content to several social media platforms at the same time, saving time running their social media campaigns.
Since then, Social Surveyor has since been expanded into a content marketing platform. In addition, to the functionality mentioned above, additional components have been added including:
- Campaign Timeline: create a campaign or a smaller sub-campaign, define the effective time period and upload your content to your social networking and blog accounts. Campaigns you can create, upload, and manage include status updates, videos, photos, events, deals, blogs and newsletters.
- Blogging: create a campaign or sub-campaign to upload content to your blog directly or post an update to your blog as part of a larger social networking campaign.
- Newsletters: create and manage lists of prospects and clients to send your emails newsletters to. Through Social Surveyor, you can track and monitor who was sent what, who opened your emails, read them, and more.
- Sentiment Analysis: monitors conversations taking place in social media and reports back the discussion on your dashboard so if needed, you can cut into the conversation to add your feedback or guide the conversation in another direction.
- Workflow Management: Assign additional users to your Social Surveyor account to distribute comments from the sentiment analysis tool for further action. Users can create ‘support tickets’, assign categories to those tickets, and track progress being made by staff on tickets generated.
- Social CRM: Contacts made through all your channels in Social Surveyor are maintained on one list so you can track a prospect’s or client’s progression from initial prospect to client. This is just a starting point for what we have in mind for this functionality.
- Campaign Analytics: Analytic information for all of your campaigns and sub-campaigns are reported on the Campaign Timeline page. Reported data includes viewers, likes, and so on. The reported data will depend on the platform content was uploaded to.
We need feedback from users at this point. We will be releasing in limited beta in the next two to three days so please contact us if you would like to sign up while the site is in beta. There is of course no charge for the time being.
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