Measuring the Impact of Messaging Using Social Media
Heading back to Boston last night on the Acela I caught myself using my spanking new iPhone to see where I am on Google Maps every five minutes. At the same time I started to put together this post because I wanted to update everyone on the topic of messaging we discussed in December. My apologies from the beginning, this is about work I am currently doing with a client of our firm, but I found it particularly exciting. At that time I was in the midst of a cross-country tour of positioning workshops for a couple of clients. At the time I wrote:
I absolutely love this exercise, it illuminates the disconnect between what customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners see as your core value proposition.
We are about a month removed from these meetings and I thought we would revisit one of the results witnessed after a positioning workshop and how social media allows us to create a barometer to measure impact. One of our newest clients is TalkShoe and we had a series of terrific messaging meetings with our combined team in December. TalkShoe is already a very popular tool for people looking to conduct podcasts and interactive calls with people. The goal was to create positioning that reflected TalkShoe’s evolved direction into social media and social networks. I’m not going to bore you with all the details of the work, suffice to say we conducted loads of research, including talking with current users and deep analysis of what the community was saying, followed by a day-long workshop held in our Boston offices. There are many deliverables that come out of this meeting but the one I wanted to share was what the combined team came up with to describe what TalkShow enables:
“community calls”
And the tagline:
“Your Community is Calling”
We left our meetings very excited about these words. We believe that it properly describes how TalkShoe empowers its users. But what we (we being the PR team and the client) think is certainly not the most important…it’s the users, and we were anxious to see what they thought.
It has been about two weeks since the messaging was put out to the public and using social media tools we can monitor how the community feels and if they are embracing the terms. I was, of course, pleased to see the terms coming up on Twitter several different times, blogs and even a Google search (already fifth).
As someone who is working to integrate social media into the PR world I really love to see this type of movement within the social media realm after a positioning exercise. I believe that positioning/messaging is an evolving practice and something to always review with your customers/users, and you must monitor how people are reacting to the message. Your community is going to be the people who embrace and propagate your messaging, or reject it outright. Use social media to check in with your community directly and indirectly, you’ll be amazed at what you learn.
Would love to know what you think and how you are using social media to help your messaging.
/kff
