How to talk to your boss about social media, Part 3: Do your research

No boss in her right mind wants the brand for which she’s responsible to be a guinea pig in a social media experiment. But if you do your research, it isn’t hard to demonstrate that experimentation isn’t necessary.

This is the third installment (see one and two) of the ongoing discussion about building your case for social media within your organization. This post focuses on the research side of helping you prepare for the initial social media conversation with your boss and outlines some of the ways to use social media to conduct your preliminary research.

So, what research should you do to prepare yourself and how should you do it? I suppose that depends on what your company does and whom it is targeting. But here are a few general things to think about to get you started:

Demographics: Who uses which sites? How old are they? Do they have kids? Did they go to college? What is the household income spread of those users? The following three sites are good resources for answering these types of questions.

Quantcast.com: Free site offering demographics on millions of sites, also gives examples of other sites that each site’s users are likely to visit.

Compete.com: Site traffic on any site, user trends available for free. Paid “pro” subscription offers greater detail and depth.

Attentionmeter.com: Enables you to compare reported traffic data from all of the above and more, since generally the numbers do not agree from site to site.

Competitors: What are your competitors doing in social media? Are they doing it well or badly? What can you learn from their approach?

Use each site’s incorporated search functions to search for key words, company names, groups/fan pages, products, services, etc. Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube each have them integrated in their sites, as does Twitter. But also try Twellow.com and search.twitter.com to deepen your Twitter searches.

You’ll end up with dozens of examples, if not hundreds of examples of accounts and pages that are done both well and ineffectively. Narrow down the examples to a few of each, to demonstrate that you have thought through the necessary complexities of doing things strategically and appropriately for your company’s brand.

Unrelated category market leaders: What is interesting about what they are doing in social media? What can you learn and is it adaptable to your product/service?

Which brands are your friends & colleagues “fans” of? Can the Bacon fan club on Facebook demonstrate any value in your argument (>257,000 fans)? I offer that somewhat facetiously, but there’s more to it than that. What makes bacon such a unifier? Social media is a magnet for common interests, passion topics, tangible personalities. Does your brand have the potential to tap into any of these?

Business outcomes: Is it possible to see a connection between the social media strategies you are finding and the outcomes they are likely working toward? Might they drive sales? Web site traffic? Retail store traffic? Awareness? Customer service?

Sorry, no shortcuts here. But look to the sales leaders (amazon, Apple) and customer service advocates (Zappos, Best Buy) to demonstrate how they use social media to catapult these specific functions into excellence. Case studies abound on the interwebs. MarketingProfs just came out with a great list of 11 companies using Twitter successfully for measurable outcomes. But you have to buy the report unless you’re a member. Worth it if you really need to sell the idea.

Here is a list of some resources, by site, that might help you dig for the information you need:

YouTube
YouTube Insights = allows account holders to track viewer demographics, dates, times, etc.
YouTube Search = search of site content, key words. Use the search box.
YouTube Suggest = most common search terms/combos are displayed as you search so you know what people are looking for/want and how they choose their words.

Facebook
Facebook.com/Lexicon = tracks and graphs key word usage on Facebook.
Facebook.com/Pages = create groups and compile demographic insights on members.
Facebook.com/Advertising = extract available demographic data without having to buy ad space (see Alec Saunders’ blog).

LinkedIn
LinkedIn.com/Answers = see what is being asked and who is answering the questions.
LinkedIn.com/groupsDirectory = see what groups are out there already for your product/service (or not).

Twitter
Twitter.search.com = search for your keywords to determine frequency of use
Twellow.com = enables search of bios, location, keywords for your targets and locations

Blogs
Technorati.com = ranks leading bloggers by category
Blogsearch.google.com = search Google for bloggers by topic, keyword.

Overall for this discussion, knowledge is your friend. By no means do you need to have answers to every question your boss asks. But if you’ve done your homework, if your passion for the importance of the topic comes through in your presentation, and if your boss is smart and open to your brilliance (and not intimidated by it), then your conversation will likely go extremely well.

As always, we’d love to hear from you with your feedback and experience. And yes, in my blog posts, the boss is always female.