Both consumers and retailers zero in on Black Friday; one for attractive deals, the other for increased business and profits. The latter are keen to cash upon the opportunity each year. There’s even an ‘official’ Black Friday site purely dedicated to the deals, promotions and offers from big retailers to encourage you to drop in and buy. All this hoopla and the inevitable throng of crazy Wal-Mart shoppers, in a way flies in the face of what social networks are supposed to do: engaging potential buyers more effectively.
What if there was a proper way for retailers in order to grasp, in near real time, how well they are engaging their prospects – a reliable social index of the ‘share of conversation’ that existing and potential buyers are having with the brand. Knowing how they respond or engage obviously would be conducive to offering better experience for buyers, and generate more revenue, than gimmicky promotions. Trust and reputation, credibility and interest are core elements, which drive ‘share of conversation’.
The ‘share of conversation’ that a brand has can indeed make a big difference. A product failure can be amplified by the size of a brand’s share of conversation; the larger the share, the wider the ripple. Since over 90% of a buyer’s time is spent researching and socializing their purchase decisions, a brand’s “share of conversation” becomes a crucial determinate of success and, in some industries like retail, a forward indicator of their “share of wallet”.
A recent article in The Forbes quotes media expert Ron Ladouceur as stating that social marketing opens exciting opportunities to create lasting relationships with customers. What’s perhaps needed is a retail social index to give brand managers a real-time, accurate ‘share of conversation’ performance plus trending data with drill down capability. It’s nothing but the ability to check how a brand is doing compared to your top competitors on a daily basis and fathoming the peaks & valleys of changes in ‘share’ so as to know what they’re doing differently or grasp how the buyers are evaluating a new product or company initiative.
In fact, a new ‘share of conversation’ index to be launched for the retail industry by Media Logic will measure social engagement for over 500 brands across Twitter and Facebook, to be extended to other social channels. The index will measure effectiveness of intensity of brand-centric conversations on a daily basis, to enable retailers quickly spot trends, promotions etc for effectively driving buyer engagement.
The Index will correlate engagement trends and compensate for mitigating variables such as the number of ‘likes’ per brand and also the engagement pattern changes as a brand grows. The Social Juice Index will gradually be expanded to other industries. It will measure the Buyers Journey; end-to-end, and provide an easy metric of buyer engagement on par with search ratings and similar such metrics businesses use today.
