Social Media and Marketing

IN-DEPTH: Carnival Cruises’ Stephanie Leavitt on social media monitoring and analysis

Published: 22 Sep 2009

IN-DEPTH: Carnival Cruises’ Stephanie Leavitt on social media monitoring and analysis

Tools continue to emerge for social media monitoring and analysis. These offerings promise to lend a new dimension to how organisations monitor and measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns.

Solution providers believe that capitalising on actionable data from the social web today can be related with the opportunity which was there 10 years ago at the start of web analytics and digital marketing.

New developments in this space are significant since consumer voices on Web 2.0 platforms can exert huge influence in shaping the opinions of other consumers.

In the travel industry, companies acknowledge that it is essential that brands are aware of and monitor conversations that are happening about them in real-time so they can understand how their customers feel and can also protect their reputation where necessary.

A lot also depends upon how companies approach their social media initiatives and what they expect out of it.

For Carnival Cruises, monitoring is a daily activity.

“One of our mantras at Carnival is “communities are conversations not campaigns”. Monitoring for us is a daily activity and involving a variety of team members also helps maintain our efforts. Some people may be surprised at how many departments/individuals are affected by what happens online on social networking sites,” Stephanie Leavitt, manager, online publishing, Carnival Cruises told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta.

Leavitt says the industry has come a long way when it comes to real-time online monitoring.

“A few years ago this consisted of someone manually monitoring sites and keeping track of ongoing conversations. RSS feeds and Google/Yahoo alerts provided free ways for marketers to monitor online conversations and more recently companies such as BuzzMetrics, Radian6, Cymfony, etc. have made it easier for organisations to really stay informed. Responding to every conversation is almost impossible. It’s a marketers job to determine which conversations need to be addressed and which just require observation,” said Leavitt, who is scheduled to speak at Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe Summit 2009 to be held in Prague (October 13-14) this year.

What is monitoring all about?

Monitoring can be very subjective, says Leavitt.

Some organisations simply use monitoring to watch “chatter”. Carnival uses monitoring for a variety of reasons including tracking sentiment, message reach, customer service, feedback, etc.

“How your organisation uses these monitoring dashboards really depends on the goal of your overall programme,” said Leavitt.

Finding the right balance between participation and observation is part of the challenge of social media.

“It’s almost impossible to respond to every comment or question about your brand. There is also something to say for too much participation. If a brand representative begins responding to every comment found online it can come across as defensive and might scare consumers off. Today’s consumer is aware that “big brother” is watching and they expect some level of participation but moderation is key,” says Leavitt.

Carnival only responds to direct questions it receives via its blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook.

Online measurement

Travel companies must be very clear in their objectives before they proceed with adding features such as videos, blogs or other UGC.

These features can be useful tactics towards objectives such as branding, promotion, SEO, building content or soliciting market intelligence. In each case, it is crucial for measurement to be aligned with goals.

The two most important factors for launching a web feature/project, according to Leavitt, are having a clear objective and method to determine if the objective was reached.

“If social marketers can establish an objective and success metric there shouldn’t be any measurement challenges. There may be some challenges in obtaining the goals we’ve hoped for, but the measurement part should be “easy” with all the tools now available,” said Leavitt.

On the whole, the industry has made great strides in improving online measurement.

Carnival, according to Leavitt, can now track and measure engagement, sentiment, how often consumers return to carnival.com, if they clicked on a Twitter link that drove them back to carnival.com and if it resulted in a purchase, etc.

There has been a lot of hype related to the application of text analytics to social media. There has been a call for actual analysis of social-media content that relates the content to the networks: how information propagates, who the influencers are, what topics and type of information propagate fastest and widest. It is believed that text analytics isn’t really there yet, not broadly as applied to social media, but progress is being made in this arena.

Overall, keeping track of the latest developments in monitoring and measurement is recommended.

Every day the industry grows, so measuring web activity is endless, concluded Leavitt.

Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe Summit 2009

Stephanie Leavitt is scheduled to speak at Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe Summit 2009 to be held in Prague (October 13-14) this year.

For more information, click here:
http://events.eyefortravel.com/sales-and-marketing/conference/online-mar...

or contact:

Gina Baillie
gina@eyefortravel.com