The Evolution of Social Media Dashboards: What You Need to Know

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to best leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of social business unplugged. And as promised, I'm here in Atlanta, Georgia in the swanky W hotel here in Midtown Atlanta for the social shake up, be moderating a panel in a little bit on social Big Data and community and how to derive value from all the data to help you develop new products. Hopefully, I'll have a summary of that for my next podcast. But this podcast, it's always a pleasure and honor when you go to a social media conference, and you meet someone for the first time that you've had a long relationship with on social, but you've never had a chance to meet in person, and especially if that person is a contributor to maximize social business. And here I am right now with Tammy confederal of the founder and CEO of marketing suite. Hi, there. Neal, great to be here. Great to have you, Tammy. So marketing suite. And whenever, in fact, yesterday, I was teaching Rutgers University, and we were talking about social media dashboards. And whenever I have my module on Twitter, I go well, there's reasons why when you get really active on Twitter, when you're on LinkedIn, you can use linkedin.com, facebook facebook.com. And if you have a personal account, a business account on Twitter, you need a dashboard. And we go through the dashboards. And I think the ultimate evolution of dashboards, starting with twitter.com. And then TweetDeck, Hootsuite, which is a column based approach, and then Sprout Social marketing suite, which is the evolution to to an inbox approach, which I think is the ultimate, the more app mentions and direct messages yet it does become an inbox, right. And I know marketing suite was there first, in realizing that and developing the product, but I also told everybody in the audience that, you know, the social media data at the end of the day becomes a personal experience. There are many of us on social media that actually have we pay money to multiple vendors to get access to multiple dashboards, because we like certain things about some and some about the others. To me, I just want to ask you, in general, without going into your product right now, which we'll get into just the evolution of social media dashboards, how businesses are using them, how they should be using them, how you see that evolution, you want to just start with a comment on that. Sure, sure. And I hope all that made sense. No, it

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 2:16

totally, totally made sense. And I think I think you're entirely right there, there has been an evolution in it. And I still remember when we were in England, because we started off as a UK company. And my CTO said to me, because we were at Adobe AIR app and marketing suite started, if anyone's like a diehard old, like, TweetDeck, yeah, we started that we thought, oh, Adobe AIR was gonna be a great idea, live and learn. But, you know, we knew we were gonna do web based model, and he stood there. And this was, you know, a while ago, now a couple of years ago, and he said, You know, it's got to be an inbox. And I said, elements genius. You know, I understand I understand what you're saying. So inbox for social was kind of born out of that, you're right, when you say that, or a small or a business page, when you deal with a business, a business account versus a personal account. And I'll even extend that into Twitter and LinkedIn to an extent, because what happens is, and we deal with a lot of small businesses and professionals, is you wear a lot of hats. And yeah, we don't ever try to recreate linkedin.com, we don't try to recreate facebook.com. But we do, what we do try to do is bring everything together. So that you can be you can flag in your mind, okay, this just occurred and I need to deal with it. Much like when you get an email, you don't always answer it right away, you don't always do it, sometimes the email is just to remind you to go off and do something else. But that approach to social that everything is happening kind of all at once. And you just need a way a way to organize it. So I think from a business perspective, businesses are being forced, by just the way social media is evolving to get a little more integrated, and really get organized so that once you organize, you can then prioritize them. Once you prioritize, you can actually gauge but missing those first two steps, could mean that you're just you know, you're approaching it from all different angles. And you could burn out on that and not actually get the true value out of using something.

Neal Schaffer: 3:53

And it's funny that we're talking about this. Another thing that I mentioned records, and I was just talking about this with Tammy is that I often recommend that and I had a conversation with someone who's still using social zoom, right? We're talking into it, I'm like, What do you like about social and well, I have the ability to schedule messages. I'm like, Well, did you know there's like five other dashboards that give me that ability now, right. And therefore I think with the evolution of technology, I always tell my clients every three months or so do an audit of all the dashboards out there. Obviously marketing suite is one of them. That's you know, I don't think you've you have the the money that HootSuite has gotten, or the the publicity or PR team that they have. But being the first inbox and as a user myself with marketing, understanding the ability to absolutely customize everything that I see in the inbox. In other words, it seems like the Hootsuite to the world are very much developed in an analog, these your app mentions, you can do a search. It's a very siloed approach. Whereas you've created a true digital product that says these are the things that are important to me. I have five different accounts. I have a Facebook, LinkedIn, what have you. These are, you know, five different Twitter accounts, but at mentions from this account is going to be the first priority. And then I have the ability to flag them and when those flags be But to notify people internally, this is what I need them to do, and actually create inboxes for different business objectives. Absolutely. So it's that ability to customize it, I think I'm almost wondering because you were so ahead of the crowd in terms of having that inbox, you're still ahead of the crowd by saying, Hey, you can manipulate all the social messages in a way to tie them a business objectives and work more efficiently internally. And most companies still haven't gotten there yet.

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 5:24

Yeah, and that's, that's been our that's been our challenge. And I have a lot of respect for HootSuite. And the team over there is just fantastic. I mean, what they did for the social world, how they proven out the concept that social can work for business, and where they're going with taking it more enterprise and really taking what was a you know, very small and simple concept and growing it into these large organizations, you see very large companies now using Hootsuite, and they have multiple teams. And that's great. And the data is wonderful. Where we found our sweet spot at market me sweet is that we don't want or need our companies to, or small businesses are professionals or solo entrepreneurs or bloggers, we're not expecting them to ever grow up and be Coca Cola, we want them to continue to be the best, you know, business that they are the best, the best social engager that they are. And we tried to build a tool that is very, that fits their unique needs and part of doing it in an inbox and not siloing it is because there isn't there's a lot that's going on. And nearly I know you push the boundaries of market receive, because nobody quite has so many followers as you. But But But But for many for many people, it's not such a tremendous amount of data. But the data that the message is in the prioritization, that that's there when you can figure out the most important conversations, it's incredibly actionable. And figuring out the conversations that you want, that you have that you should be having is half of the battle for smaller organizations. And that's where that's where we try to excel. And we sometimes will have larger companies who will be using a Hootsuite for some of their enterprise stuff, or even using a radiant six. But they have a team within a team that is a smaller social media team. And they'll choose to use something like market research our marketing suite specifically, because it just facilitates easier engagement and working as a team for just the really just really drilling down to finding those important messages. And then across you know, Twitter is quite heavy for organization. And then even just the simple thing of being just alerted when you have a Facebook notification on your fan page. Again, you're gonna go off to Facebook and deal with that. But just to have an inbox that just says hey, you know, deal with this, you know, you just got you know, you just got a notification, somebody's just like this that just reminds you you can flag that you can remember for later to go off and do it. Because you're not always going to be able to we all like to think that we can, you know, text, you know, drive, you know, get on a plane, do everything and do everything while retweeting our community manager, Allison flew with me to to Atlanta for this, and I swear to God and the entire Atlanta airport, she didn't look up once, because she was I was like, Alison, you're gonna kill yourself. This is just This is like leading her like, like, she's she's so she was socially blind. But you know, because there's just so much she's our community manager. Obviously, there's a there's a lot going on. But she always breathed a sigh of relief when she can get to her computer and sit down and really just organize it because you're Go, go, go, go go. And that's fine. You know, there's an iOS integration for Twitter, Facebook, all that. But then what about when you want to sit down and really think about it, and really drill down to what the hell just happened, you know, did I just, you know, tweet with this person and do that. It's like, follow up. And we were joking. Before I said, the only problem with conferences, and this is a great conference, the social shakeup is that sometimes people get conference fever, and they get really excited about meeting everyone. And then they just wind up, you know, everything, just all the business cards just fall on the floor when they're done. And it could be the same thing with social, you can be out there doing it all in real time. But if you don't actually take that deep breath and spend 10 or 15 minutes a day, that's literally all it takes to just say, Okay, what happened? You know, where can I perpetuate these conversations? Should I mark this? Should I flag this for later? Is this person? Is this person considered a lead? Did I schedule up enough messages to keep the conversations going, you know, who should I be, you know, and all that stuff. So that's where we really try to step in and fill that void.

Neal Schaffer: 8:58

That's great. Yeah. And just you know, the Facebook notification, you can live in a world where you're sort of tied to the notifications coming from each separate platform, the emails coming from each separate platform, when it can be in one dashboard. And there's already studies that show when you have everything in one place, the efficiency, and obviously you blog on maximize social business about social media productivity, that efficiency can be pretty huge over time.

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 9:19

Absolutely. And I love it. I love my new column. And there'll be another one coming out coming out in a couple of weeks. Because being socially productive is hugely important. We've implemented a lot of things just in our business, just as a startup ourselves, not just across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But there's a host of other kind of, I'll call them tier tools, tier two tools. So they're not directly the consumer, but they're for the business inter, you know, just interdepartmental communication that helps you be socially productive, but and I think just, there's so much going on out there. We live in an incredibly connected world, like, I don't know, my son is going to grow up and he's only going to have known a world where there was an iPad in his hands like, that's very, very interesting. He's three and a half and he has a blog. He He has a blog everyone he asked he, he one day told me he was gonna go to work. He took his little 10 laptop computer. I said, Oh, that's so great. Honey, you working at market nice, sweet. He says, Mommy, I have my own company said, Well, what's it called? He says, duckling. do.com. I said.com is going on here. So of course, being the good mommy, I immediately registered that he actually blogs every every couple of weeks. And he types it himself and does and does all that. But this is a kid three and a half he's already pushing data into into the world that you can imagine when he's in his 30s, you know, the levels of organization that's going to have to be layered on top of this digital world. Yeah. So hopefully, I think, you know, maybe we'll maybe he'll listen to this in 25 years and be like, Well, mom was really onto something. And then he'll build the next, you know, the next big thing

Neal Schaffer: 10:45

here as a cloud score of 85, by the way, but anyway, he's beating me. But yeah, I mean, in some way. And just to tie into the panel on monitoring and big social data, you what you've done with marketing suite, in essence, is try to take this data that comes from all of your business, social media accounts and manipulate it in a way that it wasn't intended for. But for business efficiency,

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 11:04

absolutely. You can argue it was intended for it, because all the social networks want you to interact on them. That's the biggest thing, right? They want you to interact on them. I don't think that any of them ever conceived that it would get so cluttered out there. Or maybe they did, but they probably you know, they were a little blindsided by the fact that it got so cluttered that people are actually needing to layer more organization on top because, I mean, Twitter does a great job. twitter.com is wonderful. And there's there's uses for it. And sometimes I'll just hang out and just see it because I like seeing what's coming through. And I like going on to the search. And that's great. facebook.com I love I love the mobile app, but it still doesn't help me in terms of from a business perspective, when if I'd have to go to all these things, I need the reminder to do it. And where possible, we let you engage inside of market research, where it doesn't make sense, we will just push you right back out. Because I think that the other thing about being a tech startup in this particular lead digital world is that you have to understand that you need to play nicely with other tools and be very understanding of the fact that people do have unique workflows, and that people are going to do it in the way that makes sense for them. So we obviously hope that everyone will sign up for marketmuse Suite account and be using it. And we totally understand if they use it in conjunction with other tools. And where we'll move as a company is to try to make that even easier. And that's where you start seeing open API's and things like that. But I think that it's it's a very, it's a very good approach for a startup to have to say, you know, we are a, we are a very important piece of this puzzle. But we know that we fit in with the greater the greater mosaic.

Neal Schaffer: 12:30

So tell me, I'm gonna close this podcast, this podcast used to be limited to eight minutes. Currently, we're at about 12 and a half minutes, it was limited a minute because he was on an iPhone, and that was the max Voice Memo we are

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 12:41

talking about. He's trying to Neal is trying to convert my team to the galaxy workflow.

Neal Schaffer: 12:48

But now it's unlimited time that I can record on this and send out but anyway, I just wanted to end and you know, everyone listen to this podcast is really trying to figure out how to make social media work for their business. So from your perspective, as you know, the founder and CEO of a social media dashboard marketing suite, what are the three to five ways in which businesses should be making more use of their social media dashboard,

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 13:09

okay, the first thing I have to say is organize. Get yourself organized. Because if you don't, you know, if you don't create smart inboxes, and figure out like exactly how you want to view all your social stuff going on, you're just, that's just like the first thing, it's like, the whole thing on the plane, secure your air mask before assisting others like organized, scurry there. And we're both gonna be flying. The second thing I would say is make sure that you are always engaging bye, bye bye, and schedule what you can. So I think scheduling is important. But I'm going to quickly follow that with scheduling isn't the whole thing. So if you schedule a whole bunch of stuff, don't just sit there and be scheduling app USA this article, I saw that article, I'm just gonna schedule the heck out of everything. If you're not then prepared to put in the time to actually engage. So your

Neal Schaffer: 13:56

people respond in real time, right? And they're like, why aren't you responding back to me just tweeted two times. Exactly.

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 14:00

So so organized. So you can see everything that's coming through, push really great content out, engage on engage on that content? I would say the fourth thing is make sure that you're engaging with the right people. So if you are a local business, you don't want to be engaging with people in Iceland, unless you know, they're likely to come to Boston to buy your bagels. I mean, you have to you have to really think about I don't know why I said Boston and bagels that doesn't even New York and buy your bagels, but cheesecake cheesecake. Clam chowder in Boston. So yeah, it isn't just hungry. Okay. It's almost lunchtime here at the social shakeup. And then the fifth thing is you asked me for five so I have to kind of see see what I did there. Make it organized schedule, engage, engage, make sure that it's make sure that it's relevant

Neal Schaffer: 14:45

relevance. follow up, follow up.

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 14:48

I'm gonna go with follow up. So on the theme of being at a conference and people getting conference fever, and you know, I was telling you before my dad used to go to conferences a long time ago, he'd stick with a with, he would sit after the conference with a stack of books. CES cards and I was like 10 years old Daddy, what are you doing there? Honey? It's called follow up. And you know, that's that's what we do now in the in the social and the digital world is and a lot of people forget it. So if you've engaged with somebody, why not flag them? Why not mark them as a lead? Why not figure that out? By the way, you can do all these things in marketing suite so that you can just remember to interact with them, why not schedule up a message, if you've just had a great conversation with somebody at the social shakeup? Why not schedule up something for a week from now right now right now while you're thinking about it, so that that person is going to get at mentioned so that you know that you've now finished up the conversation and it can perpetuate the conversation, and then you can go back and engage and then kind of the cycle starts all over

Neal Schaffer: 15:36

again? Yeah, follow up is critical in business in general, you my background, being b2b sales, it's all about the follow up. It's all about scheduling it. And sometimes, I mean, if you know anything about email marketing, you need a few touches with people to build trust to build rapport five, five, exactly VP

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 15:53

of marketing I used was the fourth employee at constant contact. And so she's right, she like built up like this whole thing. And she's like, it's fine. Like every, like five touches, you got to touch them five times, about touching all their customers, Michelle.

Neal Schaffer: 16:05

So if you feel like you're limited in what you're what you or your business has done in social media, maybe because the dashboard you're using is limiting you right. And if you find that, and if you find that you cannot do some of the things that Tammy was just talking about in myself, we were talking about, it's time for you to do your audit of different social media dashboards, there's a number of them out there. I personally, you know, pay for a few different ones. And maybe you'll start doing that as well. But definitely, highly recommend that you look at Mark and see there's one of those and I hope that in the near future, we can do a webinar together and really, you know, show people the different things they can be doing, just by using different technology. I really think once you change dashboards, assuming that you pick one for the right reasons, it can really open up your mind to wow, it's not like I'm a slave to social anymore. I can be in charge of it, and really manipulate it in a way like I manipulate email or anything else.

Tammy Kahn Fennell: 16:52

Absolutely. Well, I look forward to that. And I look forward to continuing to push out some guest blog posts to your fabulous audience. So thank you so much, Neil.

Neal Schaffer: 17:00

Thank you very much, Tammy. And that concludes another episode of social business unplugged appreciate all those five star ratings on iTunes. Feel free to reach out to me if you would like to hear about a topic or product or anything else you want me to discuss. And once again, make it a great day and best of luck in maximizing your social Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast, and adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at maximize social business.com for additional social media for business advice. Please make sure to check out your new social media for business resource at maximize social business.com Thanks again and make it a great day.