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Recently, TweetReach customer Exposed PR, along with C&I Studios, ran a very creative promotion with their client IKEA. We love to highlight interesting – and successful – PR campaigns, so read on for more about this cool promotion.

In July, Exposed PR and C&I Studios teamed up with IKEA to organize an in-store scavenger hunt with an online twist. Called Capture the Catalog, this promotion pitted 11 teams against each other in a scavenger hunt at the IKEA store in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Teams competed to complete a set of tasks in the store, and tweeted about their achievements as they went, trying to get as many retweets as possible. The teams were competing to see who could generate the most impressions on Twitter in 90 minutes. Exposed PR used TweetReach to track these tweets and measure each team’s impressions. They generated more than 8 million impressions in just an hour and half, reaching more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts!

We talked to Sara Shake of Exposed PR, one of the creators of this promotion, to understand more about where this clever idea came from and how everything went.

First, tell us a little about the IKEA Capture the Catalog Tournament. What was the goal of this promotion?

The goal of the Ikea promotion was to launch their 2012 Catalog. As a company, Ikea has a few different times throughout the year that are extremely important, and their catalog launch is the biggest. We wanted a creative way to get the word out that didn’t include the typical Media Day festivities that they had done in the past.

How did you come up with the idea for this promotion?

I share my office with a company called C&I Studios. It’s not unusual for us at the end of the day to start speaking in terms of “What If.” Once we’ve completed all the work for the day, we always try to spend sometime just brainstorming without the limitations of the clients that we currently service. We don’t think about location or budget, we just bounce ideas until something sticks. We call these ideas our 5 O’Clock Miracles.

This idea came largely from my frequent frustration with traditional media… We (Joshua Miller from C&I Studios and I) thought there has to be a better way to get the word out, without the help of traditional media. Then we thought about how competition drives people. The original concept was Capture the Flag (which is where Capture the Catalog came from), but it evolved into a scavenger hunt. We knew we needed a forward-thinking brand to latch onto the idea…and this was just about the time that you started hearing about Ikea letting the cats loose in Sweden. We said “We need a brand like Ikea!” We were lucky enough to have one in the neighborhood, so we just called.

How did you decide who won?

The first-place winner was the team with the highest number of impressions of their unique hash tag during the 90-minute scavenger hunt.

What role did TweetReach play in this promotion?

TweetReach was instrumental in the Capture the Catalog tournament. We were able to set up a Tracker to live-track every team’s (there were 11) hashtag throughout the tournament. This way we were able to make announcements like, “So and so is in the lead with 350,000 impressions.” We also announced every time that we reached another million impressions of the combined hashtags. We took snapshot reports for each hashtag at the end of the tournament and that’s how we determined the winner.

What would you change for next time?

We would just find a way to make it bigger and better.

What went well? Was there anything you were particularly proud of?

We were really proud of the teams; they went all out. It was also an amazing experience to work with Ikea as a brand. They believed and bought into the vision, and took it to an entirely different level. From the graphics and signage they produced, to the staff that manned each clue, to the prize that they provided to our winners, it was totally refreshing to work with a brand that didn’t cut a single corner. They were exceptionally thoughtful down to the last detail.

What did IKEA think?

They loved it! In a Miami Herald article about the event, Chantal Nichtawitz, marking manager at Ikea Sunrise, said, “We were certain that the event drove traffic to the store. That Saturday we had one of the biggest Saturdays we’ve seen in over a calendar year.”

Do you have any recommendations or tips for someone running their own promotion or contest on Twitter?

The key is finding the right brand and participants.

You can follow Exposed PR, C&I Studios, and the IKEA Sunrise store on Twitter.

The post TweetReach case study: Exposed PR’s IKEA Capture the Catalog tournament appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

At TweetReach, we’ve tracked a lot of tweets about television, from special events like the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl, to regular weekly episodes of many of your favorite shows. That’s because we (and our customers) know that Twitter can tell us a lot about what an audience thinks about a show, from how much viewers tweet about a show, to when they tweet about it, to what they actually tweet about. There’s a lot we can learn about a TV program’s success just by analyzing the tweets about it.

So we thought it would be fun to track this fall’s 25 new shows on the five big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC) to see what Twitter thinks about them. But we’re not content to just rank Twitter’s favorite shows. Oh no. Inspired by the New York Times’ Fall TV Season Ratings Pool and based on Twitter chatter, we’re going to predict what new fall shows will be canceled.

Want to play along? Leave your predictions in the comments. Which new shows do you think will be canceled? Or, even better, which new shows do you wish they’d cancel?

We’ll be posting throughout the fall with our updates, predictions and conclusions (and maybe we’ll even feature some special guests along the way!). For reference, here’s a list of the new fall shows, ordered by network.

ABC

• Charlie’s Angels
• Last Man Standing
• Man Up
• Once Upon a Time
• Pan Am
• Revenge
• Suburgatory

CBS

• 2 Broke Girls
• A Gifted Man
• How to Be a Gentleman
• Person of Internet
• Unforgettable

CW

• H8R
• Hart of Dixie
• Ringer
• The Secret Circle

FOX

• New Girl
• Terra Nova
• X Factor

NBC

• Free Agents
• Grimm
• Prime Suspect
• The Playboy Club
• Up All Night
• Whitney

The post New fall TV shows – which ones won’t last? appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

“Demystifying” the Formula for Social Media ROI (Spoiler: There Isn’t One)
Our good friend Tim Wilson at Resource Interactive takes on the topic of social media ROI by looking at John Lovett’s recent book Social Media Metrics Secrets and Eric Peterson’s recent post about The Myth of the “Data-Driven Business” and concludes that “there is no silver bullet for calculating social media ROI”.

How to Use Social Media to Predict Marketing Trends
David Amerland writes about how social media conversation and reaction can be and is being used to predict everything from media event outcomes to political revolutions and stock market performance. Marketers can use many of the same analytics tools to not only measure success, but to fine-tune campaigns, leverage sentiment, predict trends, and better position their offerings.

Nielsen’s Social Media Report Q3-11
Nielsen’s new State of the Media: The Social Media Report looks at trends and consumption patterns across social media platforms in the U.S. and other major markets and provides insights on exactly how social media influences online and offlilne consumer behavior.

Infographic: The ROI of Social Media
The folks at MDG Advertising put together this infographic that aims to clear up the confusion in measuring ROI of social media efforts by outlining the objectives, benefits and factors that affect the success of social media marketing.

Conversions: Whose Job Is It Anyway?
Bryan Eisenberg asks: Who owns conversions in your organization? With many companies’ online marketing efforts, there are many people responsible for driving traffic but virtually no one responsible for converting that traffic into revenue. As social media channels further fragment online traffic, companies must not ignore conversions.

The post This Week in Social Analytics #16 appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

Big news! We’re throwing open our doors at TweetReach and now everyone can sign up for a
free TweetReach account.

Interested? Skip the rest of this blog post and sign up here. Or read on for more about what’s included in a free TweetReach account.

Every day visitors to TweetReach.com run thousands of our free snapshot reports. We wanted to make this experience easier and more useful for those users. So today, we’re very excited to unveil our brand new free TweetReach accounts! Now you can save all of your free and full reports to a report archive, and access, print and export your reports at any time.

With a TweetReach account, you can:

• Save an unlimited number of quick snapshot reports to My Reports archive
• Access all of your purchased full snapshot reports, along with your purchase history
• Quickly find past reports for further analysis
• Share reports with colleagues and clients
• Get the latest tweets for any query with one click
• Download PDF and Excel versions of reports

Our new free accounts are perfect for anyone who wants to bookmark and download their snapshot reports, but doesn’t need the real-time, unlimited tracking and in-depth analytics available through a TweetReach Pro subscription.

Save unlimited reports to your My Reports archive for access anytime later.

In addition to bookmarking a report, you can download a PDF version, export it for analysis in Excel, print it, tweet it, post it to Facebook, and get the latest tweets for your search query.

So, what are you waiting for? You can sign up for a TweetReach account here. Did we mention it’s free? And if you like old school press releases, read ours here.

The post Announcing free TweetReach accounts! appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

Starting today, all TweetReach Trackers now have detailed hashtag and URL reporting. This new analysis allows you to quickly see which hashtags and URLs have been tweeted about the most and get detailed stats about each hashtag and URL in your Trackers.

We’ll show you how it works with an example. We’ve been monitoring tweets about TechCrunch Disrupt this week. As you can see here, the new URL and hashtag analysis is right below the big main graph (highlighted in red). On your main Tracker page, we’ll show you the five most popular URLs and hashtags in your Tracker, and you can drill into a summary of all URLs and hashtags, as well as detailed metrics for each individual URL and hashtag. Read on for more details.

Click those All links next to the Top 5 Hashtags and Top 5 URLs to go to an overall summary report (a URL summary report is pictured just below). This summary report includes overall statistics for each URL or hashtag in your Tracker, and is sortable by the number of tweets, retweets, impressions and contributors.

You can also click through to a detail report for each individual hashtag or URL, which includes stats on that URL’s exposure, tweet activity, and contributors. The detail report also includes a list of all tweets that included this URL and the contributors who posted those tweets.

This URL and hashtag reporting is just the next step in helping surface the most important and interesting data in your Trackers. There’s lots more on the way! Do you have any suggestions for new TweetReach features? Please let us know!

If you’re interested in getting these Twitter analytics for your company, client or campaign, Trackers are available through a TweetReach Pro subscription.

The post New hashtag and URL analysis in TweetReach Trackers appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?
According to an analysis of 1000 bit.ly links, the half life of a link on Twitter — the amount of time a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after its reached its peak — is 2.8 hours. Facebook links are marginally better at 3.2 hours. To deal with this, some sites such as Search Engine Land have moved to doing “second chance tweets”, retweeting the same link a few hours after the original, and are seeing about 50% more traffic from Twitter on these tweets as from the original ones.

The Myth of the “Data-Driven” Business
Eric Peterson at Web Analytics Demystified wonders if over-analysis and automated decision making from data will cause “data-driven” organizations to be doomed to fail. Should businesses be “informed” by data rather than “driven” by it, or is all of this just a semantics argument?

Social Media Metrics: How Am I Doing?
Heidi Cohen presents a simple, but powerful outline that ties business goals to the related social media metrics and provides some tips on how to measure results.

The post This Week in Social Analytics #15 appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

What’s the R.O.I.? A Framework for Social Analytics
Brian Solis asks whether “what’s the ROI of social media” is the right question at all. True return requires understanding more than just financial investment. He reviews Susan Etlinger’s research on “A Framework for Social Analytics” and argues that the opportunities for establishing the ROI of social media involve understanding the relationship between business objectives and social media tactics.

33% of B2B Marketers Don’t Measure Marketing ROI
Yes, you read that correctly. Pamela Vaughan at Hubspot writes about how recent research from Lenskold and the Pedowitz Group shows that a third of marketers don’t measure the ROI of their efforts, and only one in three actually report measurements they do make to senior management. In order for marketers to continue to secure budget for initiatives, including social media, they shouldn’t undermine their efforts by not reporting the results, or even worse, failing to measure at all.

The Case for Social Media Analytics Standards
In a recent chat with Beth Shultz at All Analytics and others, Marshall Sponder discusses the benefits of a standardization effort for social media analytics and suggests that “a standard and automated framework for mining data from social sites for business intelligence purposes” would be of benefit to all and help the social analytics industry mature.

15 Case Studies to Get Your Client On Board With Social Media
On the Mashable blog, Jonathan Rick suggests that marketers should explain the value of social media to potential clients by giving concrete examples of the interaction it can enable. He illustrates his point with several great case studies of how companies are using and measuring their social media efforts.

The post This Week in Social Analytics #14 appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with notable members of the social media analytics and measurement community. This week we’re happy to welcome Adam Price, co-founder of Speak Social, an Austin, Texas-based company that handles all aspects of social media marketing for brands.

TweetReach: Welcome Adam! Let’s start with talking about how you got started using social media. Can you describe your first “ah-ha” moment?

Adam Price: I come from an SEO background. My “ah-ha” moment happened while I was running analytics on one of my SEO clients. I noticed that a competitor’s Facebook page ranked above my optimized site. This site had massive amounts of SEO content and great back-links, yet we were suddenly second to an un-optimized Facebook profile. That planted a seed that I couldn’t get out of my head. I started researching social media non-stop and realized that it is the future of search. I understood then that social media will become the center of every marketing strategy going forward. I want to be a part of that.

TweetReach: How important was measurement in your initial strategy and how has that evolved?

Adam Price: Measurement is critical. The early problem in social media was that most books treated ROI like it didn’t exist. Most of the talking points around tracking and measuring ROI centered on why analytics didn’t matter, and how to refocus the conversation. I had more luck focusing on enterprise level companies who treated ROI as the central issue. At that level, they can’t just hide behind marketing fluff. You have to show hard data.

Today, tools to track social media success are booming as an ancillary business to social media marketing. Initially I pitched tracking ROI of our campaigns as my differentiator over the competition. Very few people were doing it. The social media marketers I looked up to were focusing on analytics from the beginning, following the “If you can’t track it, it doesn’t exist” model. It was a huge learning curve to get my head around how it related to the bottom line, and we continue to work on it. I learned early that time was a big factor of every campaign. Social media marketing specifically takes time before you can show results. The client must accept limited results in the first months. The clients that stick with it see results once the infrastructure is in place.

TweetReach: Does size matter? David Armano has written about the importance of topical influence. What do you think? How important is the size of someone’s social graph vs. their influence in a particular topical area?

Adam Price: David has it right, but this one is touchy. Overall, I would say a social graph size has little use to a client’s bottom line, but that’s not always the case. We represent professional athletes and models, and to them raw numbers mean quite a lot.

One of our most successful nonprofit campaigns started with a Twitter account of only 200 followers, but they were the right 200. If I had a restaurant, I would rather have one Paul Barron as a follower than 1,000 unassociated followers. This is nothing new of course; influencer marketing is old hat. The truly interesting thing is how many of the walls between a brand and the influencers are knocked down by social media. Those walls will rebuild, but until they do, we have a unique opportunity to reach out to anyone.

TweetReach: Do you have any examples of how analytics have helped you adjust or improve your social media activities? Has this ever happened in the middle of a campaign?

Adam Price: Absolutely, we obsessively track analytics. It’s important to develop social media measurement strategies based on business objective KPIs. There is a wealth of monitoring data available, but without a focused strategy, the data will not effectively develop and direct the campaign. At some level, we are always adjusting and tweaking. If our blogs get fewer views than expected, we revamp. If our Twitter reach is smaller than expected, we readjust. We never based measurements off the raw number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes. Those metrics were never a sound justification for social media marketing.

TweetReach: Is ROI for Twitter campaigns achievable? There a many different ways to measure activity, but how do your gauge your success, or help your clients do the same? What’s missing from the equation?

Adam Price: ROI for Twitter is absolutely achievable. Twitter requires you to be specific. You have to know who your audience is, and if you are reaching them. You need to create trackable links that you tweet, then measure who clicks those links. We gauge our client milestones upfront, and then work to meet them. The goals are tailored to the client. The question is not is ROI achievable, but is it achievable with this client?

When a potential client asks me to define the ROI of social media, I start by asking them how they track ROI on their current marketing strategies. What’s missing most times is the client’s holistic understanding of their business. You need to be crystal clear on where you are starting from with a campaign and where you are going. The best clients know their business inside and out. When you bring a tool like Twitter into the equation with one of these clients, it’s not hard to work together to gauge success.

TweetReach: Any social media pet peeves? What practices irritate you the most when you look at the state of the industry?

Adam Price: I think the thing that annoys me the most is the all too common perception that understanding social media channels directly equates to understanding social media marketing. We have a diverse staff of people on our team each who have different specialties, and we did that in a very premeditated way. Social media cannot be encompassed solely in Facebook. A true social media marketing strategy has multiple elements that have to each be accountable. I don’t mean to say that social media marketing is unapproachable or you have to have a team to have success, but right now there is a tendency to grab an intern who has a thousand friends on Facebook and make her your “social media solution.” The results are ineffective, at best, and reflect poorly on our growing industry.

Social media marketing is like anything else, you succeed by taking the time to gain knowledge before you begin. The great thing about the social media community is that they are so motivated to share what they know. You don’t have look very hard to find the information and help you need when you are just starting out.

Adam Price is a co-founder of Speak Social, an Austin, Texas-based company that handles all aspects of social media marketing for brands. Speak Social represents businesses, nonprofits, athletes and personalities. Adam strives to develop and improve the social media campaign process, which can close the gap between brands and the people that use them. His continued study of online media and marketing allows him to construct strategies that serve the client’s message and goals.

The post TakeFive with TweetReach – Adam Price appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.

Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity
Dion Hinchcliffe with Dachis Group talks about social media at the intersection of big data and business value and lays out a strategic view of Social Business Intelligence. Dion’s framework compares social analytics — the measurement and data mining from social networks with social business intelligence — a broader, business-centric process that he believes will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line business benefits from their social media efforts.

There are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media Metrics
The ability to measure a multitude of outcomes in social media can tempt many marketers to lose focus on what really matters. Debra Ellis at Wilson & Ellis argues that the only metrics that matter with any marketing activity are sales, costs, and customer satisfaction. If your social media activity isn’t increasing sales, decreasing costs, or improving customer satisfaction, then you’re wasting your time.

The Standard for Influence: Is It Really?
Stephanie Parker from Zamolution warns to be careful when using online influence scoring tools to measure your social media efforts. While they can be very useful in providing insight into important followers and should be used for that, it is often more important is to be engaging with a targeted, focused audience that aligns with your objectives.

Social Media Success Begins and Ends with Analytics
Chuck Hemann with Edelman Digital writes about how listening and measurement have advanced significantly over the last several years as foundational elements of social media programs. He provides some ideas on how to take it to the next level including integrating listening and measurement into the overall communications process, applying resources to the task, and surveying your audience for feedback. Chuck argues that social media analytics will be at the foundation of all communications programs for the foreseeable future.

5 Ways to Measure Social Media
Ron Jones with Symetri Internet Marketing provides a quick set of steps for measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts including awareness and exposure, share of voice and sentiment, influence, engagement, and popularity.

The post This Week in Social Analytics #13 appeared first on TweetReach by Union Metrics Twitter Analytics.