Mediaboss Marketing

"There are a lot of tools that listen for conversations in various online communities and some of them give you a sentiment analysis as well," noted author Paul Gillin. "But what Awareness is doing is allowing the user to filter the conversations based on criteria set by the user."

Awareness has enhanced its social marketing automation suite, Social Marketing Hub, with a new feature called "social scoring." The feature allows marketers and brands to identify, store and rank prospects across all the major social networks based on scoring criteria they define.

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It is a deliberate change from the fluffy metrics typically associated with social marketing -- such as "Likes," fan pages and comments -- which are impossible to tie to bottom-line results, the company said. Instead, users score social engagements based on their own business rules.

Hub had been on the market for two years before the company introduced the new scoring feature, explained Mike Lewis, VP of sales and marketing at Awareness.

"The original iteration was designed to a Software as a Service tool that allowed brands to connect all social destinations in one place," he noted. "Pretty quickly, though, we found that while they liked managing the content, they also wanted to see ROI."

Writing Your Own Scorecard

Hub was enhanced to pull social profile data and score or rate a prospect based solely on engagement. Now, with this new feature -- which has been generally available for about two weeks -- users can take advantage of a slew of criteria to rank a contact.

"The user can go through all of the profiles he or she has collected in a database and apply rules and weights to individual profiles based on certain criteria," Lewis said.

"For example, a marketing company might be interested in sales reps that have tweeted about marketing applications in the past two weeks and have more than 1,000 followers on Twitter," he suggested. "The end result is a list of people tiered according to your criteria."

Continue reading here:
Awareness Helps Social Marketers Know the Score