I am really getting excited with the impending “official” launch of our new social marketing tool socialchurn.com. But enough of the sales pitch. I want to talk about some of the interesting things we have discovered developing and testing it.
People come to social media from different angles. Some will feel worried about making a mistake or being inundated with requests and information, whereas others will have already built up a strong audience or network, but are coming with the question “how can I use it to benefit my business?”.
All valid stuff, but even with the array of tools out there to make it easier, including our own wonderful socialchurn.com, it is surprising what you can see.
We are using the product ourselves for to promote socialchurn itself, but also to test how powerful it could be covering a popular topic. And what could be more popular than football, particularly with recent events and the use of social networks in publicising them!
So we set up soccersocial.net with feeds for both fans and players. Using Social Churn we are publishing interesting content from social networks into the website. The oxygen is the player tweets, which in turn gets the fans commenting. For example we have seen that there is quite an interesting Come Dine With Me competition going on an Manchester City and some interesting medical insights at Spurs! It’s just like being in the dressing room.
The really interesting bit is that we also notify all fans that get published, which they seem to like quite alot! The point here is that by focusing on a specific topic, pulling out and publishing the relevant bits in a real time stream, you can get an insight into what’s really happening, but also sight of player personalities – who is shy, who is confident and who is daft!
We had not anticipated this outcome, but it is not surprising when you think about it. When you see a conversation mapped out in front of you, it is possible to see more than the conversations themselves. We’ll keep you updated to see what other developments take place but I’m sure a new career in social media psychology is on the horizon!