…until today.

We built Argyle Contacts to help Community Managers and social professionals build stronger customer relationships that drive revenue and retention.  We’re excited to ship the core feature today and look forward to building on this foundation in the coming months.

Much more info below. Let us know what you think!

Argyle Contacts Feature Demo

Manage Your Social Contacts

Argyle automatically populates the new Contacts tab with with people you’ve recently interacted with on Twitter. Every social action in Argyle enriches your contact database – new followers and mentions automatically create new contact records.  All of your social interactions thread together to provide a full conversation history with each contact.

Know Your Audience

The individual contact card provides a comprehensive overview of your relationship and social interactions.  You can augment social history and data with additional information. Write notes to provide additional context to your contacts. Add email address, phone, and other personal information to round out a profile. Look out for exciting integrations in the near future that will augment your social contact with data from your core CRM!

Use Tags To Build Context & Workflow

Context matters in social. Did that last tweet come from a high value customer? A valuable prospect that is in the final stages of the sales process? A customer that has an outstanding high priority ticket? Not knowing could be the difference between a win or a loss, a happy customer or a lost customer.

We integrated tags into Contacts to solve this problem. Use tags to organize your contacts into strategic groups. Tag your largest customers to make sure that you’re keeping tabs on them. Tag strategic influencers and target them with personalized content on a regular basis. Work with your sales team to tag key prospects to ensure that you’re engaging them as they advance through the sales process.

Despite all of the negative press, I think that Twitter has done a decent job rolling out the changes and communicating with its developer base. The changes are definitely unfortunate for a large part of the Twitter developer community and I can understand how so many people are so upset. However Twitter is a business and – even though it has had fits/starts and communication problems in the recent past – it has to take measures to ensure its long term viability.

The recent communications and product/API changes have made it fairly clear where Twitter is headed in the near future – namely ad products. Twitter wants to own 100% of the consumer Twitter experience both so that it can optimize the end-user experience and also so that it can own 100% of the ad inventory.

Twitter’s ecosystem visualization – that referenced above in my first ever attempt at a meme – spells things out pretty clearly:

Twitter made it quite obvious that apps in the top-right quadrant that “that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience” will face restrictions that virtually preclude a viable future as a consumer application. Again – that’s because these applications take eyeballs away from Twitter’s owned properties and thus shrink its ad inventory.

On the other hand, Twitter has made it very clear that SMMs will be important partners going forward. The recent announcements go so far as to encourage development in the top-left, bottom-left, and bottom-right quadrants. The recent announcement of Twitter Certified Products is also a step in the right direction for ecosystem providers focused on social media solutions for business.

As far as the details go, the newly imposed limitations and more strictly enforced “Rules of the Road” will not pose a problem for the vast majority of business and enterprise software developers. The display guidelines and API rate-limits will prompt a few smallish changes for us at Argyle, otherwise we’re full steam ahead.

The user-token limits shouldn’t be a problem for Argyle in large part because we’re a business app. Because we provide social media management solutions for hundreds for businesses, we don’t have the burden of hundreds of thousands of free users that would eat into any standard developer allocations.

The Twitter platform is core to our business and to our customer’s business. We’re excited to continue to build on the platform and look forward to enabling more social media marketing success for our customers.

Eric

We’re seeking to answer some simple- but meaningful – questions with some simple datapoints, as detailed below.

Post Frequency

We’re curious how frequently specific verticals share content on social sites on a monthly basis.  A higher volume obviously indicates more attention, probably more investment, and – by way of a small extrapolation – possibly more success.  A lower volume likely indicates less internal attention, investment, and success.

As a standalone datapoint, post frequency isn’t terribly illustrative.  But when benchmarked against relevant industry averages, social pros can get a sense of how they stack up against their peers and competitors.  Especially by indexing post frequency against audience size.

Conversation Rate

We’re scanning the most recent 200 posts for each handle in our sample to determine the breakdown of original posts versus replies.

A high conversation rate – meaning the percentage of posts that are in reply to someone else – indicates active engagement and an outwardly-focused social strategy.  Companies that use social for community activation and customer support will have high conversation rates.

A low conversation rate may indicate a small audience or perhaps a not-that-social audience.  It may also indicate a broadcast-based social strategy and an opportunity for more customer/community engagement.

Link Rate

The link rate illustrates the percentage of social posts that contain links.  Links give companies a valuable opportunity to cookie and track social prospects at a detailed level, yet very companies take advantage of this capability.

I’m interested in exploring the breakdown of links pointed internally – back to the company site – versus links pointed externally to other sites, blogs, and news organizations.

Share Rate

The share rate indicates the percentage of your posts that are shared or reTweeted by your audience.  We’re seeking to answer a number of questions around content quality, audience engagement, and social strategy by digging into share rates by company and by industry.

We’re sourcing data from public Twitter and Facebook APIs and aggregating the data to create industry-wide benchmarks and insights.  And of course we plan to surface this data to our customers and prospects so that they can understand their social marketing performance.

The early returns are fascinating, even though we’re just getting started with this project.  I’m excited to see what comes back so that we can analyze, organize, and present the results…and hopefully help our customers, prospects, and friends socialize more effectively.

Obviously this topic is near and dear to our hearts at Argyle – plus I did a call with Susan as a part of her research process – so I thought that I would share a few thoughts.

The report’s “Six Ways of Measuring Revenue Impact of Social Media” is pretty much spot on:

It was refreshing to see that “Anecdote” made its way onto the list. Even though it is decidedly low tech and not much fun to talk about as an industry analyst or technology vendor, anecdotal measurement is the right place to start and the ideal practice until a more integrated/automated approach becomes apparent and/or necessary.

The marketing immaturity reflected in the report aligns with our day-to-day experience at Argyle. Most social marketers have their hands full solving urgent problems around workflow, automation, and management. Revenue attribution is important, but it isn’t always the top priority when there are other pressing productivity problems.

That said – it is encouraging the data in the report underlines the ongoing quest of revenue attribution. 56% of the social professionals surveyed stated that “inability to tie social media to business outcomes” is a challenge. 70% scored themselves a 3 or less (on a scale of 1 to 5) when asked about their effectiveness at mapping social media to revenue generation. We obviously believe that these are important problems worth solving.

A 5-star effort from Susan, Andrew, and team – well worth the read.

Eric

The Social Signals API represents the beginning of a new era for Argyle, our customers, and the social media marketing business as a whole.

I’ll tell you a few reasons why.

Social Professionals Have A Massive Blind Spot

The Community Manager’s function is already a cross-functional juggling exercise – a little bit of marketing, a little bit of services, a little bit of sales, and so on.  When done well, strategic social programs should be a part of a business’ core strategic framework, tracking prospect and customer interactions at all stages of their life cycle.

The products that have enabled Community Managers to perform their primary function – including Argyle Social – to date have not aligned with this fragmented reality.  Instead, single-function social media management products have created functional silos and – as a result – massive data management problems.  Most Community Managers get by with swivel chair product “integrations” and multi-spreadsheet copy/paste marathons.

Social has emerged as a critical business function, yet it remains fragmented across systems, spreadsheet, and people.  And marketers are flying blind as a result.

We wrote about this “blind spot” problem at length in our newest whitepaper – “If You Teach A Community Manager To Fish”.  You can download the social marketing automation whitepaper here.

Argyle Routes Social Into Your Org’s Central Nervous System

Argyle’s Social Signals API resolves the blind spot problem by routing social data directly into your organization’s central nervous system: the customer database.

In short, we’ve built technology that takes all of those social marketing touchpoints – clicks, likes, retweets, shares, comments, conversions, etc. – and maps them to the individual contact.  The Signals API then makes this data accessible to your business systems.

This technology bridges the gap between your business systems and your social media marketing efforts.  Your “single view of the customer” can now include social activity history.

To avoid over-sharing all of the nerdy marketing details, I’ll just show you a picture of the Social Signals API and how it works:

Social Data Drives Smarter Marketing

So what are the implications of a non-blind-spot, social-data-integrated world?

Here are a few scenarios for your considerations:

• You can map social directly to revenue.  You can have a monthly pipeline conversation with your Dir of Marketing and Dir of Sales in which you can point out the exact leads, prospects, and opportunities that have had social touchpoints.
• You can build targeted email campaigns that trigger off of social activities.  For example, a customer may interact with brand offsite on social, but has not interacted onsite in the last 3 months.  You can target this customer with an email offer to drive onsite action.
• You can target custom offers to site visitors on their first visit.  For example, a visitor’s first interaction with your brand may occur on social.  When they visit your site, you will already have information about their activity history and can target offers accordingly.

Integration Will Drive the Next Phase of Social Business Innovation

The drive for integration in our business is undeniable.  The Community Manager’s fragmented job responsibilities obviously require it.  The tenets of effective, integrated digital marketing require it.  Argyle Social enables it.

The companies that successfully integrate social throughout their organization, organize themselves to programmatically capture key social data, and then leverage this data to make smarter marketing decisions will be the companies that win big.

We’re excited to roll out these exciting products and look forward to building on these foundations in the coming months and years.

Let me know what you think.  And let me know if I can be helpful!

Eric

There are things that matter in our business, like working out your monthly social reporting process or figuring out your social business strategy.

Then there are the things that REALLY matter in our business, things that make the other “important” stuff seem very, very small.

A few months ago, Bill Powell – one of our sales guys at Argyle – revealed that he has an inoperable tumor on his brain stem. He has three to five years of medically controlled symptoms before things will begin to take a turn for the worse.

As you might imagine, this was like a punch in the stomach for our team. And certainly for Bill and his wife Jessica.

Bill’s response to the situation has been nothing short of amazing. He immediately resigned from Argyle and announced that he’s fulfilling his lifelong goal of completing a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He begins his trek next week. You can follow all of the action on Bill’s blog “Going South”, his Twitter account, and his Facebook Page.

What’s more – Bill raised more than $10k on Kickstarter to fund a book and photo journal that will chronicle his adventure. And he’s bagged several sponsors that have comped him some top-quality gear worth thousands of dollars. He’s obviously a pretty good sales guy, but his wife Jessica deserves some of the credit for rallying the Fark.com community to support the effort.

Last night, Argyle threw a “Happy Trails” party for Bill – complete with a campfire cake, chubby bunny, a champagne toast, and a rousing set from the Argyle house band, The Bill Powell Admiration Society. You can see our photo below and some to the side, a few of which I’m sure I’ll regret publishing. (I swear that we’re a legitimate, enterprise-grade software company!)

We have 5 core values at Argyle – Passion, Productivity, Transparency, Self-Awareness, and Goodness. We talk about them frequently, including every Monday during our weekly team check-in.

Last night was the best yet reflection of our Goodness – from Jill’s and Claire’s quick planning and clever execution of the shindig, to the team’s gracious applause after the band’s decidedly sub-par cover of “Eye of the Tiger”, to – of course – all of the hugs and farewells to Bill.

It made me feel very proud of my team and very lucky be an Argyler.

Happy trails, Bill. See you later this year!

Eric

For the stat of the week, we took a close look at some Q1 data from Facebook. The data comes from TBG Digital, a major seller and manager of Facebook advertising campaigns. The company based its findings on a sample of 327 billion ad impressions from 235 Facebook advertising clients:

• CPM rates are up 41%. The study cuts this data point – and most others – by geography. The US and the UK have seen the biggest rate increases over the past 3 months.
• CPC rates are up 23%. User growth is decelerating, but the site is becoming more attractive for advertisers – which creates supply/demand imbalance.
• Ad engagement is down. There are more ads on the page and – presumably – more first-time advertisers finding their way on Facebook.

I remember that rapid bid-up of Google Adwords that happened from 2003 to 2005…and I suppose never really stopped! So it isn’t a shock to see history repeat itself with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The question remains how quickly the bidding will accelerate – both in mainstream verticals and the local/longtail market.

The Social Media Stat of the Week comes courtesy of customer feedback management firm CFI Group, which conducts an annual Call Center Satisfaction Index.

The full-report is $500 and I’m a cheapskate, so we don’t have all of the details. But the press release headlines definitely warrant discussion:

• Shift to self-service: “In 2011, 27% of respondents had tried to resolve their issues elsewhere prior to resorting to working with the call center. The primary alternate channel was the web.”
• Post support experience socializaing: “What we are seeing is that, if you have a bad experience, you post it once on Facebook for all to see and then you’re done with it,” stated Terry Redding, director of development and delivery for CFI Group. “By the same token, we are seeing good experiences posted in the same way.”
• Volume drowns out the bad: “While a bad experience may increase the odds that someone will tell others, the sheer number of positive experiences and positive posts seems to be outweighing the negative word-of-mouth in volume.”

Somewhat related case-in-point: my Twitter audience has complained about every airline equally such that their complaints no longer register – let alone resonate. And the number of positive experiences – like in-flight wifi, first-class upgrades, etc. – nets out the complaints.

Social makes everything more transparent – the good and the bad. Should your community goal be to manufacture enough good to cover up the inevitable bad?

I’m taking the stage to talk about marketing on niche social networks and Danny will holding down the fort at the Argyle booth. And we’re both looking forward to great talks from Tom Webster, Mark Schaefer, and – of course – Mr. Falls himself.

You can register for the conference at http://ar.gy/explorenashvegas. There are a few spots remaining and we’ve got a $250 discount code – so act fast and you might get a great deal on a great conference. Ping us in the comments and we’ll follow up with the discount code.

Gratuitous country music video for your pleasure:

Fun Fact: Lauren made the connection between me and LoudMouth Golf, which resulted in my fantastic collection of Argyle pants. Listen to the episode for the full story…

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes from BRANDfog – a social strategy agency based in NYC. The agency recently released its 2012 CEO, Social Media, and Leadership Survey.

To me, these are the key nuggets:

• 86% of the people surveyed rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical.
• 81% of the people surveyed believe that CEOs who engage in social media are better equipped to successfully lead a company in a web 2.0 world.

Trust and transparency are the name of the game – stakeholders want it and social media provides the mechanism to make it happen.

The methodology is fairly loose:

The company surveyed several hundred employees of diverse companies, spanning in size from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and working at all levels of their respective organizations. Respondents representing a wide selection of industries, professions and regions were asked to answer questions pertaining to social media participation by their organization and executive leadership team.

…so I’m left to question who exactly is the CEO in the question. Depending on company size and industry, the role of the social media CEO could be quite diverse.

The document is pretty meaty and the visualizations are fantastic – so it is definitely worth reading in more detail.