CoverCake: Trending
Identify conversations and influencers
This is the classic end-game for publishers looking to harness social media, and it’s where CoverCake is the most cost-effective. For CoverCake, it’s not enough to just hand over some tools and say “OK, here’s some tools to determine influence, now go to work and spend precious hours filtering and evaluating for influence”. We take it one step further and automate the entire process for publishers. We also take a real-world approach to the concept of ‘influence’ in social media, which is that for 99.9% of users, influence without context is just popularity. We strive to deliver relevant metrics, while always driving our R&D engineers to extract more meaning.
Track Down Marketing and PR Effectiveness
Let’s face it, once a particular social strategy or campaign is in full swing, it’s very difficult to know exactly what’s going on at all times outside of your own 1st and 2nd level engagement efforts. Purely engagement platforms and even more robust enterprise social solutions are all limited in tracking effectiveness, because they can only be trained to see so far in a limited time. Because CoverCake automatically sees far outside of singular searches and tracks both fast and slow trends across the entire industry, publishers finally get the ability to measure the full impact of their social campaigns. This is especially critical when attempting to gauge the effectiveness of an outsourced PR campaign.
Bringing It Back To Sales
A book could have a billion comments about it in social media, but if an analytics solution never ties that figure back to some kind of sales figure, it’s not going to do any great favors for the marketing budget. At CoverCake, we have a simple expectation that any metric on social media performance should always correlate to sales, and for the book industry that means services like BookScan, PubTrack and even Amazon Sales Rank. CoverCake is committed to making social media metrics relevant to sales, and also has integration solutions that can be customized to publisher’s business processes.
Setting Goals and Defining Strategy
No matter how powerful a tool might be, if there’s not a very clear picture of what needs to be accomplished, the job will not be performed well. The first and biggest problem with tapping into the power of social media is not one of choosing the right tool for the job – it’s knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, and how it will be done. Devising coherent social media strategy is a process that many times is done in the dark. Because CoverCake tracks the book industry at multiple levels automatically, publishers now have the ability to create benchmarks for performance in social media, which helps set real-world expectations within social book marketing strategies.
A Different Kind of Focus Group
Focus groups are used to predict product positioning and market reactions, but their utility often ends once the product is launched. However, there are strategic advantages to always having a finger on the pulse of your customers, and with CoverCake this is now possible. Because of the unique nature of CoverCake’s technology, publishers now have instant access to daily briefs on customer’s reactions to their books, and can even filter down and see consensus on specific issues. Information is always displayed in a form that can be digested by marketing directors all the way up to CEO’s.
