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Getting started 1: Do you know what people are saying about you?

19th October 2009, 07:42 pm

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

In tomorrow’s post we will look at how to estabish the aims of your use of social media and how you can measure success.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The original article is here, and the list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

Web Strategy Matrix: The Eight Stages Of Listening

Stage	Description	Resources Needed	Impacts
1) No objective at all	Organization has a listening program but has no goals, nor uses the information for anything resourceful	Simple alerting tools, like Google Alerts will suffice.	At the basic level, simple self-awareness.  Yet without any action from the data, this is useless.
2) Tracking of brand mentions	Like traditional “clip reports” of media relations, companies now track mentions in the social space.  Despite tracking there is no guidance on what to do next.	Listening platform with report capability based on brand or product keywords.  Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Techrigy/Alterian, Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, Dow Jones are providers.	Improved self-awareness to track volume of information, yet unable to track depth, and tonality of conversations.  As a result, not a full understanding of opportunities.
3) Identifying market risks and opportunities	This proactive process involves seeking out discussions online that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect opportunities.	In addition to a listening platform staff must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams.	Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitors customers.
4) Improving campaign efficiency	Rather than just measure a marketing effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time marketing efficiency.	Dedicated resource to manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to a marketing effort, and the resources to make course corrections nearly real-time.	Campaigns can be more effective, as hot spots are bolstered, and dead spots are diminished.
5) Measuring customer satisfaction	In addition to customer satisfaction scores, orginizizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact.  Sysmos and Backtype have focus areas into this space.	Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening platform and sentiment analysis.  Insight platforms like Communispace and Passenger offer online focus groups solutions.	Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction.  Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle
6) Responding to customer inquiry	This proactive response finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions.  Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond.	An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock.	Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response.
7) Better understand customers	Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them.	Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data	The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their customer touchpoints.
8. Being proactive and anticipating customers	Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it.  By looking at previous patterns of historical data, companies can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers.	An advanced customer database, with a predictive application put in place, as well as a proactive team to reach out to customers before an incident has happened.  Haven’t seen any such application yet.	Identifying prospects and engaging them before competitors can yield a larger marketing funnel, or reducing customer frustration as problems are fixed before they happen.

So for companies looking for a low cost solution, here’s our five-step guide to social media reputation management on a budget:

1. Decide what you want to track

What are the primary ‘keywords’ relating to your company that you want to track in online conversations? These are likely to include:

• Company name
• Company website address
• Names of products
• Names of senior employees and Directors
• Names of close competitors
• Common expressions – e.g. “[Company] is rubbish”, “company is great”

2. Set up accounts with free social media monitoring tools

There are hundreds of tools available. We have listed a few of the most popular ones here:

• General mentions – Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts), MonitorThis (www.monitorthis.info)
• Tracking social media – SocialMention (www.socialmention.com), Whostalkin (www.whostalkin.com)
• Blog monitoring – BackType (www.backtype.com) Blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com)
• Monitoring Twitter – Monitter (www.monitter.com) Tweetbeep (www.tweetbeep.com)
• Tracking links – Wholinkstome (www.wholinkstome.com)
• Monitoring forums – BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com)
• Mentions of senior staff – Naymz (www.naymz.com)

3.  Set up your alerts and searches

You then need to run regular searches, or better still, set up alerts or RSS feeds that notify you when your keywords are mentioned. This works best when you have an RSS reader or homepage where you can aggregate all of this information, to make it easier to read and review. We recommend setting up an iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig) or Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) homepage to display your feeds and alerts.

4. Set up your own social media accounts

When you’re alerted to a comment about your company, you need to be in a position to respond quickly. The beauty of many of the paid monitoring services is that they provide both the interface (homepage) for your feeds and the ability to respond directly to comments from that same interface. If you’re doing it for free, you need to set up accounts on all the key social media platforms, including: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and any industry-specific or consumer forums where people are likely to talk about your company.

5. Engage

How you respond to comments and posts people make is up to you, but there are certain rules of thumb:

1. Act quickly – the beauty of social media is it’s real-time. You can snub out misconceptions and fix problems instantly through a quick, smart reply. Never expect things to go away. Blog posts and forum comments linger in search engine results forever, so you need to make sure your viewpoint is there too.
2. Be nice – you really want to avoid getting angry or making threats. Try and reason with detractors and understand where they are coming from. By showing that you’re listening, you’ll win respect and support from others.
3. Be pro-active – when discussions arise that relate to your industry, get involved nice and early with your perspective. This encourages promoters to back you and takes the wind out of detractors’ sails.

By Luke Brynley-Jones

Picture: Viralheat - our favourite low cost solution

In the run up to Monitoring Social Media 09 I’ve been checking out some of the free or low-cost social media monitoring solutions. I’ve been hearing that many of the top marketing agencies still use free monitoring tools: but which ones? And how do they compare to the high-end paid-for solutions like Visible Technologies, Brandwatch etc? There are lots and lots of these services, but here are thumbnail reviews of 5 of the most best:

SocialMention (Free)

Often described as the social version of Google Alerts, SocialMention offers a really user-friendly interface. In fact, it’s definitely the nicest looking solution and the easiest to use. It provides results from blogs, twitter (microblogs), video, comments, bookmarks, news, events etc.  and sets these out with cross-cutting facts down the side panel showing Sentiment, Top Keywords, Top users and Sources – which tell’s you a lot of useful information at a glance.

The big problem with SocialMention is that you can’t save your searches and come back to them. There is no login/account function – so it’s really just useful for one-off searches. You can download the data and there is a nifty widget that lets you add realtime results to a blog, but what you really want is a private Deshboard to manage your searches. Also – you can’t easily respond to comments – which other services enable.

BrandsEye ($1 month)

BrandsEye is more of an old-school reputation management tool than a social media monitoring service. For just $1 a month (you wonder why they bother for that much), you get a “Blogger” level account that lets you set up 5 searches that you can login and return to view at any time. Results are shown in a rather Web 1.0 list which doesn’t include Twitter or other social media formats (comments, video, audio, presentations etc) and doesn’t enable you to respond within the system. It’s an nice, easy to use, cheap web-monitoring tool – but it’s really no good for social media.

Trackur ($18/month with free trial)

This is one of those services that, thanks to it’s founder, Andy Beal, get’s a lot of online promotion and coverage. It looks great from the outside and is free to sign up for a 14-day trial. Once inside it’s pretty straightforward – there is only one option “add a keyword” to create a search. The results come in a list (like BrandsEye) with Tweets, comments, posts etc. all mixed in – and a little graph showing when activity occurred. You can click into items to rate their sentiment or read the full text. It’s all very basic and obvious – though completely without bells and whistles, at least in the basic account.

Ubervu (Free)

Ubervu is similar to SocialMention but with the critical account functionality that lets you save searches and log in to see them. It brings in a full range of social media data – Tweets, comments, posts, video etc. – and shows responses/retweets in a nice. user-friendly indented way. If you’re logged in (it’s free) you can add your Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress etc. account details and reply directly to comments. You can export the data, get a widget for your blog to show results publicly and set up email alerts. On the face of it – it’s a great solution – though we had a few issues with the interface (esp. in Chrome) and some of the default settings (daily mentions) means you often get a negative looking downwards angled graph when you log in.

Viralheat ($9.99/month)

Although nowhere near as user-friendly as SocialMention or easy on the eye as the Ubervu results listings – ViralHeat is a very powerful tool that is probably our favourite budget solution. Once you’ve registered for the basic account, the Dashboard lets you set up 10 profiles. Although its’ a little confusing to navigate around, when you finally open a Profile you get a rich reward: graphs showing activity on Twitter, blogs and Video sites; the number of “authors”; the total reach on Twitter (our twitter reach this week was 51,000)  and who the most influential authors are on Twitter and blogs. You can click down into all this data and export it.

You also get a full listing of activity, with the nationality of the author site, a link to the post, the traffic of the site or full stats of the twitter user (like you get on Tweetdeck) and – a bit weirdly in our view – the ability to email an item to someone else. There is also a basic gauge for sentiment, though as with all less-sophisticated services, this is generally “neutral”.  Overall, Viralheat is a surprisingly powerful service, though they need to add the ability to respond from within the system.

Being creative and transparent is only half the story when it comes to social media marketing. In order to develop and execute a truly successful social media campaign, you simply must be able to monitor your results. At the end of the day, your boss (if you work as marketing director at a company for example) will probably be more impressed by cold hard numbers than how cool your Twitter or Facebook profile looks.

Here are five must have tools for any social media marketing arsenal -

The best tools for your social media monitoring toolbox

1. Social Listening – I’m a  huge fan of two products that facilitate social media listening. They are Spiral16 and Radian6. While both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, you really can’t go wrong with either of them.

Caption: Spiral16 Spark Visualization of Connected Conversations

Spiral16 is a tremendous tool for visualizing conversations that are occuring out on the web and on social networks in particular. Whether it is a blog, message board post, picture or even a video, Spiral will help uncover those conversations and rank them by influence and sentiment.

Radian6 is another great tool we use for social listening. If you need to get a listening campaign up quickly Radian6 is a great choice. You can run a time limited campaign for free to get a lay of the land.

2. URL shorteners – With the meteoric rise in Twitter’s popularity, URL shortening services have started to come into their own. A particular favorite is tr.im. Not only will you get the shortest URLS’s possible for use on Twitter, you’ll also get a fairly robust analytical system to track the number of clicks on your links.

Mac users: there is a very cool dashboard widget which keeps track of your short urls automatically. Of course, there are also other services available as well – budurl.com and bit.ly specifically.

3. Twitter search – Twitter search is still one of the most effective ways to take a pulse of the social media community. This real time conversational search engine (found here at search.twitter.com) gives you the ability to scan Twitter for conversations happening around specific keywords. Whats more, you can limit your searches by certain geographic areas, users or even basic sentiment.

4. Facebook Insights – Facebook has placed a lot of emphasis on analytics in their Facebook Business Marketing program, allowing page owners to access information on the age, sex and demographical breakdown of their fans. Couple this with their post quality scoring system and you will know if the content you place on your page is working.

5. Google Analytics – Yep, its good for more than just monitoring your search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click campaign results. Google Analytics is easy to set up, but best of all, free. Get in the habit of monitoring your referring sites to see which social networks provide the most traffic. If you run an e-commerce site, you should be able to marry those referrals to actual sales.

A handy and up-to-date list of Social Media Monitoring tools.