Social Media Monitoring Imperatives
Who's Watching Your Brand
“Every day, millions of consumers converse in online communities, discussion boards, blogs and social networks. They turn to the Internet to share opinions, advice, grievances and recommendations. Are you listening, connecting and responding in a way that protects and promotes your brand?” Nielsen Online
Fragmenting media and the overwhelming presence of social media websites have changed online consumer behavior. From blogs and micro-blogs to streaming video, the consumer has moved from the interruptive advertising model, to reading peer reviews and testimonials.
Companies that are not monitoring these online conversations are vulnerable to the viral effect of negative messaging. These effects can include intellectual property theft and brand threats. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have used these methods to protect themselves from fraud sites and internal leaks.
Domino’s Pizza paid a high price to learn about monitoring their brand. Two employees shot a video showing health code violations. The video was posted to Youtube and viewed by millions for several days. Domino’s immediately experienced a decrease in delivery orders worldwide. The President of the company responded with a video, which mitigated the effect on the company’s bottom line.
In the late 1990’s everyone became aware of domain names and their relation to brand identity and keywords. The same is true of online user names at Twitter. Early adapters were able to get corporate names. Companies need to reserve their brand names and all associated catch phrases.
1. Set up systems to guard intellectual property. With the rise in blogs, copyright infringement is increasing. Look for use of your logo, photos and content. Often, unauthorized channel resellers will set up a fraudulent website and redirect traffic using your materials.
2. Be pro-active about monitoring threats to your brand. Large Corporations may create a full time position for a director of online brand monitoring. Others may hire companies specializing in social media monitoring.
Small and medium size businesses can do a great deal of monitoring in house through Google Reader and Google Alerts.
Use Google reader (www.google.com/reader) for blog monitoring. Set up your account, it’s free. For example, you can follow many blog posts through Technorati. Go to Technorati.Com and type your keyword into the search field. The results page will offer a subscribe button, click on it. When the page comes up, copy the URL. Then, go over to Google reader and click “add a subscription” and paste the URL into the box. Google will aggregate all feeds into one easy to monitor page.
Google alerts, at www.google.com/alerts will monitor all videos posted to Youtube. Simply open their page and type your keywords. Google will email an alert every time a video is posted.
Other important websites include; Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, and Bebo. Depending on your needs, you may want to do searches at these websites. We’ve seen recently how movie buzz on Twitter can ruin an opening before the weekend is over.
Regardless of the method chosen, it is important to set up real-time alerts based on triggers. A quick response is imperative (as in the case of Domino’s). Decide internally who has the ability to respond to brand threats. Set up metrics and time how long it takes from incident to notification. You’ll also want to track how long it takes to go from notification to solution.
Social media offers companies the ability to execute quick, focused, brand related messages to their target market.
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Google Analytics -Free Website Tracking System
Google Analytics
Many of us have faced the daunting task of understanding our website traffic. Google has a free service called “Analytics” which was built for marketers and doesn’t require detailed technical knowledge.
Google Analytics dashboard gives an overview of search engine referrals, pay per click advertisements, email marketing, etc. Google offers customizable, drag and drop interfaces with over 80 types of reports. Examine several reporting features and see the amazing flexibility of this free website tracking system.
Goal Conversion Reports: Retail goals may consist of converting more shoppers to buyers. Set parameters and track success rates. Non-commercial websites can also meet business objectives.
Funnel Reports: A funnel is your steps to fulfillment, after your call to action. If you are in the lodging industrty, your goal is to get people from the landing page through the booking page. Google will show you how many people enter your funnel, what your abandonment rate percentage is, and how many people complete the process. Understand where performance is falling through within your website structure.
Bounce Rate Reports: A bounce is when a visitor come to your landing page and then goes off to another website. If your bounce rate is 90% your not meeting your visitors needs. A bounce rate of 40% is considered normal in Google AdWord buys.
Entrance Path Reports: An entrance path is the navigation path used by visitors to reach your goal. If you are a 501c3 for example, this report would show you which page a person was on when they clicked over to make a donation. This report makes it easy to analyze which calls to action are working.
Benchmark Reports: You have to opt-in to get benchmark reports. Once you do, Google will compare your website to other websites of approximately the same size and in your industry segment. Benchmarking enables you to compare yourself to industry standards.
To start up a Google Analytics account, assuming you don’t already have one, go to the website: http://www.google.com/analytics/ and fill in the appropriate information. Google will ask you to verify website ownership by posting a uniquely named webpage to your site. Within 24 hours of your post, Google will confirm and give you tracking code to place on your website or websites.
After confirmation, go into your analytics account and click “view report.” Important links on the left are for Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals. The Content section quickly graphs the top view pages, amount of time spent viewing content, exit pages, landing pages and click volume. Click Volume will help you to identify and reposition valuable links.
Google stores 25 months of data. You can compare two different time ranges. There is a date range picker near the top right corner of your screen. There is also a check box that says “Compare to Past.” Check this option.
There are limitations to Analytics. Google can be blocked by users who don’t accept cookies ( a tiny javascript code that tracks visitors through their browsers). Google is also not able to collect data from mobile applications; phones and PDA’s. Be sure your website has a Privacy Policy that explains how information is collected and used.
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How to be a Social Media Change Agent
An interview with Josh Bernoff, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Over the past thirteen years, Mr. Bernoff has become one of America’s most frequently quoted research analysts. His analysis, which aims at a deeper understanding of people and how they use technology, has been cited by sources from The Wall St. Journal to “60 Minutes.”
He is the co-author of the book “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” which offers myriad data-based strategies for companies that want to harness the power of social technologies like blogs, social networks, and YouTube.
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Facebook Memorable Name Application
Facebook Apps
Facebook allows you to choose a unique webaddress for both your profiles and your groups. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/webaddress and claim your brand now!
We tried it out, our unique address is http://profile.to/socialmedia. It’s particularly important to establish a group identity with a memorable address. It’s an invaluable marketing tool.
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Twitter -Advanced
Social Media Blogs
Social Media Blogs
Twellow
Twellow, at http://www.twellow.com is another great way of finding people to interact with. People here are categorized into all different areas and you can search for those with similar interests to your own.
The main page shows you all the categories, which then have sub categories as well. You just click on a category and the list of people in that area are displayed.You don’t have to be registered with Twellow to be displayed, but at the time of writing there were nearly two million people showing on the site, so you will have plenty to choose from. By all means though, register yourself and set up a profile so others can find you.
When you click on a category, Twellow displays a list of people in that category and they are ordered by the number of followers they have. If you are already logged into Twitter via the web, (not Tweetdeck), you will be able to follow people directly from the screens where the profiles are displayed.
Mr Tweet
Mr Tweet at www.mrtweet.net is another way of gaining new followers. All you have to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter and your tweets will be monitored for content and then you will get a Direct Message from “him”. You then go to the site and login and you will get a list of suggested people. You will also get a list of people who are following you that you aren’t following so you can then follow them if you choose.
It’s a really nifty little site and worth registering at.
Grader
Grader is on Twitter as @grader, but also online at http://twitter.grader.com/ and is a site of some interest. As you get going on Twitter, you can get “ranked” by Grader on a score out of 100. It is based on some secret algorithm apparently so people can’t game the system.
Apart from that aspect of Grader, you can have a look at who the top Tweeple are in a particular area or even by topic using the search function.
When you use the search function, it will list the Tweeple by their score in descending order. For example, if you search for “gardening” on Grader, you will get a list of all the top 100 people interested in gardening on Twitter. You can see their “bio” from their Twitter account and if you click on their Grader score, it will take you to their Twitter account from where you can follow them. Naturally, you must already be logged in to Twitter yourself to follow anyone.
Advanced Tweeting Tips
Now that you’re all set up, let’s get into some advanced Tweeting tips and applications that can really power your Twitter usage up.
Twitter Backgrounds
We discussed earlier about setting up your Twitter background so that it didn’t just look like the default Twitter page. Leaving it like that shows a lack of care on your part. You need to distinguish yourself from the crowd and that attracts more followers, or at the very least impresses people with your professionalism.
Now if you’re a bit of a Photoshop whiz, then you can do your own background, full of bells and whistles and load it up to your Twitter profile. But if you’re not, or you just want to save time, then there are some sites out there that will do them for you automagically. To find these sites, the best thing to do is to simply Google “twitter backgrounds” and you will find quite a few sites offering this service for free.
My personal favorite is Twitbacs at http://www.twitbacks.com/ where you can get some great backgrounds.
However, that said, if you want to do your own fiddling in Photoshop, you can get some great layouts in PSD format from http://www.twitterbacks.com/
SocialToo
SocialToo at http://www.socialtoo.com is a useful automated tool for Twitter. At Social Too, you can set your account up to do some autopilot things for you.
First of all, you can set SocialToo up to automatically follow everyone who follows you. This can take the drudgery out of checking all your new followers and then going and adding them to your own list in order to reciprocate.
You can also set up SocialToo to send an automatic Direct Message to people who follow you. Don’t do it! Automatic Direct Messages are absolutely hated by most of the Twitter community, particularly experienced users because they can pick them a mile off. It’s a sterile and rude way of starting out a relationship with new followers.
The backlash against this has largely been caused because many newbies, and some old hands too, were setting up an auto Direct Message that basically said, “Hello, thanks for following me. Now go and visit my sales page at http://….. “. I’m sure you get the picture. I can’t think of any worse way to start a relationship with a new follower on Twitter. In any sort of business, you build relationships before you try and sell someone something and this is even more relevant in the social media space.
SocialToo will also provide you with an email every day of all your new followers and those that have unfollowed you as well.
Another function of SocialToo is that it will automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Personally I don’t think this is a bad thing. If people aren’t interested in you any longer, then are you really interested in them? If you really want to keep the updates from someone, just go and follow them back when you see their name on your unfollows email each day.
TweetLater
Tweetlater at http://www.tweetlater.com is a fantastic tool to use with Twitter. It allows you to schedule tweets for various times of the day. So how can this be of use to you?
Well you need to remember that the Twitter audience is constantly changing and the tweetstream occurs quite fast. The more people someone follows, the greater the number of tweets appearing and they won’t read them all, I promise you. It just isn’t possible. By using Tweetlater, you have a much greater chance of catching people’s attention throughout the day and in different time zones.
Let’s say you have written a post on your blog and you want to drive some traffic there. Rather than tweeting the link and subject once, you can do it every hour for 24 hours if you like using Tweetlater. I’m sure you can see the power of this in terms of driving traffic or getting noticed.
There is a free and a professional version of Tweetlater. Start out with the free version and then if you need it, upgrade to the professional version when you are ready.
Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed at http://www.twitterfeed.com is also a very handy tool. It is far more secure to log into than the other sites I have mentioned as it uses Open ID which is a bit of a pain. However, it is worth persisting with in the absence of an alternative tool.
What Twitterfeed does is that you can set up your blog to feed directly via RSS to your Twitter account. So every time you make a blog post, it gets tweeted automatically on your behalf. You can use this in conjunction with Tweetlater with the first post coming through Twitterfeed and then subsequent ones at times you specify via Tweetlater.
SplitTweet
SplitTweet at http://splitweet.com is a great tool if you have a number of accounts on Twitter. Rather than switching between them from time to time in order to Tweet, you can set an account up her for free and bring all of your accounts under the one roof.
Splitweet will display the Twitter feed from all your accounts at once, or you can turn individual accounts off and on. When actually tweeting, you can pick an account to tweet to, or you can do a broadcast message across all your accounts at once.
Some very flash technology this and very useful for handling multiple accounts.
Twitdom
Twitdom at http://twitdom.com would have to be the greatest site relating to Twitter. It is a repository for all Twitter related applications and it is just absolutely amazing what there is in there.
At the time of writing, Twitdom had nearly 500 Twitter related applications in its database. Quite amazing when you think about it that there has been so many third party applications written and is a pretty powerful indication as to the value of Twitter. It also indicates the confidence of the market in that Twitter will become very much the mainstream.
Friendfeed
Friendfeed at http://www.friendfeed.com is an automating tool you can use in conjunction with Twitter. Friendfeed is a bit of a hub if you like where you can set up links to all your other accounts. Friendfeed collects information from those accounts and publishes it in your Friendfeed feed.
Although Friendfeed is a topic almost in itself, I mention it here particularly because of it’s ability to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts among others. If you have a Facebook account and you link it and your Twitter accounts in Friendfeed, then what will happen is that all your posts in Twitter will be posted on your wall at Facebook. It means you are running two social media accounts via one and saves you time.
Your Twitter Karma
Your Twitter Karma at http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ is a really useful site for having a look at your followers and who you are following. It’s great for managing your account from a followers/following perspective.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to load a fair few times and can be unreliable, but when it is working it’s great. It shows you all you all the people you are following and all those that are following you. Underneath each avatar it tells you if you are following them and if they are following you. You can also sort by people that you are following who aren’t following you back. This is great for management as you can decide whether or not to unfollow them.
By checking the boxes, you can actually do a bulk unfollow of a heap of people at once as opposed to going to every individual Twitter account and clicking on “unfollow”.
You can also list those that might only be following you and decide if you want to follow them back. Again, this can be done in a bulk manner.
Conclusion
Twitter is absolutely fantastic application whether you use it for business or pleasure.
I hope the tips and resources in this report will make it a fantastic experience for you.
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