If your company is ready to dive into the social media waters, which tools such they examine first? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter? Wrong. Try Google Blog Search, Summize, and Technorati.
Before you can launch a successful social media strategy, you must begin monitoring existing conversations about your company. This has several advantages:
1 – It lets you be proactive in responding to complaints from customers. Want to impress a customer that’s blogged about a problem they are having with your product? Leave a comment 15 mins after their post goes up, then follow up with an email attempting to help them with their problem.
2 – It helps create evangelists for your brand. See above. Often people that are complaining about your product can be converted into evangelists if you are proactive and sincere in your attempts to deal with their complaints.
3 – It increases your brand equity. By actively monitoring the blogosphere and other social sites, your company can develop a reputation of reaching out to and helping customers. Comcast is a great example of a company using Twitter to monitor conversations and provide customer service.
4 – It makes you more familiar with social media tools and sites. Once you begin monitoring the blogosphere, you’ll begin to better understand how ideas spread in this space, and how blogs work. Same thing with monitoring talk on Twitter, it helps you better understand that space, and how your customers are using the site.
So before you start a social media strategy, lay the groundwork by putting tools in place that let you properly monitor these tools and sites so that you know what current and potential customers are saying about you. Some tools that you’ll want to look into include Google Blog Search, Summize, TweetScan(Twitter), Technorati, and Plurk Lurker.
Bonus link, how to use these monitoring tools to Launch a Successful Blogger Outreach Program in One Day.
or a proprietary tool like Radian6, but yes, the strategy always begins with an intelligence piece first.
Mack, great advice. Companies can learn so much by just listening. It’s a great way to dip your toe into social media especially when you’re working with limited resources or you’re new to the whole thing.
I would also suggest companies start actively monitoring what their competitors are doing when it comes to social media – both in the blogosphere and on their site. If they have a large presence on an influential site this could be a competitive threat to your company. No presence – an opportunity.
Nielsen’s BlogPluse (http://www.blogpulse.com/) and Addictomatic (http://addictomatic.com) are also a great free tools to check out.
Nice points, thanks for the post.
Works if you have a known brand. But you’re a startup or even a smaller company, it doesn’t work well. Better find relevant online places where your target market is suppose to socialize and join. It’s a little harder because finding those places may not be easy but monitoring may not be the only starting point. It all depends on the strategy & your situation.
Mack, As always, great information, Thank You , To your one of your points, When “Things Don’t Work” are excellent opportunities to create “Customer Evangelists” Oddly, it seems as though the truest of Customer Evangelists are created from a favorable recovery of when “Things Went Wrong”
Lee that’s a great point about your competitors. Monitoring not only gives you a better idea of how social sites and tools work, but also how your competition is using them, or IF they are using them!
“Works if you have a known brand. But you’re a startup or even a smaller company, it doesn’t work well.”
Laurent I disagree. If a business begins monitoring the blogosphere and sees that no one is talking about them, then they tells them they have an awareness problem. Which can tell them that starting a blog could be a smart move, as a solid blogging strategy would help boost their awareness online.
“Oddly, it seems as though the truest of Customer Evangelists are created from a favorable recovery of when “Things Went Wrong”"
Agree completely. If I were a large company, I would HUNT for well-known bloggers that are complaining about my brand, and do backflips of joy when I found them. This is a huge opportunity for these companies to reach out to these people and doing in a sincere effort to help them will almost always convert a complaint into evangelism for the company.
But many companies panic when they see complaints, and that goes back to their not understanding social media.
All about listening and learning. Seeing where you as a company fit in the conversation. Learn to recognize opportunities and to define your audience…even better, letting your customers define themselves.
Marc,
. Thus monitoring wouldn’t really help me however finding these online places that are relevant to me and engaging in them works. Hopefully after a while, if my company’s product is getting some buzz, I can start monitoring 
May be I wasn’t clear and I’m sorry for that. But when you’re a start up (not an Apple) with no product on the market yet or you just put it on the market, nobody talks about you (seems normal to me). That’s my case for example
Laurent, even if you are not a known brand monitoring is crucial. Because it can teach you what people say about your competitors, about your market. It can help you in designing a better strategy, a competitive positioning, in avoiding mistakes. It can provide you with several valuable insights to nurture your business. (disclaimer: this is my job)
Excellent!
Most people who struggle with marketing online simply will not do the little things of monitoring, stats, and tracking and the money is often in incrementally improving a loser to a winner – then expanding.
Rick Butts
Someone mentioned Radian6. I just had a demo of that tool and it is fantastic. Much more comprehensive then one can do on their own.
I agree 100 percent Mack. See what is going on, create a strategy (hopefully hiring a firm like ours) and implement.
Laurent, Gianandrea nailed it, even if you monitor and find nothing about your company, that’s still very valuable information. Because it can confirm that you have an awareness problem, which social media can help correct.
And G also has a great point about monitoring your competition as well. If they are already active in SM, then you can see what they are doing and what is working for them. If they aren’t engaged in SM either, then you have a great chance to really set yourself apart from them, with a well-crafted social media strategy.
“Most people who struggle with marketing online simply will not do the little things of monitoring, stats, and tracking and the money is often in incrementally improving a loser to a winner – then expanding.”
Rick when it comes to social media, how many times do we hear from a company/SMB that “I know I need to start blogging/be on Facebook/Twitter, but how do I get started with that?” I always reply with “How do you KNOW that you need to be blogging or on Facebook?” They either can’t answer, or offer that “Well seems like everyone else is there, so I figured I needed to be as well?”
Social media is great, but if you are going to launch a social media strategy, it has to be because you’ve done your homework before hand, have monitored, and know that using these tools will tie into your larger business and marketing goals.
I randomely found out on google about this nice software you can use to get people find you and be attracted to your headlines in search engines. I think it was called glyphius…
I think I’ll try it to advertise my coming up business.
You pretty much type a headline and it gives you a score. You keep editing it and changing few words until the score gets higher and higher and i guess next thing you know, you have a catchy headline
Great little quip about responding to blogs. I’ve found that google blog search is beneficial with locating problems easily and quickly and allows us to provide answers to our clients problems quickly and efficiently. This is key for small companies like us to be proactive in responses.
One thing to consider is that even if people are not talking to each other about your product – it is likely they are talking about the category (food is a great example) and there is a LOT to learn in listening to and understanding the category conversation.
TO’B
Totally agree, we find most of our clients start of with Google alerts, Technorati etc.
There are some great free tools out there to get started.
Once you start needing a greater reach ,demographics and other analytics its time to look at the enterprise solutions.
Leon
Sentiment Metrics
Thanks for the great tips and sites to check out.
I’m still trying to get used to Technorati and I’m going to create my own Tweet soon, so look out!
-Gina
http://www.salesconx.com
Great, simple tools that companies of all sizes can use. I hadn’t heard of Summize and Plurk Lurker prior to this post. I’m going to check them out.
Hi,
I am looking for integrated online marketing tool for one of my clients. Preferably, something which can manage my email campaigns, web analytics , PPC bid management and web content management. Can you suggest any tool that is effective and gives me all data in one dashboard?