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#social#media#monitoring #social#media#analytics #social#media#measurement #social#media#week

Last week I gave you news about anything and everything important that happened that week in the world of social media marketing. And there was definitely no shortage of news to share from Google buyouts to Mark Zuckerberg throwing another temper tantrum. Mark, you’re the Brittany Spears of Social Media-a social media diva.

In conclusion of my three day series on social media monitoring, I searched for articles on what happened throughout this last week in social media monitoring. Honestly, not much happened, but I have a theory as to why.

Often times, when companies introduce new products or technologies, they’ll say they’re in the Beta stage. When it comes to a company listening to and engaging with one’s audience, the idea and industry of social media monitoring is in beta. People are still hesitant about it. They know they need to listen, but they’re not too sure what to listen for, who to listen to, or what tools will help them listen best. According to Alexa, Radian6 leads the pack, but Alterian is on the hunt this week with another buyout.

CyberAlert – They’ll be giving away 15 public relations grants for their CyberAlert 4.0 Online News Monitoring Service.

Social Media Week – A lineup of 150 free social media monitoring events in five cities.

Jive announces 18 business imperatives – Engage!

Cision offers free software to students – This is available to students in the U.S. and Canada.

Alterian – They acquired Intrepid (A social media analytics consultancy).

SAS Webcast – They’re holding a live webcast on September 17.  (BTW, this article is in German.  Download Google Chrome to translate it.)

For those who didn’t have a chance to follow my series on social media monitoring, I encourage you to scroll down and read my blogs from the last few days. Thanks to you they were my most popular blogs to date, and I want to thank each of you for reading.

Stay social,

Erick

Yesterday, I suggested the return on traditional markets levels off and becomes predictable, whereas the return on social media markets is fickle because people are fickle.  Both markets require people, and since people are fickle there are margins of changeability within the predictability of both markets.  However, there is more room for changeability within the predictability of social media markets because there is a lower threshold to cross and commitment to keep.

If a company wants to go public and enter the market, they must cross financial and even legal thresholds.  A person can’t just open Joe’s Garage on Monday and go public on Wednesday.  People also have a financial threshold to cross in order to become shareholders.  Companies and people who want to take their social media public have a much lower threshold to cross.

As with traditional markets, those who play the social media market must observe social patterns and adjust their social media marketing efforts according to those social patterns. Those similar social patterns within one’s audience determine the common denominator of one’s audience that should be the focus of one’s social media marketing plan.

Rules of playing the social media market:

1. Engage your audience. Three Rules of Social Media Marketing.
2. Not all social media has longevity. My blog on FourSquare.
3. Not all social media is for everyone. Don’t use Twitter just because everyone else is.
4. Don’t follow people just because they follow you.
5. The best social media marketing is niche social media marketing.
6. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are good for finding your audience and determining how to engage them best.
7. The best social media marketing is followed up by meeting your most devoted Facebook friends and Twitter followers in person.
8. Unless your famous, start out with a regular Facebook profile.  Don’t expect people to want to become your fan when they don’t know who you are.
9. Develop a social media marketing plan.
10. Include social media monitoring in your social media marketing plan.

Speaking of social media monitoring, here are three more sites for you to check out.

SociafyQ

• An open-source social media monitoring platform that offers free and reasonably priced services
• You can add a SociafyQ widget to your desktop or iGoogle account
• You can choose which social networking sites you want SociafyQ to track

I cannot locate any videos for SociafyQ

Actionly

• Monitor Twitter tag clouds and top tags
• Monitor keywords on Twitter, Facebook (public) status updates, blogs, Flickr, Youtube, news, and Google Buzz.
• Monitor key Twitter metrics, including number of followers, retweets, and mentions.

No videos for Actionly either

PeopleBrowsr

• Identify your advocates, critics, and opinion leaders
• Research reports analyze the whys and how of traffic spikes, sentiment trends, brand engagement, customer loyalty, and more
• Monitor global and U.S. Tweet distribution

Thanks to everyone for reading my series on social media monitoring.  Come by tomorrow for a special ‘This week in social media monitoring.’

Stay social,

Erick

Traditional and social media marketing require brands to identify their audience and a common denominator within that audience.  Unlike television and other traditional forms of advertisements that are targeted to a specified group of people, blogs and articles are available to almost anyone, anywhere, at any time.  For that reason, the social media marketer must identify and identify with an active audience through social media monitoring.

The social media marketer must write and distribute authoritative information in order to attract an audience, and then they must continue to write and distribute authoritative information that is useful to their audience’s common denominator. The traditional marketer goes into an established culture, identifies an established common denominator, and integrates their message to appeal to those establishments.  The social media marketer must identify their attracted audience through social media monitoring and set themselves up as being the most useful brand by writing and distributing the most authoritative information.

Since the investment of traditional marketing is to identify with an established audience and appeal to the common denominator of that audience, the return on their investment is that they will become part of that audience.  Since social media marketing requires a social media marketer to attract an audience that can and does change, they must adapt their message to their audience’s whims.  So, what’s the difference in the returns?  Just as the investment of one is established and the other is changing, the return of one is established and the return of the other is changing.

In quantifiable terms, since the traditional marketer identifies an established audience and an established common denominator, the return eventually levels off into a predictable pattern within a set of measurable parameters.  The quantifiable measurement of social media marketing is that just as social media marketing must attract an audience and determine ever-changing common denominators, the return on the investment of social media marketing must be measured according to the whims of people, using social media monitoring.

Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, but in social media marketing the exception to the rule is the rule.

Here’s a few more social media monitoring services.

Infegy

• See who your brand influencers are
• Measure real-time results of any given topic or trend
• Experienced analysts will notify you via e-mail of changes in your brand’s message

Collective Intellect

• snippet-level analysis enables you to determine who your brands key influencers are
• Receive customizable alerts according to predetermined dimensions
• Receive reports that highlight key findings through social media metrics and qualitative analysis

Note: There are videos on their products page.

LogicBowl

• Logicbuzz tracks consumer generated content
• Logicbeep is a real-time online reputation management alert system that is available to any authorized person anywhere
• Logictrends monitors Web trends by monitoring search engines queries across various channels

Stay social,

Erick

Over the next three days, I’ll talk about using social media to listen to your audience, adjust your brand message, and stop crises from adversely affecting your brand.  Each day I’ll list a few services to help you in that process.

ViralHeat

• Discover new Twitter leads and potential Facebook fans
• Follow conversations about your brand or product as they happen
• Set up alerts that allow you to monitor your brand, topic, or product

Crimson Hexagon

• Measures statistical patterns in words used in blogs, forums, Tweets, etc.
• Monitor real-time, global conversations that affect your brand
• Monitor the ROI of online marketing and PR investment

There’s also a video on their site.

Visible Intelligence

• Monitor wikis, video sharing, and custom RSS feeds
• Monitor what people are saying in over 50 languages
• Monitor historical trends going back to 2005

Imagine paying thousands of dollars for an advertisement during the David Letterman Show. You can use a service like Nielsen Rating to conduct a study of your potential and actual audience based on demographics. The problem is that just because a certain population set’s televisions are on doesn’t mean they’re watching or paying attention to the commercial. Web analytics gets a little more personal, in that it not only allows you to monitor the segment of a given population that comes to your website, but you can also monitor things like bounce and click rate. Therein lies the problem that people Web surf like they channel surf. Social media monitoring allows you to identify specific people within a given population who engage with your message, how they engage with your message, whether or not they engage with your competitor’s message, and much more.

Traditional marketing measures potential ROI according to what has and has not worked. Web marketing measures potential ROI according to the Web statistics of anonymous users’ computers. Social media marketing monitors actual ROI according to the ability to engage with one’s audience through the social Web. While all three forms of marketing require financial and time investments, traditional marketing and Web marketing require greater financial investments, whereas social media marketing requires a greater time investment.

In many cases, people are so used to the greater financial investment of traditional and Web marketing that they can’t imagine that free or low-cost social media marketing would have long-term ROI.  Those who are skeptical of the value of using social media marketing must understand that since the values of the investments are different, the returns on those investments are also different.

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more about those differences.

Stay social,

Erick

For those who take the time to learn how to navigate it correctly, Google Analytics can be a very effective social media monitoring tool. Here are four ways to use Google Analytics to monitor the sentimentality of how people are engaging with your site. These four methods monitor bounce rate, but don’t forget to monitor exit pages.

1. Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources >> View Full Report (Located at the bottom of top traffic sources): Check your site’s bounce rate from people coming from social networking and social bookmarking sites. Stop posting to social networking sites where your bounce rate is the highest and more often where it is the lowest.

2. Traffic Sources >> Search Engines: Click on the search engines, and you’ll see which words people are searching for that are causing a high or low bounce rates. Change your blogging style according to your bounce pattern.

3. Content >> Content by Title: Look at which blogs people are going to most often and which blogs have the lowest bounce rates, and change your blogging style accordingly.

4. Visitors >> Visitor Trending >> Bounce Rate: On the right side, above the graph, select the clock: See what hours people are less likely to bounce from your site and post links to your blogs in social bookmarking sites at those times.

Are there any other ways you use Google Analytics as a Social Media Monitoring tool? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Stay social,

Erick

If you’re engaged in Social Media Marketing, you should be equally engaged in Social Media Monitoring—the listening side of the conversational web.

You can listen for your name, your brand, other brands, your company, your competitor, or any number of terms.  Though, no matter who you listen to or what you listen for, it’s important you listen strategically and converse actively.  I listed some Social Media Monitoring tools. Some of them have free versions, so go ahead and peruse.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Jive Software Radian⁶ BrandsEye PostRank BuzzGain SM2 Buzz Logic

Trackur Visible Technologies ReputationDefender Sentiment Metrics Brandwatch

StepRep CISION ScoutLabs Sysomos ListenLogic Vocus Social360 PivotLink

Questions to ask before listening

• Why do you want to listen to what people are saying (market research, customer relations management, etc)?
• What are you going to listen for (Name, brand, etc)?
• What mediums/people are you going to listen to (Find out where the most relevant conversations are and listen to those)?
• Are you willing to spend time and money to listen and respond?  If yes, how much?  If not, is it really worth your time? (There are plenty of free tools, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).

Do you know of any other Social Media Monitoring tools, or do you have any other suggestions of what people should consider?  If so, comment, e-mail me, or Tweet me.