That can be a complicated process, but one that Spiral16, a web and social media monitoring tool, was built to facilitate. It’s also a process that Aaron himself has been involved with since the days that he served as a “content meatshield” for the (now defunct) site Transbuddha, a self-styled “repository and showcase for those wonderful and compelling nuggets of media that pepper the information highway like so many two-headed cows and 20-foot spiders.”

During his Transbuddha days, as Aaron describes it, he learned how content spreads across the Web as well as how to interact with people online. Today, he applies these lessons to the work he does as Spiral16’s data and analytics manager.

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk to Aaron about what makes content popular (the big thing that people often forget, he says, is that “a lot of it is pure luck”), how effective algorithms are at parsing the Web’s information (turns out that, somewhere along the line “you need a human brain” to make sense of what you find), and how best to connect with the people who are actually talking about you on the Internet (the precious “signal” so easily lost in the “noise”).

On this last point, Aaron is adamant: Developing connections means remembering that all content on the Web is produced by “someone sitting at a machine carving out their world.”

Unfortunately, he adds, ”To the suit who wants to push product, that voice on the Internet is just a distribution method.”

To learn more about mining the Web for business intelligence, the seasonality of content, and how we consistently bring technology down to our level (rather than letting it elevate us), give our entire conversation a listen. You may do so here:

You can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Podcast in iTunes.

If you’d like to learn more about connecting with customers via social platforms, you might want to check out this recent PRO Seminar, “How to Strengthen Customer Experience on Four Social Media Platforms.”

Marketing Smarts Podcast: Social Media Monitoring Feeds on Brains is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

At Search Marketing conferences, you’ll hear a lot about driving website traffic and links through social media linkbait – a SEO tactic that is distinctly different than what goes into building customer relationships. Companies like Proctor & Gamble are paying for engagement, not eyeballs.

Companies that want to take full advantage of better customer engagement, online word of mouth and influence on sales should ask themselves a few key measurement and related questions while developing a social media strategy:

1. What goals do you hope to achieve from a social media marketing effort? What does success REALLY look like short and long term? This is according to the segments or divisions of business affected, not just the organization as a whole. Customer service success is obviously very different than Marketing or Public Relations.
2. Are web and social media synced? How will current web analytics and other digital performance reporting interact with social media marketing analysis?
3. What measures of success (KPIs and Outcomes) will be used? How are you defining ROI?
4. Is there a strategic plan for coordinating and measuring social media efforts across the organization? Will these efforts work synergistically? In silos?
5. What are current measures? Is the business conducting a formal effort at monitoring social channels using a social media monitoring/analysis software application? (Ex: Alterian SM2, ScoutLabs, Sysomos, Trackur, Vocus (TopRank Client), SocialRadar, Radian6) Are different business units using different monitoring tools? Are analysis staff allocated to making sense of the data and reporting?
6. Where to start? Is there a particular business unit, division or product that can serve as a test case?
7. What’s the current tactical mix? Assess current social media activities: How long has the company participated with social media sites and which? Blogging, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Wikis, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Identify your benchmark measurements with relevant channels.
8. Is a dashboard and social media marketing management tool used for content promotion?
9. Moving forward, what will it take to transition from fragmented efforts to something more coordinated? Which “hearts and minds” do you need to win over for support to make it happen?
10. Is there an internal social media council or group tasked with assessing social media strategy and how will their role affect defining goals and ongoing performance reporting?

Every company, division, product/service and their customers are unique. The questions above can provide valuable insight into a company’s state of social media marketing readiness as well as provoking new thoughts and direction. The more informed companies are about planning for the social web, the more successful they will be.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
10 Questions for Social Media Measurement Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

10 Questions for Social Media Measurement Success is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Note from Lee: This guest post comes to us from Andy Beal, CEO of social media monitoring tool Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online. Andy and I have known each other for many years and in fact, Andy was the first “famous” SEO blogger I had the opportunity to meet in person. He was gracious, helpful and very smart then and continues those traits today. He literally wrote the book on Online Reputation Management and I appreciate his willingness to share practical insights into the world of social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring. Reputation monitoring. Buzz monitoring. Call it what you want, but it’s all the rage. All the cool kids are doing it! However, friends don’t let friends monitor social media without first teaching them the six critical steps that most companies overlook.

Don’t start any kind of online monitoring effort until you’ve worked through these important steps. Ignore them, and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

1. Understand Your Goals

Just because you can monitor everything that’s being said about your brand online, doesn’t mean you should just jump in, without setting clear goals. That’s the monitoring equivalent of hanging out at an open bar–you’ll quickly get dizzy and will end up with a major headache!

Take the time now, to write down what your goals are for your social media monitoring campaign. Are you trying to better understand how Twitter users talk about your products? Are looking to measure the success of your new viral marketing campaign? Or, perhaps you suspect a rogue employee is sharing too many company secrets.

We talk a lot about “monitoring” social media, but you also need to “measure” the information you collect. You can’t do that without first defining your goals!

2. Know Which Keywords to Monitor

Now you know your goals, you need to determine your keywords. What exactly do you plan to monitor on the web? Your company name? That’s a given, right? Your CEO’s name? Check! Depending on your goals, you might also consider the following:

• Your product brands–iPhone, Android, Windows, Fiesta, and Motrin are all buzz-worthy products.
• Popular company employees–are they saying too much?
• Your trademarks–watch for infringement
• Super secret products–the ones you worry might leak to the web
• TV and Radio slogans–is that cute jingle resonating with your audience?
• For more suggestions, download this PDF.

3. Start With the Free Monitoring Tools

Trackur is one of literally hundreds of social media monitoring tools you can pick from. You might think that the CEO of a monitoring tool would want you to immediately invest in a paid solution, but I’m not your typical CEO. Instead, I want you to try all the free tools first. Google Alerts, Social Mention, Twitter Search, if it’s free, use it!

Am I insane? Possibly, but not because I want you to use free tools. I want you to use free tools for two reasons.

First, for 80% of you, the free tools will be quite sufficient for your needs. Maybe you don’t get a lot of online mentions. Maybe you are a small mom-and-pop shop. Maybe you’re a Realtor and only need to monitor your name–that’s it! You won’t need the extra tools and features that come from paying for a social media monitoring dashboard.

Second reason: you won’t know what’s worth paying for, until you’ve tested the free tools. For example, maybe you need a tool that can tell you not just who’s talking about your brand on Twitter, but who’s talking about your brand on Twitter AND is influential. Or, maybe you need a way to let various employees have access to your social media monitoring reports. Until you use the free tools, you won’t know what features are worthy of opening up the company check book.

4. Roll-up Your Sleeves and Monitor This Yourself

That leads me to tip number four: monitor your reputation yourself, before outsourcing it.

Just as I don’t recommend you pay for a monitoring solution until you’ve tested the free tools, I also don’t recommend you outsource your reputation monitoring until you’ve attempted it “in-house.” Why? Because, until you’ve attempted this internally, you won’t know what your needs are. Go straight to a marketing, PR, or specialist online reputation monitoring firm, and you’ll likely be taken for a ride. You won’t know what questions to ask, you won’t know what reports you need. You’ll simply hand over lots of money and hope for the best.

Monitoring social media in-house gives you the opportunity to learn directly from your clients. React in realtime and learn first hand what your weaknesses are. The moment you outsource that, you add an extra layer between you and your customers. If you’re going to add that extra layer of insulation, you’d better have clear goals and set clear expectations. It’s hard to do that, when you’ve not been in the trenches yourself.

5. Don’t Silo the Information Collected

OK, so you’re monitoring in-house with either free or paid monitoring tools, or you’ve outsourced the entire task. Next, you need to decide where this collected information is routed. Who in your company is alerted when a customer complains on Facebook that his laptop battery just exploded? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that your cars’ gas pedals doesn’t stick in the 2011 models?

I’m seeing more companies tackle this “chain of command” question by appointing a social media quarterback–aka a Community Manager. Call them what you want, but their job function is to collect and collate the data that comes in from your social media monitoring efforts and ensure critical information is passed on to the most appropriate person, or department in your company. They’re the social media silo buster! They ensure there are no bottlenecks or silos of data.

6. Commit to Act on the Information Collected

The data is flowing in to your company. Your Community Manager is making sure that same data is flowing to the most relevant person in your company. OK, so now what? What’s actually happening to that data?

The last step is to make sure you have a process for ensuring you take action on the important information gleaned from social media. Are you actually improving your products? Are you actually training your employees to provide better customer service? Are you actually ensuring your deep sea oil wells don’t leak in the future?

Commit now that you will not just pay lip-service to your customers. Get commitment from your executive team that they will actively listen to what’s being said about your company. Or as Dell puts it:

“We want the customer is walking the hallways…this is not a communication exercise, this is not a feel-good thing, this is part of the DNA of Dell!”

Are you ready to make social media monitoring part of your company’s DNA?

You can find Andy blogging at Marketing Pilgrim and on Twitter.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Six Critical Steps to Take Before Starting Your Social Media Monitoring Initiative | http://www.toprankblog.com

Six Critical Steps to Take Before Starting Your Social Media Monitoring Initiative is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

As Steve Farnsworth points out in his recent blog post, most social media monitoring software becomes shelfware due to the “lack of vision, and understanding of smart practices around implementation and adaptation.”

How then is a marketer to prepare themselves? It’s important to ask the right questions, know what to look for and to make the right decisions. I went in search of some of that information and recently requested a demo with the folks over Radian6 to find out (I had already checked out SM2 and a few others in the past year or so).

Here’s the thing, marketers tend to get wrapped up in dog and pony shows, bells and whistles, etc. No doubt, tools like Radian6 are very snazzy. I was mesmerized by the account manager zipping around showing me everything their platform could do. But that is not enough when spending a part of an already tight budget. Marketers need to dig deeper into WHY and what they and their organizations need when considering an investment in social media monitoring software.

Here are some questions to keep in the back of your mind when reviewing your social media monitoring options. And I am sure there are many, many more – feel free to add them in the comments if you’ve already been down this path!

The MOST important question:

Where Do You Get Your Data?

This is important! If you were thinking that SMM software scours Google for you, you’d be wrong. Most SMM companies have their own proprietary Internet crawlers or they have partnerships third-party monitoring companies like Moreover, wool.labs, Blinkx, Boardreader, etc. The result? No two SMM companies will provide you with the same data. You need to know what data is most important to you as an organization and select accordingly.

Some others:

• How far back do you pull data? (Note: Look for an SMM company that can retrieve at least two years.)
• How can I filter the data you retrieve? What are the options?
• How can I segment the data?
• How can I remove garbage like spam, flogs/splogs, irrelevant data, etc.?
• How does your auto-sentiment work? Can I edit it? Do your algorithms learn my sentiment edits over time?
• What kind of support services do you offer? What’s the cost? (Note: Not all sentiment is 100%. Closer to 40-70%. Most SMM companies offer professional services to help you get closer.)
• What types of data and how much can be exported for additional reporting and analysis?
• How many users do you support and what is the additional cost?
• What are the options for assigning follow-up to co-workers or other departments?
• How do you charge? Is it by brand, company, user, profile? (Note: Some charge by profile, if you are an organization with multiple brands, it’s important to ask about cost.)
• Where do you specialize? Which social media channel is your strongest? Do you cover traditional and social media?
• How do you help find influencers (Note: Not those with large follower/fan counts – that’s not enough. I am referring to people who truly motivate other people to action.)?
• How deep are your analytics? Do they provide actionable insights?  
• Do you offer education/training resources?

Obviously, it takes a lot of internal work to get ready for this type of investment and no SMM company can help you with that. Is there consensus among your CMO, CTO, CEO and legal/HR teams? If so, ask them ALL what they need from a SMM software platform…you might just be surprised what you find out and what the SMM company can (or not!) provide from that perspective.

What else would you add to the list?

Related posts:

1. Got 2 Minutes? Take Our Short Social Media Measurement & Monitoring Survey
2. Guest Post: Four Steps To Obtain Budget For Monitoring In 2010
3. Your Social Media Strategy Starts with Monitoring

Considering a Social Media Monitoring Investment? Ask Questions First. is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

If you are active in social networks, you will have heard someone pontificating about how important social media monitoring is for companies. It can be used strictly as a crisis/brand reputation management tool or, ideally, as a tool to inform either an internal or external engagement strategy.

However, just because we’re espousing the benefits of monitoring within the “fishbowl” doesn’t mean companies are lining up to pay for it. Why? Social media monitoring suffers from being linked in name to traditional media monitoring. Ask your boss or client their opinion of traditional media monitoring. What do you think the answer will be? Every situation is different, but I presume the first thing that will come to their minds are those clip books we receive every month. If they have an opinion beyond that it will likely to be that monitoring is very tactical, and not something they want to devote many resources toward.

So if this is how they feel about monitoring, how do we overcome it to obtain budget? Here are four ways that you can “sell” monitoring to your boss or clients.

1. Call It “Strategic Listening.” Ken Burbary, Director of Social Media, Advisory Services at Ernst & Young, and I have been discussing the term “strategic listening” for a few months and we feel it more accurately depicts the true power of social media monitoring. Where the term “monitoring” falls flat is in it’s lack of an end-goal. What are we hoping to achieve? How long will it take? The concept of strategic listening utilizes monitoring tools (among other data gathering tools and techniques) to help us solve a business problem. Whether that issue is related to new product development, engaging stakeholders through social media, improving customer care, growing sales or even altering the strategic plan, we are starting the process of monitoring with some sort of strategic imperative already in hand. If you are offering a solution to a business problem, where listening is one component of that solution, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where you would not be heard. 
2. Demonstrate Due Diligence. There are an abundance of listening solutions available to professionals these days. Soliciting feedback from colleagues will help you narrow down the list of providers, but it’s imperative that you test as many of them as you can. Some providers have a more robust tracking of blogs, while others are not tracking Twitter (yet), and still others are not capturing that many forums. Seeing the tools first-hand will allow you to make a decision as to whether or not it fits your company’s needs. Consider creating a grid with strengths, weaknesses, information on what data they are pulling, how the information is presented and some general thoughts on how you plan to share information.
3. Create a Listening Team. So after you’ve accepted the term strategic listening and done your due diligence on the tools, it’s now time to start considering who will be on your listening team. If you have been a part of a listening program before you’ll know that it takes more than one person to manage those responsibilities. Quite often, the person conducting the listening for an organization is “housed” in market research, consumer insights or marketing. Ideally, your social media listening team will be comprised of people from market research, consumer insights, marketing, PR, product development and customer service.
4. Develop a Workflow To Respond. Paying attention to consumer insights is only one half of the listening battle. You need to determine if, and how you plan to respond when people talk about your brand. To date, the best example of this type of response workflow was created by the Air Force. While it’s very specific to blogs, it’s easy to see how you could adapt it for your business.

So to recap…if you’re trying to get budget in the coming year for monitoring start by calling strategic listening, demonstrate you’ve done your homework on the tools, deputize people to assist with listening and develop a mechanism to respond when people talk about your brand.

What successes and obstacles have you had when trying to obtain budget for listening?

Chuck Hemann, a 2010 Society for New Communications Research Fellow, is currently the manager of research & online reputation for Dix & Eaton, a communications consultancy with specialized expertise in social media strategies and tools. On February 15th, Chuck will begin a new role as social media associate for WCG, a global media services company focused on the corporate and product marketing and communications needs of leading healthcare companies. You can follow Chuck on Twitter. 

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: The Nights Before 2010
2. Guest Post: The 4 Pillars Of B2B Marketing-The Lifecycle Of a B2B Campaign
3. Guest Post: When Navigating The New World Of Sponsored Tweets…

Guest Post: Four Steps To Obtain Budget For Monitoring In 2010 is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.

The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who’ve adopted social media don’t measure their social media programs.

Even worse: 40% weren’t even sure they could monitor social media ROI.

Thankfully, there are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these 5 social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working.

1. Trackur

This social media monitoring tool from ORM expert Andy Beal tracks nearly every element of online media, from blogs, RSS feeds and Tweets, to images and video. Trackur provides the ability to not only view conversations about a brand, but also view the increasing or decreasing volume of the conversation. That way, users can be alerted to any spikes in buzz from a product launch or a negative event. Plus, Trackur offers analysis of any website mentioning a term being monitored, allowing users to distinguish how influential that site is. Monthly subscriptions to Trackur start at $18 per month.

2. PostRank Analytics

PostRank provides engagement scores to gauge how well pieces of content (i.e., a blog post, a news article) convinced users to take action (i.e., re-Tweet, a blog post comment, an RSS view). But beyond that, this social media monitoring tool shows the messages and comments from other sites that are contributing to the engagement score. In addition to individual pieces of content, this free service also maps out engagement activity and number of page views for entire blogs or websites per day.   PostRank also offers integration with Google Analytics.  Cost is $9 per month to track 5 sites. The image below illustrates a single post analysis with both engagement metrics and pageviews.

3. Google Alerts

This free tool from Google provides email updates of the latest relevant Google search results. It’s as simple as choosing a search term, determining the type of search results to be tracked (news, blogs, web, video, etc.), selecting update frequency and entering an email address. Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to monitor brand mentions for both company and product names. Plus, the tool can be leveraged to monitor competitor mentions.

4. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention – a real-time search engine – aggregates search results from blogs, microblogs, videos, bookmarks and other social sites. But this free monitoring tool goes a step beyond that. Social Mention provides a social ranking score based on popularity for every search (i.e., how often the search term is mentioned, if the sentiment is positive/neutral/negative). All of this data can even be compiled into a CVS or Excel spreadsheet.

5. TechrigySM2

SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. The “freemium” version of this full featured social media monitoring service allows you to create up to 5 profiles and each query is limited to storing up to 1,000 search results. There are many features with setup and reports as you can see in the screen shot below. Along with standard help and FAQ resources, there’s a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users that you can tap into and share information.

Incidentally, we did an interview with Connie Bensen, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, the company that owns TechrigySM2 earlier this month.

Whether you leverage one of these low cost or free tools to get started or other tools like Collective Intellect, Cymphony, Converseon, ScoutLabs or Radian6, it’s critical to track social media efforts and tie results back to the goals of your business. Because the scary truth is this: When cut-backs rear their ugly heads, the first programs to go are those that can’t illustrate measurable results and link them back to organizational goals. Don’t find yourself in that 84% of Mzinga and Babson Executive Education survey respondents who don’t measure the effect of social media.

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5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site