New Media (R)evolution – Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
Published September 6, 2011 | 
Okay, so the use of monitoring tools has been mentioned and suggested as a part of your overall Social Media Strategic Plan. As more businesses turn to social media, communicators need to find monitoring tools to track and measure social media visibility and trends. Quite a few of these tools are available for free. Following are monitoring services that are free to use, and you will find that many of the services offer demos.
| Addictomatic | Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the Web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. |
| Backtype | Backtype is an analytics platform that helps companies understand their social impact and make sense of social media so they can make better marketing decisions. |
| Blog Grader | Blog Grader measure the marketing Mojo of your blog and makes suggestions to help you improve it. |
| Blogpulse | BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. It applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. |
| BoardReader | BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards. It uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. |
| BoardTracker | BoardTracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted. |
| Collecta | Collecta is a real-time search engine bringing content to you as it’s posted. |
| Facebook Grader | Facebook Grader is a free tool that measures the power of a Facebook business page. |
| FollowThing | FollowThing is a powerful, Web-based professional networking and media monitoring tool that informs inbound and outbound marketing decisions. |
| Google Blog Search | Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. It enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. |
| HowSociable | HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social Web. |
| IceRocket | IceRocket is a real-time blog search engine. |
| iMooty | IMooty is a next generation media monitoring tool that helps companies, PR professionals, and marketers gain real-time insights on the latest news and trends that matter to them and who the important opinion makers are. |
| Samepoint | Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. |
| Social Mention | Social Mention is like Google Alerts but for social media. Sign up to receive free daily e-mail alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on any topic you choose. |
| StatsMix | StatsMix allows companies to easily build and share custom dashboards for displaying and analyzing all the metrics they generate. It provides an overview of all your metrics and what drives them. |
| Topsy | Topsy is a new kind of search engine that sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy results are the things people link to when they’re talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them. |
| TRIBE Monitor | TRIBE MONITOR is a social statistics aggregator that helps you find out where your fans are and where conversations about your brand are taking place by tracking your online presence once every hour. |
| Twazzup | Twazzup operates a leading real-time news platform that enables users to filter the news out of live Internet content. |
| TweetFeel | Tweetfeel monitors positive and negative feelings in Twitter conversations about many things, including popular brands, and displays the results in a clear and simple way. |
| Twendz | The twendz Twitter-mining Web application from Waggener Edstrom uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does the twendz application by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute. |
| twitt(url)y | twitt(url)y tracks and ranks the URLs people are talking about on Twitter. |
| Twitter Grader | Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. |
| Twitter Search | There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the service. |
| Vitrue Social Media Index | The Vitrue Social Media Index is an easy-to-use tool designed to provide you a snapshot in time to help you measure your brand’s online conversations. |
| Workstreamer | Workstreamer is a business listening platform that delivers a competitive advantage to professionals by providing real-time social updates on competitors, customers, prospects, partners and more. |
| Xinu Returns | Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics. Check PageRank, backlinks, indexed pages, rankings, and more. |
| YackTrack | As a content producer, you can search YackTrack for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content. Another site feature, Chatter, gives you a keyword search for the social media sites — this allows you to see “chatter” on various sites that talk about a specific keyword. |
New Media (R)evolution – Walk Before Running
Published September 2, 2011 | 
Of course, when we consider communication strategies, the most effective tactics start inside the company or organization. So let’s contrast this with long-established marketing or public relation efforts before the assimilation of digital and social media channels. If marketing or public relations didn’t maintain goals to support, didn’t understand its targets, had absolutely no bona fide plan for implementation and anyone in any department or branch could offer a story to the media or introduce a campaign simply because it was the traditional action to carry out, the project wouldn’t stand a chance.
The new world of market niche engagement is actually no different. Before you initiate any implementation, you need to clearly understand what you’re striving to accomplish, who your target market niche are and what the tactical plan to carry out looks like, and of course, ultimately have strong support from the highest echelons, across the organization. Predictably, without that, you’re going to be constantly swimming against a strong current.
Establishing early internal cooperation is one aspect, but acquiring funding and strategic ongoing support require actual results. So the questions address is what kind of results and what yard stick will you use to measure them?
If you’re eliminating traditional approaches, leaping headlong into social media because it’s trendy or because everyone’s kids are on Facebook, you’ve failed to see the meaning. On the contrary if you’re implementing new media tools and channels due to the fact one or many of your target market niches have, and by way of strategic listening, you’ve discovered terrific new channels and strong platforms for connection and deliver of ideas, you’re most definitely proceeding in the right direction. You’re ready to create a strategic and tactical plan.
Unfortunately, adopting social media and other digital channels without any plan or objective for engagement is a guaranteed formula for potentially serious failure. Way too many companies and organizations run before they walk. 
Most often as a direct result of their persuasive enthusiasm encouraging them to enter the new world of social media and just start doing it. They don’t understand why they are using social media tools and applications, what their specific goals are, and more importantly how to measure success. In the end, they don’t get the level of return they anxiously anticipated and as a result get frustrated, and in many, many cases, just quit without ever enjoying any level of success.
So how do you develop a plan of the tasks, tools, processes, achievable goals and measurement metrics for target market engagement that is sustainable and will help you achieve your ultimate business objectives and success?
New Media (R)evolution – Listening Results
Published August 31, 2011 | 
With as many as 175,000 new blogs and over 140 million tweets each day, along with plus a mass of news content, millions of videos and other items continuously posted to the Web 24 hours a day, there is no way you can read everything that posts up about what your competitors are doing, industry news or marketplace happenings. Even more overwhelming at times to follow every single mention about your own business, so it makes sense that the process has to be programmed for operational and reporting efficiencies.
The sheer volume of information makes for very good reasons reporting tools are vital components to the listening stage, as well as to provide data during planning and analysis for the market niche connection and engagement. 
Understand these type tools aren’t designed to gather meaningful sense of individual conversations like humans can from one-on-one interaction. They are instead programmed to quickly and clearly identify significant trends and shifts in discussion topics and associated sentiment and opinion. This can be helpful pinpointing important influencers and quantifying the important impact of the conversations.
A variety of subscription-based monitoring tools have been developed. These kinds of powerful tools can make it easier sifting quickly through all the data noise. The hub is where conversations linked to your brand are taking place, and where you want to be to improve efficient use of your own resources and the incorporation of the correct channels.
Understand that it’s of no use to set up a Facebook page, devoting your valuable time and energy when your target market niche is actually spending most of the time reading blogs, tweeting and communicating on Twitter, and spending very little time on Facebook.
If you need more listening depth, research products can pinpoint for you where conversations connected with any topic, trend or idea are happening. This allows you to focus on topics that matter most to your market niche. You can combine some tools to help you quickly determine answers to similar important questions.
If your budget allows you to properly monitor, listen and engage your target market niche, then a powerful, comprehensive monitoring tool will serve your purposes well. 
On the other hand, if you don’t have the budget to invest in market niche engagement or you’re building a case for allocating the necessary funding resources, then you can get by nicely with some of the free tools available to you.
If you haven’t already, sign up for Google Alerts and Google Reader, but you should also check out the feeds about social media posts from www.socialmention.com. In addition, checkout sites that track specific platforms such as Twitter and blogs, to measure activities and locate the important influencers. You can also use the Facebook Insights link on your company page to gather some context specific to your Facebook fan base.
New Media (R)evolution – Dedicated Listening
Published August 30, 2011 | 
A strong, focused commitment and dedication to listening allows companies to dig deeper than the basic conversations that traditionally get the most attention. But you should proceed with caution. Why? The majority of what people have to say is neutral at best, so it’s quite easy to ignore. If like most, you do that, you run the costly risk of focusing on the relatively few negative comments at the expense of the larger community, and all too often attempt to satisfy an insignificant number of people who like to gripe and make a lot of noise, and you may make the mistake of taking your eye off the much bigger and more important picture, which of course is making all of your customers happier.
On the other hand, if you find that your consistent gripers are the ones wielding the most influence, then you may decide that it’s essential to pay a little more attention than normal to them. 
Always try to keep everything in proper perspective through online research in addition to the data that you routinely examine and analyze.
It is important to remember each social network community has to be monitored on its own territory or platform/application. For example, Twitter will only give you one set of data specific to its stream, and Facebook provides another specific set. Continue to search for information from a wide variety of sources and pay attention to the trends over time so that you can understand how the conversations, stories and perspectives change, and the level of intensity.
There’s absolutely no question that listening takes a great deal of time, but anyone who is successful at listening and clearly understands their market niche, willingly acknowledges it is essential to spend 80% of any conversation listening. As a result, it’s extremely important that you recognize it is no longer about simply broadcasting one-way messages to the target markets hoping that someone hears.
Now you need a good set of ears as well, listening constantly to proactively connect and engage to tackle and deal with any changes in the conversation as they occur and surface over time. 
Rock-solid successfully working models exist, evidenced by the some of the best listeners that also rank highest in terms of customer engagement.
Some of the pioneers and leaders in listening to online communities have reached the point of initiating social media control centers, sophisticated high-level listening hubs with employees dedicated solely to listening and monitoring for any brand mentions, with a keen eye especially watching for trouble spots and constantly analyzing user experiences. Dell, Starbucks, Zappos and others are leading this vital worthy effort with the support of the organizations’ highest levels.
New Media (R)evolution – Listen
Published August 25, 2011 | 
Let’s face it. Marketing, public relations, and corporate communications, are traditionally all about talking and more talking. Of course, quite often we were driven to do so by whatever new product we happen to be launching, and depended on the product development department to perform the necessary due diligence before creating and making the company’s announcement of the next big thing. At that time we determined our position and approach centered on exactly what we clearly established our market niche or audience wanted to hear in the message, created and shaped our story and released our great message for eager market niche audiences to take in, always hopeful that we hit the target and achieved the desired results.
The greatest benefit of the new media communication environment is the way it eliminates conjecture and guessing from the equation. There’s no call for trying to imagine what people are processing and thinking anymore. Leads, prospects, shareholders, customers, and consumers in general will tell you just what they think, believe and ultimately what they want to know.
It is becoming quite evident that social media offers some of the best research tools anyone could ask for. Consider that you can listen in on exactly what people are saying about your business, your industry, your products, and better yet, your competition. You can determine exactly what they’re responding to as well as sharing. So then the obvious question becomes, “Why not use this open forum to equip ourselves with market engagement strategies that work?”
With that said, you may have wondered why “Listening” before “Planning.” While the traditional method always starts with planning, in today’s new social media environment, it is vitally important to listen first, learn and then prepare a better informed and strategically effective market engagement plan.
Understand that except you begin first by listening and continue to listen, even the most brilliant ideas for audience engagement will be based on absolutely nothing certain (uncertainty is anathema to business marketing success). You may get lucky and hit the right message but the odds are you’re just as likely to miss the target altogether. Instead of the traditional “hit or miss,” by listening carefully, you can determine exactly the content, along with experiences and interactions people in your market target segment or niche actually need and want. All that’s left for you to do is just create and deliver on “it,” and people will respond honestly with, “That’s exactly what I was looking for!”