The 5 'Mention types' in Social Media Monitoring

Executing SMM for the strategising (as discussed in the last weeks post) is not a simple and one time activity. It requires a deep knowledge of all the "Mention types" that constitute the UGC(User Generated Content) and understanding of how to prioritise and categorise then. I am trying to put them in the simplest possible way to understand and also some means of 'Monitoring' the same.

News
Media News can be best tracked on news.google.com. It works like search where you can enter your company name, sort the results by date published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You can get RSS updates of any news items that mention you or your products.

Blogs
www.ysearchblog.com from yahoo and blogsearch.google.com help you find the stories that mentions you or your products. You can get alerts to matching stories via email or RSS. Blog search will not miss out on mentions that would be difficult to find in the news and ordinary search.

Tracking blog-posts often does not reveal the full conversations. The blog post might be positive, but those leaving comments could attack your reputation. Services such as Bloppy (www.bloppy.info), Commentful(www.commentful.blogflux.com), co.mments.com (www.co.mments.com), Twingly (www.twingly.com), BackType(www.backtype.com) track the comments left on blogs. You can search for your brand and subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates. Blogpulse’s conversation tracker is a tool to track who’s linking to the blog post about you or your products.

A step ahead in this process is to not only track the 'news' or 'Blogs' but also the ones that becomes 'popular'. Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon will help you keep a track through search for stories that match you or your products. You can subscribe to the resulting RSS feed and you’ll know about any story on these sites mentions you or your products–or your rivals.

Bookmarks
Thanks to online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us(www.delicious.com), Diigo(www.Diigo.com), Furl(www.furl.net), Mister Wong(Mister-Wong.com is Europes no.1 service) and Blinklist(www.blinklist.com, I use blinklist ever since i started bookmarking) many people are sharing their bookmarks online. subscribing to the RSS feeds from such services makes it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of you or your products.

Social Media News
Technorati (www.technorati.com) is one of the best options for tracking social media sites. It offers Real-time search engine for blogs that tracks what is current and popular. It Offers the ability to search blog postings using a tag library, list your blog, and Custom RSS feeds let you get quick updates on any blog that refers to you or your products.

Forums & Message Boards
Message boards and forums not only paved the way for social networking, they still attract a lot of people to interact. Many a times the most important interactions take place in a forum discussion and if you are not keeping track of F&MBs you could miss on vital information. BoardTracker and BoardReader are two extremly good tools to monitor posts, topics, and actual forum names.

Photos, videos, Tags, Job listings and finacial mentions etc are the other "Mention types" that need to be monitored. A SMM program cannot be complete without taking care of all these.

I will publish the third part of this SMM post in a couple of days and talk about the largest UGC generators like Twitter and Facebook.

Social Media Monitoring: Whistle and the Torch

Most of us not only consume Social media content, we are the content. Every morning when we change our status msg on FB, every time we tweet a cup of coffee and every time we comment on a job switch, we consume and create social media content.
From the level of just being a distraction at work (or studies), it has reached the strategic screens of many company's think tanks. All this content has reached a level that has started impacting the way companies approach the WWW. The time for "Social Media Monitoring" has really come.
What is SMM?
In simple words it is digging into all the User generated content on Social networking sites and blogs and analyze who is taking what about you or your product. It is the process of analyzing, understanding, and responding to conversations about brands, products, reputation and end user opinion in the WWW's Social platforms.
What elements are involved in SMM:
Viewing or tracking conversations and updates in real time.
Check for trends and analyze them.
Determine and segregate these on basis (a)locations (b)demographics (c)other specific criteria
Determine and segregate these on basis (a)sentiments +ve, -ve (b)repetition (c)other specific criteria
Identify influence r/s or Community Nodes(people)
Devising a response strategy: To blow a whistle(raise an alarm) or to be the torch (Lead the way in reputation building)
What after the analysis?
You can opt to react/respond/reply/comment on both negative and positive outcomes of the reports in the following manner
Gauge the necessity of a statement from the company's CEO/PR/Marketing.
Make Product improvements or do bug fixings.
Product innovations or new revenue streams can be created.

Oh yes!. If you are a blogger like me who doesn't blog for money, you can do 'Ego surfing'. Believe me its interesting.

Hammer the Jet !

When dear friends Suneet Manchanda and Akhilesh Kumar updated their Facebook status with a link to bid on a private jet flight, I was impressed. It made me think 'if I do so, who will I become equal to, among the known people in India', so I asked Suneet and the answer (conversation pic is attached) made me go wow!!









Auctions the world over:
Since the time Ebay was founded, back in 1995, it has been the world leader in the online auctions domain, with an exhaustive list of items and categories as compared to any of it's competitions. Now Ebay has a number of specialty Verticals and also many regional sites in different countries. The amount of user traffic that Ebay generates has prompted a lot of API integrated bidding applications to help people and companies reap profits out of Ebay.Ebay also operates as Ebay.in. Although the Indian site nowhere matches the Ebay.com site in its outlook, the categories are same on both the sites and the focus also generic at both the places. Another large international auctions site http://www.ubid.com/ also has similar categories and focus in terms of the products available. The site however has a nice positioning by saying "Excess inventory from worlds leading brands".

Auctions in India:Most Indian sites that do Ecommerce in India also have an auctions platform. The categories and products available are nearly the same as on the likes of Ebay. Indiatimes used to have an Auctions site as well that was launched in 2002-03. For people who are not aware that http://www.auctions.indiatimes.com/ is no longer operational, let me tell you that this happened very recently, some 3 months back. The auctions link now redirects to the Shopping homepage! In its early days Indiatimes Auctions did not have much to offer apart from the newness of the concept in India. They tried to innovate with things like fancy timings for auctions (Late night Auctions etc), slowly graduating to offering Air tickets @ 1 Rs Auction and then creating some wonderful propositions for its users. Now this is all over.
In this not so happening scenario when you come across an idea that catches your eyes, it deserves a place on PraveeL. The http://www.tradus.in/ homepage is strikingly different from most of the others found in the www. It shows the differentiator (Experiences money can't buy)upfront as a visual, and the whole page is absolutely neat and clutter-free. The help tools are also perfectly placed and the whole bidding process is also quite user friendly like most of the other products from IBIBO.Hope they continue to retain the user interest after a good first impression. Hey Guys! What about "A night out with Katrina @ Rs1" ...No, that would sound like all the actor meet-up offers that are abundantly available.

For your Eyes only...Ears too

Google has touched nearly all our organs by dominating the search and other web utilities the way they have. This they have done partly by indulging in research and partly by making some smart acquisitions, to give us products and services that are addictive.
Google has made in excess of 50 acquisitions till date (I came across one of the compilations here) and have added value to the way we can use the web for our advantage. Some time in July 2007 Google acquired a company called GrandCentral Communications. Now nearly two years later Google is preparing itself to touch our 'Ears' with Google Voice. The recent articles that have been written on this subject suggest that we could soon hear each other through Google!

As the Google Voice official site suggests that "Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more. Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon. We expect to have the service ready for new users in a matter of weeks, and are focused on opening it as soon as possible.
For existing GrandCentral user:- Over the next few days, instructions will appear at the top of your inbox on how to upgrade your GrandCentral account to Google Voice. Thanks for your patience."

Google has also been working on creating mobile sync applications (another subject that I plan to take up soon) for some time now and if Google launches these two services as a combination, it will surely touch our Ears. And people who look to critisize Google might as well 'pull' their Ears!!