5 things that Facebook can do more! Part I

Facebook have acquired Friendfeed, even as I was planning to write 'what FB can do more' as I hinted in my previous post, the last in the series on Social Media Monitoring. The context of my thought was more from the wish-list perspective. Things that come to the mind while using the platform. Things that could increase the usage by me and people who I interact with.

What I am talking are small things that make a difference. Facebook already has a lot of these small functionalities, that make it such a popular SN platform.

Lets begin with the most used feature on Facebook; The Status updates. This is where most of the interesting conversations begin. You would have noted that FB shrinks the whole conversation thread if there are more than 3 comments on a status. This is where the first of the 'Mores' can be created. People often click on View all comments link, opening the conversation thread. Two requirements that originate due to this are:

1. There is no way the user can close the displayed conversation.

2. Users also wish to go back to some interesting conversations, but it is difficult to do so, due to the unending flow of Updates from the friends.

Things that facebook can do, to make the above simple:

1. There can be an Up arrow on the top of the opened conversations, that can shrink-back the opened conversation.

2. There can be a 'bookmark' icon that would bookmark conversations that a user might find interesting.

3. These bookmarked conversations can be viewed on the Users Profile page, where currently Facebook offers the tabs to view updates from Self, Self+friends and Friends only. Adding this tab would definitely improve the usability and the feature can be extended by giving people the option to group bookmarks.

Part II coming up in a few days.

4th post on Social Media Monitoring: Facebook

Now that Facebook has become the hottest social network, it’s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. You can do this with Facebook Lexicon (you need to login to see it) that creates a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. The FB site says that Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications like one-on-one chat.
Reaching Lexicon in itself is a bit of a task. You need to click on the Advertising link in the footer. Here is what all you monitor once you are there:

•Dashboard Shows the number of unique users for the search keyword, the percentage of the Facebook user base that mentioned it, and the total number of posts.
•Demographics Show trends over time, based on users characteristics like age, gender and country.
•Maps display locations within different countries. Currently limited to the US, Great Britain, and Canada.
•Sentiment display the like or dislike for a given topic.
•Associations is like related topics.
•Pulse is an interesting feature that shows the Interests like Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books etc of people discussing the topic/keyword searched. Example: You can have a count of people who like listening to 'Madonna' among those talking about 'Swine flu', for a date range.

Its not a very good tool and certainly stands no where near the effort that products like Twitter(my previous post) have put in to facilitate SMM.

That's a good idea...a series on What Facebook can do more? Coming up next...on a browser near you :-)

'Birdwatching' in SMM: Monitoring Twitter

I had promised a post on monitoring Twitter and Facebook, in my last post. I have however decided to break it into two posts to keep it short and simple.

Twitter's growth is due to the power it holds in connecting people without much effort. Its simple as an SMS and the kind of virality it can ignite is tremendous. This has made it important for you to pay attention to what is being said about, you and your products, on this micro-blogging service. The product team at Twitter had the foresight to create an elaborate search mechanism for people to 'monitor' activity on Twitter.

On the footer you can click the Search link to use the official search engine. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the search as well. There is an option for Advanced Search which is clearly created to facilitate monitoring. The best part of this all is the Search Operators . These are phrases that if used as a search keyword act as short-cut to advance search. For example : you can search for "Rediff :(" to get results for tweets containing "Rediff" with a negative attitude.

There are other services like TweetBeep (http://www.tweetbeep.com) , Tweetscan(http://www.tweetscan.com/), Monitter (http://monitter.com/) also, that facilitate your SMM activity. Sideline(http://sideline.yahoo.com/) is another good tool that allows you to create a keyword group so that you can monitor more than one keywords in one go. BackTweets(http://backtweets.com/) can be used to monitor tweets with links to your site that are "hidden" inside of shortened URLs.

There is immense power that Social media has and services like Twitter can make or break a product or service if the owner does not Factor in SMM. A simple example in the attached screen shot explains that. If you look closely at the attached image you can see a link on the right navigation that says "Twitter these results".
It has become extremely easy to spread the word now..good or bad.. is just a matter of an emoticon ;-).


And as far as Ego Surfing on Twitter is concerned, Tweetdeck

gives you the option to see the tweets which mention your name, even if you maintain multiple personalities. My friend Rajeev, who uses Twitter extensively, is quite satisfied with Tweetdeck.

The Facebook post is coming up next. Happy 'birdwatching' to all.

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
http://www.ysearchblog.com/ from yahoo and http://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 (http://www.bloppy.info/), Commentful(http://www.commentful.blogflux.com/), co.mments.com (http://www.co.mments.com/), Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), BackType(http://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(http://www.delicious.com/), Diigo(http://www.Diigo.com/), Furl(http://www.furl.net/), Mister Wong(http://Mister-Wong.com/ is Europes no.1 service) and Blinklist(http://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 (http://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.