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Cecilia

5 ways to use social media insight

How to Turn Social Feedback into Valuable Business Data

Week 6 Monitoring and Measuring

This week’s assignment asks students to research three free measurement tools and one additional paid analytic tool. There are so many tools out there to help professionals and new users like me in understanding how to monitor your social networks. Tools like these really do help manage the information and all your networks!

Free measurement tools

Stats in Google BloggerIn my search for tools that can help you monitor and measure your social media program, I started to look at my personal blog. I am using Google’s Blogger. Within the tool, a simple Stats page provides you with a high-level summary of the number of page views. The report shows page views for today, yesterday, last month and all time history. You can also look at traffic sources and page views by country, browsers and operating systems.

Page view tracking in Google Blogger

Reppler
I learned about this tool from a colleague and saved it as a favorite to look at later. Reppler is a tool that helps you manage your online image across different social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.


Reppler looks at how your social media networks might perceive you by analyzing the tone you use in your interactions, the words you use, activities and Facebook wall sources and categories. I like that it works with you on a continuous basis by emailing you progress reports to summarize your activities across your social networks that could affect your online image.



Reppler



HootSuite’s Basic Social Media Dashboard

With the basic version of HootSuite’s social media monitoring dashboard you can link a number of your networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace etc. With the basic plan you get some free quick reports, connect up to five social profiles, two RSS/atom feeds and a list of your promoted tweets.

Having never used the tool I signed up for their basic plan and received an email with a lot of great information for someone to get started. HootSuite not only allows you to monitor your social networks but you can manage them with this integrated interface.

HootSuite also offers a paid professional version for just $5.99 a month with additional monitoring and measurement tools at your fingertips. I also checked out their blog and noticed that they offer Social Media Education for Industry Leading Professionals through their HootSuite University Certification Program.

Paid Analytics

SAS Social Media Analytics is an on-demand application offering that integrates archives, analyzes and reports on the effects of online conversations occurring across professional, consumer-generated and social network media sites. What I like about this tool is that you can view your social influences by media source. For example, you can check the number of tweets, mentions, replies, retweets and followers all in one central place.

The tool can also help you with the following:

• Monitoring online conversations
• Alert you of good and bad influences so that you can react in a timely fashion
• Help you understand your audience behaviors

After all this research, I still cannot decide which the best tool is for a new beginner. I am looking forward to reading reviews from my colleagues, hoping to learn more about how to monitor and measure social media and networking activities. I also hope to learn a few tips along the way!

You're doomed if you don't use social media

This week’s class discussion has been an eye opener for me. In our assigned groups, we had to discuss real world examples of how organizations have been using social media. Some examples provided were RIM’s announcement of their new CEO, Tassimo Canada Recall, Obama Barack’s 2012 Campaign and Costa Concordia Carnival just to name a few. There has been lots of great discussion from the classe from how companies are using (and not using) a number of social media outlets to connect and engage with their customers to build their brand.

Mashable published this article on how PR professionals are using social media to show results. The article goes on to say, “PR professionals use social media every single day to get the word out about clients, to communicate with customers and to respond to questions or problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites have quickly become important tools in a PR professional’s overall toolkit.”

PR professionals need to understand the medium and use it to advance their message to their publics and expand their reach. I think companies that do not have a social media program or lacking in one, are "behind the eight ball" and really need to on top of it because their competitors might be better influencing and taking away your customers.

I'm curious, are there any companies out there that aren't using social media and are they still surviving?

Social Media Humor

This week's course reading goes on about how to manage your social media programs and the types of scenarios or questions you might encounter to get buy-in. I found this fun picture on pinterest and have embedded it here.

Source: tomfishburne.com via Beth on Pinterest

I love the reference to the legal department! The questions starting on page 43 in our course book are great to consider when developing and managing your social media program.

It also mentions that your legal department should be a big part of your social media guidelines and policies but how do you get them to respond quickly?

A sheep in a field of Twitters

So this week's assignment gets us to research and discuss examples of effective community management and I went looking at two that I frequently follow which are @LushCosmetics and @NNUptown21.

@LushCosmestics is a Vancouver BC franchised based company that produces and sells a variety of handmade products, including soaps, shower gels, shampoos and hair conditioners, bath bombs, bubble bars, hand and body lotions and face masks.

@NNUptown21 is a local upscale fine dining restaurant owned by a husband and wife team right here in my home town.

Quick stats:

@LushCosmetics has over 35 000 followers and over 3100 tweets.

@NNUptown21 has over 1600 followers and 2900 tweets.

What I like about these communities and why I think they are effective is that they tweet regularly on what's going on. 

@NNUptown21 has a weekly brown bag take out lunch special for $5 on Fridays. $5 gets you a yummy home made sandwich and if you bring your own mug you get a free beverage! To hype up their #brownbagfridays every Thursday they run a quiz and they offer the first person who responds with the correct answer a free lunch! I also love that it's a small community and when the owners tweet you can tell their sincere and dedicated to their customers.

I love the tweets that @LushCosmetics sends out. Their tweets are playful and well suited for their brand. I love that they can be playful and fun! I get giggly when I see a them tweeting.

I'd love to hear about who you're following and why you think their community management is effective with connecting with their publics!

Multiple Personality Traits of a Community Manager

Check out this infographic posted here.

Do you think there are any other traits that could be added to the list?