"In" Seattle News

Next week I’ll be leading a discussion on measuring a company, person or organization’s social media presence. While I have participated in various conversations with larger social media monitoring services, the price they quote is rather larger (over $50,000 a year). Although these companies package the information into a full on report, so can you! If you utilize the free tools that are available; dedicate a certain number of minutes each day to monitoring, listening and responding; and develop a weekly or monthly report on your stats; you can save yourself lots of money.

Nonprofits – listen up.

Tip 1: Twitter has a search engine that allows you to monitor what is being said on the network. Twitter is vital for businesses and organizations so paying attention to what people say in the network is important. You can use Twitter’s official search engine to monitor. TweetBeep is another application service or program that was created – it basically alerts you every time your company or organization is mentioned on Twitter.

Tip 2: It is simple but make sure you set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. It allows you to monitor a news story, keep an eye on competitors, etc.

Tip 3: Yelp is a social review site that gives the general public an opportunity to “Review” your company, service or organization. Spend some time on the Yelp Business page, activate your company’s Yelp page, and set up business alerts to notify you every time someone reviews your organization.

Tip 4: Blogger comments are often difficult to track. But a new service called BackType monitors blog comments. Bloggers may write a nice story about your company or service, but the commenters may write negative comments about your company. Until BackType surfaced, these comments were difficult to track. It also has an alert tool that you can use when someone continually writes about your company.

Tip 5: Facebook is the top social network in the U.S. today. It is so popular that a quick mention in someone’s status update could affect your company’s bottom line. We need to start monitoring what people are saying on the site. A Facebook application called “Lexicon” (you’ll need to login) allows you to search a keyword to see how often it is discussed on user “walls”. You can also check out sentiment data and demographics of people commenting about your organization.

Tip 6: Social Mention is a site that offers a sentimental overview of social media discussions involving your company. While the site is slow, the info it provides is valuable. I wouldn’t use just this service as your overall social measurement, but I would use it as a part of the overall picture. All you have to do is enter a keyword and it allows you to switch between the various social mediums – from Twitter to bookmarks and images and comments, etc.

Tip 7: Google is a great resource for trending topics on the Internet. Thanks to Twitter’s trend topics, this has become a major part of discussions on the Internet. Google has a free tool called Trends that you can use to analyze current trending topics.

Tip 8: Is there a competitor’s site that you must monitor but don’t have time to check the site every second of the day. Use a tool called WatchThatPage and let it alert you whenever content on the particular Website is changed. Something similar to this is Notify Me .

Tip 9: Message boards are still popular. BoardTracker is a good tool to monitor message boards, and its sister site BoardReader allows you to monitor forum posts, topics, group names, etc.

Tip 10: Set up a free trail with Filtrbox and get social discussions delivered to your basis as much or as little as you prefer.

Tip 11: Want information about your company’s Website. Are you considering an ad on a newspaper’s Website? Are you interested in how many unique visitors go to your competition’s site each month? Then visit QuarkBase.

Tip 12: Trendpedia offers you the opportunity to search buzz for free and it allows you to compare your topic with two other potential trends or topics.

Additional free tools:
-Collecta
- Addictomatic
- WhosTalkin
- Blogpulse
- Technorati
- Google Analytics - IceRocket
- Digg Search
- Delicious Search