Tag Archives: social media monitoring
Think Social Media is Free? Think Again.
Before you take an accounting of the true costs of social media, consider what expectations you have of a program. Is it just to get your feet wet? Are you counting on it for customer service? Do you expect to drive traffic to your website? Calibrate your budget accordingly.
Strategic Leadership (Monthly)
What are the goals of your program? What are the metrics? How will it be managed? Who is your target audience? How will you grow or engage your audience?
Tactical (Daily)
Who will create content? How often? What are the rules for acceptable posts and Tweets? How will you achieve economies of scale by deploying the same content across multiple platforms?
Monitoring (Daily)
How will you monitor and respond to interactions on social media? Friend requests?
Analytics (Daily – Monthly)
What are you measuring? How frequently? Will you analyze response to content, e.g. a LinkedIn Group? How will analytics affect decision-making and content?
The software for social media may be free, but the meatware is not. Effective social media programs require investment, brains and tenacity.
Use the News to Create Buzzy Campaigns
A quick public relations reaction to news that relates to your brand can spur exceptional results. After all, your customers are already tuned into the news. All you need to do is weave in a relevant story about your brand. Procter and Gamble, for example, immediately responds to oil spills by donating Dawn dishwashing detergent. The community relations effort drives millions in free publicity while embedding a key brand message about Dawn’s cleaning power.
You don’t need a billion dollar advertising budget to harness the same concept. After Sony announced that it would cease floppy disk production, Ideopia pounced on this news to unseat one of its client’s competitors, whose medical device is dependant on floppies. Yippee!
The Advantage of News Tie-ins
- Built-in and sensitized audience
- Credibility of third party endorsement, e.g. “Silicon Valley News says the floppy is dead.”
- Relevancy. It’s happening now, not six weeks from now when your next ad campaign launches.
Unearth News Tie-ins for Your Brand
- Monitor keywords and trending topics in social media
- Track online publications using Google Alerts
- Keep micro audiences in mind. It may not be news for June and Ward, but it could blow the top off your industry.
Develop a Quick Response Mentality
- Create an infrastructure that can think and act quickly.
- Social Media and Web: 1-2 hours
- Print: 24 hours
- TV and Radio: 12 hours
Make Your Own Social Media Listening Post
Thanks to Open Source (free) widgets you can create your own division of the NSA to monitor social media conversations about your products and competition. Using free code from TweetGrid.com we did just that for a new section on our Eyechat Blog. Dubbed EyeSpy, the four columns on the page each search the Twittersphere for terms relevant to optometrists and display Tweets that match. Though other free applications, such as Tweetdeck and CoTweet, also offer search capabilities, they’re not very portable. A widget can work just about anywhere: you’re website, mobile phone, or intranet.