L&S Unscripted

Admittedly, we first have to ensure there is dialogue. If you participated in the third part of the L&S Social Media Boot Camp, then you know that we experienced a couple minor technical difficulties – but luckily @markmorgan was able to join the conversation for questions and answers at the end.  Thanks to @courtneylotzer who continued through like a champ and our participants who stayed with us during the bump and if you missed all the excitement, you can watch the updated version of the webinar here or use Twitter Search and query for #TheExtraMile.

Here’s a brief overview for those who missed Tuesday’s webinar.

Where to Start?  Listen. There are numerous tools and online resources to measure and listen to all sorts of conversations online. To start listening, to help filter all the noise, we suggested a few free tools that we find valuable.

• Trendrr
• Quarkbase
• SocialMention
• Technorati Search
• Google Alerts

These are all great tools for providing a snapshot of what people are saying in the online space. Trendrr is probably the most comprehensive (look beyond your initial confusion, just stick with it for awhileJ), Google the easiest and others are fun to play around with if your geeky like our team is!

Lawrence and Schiller uses these tools in addition to our subscription based tool, Radian6. As a company we looked at many different options for our social media monitoring tool of choice.  We debated between Radian6 and Sentiment Metrics. We liked Sentiment Metrics because it automatically assigned sentiment to each post. After researching it further, we came to find out that statistically, the sentiment metric was only correct up to 40% of time, so we chose Radian6 because of its ease of use and functionality.

With the Radian6 measurement platform, you can find your brand on millions of blog posts, videos, reviews in forums, sharing of photos, twitter updates. It is real time monitoring of mentions about your company, product, issues and competitors, and has the ability to quickly find the most important relevant conversations.

Free tools are great for initial competitive review, building broad insights of topics from a general audience and checking your “gut” instincts.  We prefer to use an in-depth tool such as Radian6 for trend analysis and quantifiable ROI measurement.

I’ve listened. Now what? Define your goal, then the tool. We can’t say it enough. Social media should always start with understanding, and agreement, of what you are trying to accomplish with your overall marketing and/or communication efforts.  Measurement of social media is the same. Understanding your goal is the key to defining and selecting an accurate metric for ROI.

And finally, start engaging online and offline (use traditional marketing to promote your online efforts). If you don’t engage on behalf of your company, someone else will. If there is a void someone will step up and fill this role when there is a need for it.

Deserved or not deserved a single negative review or mention can taint a brand for a long time. It’s important to take a more proactive role in protecting your brand before it’s too late. You have the tools, now you can start monitoring the digital space for mentions of your brand, either positive or negative, and it’s the best way you can actually cultivate relationships, too.