Social Media Monitoring

Real Time Understanding

by Malcolm De Leo · March 14, 2013

We all know that social media data is driving us towards thinking about our business differently. Whether it is engaging your consumer demographic in new ways: engaging with customers on a Facebook fan page or managing up to the minute attacks on your brand; handling a viral twitter crisis or simply peeking in on those talking about your brand; listening to people talk about what they like on forums or becoming a trusted resource in those communities; your world is now upside down. To add insult to injury, all of this is starting to become necessary at the speed of social. To put it bluntly, this means real time baby. It isn’t enough to simply track your brand week by week now, it is becoming moment by moment. And you can’t simply look at key attributes at only the highest level, you need to look at the attributes you know as well as ones that you may not even know exist.

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Finding Gaps In The Social Media Monitoring Market

by Jason Falls · August 14, 2012

For the longest time, if you wanted social media monitoring software, which is now being referred to as “social listening” software at a decible level hovering around obnoxious, but I digress, you had to pay about $500 per month for it. What that meant was social media monitoring wasn’t available to medium or small businesses.

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Viralheat Offers Free Social Media Management Software … For Realz!

by Jason Falls · August 3, 2012

The opportunities for even small businesses to access better-than-basic social media management and monitoring tools got a lot bigger last week as Viralheat launched what I believe to be the first free social media management platform. The long-time social media monitoring provider has added publishing and engagement as well as a fair set of analytics pass throughs from Facebook, Twitter and the like to form the basis of a simple SMMS platform. And they’re not charging for it. Sign up for free and try it if you like!

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Never Trust Sentiment Accuracy Claims

by Seth Grimes · July 17, 2012

Sentiment analysis plays a key role in social intelligence (a generalization of social-media analytics) and in customer-experience programs, but the disparity in tool performance is wide. It’s natural that users will look for accuracy figures, and that solution providers — the ones that pretend to better performance — will use accuracy as a differentiator. The competition is suspect, for reasons I outlined in Social Media Sentiment: Competing on Accuracy. Per that article, there’s no standard yardstick for sentiment-analysis accuracy measurement. But that’s a technical point. Worth further exploring:

Providers, using human raters as a yardstick, don’t play by the same rules.

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Approaching Social Media Monitoring With Purpose

by Jason Falls · January 19, 2012

Social media monitoring is perhaps one of the most widely known and used social technologies among businesses large and small. Whether using free tools like Google Alerts and SocialMention.com or paid solutions like uberVu, Radian6, Sysomos or others, it seems listening as the most important function of a business’s efforts in social media has been successfully ground into our collective conscience. At least to those of us determined to implement good social media marketing strategies.

But social media monitoring is often thought of and implemented as a reactionary practice. Find the keyword mentions, then respond. Done. Smart companies know, however, that using social media monitoring as a proactive, business driver, can make the difference between being successful with your social media efforts and not.

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Altimeter Report On Social Media Management Systems Will Help Your Brand

by Jason Falls · January 5, 2012

Altimeter Group‘s newest research report, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” labeled as a “Buyer’s Guide,” is out and offers a deep look at social media management systems and how brands are using them. The report, which is free and available for download on Altimeter’s website but is also embedded below, is the first deep dive into the SMMS space which grows increasingly confusing and crowded. This report, authored by Jeremiah Owyang, will help brands better understand what is available and what platforms they should consider based on their strategic goals for social media activity. (Disclosure: I was interviewed and am included in the research for this report.)

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