What do Shakespeare and Social Media Have in Common? (Part Deux)
In my last post, I focused on how you can go about identifying the main trends and issues in your industry as you start working with social media or work to focus your program. In this post, I’ll discuss how to find out where your target audience is getting information and how to understand what your audiences are saying about you.
Where are your target audiences getting information?
Your industry has its own community and much of it is probably talking at places like Facebook, LinkedIn Answers, Twitter, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, YouTube, forums and mailing lists or other places. Alternately, you might check out the social news and link aggregation sites like Digg and delicious.
This might seem simple, but have you asked customers what they read online and in print? Are there specific trade publications or journalists they follow? Bloggers? Trade shows? Webinars? Are they on Facebook and Twitter? If so, let them know that you are, too. Displaying it on your website, put it in your company's email signature, add it to press releases, hang signs in your trade show booth and include it in lead gen or online marketing campaigns.
iGoogle is another news aggregator that lets you create a personalized homepage that contains a Google search box at the top and your choice of any number of gadgets. Gadgets come in different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web, without ever having to leave your iGoogle page. Here are some things you can do with gadgets:
- View your latest Gmail messages
- Read headlines from Google News and other news sources--use it to track what the media and others are saying about your company
- Check out weather forecasts and stock quotes
- Store bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer
- Design your own gadget
What are your customers, partners, employees and the media saying about you?
Monitoring your reputation is critical. Again, one of the most direct ways to find an answer is to ask. Find out if there are any discussion groups or forums in which you appear. Getting customers to put their thoughts in writing on a questionnaire or survey is one of the most well-established feedback techniques.
As you know, Twitter is a real-time conversation between thousands of people in a public forum. Twitter Search lets you filter those Tweets and find the information you’re looking for. Using the tool’s Advanced Search, you can craft your queries and find out what people are saying about your company and brand. Just type in the word or phrase you want and from there you can find which Tweets contain it.
Take it a step further and set up columns in TweetDeck, your personal, real-time Twitter browser, which allows you to view several contacts you are following at the same time. By connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more, you can better monitor the people you are following on a daily basis. This is extremely valuable during product launches, for example.
You can also set up Tweetbeep to send you a daily email with a list of all the mentions of your defined brand on Twitter.
As with Twitter, there are many ways to evaluate media coverage. Was it the right sort of press coverage? Did it reach the right people? You can judge the tone (positive, negative or neutral) and volume (how much your company was included or quoted). Did the article include your core messages? Or did your competitors dominate the article?
One informative graphic to help you understand the most commonly used words in a blog post, article or other piece of writing is Wordle. Simply paste text into the Wordle engine and see what words dominate. For advanced users, Tagxedo can create dynamic, easy-to-read and customizable word clouds. If Wordle is the average four-door sedan of word clouds, then Tagxedo is your high-end mini-van with options. The highly versatile tool allows users to control to font, color, orientation and even shape of their cloud.
Trying to impress a client? Word clouds allow us to present literally any quantitative data we can imagine in an illustrated format. As humans, we are drawn to visually stimulating graphical representations, and spending the extra few minutes to create a powerful visualization of the words most relevant to your client can go a long way.
Social media…online networking…or whatever we call it…is constantly evolving. Finding your place in this etherworld takes time and there is no one right or wrong way. What works for one launch might not work as well for another. The important thing is to start experimenting with a couple of tools and building up your network…or whatever you’d like to call it.
Posted by Davida Dinerman on October 6, 2010 at 7:29 AM
