Social Media Monitoring – 10 Free Tools

Last week I had the privilege of presenting my third session at the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS) - Armchair Discussion Series. This time, the topic was Social Media Monitoring – 10 Free Tools For Finding Out What People Are Saying About Your Organization. I chose to present this as a follow up to my “Social Media 101″ and “Social Media & The Canadian Government” topics. I figured it was time to give people some hands-on examples of how to “listen” to the social media “conversations” occurring all around them. More importantly, I wanted to show public servants that they can use these tools right away, for free! I have posted up the presentation on SlideShare (embedded below) and provided the URL’s to each tool that was demonstrated live during the session. Note that even though I have listed ten tools, they are not necessarily in order. I didn’t want to provide a “Top 10″ list since at the end of the day, the best tools depend on what the objectives are. Without knowing these, only broad suggestions can be provided. That being said, I did point out during the presentation that Google Reader (for aggregating content) and Twitter Advanced Search (for real time discussion monitoring) are my two personal favourites. Which monitoring tools do you swear by?

My July Social Media Digest

Rather than continue letting my list of “things to blog about” grow this month, I have decided to compile everything into a single blog post.  Some items are new, others are old but still relevant. Here they are in absolutely no order:

• Facebook Lexicon: This is a great tool to follow language trends on Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers. Play around with it, it’s a great tool to add to your social media monitoring. When I compared “Harper” and “Dion” to gauge for political discussion popularity, this is what I got:

• Microdonations – GlobalGiving: I’m sure the concept of microdoantions is familiar to most of you by now, especially with the recent success of Barack Obama using this approach for fundraising. That being said, the non-political , social activism world has adopted the concept of microdonations with tremendous success as well. The GlobalGiving website lets individuals easily choose their cause and immediately make a small donation directly to the source.
• Rapleaf: Great tool for determining someone’s online reputation. I have thought about creating something like this for a while now, but it looks like they beat me to it. It’s far from perfect at this point, but I think the main idea is to be able to come up with an overall reputation score based on an individual’s online activity (where privacy settings are turned off). Standardization is going to be a big challenge of course.
• YouTube Annotations: A YouTube has added a feature that allows its users to add interactive commentary to their videos during playback. Very neat feature with lots of potential for 2-way public sector/non-profit marketing tactics. For example, imagine a MADD drunk driving video or second hand smoking effects video, where users choose how the story proceeds through multiple choices. This way the desired target audience can be a part of the message and actually think about how they would act in a similar situation.
• Google Lively: A neat little mini-3d world application where you can create your own 3d virtual environment in seconds. I have embedded my room , which is pretty abysmal , however I did spend about 30 seconds on it. That being said, the applicability of this in our industry will eventually be significant. Browse around some of the other rooms created on the site and notice the amount of visitors at any given moment on the more popular ones. You can mash-up items and integrate rss feeds into your room. Have a look at the Latinos Del Mundo Room, which has a plasma screen with user-specified YouTube videos playing on it. Once all the technology barriers are eliminated, this sort of thing will eventually be the website of the future. It already is for many organizations on SecondLife.

• AideRSS: This tool is simply brilliant. When RSS feed readers/news aggregators first came out, I considered them a godsend. Everything nicely came into one spot and I even managed to eliminate a good chunk of my email newsletters! The only problem was that over time , my list of rss feeds became quite large. As a result, keeping up with my favourite blogs and news sites became harder to do each day. Along comes AideRSS, a tool that analyzes the feeds you subscribe to and lists individual posts in order of popularity rather than in reverse chronological order. What does this mean? Basically, it allows you to focus your reading time on only the most important posts that came out since your last check. After all, the 80/20 rule applies to blog posts as well!
• Recent Economist Intelligence Unit Report: This 2007 study looks at the most recent Web 2.0 trends amongst major businesses and industries. The chart below shows how mash-ups have moved into first-place in terms of business applicability.

Ok, well that about clears up my little yellow Windows Vista Sidebar widget that I use to make notes. More coming soon…

Social Graphs and their implications from a personal branding perspective…

Although the concept of social graphs is nothing new, I recently became quite intrigued by an application for Facebook called Nexus , which creates a visual representation of your contacts and their relative relationships to one another. You can see mine below or click here to access it.

What I find especially interesting is that there is actually no new information shown, but rather the information is presented in such a manner that it creates an entirely new application with a specific purpose (mash-up). You can instantly decipher who the odd balls are in your network (relative to yourself) by looking at how far off from the centre they are. You can also visually group people by interests and look for 3-d visual linear patterns on the social graph. Naturally, this presents a huge opportunity for marketing research firms that can create effective behavioural models out of all of this.

So how is this different from traditional behavioural marketing research?

How about the fact that 70% of Canadians are on Facebook and spend an average of 20 minutes a day on it. How’s that for participation rate and sample integrity?

This really got me thinking about the whole evolving field of personal branding (or digital presence reputation management as I like to call it). This simple application can instantly paint a picture of an individual from both a personal and professional perspective (assuming of course, that they filled out their Facebook profile accurately).

Now imagine the possibilities if there was a tool like the quickly growing FriendFeed that would amalgamate your online social media behaviour in a visual multi-dimensional way as opposed to simply linear. What I mean is a virtual representation of a single individual formed from their digital presence (scattered throughout the web over years of usage). Anything you create online, no matter how private and secure you think it is, could one day be used to feed into this “assumed model of yourself”.

The big question is “Who will own it?” -especially seeing as how people sign off their rights each time they check the “I agree” check box on social networks, cloud applications, content uploads, etc…

Perhaps it’s time for a “social marketing” campaign to make modern internet users seriously modify their behaviours. Based on reactions I see at my workshops, there is little indication that people are aware of the potential future implications of their online actions. Especially considering the fact that my workshop audience is usually made up of communications or marketing people (the ones you would think would be aware of all of this).

Even just looking at it from the perspective of employment , the one-way fluffy, drum-beating resume is no match for an unbiased social representation of an individual accumulated over many years. And what about the employers themselves? Would they not have to be monitoring their own personal brands even more so than their potential employees/shareholders to avoid embarrassment? Lots to ponder about for a Friday! I’ll leave you all with that and eagerly await your comments…

Cheers,

MK