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This video has a preview of Imooty’s social media monitoring tool.
We’ll first go over Imooty’s keyword navigation and see how you may navigate according to news, blogs and other social media sources. Next, we’ll see how social media data is saved and categorized in the media library. Lastly we’ll show how to locate special sub-topics in Imooty’s social media monitoring dashboard.
Register for a free trial of Imooty.eu social media monitoring tool today!
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Is social media monitoring a good way to generate leads? Someone actually asked me this the other day. A good answer is sometimes found by asking a new one: Have you noticed that people often use status messages to announce particular interests and things they’re looking for?
In the ‘old days’ you might have invested in a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to your site. You could also have created a pay-per-click campaign to gain visibility, make Google some extra cash and to decrease your dependence on SEO. However, with social media monitoring tools, there are ‘real time’ opportunities to connect with people looking exactly for what what you have to offer.
There are of course an over-abundance of social media monitoring tools offering their services, however, the real work is identifying the keywords to use in your campaign. This process is indeed similar to SEO; just as you want your website to be indexed for words and phrases people use to search for your (type of) products and services, you’ll want to monitor keywords that people use to describe interests running parallel to what you offer.
For example, if you’re in the business of making designer shirts from orders received through your website, you may want to monitor “custom-made shirt”, “tailor-made shirt” and/or “made-to-measure shirt”. Simply monitoring ‘designer shirts’ could also work, but there’s a risk that’s too generic.
In this process, you may also want to compare ‘your’ keywords to those used in connection with competitors product and services. It’s also a good idea to monitor key industry terminology to pick up the latest industry trends and detect new directions where customer interests may be heading.
Chances are that you’ll find social media monitoring a cost effective alternative to traditional market research. And best of all, with Imooty.eu, you can try it out for free!
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Brand monitoring 2.0; Feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the never ending stream of information? Prefer sticking your head in the sand and wait for it all to go away?
The good news is that with the new media outlets, new tools emerge to leverage value from this endless flow of information. Learning how to use such tools can save time, avoid online reputation issues and help identify new business opportunities.
Lets start with the time management issue. Sure, there’s times you just want to browse around, check out some mainstream news or funny videos, but when it comes to specific monitoring activities, focus is the name of the game. Unless you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for, and a strategy for what to do with the data once located, you’ll quickly get distracted.
By identifying keywords that are important for your business, you will be in a position to find conversations about your brand, competitors and industry trends. Next step is to filter out the useful information and decide what to do with it. Oftentimes, brand monitoring data will be forwarded to a colleague in customer support, who will take action, addressing unhappy bloggers or forum participants. Positive mention will be of interest for the person in charge of SEO link building and the PR and marketing department. Other data, such as competitive intelligence and market trends, will be of interest for the R&D department.
Over the last months Imooty has developed a tool facilitating this type of work. Through a social media listening dashboard, users locate information on keywords across different social media sources and save posts to their media library. Users create projects, delegate responsibilities and define milestones, creating a sense of accountability when dealing with online media intelligence.
Want to take the Imooty tool for a test drive? Sign up for a free brand monitoring trial today!
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From time to time, we get the question “what’s the risk of not having a social media monitoring tool?” The question reveals a perception that “social media is just an add-on to other media outlets”. It’s not. Social media has a different set of rules and is reshaping entire markets.
With social media, people are engaging and interacting around context, not necessarily personal relationships. Whereas we used to connect around place (neighborhood, community, schools, associations, etc.) we now link to online personas that share our intellectual interest and emotions. For many, traditional media is no longer the main source of information. Increasingly people turn to social media looking for “someone just like like me” and consequently, many blogs and forums discussions are more important in shaping opinions and perceptions than traditional media outlets.
Likewise, PR and marketing campaigns are no longer about one-to-many communication by distributing press releases and pushing “call to action”. Via social media monitoring tools, companies connect and interact with people that have expressed interest in a particular topic.
Still, the strategy of reaching out to people of influence has not changed. PR and marketing efforts still try to connect with “trust agents” that are likely to pass on a particular message to their networks. In effect, successful campaign management is engaged in one-to-one-to-many communications. The PR or marketing message gets forwarded from one-to-one-to-many if it connects with the interests of the person receiving it, AND if it provides value to his/her network.
The main challenge for companies using social media is therefore the blurring between marketing and communication. Marketers want to use it to sell, communicators to build relationships. Of course, social media is very much about being a real member of a community and providing value, rather than just chasing the next sale. That increases the number of people a company has to deal with, requiring more time and investment in building relationships.
The effect of social media monitoring and interaction will have a profound effect on the PR and marketing industry as we know it. PR and marketing efforts is increasingly about connecting with real people and because everyone is involved in a network, it’s not just up to the people working in the PR and marketing departments. A well thought out strategy will leverage the connections of the entire organization, leaving a more profound, valuable and documentable impact than any traditional campaign could ever hope for.
Want to start listening in on social media conversations? Sign up for the free trial of the Imooty social media monitoring tool today.
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Why monitor social media keywords?
First, because search engines have turned into reputation engines. Today, people use search engines to “shop around” and check a brand’s reputation before making a purchasing decision. Locating discussions around your brand and identifying important opinion makers can avert brand attacks before the reputation is affected.
For example, media mointoring can lead you to spot negative comments in a blog or forum discussion, putting you in a position to interact directly with the dissatisfied customer. A proactive PR effort is the best medicine against crowdsourced social media complaint movements and on the other hand, locating positive mention is equally important. It too can be crowdsourced and distributed via social media, generating a number of back-links from fans or supporters of your brand. In turn, back-links and bookmarks will increase the visibility of positive brand mention in search engines.
Second, keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to, is always a good idea. Monitoring how they invest in media exposure will give you clues about their overall market strategy: By looking at where their brands show up (industry journals, newspapers, blogs, social media forums, portals, bookmarking sites etc.), you can assess their investment size and which market segment is being addressed.
Also, by measuring media exposure for different products / services you may establish what their strategy is for each line of business. Systematic media monitoring of your competitors social media keywords will enrich both short- and long-term knowledge of their commercial intent. That is valuable market intelligence when you fine tune your own social media marketing strategy.
Third, defining keywords that generically describes your products or services will enable you follow industry news and trends in social media. Whereas it normally takes several hours to collect and categorize data, a media monitoring dashboard will dramatically reduce the time required for locating valuable information…
In locating social media keywords, you first need to define your monitoring goals. Is it measuring ROI on online PR and marketing efforts? Online reputation management and locating competitive intelligence? Tracking industry trends and buzz? All of them? In which languages? The classic phrase is “garbage in, garbage out”. You are only as good as your data, and your data is only as good as your algorithm for getting clear about what your social media keywords are going to be.
Looking for a media monitoring dashboard? Try Imooty’s free media monitoring trial today!
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In a context of online reputation management, we refer to crowdsourcing as social bookmarking or collaborative tagging. So what does that have to do with brands and brand monitoring? Well, these days, pretty much everything. The latest example comes to us from Sears, a large department store chain in the US:
A couple had just bought a freezer from a Sears store in Dripping Springs, Texas. It would be delivered directly to their home free of charge. When the Sears truck arrived, the family dog, Toot, ran out to investigate the new visitor. As the truck was about to a stop, a loud yelp was heard. Toot had been run over and died shortly thereafter.
Understandably, the dog’s mom was upset and went to see the store owner. She wanted to bring closure to the tragic event. The owner apologized, but went on to say that it was not Sears fault. It was the couple had let the dog out in the yard. This did not help the woman to find closure and when she got home, her husband was unhappy about how Sears had treated her.
He called the store, the owner repeated that it was the couples fault, the dog should have moved. He would have been wiser in offering an apology without placing the blame on a distraught customer.
The couple bought a domain name, SearsKilledMyDog.com and created a website telling about their experience. Once live, they forwarded it to their friends and family, and posted it on Facebook. As with any viral story, the response was immediate. Within 24 hours, their website was generating heavy traffic, and the tragic tale was trending as number 1 on Reddit while becoming a Twitter phenomenon via The Consumerist.
At this point Sears customer service entered to execute online reputation management and active damage control. High level executives called the couple personally to apologize and offer restitution for pain and suffering. The couple felt they had been heard and the SearsKilledMyDog.com website was taken down. Next, Sears added their voice to the conversation raging at The Consumerist. They requested to add a response in the article itself;
“We are very sorry about the loss of the dog of a devoted Sears customer. As soon as we heard about this (which was at 5 PM CT on Dec-11-2009), our team acted swiftly to contact the customer who purchased the freezer from our Hometown Store in Dripping Springs, Texas. In fact, Will Powell, our business unit President, spoke to the customer just before 7 PM CT on Dec-11-2009 and extended our apologies and the customer graciously accepted. As a symbol of our deep regret for the accident, we offered to reimburse him for the cost of his dog as well as to refund the original sale.”
After the update, Sears identified the people with most influence who had Tweeted the article and sent them a link with the update. This enabled 3rd parties to post an update to the article via their own accounts, adding online reputation management credibility since such re-tweets would not come from Sears directly.
The conventional definition of crowdsourcing is that it is the completion of tasks that normally would be performed by in-house employees or contractors, and out-sourcing them to a random set of people (that’s the crowd). The Sears story shows how the term applies to online reputation management too. With engagement, sincerity and personal interaction, Sears was able to turn the negative crowdsourcing around to a positive.
Feel like getting started with online reputation management? Sign up for a free Imooty.eu trial today!
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Last week, Kristoffer was featured in an interview at Krawattenträger, a blog on social media marketing. Apart from talking about Imooty’s development over the past years, he was asked how Imooty uses social media for marketing purposes. The answer is that we haven’t done much of that (so far). The best ROI for our target audience has proved to be good old direct mail and followups per phone.
Many companies seem to be embarrassed admitting to this. Sure, there are many cases where there’s reason to cringe at opportunity lost by not following a social media marketing strategy, however, it also not for everyone.
First step is obviously finding out where your customers are likely to hang out. If you’re a B2B service, it probably won’t make sense to pursue MySpace users. Secondly, the effort required to convert “fans”, “contacts” or “friends” into paying customers can be considerable so there needs to be someone in charge of community management. Then, the million dollar question, what’s the social media marketing budget? It’ll definitely not be enough registering a profile here and there and wait for magic to occur…
Trying to do too much will inevitably end up with a lot of things being done poorly. Don’t try being everywhere all the time, focus on delivering content that your audience will find meaningful.
To conclude, there’s no sense in rushing into social media marketing just for the sake of it. Research whether it makes sense for your product or service, find out where your prospects are, how they interact and assess what your cost is going to be.
Already do social media marketing and want to assess your ROI? Register with Imooty.eu for a free trial today!
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Last week Imooty was awarded a Ruban d’Honneur for its business intelligence application at the European Business Awards! We were nominated in the Business Innovation of the Year category.
The Awards ceremony took place at the Westin Excelsior in Rome where about 200 business leaders and esteemed guests showed up. We were awarded the Ruban d’Honneur by former President of Romania, Mr Emil Constantinescu.
From 7000 entered companies, 99 Ruban d’Honneurs were awarded and 10 overall category winners announced. Reaching this level of recognition is a major achievement for our young company and we look forward to participating again next year.
Try our business intelligence application for FREE today!
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Imooty.eu is proud to announce its membership of the European Knowledge-Intensive-Services-Innovation-Platform! News flash; our media intelligence tool was selected following our participation and presentation at the KIS Partnership Forum in Brussels last month.
The platform, a.k.a. KIS 100, brings together the most interesting and successful “knowledge” companies in Europe. It was established to promote exchange of ideas and to promote partnerships between cutting edge innovators, among others in the mobile news area.
The KIS 100 CLUB and Europe INNOVA are initiatives financed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry.
Want your own news flash? Start using Imooty today!
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The result of financial downturn and crisis is a “shake out” of unsustainable business models and unhealthy companies. The media sector is going through a period of major restructuring and Darwin, born 200 years ago today, would probably see this as a natural development.
The internet started to change how we access information over a decade ago. Different media formats, text (newspaper articles), audio (radio programs) and video (TV programs) are merged in a single browser.
The consequence for ‘old media’ is devastating; old business models are going out of business! For newspapers the problem is sinking subscription sales, dwindling interest in their classifieds and advertisers who increasingly become aware that they’re being overcharged. And News Flash; Broadcasters face similar struggles as users access the internet for audiovisual content.
Meanwhile, the question of how to monetize on the web remains unanswered. Today Youtube announced a system of micro payment for offline content on their blog. Would you pay for content on Youtube?
So far conventional wisdom show that it is difficult to charge for media content on the web. Part of the problem is diversity, why should I pay here when I get it for free over there? YouTube’s efforts will be interesting to follow…
Locate market intelligence with Imooty.eu today!
