13 Ways to Monitor Your Brand on Social Media: Do You Know What Is Being Said About Your Company Online?

 I recently wrote a post about 28 Reasons Why The CEO Is Afraid Of Social Media and I received a lot of comments from people about how they often heard some of these reasons, either as internal advocates of Social Media or as external consultants.

They said they came up against CEO’s and management that were afraid of the conversations they might hear on social media and the  many reasons why they as a company and brand shouldn’t be and won’t be participating. A few of these excuses were.

• It could damage the company’s reputation
• We will lose control of our brand and image
• They are terrified of feedback and truth

I recently experienced personally on my blog  a great example of how an emerging brand monitored and then responded to an Online conversation about their company on Social Media.

 A reader of my blog made a comment on  my post “5 Case Studies on Companies That Win at Social Media and eCommerce”, his comment below was a rather tongue in cheek comment in the blogosphere about the statistical accuracy of Hubspot’s lead generation results from Social Media. Below is his comment and Mike Volpe’s response from Hubspot.

Dagan’s  Comment “‘With our WebsiteGrader.com tool, we marketed it through social networks and it brought us 450,000 leads,’ says Marketing VP Mike Volpe at HubSpot . . . A Hubspot Report mentioned in their Blog post reveals a $84 cost per lead versus $220 for traditional marketing..So this was a $37.8 million social-media marketing campaign?” (This comment was directed at Hubspots claim)

Mike Volpe’s Response in a comment on the same blog post

“@Dagan – Nice work on the clarification. We did not spend $37m, Also, I am a big believer that social media marketing is a tool to use in addition and as part of an overall marketing campaign, not a tool to use by itself. So, we use social media a lot to build our brand, drive traffic and leads, but our presence in social media is built because of our blog and other content, and social media helps drive our SEO results, we get more webinar registrations by using social media as one channel to promote them, etc. Social Media is a tool to use along with other tools.it is not its own campaign. But, it can be very powerful!”

Later Dagan said in another comment, and I paraphrase… ”that he did a further evaluation of  Hubspots posts on the subject and he is now reassured of the accuracy of Hubspots claims.” 

This illustrates the capability of “New Media”  Social Media Tools to monitor conversations about your brand, as it happens and respond in a timely and  appropriate manner. The thing to keep in mind about brands that don’t want to engage in Social Media is that these conversations are going on about you whether you are there or not, and whether you want to hear it.

So isn’t it in your companies best interests to be engaged and  part of the conversation and know what is being said and to respond appropriately as is shown by Mike Volpe’s response.. which by the way was within 12 hours of the initial comment on my blog (they obviously are using a social media monitoring application)…. Impressive.. I was certainly was taken back by the timeliness of the response.. as I am sure Mike Volpe isn’t reading my Blog every day. (Hubspot is an Internet Marketing blog covers all of inbound marketing – SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.) and well worth checking out ..they live what they preach

So to help you with monitoring your brand online I came across this post by Marketing Profs.com  which lists a few Social Media ”Listening Tools” that are a good introduction to the social media monitoring universe.

13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools’

Are you listening? If you have customers, chances are they’re talking about you to their friends, to their coworkers, and to anyone else who will listen.

Here are some of the top tools for listening to and monitoring the online chatter about your brand:

Free Apps

1. Google Alerts Google Alerts is the steady rock in the sometimes white-water world of monitoring. You can easily target keywords that are important to your brand and receive streaming or batched reports…. I use this regularly to find out the latest noise on a topic or brand

2. Technorati  Billing itself as “the leading blog search engine,” Technorati has been helping bloggers and those with their fingers on the blog pulse stay informed for years.

3. Jodange Tracking your brand or a product is one thing, but turning that tracking into a measure of consumer sentiment about your brand or product is something completely different. For that, Jodange has TOM (Top of Mind), which tracks consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.

4. Trendrr Want to know how your brand or product is trending compared with others? Trendrr uses comparison graphing to show relationships and discover trends in real time. Use the free account, or bump it up to the Enterprise level for more functionality.

5. Lexicon What are people talking about on Facebook? Lexicon searches Facebook walls for keywords and provides a snapshot of the chatter volume around those terms.

6. Monitter  everyone is talking about Twitter, but what are people talking about on Twitter? Beyond the integrated search of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter provides real-time monitoring of the Twittersphere.

7. Tweetburner In the world of Twitter, URL shortening is the Obi-Wan (it’s your only hope) for effectively connecting with the public. Tweetburner also lets you track the clicks on those magically shortened links, giving you some hard numbers.

8. Twendz Public relations shop Waggener Edstrom recently launched its Twitter-monitoring tool, Twendz. The tool piggybacks off Twitter Search to monitor and provide user sentiment for the real-time Twitterstream—70 tweets at a time.

Paid Apps

9. TruCast TruCast by Visible Technologies provides in-depth, keyword-based monitoring of the social Web with an emphasis on blogs and forums. Its dashboard applications provide visual representations of sentiment and trends for your brands online.

10. Radian6 Radian6 pulls information from the social Web, and analyzes and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand

11. Cision When Radian 6 is paired with Cisionpoint from Cision, Radian 6′s dashboard can provide a wealth of information 

12. Techrigy Techrigy’s SM2 is a social-media monitoring and analysis solution for PR and marketing folks. With a focus on complete analysis and comparison, the SM2 experience draws information from all major social-media channels.

13. Collective Intellect  Collective Intellect (CI) is a real-time intelligence platform, based on advanced artificial intelligence. Its solution provides automatic categorization of conversations based on CI’s proprietary filtering technology. According to CI, its technologies provide credible groupings and reduce the “noise” seen in other keyword-based searches.

Listening and making sense of how your brand lives on the Web is only part of the equation. How you use that information to interact with the public is the next step.

So are you listening and monitoring your brand online?