FreshNetworks Blog

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

In tomorrow’s post we will look at how to estabish the aims of your use of social media and how you can measure success.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The original article is here, and the list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

Advertising Age has today reported on an interview with Mike Murphy, VP-media sales at Facebook. Mike is talking about their newest mechanism for brands to connect to Facebook users.

An aside:
Some people have a go at Facebook for trying so many different ad models. I certainly don’t hold this against them. Right now, they:

1. have advertisers reporting poor returns when using current Facebook ad services
2. are burning cash at a rate of around $150M this year to keep the party going
3. are in a social networking marketplace which is changing very quickly, for which no one has yet figured out the best way to sell users or their eyeballs to advertisers

As a result they need to innovate FAST. Throwing mud at the wall is not the most elegant solution (and as seen with Beacon, it can be dangerous) but it’s a perfectly credible strategy in Web2.0 world where users and advertisers are prepared to try out new things.

Now back to Mike Murphy. So apparently he’s said Facebook is attempting to solve the demand-creation side (i.e. “this is HOT, get one”) of the online advertising equation as opposed to the demand-fulfilment side (i.e. search ads and text links). So that means Facebook hopes to be great at getting you to want a Nike track top because your friend just bought one, commented on one or became a “friend of Nike”. I can totally see how Facebook is well suited to this and why it can work. It’s ironic that a company leading an online revolution is reverting to old-style PUSH advertising: “getting people to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have” but he makes a good point, saying: “the web as a whole hasn’t done a good job creating value on the demand-generation side,”

Facebook has no choice but to veer in this direction because it is a pure social network. Users visit to chat with friends and extend their off-line social lives. Users do not spend time on Facebook when they are tying to decide what car to buy or which hotel to stay at. And that’s exactly why Facebook adverts tend to get poor response and clickthroughs.

It’s a great shame for Facebook and marketeers alike that the site is not a good platform for supporting demand-fulfilment. But that’s because people are simply in a different mindset when looking for something they know they want vs chatting to friends about who they hooked up with last night. Jeremiah Owyang makes this point here using some research from Forester.

This debate goes to the heart of why we, at FreshNetworks, often advocate branded online communities over Facebook advertising campaigns. An online community is not the same as a social network and people do visit online communities when in the demand-fulfilment mind-set. For example they visit Amazon to read book reviews, Tripadvisor to read hotel reviews and thousands of other communities where comments have been posted on every product from nail clippers to luxury yachts.

Demand-creation is very important for growing any business. I do hope that Facebook’s new propositions successfully help marketeers achieve it. I am sure they will. However FriendFeed and Open Social will in time provide a replication of the benefits of this new Facebook model across a broader audience. As a result, it is far better for brands to focus on an online community that can provide the basis for both demand-fulfilment and demand-creation activities. For me that’s why a branded online community beats a Facebook advertising campaign in the majority of cases.

Some more reading

• Facebook Proposes ‘Engagement Ads,’ Educates Marketers
• What Facebook’s New ‘Engagement Advertising’ Means to Brands
• Do Privacy and Advertising Mesh?
• FriendFeed Adds Widgets; Its Path to Mainstream?

A few weeks ago I posted about the nature of friendships and manners online and in social networks (see post here). Over the weekend I heard a conversation that made me think again about this and post a bit more.

Two people on a train from Cambridge to London were discussing Facebook. Let’s call them Mary and Simon. Mary was bemoaning how she doesn’t use it that much because she doesn’t want “people to know what I’m doing all the time”. Simon on the other hand found that he was slimming down his friendship group because he didn’t “want to know what everybody was doing all the time”.

This conversation highlighted for me a rather developed aspect of the nature of friendships in social networks. One of the features of Facebook, Twitter and other networks is the ability to constantly update what you are doing, what you have stumbled upon online, photos of events and so forth. This can be seen in two ways, the second of which is often overlooked:

1. You are sharing information with your friends – you update what you are doing, post photos and write notes that you want your friends to read. It’s a way of you keeping them up to date
2. Your friends are being shared with by you – this constant flow of updates and and information is received along with those of every other friend

In terms of how you deal with situation, there is a need for people to understand both of these and then to respond to them. As I said in my previous post, social networking manners is an emerging area and one where people are developing their own approaches to mirror their different uses of the networks.

Some people update regularly, share everything they find and will constantly tell you what they are doing. Others use the networks only report on things that they would possibly previously have done via email. Both are valid approaches but can come into conflict with each other. When a small number of your friends update regularly on everything and other very rarely, then your news feeds will be overrun by this minority.

Of course there are two ways of dealing with this – either unfriending the frequent updaters, or conversely adding even more friends so that their updates get drowned out. But perhaps the best thing to do is to reevaluate what it is you use your social networks for.

Different social networks are for different things. I update Facebook more than LinkedIn, for example, and befriend different people on each of these. Whilst my friends on Facebook may want to know about the wedding I was at over the weekend, those on LinkedIn probably don’t.

When you think about accepting friends and using social networks it worth thinking about who else you are friends with their and what, for you, the purpose of this network is.

Sharing is great, but share the right things with the right people in the right places. Some people want to be shared with regularly and others don’t. The beauty of social networks, and one of the reasons I expect that the proliferation of networks and communities will continue, is that you can go to different places to do different things.

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I read a good post from LouisGray about the social rules of social networks. Who do you follow and why? Who don’t you follow and why not?

The online etiquette of social networks and online communities is an interesting and emerging area, and one that tools such as OpenSocial will only influence. For instance, I have profiles on a range of sites, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and FriendFeed, to niche industry social networks and ones of people with similar interests to me. I often have different friends on each of these and in fact probably use each one for very different reasons.

These reasons are worth investigating. Some people choose to become friends with only their close circle of real-world friends, or conversely may accept every friend request they get. As LouisGray points out:

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race – to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

So whether you have your close friends, your wider friendship group, or as many friends as you can lay your hands on, you have a set of social media manners that define who you invite when.

Some people talk about having social network friends. I think this is a misnomer – you don’t have social network friends, but rather have Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends, Twitter friends and so forth. Not everybody I follow on Twitter are friends on LinkedIn, and I probably wouldn’t one some LinkedIn connections to follow me on Facebook.

Social media manners are actually quite advanced and getting more so as people adopt more networks and communities. I have decided that I want to use Facebook for certain purposes and so invite appropriate people; LinkedIn I’ve decided is for other purposes and so invite a different mix of people. The distinction isn’t clear-cut with a lot of overlap, so these friendship groups become blurred.

I would imagine that everybody has slightly different groups of friends on each different social network or online community they are a member of. I would also expect that their is blurring between them. Social networks are developing, rather than having distinct and distinguishing brand identities and so mean different things to different people. This means that the policy I have for using LinkedIn and making friends there is probably different to the one everybody else has.

This is where the real blurring is. Social networks are centred on me and so I decide how and why I use it. I develop my own social media manners and then develop and test these. The world of social media is changing and developing all the time, and we are helping to shape this by the mere fact of using them.

Some more reading

• You Are Not My Friend
• Choose Wisely: Scrutinizing Your Social Network Connections
• Facebook Facelift Targets Aging Users and New Competitors
• Experiments and Lessons Learned in Social Media – Part III
• The Intangible Risk and Opportunity: Your Network
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?

I think this is the first time that I’ve reblogged somebody else’s content, but this post from [chrisbrogan.com] is really good and throws up a number of great ideas and interesting issues. I will post my thoughts on theses and also some examples of clients who have faced similar issues or used similar ideas later.

The full original post was here: 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing.

As Chris says:

Here’s a list of 50 ideas (in no particular order) to help move the conversation along. Note: I mix PR and Marketing. They should get back together again.

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.
12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.
14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.
15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.
17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.
20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email me for a calendar).
21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.
22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.
23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.
24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.
25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.
26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.
27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?
28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
29. Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
30. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.
31. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
32. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.
33. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.
34. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.
35. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
37. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.
38. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.
39. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).
40. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.
41. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.
42. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
43. Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).
44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.
45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.
46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.
47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.
48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.
49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.
50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.

Some more reading

• 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing
• How Brands Will Use FriendFeed