COMMENTS
Any automated sentiment analysis should not be trusted wither it's with Social Mention or any other paid service. It is simply unreliable AND as you suggested you need to check the results manually anyway so why pay for it? There are many low cost tools that take you beyond Google alerts (which become very cumbersome very quickly when trying to track multiple keywords / key phrases.
One good inexpensive solution is Trackur. Robust results without dinging the budget.
Thanks for the post.
@Frank, thank you for sharing another site! I wasn't aware of the fact that businesses need to pay to use Social Mention since I navigated the site without paying a cent. Perhaps you are right.
Best,
Lily Zhu
It is funny that I was just looking at my Google Reader for what people are saying about me when I saw this post.
These are not hard things to implement, but it is shocking to find so many people not using them. There are too many companies flying blind but still wonder why things are not going their way.
This is huge! We all google ourselves ... our potential employers google us ...
Imagine trying to manage the google alerts for Toyota right now!
This is a real eye opener, I have to agree though there is little need to pay for analysis.
It's clear that analytics is going to be a career path of its own, porbably just as great as the "Social Media Manager"
Excellent post in many ways, Lily; need to monitor is greater than ever - and harder.
People and businesses that are new to new media and now 'get' that monitoring is crucial, often try similar first steps;
Google alerts and maybe search.twitter.com. They see something about themselves and think "Great, I'm covered".
But it's not that simple.
-A lot is missed
-There's too much noise.
-It's chaotic
If folks and especially businesses think they're too busy to take the time to really learn the process, then ignoring that feedback will be brand suicide.
Even if a company (whether 1 person or 1000) does well, they can do far better by listening.
After watching the dynamics of new communication (intensely for the past 3 years on Twitter),
I now tell everyone to sign up for @AndyBeal's Trackur.
It's been engineered, built refined, for exactly this purpose.
It comes down to 'What's your time worth? + What's your reputation worth?'
(If a corp outgrows Trackur's powerful Enterprise/Custom service level, I send them to consult with Amber Naslund (@AmberCadabra) at Radian6.
Hope this is helpful,
Keep up the good work at HubSpot! -Ed :)
@Ed: great suggestions, Ed. I totally agree that there are many better (though slightly more expensive) tools out there that perform more personalized, relevant, and in-depth search. There is always a tradeoff between quality and cost, and different tools apply to users at different brand monitoring stages.
Best,
Lily Zhu
Great stuff, Lily, I was just putting together a post on this subject when yours came up.
I think it's important to keep in mind that you can't automate everything. Another key tactic
I covered that should be part of a brand monitoring strategy is to find the forums, comments, and discussions where people are talking about your industry in general and visit them regularly. Customers may use shorthand references to your business that don't show up in your Google alerts. And in any case, participating in those industry conversations is good for your image anyway.
@Jeremy: absolutely. Gauging brand image in the context of industry development is a good strategy and definitely keeps business owners/managers aware of the possible trends that can be incorporated into building their brands.
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback!
Lily Zhu
Hey Lily - Great stuff here, and some solid ideas. And like many in the space, we're ALL for companies getting started with listening practices, even if free tools are the most sensible way to do that. The important thing is the act of paying attention and doing something with that information once you find it. It's a big, busy social web out there.
But unsurprisingly, I'm going to respectfully disagree with Paul up there that there's "little need" to pay for social media monitoring or analysis. There are tons of advantages to paid solutions - from coverage and aggregation to reporting, workflow, and more robust analysis or measurement than is reasonable to tackle manually. Whether it's Radian6 or not, it's most important to find a platform that helps you spend your time on the human side of social media - engagement and content strategies - and not on crunching spreadsheets. :)
And thanks to Ed for the shoutout! Always appreciated.
Thanks for sharing some great resources for folks, Lily. Well done.
Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@Ambercadabra
what if my brand can not really be called as a brand?
@ed hardy uk: if you are planning to expand your business in the future, then it's important to start build your brand. Even if you intend to confine your customer targets to your relatives and friends, they will still have some perception of your products/services. Brand is broadly defined and often associated with the quality, characteristics, or uniqueness of your products/services. If you are starting a small business, perhaps you can focus on developing your products first; just keep in mind that brand building will be a necessary step somewhere along the way.
Hope this helps,
Lily Zhu
Interesting story. I agree with you that social media has become the important and effective platform to convey our message to the targeted audience. Not only for the business purposes, it is equally useful to solve personal tasks.
What is the best way to monitor Facebook? Is there a way to monitor what people are saying about my brand even if I'm not friends with them and/or can't view their profile?
@Ryan: good question. It seems that Social Mention has the capability of searching everything relevant to a keyword (i.e. your company name) on all major social media sites including Facebook. The search algorithm might be crude, however, so be wary of judging your brand image too quickly without first reading specific comments.
Hope this helps,
Lily Zhu
The velocity of change and content/message distribution makes brand monitoring more important than ever.
Great insights and thanks for sharing!