By Jeff Selig
Social Media Dashboards
Listening, Learning, Engaging and Integrating—The Four Keys to Successfully Leveraging the Social Channel
Are you listening to your market?
People are engaged in conversations with each other about your company, your brands, your products and your services. They are also reaching out to you with insights, suggestions, stories, and sometimes, important issues and major complaints.
There conversations are all happening online, right now. Are you listening?
The trick is to find, manage and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service and your people online. How can you be effective and more organized way to keep up to date and engage with bloggers and social networks users?
Conversation leaders and shapers exist within social web communities, where they weigh in on the public agenda and the fashion the tone of conversations. There are no at large influential bloggers. However, many bloggers yield qualified influence within the different communities of the social web.
A site may enjoy a high level of visibility with the main stream media and yield influence with their peers online. Still, all of these opinions and views may remain unknown to communities interested in trends unrelated to their core and be deprived of any form of influence therein.
Beyond a website’s structural influence within its community, the dynamic nature of the social web, where millions of opinions are exchanged everyday, has led us to evaluate and seize the moment of influence with each message using its viral level (number of comments, trackbacks, partial or complete quotations without links).
The end goal; determine who the most influential bloggers are in your industry and devise a strategy for communicating with them and engaging; quickly and easily access and sort through content from all relevant social media sites, chart the results and generate user- friendly documents into actionable activities in real time.
Here’s how you get from here to there:
Radian 6 Listening platform helps companies understand and participate in the conversations happening about their brand across the social web. As-It-Happens email and IM alerts, and powerful metrics and analytics, you can create and set up a comprehensive listening grid for your enterprise to manage your entire social media outreach strategy
Netvibes actually allows you to set up a pretty nifty dashboard using a combination of RSS feeds and widgets. There’s a great tutorial on how to do it
Attensity research in the areas of search, natural language processing (NLP,) machine learning, artificial intelligence, and semantics. This research led to breakthrough software that allows computers to understand, process and analyze free-form text, offering government and commercial organizations the opportunity to leverage the vast amounts of information contained in non-structured formats.
Attentio By continuously monitoring what is written in online news press, blogs, discussion forums and other Web-based social media, Attentio aids customers to execute successful market campaigns, launch new products, gain consumer insight and maintain brand reputation. Automated daily reporting of buzz and demographics in relation to their own and competitor’s brands and products. This new online service uses charts to visualize buzz trends, share of buzz, detection of bursting events, and breakdown by source, topic and country. Industries that are strongly impacted by the online conversation in blogs, discussion forums and other social media includes automotive, computer & information technology, consumer electronics, higher education, financial services, food & nutrition, mobile phone & telecommunications, fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs), media & entertainment, pharmaceutical & healthcare, and public services.
Brandtology Online Conversation Audit, Buzz and Voices Tracking Services tracks the buzz and conversations happening in channels that relate to your company on an ongoing basis. Daily reports and summaries would be sent to you so that you are always in-the-know about your brand. We also identify the voices that are talking about you and to decipher the sentiment on what they are talking. Track sentiments on campaigns before, during and after it happened and provide timely information and intelligence for your strategic planning needs. Influencers Engagement Services, After understanding, who, where and what are online that concerns your organization, Brandtology and/or one of its agency partners can work with you to strategize an influecers engagement campaign. The goal is to build up your brand equity and thus financial value.
Brandwatch finds where a keyword is talked about on the web, it tracks the sentiment towards it as well as identifying the credibility of the author. Influence is often a subjective measure, as business and personal relationships (which cannot be measured) can come into play. Brandwatch Influence Analysis is extremely powerful – it has the ability to find people and sites which exert influence depending on your criteria. Using measures such as sentiment (i.e. are they positive or negative towards you), credibility, citations, links and reach of audience, Brandwatch will suggest influencers for you to engage with.
Buzzcapture proprietary technology retrieves data from millions of social media sources and filters the data through its linguistic analysis technology. Product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, analysts, proponents and critics.Tracking and analysing campaigns and events nearly real time on overall perception, discussions and adoption of key messages. Campaigns could include discussions on online and offline campaigns, local or international events, product launches, management changes and more.
BuzzGain helps identify the previously hidden communities who are actively defining and shaping its future, including blogs, Flickr, youtube, Twitter, and traditional media. BuzzGain reveals influential voices and corresponding conversations so that companies can listen, learn, and engage in the connection of mutually beneficial relationships. Identify, learn, engage and cultivate early adopters and influencers.
Buzzienthas a set of tools for social media integration with enteprise applications, monitoring, deep analytics and engagement. Using patent pending technology, the platform automatically collects information from a huge number of online sources in real time and analyzes the content based on your specifications. The tool turns social media data into actionable information through integration with CRM packages such as Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. Fully automated data collection from millions of online sources, including historical data several years back Monitoring of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace Real-time analysis of Twitter conversations, Automatic lead and support case creation, Alarm and Notification Features, Identification of most important websites and high-impact advertising opportunities.
Digimind digital information provides the unique opportunity to get a better understanding of market dynamics, technological advancements and competitive actions. Because of limited resources, many competitive intelligence practitioners are struggling to identify important information on a timely basis. Digimind platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools to support the repetitive tasks of competitive intelligence – including data collection, information management, data analysis and publication – while supporting all Internet formats – web pages, invisible web, blogs, forums, RSS feeds, etc. By automatically monitoring a virtually infinite number of sources and key topics.
dna13 delivers visibility into news coverage and PR activities, so you can manage the corporate and brand reputation strategically and in-the-moment. A set of on-demand public relations applications such as media directories, editorial opportunities, media monitoring sources, and PR measurement tools; help PR teams align and collaborate in a secure setting, plan targeted communication strategies, and engage stakeholders through traditional and consumer-generated media channels. Delivers immediate and cost-effective results in today’s complex media environment. With on-demand monitoring, clip book wizards and analytical capabilities, it is a powerful dashboard tool that provides real-time visibility into your reputation, market trends and competitive activities.
Dow Jones Insight software monitors news and discussions about your company, newspapers, news wires, magazines, business publications and broadcast media outlets—in 23 languages available in a single offering. The ability to listen to consumer conversations from millions of blogs and sites like YouTube and Twitter. Analyze issues, trends and strategies, extract thousands of concepts—people, companies, brands, issues, events, messages, positive and negative words or phrases—and match them to the interests of our clients so they can quickly understand the impact of your efforts with results distilled into easy-to-read charts and graphs.
eCairn is a suite of on-demand applications that provides cost effective solution for Marketing and PR professionals who want to leverage social media to: Gain consumer insight, Increase customer satisfaction, Promote brand awareness, Build trust with key influencers. eCairn Conversatio provides the tools to define and implement an effective marketing strategy with the social media community.
Filtrbox monitors mainstream news, blogs, and social media in once place. Consolidated results in one dashboard and you can eliminate the redundant searches and alerts that clog up your inbox. Customize account by adding your own sources via RSS. Import Google Alerts, add noise control, duplicate removal, and noise consolidation. FiltrRank looks at multiple dimensions of info to generate a score (1-10 scale) for each article, allows you to dial the noise way down, you can pick the minimum score an article must have to be included in your Daily Briefing emails or FiltrFeeds
InfoNgen extracts relevant and timely information buried on the web, within emails, in desktop documents or on network drives. Identifies trends and connections between topics, companies or products that might not otherwise be apparent. The system ‘reads’ stories in eight languages and dynamically translates them into English. Users also have the ability to add sources that they deem important.
Lexalytics sentiment software and text analytic solutions, providing entity extraction, sentiment analysis, document summarization and thematic extraction. As unstructured content continues to accumulate online and within organizations, text analytics becomes increasingly important to corporations trying to make sense of it all. Lexalytics provides companies with the ability to extract important metadata from numerous data sources to get straight to the relevant information. Positive and negative sentiment about your products or company can be helpful or hurtful – it all depends on what you know and how quickly you are made aware of it. Brand or reputation management is a real concern in today’s market as more and more companies are scrutinized for their business decisions.
Linkfluence studies and offers solutions to map, monitor and analyze the social web, its media (blogs, mass media sites), its discussions (forums, micro-publications, …), its interaction and mobilization venues (social networks). linkfluence’s approach is based on social graph theories. Through a links and contents based analysis of social web sites, linkfluence draws the borders of conversational communities around your stakes, brands or products and assess their true impact on your image and your your reputation.
MediaMiser objective media analysis helps show the effectiveness and value of communications plans, media strategies and pr campaigns, while also providing intelligence on your industry, competitors and issues. Written reports supported by unique quantitative and qualitative analysis of data, driven by our industry-leading media analysis solution. Instantly generate updates and analysis of the most prominent blogs related to your industry and vertical, and track trending on your key issues.
Metrica Using the latest web technology this real-time evaluation platform provides complete control over the analysis process enabling clients to track developments, spot opportunities or threats, monitor and archive coverage as well as build reports and planning data They claim scoring systems do not work, so they do not use them. Complex evaluation reports with nifty scoring systems might look impressive but they are neither friendly and nor insightful. Metrica’s dashboard of metrics, unique to each client, clearly identifies required trends in media coverage enabling at a glance evaluation which delivers actionable information. The tailored reports, which summarize the findings, do so in a way that makes them meaningful to users outside of communications.
Netemic is constantly scouring social media for new sources via its content crawler. Discovered content is then filtered twice before it is displayed to the user. First, the most relevant content is aggregated in our database, ready to be re-interrogated for relevance by iFeed’s search technology (or analysis engine) and dispatched to the user’s iFeed interface. Secondly, the user then has the ability to filter these results by time, relevance and source by adjusting buttons and sliders on the iFeed interface (or interaction engine) to ensure the final clutch of content is as relevant as possible.
ReputationHQ searches for your desired information and updates your reputation manager every 10 minutes. They search across millions of websites and available publications including: Social Networks, Online News Articles, Blogs, Message Boards, Photo Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Amazon Product Reviews, Wikipedia, Almanacs, Books, Encyclopedias, Magazines, Maps, News Wires, Newspapers, Press Releases, Thesauruses, Transcripts, White Papers, Dictionaries. “Socialprise.” It’s meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = “socialprise.”
Scout Labs helps your team find signals in the noise — what to pay attention to, what customers are ranting and raving about, what’s new and emerging. Take control, and social media can help you improve your products, marketing, sales and service. VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER Social networks, blogs, Twitter, images, video and more. REAL-TIME ANALYTICS Sentiment, trend spotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves. PLATFORM FOR ACTION Coordinate your response, assign tasks, add comments, share product and marketing ideas.
Sentiment Metrics social media measurement dashboard you can monitor and measure social media and gain actionable business intelligence, allowing you to develop more targeted marketing, improve products and increase profits. locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites. SentimentMetrics then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs, for you to interrogate and glean actionable business intelligence. The insight you gain from SentimentMetrics allows you to grow customer satisfaction, increase market share and profits, and benefit from a real competitive advantage.
Smmart Arising from the crossed interests of the aeronautics, road and maritime transport sectors, the SMMART concept of integrated information system potentially addresses other activities requiring the monitoring of complex componants’ life-cycle functioning in a highly regulated environment (among others: rail transport, lift, machine tools, windmills, micropower stations…)
StartPR helps you find, manage and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service and your people online. It searches all of the popular Web 2.0 hot spots for you, at one location. It also sends alerts, daily digests, and so forth to keep you informed about how your keywords and brand are doing.
Synthesio By using the many publication and discussion spaces available online (blogs, forums, video sharing, social networks, comments, online news websites), users now have the power to shape your brand’s global image and reputation. Synthesio helps marketing and communication professionals to detect and analyze these conversations, and to identify trends and influencers, as well as brand detractors and advocates. A monitoring platform whose innovative capacities enable you to detect, analyze, and promulgate strategic information published about business activities online.
Sysomos uses the five Ws are a fundamental part of how we help companies get in-depth and comprehensive information and insight about what is happening within the social media eco-system. You’ve got lots of questions; Sysomos has the answers. What are people talking about? What are the key conversations? Monitor the conversations to see what is being said about your products and brands, and identify the major themes and issues being raised within the social media landscape. When did these conversations happen? Was there a lot of activity? Learn more about when these conversations happened – both historical and real-time. See, compare and contrast buzz generated over time.Where did these conversations happen? Was there a lot of activity? Access geo-demographic information to see where around the world conversations are taking place – right down to the country or city.Who is doing the talking and what’s their influence? Quickly identify the key influencers, and then get detailed information about their gender, age industry and interests.Why are conversations happening? Are they positive or negative? Discover why conversations are happening. See whether what’s talked about is positive, negative or neutral, and determine the impact on your business.
Techrigy complete analysis tools including charting with comparisons, demographics, geo-location, sentiment and drill-down reports.Run tests on your brands to manage risk, track trends, understand market reach and manage reputation. Track conversations, reviews and positive/negative sentiment for your brands, clients, competitors and partners across the eco-system called social media: blogs, wikis, microblogs like Twitter, social networks, embedded video and more – in real time.
Visible Technologies keeps pace with the incredible speed and vast volume of social media conversations via an easy-to-use, RSS feed-based Web monitoring application. social media monitoring and analysis applications allows you to effectively tap into the vast sea of consumer conversations to gain real-time business insight. This actionable intelligence helps you execute more effective outreach and online campaigns, better target key audiences, assess your competition and market, improve product and services, maximize marketing spend, and ultimately grow revenue through increased sales and enhanced customer loyalty. truVOICE application centrally manages online participation and responses making consumer engagement easy and efficient. You can identify posts needing response, comment and interact with thousands of authors without ever leaving the system, assign conversations to subject matter experts within your organization, manage and track response workflow, and measure and assess engagement and outreach efforts.
Vocus provides the ability to leverage the ubiquity of the internet to interact with the media, publish their news online where it can be found by millions, monitor news and social media conversations from virtually any source and track their results to compare them with key competitors. On-demand modules that together address the communications life-cycle from identifying key contacts, to distributing information, to closing the loop with digitized feedback and management analytics.
Whitevector Chat Reports is a web-based service that provides marketing professionals a comprehensive picture of the social media discussions together with real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. Marketers can generate consumer insight on the chosen topics and measure the influence of their marketing efforts from the diversity of online discussions. The different analytics allow you to compare brand awareness to competitors, identify the most influential discussions shaping consumer opinions, conduct target group analysis and measure brand associations and buying intentions. You can monitor rising trends and detect which issues are on top of consumers’ mind at the moment. Provides a web-based dashboard that allows you to instantly see the most essential graphs, reports and discussions. The interactive dashboard updates constantly in real-time allowing you to react quickly when something important comes up in discussions. When needed, you can drill-into single blog or forum conversations.
Social Media Tools for the “do it yourself” crowd
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Twitter Search There are some fantastic advanced search commands you can use with Twitter’s search engine. From simple brand related searches to local phrases, Twitter Search can do it all.
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Good blog search engine.Technorati
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Another good blog search engine.Blogpulse
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Blog search from Nielsen.Google News
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Track news stories and more.BoardTracker
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Forum search engine, useful for tracking forum conversations.Facebook Lexicon
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See how often people are mentioning you or your brand.Google Analytics
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You may not think of Google Analytics when you think of social media, but you should be. With Google Analytics, you can track referrals to your website from the social media platforms you’re using.Google Trends
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See what’s trending on the web.Delicious Search
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See how many times pages from your site have been bookmarked by others.Digg Search
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Much like Delicious, you can see how many times pages have been Dugg by others.Google Blog Search
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Blog search engine from Google. (none of the blog search engines are perfect, so it’s a good idea to get a mix of data and parse it yourself)TwitterCounter
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Get a rough idea of your Twitter reach.User Name Check
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See if your brand’s username has been taken on major and minor social media networks.BackType
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Monitor blog comments.Social Mention
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Decent search aggregation for various sources, from blogs to social sites.Google Alerts
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Set up alerts for keyword or brand name mentions across the web.Google Reader What’s great about the tools mentioned below is that almost all of them offer RSS feeds for your searches. If you’re an agency, or just represent multiple clients, it’s real easy to aggregate a bunch of searches for one client into unique folders.
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