…If you don’t know the answer to this question then you’re doing it wrong!

At the last OxonDigital meetup I was happy to be on the first Q&A panel to talk about social media. There were some excellent questions including one about monitoring that I thought deserved further attention. I must begin with an apology because I don’t remember who actually asked the question on the night. If it was you let me know in the comments You asked what options were available for a small operator to monitor for mentions of your business or yourself online.

The first question – Why?

Before I get too deep into the tools I think it’s important to take a step back. First you must answer the question ‘why?’ Why do you want to monitor online communication about you or your brand? I hope no one is thinking ‘because so-and-so told me to!’ There is no absolute right answer but there are few wrong answers. The reasons are individual to you and your company but probably include at least one of the following:

• Knowing instantly when someone says something about you
• Hearing what is being said about you, your brand or your products
• Responding quickly to customer service queries
• Keeping track of the competition
• Identifying conversations where your brand could get involved
• Finding people of influence in your industry
• Understanding the most important sites to monitor

Where?

Now that we know why you want to know who is talking about you online, we need to decide where to monitor. Wikipedia (obviously meaning it’s true) has 204 ‘social networks’ listed as being ‘major active’ sites. There are many, many more. Then there is the small question of 75 million WordPress blogs, 55 million Tumblr blogs, 12 billion forum posts and that’s just the public stuff! No, you don’t need to monitor them all, but how many should you be watching? This comes down to time and budget. For an individuals, start-ups and SMEs you can go a long way by monitoring just a few select sites. Twitter is always a good starting point, alongside the blogosphere and the forums.

How?

There are a number of paid services which will promise the world and from all accounts some of these services are excellent. However I’m going to focus on free systems which are usually more than enough for individuals, start-ups and SMEs.

Google Alerts should be everyones’ best friend. Depending on how quickly you want to be alerted you can receive the latest content matching your search query by email immediately, daily or weekly. Setting search queries on your company name, employee names and products will give you a decent picture of where you are being mentioned online. For housekeeping purposes I would recommend setting your alerts to be emailed to you daily, and then setting rules/filters for your email system so they feed into a specific folder. Your alerts will be there in the folder when you want them. If you need instant alerts then you’ll obviously need to keep them in your standard inbox to see them quickly.

Let’s move on to Twitter. For live monitoring I recommend the desktop version of Tweetdeck. I always have this open on my laptop, with a number of columns running to track myself, Bright Digital and, of course, OxonDigital. I also have columns for people I have added to private Twitter lists of relevant, interesting or influential people in my industry. Tweetdeck lets me choose the way in which I am alerted to a new tweet in any given column with a popup, sound, or nothing. Other tools I’ve used to do a similar job are Seesmic and Hootsuite.

The Tweetdeck mobile app lets me take these same lists and searches with me on my iPhone too.

A number of services offer the equivalent of Google Alerts for Twitter. The one I have been using recently is TweetAlarm.com. The features and interface are similar Google Alerts and when I’m out and about I’m more likely to see a new email notification than a tweet notification.

The hardest part of monitoring on Twitter is probably storing and making sense of the data you collect. (I’m assuming you aren’t paying Twitter for access to the Firehose) None of the storage tools available are 100% reliable. They are hampered by Twitter server restrictions, private accounts and other roadblocks. One of the better systems is The Archivist. I’ve used the desktop version extensively with great success. It works well as long as you don’t need to archive more than 1,000 tweets a day. The other limitation is having to manually search and export the data. Backupify is a much talked about Twitter back up service which automates the process and sends you frequent batches of tweets matching your searches. I have rarely managed to make this work. Even when I request the content manually I rarely get what I need. Maybe you’ve had a better experience with it? In the end, here at Bright Digital, we built our own application to store tweets on our specified search terms.

To monitor forums I would normally recommend BoardTracker but, as appears to be becoming customary for sites that I talk about on OxonDigital, it is currently offline being redeveloped with promised improvements. So instead I will talk about BoardReader. Like any search engine BoardReader uses search queries, however the way that message boards are built makes it very difficult for standard spiders to access the data. BoardReader searches in a way specific to message boards and brings back either posts, topics or forums related to your search. Once registered you can setup email alerts for your searches as well.

There are a huge number of message boards out there, and a lot of spam content, so I would advocate using board search tools to identify the forums of interest and relevance to you. You can then sign up for those sites and search manually. This will be a massive help if you decided to get involved in the conversation (that’s a whole different post though!)

You will already be receiving a lot of blog content through Google Alerts, but I wanted to point out a couple of specific blog search engines which are also useful. Of course there is Google Blogs, but that will return very similar results to your Alerts. Technorati has been around for a long time now, offering a useful directory structure. I think it is limited however by only indexing 1.2 million sites (remember the 75 million WordPress sites mentioned earlier?). Finally, IceRocket which works in a similar way to Google Blogs.

Now what?

Congratulation. You have now collected thousands of pieces of data showing what people have been saying about you, your company and your products online. But what to do with it?

If you are using one of the paid for services, they will be offering you sentiment analysis on the content using NLP (natural language processing) technology. Call me a skeptic but I’m yet to see an NLP system which is truly accurate enough. We’ve all heard the urban legend about the company CMO woken up in the middle of the night by an automatic alert system because someone called one of his products “badass”.

I know of one agency still using real people to analyse content. This is an incredibly labour intensive way of doing things, and there is still a large amount of interpretation to take into account but it must be more accurate than a computer program.

If the volume of data you have is manageable then why not look through it yourself and decide whether comments are positive or negative, and what subject they relate to? You will very quickly get a picture of what parts of your company people are being nice about, and those they aren’t. If you are lucky it may even be constructive criticism and you may find out what they don’t like, but don’t hold your breath.

From the data you have collected you will also be able to work out which sites are the most important for your ongoing monitoring . If you haven’t been mentioned once on Piston Heads this quarter then maybe you can focus your time somewhere else instead.

What are you using to monitor your reputation? Do you do it yourself, in-house or with an external agency? Have you tried any managed services? If your experience has been different let us know with a comment below.

As this is my first post for Oxon Digital (Hi, *wave*) I’ve decided to keep it light and simple, showcasing some of the things that have caught my eye recently in the world of social media. These range from social campaigns being run by global companies to the smallest spark of a great idea.

For today, we will stick to things on Facebook. In future posts I will move out into the scary world beyond Facebook and look at some of the up and coming networks out there and maybe some of the dying ones.

British Airways

We’ll start with the big boy, British Airways. In a year, which has been more than a tad difficult for them, they have come out punching, putting some true faith in social media. Not to mention launching an advert on Facebook ahead of traditional media platforms. I want to talk about their current competition named “Tickets for Teamwork”.

To enter all you have to do is authorize the app then select your team of five Facebook members. Then, at some point between 23rd February and 7th March you will receive a Facebook notification saying that ‘check-in is open’. The team whose five members check-in in the shortest time win the tickets. Now, other than the obvious viral benefits of asking entrants to choose friends to be involved I like the idea of using Facebook notifications as the mechanics of the competition. Facebook features are often used in competitions, but this is a seemingly rare example of using a feature without breaking Facebook’s promotion guidelines.

Sakata

Like most people I had not heard of Sakata until I came across this innovative Facebook campaign. Sakata, one of the biggest sellers of Japanese rice crackers in Australia, have entered the UK market. However, there seems to be some debate over how to pronounce their name. So to put a stop to the arguments they are running a campaign on Facebook to let their followers decide. Watch the videos and vote for your favourite. Whichever video receives the most likes will be the way Sakata is pronounced in all future advertising and marketing activities. It’s nice to see companies engaging with their customers on such a fundamental brand level.

Apparel Giveaway

Unfortunately, the next two things I want to show you are no longer live. Apparel Giveaway is a new concept on clothing store, they collect items of clothing from known brands and give them away for free on a first come first serve basis. However this has nothing to do with Facebook. What they did that caught my eye was an interesting take on an age old community growth technique. They bought a lottery ticket, took a picture of it, and uploaded it to Facebook, promising to share the winnings with anyone who ‘liked’ the photo. It could be argued that this breaks the previously mentioned Facebook promotions guidelines, and could explain why it is no longer live, but I am still impressed with the creative thinking. Sometimes the simple things are the best!

Anti-Drugs Timeline

There has been lots of talk in recent months about Facebook’s change to timeline based profiles and the impact on users’ privacy. I thought I’d show you an innovative use of a Timeline. Unfortunately this one broke Facebook’s rules on fake profiles and was pretty quickly removed.

The profile was set up by the Israeli Anti-Drugs Authority to compare a year in the life of ‘Adam Barak’ while on drugs to a year clean. Throughout there is an eye opening contrast in his physical appearance and situation. Luckily the profile was captured and made into a YouTube video…

As a team, the four of us are taking on this challenge, backed up by our awesome support crew. Who it turns out we wouldn’t have got close to completing it without.

After months of training, aka the odd walk here and there, the odd diversion to a cricket match and the odd rain out, the day came. The night before the start we camped in Petersfield with most of the other peple with early start times. The Gurkha’s put on a BBQ and cultural show, there was an air of nerves, excitement and rain!

Alarms set for 5am, to give time to get up and get some carbs in before the 6am start time. We went off in the first group to give ourselves the most light to walk in. When picking the start time this seemed like a great plan, what we didn’t know then was that the weather was going to be abysmal! Driving sideways rain for the first 8 hours of the walk to be exact. This hit even the most experienced walkers hard, the Gurkha’s talked about how this is the worst conditions they’d seen at a Trailwalker event and their times went down from 8 hours to 11 hours.

Once it stopped raining things got a bit better. Eventhough everything was beyond wet the sun was shining and you could see further than a few meters again. This lifted spirits, spirits were lifted even higher when our support crew returned from the dry cleaners with warm dry clothes for us!

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the experience during the walk, the pain, the emotions, the commitment. If you want to know more about it, ask me, I love talking about it

We finished in around 27 and a half hours, in the top 20 or so percent. Very impressed considering the longest walk we’d ever done in the past was around the 25 miles mark. And most importantly, we raised nearly £2000!

Coming up the finishing straight.

For some reason Che and I are holding Jeff’s walking sticks?!