What’s a tag?

Well, if you think of the web as one big filing cabinet, a tag is the label you put on a folder within the cabinet. The beauty of these files you’re using is that you can put as many labels on them as you like.

You can create these folders in one of two ways:

1. As a content producer, you’ll use the labels (re: tags) to help others who are diving into the filing cabinet find your content. Your choice of tags is important, because you have to imagine how others will use the filing cabinet and select words that are relevant to them.Content producers will tag their content when they update their blog, post videos to YouTube, add pictures to Flickr and so forth.
2. As a content consumer, you’ll use tags to organize files that you’ll want to reference again later. Social bookmarking services like Delicious provide a practical example. When you bookmark content to your Delicious account, you’re asked to provide tags for that piece of content. You can then search through your bookmarks by tag to find related information.Of course, how you tag content as a “consumer” will help others find information within the filing cabinet as well.

Why is this important for social media monitoring? Because tags are an excellent way to see how people relate the content you’re interested in to other topics. When you examine the tags attached to a particular piece of content – or several pieces of content discovered through the same keywords – you’ll gain insights that go well beyond your keywords. Ultimately, you’ll discover new information that will help you understand the topic you’re researching that much better.

How do you think of tags?

1. You plant seeds across the web
2. You ask others to plant seeds on your behalf
3. People are planting seeds ” good and bad ones ” for you

Point is, though, if you’re not using social media monitoring tools, you’ll never really have a full handle on when and where those seeds are planted.

To monitor the social web, your options are simple enough. You can use free tools or a paid ones. Now, I don’t want this post to become about those options, as there are many resources available on the topic. The only point I want to make is this:

If you’re not clicking through and reading the links, you’re wasting your time.

It’s one thing to collect links, as I’m sure many people do. It’s easy to look at numbers and statistics. It’s fun to watch your influence and reach grow far and wide across the web.

However, and I don’t say this lightly, if you’re not bothering to click through and read, don’t bother at all.

All the real insights come from reading.

All the relationships you’ll build will come from knowing where to interact.

And none of this can really happen unless you’re reading the posts, threads, Tweets, status updates and comments you’re collecting.

If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, have someone help you gain these insights and guide your participation. But even with a little help, take a little bit of time to read what people are saying about you. At minimum, it’ll give you a feel for the social media environment you didn’t have before.

How are you gaining insights from your social media monitoring program?

Fair is fair. When you call out social media monitoring companies for not responding and question whether they’re even listening, you have to give credit to those who are paying attention.

So here’s a list of all the companies that have responded to the original challenge so far. These 140-character descriptions of social media monitoring services where either added a few weeks back, by commenting on the last post here at Planting Seeds or through Twitter this time around.

You should also note that Tuesday’s post was also syndicated over at The Customer Collective, which generated quite a bit of attention. You can see the conversation in the comments over there. And you can see just how much discussion this topic generated by checking out BackTweets (Planting Seeds post | The Customer Collective post).

Onto the list:

THE ORIGINAL SIX

• CustomScoop @All4Monitoring CustomScoop: Fast/accurate/affordable online news clips/social media monitoring. 24/7 Dashboard-Email Alerts-Custom Reports

• radian6 @All4Monitoring Real-time tracking, slice’n dice analysis, influencer scoring, workflow/team feats., platform API, Salesforce & Web trends Integ.

• Catherine_VZ @All4Monitoring Attensity: Monitor+analyze+respond 2 social med+email+surveys etc: deep sentiment+intent 2 buy+intent 2 churn+other reports.

• Blake Cahill @All4Monitoring @visible_tech here. A comprehensive social web listening, learning, engagement, & BI SaaS platform for brands & agencies

• vishals @All4Monitoring #Viralheat Real-time social media analytics #a4m

• Intelligence Pro @All4Monitoring Blog monitoring, search profiles, five presentations - graph, latest by authority, latest from prefered, frequent, search

THE COMMENTERS

• gianandrea facchini
Buzzdetector, a company monitoring and delivering strategic insights to his customers. http://www.buzzdetector.com (in Italian but with a presentation in English, too)

• Zak
Moreover’s Newsdesk tool is the one-stop shop for marketing pros delivering real-time news & social media monitoring

• Ari Newman (Filtrbox)
@all4monitoring easy 2 use, real-time, unl. keywords, drill-down, analysis, custom-branding, sentiment, team collab, API, influence, less $$

• Shanna Gordon
@bdbrandprotect - finding a needle in a haystack as opposed to a data dump, assessing sentiment and influence, providing useful analytics.

NEW TWEETS

• socialscape Listening, Strategizing, Engaging. Real-time analytics that assess influencers, trends and insights within social media

• RepuTrack™ we combine real-time retrieval of relevant online convo w/ human review. See http://www.reputationmonitoring.com for precision ORM

• filtrbox easy 2 use, real-time, unl. keywords, drill-down, analysis, custom-branding, sentiment, team collab, API, influence, less $$

• jeanju
Sid Lee provides Brand Monitoring Service based on quality analysis not only focus on tools.

UPDATES

18 September:

• ImpactWatch provides real-time monitoring of all types of media with powerful reporting tools and customizable metrics.

19 September

*

We’ll keep this challenge open ended. If you’re a social media monitoring company offering a free or paid tool, let us know in 140 characters what you’re all about. Send a tweet to @all4monitoring or #a4m or leave your comment here, after the original post or over at The Customer Collective.

We’ll use this post as the master list.

It started with a simple Tweet from @all4monitoring:

“In the social media monitoring business? If you’re a free or paid tool, describe your service in 140 characters. #a4m“

After the first three responses, I posted this a day later:

“@radian6, @CustomScoop + @Socialscape responded to this: http://bit.ly/37EZnT. Are other social media monitoring companies listening?”

In total, over a few days, six social media monitoring companies responded to these tweets. Six.

Hats off to those who did respond, including the following (in chronological order):

• CustomScoop
@All4Monitoring CustomScoop: Fast/accurate/affordable online news clips/social media monitoring. 24/7 Dashboard-Email Alerts-Custom Reports

• radian6
@All4Monitoring Real-time tracking, slice’n dice analysis, influencer scoring, workflow/team feats., platform API, Salesforce & Web trends Integ.

• Catherine_VZ
@All4Monitoring Attensity: Monitor+analyze+respond 2 social med+email+surveys etc: deep sentiment+intent 2 buy+intent 2 churn+other reports.

• Blake Cahill
@All4Monitoring @visible_tech here. A comprehensive social web listening, learning, engagement, & BI SaaS platform for brands & agencies

• vishals
@All4Monitoring #Viralheat Real-time social media analytics #a4m

• Intelligence Pro
@All4Monitoring Blog monitoring, search profiles, five presentations - graph, latest by authority, latest from prefered, frequent, search

So my question became, as noted in the title of the post, “Are social media monitoring companies even listening, let along responding?”

You would think it’s a natural.

Thanks to bit.ly, I can tell you that the link was clicked 75 times, which would indicate to me that some of these companies are at least listening. However, in a world where it’s vital to plant seeds to get yourself on the radar of potential customers, why didn’t more than six companies bother to respond? Especially to a Twitter account that identifies itself as:

“All about monitoring, including links, pointers and the odd challenge to companies to see if they’re listening. Are you all for monitoring?”

So, social media monitoring companies, are you practicing what you preach? Feel free to answer on Twitter (@all4monitoring or #a4m) or by posting a comment below.

Last week, I opened a new Twitter account, @All4Monitoring, to support the new social media monitoring service I’ve been offering clients.

Why start a new Twitter account aside from helping me plant seeds for this new offer? Actually, I have a very clear intention for it. As the profile says, it’s “All about monitoring, including links, pointers and the odd challenge to companies to see if they’re listening. Are you all for monitoring?” (Sidebar: The link from the profile is to our new site: socialmediamonitoring.ca, a URL I couldn’t believe was available given the presence of serious social media monitoring players up here in Canada.)

The idea is to become a hub for all things related to social media monitoring. So you can expect to learn about new monitoring services, talk about familiar ones, participate in the odd twtpoll here and there, and general observations about monitoring the social web for all kinds of different reasons.

Of course, you can play a role. To get the most out of this new Twitter account, it would be great if you could:

• Follow and reply to @All4Monitoring
• Tag any tweet with #a4m to point us to stuff and get our attention (as you can see, this hasn’t taken off just yet!)
• Provide feedback on the account
• And anything else you can think of within your comfort zone and the realm of Twitter

I’m viewing this effort as an ongoing experiment with a clear direction. If you have any ideas for how this account can evolve, let me know. I’m all ears!

Otherwise, I’ll see you out there on Twitter!

P.S. Feel free to connect with me on my personal account, @MarkGoren.