How can I track and read all conversations about my company in social media?

Kelly, welcome to the amazing world of social media monitoring! Ok, so I am going to start things off by recommending that you take a look at my service at http://www.WhosTalkin.com/ at WhosTalkin.com we combine data from around 60 different social media gate ways.

But, to show you how awesome I am, I am going to go ahead and list my competitors as well:

http://socialmention.com/
https://www.delver.com/
http://www.samepoint.com/
http://www.oneriot.com/
http://www.scoopler.com/

All of the services listed above are great for one time searches, but arent so great for long term monitoring campaigns. Therefore here are a few monitoring dashboards that can help you build campaigns.

http://www.google.com/alerts
http://trackur.com/
http://www.brandseye.com/
http://reputation.distilled.co.uk/
http://reputationdefender.com
http://www.sentimentmetrics.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.reputrace.com
http://raventools.com/

You might now be wondering how the heck you use these tools! Well don't worry, I got you covered! Here is a series of post I did for SearchEngineLand.com about social media monitoring.

http://searchengineland.com/author/joehall/

Once you have started monitoring you are going to want a fun way to manage the incoming data. Here are a few post on how to do that.

How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard
http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-d...

How to use Outlook 2010 as a RSS reader
http://blogmines.com/blog/2010/06/14/how-to-use-outlook-2010-as-a-rss-reader/

If you have any more questions regarding social media monitoring feet free to ask!

Google alerts is very effective as well as using a Twitter application, like Tweetdeck, that automatically searches for all tweets with your keywords and company name in them.

I think there is a step before identifying the tools that you want to use and that is trying to understand what it is you want to listen to. Here are a couple of thoughts on the matter:

- people tend to focus on the toolset, rather than the mindset and end up simply putting together a list of what features they the tools to have
- depending on where you sit in an organisation will influence the type of conversation you want to monitor. If you sit in customer service, you'll want to look at complaints, if you're in Pr, you'll want to look for brand mentions etc. Do you want to listen from where you sit or where the company sits in relation to your customers?
- why do you want to measure all conversations?
- there is a difference between listening and tracking conversations. Listening is about seeing where your customers are and what they are saying. Tracking implies there is a reason behind why you want to track - sales conversions, mentions etc.
- once you have tracked all the conversations about your company (are there any in the first place?), what do you intend to do with that information? This may help inform about why you are doing it. There is little point tracking, if you aren't going to do anything with it.
- Once you know what you want to do, then look at the tools available, start with the free ones and go from there.

Good luck, but please make sure you have a clear reason(s) why you're doing it, otherwise you will be driven by paranoia and the fear of needing to know everything.

There are a number of free tools available, which in aggregate can keep track of social media conversations surrounding your brand.

A good place to begin is Google Alerts. You can use it to have daily and weekly email alerts sent when your desired keyword is mentioned across the web. Start by running daily and/or weekly alerts for your Brand name and brand keywords. Monitor the conversations carefully and refine your keyword settings to filter out spam.

Another free option is http://www.SocialMention.com, because it is targeted to the social web. It has similar search functionality to Google Alerts, however it goes above and beyond by providing insights into the conversations. It will provide data on top hashtags surrounding your brand, users talking the most about your brand, and sentiment. Sentiment is an analysis of the tone of the conversation in order to classify it as positive, negative or neutral. The drawbacks to this tool are that the email alerts can only be sent daily, and they cannot be easily modified, only deleted.

On the other hand
If you are looking for an enterprise level solution for social media monitoring - I would recommend the following tools from experience. Both tools are user friendly, and they tend to collect the largest number of "posts" or conversations when compared to other paid tools.

1) Sysomos ( http://www.sysomos.com ) -
This tool tends to be the most accurate in terms of sentiment analysis of conversations ( positive, negative or neutral).
This enterprise level tool, seems to report on the largest number of posts compared to other paid monitoring programs. It is also very responsive
2) Radian6 ( http://www.radian6.com ) -
This tool provides robust graphs and reports which are good for presentations, however, there is very little functionality in terms of providing a high level overview.

There are several ways to do this.

- First you must investigate why you want to use it and where you want to use it for "All conversations" may be to much data to handle. And why do you must know everything?

- Second, your country can be important. If you live in The Netherlands for instance, you can't just use any tool out there since you want to focus on what people are talking about in Dutch and on Dutch sites.

- Third: select the tools you might be interested in. Use the help of an expert, your agency, Focus or maybe Google search to find out what tools are out there. Look at the price tag and what you get for it. There are free tools, midpriced tools and high end tools. And ask for a demo, so you can try it out. Several tools can do the same work, but not every tool is handy to work with. What fits your needs?

Hope this will help

Hey Kelly,

I saw that people were already kind enough to recommend Sysomos to you, but I just thought that I would throw it out again. We actually have two pieces of software that you may find interesting. One is used for real-time monitoring and engaging and the other helps you delve deep into anayltics and metrics to view and create reports about your brand.
Feel free to check us out at http://sysomos.com

Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

Try SocialMention.com. Just be specific or you will get more than you want.

Derek Roush
Vocal Point Consulting Group

Hi Kelly,
Unless you are open and have set a strategy about why you want to monitor your company in the SM and what kind of mentions are you looking for, the discussion about tools is vain in my opinion.

The reason is that there are a lot of tools from free to expensive, from easy to really difficult to use, reqruiring previous training. Unless you define carefully your needs, the target groups that are most likely to talk about your company (only and/or about products or services), the regions of interest to you (your city, your country, your continent, the world?), you will not be able to choose the right tool.

Why not start out with the easiest of all Google Alerts and see whether it fits your needs? Radian6, Sysomos and the like are expensive, and require a high degree of expertise with them.

You may always come back, tell us about your experience with Google Alerts and your needs in more details and then we may join focces to make suggestions.

Kelly:

My two cents' worth of validation and addition:

Validation: Google Alerts. Enough said about it already. Use it along with any/everything else you use.

Addition: I find Postling (www.postling.com) an easy-to-use free dashboard from which to post to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter simultaneously and to track both my own posts and posts that mention me. I have not used its premium services, so I have no opinion about those. But it's YOUR opinion and needs that matter most here.

Please let the Focus.com community know the fruits of your exploration, and thanks for a great question!

Kelly,

Lot's to sort through here...I've done a bit of research on this as well and here's what I've found:

Alterian SM2: They have a free version that is fantastic. (http://socialmedia.alterian.com/). I like them because not only do they keep up up to date on a ton of streams...they have a great archive as well.

I like Netvibes - it's cool, free, and has a ton of stuff built into it. (www.netvibes.com)

I tried ViralHeat - it is a really promising tool...it's not cheap. HOWEVER, I forgot to cancel after my 14 day trial and got billed. I am still working with them to get a refund...we'll see how that goes. So be careful here.

I also trust M. Dorch...his advice is always really sound...

Hi Kelly, first let me say I work for Radian6 so obviously I have a bias. What I would like to suggest is you visit our web site, particularly the resources page - you should find a lot of helpful material here in the form of blog posts, ebooks, recommended best practices etc.Hopefully you will find this useful in arriving at your decision here is the link. http://www.radian6.com/resources/

I value the responses that suggest first defining your needs to guide you in the selection of the most effective tool...... but, what about companies wading into SM for the first time? Engaging a wide ranging monitoring/listening tool, can help them learn where (which SM sites) the most is currently being "said" about them. Newbies often ask, "Which sites should I be in?" and the answer is, "where your buyer personas are". An effective monitoring tool can help them identify where their customers are "hanging out" on the net, and talking about them- go where your customers are, use what your customers are using.

Love your program, "Whos talkin, Joe. And here's another new one comin up on the horizon that goes beyond just social media mining.
http://tattlerapp.com/

If you are looking for a free social media monitoring tool, take a look at Brand Monitor: http://brandmonitor.position2.com/. Comes in 4 editions, including a completely free ‘Basic Edition’ with no time constraints. Brand Monitor is great for tracking conversations, gauging sentiment and share of voice, getting a dashboard of mentions and also has Twitter and Facebook functionality built in.

Disclaimer: I work with Position2.

I recommend: Techrigy

I'm impressed that, from what I read, everyone "assumes" this is "her" company. I did not see anyone asking if this is the company she owns or her employer. I didn't read it but what was her reason for asking? Kelly could be looking to drop in on her employees, employer, or customer...but no one asked.

It seems everyone think I was mean our real ears!

The best listening tool is a pair of ears. Don't complicate it with expensive tools.