Get grounded before you jump into the fire & start responding

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, educators.

Guest post by Carie Lewis
Humane Society of the United States

Listening is the first step in social media. You have to listen to what others are saying about you before you jump into the fire. Listening will tell you what people are saying, and where they are saying it, so you know where to get started.

Many of these tools are Twitter-focused, because Twitter is the easiest place to get started in listening.

Here are five free tools I recommend to get started.

Tweetbeep: Twitter alerts via email

1Tweetbeep is essentially Google Alerts for Twitter. Whenever you’re mentioned on Twitter, you’ll get sent an email with details of that mention. You  can specify any search term you want. This is great for people who are not ready for the power of Tweetdeck of HootSuite with all their bells and whistles. Twitter is the most real-time account you have of what people are saying about you, so it’s really important to have a Twitter listening tool that matches your comfort level.

Tweetdeck: Your command center

2Tweetdeck is great because it runs in the background and gives you desktop alerts for mentions, similar to Microsoft Outlook when you get a new email. You can customize the different columns and have an array of search terms for people talking about you on Twitter. For example, mine has the following columns: @ replies of my personal Twitter account, @ replies of my organizational account, mentions of “humane society,” mentions of “hsus” and direct messages. When you’re ready to get real serious, ask your IT department for a second monitor that you can put just Tweetdeck on. (See photo at top.)

Kurrently: Check your public persona

3It is amazing, and scary, how many people still do not lock down the privacy on their Facebook profiles. That’s what makes Kurrently so useful: It’s a search engine for public Facebook updates. It actually now pulls in a lot more than Facebook updates, but that’s what I find it most useful for.

Twitalyzer: Turn monitoring into metrics

4It is very important to think about your goals and how you’re going to measure success when diving into a new online venture, and listening is no different. There are many tools out there for measurement, but I like Twitalyzer, because of the breadth of statistics it provides and its ease of use. The graphs are pretty, too. It provides data such as number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, top hashtags, number of mentions, etc – which are great metrics. For Facebook, check out their built-in analytics for your fan page.

Google Alerts: Trusty standby is still critical

5You’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now, right? At the bare minimum, you should use Google Alerts for your organization’s name, acronym, prominent staff names like your CEO or executive director and large campaigns you’re working on. Depending on the number of mentions you get, you’ll probably want to set the alerts to come to your in-box as they happen so you know quickly what’s being said and can determine a response, if needed.

How the Humane Society reacts to negative comments

Those are my top five. What are yours? Please add them in the comments!

Once you start listening and come across negative conversations, what should you do? When we see something being said about us, we kick a simple process into gear:

1. Identify the person behind it. What kind of influence do they have – how many followers do they have, what kind of people are following them? Are they a known detractor or troll?
2. Identify the tone. Are they annoyed? Angry? REALLY angry? This will give you an idea of how easily they can be persuaded.
3. Decide whether or not to respond. Based on tone and influence, you should make an executive decision on who this person is and if they can be turned around.
4. Craft the response. We work with our PR team to get our official stance or response on the issue, then craft it under 140 characters or less – (which can prove to be very challenging with a PR response!
5. Deliver the response. Always deliver in the medium the conversation began. For instance, if someone says something about you on Twitter, don’t go seeking them out on Facebook to send them a message.
6. Monitor the aftermath. Don’t just respond and walk away. Monitor the conversation following, but know when to reach a stopping point and move on.

This is mostly for negative conversation. If it’s positive, you should absolutely @reply them, follow them or direct message them to start a relationship with them! If on Facebook, find their fan page and add them to your favorite pages, tag them in a status update, or post a message on their page from your fan page account.

It’s all about relationship building. Negative comments can often be turned into positive experiences! We often have listening experiences where people will say something negative, we’ll respond, and they can’t believe we were paying attention and took them time to respond to them. This kind of customer service is becoming more popular, but is still new – so take advantage of it!

Related

• How to use Twitter to monitor your brand

• Best Twitter dashboards for nonprofits

• How to use Twitter to monitor your brand

• How to build & manage a monitoring dashboard

• Socialbrite’s social media monitoring section

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What you need to know about recent changes to two key social networks

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, Web publishers, bloggers, educators, social media managers, individuals.

The social media landscape continually evolves, and it’s hard to keep up with all the changes. Platforms and apps I know and love suddenly have new capabilities, add-ons and new wrinkles. In this new feature, “New and Improved on the Social Web,” I’ll be highlighting some of the latest changes to social media platforms, apps and tools, and commenting on their implications. Let’s start by tackling the recent changes to Delicious (social bookmarking) and Facebook.

Delicious stacks

Delicious, the social bookmarking site — acquired not long ago by the founders of YouTube — just rolled out a completely new Web interface as well as a new product, Delicious stacks. The new interface is fun and updated and brings the brand experience in line with today’s Web experience and expectations. While Delicious has always enabled users to bookmark, tag and publicly share bookmarked URLs and tags, users were not able to compile sharable topic areas. The new feature, Stacks, is Delicious’ version of publicly curated content streams. Any Delicious user may create a topic (called a stack) and add links from around the web to create a stack of the topic. Delicious users can follow stacks, share stacks with others and save individual links within others’ stacks.

With the stacks rollout, Delicious is clearly trying to be a player in the content curation trend. If this succeeds, stacks could easily compete with other curation tools such as Google Reader, scoop.it and Pearltrees.

Open commenting allowed on Facebook pages

Facebook announced a lot of upcoming changes at their F8 developer conference in September. Some of those changes are rolling out now, with implications for your organization’s page.

One of the more significant changes to your page is that any Facebook user can comment on your posts and on your wall, without Liking the page first. Just as you had previously managed your settings to allow fans to write or post content to your Facebook wall, the new permission allows “users” to do so. One note: this is a change that you can opt out of – if you allowed fans to post, the new settings automatically allow any Facebook user to post.

Potentially more people will post to your page and Like (or Subscribe to) its content because they can interact with it more easily. Ideally, more Facebook users will see your content because the increased commenting will appear in users’ newsfeeds (now called “tickers”). A user still has to Like a page for that specific page’s updates to show up in his/her ticker. On the other hand, there is less incentive to Like a page if a user just wants to post or comment. The largest implication I see is that page admins now have an even better incentive to create engaging and sharable content.

New Facebook Insights & the ‘People are Talking About’ metric

The new “People are Talking About” metric appears below your page’s Likes, on the left-hand side of the wall. It is Facebook’s attempt to benchmark and reveal how engaging your page’s content is. The PATA metric includes people who:

• like, share, or comment on a post or on the wall
• answer a question on your page
• mention your page by tagging it, or tag a photo of yours
• like or share a check-in deal, or check-in at your Facebook place

The new Facebook Insights offers a more subtle breakdown of engagement by individual post than the old Insights did. The previous individual Post Impressions metric has been replaced with multiple engagement metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This, and Virality.

According to Search Engine Land’s comprehensive summary of the new Insights:

“The goal of Pages Insights for Page admins is to understand what drives that number and how they can best engage their advocates, so that they can get a sense of how to optimize their Page content to increase the people they’re reaching with their messages. Which means that no matter the size of your Page’s audience, you can really get a good sense for which posts spread and get shared with others.”

I believe the new Insights will offer admins a more accurate sense of how engaging their pages’ content is with fans. If nonprofits are using social media to move online fans to take action, and to help the organization further its mission of changing the world, then creating more online engagement is a critical step in that path.

Related resources on Socialbrite

• Video tutorial: How to use the new Facebook Insights
• Facebook nuked the Like button, now what?
• 7 ways Facebook’s subscribe button could be a nonprofit game-changer

The post Inside the upgrades to Facebook & Delicious appeared first on Socialbrite.

Trackur, Sprout Social, Thrive & other monitoring tools worth paying for

Target audience: Mid-size nonprofits, cause organizations, agencies, brands, NGOs, Web publishers, individuals. This is part of our series on social media monitoring:
• Guide to monitoring social media conversations
• 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools
• How to create & manage a monitoring dashboard

Search engines and free monitoring tools can help you find mentions of your brand easily, but if you want to take your social media efforts to the next level, you may want to consider using a social media monitoring vendor.

Once your nonprofit or business reaches a certain size — with, say, hundreds of daily mentions — a paid social media monitoring vendor or service can help you smartly assess the conversations taking place about your brand. In many cases, they offer tools for you to respond and forge deeper levels of engagement. A good paid service will offer not just data but ways for you to draw insight and develop strategy by tapping into actionable intelligence.

Paid subscription services for social media monitoring can save staff time and provide insight into influence, authority, sentiment and reach. But remember: For your social media program to work, you’ll need to designate someone on your staff to own this. The person or team should analyze the results, act on time-sensitive issues and make recommendations about how to integrate the learnings from the community into your operation. (Socialbrite can help you get your program up and running.)

Social media vendors come in all shapes and flavors. Some cater to small organizations with modest budgets that want to handle monitoring internally. Others service large nonprofits and corporations that want a robust suite of tools and access to expert analysts. So we’ve broken this package into two parts:

• 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits (below)
• Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business (on our sister site, Sociamedia.biz), which includes Radian6, Lithium and 18 other vendors that work with nonprofits

Please note that we’ve already covered a number of monitoring services in our roundups Top 10 social media dashboard tools and 14 free tools to measure your social influence — including TweetDeck, CoTweet, Seesmic, Spredfast, MediaFunnel, Bit.ly and others  — so think of this as a package of monitoring resources.

Commercial social media monitoring services

Here is our guide to 10 subscription-based social media monitoring services for nonprofits and organizations, with the most affordable ones listed first. Have your own favorites? Please add them in the comments below.

Trackur: Affordable tracking & engagement

1An online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by reputation expert Andy Beal and team, Trackur is sort of a Google Alerts on steroids. Trackur provides all the monitoring tools you need. It is brandable, will rate the sway power of your influencers for prioritized responses and will deliver results to your inbox, RSS feed or Web-based dashboard. Quickly monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze media mentions for your company, brands, sector, cause or clients. Cost: Four plans range from $18 to $377/month and vary depending on number of searches and features used. Free 10-day money-back guarantee. Clients: 27,000+ users. Affordability makes it popular among small businesses. Owner: Independent.

Sprout Social: Track & grow your social footprint

2We’ve heard good things about Chicago-based Sprout Social, which lets you target and discover new customers or supporters, monitor your brand across the social Web, organize your social networks and manage up to five identities with the basic plan. The service offers an easy-to-digest summary of what’s happening online around your social presence. Cost: Pro Plan at $9/month is geared to small, independent businesses, nonprofits and organizations. Business Plan at $49/month is tailored to larger companies. Free trial. Clients: Chiefly small businesses, independent service providers such as attorneys and real estate agents, bloggers. Owner: Independent.

uberVU: Affordable for smaller operations

3A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use, uberVU offers a monthly price that should be more attractive to nonprofits and small and mid-size brands. Cost: Four packages:$49.99/month for individuals, $180/month for popular Plus program, $400/month for big companies, contact team for PR agencies. 14-day free trial. Clients: OMD, Edelman, Sharp. Clients generally consist of small businesses and startups, PR & marketing agencies, bloggers. Owner: Independent.

Thrive: Convert fans into donors

4Thrive, from the consultancy Small Act of McLean, Va., is an all-in-one social media tool that lets you listen, publish, report and engage with donors and supporters. Features like contact tagging and sorting, automated keyword searching and automated conversation archiving help you cultivate relationships over time, turning fans into donors. Import your existing email lists and convert them into detailed social profiles so you can jump-start your social media program. Small Act is also launching a service that takes an organization’s donor database to help them build social communities from that data. Cost: Recommended plan for most nonprofits is $1,188/year per user ($99/month per user). Small Act offers a one-month free trial as part of the contract if requested. See the demo, too. Clients: AARP, KaBoom, Global Giving, Ashoka, Office Depot, National Geographic. Owner: Independent.

ReSearch.ly: Newcomer packs a lot of power

5Launched in December 2010 and in development for two years, ReSearch.ly — from the folks behind Sydney- and San Francisco-based PeopleBrowsr — is essentially a powerful social search tool that gives a window into informal communities of interest on Twitter. You can look for mentions of a brand, cause or event in real time, filter out unimportant mentions and funnel in all Twitter users, Twitter folks you’re following or just your followers. Segment by media or content type (like photography or bios) to identify key influencers or communities of interest on the fly. We got an advance look at ReSearch.ly at BlogWorld Expo and liked what we saw. Cost: $99/month per user. The cost quickly goes up if you want to add data from Facebook, blogs and other networks. Clients: New service. Owner: Independent.

eCairn: Conversation & influencer mining

6Find your tribes, rank your influencers, listen to the people who matter and engage in meaningful conversations with eCairn Conversations. This video on YouTube describes a number of enhancements — campaign management, influencer geo-location, relevance filtering — released in November 2010. Cost: Pricing starts at $99/month. Clients: HP, Chanel, L’Oreal and several PR and communication agencies. Owner: Independent.

Hootsuite: Integrate your social platforms

7We like Hootsuite because we think of monitoring as part of an integrated approach to social media. (Other monitoring dashboards offering tiered pricing include TweetDeck, CoTweet and Seesmic.) With Hootsuite you can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or mobile device. Your team can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Social Insights, which comes with the Pro editions, gives you access to information about your social network and intelligence about how to enlarge your network and adjust your marketing strategy. Cost: For $5.99/month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $15/month. Clients: The White House, Oxfam, Martha Stewart Media, SXSW, Zappos, TED, LA Times, Fox, BET. Owner: Independent.

Actionly: Low cost and no frills

8Actionly tracks keywords across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, etc. and pulls updates every hour. The information is gathered, analyzed and stored in an easy-to-use dashboard that allows you to manage multiple Twitter or Facebook accounts and lets you export all data for future use. The service also offers customized reports, email alerts and sentiment analysis, and its integration with Google Analytics allows you to see your social media ROI. See this tutorial on how to use Actionly strategically. Cost: Basic monitoring for $20/month, premium for $50/month and a Pro option at $100/month. Free one-search trial. Clients: Public relations professionals, others. Owner: Independent.

BuzzStream: Build & manage relationships

9BuzzStream helps you build a dossier about your influencers. Search mainstream news, blogs posts, blog comments, Twitter posts, forums, message boards and many other social sites for mentions of your keywords. Cost: Pricing starts at $49/month for one person and 10,000 search results, $99/month for three users. If you monitor social media to find link opportunities or conduct reputation management, you can set up media monitoring searches in BuzzStream starting at $29/month. Clients: Sapient, Rubbermaid, Random House, HomeAway, Bazaarvoice. Owner: Rel Equals, Inc.

Meltwater News: Mixed reports

10Meltwater News combines broad search capabilities, analytical tools and a consultative relationship with its clients. Through its Web-based interface, users can evaluate trends, map press activity, identify target markets and measure the ROI of marketing and PR campaigns. Track keywords, phrases and topics from 130,000 sources and receive daily reports. We’re reluctant to recommend Meltwater News, however, based on some recent feedback. Cost: In line with other basic monitoring services. Clients: Meltwater News has more than 20,000 clients, including Airtran Airways, European Tour, USA Cycling. Owner: Meltwater Group. Its nonprofit arm, the Meltwater Foundation, operates the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. Also see: Meltwater Buzz in Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business.

Other paid social media monitoring solutions

There are more than 200 social media monitoring services in the marketplace, so this is meant as a sampling of some of the notable vendors that would be of most use to nonprofits and small to mid-size organizations and businesses rather than a comprehensive list. If you’ve had success with other vendors, please your experiences in the comments below.

More social media monitoring vendors and tools:

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• 14 free tools to measure your social influence (Socialbrite)

• Socialmedia.biz’s Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business includes a host of vendors that also cater to nonprofits, including Radian6, BuzzGain and many others.

Related

• Social media monitoring: Articles (Socialbrite)

• Social media metrics: Articles (Socialbrite)

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How & why your organization should be tuning in the social Web

Most brands and nonprofits have received the memo: To succeed in today’s interconnected world, you need to listen to what your supporters and customers are saying about you. With the new year still fresh, you may be finally ready to put into place a listening program to tap into the conversations taking place on the social Web about your organization or sector.

Social media has blown apart yesterday’s top-down communication funnel and replaced it with a peer-to-peer model of empowered citizens and producers. People are tiring of mass media and prefer to listen to their peers’ recommendations about products, services and causes. It’s no longer just about driving people to your website. Today the action revolves around a complex set of social conversations outside of your control — but not outside of your influence. Even the most technically unsophisticated users can now use social tools to spread their messages with unprecedented ease. So what are they saying about you?

In this weeklong series launching today, we’ll cover:

• Why and how to listen (see below)
• 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools
• 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits
• How to build & manage a monitoring dashboard

Some people confuse monitoring with metrics. For our purposes, monitoring refers to tracking the conversations people are having about you; metrics refers to measuring the impact you’re having by tabulating such things as visits, tweets, registrations, donations and so on. Monitoring informs the metrics process.

If you’re just starting out, we recommend beginning with a few small ‘listening’ techniques to ‘hear’ what people are saying about you. Set up only a few alerts and track a few feeds – don’t turn on a firehose that you won’t be able to manage. Monitoring can be built into your existing work processes; get started by building a monitoring dashboard (coming Thursday) or by creating a social media dashboard for an integrated approach to manage your participation on the social Web.

Note that although our monitoring guide focuses on nonprofits, the lessons in this series can be applied to any brand. Have your own tips? Please share in the comments!

Why listen: A multitude of brand opportunities

Before you dive into a river of conversations, you need to understand what people are saying about you. Learn. Understand. Only then, speak. Share stories. React, inform and engage.

Listening is only one step in the process of engaging with your supporters or customers. Other steps in  your social program might include the following: monitoring; setting business goals; creating and tracking metrics, and incorporating learnings from your listening and metrics efforts into your operation. You’ll want to share your learnings with marketing, sales and your organization’s version of product development or R&D.

There are a multitude of reasons why brands — nonprofits, companies, cause organizations — need to listen to conversations on the social Web. Here they are:

10 reasons to listen to social media conversations

1Assess overall sentiment. In the main, do people know what your organization is about? Do they like your goal but not how you’re going about it? Do they love your platform but don’t connect emotionally to your cause? Take the temperature of the room!

2Target new stakeholders. Can you do a better job getting one of your offerings across to a new audience that’s only loosely connected with your organization? What are their particular interests and motivations? Is there a potential to build a new vertical or niche community around your service or cause?

3Identify your champions. Do you know who your brand’s strongest advocates and evangelists are? How are you rewarding or engaging with them? Particularly with a new brand or campaign, you’ll want to reach out to these leading voices and influencers who can help spread an opinion about a brand faster than your own website can.

4Identify your critics & fend off crises. Your reputation could be jeopardized by criticism — warranted or not, true or not — taking place on the social Web. You need to swoop in and respond in a positive manner, correcting any errors of fact and demonstrating problem-solving abilities, before misperceptions harden into negative sentiment. This is also a critical step in warding off PR disasters. And your critics aren’t always wrong. Adds Liz Strauss: “Listen for the things that you don’t want to hear” and learn from them.

5Audit your efforts. At some point you’ll want to step back and do an assessment of your social media channels. What’s working? What’s not worth the staff’s time? Monitoring tied to metrics will tell you.

6Study the success stories. What resonates with your users? Do you have a good sense of what pages on your site, which blog posts, which Facebook postings, Flickr sets or YouTube videos — by your team or by others in your sector — are causing the most stir and generating the most interest? Track what’s working and emulate the best features.

7Identify new program or product opportunities. Brands are beginning to realize the value that users can offer about their programs, products, services and campaigns. To some extent, the social Web is the new focus group — only free, larger and instantaneous. Social media can help you to stay abreast of the latest development in your sector and to use that business intelligence to inform your organization’s product or program roadmap.

8Identify donors or lower costs. Business development and sales teams are increasingly turning to the social Web for sales leads and business prospects. Nonprofits are beginning to use social media to track potential donors and new sources of funding. Businesses, meantime, are reducing internal costs by employing online services that save time and effort.

9Keep tabs on competitors. What’s the competition up to? Today it’s easier than ever to monitor your sector or industry to find out about a new competitor, to get an early warning about competing brands’ strategic moves or to take advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with a competitor’s product or service.

10Improve your campaigns and programs. Are you launching focused efforts to move the needle for your organization? Track the mentions of your brand on social networks before, during and after a campaign to see what’s resonating. Use social media’s feedback loop to improve implementation of your programs.

What to listen for: Insights from your community

Listening isn’t about numbers, although the right data can help. It’s about understanding your community, internalizing their remarks and then acting on the information. As the wise social media strategist Liz Strauss writes, “Listening is the most important part of a conversation. Conversations are how communities begin.”

In parts 2 and 3 of this series, we’ll look at a rich array of free and paid monitoring tools you can use. But let’s focus first on the how. How do you wade through the mindless babble and discover the gold shavings?

Your social media team should be trying to turn information gleaned through social media channels into actionable insights. Your point person, or team, should start out by creating two things: (1) a Community Insights Checklist that’s informed by your organizational goals and (2) a Keywords Checklist. Here are some key questions that you may want to add to your first checklist (Note: These are not the questions you put to your community but rather bottom-line conclusions you’re trying to draw over time).

Community Insights Checklist

• What do people like or not like about our brand, cause or organization?
• What are their complaints, and what are the best channels to address them?
• Who are our champions and evangelists? How do we entreat them to become even more involved?
• Are there perpetual detractors about our brand that we can turn around?
• Is there a need in the marketplace or in our sector that we can fill?
• How can our community help inform our new offering, service or product?
• What suggestions do they have to help us improve our next fundraising campaign?
• Are there ways to crowdsource some of what we do to decrease the strain on our staff?
• What existing outside communities can we tap into? What partnerships can we strike?
• Can we use stories in our public outreach based on some of the community members we’ve touched or helped?
• Bottom line: How can we use these insights to drive our mission forward?

Keywords Checklist

• Organization’s name
• Name of your chief executive or other individuals associated with your organization
• Names of key services, programs or brands
• Name and url of your blog or online community
• Name of key events you put on or attend
• Names of key terms or phrases in the sector
• Names of your competitors or other organizations in your space
• Anything else that’s distinctive to your mission or business objective

While some brands turn to social platforms only as part of a short-term social marketing campaign, it’s much more powerful to incorporate social media as part of your organization’s ongoing efforts. That way, your listening will come more naturally rather than seen as a self-serving data-mining technique by the community.

Next: 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools

Image at top right by Terrence Stamp on Flickr (CC-BY)

Related

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• Monitoring articles on Socialbrite

• Metrics articles on Socialbrite

• ROI of Listening by Nonprofit Marketing Guide

• ROI (Results on Insights): Nonprofit Examples of How Listening Returns Value (Beth Kanter)

• 27 Different Types of Conversations (KD Paine)

• Listening Literacy For Nonprofits (Beth Kanter at BrianSolis.com)

• Social Media Listening Literacy Skills for Nonprofits (Beth Kanter)

• How to Listen to Your Online Community (2-page PDF by Meghan Keaney, United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley)

• Got Your Listening Ears On? (Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer at NTEN)

• WeAreMedia.org: Listening module

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