Social Media Monitoring - Are You Hot, Hot, Hot?

I'm sure you've heard us marketers barking about social media monitoring, but what's it all about? The standard line is something like "people are already talking about you online, so you might as well join the conversation". Well, maybe that's true and maybe not. Let's find out. Let's take our social media temperature.

First let's go to SocialMention (www.socialmention.com) and see what a popular brand looks like. Type "starbucks" into the search box and click the search button. Here's what I got today.

Here's how Social Mention describes its service: "It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc." Editor's note: Best of all, it's free!

In a familiar, Google-like search results page you can see all of the instances of your brand being talked about across the social media spectrum. Charts on the left-hand side show you the top people and keywords as well as some interesting metrics about how people "feel" about your brand and how "powerful" your brand is:

• Strength: "phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions".
• Sentiment: "the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative".
• Passion: "a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly".
• Reach: "the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions".

Of course, they won't tell us how exactly how they figure out the positive and negative, but it most likely has to do with certain keywords related to sentiment, like "I love Starbucks coffee" or its converse.

Pretty cool, huh?

OK, now you try it

Search on your company brand or your personal social media identity, anything that might by found in a blog, microblog, web page or social media bookmark.

Once your results come up, filter by the "results" pulldown on "Last Day". Now you know how much "buzz" has been created in the past 24 hours. What's your social media temperature?

HOT

Like Starbucks. Hundreds of mentions in a single day.

MEDIUM

10 - 100 mentions. More typical of companies that are active in social media but may not have such a well-known brand.

COLD

0 - 10 mentions. Needs work. Good news if you're trying to keep your activities secret. Bad news if you're trying to spread the word about your brand. If the latter is the case, try inbound marketing and work it every day.

How does your website stack up against your competitors?

Click here for a free report.