Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

The Brushfire Effect and Reputation Management

When I was a kid we used to build fires in a nearby wood. One dry summer some sparks from the fire started a brushfire. We ran around stomping out little blazes as they started but they kept popping up in other places. Eventually a neighbor came by with a shovel and we were able to stop our little conflagration. No damage done but things could have turned out very differently.

In social media this reflects something I’m calling the Brushfire Effect. It’s not the Groundswell, instead it is the fact that a small spark can spread extremely fast, possibly turning into a big problem- or opportunity. This brushfire effect is probably the primary reason for diving into social media if you manage brands or reputations.

It’s relatively easy to monitor what people are saying on the high-traffic sites with existing tools. However it’s out there in the long tail of social media that brushfires start and spread until the big guys take notice. And the time you need to be aware of a nascent brushfire is while its still out there in that long tail because that’s where you can address things early on- before they get out of control. You might even be able to change things with shovel instead of a fleet of planes dropping tons of water.

Reputation Management in Social Media: SlideShare

Brief interview with Charlene Li of Groundswell

If you want to know why monitoring social media is mission-critical read this Fast Company interview. Then get Groundswell and inhale it.

White Paper: Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

Aaron Newman, our commander-in-chief here at Techrigy, just posted a new white paper on engagement in social media. It lays out a complete approach to listening, analyzing and participating in conversations across the social space including several links to resources, advice on how to avoid being viewed as a spammer and how to build a positive reputation.

Recommended.

No registration required…

Today’s Release: SM2 Launch Anouncement

The release below announcing the SM2 launch went out on the wire today even though SM2 has been available ‘under the radar’ for a while. Now we’re official!

For Immediate Release
June 3, 2008
Contact: Martin Edic, Director of Marketing, Techrigy Inc. 585-586-0160

Monitoring Social Media: Techrigy Launches SM2 Social Media Monitoring Solution

SM2 Tracks What People Are Saying About Your Brands, Companies, Products and Competitors in the Blogosphere, Across Social Networks, in User-Generated Video, Microblogs and More

June 3, 2008, Rochester, NY Social media has emerged as a rival to the Internet itself. Every second, millions of users are blogging, Twittering, sharing, reviewing, and uploading their ideas, lifestyles and activities to the social web. This ongoing conversation includes a constantly changing cross-section of stories and opinions. For public relations and marketing professionals, tracking what people are saying about clients, brands and reputations is mission-critical.

SM2: A new model for social media monitoring, discovery and analysis

Techrigy, Inc, a Rochester, NY-based software company, has released SM2, our social media monitoring and analysis service. Designed for use by PR and brand management pros, SM2 is a hosted solution easily accessed via any web-browser. Fast and easy to use, SM2 offers extensive capabilities including:

• Real time, keyword-driven search of blogs, wikis, social networks, video and photo-sharing sites, micro-blog threads, forums and more
• The ability to track brands, people, products, competitors and partners
• Extensive reporting including sentiment (positive/negative opinion), geo-location, demographics, timelines and extensive charting options
• Deep drill-down analysis to manage reputations, identify emerging trends and follow influential opinion-makers

Supporting PR and Marketing Agencies with Tools Clients Demand

SM2 solves a major problem: understanding and responding to extremely rapid changes in opinion on the social web.

“ When the blogosphere runs with a new piece of information, reputations can be destroyed, new markets can emerge and trends can come and go literally overnight”, says Aaron Newman, CEO of Techrigy. “Conventional search cannot index these media formats fast enough nor can they provide the in-depth intelligence that SM2 offers. We built this technology specifically to track brand and name reputations in social media.”

“SM2 can be tested by opening a fully functional, no charge Freemium Account. Pricing is designed to scale with the needs of our users from the solo practitioner to the demands of a global organization”, notes Newman.

Built On Extensive Database and Search Experience

SM2 was developed out of a deep expertise is large scale data-mining and analysis. Techrigy’s founders co-founded Application Security Inc., a pre-eminent leader in enterprise database security systems. President and CEO Newman, who is also CTO of Application Security, is the co-author, with Jeremy Thomas, of the forthcoming book Enterprise 2.0 Implementation (McGraw-Hill September 2008).

For more information about SM2 from Techrigy visit our website at www.techrigy.com or contact Martin Edic, Director of Marketing at 585-586-0160.

About Techrigy, Inc.

Techrigy’s products allow organizations to know what’s being said across the social media eco-system about their brands and to ensure that social media used inside the organization meet all compliance standards. Techrigy’s SM2 provides an aggregate tool that enables organizations to monitor and track the social media eco-system with one suite of tools. Visit us in Rochester, NY.

Our Community page: http://www.techrigy.com/community.htm
585-586-0160

User-Generated Content (UGC) can be a problem- d’oh!

Sarah from ReadWriteWeb has a great piece about the volatility of UGC and the importance of social media monitoring for brand stakeholders. Obviously for us here at Techrigy this is preaching to the converted, but she is absolutely right- you cannot ‘control’ the conversation nor should you try to. Monitor, analyze, listen, join in and participate. Everyone becomes a customer service person in this new paradigm and once again, as always, the customer (user) is always right (even when they’re wrong!).

Future PR right now

Brian Solis has a long piece on Techcrunch today on the Renaissance of PR driven by social media and how the way we pursue publicity has changed from pitching to participating in the conversation, one of my talking points.

Highly recommended. And don’t worry about the title: this applies to everyone- not just start-ups.

Techrigy Upgrades Freemium SM2 Social Media Monitoring Accounts

We’re happy to announce that, effective immediately, all current and new users of our Freemium (no charge) SM2 Accounts are now being upgraded to 5 keyword searches and 1000 stored results. This more than doubles the functionality of SM2 for early adopters and PR and marketing agencies who want to test the waters in the social media monitoring space. Prior to the introduction of our Freemium Accounts, the costs of entry to social media monitoring services were prohibitive. Now you can start using the service, showing your clients results and developing new business opportunities monitoring brands across blogs, social networks, user-generated video, Twitter and more.

Social Media Influence is Exploding and So are Opportunities for PR and Marketing Agencies

Techrigy offers this free version because we want to grow with our clients. The explosive expansion of social media and its influence on opinions and reputations is the big story in managing brand and corporate public relations. Because this is such a new realm we understand that many PR and marketing professionals are scrambling to develop expertise and offer that knowledge to your clients. The fastest way to get up to speed is to register for the SM2 Freemium Account and begin monitoring your client brands. With this upgrade you can create profiles and generate enough analysis to demonstrate to your clients why and how you track their reputations in social media.

Simple Growth Path to a New Agency Profit Center

Once you’ve tried SM2 and you’re ready to turn it into a profit center for your agency, we work closely with you to bring your clients onboard. Whether they are existing clients or new business prospects, SM2’s capabilities offer any size agency deep drill-down ability to follow conversations and brands including extensive reporting options. You can then apply your market knowledge to analyze results and recommend actions to manage risk and take advantage of opportunities. The Freemium Account offers all the analysis tools available in our Premium Silver, Gold and Platinum paid plans. These plans, which are purchased on a monthly or annualized subscription basis, offer you the ability to scale up to managing multiple clients and tens of thousands of saved searches.

In social media, don’t pitch, participate

This obvious statement was clarified for me while commenting on a blog post about using Twitter to pitch people, a very bad idea, IMHO. When we look into social media to follow conversations about brands we don’t see places to insert a pitch, we see opportunities to join the conversation; a different proposition. Pitching is pushing out a message into a situation that may very well resent the intrusion. Listening and adding value mean you are building trust and authority by respecting the others in the conversation.

The primary goal of brand marketing is building trust. In social media, trust is based on reputation as verified by individual contributors. Factors are sentiment, relevance, quality of response in both good and bad situations- all the things we measure when we interact in the real world with real people. The people you interact with in social media aren’t markets or personas, they’re actual people and they can make a snap judgment about you just like in real life!

Treating social media like news media doesn’t work. Treating social media like a conversation does. And that’s where the opportunity lies.

What’s on your TwitPitch?

BusinessWeek has a piece on the latest in elevator speeches, those short and sweet business descriptions we all need when we’re standing in an elevator and someone asks what our company does. The article covers the latest form, using Twitter’s 140 character limit to define a so-called TwitPitch- describing who you are, what you do or what your company does.

But using Twitter, let alone pitching on it, is still a big leap for most companies, PR firms, and reporters. In the month since Boyd began Twitpitch, just about 150 messages have been tagged with the “#twitpitch” label, according to a search on Twitter search tool Summize.

“Boyd, who now takes pitches only via Twitter, acknowledges some companies may resist the idea. But he also says some PR people have told him they favor the process. “The real value isn’t how many commas you put into an e-mail. It’s really about how effective you are about getting people who are interested to take a call or a meeting,” he says.”