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Posts from the ‘Featured’ Category

Apr 6

How to help save the world… one drop at a time

How can you help save the world? I think you can do it by donating to good causes… Like charity:water!

Charity:water is an organisation that builds wells in communities that don’t have access to fresh water. Because of charity: water’s unique model, 100% of all donations go directly to direct water projects costs, and each donation is “proved” and tracked to the village it helped when projects are complete.

My birthday is coming up July so I thought I’d use is as rallying point to raise some money to build a well. The goal is $5000 but between you and me, I know we can totally smash it and build more than one well icon smile How to help save the world... one drop at a time .

So… if you’re feeling generous (and I hope you are!) get me the best birthday present and donate to my charity:water campaign.

Not convinced? Watch this video to see the difference your donation can make.

Mar 22

I’m gonna go social on you

What happens if you’re a customer and you don’t get your way? In the age of social media you terrorize, apparently. At least that’s what happened to my company recently. That’s right – we had a social media terrorist attack.

I’m gonna go social on you

I work for an insurance company. We’re in the business of protecting the quality of people’s lives. We do this by restoring their cars and homes to the state prior to the incident that caused them to file a claim. We try to provide them with the best customer service we can throughout this process. We don’t send our cars to the cheapest repairers, but rather to repairers that we know can do a good job. One of our customers recently wasn’t too happy with this process and really let us know about it.

gonna go social on you Im gonna go social on you

The customer in question was getting his car repaired with us. For some reason he didn’t like the repairer that was going to fix up his car (he was getting a lifetime guarantee on the repairs, mind you!). He instead elected to take a cash payment for the repairs. Unfortunately, he didn’t agree with the amount of money the repairs would cost and was therefore unhappy with the cash settlement.

If you’ve followed so far, we’ve done everything right: we tried to fix the car, the customer said ‘no’, so we tried to pay him cash based on what the actual repair would cost and he still said ‘no.’

The next thing we knew, we received a letter (or email, rather) of demands. Unless we pay the cash amount that he thought was reasonable, he’d blast us all over the Internet. He wanted to falsely accuse us of doing wrong to get his way. He was gonna go social on us!

How to respond, or “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”

Let’s face it – if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have no reason to negotiate with a social media terrorist. (If you have done something wrong, then you need much more than just this blog post to help you… I suggest getting some legal advice, my friend. Also, you should probably rethink your business model. Being dodgy won’t get you too far in the end…)

If someone does try to go social on you, here’s a few tips I think you should try.

Talk to them

If you hear about the threat directly like we did, then try talking to this customer first. They’re angry, but at least they’re open to a conversation, or you’d never have received the warning email. Perhaps you can reason with them and explain why you did what you did. Appeal to whatever logic they have left. See if you’re really the problem or if there’s something else going on in their life that’s causing this frustration.

Get someone senior to talk to them

Escalate to a manager. In our case, our CEO got involved and was happy to calmly explain our processes to this customer. People like to feel important. If the CEO is talking to you, you feel like you’re getting somewhere and you’re less likely to live up to your terrorist threats.

Scope out the places you think they’re planning their attack

Check all the websites where you think he may strike and monitor the rest. If the terrorist talks, you need to be there to respond with the truth immediately. Set up an immediate Google Alert so you get notified if something comes up.

Be rational and calm and stick to the facts

If your terrorist does post some things you don’t agree with, get involved. Respond calmly, rationally and factually. Staying silent may convince others that you’re guilty. If a particular forum doesn’t allow you to respond or refuses to publish your comment (happened to us several times), Google Sidewiki will be your best friend. You can state your side of the story using Sidewiki, which may not reach too many users, but it’s the best you can do in that situation. Or, try contacting the webmaster with the facts to try to convince them that you really do need to give your side of the story.

Know when to stop

Sometimes engaging someone in the public forum just adds fuel to the fire. The social media terrorist may enjoy the spotlight too much and make up more lies. The last thing you want is for the situation to blow up out of proportion and start showing up in searches for your brand. If you don’t get rational responses, then leave. It will only get worse from there. (Trust me… We’ve been there too…)

Don’t wait for an attack – Stage a preemptive strike

dont mess with me 150x150 Im gonna go social on youThere’s no 100% guaranteed way to disarm a social media terrorist. If someone really wants to go social on you, they will. All you can do is be ready for them. Engage your customers enough so that they don’t resort to social media terrorism in the first place. Create a blog or a forum on your site so if they do go social, maybe they’ll do it on your turf and you can at least respond on your terms. If you build it, they will come…

In our case, we actually got somewhere in the end. Despite his threats, our disgruntled customer hasn’t done anything dramatic. Talking did work in this case and hopefully this customer will agree to just have his repairs done and get his car back ASAP. It’s taken a high level of attention, but it’s worth it in the end if it means this customer is now happy and his car is restored back to its original condition. After all, as an insurance company, that’s our job, come rain or shine, right?

Mar 8

13 Comments

Social Media Monitoring Tools

One of the musts of social media is to monitor what is being said about your brand. There are many free and subscription tools out there for you to use. Here’s a short description of the most popular ones for your review. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend at least using a few of the free monitoring options like Social Mention and Google Alerts. As your brand engagement or social media activities grow, it’s worth exploring the paid options. You should check out user reviews before committing to any of the subscription options. Most have demos or trial accounts so be sure to check them out.

Please note – I copied a lot of the descriptions below from third party sources instead of writing each one myself. I’ve cited the source under each tool.

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

To start off with, here are some free tools you could try in order to find out what’s being said about your brand in the social world. These tools are great as far as reach, but because most are search engines, they don’t offer the pretty (and useful!) dashboards you get from the paid tools.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the free, simple and effective way of finding out what’s being said about your brand online. You can choose to have your alerts delivered as they happen, or on a less frequent basis like daily or weekly. Setting up Google Alerts for your brand name as well as names of your key competitors is definitely step one in your social media monitoring efforts. What’s great about Alerts is that they’re quite comprehensive and super fast if you set them to immediate notification. I’ve done random little tests of posting content about our brand and Google Alerts picks it up nearly immediately. The bad thing about this free tool is that there are no trending tools, filters, dashboards or other fun stuff you get from the paid tools.

Yahoo Alerts

Yahoo Alerts is just like Google Alerts except for the Yahoo network. What’s kinda cool about Yahoo Alerts is that you can get them delivered via Messenger and mobile, not just email. Although I’m not sure why you would want to deliver alerts to your mobile…

Social Mention

I love Social Mention. It’s simple, easy to use, and it’s free. It’s a social media search engine that lets you narrow your search by type (blogs, microblogs, events, comments, etc.) or lets you search everything at the same time. The search results will give you direct links to articles as well as a measure of sentiment, most frequent hashtags used and a list of users who are making the most comments about the keyword searched. This tool probably doesn’t pick up everything but it sure does flag a big chunk of content about your brand. For a free tool, it’s pretty good.

Daymix

Daymix is a free social search engine that organises search results by media type: wiki, news, blogs, video. It didn’t have too many search results so I wasn’t thrilled by it, but it’s free so you might as well check it out every now and then.

Whos talkin

Whos talkin is a free search engine for social media. Just enter your brand (or CEO’s name or whatever else you want to monitor) and the tool will return a comprehensive list of search results. If you are after results from a particular source, just click the source on the left side of the page to filter results. The big downside of Whos talking is the limited scope of its search engine.

Friend Feed

Source: Top 10 free tools for monitoring your brand’s reputation

FriendFeed is a free social aggregator. You have the ability to take all of your social accounts, such asYouTube, Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr, and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed. You can conduct searches on your brand throughout all social networks at once using this search engine.

Aside from learning about the latest video or tweet related to your topic, you can analyze comments that people make under them. FriendFeed users tend to favorite and comment on what you share and tracking it will become more important as this service grows in population. You can also receive alerts straight to your desktop with Alert Thingy.

Board Reader

Board Reader is a “community search engine” which crawls blog posts, forums, images, and microblogs. Other social media monitoring tools use feeds from Board Reader to build their dashboards.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools

As we have found at my company, the great free social media monitoring tools only get you so far. Once you decide to invest more time into social media, you should probably invest some dollars into monitoring. The major advantage is the customisable dashboards you get with the paid tools which give you a great visual representation of your social brand on the web.

Trackur

Trackur seems to be quite a flexible and affordable social media monitoring tool, not unlike Radian 6. Pricing starts at $18 per month for an individual user to $297 for an agency. Either way, not bad! Here’s what one reviewer had to say about Trakur had to say: “What will make or break this tool in my eyes is the effectiveness and thoroughness of searching the web. I definitely sense the need for a tool that can do a good job of the aforementioned. One thing that stands out to me initially is the tool is very user friendly. It is simple and easy to use. You can quickly find the information your are looking for and can utilize a “saving” mechanism to come back to searches you have done in the past. Furthermore, you can subscribe to your searches via email alerts and RSS feeds, which is handy.”

Update: There’s a free version of Trackur as well. I totally missed it when I had a look since it was on the bottom of the pricing page. Worth checking out. I’ve signed up for a trial and will let you know how it goes.

Reputation Defender

Source: Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Reputation Defender offers four different services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen by name, screen name or social network profile and reports back to you. MyReputation allows you to review everything that is available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to remove your personal information from people search databases, such as Pipl and Peek You.

Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google results. All of these services scale in size depending on your need and how much money you want to spend.

Brands Eye

Source: Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that accurately reflects the state of your reputation over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria.

Like many of the other services, you are paying for keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many times you receive updates grows depending on how big your package is.

Radian 6

Radian 6 is one of the best known social media monitoring tools. According to their website, Radian 6 scans over 100,000 million websites for buzz about your brand. The tool includes a handy dashboard which can be easily shared. It also includes workflow and segmentation tools. Pricing starts at $500 per month for US customers, which makes it a great mid-range paid monitoring tool to try.

Dow Jones Insights

According to the Dow Jones Insights website, their tool puts all results of social media monitoring into one convenient dashboard. It also allows you to benchmark your brand against your competitors. What’s funny is that it’s quite hard to find reviews on this tool. Also, their site isn’t that great. I’ve had great personal recommendations for Dow Jones Insights, however, so if I end up trying it out myself, I’ll update this post to reflect my impression of the tool.

UPDATE: After meeting with the DJ people I’ve realised that their tool is not really a technology but rather a consulting service. They get data from various sources (for example, Board Reader), some of it is automated and the rest – including sentiment – is essentially categorised by analysts. Human involvement seems to be their differentiator. It also seems to be the reason for their hefty price tag of over $5000 per month, plus extra for benchmarking reports. Because the tool isn’t as automated as the others, the dashboards aren’t as pretty or flexible as on the automated tools. Dow Jones does bring a lot of experience and reputation to the table (remember using Factiva in college?) so I imagine they would be a valuable partner to have… for a price.

Nielsen Buzz Metrics

Nielsen Buzz Metrics offers brand and buzz monitoring through it’s suite of products. According to their website, “Nielsen My BuzzMetrics customizable dashboard provides easy access to key brand health metrics and consumer commentary. Nielsen ThreatTracker analyst alerts keep you abreast—in real-time—of fast-moving reputation threats. Nielsen BuzzMetrics Brand Tracking provides an audit of your brand’s online health today and Nielsen BuzzMetrics Audit gives you a picture of your brand’s online health over a specific time period. Nielsen BuzzMetrics Scorecardshows you how your brand stacks up against your competition.” To be perfectly honest, it’s not clear to me what their competitive advantage is.

Dialogix

Dialogix is a social media monitoring tool that focuses on Australian, NZ and UK websites. As with other tools, Dialogix monitors news media, social media and measures sentiment. What’s cool about this one is that it lets you focus in on key influencers for your brand. Dialogix pricing starts at $149 per month for localised Australian results (which may be enough for some brands) and increases up to $1495 per month for international monitoring. It does give you a free trial so you might as well have a look and see if you like it compared to others.

Cymfony

Cymfony offers the Maestro Platform, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you. While other tools may focus on keyword analysis, Cymfony claims to work on a more detailed grammatical analysis of text in order to eliminate irrelevant results. They provide some more added value by writing market intelligence studies.

Sentiment Metrics

Source: Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that, just like the other services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the name), which tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the big differentiators and benefits of using this service is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you have bad press.

Visible Technologies

Visible Technologies offers the TruCast suite of products, which is a comprehensive solution used by enterprises who want to track, analyze and participate in social media communities all in one space. The differentiating feature of TruCast is TruVoice, their tool that lets you comment on blogs, forums, etc directly from within the tool. TrueCast also includes a crisis management tool to identify potential issues in social media, monitor how they develop and address them using SEO principles (that is, promote positive information about the brand or topic).

Cision

Source: Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Cision offers the Cision Social Media service, which claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. One of the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is that these companies have been monitoring and measuring traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide a more comprehensive solution across the board.

Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7 buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6, which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and daily reports, just like the other services, where they tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day through email.

Biz360

Biz360 Community is a DIY social media monitoring tool which is priced per user, per topic. For example, 5 topics will cost you $399 for one user license. There are other pricing options available as well for additional topics and multiple user licenses. From user reviews it seems that its Topic Velocity feature seems to be a useful tool. Topic Velocity provides users with information on rate of change of sentiment about a particular topic. It also lets you view this change over time so you can look for and perhaps predict trends more easily. Check out the list of features for more information.

BuzzLogic

BuzzLogic is another tool I found good reviews for and therefore included in this post. However, it turns out that the social media monitoring tool is no longer available as a standalone product. Instead, monitoring comes as part of BuzzLogic’s advertising platform. The only way to get this tool, then, is with a media buy through BuzzLogic. The write-up from Mashable is below for your interest.

Source: Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Buzzlogic offers the BuzzLogic Insights application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).

They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.

Are there other tools that you know of that aren’t in this post but are worthwhile checking out? Please comment to let me know and I’ll update the content to include them. Thanks!

Dec 16

6 Comments

Googleifying your life

I love Google. I only worked there for a year but I’m a Google girl now and forever. During this past week I fell in love with Chrome and I’m already taking it for granted. But that’s the beauty of Google’s tools – they’re so intuitive, easy and useful that we take them for granted. So here’s my “thank you Google” blog for the tools I can’t live without and you should use too.

Gmail – the perfect email

gmaillogo Googleifying your lifeThere is such a clear distinction for life before Gmail and after Gmail, that I don’t know how I ever communicated online without it. Checking email was always a chore – sifting through spam and deleting emails with attachments was a daily task. With Gmail’s unlimited storage and superb spam filters, email became a natural and easy part of my day. All my conversations are logically organized, they’re fully (and quickly!) searchable, I NEVER have to delete anything and I don’t even remember when I had spam in my inbox. There’s seriously no reason why you should be using anything other than Gmail.

Google Chrome – the reliable browser

google chrome 300x214 Googleifying your lifeAs I’m a Mac user I’ve only had the pleasure of using Google Chrome for a short time, but already I love it. Just check my Twitter. I went from “I want to kill Firefox” to “Oh my god how fast is Chrome?!?!?!?” It’s truly amazing. Pages load super quickly. New tabs open instantly. The screen is optimized to display content, not toolbars. It installs in about a minute and takes about that long to import your bookmarks, settings, etc., from your other browser. There’s no need for a search box because you type everything in to your address bar. When you click on a link, it opens in the tab adjacent to the one you’re in, not as the end of the window. These are all simple things we should expect from a browser, aren’t they? Until now, they were things I hoped for but knew I wouldn’t get from IE, Safari or Firefox. Chrome delivered big time. But the coolest feature is the ability to drag a tab into a new window, and vice versa. You literally drag and drop. So cool.

Oh, and I’ve had the same browser open for nearly a week now. I haven’t had a single problem with load speed, freezing, nothing! I’ve had to force-restart Firefox several times on a daily basis before. Finally, a reliable browser.

Google Docs – your mobile office

google docs logo Googleifying your lifeLike Gmail or Chrome, Google Docs is just another no-brainer way to do something you’re used to, but better, faster and easier. Docs lets you create documents within your browser or, if you prefer, import existing documents from your computer or email. You can easily collaborate on documents or open them up as read only to anyone with an email address. If the styles on Docs aren’t enough for you, you can always open the doc on your computer and update the Docs file when you’re done. It’s all so easy it’s ridiculous. What’s best is that it’s all linked to your Google account and online so you can access your document library without even owning a computer.

Google Analytics – data even the marketing department can read

I’ve been using Analytics for years and I obviously think it’s great, but it’s not until I see another analytics tool that I appreciate the Google Analytics interface. All your data is at your fingertips. It’s easy to manipulate, it displays beautifully and exports easily. It’s so easy to read that you can show a screen to someone who’s not web savvy at all, and they’ll know exactly what they’re looking at. It makes data understandable no matter what your role you’re in. Last month Google launched a huge update to Analytics which now includes a broad spectrum of actions you can measure as well as very useful customized alerts (like, when your bounce rate goes above a certain level). There are entire blogs on Analytics alone (check out the best Analytics blog of all) so there’s no point for me to expand more. To make a long story short, Analytics empowers you really understand what’s happening on your site without spending thousands on software or staff.

Adwords Editor – SEM made easy

adwords logo Googleifying your lifeIf you run a business, chances are you’re running an SEM campaign on Google. The Adwords web interface is super easy to use, but when it comes to bulk edits, I still prefer Adwords Editor. It’s a piece of software that you install on your computer which lets you update your CPC campaigns quickly and easily. It uses all the same keyboard shortcuts that you’re used to in other programs, which makes bulk editing a breeze. Since it’s on your computer, you can use it offline and upload your changes later.

I can’t wait to see what Google thinks of next. I think Wave has tremendous potential for changing how we communicate, but it hasn’t reached full Google-ness yet. That is, it’s not as slick and intuitive as Gmail, for example. Google’s phone should be quite phenomenal as well. Thanks for keeping our digital lives interesting Google!

Nov 8

3 Comments

Navigating the social media landscape

As a company, what can you do with social media? How do you get started? How do you even know what your options are? I’ve gone through that confusion. Believe me, I know how you feel. Through the course of my blog I hope that I will help fellow web professionals answer those questions for their companies. For now, I offer you one of the best visual social media devices I’ve come across. I hope it will get you started in outlining what your options are.social media landscape Navigating the social media landscape

As I prepare for adtech Beijing, I’ve been looking for some good images to use in my presentation and I came across one of my favourite representations of social media (above). Although it’s incomplete, it neatly categorizes the main types of activities that are possible in the social web world.

Social media landscape

The main activities the graphic outlines that companies can engage in are to: publish, share, discuss, network, microblog, live-stream, livecast, live in a virtual world, participate in or create social and MMO games. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, what industry you’re in and what your company culture is, you may do any combination of these activities. Because there are so many potential ways for a customer to engage with your brand/company, it’s extremely important to set a clear social media strategy and not just write off social media as a fluffy trend the tech companies are doing. Literally every company can go social. Knowing how to get started can be a little confusing, though.

What Real Insurance does with social media

As an insurance company with a transparent and honest (but somewhat laid-back) culture, at Real Insurance we focus mainly on the “share” and “microblog” aspects of the social media landscape wheel. Why? Because our primary objectives are to manage our brand reputation and engage our customers (with a secondary objective of lead generation). All else is just icing on the cake.

We actively monitor what’s being said about Real via tools like SocialMention and we respond to feedback on our brands, be it good or bad. Where we can’t respond because the site doesn’t allow it, we use Sidewiki to comment. If the feedback is good, we’ll thank you. If it’s bad, we’ll admit if we’re wrong and we’ll do our best to rectify the situation. That’s why we have clear work flows internally for following up on any complaints that we see in the social world. The end result? Having as much control as possible over our brand, customers who know they are being heard and staff empowered to help customers.

How you can get started with your social media strategy

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It’s an ancient Chinese proverb which rings true in the case of social media strategy as well. Start small. Set up a blog. If you can, get your CEO to blog. After all, he/she is the expert on your company. Set up a Twitter account. Then use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet new posts to Twitter. There, you’re already social! After that, check out the many resources on social media on Mashable to start learning.

Get your feet wet with Twitter and absorb everything you read. Think it through and outline a strategy that makes sense for your company. Then slowly add channels as appropriate. Remember another Chinese proverb: “Don’t be afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still.”

Good luck with your social media activities. It’s a very exciting space where brands can really get close to their customers and create positive interactions between the commercial and “real” world. I, for one, can’t wait to see what cool new tool or networks comes out next.

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