We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Integrated Twitter Client

You can now tweet, reply, retweet, follow and unfollow right from the Brand Monitor™ interface! Sharing posts and creating new conversations is now easier and more convenient.

• Multiple Twitter Accounts!: You can add all your Twitter accounts into Brand Monitor™. Each Twitter account added gets a separate search bucket with graphs that show volume, sentiment, top influencers and “most talked about” topics.
  
  
• Never miss a single tweet: All tweets are tracked in one place and tagged with sentiment and influencer scores, even when you are not logged in!
• Clearly demarcated read and unread tweets help keep the information stream manageable – you can easily identiy new tweets, and the system works better than your exising Twitter client as it works 24/7 and not just when you are logged in.

More Customization for Email Alerts

You now have more control over your email alerts – you can choose which search buckets you want to get emails for, and you see the top posts for the day in your alerts.



Aggregation of Similar Posts

Too many posts on the same topic clogging up your information stream? Not any more! Brand Monitor™ identifies duplicate posts and tags them as one – you can expand the post to see duplicate entries.



We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

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We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Twitter Influencer Analysis and Display

Now, next to each tweet, you will see an “Influencer Score” (out of 100) that our algorithm has rated for the author. Also, if you hover over the twitter author’s username, you get to see more information about the author: Full Name, Influencer Score, Bio, Location, Website, Total Tweets, Followers and Following.

• How do we arrive at an Influencer Score?
  
  We identify 10 key sets of information on each Twitter author, and apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final score. The final score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging his/her audience and how large the impact of their opinion is.
• New Tweet Display
  
  We have redesigned the way a tweet is displayed, for a closer resemblance to how it looks on Twitter.

Post Title and Summary Redesigned, Media Logos Added

Earlier, our system used to remove special characters from a post title; this would make “AT&T” look like “ATT”. Posts now display special characters, and summaries end in a complete sentence.

• Media Logos
  
  Based on the media source, each post has a logo associated to it. This enables you to quickly identify the source of a post. These logos are also in the “Filter” section for media.

Preview Search Bucket Results



While creating a search bucket you now have the option to preview a sample set of results.

This ensures that your search is getting the desired results before you actually submit it, saving you time and effort.

Date Range for Comparison Reports



You now have the option to compare data based on a time range in the comparison report section.

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. If you’d like to try out Brand Monitor™, let us know!

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If you have been following my posts, you would know that  last time I spoke on Social Media Monitoring and its importance. In this post I will be talking about the importance of measuring social media campaign to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

Social Media should be used in a well planned way around your Objectives or Product. The key things which are cyclic in a well structured Social Media Strategy are:

1. Planning in advance
2. Designing your path
3. Execution
4. Measurement and review

Social Media Campaigns take time to show tangible results.  One should have some clarity in what needs to be done. Measure the engagement and plan your next step accordingly.

Measuring Social media is not just about the traffic or conversions that you get. Make sure you measure the conversations, search, and the influencers. Later measure the provoking level of the involvement, interaction and influence your campaign creates with consumers. To get a full picture make sure you put together all the factors of monitoring and measuring your campaign along with web site analytics.

We have Free and Paid tools to monitor these.  A tool like Radian6 might give you influencer insight where as a tool like Sysomos can help you in sentiment analysis. Even free tools like Socialmention, Samepoint help in evaluating your efforts.

Success or failure in Social Media depends on the engagement level that you are able to create and better understanding of your efforts.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

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Link building is a process of increasing the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines.

There are three primary reasons to build links;

1. Direct Click-Through Traffic
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and
3. Help save advertising costs

The goal of most search engine optimization and social media marketing campaigns is to build traffic and higher rankings. Link building can be done in many ways, it is difficult and time intensive but when done properly it is worth the effort.

Most effective ways of link building:

1. News and Article Syndication
2. Directories & Social Bookmarking
3. Q&A sites
4. Forums and discussion centers.
5. Blogs and blog commenting.

There are many other ways of increasing links like Advertisements, Giveaways and Conferences & Social Interactions. All these processes take time and can lead to spam if not done properly. Link dropping has to be done carefully in a relevant, good site and should have content similar to your site.

Contributed by Ganesh Vel

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YouTube has been the revolution in the Internet for sharing videos covering different topics. There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minute on YouTube making it the second largest search engine in the World. It has become vital for business to gain market value over the Internet and YouTube has the right mix with its varied topics.

YouTube has a reputation of being the place to look for funny videos. It is the second place to go after probably ‘Googling’ it. Most videos generate a one-time audience response, as very few people look for the same video again. Since YouTube plays such an important in search results and ranking, it cannot be overlooked. To reach out to your audience and to keep them coming back to view the videos again, here are some rules to be followed :

1. Creation of a channel specific to the videos
2. The video has to be optimized with the desired keywords and involving in the community discussions is vital
3. It is also essential to upload new videos frequently
4. It important to keep in mind while creating the videos that viewer would come back to view the videos only if the videos are informative, original and interesting
5. Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization
6. Embed the videos in the blog. This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience

YouTube has become feature rich with its recent launch of trending topics, to provide more real time value and ease of use for the user in finding information on trending topics. This new addition has made YouTube all the more attractive making it vital for business to get a share of voice in the online market as the volume of search in YouTube is growing at an increasing pace.

Contributed by Vishnuram Muthukumarasamy

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Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

Listen: It is very important to “listen” to what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry as a whole. People and their opinions influence your customers. Watch out for any complaints against you or your competitors, as it is the best opportunity to showcase your customer service to them and show that you care and value customers.

Potential customers also look for others opinions before they make the purchase decision.

Participate: It not about just listening, you need to get engaged and converse with people. If you respond timely to any of the questions it reassures the faith in your brand among the people. Even if your brand is not talked about its essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Make a plan and start conversation at relevant places and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Respond: When you are monitoring the conversations you know the happenings and can implement relevant responses. A proper response goes a long way in spreading the good about your brand in these times of the ripple effect like Twitter.

Tools: There are many paid and free tools to keep a tab on the conversations. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Backtype.

There are paid tools, which help in monitoring and analyzing the brand such as radian6, Collective intellect, TechrigySM2 to name a few.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

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Every brand needs inputs from its customers, it helps understand their need, address their concerns and provide products/ services based on the feedback. As more and more netizens are storming the web to vent out their frustrations, ask for suggestions or just researching, it becomes all the more necessary for any brand to actively participate in this space. In this post I talk about the elements you should consider to manage your brand using Social media.

Explore
You can have as many consumer surveys you want, but tapping into social media communities provides you interesting discussion topics which your consumers discuss and influence other probable customers. Be proactive, research in blogs, forums, social networks, video sites etc. Record the types of complaints / suggestions. Make sure you keep looking.

Analyze your research. Now ask yourself!
• Does your audience know your product?

• Have they got it wrong?

• Do you need to educate them?

Establish Contact & Empathize
The secret to every successful brand management strategy is to make sure that you reach out and respond to the consumer. The key is to listen and participate, I follow a simple methodology.
• Listen
• Understand
• Respond
• Correct
To make it simpler, analyze the complaints. Make sure that that you understand the consumers feedback. Classify your complaints and build messaging strategies for each classification. Place your response and monitor feedback.

Engage
Now that you have got the attention and probably even addressed his concern, it is necessary you still engage the customer and participate in his conversations. A happy consumer always recommends the product/ service to his friends.

Evangelize
Finally, don’t just stop at ‘Engage’. To run an effective brand management campaign make sure you’re constantly educating the target audience of on your product/ service. Create that buzz and make sure you’re visible
• Choose the media vehicles your target audience frequents.
• Provide information to them through these channels.

Brand management can be done anytime; you need not wait for a crisis situation. Start embracing social media today, so even if a crisis hits you are better equipped to manage the situation effectively.

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