Social Media Tracking and Analytics for Online Reputation Management

Introduction
Free Social Media Tracking Services
- Twitter Monitoring & Analytics
- Online Video Response Tracking
Paid and Enterprise Level Tracking & Analytics

Introduction

Return to Internet Marketing Resources Home

The phenomenon of social media on the Internet changed the behavior of consumers dramatically. Once being passive and easily reached via one-way communication marketing messages and images, consumers became active and engaged with the products they purchase and use and the companies that manifacture and sell them.

They also learned to share thoughts and opinions with others, to influence their buying decisions, without just trusting the marketing messages of the TV, Billboard or Magazine advertisement.

Once a group, consumers also learned about the power that they have over businesses where they were helpless in the past, when they were struggeling alone against a company that did not deliver what it promised.

This has impact on any company, large Fortune 500 or small mom & pop shops. Knowing what people have to say about you, your company, your brand or your products at social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and others is not only recommended, but of essential importance.

If you do not monitor and manage your online reputation, you are unable to respond to any emerging issues and problems related to you or your products, while the issue is still managible and relatively easy to take care of.

If you hear about it on the evening news on mainstream television or after sales of your products declined significantely, major damage to your business and image is already done and much more difficult and costly to remedy. And it might started all with a discussion of sone social networks or a blog post by an influential blogger and could have been stopped from spreading right there and then, if you only would have known about it earlier.

To help you with the daunting task of monitoring the millions of communications and engagements of people with everything they are caring about and more important the filtering of those communications, tools became available to make this task manageable.

Below are lists of such tools and services, some are free, others are commercial and have cost attached to their useage.

Further Reading

Social Media Primer for Large Corporations, article by Carsten Cumbrowski

Free Social Media Tracking Services

Return to Internet Marketing Resources Home

Logo	Description
	Google Alerts is a powerful and free tool by Google that lets you monitor News, Blogs, the Web, Video, News Group or Everything based on keywords or keyword phrases (same syntax as search queries) and get an alert via email or RSS feed (for Google Reader) when a Google Crawler encounters a new occurence of your specified key phrase. You can limit the notifications to only get a weekly or daily summary or real-time notifications every time it happens.
	Technorati the classic blog search engine provides powerful tools that help you monitor if and what folks (like bloggers) are saying about you or your company. You can subscribe to search results via RSS. The URL search lets you monitor who links to your blog or web site and the tags search lets you monitor the blogosphere for terms and phrases that are relevant for your industry.
	Jodange automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media. Beyond the simple tracking of that it is talked about you, the feature TOM (Top of Mind) tracks consumer sentiment about your brand, company or product across the entire world wide web and groups the result accordingly.
	Trendrr is a tool that lets you search for what people are saying on the social internet about you or your company and also compare it to what is being said about something or somebody else, such as your competitor.
	Facebook Lexicon lets you find out what people on Facebook are currently talking about a lot. You simply enter the keyword or keyword phrase where you would like to know more about and "Lexicon" will return figures that show you how much people are talking about it. You must have a (free) Facebook account to be able to access Facebook Lexicon.

Track and analyze what people are doing on your own web site. Use web analytics solutions to make sure that your web site meets your visitors and potential customers expectations, as well as your own business goals.

Twitter Monitoring & Analytics

Logo	Description
	Monitter is a free monitoring tool that offers features beyond the integrated tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck to allow you to do real-time monitoring of what is happening in the Twittersphere.
	Tweetburner is a mix of TinyURL and Feedburner by Google. It lets you create short URLs (looking like this: http://twurl.nl/16rf3u) for your long destination URLs to save precious characters in your tweets. But in addition to creating a short URL, Tweetburner also lets you monitor the traffic (clicks) that are generated through this shortened URL.
	Twendz is a free Twitter monitoring tool based on Twitter Search provided by the PR Agency "Waggener Edstrom". Limited to 70 tweets at the same time.
	Twitter Search is the official real-time search for tweets by Twitter.com that contain the entered keyword or keyword phrase is a great tool to find out who is talking about a certain topic and also to learn what they are saying.
	TweetScan is a real-time search like the official Twitter Search, but has additional features that the official tool is missing, such as the ability to narrow the search by Twitter user and most importantly the option to sign-up to receive Email alerts to phrases where you want to monitor the twitter stream for.

Online VideoResponse Tracking

Logo

Description

TubeMogul is not only a tool that lets you upload a video once and distribute it for you to various online video sharing sites, it also provides in-depth analytics and statistics.

Even more data are available for videos that you are hosting yourself, in combination with their paid InPlay service. Premium accounts also have access to their data API and to advanced keyword reports that are not available to users with a free TubeMogul account.

Monitor general Trends & Mindsets within your industry and also keep an eye on what your competition is doing by using competitive intelligence tools and methologies.

- top -

Paid and Enterprise Level Tracking & Analytics

Return to Internet Marketing Resources Home

Logo	Description
	GoogleAlerts.com (GigaAlert) is a professional service that is providing more options and data than Google's Free "Google Alerts" service, including the current ranking of the page for the monitored search query/keyword or phrase.
	Viralheat is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics tools to help with your online reputation management of your brand or company. You can monitor 10 phrases for about $10/month and 50 phrases for about $40/month. If you need more than that, then you need the "Platinum" version of the tool where no pricing is available on their public web site. They offer a 7 days free trial for all levels to check them out risk free.
	TruCast by Visible Technologies is a complete solution for Social Media and Blog monitoring, measurement, analysis and online customer engagement. TruCast also has a customizable sentiment analysis feature. It also helps you with actionable intelligence and the planning of participations in conversations about your company or brand.
	Radian6 pulls information from the social Internet and then analyzes and generates consumer sentiment ratings for your company or brand. When used in conjunction with CisionPoint from Cision, the evolved Bacon's of today, Radian6's dashboard can provide an even greater wealth of information.
	CisionPoint by Cision is tool that acts as your marketing campaign dashboard, where you plan your campaigns, connect your media, monitor the coverage that you receive and analyse the overall campaign results.
	Techrigy by Alterian is a tool to track the social web and helps your company with direct customer engagements whenever customers are talking about you. A unconditional free trial is available for TechRigy that you can test-drive it without risks and obligations before you decide whether or not you should buy it.
	Collective Intellect collects real time market intelligence, providing direct insight into consumer opinions for marketing professionals. They offer a set of different services, optimized for a specific need. Real-Time Category Insights is a service to monitor specific markets, Real-Time Brand Insights lets you monitor your brand, Real-Time New Product Insights helps you track consumer responses to your new products, Real-Time Campaign Insights tracks the social media responses for your online and offline marketing campaigns and Real-Time Corporate Reputation Insights watches the sentiment and thoughts of customers and others about your company in general.
	Trackur by Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrims.com and author of the book about online reputation management titled "Radically Transparent".