With the growing number of social networks, it can be a pain to keep on top of them all.

Below I’ve highlighted three tools to help you manage your various social networking accounts from one neat dashboard.

#1: Alternion

Just recently out of private beta testing, Alternion packs a punch with the number of networks and social profiles you can manage.

Each profile or account is added by logging into the original site and allowing Alternion to access your account.

From blogging to bookmarking, image-sharing to shopping, Alternion will cover more of your accounts than any other dashboard I’ve tried so far. For business and marketing purposes, you’ll find most of the accounts you would need: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Vimeo and YouTube are all here.

Alternion also places an emphasis on user privacy, with sharing options available for each linked account (perhaps having learned a lesson from Facebook’s privacy fumbles). You can decide whether to display a link to each account on your Alternion profile, and who can see your updates from a specific network.

Alternion's privacy settings are simple and easy to change.

The main dashboard page is a little reminiscent of Facebook’s once-simple layout—the blue and white design and clean structure make it easy to focus on your data and the task at hand.

Two sidebars keep your main news feed or message stream uncluttered.

Alternion offers three main viewing options: your social news feed, which pulls in updates from your social networks; messages, which allow you to interact with your various email accounts; and contacts, which is fairly self-explanatory.

One great feature that I was surprised to find is the ability to not only edit your Facebook and Twitter lists, but also to create brand-new lists from within the contacts tab.

Alternion also creates a user profile for everyone with an account. On your profile page, you can see updates you have made to any linked social networks, links to your various social profiles, photos and videos you have shared and some basic stats about your activity (number of profiles, number of updates, etc.).

The profile sidebar shows an overview of your activity from all accounts across the web.

#2: LiveGO

Unlike Alternion, LiveGO focuses on a smaller number of popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also incorporates email accounts and instant messengers such as Gmail’s GTalk and AOL Instant Messenger.

LiveGO aims to be a simple way to communicate with others through email, social networks or instant messages.

LiveGO has several viewing options, allowing you to get an overview of everything at once or focus on a particular area. The standard inbox view shows your email inbox at the top, with mixed social network feeds underneath. Your instant message accounts live in a sidebar to the right, which can be hidden when not in use, giving you more space for other tasks.

Each of your accounts has its own button on the left, with a pop-up menu that makes it easy to switch to specific feeds; for instance, Twitter mentions or email drafts. A menu across the top of the main feeds panel offers different areas of each network, giving you full, integrated access to your account.

The Facebook-specific view has menu options for your news feed, photo albums, messages and more.

Each Twitter account has its own panel as well, showing your main feed, your own tweets, favorites, mentions and direct messages.

LiveGO's integration with Twitter includes the ability to favorite and unfavorite tweets, see conversation threads and follow or unfollow users.

A constant update box sits at the top of the screen, allowing you to update any of your social networks with ease. Choosing the account you are sending from is clear (something I have had issues with in other dashboard apps), and sending the same update to more than one account is an option.

Finally, a couple of unusual features that caught my attention: First, the ability to add special characters (music notes, hearts, arrows) to your updates. Admittedly, this is not something I use often, but is an interesting addition to the update box, especially considering an “add media” button is conspicuously missing. Second, a feature I have never seen before: an automatic collection of updates from the same person. See the image below for an example.

Two recent tweets by the same person were linked automatically by a bracket to show that they came from the same author.

#3: Netvibes

Netvibes is more of a monitoring dashboard than an integrated updating tool. With the ability to add several social networking accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (yes, really) and email accounts, it offers a good overview of your networks. Its focus is more on monitoring your brand across the web than communication, however.

Netvibes aims to be "everything that matters to you" collected into one dashboard.

With the ability to add several “dashboards” to your account, Netvibes offers a comfortable way to keep different areas of your work separated; for instance, personal and professional accounts or different brands you are monitoring.

Various widgets allow a huge degree of personalization to your dashboard.

Each dashboard view lets you choose widgets to add, which come as specific as the calculator, weather or to-do list widgets, and as indistinct as standard text or HTML widgets.

Social widgets allow you to monitor your email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Each social networking widget offers standard functionality, such as replies, comments, retweeting and other sharing options. The email widget, however, is disappointing in its lack of features, offering essentially an inbox monitor and nothing else.

Adding widgets is a fairly simple process, with categories to browse at the top of the page. Each widget can fit into different areas of your dashboard, and change size and shape accordingly.

Widget previews show user ratings, image previews and the number of users who have installed the widget.

The one thing Netvibes really does differently is the integration of RSS feeds. With RSS widgets, you can quickly get an overview of recent headlines, and open these in a reader view to see the full article.

RSS feeds can be read without leaving the Netvibes dashboard.

This integration makes Netvibes the perfect place to monitor specific topics across the web, without actually “traveling” across the web.

If you prefer to view the actual website, you still don't have to leave your dashboard.

Netvibes also offers the most extensive personalization options of these three apps, with several themes available to choose from, and color options available for each separate widget.

The Verdict

As always with these roundup posts, your needs will determine which app is of the most benefit to you.

What do you think? Let us know which dashboards you’ve tried, and what you like best. What features would you like to see added to your favorite dashboard?

As online publishing platforms and social networks have exploded in popularity, there is a new need to aggregate and search the dynamic “real-time” web.

New platforms hold much promise for marketers who want to understand trends and customer problems in real time. In this article I review three of the top real-time search engines (in no particular order), and each has a unique profile that fits certain use cases particularly well.

#1: OneRiot

OneRiot is the largest real-time web search engine today. It aggregates information about popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites.

OneRiot consolidates all these articles into one headline that you can click that leads you to a list of articles associated with a topic. This is a great way to see multiple articles on one topic all at once and in real time.

Instead of having to search different news sites looking for a hot topic, users can access OneRiot’s aggregated real-time information on the topic. Also, OneRiot does a good job of blending hot topics from different spheres. It has a balanced mix of entertainment news and hard news, but seems to concentrate more on entertainment news.

OneRiot has a bar on the right side of the page that breaks common topics into categories. If you’re looking for the latest news on trends or culture, politics or technology, you can easily find it.

Though OneRiot focuses on news organization sources and provides more reliable information, it lacks the personal touch from integrating commentary from individuals into the feed. This eliminates how the public is reacting to the news. OneRiot is great for lists of news articles related to the topic, but it’s important to get the public’s take on these articles as well.

The best way to use OneRiot for online marketing would be to use its search results about important topics. You could give your audience up-to-date information aggregated from multiple social networks. For instance, if you sell cars, linking to the OneRiot results page with the latest information about models you sell could be a great way to display feedback for people who own your cars.

By going to OneRiot, you can quickly see what the most frequently posted information is at the moment. Overall, OneRiot has the potential to be a great source for generating organic leads.

OneRiot’s real-time results display information about the first person to tweet a story, up-to-date news coverage and social media commentary on those news items.

#2: Collecta

Collecta has more of a mainstream U.S. and international news focus, and does not offer the entertainment and lifestyle content that OneRiot integrates into its results. As a result, Collecta is a great source for people who want important news stories and like to view several sources to understand the breadth of angles on a topic.

The main page displays a general headline for each topic and then three suggested articles related to the topic. This makes it easy to read and gives it a professional, news-style approach. Also, Collecta does a great job of gathering recent social media updates from several sites such as WordPress, Digg and niche blogs; whereas OneRiot seems to pull most of its content from Twitter.

Collecta aggregates multiple sources and displays them based on recentness. There is the option to filter results based on the sources of data you want to include in the results.

Though Collecta does a good job at pulling information from multiple sources, its user interface makes it somewhat difficult to see the information it’s pulling from Twitter and other social media sites. The first suggested article on the homepage is usually an article related to a popular topic, but the next two subheadlines are the newsfeeds for the various social media sites discussing the topic.

The best way to use Collecta for online marketing would be to scan a variety of social media sites updated with the latest information on your business and industry within seconds. Collecta maintains a newsfeed that is updated by the second with several personal and professional social media accounts listed. This is a great way for marketers to research how the public is responding to a topic in real time.

#3: 48ers

48ers focuses more on the collective reactions of individuals to news events in real time. The site is great if you’re searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about a certain topic. For example, during the eggs recall you could enter a search for “eggs” and see the discussion on all social media sites about eggs.

The tradeoff here is that if you aren’t aware of a particular topic, you don’t know to search for it to explore it further. Twitter and Google have both overcome this problem by adding trending results and searches. The main page of 48ers is set up almost like Google where you type in one word and review the results. The difference is that 48ers results are social media results, not news articles or irrelevant articles about eggs from last year.

This is a great source for viewing the most up-to-date information on a particular topic, but it isn’t great if you don’t know what everyone is already talking about. OneRiot and Collecta are superior to 48ers in this respect because they offer the functionality of 48ers while also offering suggested hot topics.

48ers has a more streamlined interface than either Collecta or OneRiot, but it also integrates multiple data sources and offers the ability to filter results based on source.

The best way to use this site for online marketing is to analyze a larger number of social media results on a particular topic and discover brand mentions or industry discussions. Results are being pulled by the second and you have a lot more content to work with compared to the suggested social media results from OneRiot and Collecta.

The Final Word

All three profiled real-time search engines offer benefits, and it’s not clear who will plug the holes in their service first and offer the most compelling real-time search offering.

These independent companies are also competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other larger companies that are offering some version of real-time search and actively seeking to improve them.

Have you used real-time search engines? Do you think they hold promise? Let me know your thoughts in the box below.

In this article I’ll present three ideas that will draw customers to you without that nasty marketing aftertaste.

One of the reasons social media is so valuable to businesses is that it offers a chance to show you’re listening.  As a result, you can gauge customer sentiment, turn prospects into clients and turn customers into brand evangelists.

Instead of looking for instant results in the form of sales, try looking for results on the other side of the spectrum, such as in customer retention and/or brand mentions.

These are the kinds of things that are easily measured and easily influenced. They’re time-efficient, and they’re the perfect use for that Twitter account you set up for your business.

How do you do it? You feed egos.

#1: Let Others Sell For You

Can you improve your sales numbers by throwing links out on Twitter? Sure, but I don’t think it’s the most efficient use of your marketing dollar. Marketing to people directly is not nearly as effective as letting your fans and customers market for you.

I much prefer to spend my social media dollars to bolster my community and create brand evangelists. They’re the best marketers I could hope for.

In these Tweets, each one is sending out a powerful sales message.

#2: Put Out Fires And Spread The Good Word

Dealing with customer issues via email, help desks or on the phone can really sap a company’s resources. Although these lines of communication will probably never go away, there are many cases in which you can put out the fire before it gets that far.

Unhappy customers will complain, and Twitter is one of their favorite places to do it.

However, the beauty of Twitter is that when they complain to the world, you can find, track and intercept that complaint before it spreads, often from the screen of a single employee.

Take a look at how a Domino’s manager did this with a video (brilliant!).

Just think about the impact of a complaint on Twitter. One complaint reaches thousands, which then gets retweeted to tens of thousands, ad infinitum. If you can put out the fire before it gets to the second tier, then you’ve not only kept a dangerous message from spreading, but you’ve shown that you care. At that point, it’s highly possible that the person complaining will tell his or her followers that you’ve responded, which in turn creates a message of goodwill.

All you’ve done is reach out and respond to a complaint.

These tweets highlight a fire needing to be put out. Notice the frustration just waiting to boil over.

#3: Responding Is Solving

People just want to know that you care. When I surveyed my Twitter followers for their expectations when dealing with companies on Twitter, they said that more than anything, it’s the response that matters.

Even if you can’t solve the problem immediately, the very act of responding and addressing the complaint proves that you care. That’s all people want, to do business with a company that cares.

If you can go a step further by routing the complaint to the correct department, then that’s a +1.

The trick for businesses using Twitter is not how you can get more followers so that you can sell more stuff, but how can you create more brand evangelists so that you can sell more stuff. That act of just being there, listening, engaging and hanging out will do far more than spamming your followers with links (if you have any followers left).

Trade Emotional Appeals for Empathy

Being successful on Twitter is nothing more than padding egos and making people feel good. Are you going to win every time? No, but you’ll sure save your company a lot of disruption by tackling problems before they become wildfires.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not asking you to trivialize people and their problems. I’m simply advising you to focus on the empathy instead of emotional appeals.

At worst, you spend a few dollars to solve problems. At best, you create loyal fans who will spread your message for you.

Make people feel good, and they’ll pay it forward on your behalf.

People don't expect miracles; they just want to know you care.

It’s Simple

To get involved, the first step is to let people know you’re out there. Next, set up groups and searches so that you can monitor the pulse of both your industry and your brand. Lastly, find someone who can spend the day hanging out with prospects, clients, and customers. Focus on reducing customer service costs, minimizing attrition and refunds, and turning complainers into evangelists.

It’s not about you or your company, it’s about making people feel like they matter. Do that and you’ll win almost every time.

What do you think?  Have you reached out to someone on Twitter? What do you really expect when you complain? Share the details with us below!

At a time when businesses are using social media to promote content and start discussions, Avaya has found that listening trumps talking.

“We’re listening to social media and responding,” said Paul Dunay, Avaya’s social media ringleader, who is global managing director of services and social media marketing.

“There is no Tweet that goes unturned. No forum post that goes unturned where our name is mentioned.”

What began as a way to engage and support customers has evolved beyond even Avaya’s expectations. And if Avaya ever doubted its investment in social media, those concerns are now put to rest.

A recent quarter-million–dollar sale, which began on Twitter, soundly answered that question.

Making the Case

Avaya started in 2000 as a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, but its legacy goes back more than a century to the original Bell system. From the earliest phone systems to advanced, unified communications, Avaya and its predecessors have been – and continue to be – at the forefront of the field.

It makes sense then that Avaya would be wherever people are communicating today. The company’s social media activity started informally and grew organically. First, it was mostly a matter of supporting – and keeping – existing customers, many of whom need replacements as old phone systems are retired.

At the time, Dunay followed Avaya mentions on Twitter, which were mostly questions that he forwarded to support reps.

“The old 1.0 way was a call center or inputting tickets on the web,” he said. “2.0 is we’ll try to reach out to Avaya support which is, by the way, me on Twitter.”

With the growth of social media, those mentions soon became too much for Dunay to simply watch on his own. He brought his case to Avaya’s CMO, and left with official backing to build a cross-functional, global, and virtual social media team.

“It was very easy for me to build my business case on retention of existing customers because it’s so expensive to get new ones,” he said

Customer Conversations ‘Everywhere’

Through word of mouth, Dunay found early social media adopters within Avaya’s 15,000 employees, starting with seven people across communications, marketing, support, legal and other business units. As the team began organizing Avaya’s social media strategy, they chose to focus on four main tools: Facebook, blogging, forums and Twitter.

From there, Avaya’s social media was “literally an explosion,” according to Dunay. That team of seven employees has now grown to 50 – all of whom volunteer to participate in social media on top of their regular jobs.

Today, the company has 42 Facebook groups, five Facebook fan pages, one external blog with 10 regular Avaya writers, 10 global Twitter accounts, and 12 LinkedIn groups. Internally, Avaya leverages social media just as much, with 14 internal blogs, 15 wikis, about 3,000 employees on Yammer and some on the recently launched Socialcast.

Facebook serves as the hub, with events, news, discussions and links to blog posts. The blogs discuss trends, innovations and cultural insights. Twitter allows them to post quick bits of information, respond to support requests, and monitor mentions of the brand and competition. Forums enable customers to get help from each other or from Avaya tech support.

With significant momentum, Dunay reported back to the CMO. “She asked, ‘Where are we talking to customers?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ She asked, ‘Where are we holding conversations with partners?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ We’re holding all the conversations in the same places with each one of those constituencies – and then some.”

Contests, videos and other resources engage Avaya’s Facebook fans.

The Eyes and Ears of Avaya

With active listening as the team’s main approach, members found they simply couldn’t be everywhere at all times – especially as mentions of the Avaya name grew to between 1,000 and 2,500 weekly. They turned to Radian6 technology to listen to and measure all social media mentions of not just the company’s name, but competitors’ names, product names, and types of conversations.

“We identified conversations we wanted to go deeply into,” Dunay said. “Wherever conversations about small business and communications happen, we need to be there.”

Avaya tracks a dashboard of mentions, and can choose to either ignore or respond to each. When one member “hears” something requiring further action, he or she posts it on an internal wiki and it’s assigned to someone on the relevant team to address it. That might be support, billing and finance, engineering, a partner, and so forth.

Dunay stresses that none of Avaya’s responses are automated. Who knows what a customer or prospect might say? If your response isn’t tailored to their comments, then you’ve missed the opportunity to connect on a personal level.

The 58-Character Sale

On average, Avaya interacts with a couple of dozen customers through social media on a weekly basis. By listening, the team also comes across sales opportunities. In June of this year, 58 characters of a simple Tweet started the relationship with a potential customer.

“shoretel or avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon,” the Tweet read.

“In less than maybe 15 minutes, we had seen it and figured out what the heck to say to this guy,” Dunay said. “I wrote back, ‘We have some highly trained techs who can help you understand your needs best and help you make an objective decision. Give me a call.’”

Dunay referred the gentleman to a business partner, and 13 days later, they closed a $250,000 sale. At the same time, the new customer’s follow-up Tweet went out: “…we have selected AVAYA as our new phone system. Excited by the technology and benefits…”

“We were there. We were listening. It pays to listen,” Dunay said. “I can’t say we hit 100% of the conversations where we’ve wanted to be, although it’s probably 60–70%. But on our brand name, it is 117%. We’re on every one of those.”

Avaya proactively identifies and responds to support issues using Twitter.

One Tweet Away

By proactively looking for mentions and conversations, Avaya sees issues before they even arise, before anyone contacts the company. A response to a social media mention truly makes an impression on customers, prospects and partners. “We are the early response center for things happening in the marketplace,” Dunay said. “They love knowing you’re one Tweet away.”

Avaya’s social media team grew quickly, but Dunay has an even bigger vision for social media.

“I don’t think it should be 50. I think it should be 15,000. Everyone should have a hand in it,” Dunay said. “We definitely want more people deeper and broader in the organization.”

“Our goals are to have deeper, more interesting and more pervasive conversations with as many people as we possibly can,” he added. “Why wouldn’t you take every opportunity for your brand to build better and deeper relations with every customer you can?”