But new social media management tools are popping up like weeds and a couple of them might end up being roses. One new such tool is SproutSocial.com.

Here are the 7 ways to tell if you’re ready to graduate from TweetDeck.

#1: Social media monitoring is eating up a lot of your time

Time is money, as they say, and although TweetDeck is handy, its functionality is limited to the few things it does well.

SproutSocial was launched last November and represents a big step up in terms of performance for a modest monthly fee of $9/month—a fee you may or may not be ready to pay.

Among the many things I like about SproutSocial, an elegantly designed browser-based “social media management” tool, is its ability to save you time on multiple fronts:

• Providing an inbox that combines your multiple social streams and then allows you to respond or flag messages for follow-up
• Making it easy to automatically post your RSS feed from your blog to your Twitter accounts
• Helping you to remember the names of the people you follow by auto-suggesting their handles after you type the @ sign
• Scheduling recurring messages easily but without being annoying

Creating a recurring message on SproutSocial is quick and easy.

#2: Social media has become a good source of competitive data

Let’s assume you’ve decided to track a number of keywords and phrases via individual TweetDeck columns. At some point, you’ll end up adding too many columns to view them all with ease on one screen.

With SproutSocial, you can aggregate your searches into one data stream, allowing you to see who’s tweeting about you, your competition and your category. You can also search by company name, which allows you to find which of your competitors are tweeting and the size of their following.

This shows an aggregated stream of tweets by individual keywords and phrases selected by the user.

#3: You want to know when is the best time to tweet your particular topic

Though TweetDeck can help you schedule tweets for a later time, it isn’t much help figuring out the ideal time to do so.

Using SproutSocial’s keyword search frequency analyzer, I noticed, for example, that one of my topics of interest, “social media expert,” was mentioned most on Sunday, suggesting that some prospects were in planning mode on the weekends.

You can analyze keyword frequency by time of day and by day of the week.

I also noticed that my other key topics bunched up during the business hours of 12-6pm, suggesting this might be the best time to engage. SproutSocial also helps you assess frequency of tweets by people and by business—another bit of knowledge that could improve the efficiency of your efforts.

#4: You’re wondering how you’re doing compared to others

TweetDeck is like a nifty broadcast center, making it easy to send messages to all your social channels. But among its many shortcomings is its inability to assess how your social program is performing relative to current best practices.

This is one of the areas in which SproutSocial shines, providing scores for both engagement and influence right on your dashboard. Better yet, by following up with items in your inbox, you can watch your engagement numbers improve, making you even more confident that your social media time is well spent.

The SproutSocial dashboard provides a score for both engagement and influence, which gives you a sense of how you're doing relative to others.

#5: You’re managing multiple accounts across multiple channels

If you’re a TweetDeck user, you already know the advantages of being able to direct the same message to multiple accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But wouldn’t it be great if you could also get a snapshot of how you’re doing across these platforms and toggle back and forth between various accounts?

This is one of my favorite features of SproutSocial, which makes it very easy to add Twitter accounts and then link these to Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn accounts. By bringing these accounts to one place, you can also look at your incoming message streams from each platform, again saving valuable time.

Your inbox on SproutSocial allows you to monitor your feeds from multiple sources, which you can also do on the Chrome browser version of TweetDeck, but not the desktop application that most people use.

#6: You’d like to share progress reports with someone else

Manual reporting is the bane of any of social media manager and TweetDeck offers no relief from this grind. SproutSocial, on the other hand, makes the creation of dazzling reports almost embarrassingly easy.

Starting with your dashboard, you’ll find an instant snapshot of your progress, with six widgets covering things like Twitter stats, most recent clicks and your social scorecard. All of these reports can be turned into PDFs that are easily shared.

The only widget that didn’t work for me was the demographic, which SproutSocial CEO Justyn Howard called a “work in progress [that] will get more reliable in the next few weeks.”

Fully customizable by time frame, this report examines my progress on Twitter over a 30-day period, looking at engagement, influence and message type.

#7: You’ve decided you really want to get leads from Twitter

While TweetDeck makes it easy to add a follower from your topic searches, it offers little help when it comes to identifying the titles of the folks who make up your best leads. This is one of the areas that SproutSocial truly shines.

Because many people put their job title into their public profile on Twitter, using SproutSocial’s “People Search” tool allows you to select the titles of your best prospects. You can also add additional contact info to the leads you track, making following up on those leads that much easier.

SproutSocial makes it easy to find potential leads by searching profiles by particular title. This shows the results of my search for "senior marketers" on Twitter.

Final Note:

Just so you don’t think this is an ad for SproutSocial, let me assure you I have no relationship with this company in any way. I also looked at a bunch of other tools like MarketMeSuite, which got good reviews from others but I found it to be so poorly designed that I simply gave up after a couple of hours.

After using SproutSocial for six weeks, I can assure you that there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “We’ll be adding more in-depth analytics, team workflow and white label offerings in the near future,” Howard explained. The good news is that they seem to understand the importance of customer service and responded to my emails and online inquiries with remarkable speed.

Howard also noted that most of his prospects are using free tools and like you, are currently weighing the potential benefits of “business-specific tools to enhance their efforts.” Which begs the question, would you be willing to pay $9 per month to substantially improve and easily track the performance of your social media efforts? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

You can also check out the Top 5 Most Indispensable Twitter Tools for Marketers here.

Do you use free social media monitoring tools? What are your thoughts on TweetDeck and SproutSocial? Please leave your comments in the box below.

If you’re looking for a social media monitoring tool, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quickly becoming a confusing landscape. For those who are new to social media and looking for tools to manage their presence, it’s difficult to know how to compare one vendor to the next. Here’s the skinny on where Radian6 fits into the picture.

Where does Radian6 fit into the social media measurement landscape?

Radian6 helps brands ensure that no post is missed.

We offer unequalled coverage of the social web and provide metrics to measure what is being said, and by whom. —David Alston, CMO Radian6.

Primarily, Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It can help you monitor brand mentions across the social landscape and the new Engagement Console offers you an end-to-end presence management tool.

Radian6 Dashboards

For consideration: Think about how much “noise” you have in your space. In order for monitoring to be actionable you want to keep in mind that for industries and brands that are targets for spammers it can take a considerable amount of work to filter and find the “meaningful” conversations. I experienced this problem myself, as CareOne and the entire debt relief industry are hounded by spammers and it required intervention from Radian6 to get it in line.

Tip: Many people start by putting in keywords that are used in SEO and paid search. To narrow your results, sort them by comment count. Because comments indicate more engagement, it’s more likely that the conversations are meaningful. Look for other words that are used frequently with your keywords and add them as modifiers to narrow your results to conversations, rather than spam bots.

The Engagement Console is a real-time social web client—more complete than Twitter.

What are Radian6′s greatest strengths?

“Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of discussions on the social web, covering hundreds of millions of blogs, comments, the public Facebook API and the full Twitter firehose. In addition to this coverage, Radian6 is scalable within an enterprise, allowing online comments to be assigned within the business, to customer service, sales, marketing and so forth. Radian6 also integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.” —David Alston

You can scour more than 150 million public sites and sources including blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news publications, public photos and videos.

In the landscape of monitoring tools, while competitors are on the rise, Radian6 has had a very comfortable and secure position in the market. I think this is because of two things. First, they entered the market early and got popular social media bloggers to test them out and recommend them. Second, they quickly gained popularity among enterprise organizations with big brand names as being the go-to choice.

For consideration: Radian6 is a very comprehensive tool that gives you a one-stop shop for engaging on your social channels. The workflow aspect is a key consideration for enterprise-level organizations. However, for smaller businesses or teams with one or two people it may be overkill. Additionally, their pricing model can get expensive quickly for larger teams. It starts at $1k+ per month.

Tip: Take advantage of the free tools out there for a while. See what you like best about them and see what they’re lacking. Create a list of absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves. When you’re looking at different providers you can use this checklist to make sure they have what you need. Anything they’re offering that isn’t on your absolute must-have or nice-to-have lists will likely end up being an unused feature.

If Radian6 is integrated with Salesforce, Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics, can they provide ROI data?

The short answer is no. Based on the integration David described to me, there’s no way to follow the conversation back to the revenue. The integration was mostly done from a customer service perspective.

“For Salesforce, it’s designed in such a way that, for example, if you find a customer service issue in Radian6, you can link the record of what you find in Radian6 back to the customer record. In terms of Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture, you can create an XML report of the 10 terms that get captured in Webtrends that you want to import into Radian6. You can then overlay the Webtrend data on those keywords with the information inside Radian6 and do kind of a pivot to sort by items like time on site.” —David Alston

For consideration: The level of conversion tracking was described by Alston as items like lead forms that are set up as goals within your web tracking software. In my experience, this type of conversion data is nice but unless it was an online sale it doesn’t attach to revenue.

Tip: While Radian6 doesn’t provide ROI data within its interface, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to it through other channels. You may need to work with a consultant who can help you quickly identify where to connect the pieces to get to revenue.

What are Radian6′s biggest weaknesses?

There are a several things that I think Radian6 could do better.

Up-front Effort for Workflow Features

From a workflow perspective, it’s great to be able to assign tasks and tags to posts; however, to be effective, you need to create a system of tagging up front or you’ll end up with a large clean-up effort later. It was a great improvement when they released the Engagement Console which allows you to write macros. This cuts down significantly on the number of clicks it takes to assign a post and tag it. But it does take a lot of forethought and setup to get that working well.

David acknowledges that this can be a challenge.

“Because the Engagement Console was designed to optimize usage in a team environment, it requires users to think through the tagging, classification and macro systems they would like to use in advance. This takes an investment to create (we call it a “playbook”), but it’s definitely worth it once it has been set up. The latest addition of administrative functionality in the Engagement Console means a single super-user can help pull this all together for the team, thus saving more time.”

Two Interfaces

As a user you’ll find that there are two interfaces for you to use. The Engagement Console is where you manage your social media channels, tag posts, assign them and so on. I liken it to your HootSuite or TweetDeck interface on steroids. This is what you’ll likely use every day. Then you have the Radian6 dashboard which aggregates all of your stats into pretty little charts and you can get data based on specific timeframes.

I found it awkward that the Radian6 dashboard is web-based and the Engagement Console is a desktop app. I would have preferred to have them both as web apps.

No Smart Phone App

For those who manage their presence on the go, there’s one big missing piece of the puzzle. You can’t use Radian6 on a smart phone because there is no app. I asked David about this and he said to “stay tuned” but I’ve been hearing that for over a year now so I’m becoming a little skeptical on their ability to make it happen in the short-term. If I were at Radian6, this would be my top priority. For users, it creates a disconnect from presence management and forces us to use other tools on our phones.

I’d rather look for all of my stats on my smart phone, and using the Engagement Console means I have to get reporting in two locations, which is not my preference.

Pricing

There are three fees. One is a per-seat license. The second is a per–topic profile fee. A topic profile is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. An agency managing multiple clients would need at least one topic profile per client and it’s the most expensive item on the list. The third fee is based upon the volume of posts that come into your topic profile.

While the initial volume range that comes with your topic profile is reasonably high, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can exceed it. You can use keyword refinement to bring this down. These are all monthly fees that make up your core price. While I think Radian6 is certainly the Cadillac in the space and their price indicates that, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the money.

Summary

Radian6 is a great platform that’s equipped with a lot of bells and whistles. From my perspective, it was clear the company is dedicated to continual innovation of the tools. To decide if it’s right for you, you’ll need to look at your list of absolute must-have and nice-to-have features and see if buying the “whole farm” makes sense for your organization. My feeling is that for most one- or two-person operations it may be a little overkill and pricey, but for corporate marketing teams I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Read these posts for more on measuring social media and its impact on brand awareness, looking to track social media metrics and 5 ways to use social data to grow your business.

What do you think? Are you a Radian6 user? If so, what would you add to the list of strengths? How about weaknesses? Did you switch from Radian6 to another tool? If so, which one did you pick and why? Please join the conversation and leave a comment in the box below.

HootSuite just announced that they’ve passed their millionth user at the end of November, so it’s time to take a deep dive to see what HootSuite is doing and how it’s going to impact the social media space. Here’s a review of the latest and greatest with HootSuite’s new freemium service model.

Last fall, HootSuite announced that they were changing their business model to offer new “premium” services for business customers. All HootSuite users received a message asking them to choose a plan when they attempted to log in for the first time after the change.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said, “We designed HootSuite to be a comprehensive dashboard for agencies, enterprises and consultants using social media to monitor brands, manage campaigns and analyze results. We’ve integrated with the leading social networks – including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – and now look forward to adding mash-ups through our API as well as adding more reports which business users seek.”

However, on the HootSuite blog, it clarified that the move wasn’t to cannibalize their customers by suddenly charging for services that used to be free: “We aim to continue providing free service to approximately 95% of our current users.” The big question is whether it’s worth it for business teams to pay for these expanded services. Well, here’s what has changed.

Social Profiles

The free version of HootSuite now allows management of up to five social networks, while the Pro and Enterprise versions offer unlimited networks.

RSS/Atom Feeds

This is the first time I’ve actually explored this option, but I realized how much time it could save me. It allows you to view RSS feeds right within HootSuite. I envision seeing a blog post, reading it and easily sharing the link on all of my networks.

Personally, I wish that it just allowed you to import your Google Reader Feed rather than individual RSS feeds but it’s a step in the right direction. I’ll probably only import a few of the most “important” feeds for now. If you’re on the free version, you get two feeds, and unlimited feeds are available for both the Pro and the Enterprise versions.

Team Members

This part got a little confusing for me when we upgraded our accounts. You get one free team member for the $5.99 per month charge. But if you have additional team members, they’re $15 each per month. I’ll comment on this a little bit later.

Social Insights

In the paid versions, HootSuite gives you a list of other social networks users participate in. I’m not 100% sure where these sites come from or how they’re gathered.

I took a look at Chris Brogan’s profile, as I figured he would have a robust set of sites and was surprised that it didn’t have his LinkedIn profile, his blog or his Delicious account. I’m not sure these are the networks that Chris would want to promote and I don’t see any way that I can control what shows up in my profile.

Influence Scores

This score tells you how much influence HootSuite thinks a user has. It’s a useful tool for trying to understand who your followers are and who you’re following, but is more of an indicator than a hardcore measurement that I would rely on. You can also use it to track your own profiles to show growth in your influence as your network grows.

Overall I think these features are useful for a business user but the only thing that’s worth paying for to me is the team members feature. And this was tough to swallow because our team was used to getting it for free and we can still have that feature for free if we migrate back to TweetDeck.

The one challenge that I had was that we have people in our organization who “monitor” accounts and those who “manage” accounts. It would be nice if there were a “read-only” option for multiple accounts at a lower price point. We had to go through and prioritize our users, which forced us to limit visibility to some individuals who really could benefit from having insight into the conversations. For now, we’re migrating those users back over to TweetDeck.

Analytics

The big thing I’m seeing promoted as the real value in upgrading your account is the analytics packages that are available. I used a fairly new Twitter account for the sake of this review.

I used this account because it’s new and doesn’t have a lot of traffic yet, so it allowed me to look at a limited amount of analytics to digest the feature fully without impacting my own measurement strategy, which does not use the ow.ly URL shortener.

Ow.ly Stat History: The free version will offer 30 days of URL history while the Pro and Enterprise versions offer unlimited history.

This is great for those who use the ow.ly shortener, but if you use another shortener as your favorite, you’ll not have any data available.

For us this is very limiting because we use a proprietary URL shortener for campaign tracking purposes. For the purpose of the test, we did use the ow.ly shortener to see the results.

The stats that are available are daily clicks on a nice chart broken down by clicks by region and clicks from top referrers. You also get a list of your most popular messages and tweets by influencer. And if you want to get really granular, you can get down to the stats by individual message. This really gives you some insight into the social graph of the account and what is and isn’t working. From a management perspective I really appreciate this level of insight at the click of a mouse.

Google Analytics: This could be one of the most powerful features of the HootSuite premium package, and if you ask me, is currently their primary differentiator in the market.

Within the dashboard you can now overlay items like the number of tweets sent over your website traffic to look for trends. Even more powerful, they’ve integrated Google Analytics campaign features so that you can tag a URL with a campaign and track results.

We built a proprietary shortener at my company because there were no tools to do this at the time, but now tweet-level lead generation tracking is available to anyone who has Google Analytics set up on their site.

This is a game-changer for tracking return on investment (ROI). It certainly has its limitations in that you must have some mechanism for conversion on your site that you can use to evaluate sales, whether it’s lead forms or actual online orders.

For service businesses, lead forms will likely be the only way you can measure sales interest using the campaign integration feature, but that’s far better than what we’ve had access to in the past.

Holmes mentioned that they’re working on integration with Omniture as well. This will open the doors for many mid- to large-sized businesses to use the tools, as Adobe-owned Omniture is one of the largest providers of integrated business analytics. Holmes didn’t give an indication of when the Omniture integration will be complete, but personally I’m anxiously waiting for that day because then I’ll be able to use HootSuite for end-to-end measurement. And having one end-to-end solution for management and measurement is huge.

From a cost standpoint, I think HootSuite Pro is reasonable with their $5.99 per month charge, and while I would prefer to have two levels of users to avoid the $15 per month per user charge for all of our users, with a corporate budget it isn’t unreasonable. This is certainly a nice entry point for businesses that are looking to have ROI-level measurement capability without dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars for costly systems integrations and custom development.

Enterprise Options

Behind the curtain, HootSuite has also introduced HootSuite Social 360, the Enterprise version. This is the big daddy and comes with everything including the kitchen sink. It gives you everything in the Pro package, includes 30 team members, a vanity ow.ly URL and 10 seats for their certification program.

They boast “enhanced” analytics, but because I only have access to the Pro version, I’m not sure what that means. At $1,499 per month it’s a hefty big brother to the Pro package, but I was surprised by the limited amount of information that was available. They offer a PDF with a few details and push you to schedule a demo. I suppose at that price point they want the ability to customize your experience and walk you through the system. I was hoping to find beautiful graphics of the expanded analytics that would make my mouth water!

Closing Thoughts

It will be interesting to see how HootSuite will start to impact users of other monitoring tools like Radian 6 and Meltwater Buzz. Monitoring tools have been held up as the Holy Grail for measuring brands since social media started to flood the market. They are very often confused with ROI measurement tools.

But their big weak spot has always been their inability to get to that level of measurement. Quite frankly, HootSuite allows you to do the monitoring and the measuring but there are tradeoffs. You won’t have easy metrics like share of voice across your industry and be able to compare yourself to your competitors with fancy graphs like you can in Radian 6.

But the question will become do you have the budget for both and how much value do mention metrics provide for your organization? With HootSuite boasting over a million members, it means based on their own math that of 5% of users who will be impacted by the changes, there are 50,000 users who are likely potential premium users.

Disclosure: HootSuite provided a 30-day free trial of their Pro model with multiple users so this review could be written. A free 30-day trial is available for all users.

Check these two great articles to learn about 8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring and 8 Easy Twitter Monitoring Ideas.

What are your thoughts? Have you upgraded your HootSuite account? If so, tell us what you think of the premium features. Are they worth the money? Are you also using monitoring tools like Radian 6 or Attensity? If so, how are the changes impacting your usage of your other monitoring tools? Let’s talk about it! Leave a comment so we can start the discussion.

The truth is there are dozens of viable metrics you can use to gauge the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability; it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 undervalued social media success metrics you should be tracking:

#1: Daily Story Feedback

Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue, which signifies nothing more than digital bumper-stickering, track how often your fans click “like” and comment on the status updates you post.

The more fans who click “like” and comment, the more likely your future updates will be seen in their news feed, dramatically increasing your actual Facebook audience.

If you’re an administrator of a Facebook fan page, you can find the Daily Story Feedback chart at http://facebook.com/insights (look in the Interactions category).

#2: Look at Klout

Rather than paying rapt attention to the number of Twitter followers you’ve corralled, instead look closely at your Klout score.

Klout is an online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) and then applies some fancy algorithmic voodoo to arrive at a unified metric.

The data used to calculate Klout continues to change (they recently added Facebook information), but I’ve found it to be the most reliable influence-tracking metric, because it’s nearly impossible to “game” using automated follow-back programs and other Twitter nefariousness.

Klout’s scoreboard for Social Media Examiner founder Mike Stelzner is 73 (on a 1-100 scale).

#3: PostRank

One of the challenges of writing a blog is knowing how to value the wide variety of reader engagements and behaviors. Should you care more about Digg submission than about comments? Are tweets more important than Facebook shares?

PostRank Analytics solves this problem.

It’s free if you connect with their “influencers” outreach program or $15/month if you don’t. PostRank provides a useful, detailed blogging scoreboard, especially if you connect it with your Google Analytics account.

The best part of PostRank Analytics is the engagement score, which is sort of your Klout score for each blog post. The system looks at total comments, tweets, shares, etc. for each post and applies behavior points and an algorithm to determine the total score. This is a fantastic way to look at your last 25 blog posts to see which type of content you’re publishing generates the most engagement. The image below is a recent post on Convince & Convert .

PostRank Analytics shows “engagement points” broken down by audience action.

#4: Share of Voice

Tracking how often your company and/or its products are mentioned on the social web is a best practice, of course. But without also paying attention to how often your competitors are referenced, it’s difficult to determine whether the chatter about your brand is significant.

To add a reference point to your social mention tracking, create a “share of voice” report.

To do so, determine the number of times your company and its products are mentioned on the social web in a neutral or positive context over a 30-day period. You’ll want to use Radian6, ViralHeat, Social Mention or any of the other social listening tools for this project. Then determine how often your competitors are mentioned (neutral or positive) during the same 30 days.

Add up all mentions for the category (you plus your competitors), and then divide your mentions by the total to calculate your “share of voice”—which is always a percentage. Usually, share of voice reports are formatted as a pie chart, so you can easily see how you fare versus your competition.

#5: Search Volume

Perhaps more than any other marketing metric, the number of people who are searching for your brand on Google serves as a catch-all metric for market awareness.

In many ways, social media and your other marketing efforts create demand, which is then harvested via searches.

The tie between search and social media cannot be overestimated. Perhaps the best study on the subject, from GroupM in 2009, found that consumers exposed to a brand in social media are subsequently 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand than are consumers unexposed within social media.

Use Google Insights to examine whether searches for your company and products are increasing over time, and if your volume is going up, and your competitors’ isn’t – double bonus!

#6: Inbound Links

Without other sites linking to your website, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever crack the Top 10 in Google. Links are the coin of the realm in SEO, and without them all you have is a pile of carefully crafted words.

Social media is one of the best places to accrue links, because we social types are prone to link from our tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, within blog comments, etc.

Track the number of links pointing to your website and/or blog, and examine the source of new links. How many links do you have, in comparison to your competitors? What sites are linking to them that perhaps you could get to link to you as well?

There are several inbound link-tracking services online. My favorite is Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. The free version allows you to track and report on up to 1,000 links.

Open Site Explorer shows a total number of links (38,935!!) to Social Media Examiner that are coming from 826 separate websites.

If you’re looking for a magic number that automatically determines your social media prowess, you’re not going to find it. Instead, the secret to tracking social media is tying together disparate data sources and selecting the metrics that make the most sense for your company. And those are never the obvious ones like Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Tracking social media may not always be easy and fast, but it’s absolutely, 100% doable.

If you’re interested in more on this subject, my new book, The NOW Revolution (written with Amber Naslund) has an entire chapter devoted to metrics and how to pick the right ones.

What are your thoughts? Have you employed any of these metrics? Leave your comments in the box below.

The pains of managing social media are obvious – now let’s look at 10 different cures to make those pains disappear.

#1: I can’t keep track of what’s going on!

Between answering questions on LinkedIn Answers and updating your Ning profile, you missed the fact that one of your customers just wrote a scathing comment on your Facebook page.

Cure: Start a social dashboard.

Social media management platforms allow you to consolidate multiple social media accounts into one place, so you can manage them all more efficiently. You get an overview of what is happening in different channels, all on one screen. The benefits extend far beyond that, but that’s enough of a reason to look into these solutions. Some solid choices include Hootsuite and Awareness. But different platforms work better for different needs.

#2: I’m talking to a bunch of nobodies!

You exchange 40 tweets with someone who is knowledgeable about your industry. Great! A real prospect! Then you find out that she is a 20-year-old college student (with 15 Twitter followers) writing a paper – and she has absolutely no ability to make a purchasing decision.

Cure: Understand social influence.

You should spend time engaging with people who can move your business forward. That means you need to identify the most influential social media people in your niche. Klout is a tool that tracks influence on Twitter and Facebook. Use it to see if that person is a thought leader, a connector, or a decision-maker.

#3: My customers are out there – but where?

Tools like Gist put your customers’ email addresses together with their social media identities.

You just know that your current customers are on social media. But your Facebook page only has 40 fans. Where are your customers, and how do you connect with them?

Cure: Check out your customers’ social profiles.

Flowtown and Gist both unify multiple social media presences based on your existing customer email database. This gives you a quick way to find out which of your customers are using different social media platforms, and which customers are influential.

#4: I share a lot of content – but it doesn’t drive visits to my site.

You’ve seen the recommendations from experts to keep your self-promotion to a minimum. Social media is about sharing. But you’re also accountable for your own metrics. How can you share, and still get people to check you out?

Cure: Create social media landing pages.

By giving you control of the frame of your link, ObjectiveMarketer gives you the chance to message and brand all of your social media links with customized content. You get all of the benefits of sharing great content with your followers, plus you can show them the interesting things that you’re up to at the same time.

#5: I can’t justify all the time it takes to do social right!

Your team spends hours each week retweeting, sharing links and joining the conversation. But now it’s the end of the year, and you need to make a budget for next year. You know you can’t go on with such a long to-do list, but you don’t have the metrics to show the impact.

Cure: Use your existing metrics – just show the social benefit.

Argyle Social tracks the response from your social media updates and maps them back to the conversion metrics you set up on your website. And it looks back up to 90 days in order to account for a longer consideration cycle – showing how a bunch of tweets adds up to an eventual sale.

Argyle Social tracks the social media links you share and maps that activity back to your website conversions.

#6: I don’t know what my followers are doing online!

You see what happens to your own status updates and blog posts – visitors come to your site, readers leave comments, etc. But you have no idea what they’re doing on the rest of the web.

Cure: Tell people what you like to find out what they like.

This is one place where the biggest names in social media can help you. Twitter and Facebook offer login credentials that any website can adopt (there are open source alternatives as well). Whenever possible, you should connect to other sites using one of these login protocols and “Like” content across the web liberally. Often, you can see who else in your network is also interested in that website. In this way, you’ve created a new opportunity for engagement.

Facebook “Likes” are a great way to find out what your fans are interested in from across the web. “Like” the content you find as you browse, and you’ll see what your fans like in return.

#7: I can’t filter out the noise from the important stuff.

Every time you login to Twitter, you see that there are thousands of unread tweets. Your Facebook page is overrun with comments from people you’ve never heard from before. And there are 1,575 blog posts that are ready for a comment from you.

Cure: Get information fast – when you need it.

Cadmus can definitely help in this arena. It’s designed to show you the most important tweets from your network. If you’re looking for information from your network on a specific topic, Nsyght searches across your social network. It’s like Google but only for the people in your social network.

#8: All this engagement isn’t leading to anything!

You get retweeted by the same people over and over. You have the same conversation with multiple followers. You’re running in a hamster wheel, not moving your marketing forward.

Cure: Get yourself some game mechanics.

Game mechanics means linking your marketing efforts together, so that one interaction naturally leads to the next. You have to create a series of social media events that encourage your followers to engage more deeply – and game mechanics provide a solid framework for planning.

#9: There are not enough hours in the day!

As soon as you feel like your Facebook presence is strong, you know you need to create a SlideShare presence. There’s always one more tweet to write, one more blog post to comment on and new marketing campaign to support.

Cure: Make the case for dedicated resources.

Your marketing program needs to evolve, or it will die. That means your team needs new skills, and a more sophisticated understanding of social media. Work internally to make the case, based on your current success, to shift marketing dollars into social media. And make sure you find the people, whether internal or external, who can hit the ground running.

#10: I have all this content, but I don’t know what to do with it.

You’re doing a great job of engaging with your audience. They’re responding and you have some great quotes. But you’re not getting the full marketing benefit from this engagement.

Cure: Create a space on your site to feature the best social content.

Assuming that marketing involves bringing people to your site so they can take some action, you should feature some social content from your community on your site. This gives your best followers a pat on the back, and allows others to brag about you so you don’t have to. Testimonial pages are a great way to do just that.

What are your biggest social media pains? The community just might be able to cure them for you. If you’ve figured out how to cure them already, be sure to share your solutions in the comments box below.

The pace is fast and this video is full of useful information. Be sure to read the list of takeaways below.

Here are some key takeaways from this video?

1. Listening is so important. The unstructured data you get from listening gives you more than surveys. Be sure to check out his tutorial: Grow Bigger Ears.
2. Establish your presence: Create passports to establish a presence.  Go where the people’s voice is rather than drive traffic to your site.
3. Monitor sales marketing and content marketing that drives leads instead of monitoring ROI.
4. Integrate social media into your customer support, sales and marketing.
5. Chris’ Twitter strategy:  12 to 1 ratio: promote 12 times more stuff from other people, and it pays to mix business with pleasure on Twitter
6. Chris is working one new books called Social Media 101 and and How Human Business Works and why this is important in today’s business world

What about you? What do you think about this video interview? How does listening on social media help your business? Please share your comments 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?”

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer:

Social Media Monitoring Is Listening

Listening to online conversations is technically done without ears. Using search engine technology, social media monitoring tools scan the Internet looking for documents that contain keywords you select. They return those results in some sort of order that allows you to see where people have mentioned your brand, company, product or whatever you specified.

Seeing these results reveal which websites or blogs you should visit to either see what people are saying about you or actually participate in those conversations. Without monitoring, the conversations are happening without your knowledge.

Social Media Monitoring Can Be Free

The easiest way to start monitoring social media is to sign up for some free tools and services. Google Alerts allows you to search for a word or phrase just as you would in a regular search, and then notifies you when something new pops up on the web with that search term. You can subscribe to email updates of the new search results or add them to your RSS subscriptions. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch “RSS in Plain English,” a video from CommonCraft.)

You can also search for your company or product name on Twitter to see real-time conversations that include mentions or discussions of your brand. Add Technorati to the list and your monitoring will cover the majority of blogs as well.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Solutions Are Often Worth the Investment

The one drawback to the free monitoring solutions is that manual work will be required to quantify the results for your executives or report your findings. Paid social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Techrigy pull all those conversations together into an organized, web-based dashboard and allow you to pull charts and graphs that explain the information with very little work on your part.

One big benefit to many (but not all) of the paid solutions is their ability to analyze sentiment and tone of the conversations through fancy computer algorithms using natural language processing. What this means is that you can log in to your service, see that there were 250 conversations mentioning your brand this week, and of those, 83 percent were positive, 10 percent were negative and the other 7 percent were neutral.

Paid monitoring solutions offer dashboard experiences like this one from Radian6 which makes monitoring your brand easier

Monitoring Is Only the First Step

Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then participate in the conversation. This is critically important for companies because today’s web-savvy consumer requires direct access to the people behind the products and services they buy or shop for.

Let’s say you find a customer upset about the service she received at your place of business earlier today. Letting the individual mouth off to her friends who have a natural predisposition to either agree or jump on the bandwagon of hate only guarantees your company will be thought of negatively by those involved in the conversation. However, social media case studies show time and time again that entering into similar conversations with a simple, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. What can I do to help?” shows the disgruntled fan—and her bandwagon-jumping friends—that you’re truly interested in improving the situation. The customer response is almost always something like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were listening. Thanks for offering.”

Smart Monitoring Can Build Your Business

Please don’t think that social media monitoring is limited to mitigating online detractors. By analyzing the conversations around not just your company, but also your industry or even competitors, you can gain a significant market advantage and actually drive business.

Let’s say you’re monitoring mentions of your nearest competitor and uncover a trend that people are complaining that their product (say, a coffeepot) is great but not durable. You then change your advertising campaign to trumpet the fact your coffeepot lasts three times longer than the competitor’s.

For another example, suppose you have a national product that has inconsistent sales patterns from region to region. Your social media monitoring shows you what people in the Pacific Northwest say are the best and worst qualities of your product, but the answers are different in the South. This consumer intelligence helps you better market your product based on geographic and cultural specifics which can be the difference in customers choosing you or your competition.

Last but not least, sophisticated monitoring can even reveal individual customers who are at the point of making a purchase decision, enabling you to reach out and help them make a connection to your product at the absolute perfect time.

What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you have an idea of what social media monitoring is and what it can do for you, dive in. Start a Google Alert for your company or product. Add one for some general industry terms your customers might use when discussing your category. Add one for each of your competitors. As you feel comfortable, add Twitter and Technorati searches, then branch out and start exploring other social media monitoring tools. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what people are saying about you.

What social media monitoring tools are you using? What are your thoughts?  Please leave a comment below.