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.

As enticing as the saying is, “If you build it, they will come,” we all know that just because we build a social media presence, people don’t magically start knocking down our door.

Instead, we need to encourage people to come to our social pages and once they’re there, we have to create enough value for them to hang around. And through these repeated exchanges, casual users can become regular visitors as well as valuable leads.

In previous posts, I’ve written A-Z guides to help create the absolute best presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. Now let’s turn our attention to harnessing the power of those efforts for lead generation.

#1: Assets

As part of your social media marketing plan, Michelle deHaaff suggests that companies examine social media and online assets to see what they can leverage for full social media engagement. She identifies seven key assets: location, people, stories, images, video, audio and words to help us think about engaging more fully.

#2: Brand Message

Ethan Lyon suggests that users want to identify with a brand. He offers Nike’s identity as an example, “Customers buy Nike because the brand gives them the confidence to succeed—much like an effective coach.” What is your brand message? What should users know about you? Can they tell that from what you’re posting?

#3: Compelling Messages

Use compelling messages throughout your communications. Craft messages that users can relate to and won’t be able to resist. These are generally the messages that speak like real people and not marketing spin. Below is an example from Pogue’s Post.

David Pogue uses a conversational tone and a bit of humor to drive home a point from Pogue's Post.

#4: Differentiations

Because there’s a tremendous amount of competition vying for consumers’ attention in the social media arena, businesses that can differentiate themselves will stand out and get noticed. Zappos Service Twitter page shows how to make it friendly and feel like you’re hanging out with a good friend. Create remarkable content.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=8364&message=1

Zappos employees tell you when they're signing off and when they're leaving for the night.

#5: Etiquette

Michelle Golden recommends in her book Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms to practice good etiquette. “Definitely don’t write about and link only to your stuff. Instead, go out of your way to promote others liberally.”

#6: Feedback

Users who write comments and ask questions appreciate receiving feedback. Make it a regular practice to take time to respond.

A fan poses a question on Social Media Examiner's Facebook page and Cindy King responds with a timely answer and directs the fan to a link.

#7: Google

Remember that the social media updates you post via your blog, Facebook page, tweets and YouTube channel appear in search results, too. The person searching is an active user looking for information, and bringing the user to your pages is an excellent way to get in front of potential customers.

A person looking for sources for how to choose a paint color would find blog posts and videos. This person is looking for help and the companies have provided advice and solutions. The companies have found ways to get in front of potential customers.

#8: Help a Reporter Out

Companies are often looking for ways to share experiences that might be referenced in blog posts and articles. You don’t have to be a big company to get picked up for a story.

Sign up for Help a Reporter Out and when you have a story to share on a topic, offer the information to the reporter. HARO is one good way to spread information and get high-quality, free publicity for your business. Keep your eyes open for other ways to distribute information about your business with social media press releases.

HARO serves as a vital social networking resource for sources, reporters and advertisers.

#9: Icons

Social media icons help users share your content and offer ways for people to like your content. Likes are valuable votes of confidence and go a long way with users who may have come to your site for the first time. Make your content easy to share.

#10: Joy

In Guy Kawasaki’s new book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, he tells us that achieving trustworthiness will go a long way for a business. People want to do business with companies and people they can trust. And sometimes it means that we may end up giving our time or some kind of service that we’re not compensated for. Guy suggests that we give with joy.

#11: Knowledge-sharing

Share your knowledge freely in blog posts and white papers. Some businesses are afraid they’ll give away all of their secrets. Your knowledge is a valuable asset; don’t be afraid to share what you know.

HubSpot's inbound Internet marketing blog regularly shares the blogger's personal experiences in marketing and is very generous about sharing tips.

#12: Leverage Content Products

Jeff Bullas recommends using 7 content products for marketing: social media, e-newsletters, blogs, white papers, article marketing, case studies and online videos.

Use a good mix of content, because not all users will read a case study or watch an online video. You’ll increase your odds of being seen by more people by using a mix of content products.

#13: Monitor Conversations

Monitor conversations about your brand and competitors. There are many social media listening tools that will help you keep a pulse on what’s being talked about. The more you know, the more responsive you can be.

#14: Nobodies Are the New Somebodies

One of the most serious mistakes we can make is to pass up a potential lead because we don’t perceive the company or person to be a valuable lead. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Nobodies are the new somebodies in the world of wide-open communications.” Treat everyone with the same attention and respect.

#15: Offline Skills

Online skills don’t have to be inherently different than the way we act offline. Erica Swallow suggests that we use our offline skills and go out there and “Meet people, communicate and build relationships… Be genuine, track conversations and respond to inquiries promptly and thoroughly.”

#16: Produce Content

Not only do we have to produce content, we also have to produce enough of it. HubSpot provides some interesting recommendations: “Businesses must produce enough content for their blog to kick off growth in leads, which starts with about 24 to 51 posts.” HubSpot found that more indexed pages on Google also translate to more leads. They suggest that every 50 to 100 incremental indexed pages can mean double-digit lead growth.

#17: Questions

Lisa Barone recommends that social media marketers should “answer questions because they’re a good way to establish your authority, but also for people to ‘test’ you out.”

#18: Relationships

Lisa Barone also suggests that “social media is an emerging lead generation tool because it lowers the barrier to the sale by building relationships, displaying expertise and through networking you’re able to bring in more people than cold calling ever could.”

#19: Showcase Your Experience

According to Erica Swallow, “The first step to engaging a community of potential customers is sharing content that showcases your expertise. A simple social media update usually isn’t enough to convey a full analysis on a topic. Include links with your updates that expand on key ideas. Keep in mind that your goal is to create value for your followers. Learn what your fans respond to and what they don’t, and then adjust your updates based on that information.”

#20: Target Personas

Buyer personas have been around long before social media hit our radar screens, but marketers have found that having a good picture in mind of the target customer is beneficial in terms of how we write our content.

A blog, for example, can have multiple categories of topics and so you may find that certain categories speak more to certain personas than others. And certain Facebook and Twitter updates may appeal to certain users.

Regardless of how you segment these groups, it’s incredibly beneficial to share target persona information with whoever is developing content for your social media channels.

Before writing, review your persona list to remind yourself whom you're conversing with.

#21: Useful Content

Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, says that if our content isn’t supporting the successful fulfillment of our business objectives or our users’ top goals, then it’s a waste of pixels. She suggests adding two columns to a content inventory: value to user and value to business.

#22: Value

Guy Kawasaki says there are three types of value: 1) pointers to useful, inspiring or entertaining content, 2) personal insights, observations or content, 3) advice and assistance. Guy’s recommendation is to pass along these gems to friends and followers to help them derive more value from online resources.

#23: Word of Mouth

The Marqui Web Marketing Blog’s post 6 Ways Social Media Marketing Helps B2B Lead Generation says, “Word of mouth has been, and continues to be, one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. Buyers tend to trust peer referrals more than any other source of information and since social media allows people to share their experiences (both good and bad) with a wide range of people, this can help increase trust in your company’s products and services.”

#24: Excellence

The Network Singularity blog says “there are 5 C’s to social media excellence: coordination of social media activities, commitment means engaging with your environment and deliberately pursuing social interactions, confidence in your social media activities, comprehension of social media, and cultivation of worthwhile and friendly relationships.”

#25: Yes

Being likable on social media enhances our potential for lead generation. Guy Kawasaki says one way to become likable is to “adopt a yes attitude. This means your default response to people’s requests is yes… By contrast, a no response stops everything… To make a default yes work, you must assume people are reasonable, honest and grateful.”

#26: Zeal

Enthusiasm is contagious. By showing the fervor you have for your business, products and services, and through the content you share on your social media channels, users will be inclined to want to stick around, engage and build a relationship. Reach out and show your enthusiasm.

What ways have you generated leads with social media? What would you add to this list? 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.

This can be considered one of the best ways to beat a case of old-fashioned writer’s block.  You just need to know where to look and set up some channels to provide at-your-fingertips-access when you need it.

Here are nine ways to use social media to find writing inspiration.

#1: Use Twitter for Monitoring Discussions

An example of keyword tracking using advanced Twitter search queries in HootSuite.

I personally like my inspiration in short, 140-character bites, as it provides the spark to think about a topic. If you use a Twitter management tool such as HootSuite, Tweetdeck or CoTweet, you can easily monitor conversations on any given topic by simply setting up searches for particular keywords.

My personal tool of choice is HootSuite, because you can have many tabs, each with 10 columns of searches. You can use the keyword searches simply to see current conversations on that topic, or go further with advanced Twitter search queries, such as:

• Keyword filter:links for people discussing a topic with a link in their tweet so you can see a news item, article, or blog post on the topic. -filter:links removes the link so you can see people just talking about something.
• Keyword ? for people discussing a topic and asking a question – this can be a great way to generate writing ideas because you know people will be interested in your writing if you answer most-asked questions.
• Keyword for people discussing a topic that they like, or Keyword for topics that they dislike – a great way to come up with a top 10 list of things people like or don’t like about a certain subject.

#2: Use Twitter for Monitoring Industry Leaders

Another way to be inspired is to simply see what leaders/authorities in a certain niche are talking about. But first, a good question is how do you find industry experts?

• If you’re looking for experts who blog, try out the Technorati search – just switch the slide over to Blogs and search for a keyword. The results will bring you the highest authority blogs related to that topic.
• Twellow directory allows you to search by keywords found in Twitter profiles. The results are sorted by the people with the most followers, which is not always (but is usually) a sign of an expert in that niche.
• Wefollow allows you to search Twitter users by particular keywords, and you can look at the people with the most followers or those who are most influential. Surprisingly, you will find that the results vary between the two lists.
• Listorious lets you search among Twitter lists for particular topics. Check out the top 140 lists which have the most followers for collections of industry experts.

Once you have found some people who are leaders in your area, create or follow an already-created Twitter list of the top writers in your niche and keep an eye on the things they talk about. Sometimes you may find that you have a little extra to add to what they say, or maybe you disagree and have a better alternative to something they write about. This is a perfect topic to write about in your own blog or article network – just be sure you mention the person who gave you the idea.

Another way to combine the world of experts with the above-mentioned keyword/question searches is to set up a search of questions being asked of industry experts. You would be amazed by the writing topics that can be inspired by simply setting up a search for @expert ? -filter:links to find any mentions of an expert’s Twitter username including a question but excluding any results with links. This limits the number of results in which someone is asking questions about a particular website or a retweet of the expert’s articles. Considering that some people have thousands to millions of followers, imagine how many questions are just waiting to be answered.

#3: Use LinkedIn Answers

Use the simple LinkedIn search box for queries.

Speaking of questions, another great place to find out what kinds of questions are being asked in your niche or industry is within the LinkedIn Answers section. Once you’re signed into your LinkedIn account, simply use the search bar at the top right, select Answers from the dropdown and enter your keyword.

If just reading questions doesn’t inspire you, why not try answering some? Use the Advanced Search option to find keywords specifically in questions only, and check the option to look for only open questions.

Use the Advanced Search for more specific LinkedIn Answer queries.

I’ve found that answering questions on LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers and even within blog comments has a tendency to inspire a new article idea.

#4: Facebook for Monitoring Discussions

Would you like to monitor topics being discussed on Facebook the same way you do on Twitter? There’s a site for that too, although it’s not as advanced as the Twitter search queries (which means no filtering links or finding only questions). Kurrently lets you monitor up-to-the-minute status updates made from public Facebook profiles.

Search real-time Facebook status updates with Kurrently.

Although you can’t do a search for questions only, you can include question phrases in your search, such as “How do I” keyword. But even if you put the words in quotes, Kurrently will pull any status update with those words contained anywhere in it.

#5: Niche Networks

If your niche or industry is super-specific and has networks that are narrowly focused on that area, why not check out the networks that cater to that specific audience? Some ideas on niche networks include:

• Active Rain for real estate professionals.
• Dogster for dog owners.
• Ballroom Dance Channel for dancers.
• Tennisopolis for tennis fans and players.

To find more niche-specific networks, just Google your keyword and “social networks” or visit websites where you can create your own network (such as Ning) and search for networks built with their platform.

Inspiration for Writing on Popular Topics

What if you’re not necessarily looking for just any topic to write about, but the topics that are going to be most well-received by your target audience? The best way to find out the most popular subjects is simply to look at what’s popular and trending right now. Here are some ways to find some great topics that are more likely to go viral.

#6: Social Bookmarking Networks

If your aim is to get a lot of votes on Digg or similar social bookmarking networks, why not check out what has recently and historically gained a lot of votes in your niche? The Digg search box allows you to look up any topic, then sort it by the Best Match, Most Dugg or Newest results.

Search results for "social media" in the new Digg platform.

You can also use the sidebar to get results only from a certain date range (today through the last 30 days), narrow it down to items that have received 50+ to 5,000+ diggs, and sort by a particular media format – in the case of article writing, you will want to go for News. You can also use advanced search queries such as -term to remove unwanted related items from your keyword search.

If Digg doesn’t cater to your industry, you should look at social bookmarking/voting networks that are more niche-specific such as:

• Sphinn for SEO to social media themes.
• Tip’d for financial news.
• Design Bump for design and freelance articles.
• Dzone for developers’ posts.
• BizSugar for small-business topics.

#7: Find Out What’s Most Popular on Twitter

If your goal is to have the most tweets, you will want to check out the following sites to learn more about topics that get retweeted the most.

TweetMeme

Tweetmeme lets you see what topics are tweeted about the most on a variety of channels such as comedy, entertainment, business, technology, sports and more. You can view items most retweeted today through the last seven days and sort the items by news, images and videos.

Example search results for "social media" on Tweetmeme.

You can also do a keyword search and sort by the highest number of tweets, age of the tweets (from the last day, week, or over a week old), search within categories and filter items with 100+ or 1,000+ tweets.

Topsy

Topsy is a search engine powered by tweets. Simply enter any keyword. Like the Google search box, it will also suggest specific ideas or phrases for you to get started, or you can just enter a more basic keyword. You can search within the last hour, day, week, month or all recorded tweets for a given keyword, and see the number of times those items have been retweeted.

Topsy uses a suggested search popup similar to Google.

Although you can’t sort items by the number of retweets, what I find particularly useful on this network is the piece of information you can find when you click on the number of times the item has been retweeted.

Example search result on "social media" in Topsy.

Hover over the Twitter username for more stats and the ability to follow.

On the next screen, you can either see all of the retweets for a particular item or you can see just the retweets by influential users.

This little piece of information helps you get to know not only what’s popular throughout the mainstream Twitter community, but what topics are likely to get retweeted by the bigger players on Twitter. Hovering over a user’s name, as shown above, shows the user’s stats as well.

#8: Most Popular on Facebook

It’s Trending is a great site to find out what’s being shared the most on Facebook. Although it doesn’t have a search feature for particular topics, if your niche falls under Sports, Tech, Gaming, Entertainment or Comedy, you can see the most shared items on Facebook in those areas.

ItsTrending.com shows popular shared items on Facebook.

You can also see what’s most popular on particular featured site, so if your writing subject is social media, you can see the topics on Mashable that have been the most popular on Facebook. See our review of It’s Trending for more details.

#9 Most Popular on Authority Blogs

Are you looking to secure a guest posting gig on a major blog, or simply looking to see which posts by authority bloggers in your niche or industry are the most popular? Check out PostRank, which gives posts a ranking based on their audience engagement through comments and tweets.

PostRank displays social engagement ratings for individual blog posts.

You can do a search for Great or Best Posts to receive the top content by particular blog.

Hovering over the engagement score shows social sharing details.

By hovering over the score, you can quickly see how that particular post was shared the most (Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

Your Use of Social Media for Writing Inspiration

Do you use social media, networks and tools to get you through writer’s block or to find the topics that are going to be most popular? What other suggestions do you have for writers in any industry on finding topics to write about?

Twitter’s role as a Magic 8 Ball for our shared culture is unrivaled, and it has almost single-handedly ushered in the era of real-time search and social customer relationship management.

But Twitter is the online equivalent of HBO – important more because of who uses it and the media’s infatuation with it, rather than the actual size and impact of its audience.

Don’t get me wrong. I advocate participating in Twitter, and I’ve certainly grown my own audience via that channel.  Twitter indeed should be part of almost every company’s social media tool kit. (See the great post here on how to methodically grow a Twitter following.)

However, Twitter alone does not constitute social media, and you’d think it does given all the disproportionate attention being paid to it at conferences and in trade publications.  Let me provide seven reasons why you shouldn’t focus solely on Twitter…

As an aside, I presented a half-day workshop at the Email Evolution Conference on social media strategy (slides here) recently with DJ Waldow and Mike Corak, and the majority of the questions were about Twitter. That got me thinking that perhaps social media types aren’t fully recognizing Twitter’s limitations?

So, fully expecting each of you to tell me I’m wrong in the comments, here are 7 reasons why Twitter is not the Valhalla of social media:

#1: Growth Is Slowing

The true size of the Twitter audience is a bit tricky to pin down because 55% of its users access Twitter via third-party and mobile applications. But new data from Compete.com shows a clear stagnation in Twitter’s runaway growth.

Has Twitter Peaked?

According to these numbers, the audience using Twitter actually declined from August to December 2009 (during the same period, Facebook went from 250 million to 350 million members).

#2: Young People Don’t Use It

Today’s marketing coordinator is tomorrow’s CMO, and younger Americans don’t embrace Twitter. A new Pew Research study shows only 8% of U.S. teens using Twitter, compared to 66% engaged in texting. Do young people not appreciate the m:any-to-many nature of Twitter, preferring the one-to-one paradigm of text messaging?

Regardless of the reason, as the current teen population ages, it threatens Twitter’s preeminence unless adoption rates soar.

#3: New Features Aren’t Being Used

Last Fall, Twitter rolled out the option for users to “tag” their location onto Tweets, to add geographical context. In true Twitter fashion, it wasn’t “rolled out” per se, it just appeared as part of the API that third parties access. Since then, .023% of all Tweets include location data, according to Sysomos. Not an overwhelming participation rate.

Twitter lists, while useful for categorizing people to follow, haven’t really taken off either. Nor has the new, integrated retweet capability.  With each new release of features being met with tepid response, Twitter users are making the statement that they like Twitter just the way it is. That’s great for keeping the existing user base satisfied, but further impedes growth potential.

#4: Facebook Sharpening the Knife

You may remember that Twitter refused Facebook’s $500 million buyout offer last September. So as expected, Facebook just added Twitter-style features and functions to its service, to evaporate Twitter’s competitive angle.

Updating Facebook from third parties like Tweetdeck? Check. Tagging people with @ within status updates? Check. Posting to Twitter directly from Facebook? Check. Stripped-down interface option, with status updates at the core? Check (Facebook Lite). Retweet-style sharing tools? Check.

Functionally, everything Twitter does, Facebook does just as well, with the exception of mobile usage. Because Facebook has so much more overall functionality than Twitter, the mobile experience is a bit more clunky than Twitter. However, it’s important to recognize that 3 times more people use Facebook from a smartphone every month than use Twitter at all.

#5: The Better You Are at Twitter, the Worse You Are at Twitter

Being a new user on Twitter is as lonely as Michael Boublé at a Green Day concert. “What’s happening?” it asks, followed by a box and a blinking cursor. Twitter success requires an understanding of the unique rhythms and cadences of the community, and a give first, get later mentality that is a bit counterintuitive at first. The site is exceptionally poor at welcoming and training new users, which may result in its high churn rate.

But a bigger problem with Twitter is that like CB radio, it doesn’t scale well. If you have a few hundred followers, you can semi-coherently keep them straight, and watch what they are doing via your public stream. But once you get into the many thousands of followers, that public stream is a cacophony at best. Twitter lists can help in this regard, but many Twitter power users lament that the way they use the service is forced to change significantly as their own Twitter connectivity increases.

Much less time is spent in the public stream, where discoveries occur, and much more time is spent answering replies, and monitoring relevant topics via Twitter search.

When your most popular users are the ones who have the hardest time using your service to its full advantage, you have some issues to consider.

#6:  FourSquare and Gowalla Go Back to the Future

The new location-based darlings FourSquare and Gowalla are stealing a lot of the place-based intimacy that originally propelled Twitter. The “original” Twitter contained a substantially larger percentage of tweets about the author and what he or she was doing in his or her own life at that moment. That type of status update has been migrating, first to Facebook, and now to the location services.

Because you actually know the people you are connected with in most cases, FourSquare and Gowalla feel a lot more like the original Twitter, with a sense of engagement that today’s Twitter can’t deliver.

#7: Measurement Lacking

Other than retweets and clicks – data that inexplicably is only available from third parties – Twitter provides no statistics to its users other than followers/following. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy adding layers to its Insights platform, which provides a nuanced dataset enabling business users to test, optimize, and evaluate the efficacy of their time spent on Facebook.

The lack of integrated metrics on Twitter may not be a big deal for personal users, but for corporations looking to embed Twitter into an integrated social CRM approach, it’s a gaping hole that is currently being patched by inefficient, home-grown workarounds.

I love Twitter. It enriches my life every day. I hope it sticks around for a long, long time. But, figuring out what you want to do on Twitter is not your “social media strategy” – it’s just a short-term, tactical plan for a platform that survives despite its shortcomings.

What do you think? Are you still sold on Twitter? Please leave your comments below.

The answer is yes and there’s a great Twitter feature that can help you: Twitter lists.  Twitter lists can grab the interest of people you most want to meet, help you make a great first impression and can help you with marketing segmentation.

Below I’ll show you some unique ways to use Twitter lists.  But first…

How Do Twitter Lists Work?

Twitter lists creates separate lists of people. If you haven’t already used Twitter lists, watch this video to see how you can get started.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgpPY8eGvjU

There are two interesting points to remember about Twitter lists:

• You don’t need to “follow” people on Twitter to include them in your lists.
• You can have both public and private lists.

Now here’s a look at what you can do with Twitter lists.

#1: Listen with Private Lists

Twitter lists are great to monitor and listen to different groups of people.  No-one else can see your private lists, so this is a good place to start using the Twitter list feature. You can create private lists to:

• Monitor your competitors
• Carry out specific market research
• Keep track of different networks of friends and colleagues

Private Twitter lists can help you segment the fire hose of information streaming in through your Twitter feed, according to Rohit Bhargava. Segmenting people into lists also helps you more effectively listen to and  monitor your market.

John Jantsch says Twitter lists make it easier to listen to what others have to say.

And monitoring people without following them makes it easy to carry out specific market research or intelligence gathering.  Once you’ve finished doing your market research, you can simply delete your list without making any changes to the people you usually follow.

#2: Craft Your Brand With Public Lists

There’s not much space to brand yourself on your Twitter profile page.  You do have space for a few words in the bio box and you can add in background graphics.  But you can also add another dimension to your branding by carefully crafting your public Twitter lists. Here’s how.

Choose appropriate names for your lists
Spend some time finding the best name for your list.  There are a few things to keep in mind when naming your Twitter lists:

• Engage the right people.  You’ll get more people interested in looking at your list if the name sparks their interest.
• Remember to communicate with everyone.  Don’t limit your audience.  The right name could help you reach more of the people you want to connect with.
• The SEO bonus.  Another reason to think about how you label your lists is for search engine optimization (SEO).  Look at the screenshot below.  This Twitter list is in a good position in Google search results for a competitive keyword.

The bad news is that if you change the name of your list, the URL of your Twitter list changes too and you’ll lose the people following that list. So take some time to get this right.

Choose appropriate Twitter lists for your public profile
When creating your Twitter lists, you want to think of how lists help you:

• Connect with your Twitter followers
• Achieve your main goal for using Twitter
• Continue the story you began in your Twitter bio

As you build up a following on Twitter, your followers will be interested in your Twitter lists. The choice of Twitter lists found on your Twitter home page is important for engaging with  people.

Choose the number of public lists
Remember, there’s a limited amount of space available for your Twitter lists on your home page.  Although you can create a larger number of lists, only about 4 to 6 will appear on your home page depending on the character length of the names of your lists.  Your audience will have to click on the “View all” link to see all of your lists if you have more than this.

So you may want to think carefully about the number of lists you want to create and the order in which you create them. Put your most relevant lists at the top.

Advertise your Twitter lists
Create Twitter widgets for specific Twitter lists and put them up on your blog or website to engage people and establish your areas of interest and expertise.

Better Marketing With Twitter Lists

Twitter’s list feature can add some extra marketing power to your Twitter strategy if you take some time to get it right.  You also need to find the right way to make your lists work for you.  This will depend on your goals for Twitter, your audience and how they like to connect with you.

A good Twitter list improves your visibility in your market. Here are a few more benefits:

• The people you follow in your public lists will appreciate the recognition.
• By providing a useful resource, you’ll increase your credibility in your market and attract more followers.
• As you become more popular, you’ll be listed on other people’s lists. This is another way to measure your social media influence.

What are your thoughts about Twitter lists? How are you using them?  Do you regularly follow other lists? Please share your thoughts and comments below.

#1: 50% of Small Businesses Say Lead Generation is Biggest Benefit of Social Networking

According to the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010” from Ad-ology, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for U.S. small businesses.

Here’s the breakdown of respondents’ top benefits of social networking:

• 50%: Generating leads
• 45%: Keeping up with the industry
• 44%: Monitoring online conversation
• 38%: Finding vendors/suppliers

This chart shows the level at which the respondents found each social networking benefit useful.

Here’s a surprising statistic: While 67% agreed that social media is a good way to increase business, 39% of those surveyed said they did not plan to use social networking in their marketing plan in 2010.  This number is likely tied to the finding that 31% reported that their customers do not use social media, 29% stated they do not have enough time to devote to it and 21% said they do not know enough about social media.

Although more businesses are beginning to adopt social media strategies into their overall marketing plans, this report suggests businesses still have a long way to go before social media is fully integrated into marketing efforts.

#2: Online Forum Users Are Enthusiastic Brand Advocates

According to a recent survey published by PostRelease, people who actively contribute to online forums are overwhelmingly more engaged in “influential” activities – both online and offline – than people who don’t use forums.

What’s most interesting about these findings is that a forum contributor’s influence far extends past the walls of the forum.  Here are some statistics:

• 79.2% of forum contributors help a friend or family member make a decision about a product purchase – compared with 47.6% of non-contributors and 53.8% overall.
• 65% of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online – compared with 35% of non-contributors and 40.8% overall.
• 57.7% of forum contributors proactively recommend someone make a particular purchase – compared with 16.9% of non-contributors and 24.9% overall.

There’s also an interesting correlation between forum users and blogging.  The study found that those who contribute to online forums are 10 times more likely than non-contributors to also publish a blog, and are 9 times more likely to take an active role in organizing an offline event or meeting for a group that originally met online.

For marketers who are looking to connect with the key influencers in their niche, the findings suggest that online forums are a smart place to start; however, marketers should proceed with caution. Justin Choi, founder and president of PostRelease, writes, “Online forums are great places to find enthusiastic consumers and influential brand advocates. The people in forums are often discussing specific products, sharing advice and asking each other for recommendations.  For marketers, participating in that discussion is not quite as simple as jumping into a forum conversation – forums have rules about that.  But there are tools for connecting in a way that’s transparent and relevant.”

Here's a snapshot of the behaviors and habits of people who contribute to forums versus the non-contributors.

#3:  Only 47% of Companies Experimenting With Social Media

A study by Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, more than 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will manage an online community.  However, another study by ComBlu brings Gartner’s findings into question.

ComBlu’s study, The State of Online Branded Communities, shows how most companies do not understand how to engage within online communities and have no real idea of what their customers want on these sites.  Furthermore, most companies are unaware that people interact on these sites in different ways, so many companies are merely pushing data with little or no interaction.

The report reveals that when companies do get people to join their communities, their lack of engagement is extremely obvious to the sophisticated user.

“Instead of engaging the visitor, the brand drives them away because they offer little of value. Consumers today are sophisticated users of social tools and seek out communities to learn, share and interact. If these elements are missing, or there is no obvious organizing structure that fulfills specific needs, the ‘faux’ community will be quickly abandoned,” stated the report.

Here are some interesting findings related to brands and their online community activity (or lack thereof):

• 47% of brands are still in the experimental phase, meaning they “exhibit lots of social activity with little connection or integration with each other.”
• 24% are community ghost towns, meaning there is no engagement and very few members with no return visitors.
• 20% show a cohesive strategy and typically had robust engagement tools and multiple activities with an active participation from their community.
• 9% show community overload with multiple messages to the same audience, most likely causing confusion and diluting the message.

Perhaps even more important, the study points out that some of the most effective online community best practices were used the least.  Of the 135 communities they examined, only:

• 44 have a community manager. A community manager acts as the face of the community. Without one, there is no cohesive bond between the community sponsors and its members.
• 44 allow social networking. This practice allows community members to connect with each other and find shared interests, thus promoting further connection.
• 35 offer social bookmarking. This best practice gives community members a tool to personalize and aggregate their online experience at the brand’s destination site.

What do you think about these study findings? As always, we want to hear from you. Have you had similar results that support the data above or does your social media experience contradict the findings? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box below!

With Twitter and Facebook updates appearing in Google search results, many businesses are trying to figure if this is good or bad—and what to do next.  Ziff Davis featured this blog post a while back.  It got me thinking about the implications of the real-time web and how businesses can navigate through these rough waters.

The Business Upside to Real-Time Search

Here’s what real-time search means for you:

• Increased reach of your messages:  With Facebook and Twitter appearing in the search results, branded social properties will now have the opportunity to share their messages to a broader audience on the social web.
• Growth in social equity: Businesses now have the opportunity to increase their Facebook fans and Twitter followers by strategically posting at optimal times and authentically engaging in conversation.
• Potential customer acquisition:  Google is a trusted source.  When it lists content on the first page, a lot people click.  It’s a fact. By actively participating and strategically posting content, you’ll have the opportunity to convert and/or upsell via social media messages.

Here is a quick video highlighting real-time search to get you up to speed:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkYmx4A9Do

Now the Dark Side of Real-Time Search

The business challenges are clear. Not only do brands (small or large) need to be ready to engage online with their constituents in real time, they must also be willing to relinquish some control of their marketing messages.

The good news is you don’t have to give up full control as long as you are willing to participate. Participation can mean listening, watching and monitoring all the activity that happens on the social web, and in this case, Google search engine results pages.

You need to be ready to use Twitter Search to monitor trending topics, branded terms or any other keywords that may apply to your brand or business, and engage in the discussion.  Common reasons to engage include:

• Having something of value to contribute
• Intercepting a ticked off customer and changing his or her attitude
• Correcting false information

The caveat is that the technology today is still not fast enough to monitor live conversations.  Real-time search requires “real-time” monitoring which translates to “boots on the ground” brand participation.  If a brand is highly engaged and savvy with Twitter, it will be ready to respond when issues arise on the fly.

A great example of a missed opportunity is when Motrin released the Babywearing ad (see below); and didn’t notice the negative groundswell in Twitter until it was too late.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO6SlTUBA38

With Facebook updates now appearing in search results, brands must be more strategic when posting messages. It’s going to require marketing and PR to work collaboratively with search engine optimization (SEO) or web teams within the organization. If that’s a challenge, there are tools like Google trends which display how often a particular term is entered into Google relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world.

Use Google Keywords

Another important data source is the Google Keyword tool that will determine the competitiveness of keywords and how many times that term is searched in Google in a given month.

Google keyword data is significant for many reasons. Marketers can use this data to strategically post messages on Facebook that can be indexed and eventually appear in the search results. Take the following as an example of the latest update from the Adobe Photoshop Facebook fan page:

A more effective status update might be to include the keyword phrase “Photoshop tutorial” instead of just “Tutorial” as seen above.

Now don’t get me wrong, this status update is really good. It’s concise; they are providing value to their readership by giving away free tutorials and they are empowering the community to share their work on the wall (disclosure: Adobe is an Edelman client).

However, by simply adding “Photoshop” to this update, Adobe would have the opportunity to have this particular update appear in Google real-time search results when someone searches for “Photoshop tutorial.” A brief look at the data in the keyword tool shows that the term “photoshop tutorials” yields approximately 301,000 monthly searches.

A Few More Concerns

Some may view the indexing of Facebook status updates as a threat of disruptive technology.  And while this may be true in some cases, there are definitely things that brands must think about and prepare for:

• Spam:  Spammers will continue to use Twitter and status updates by placing links within messages in hopes of their messages also appearing in the search results. This happened when the Skittles home page redirected to Twitter search for the term “Skittles.”  See http://www.socialcustomer.com/2009/03/skittles-social-media-experiment.html.
• Increased Facebook participation: In order to capture mindshare and search engine real estate, brands must now use Facebook status updates more often; especially around product launches or important announcements.  It’s just as important, if not more, than traditional website copy and blog posts.  Just be careful not to spam the community as balance is important.

So what are your thoughts about real-time search? Do you see it as an opportunity or a threat to businesses?  Please comment 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.

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.