Earlier this week, Cossette posted the results of a survey they conducted last fall of over 3,000 web users in Canada, the U.S. and UK. You can find the complete report here.

Specifically, one of the findings stood out to me:

Among some 20 online activities surveyed that can be tied back to social media behaviour, two are particularly meaningful:

• Two-thirds of Internet users turn to online information about products, brands or companies that have been produced by family, friends, colleagues and others they don’t know personally.

• 30% have shared something online about a brand or a company in the past week. More specifically, 20% have cited a company or brand in a personal web page or blog. They are the only group that finds advertising as useful as social brand content, and a lot more likely to join various types of sponsored communities

Of course, this has many significant meanings for brand managers and the agencies responsable:

1. You’re no longer in control of your message. (If you haven’t heard that before, it’s time you did.)
2. People are planting seeds on your behalf around the web and it’s up to you to know where they’re talking and what they’re saying, as their positive and/or negative comments can have a profound impact on purchasing decisions.

As a result, you must start a strategic social media monitoring and response program. Without one in place, the public becomes your brand’s manager and, due to the shelf life of search, anyone who can type your product/service name into Google can be influenced by what’s already been said. It’s on you to find the relevant conversations and join in, so you can correct wrongs and misconceptions and have your point of view on record.

So, do you know what they are saying about your brand?

When I talk to people about social media monitoring, they’re mostly interested in how it relates to their overall online engagement strategy. And, of course, that’s perfectly reasonable as you think strategically about planting seeds around the web.

However, what a lot of people aren’t thinking about are all the other reasons why they could be monitoring online conversations. After all, it’s one thing to use a monitoring platform to guide your online participation. It’s a completely different thing, though, to collect information for a wide range of reasons.

Over the next few posts, we’ll be taking a look at the different reasons why social media monitoring isn’t just for monitoring social media. For example…

It’s to help you gain business intelligence.

• Generate leads
Beyond engaging in social media and being ready to act on leads generated through participation, you can learn a lot by listening. Keep your ears open and look for issues people are having with your competitors, needs expressed online, news of events related to your service offering and RFPs that are coming through.

• Keep an eye on your competitors
Knowing what your competitors are up to can help you decide how to differentiate your offer. Run keywords that are directly connected to your competitors’ executives to see what they’re doing. Listen to conversations related to their brands to learn what people are thinking about it and to identify its flaws. Consider listening in on their employees, because you never know what nugget of insight they’ll drop in your lap.

• Feel out the issues facing your industry
Listen to industry keywords to learn what influential people industry wide are thinking. Figure out some of the trends that will affect your business. Learn the language people are using to discuss the field and reflect that back in the messages you prepare.

• Gain key product development insights
People will often give you unsolicited feedback on how you can make things better. Whether it’s in customer service, supply chain, or the product itself, keep an eye out for clues on how to better meet the expectations of your users.

How do you use social media monitoring to gain business intelligence?

My friends at Point To Point in Cleveland invited me to guest post and it just went live. The post, titled, “Playing the name game when it comes to online reputation management” comes with a back story.

You see, in February 2007 I was contacted by their president, also named Mark Goren, to discuss our “Google problem.” Since that first chat, we’ve become friends, done a little work together, and continue to serve as each others’ mentor.

The guest post talks about the importance of filtering out bad information from social media monitoring to collect results that are most relevant to your search strategy. Using the example of our name, I illustrate how to do so through simple search.

Why does this relate to planting seeds? Because the more content you produce through different social networks or the more you’re being written about, it’s vital to know where conversations are taking place if you want to manage your reputation online. In some cases, it may even make you want to distinguish your name somehow, to help make it easier to search for. Cleveland’s Mark Goren did so by using his middle initial, which you can see on the right sidebar on P2P’s blog.

Mark is a great guy and the team at Point To Point is at the top of their game. I encourage you to learn a little bit about them, their award-winning work and their unique charity, Change for $20, which they launched last year for the holidays.

To learn about how Mark and I met, read this old post.

To read today’s guest post, head on over to P2P’s blog.

To check out Change for $20 (which is probably the first thing you should do), visit the site.

As I wrote in the original post, and still believe very strongly today:

The world is smaller than ever. People are meeting new people and making new friends every day. It’s all about reaching out, connecting and making meaningful relationships. Last night’s chat was just one more powerful example.

And so is today’s guest post.

I’ll probably hear some good natured opposition to this post from some friends at different Social Media Monitoring companies, but I stand solidly behind this advice.

No matter which social media monitoring platform you’re committed to, use others as well.

True insight comes from using several different kinds of search engines, applications and tools. That’s not a knock on the different services, it’s reflective of the monitoring environment’s reality. By using several of the different services available – mostly for no added cost – you’ll uncover deeper intelligence, greater statistics and a better understanding of the conversation.

There may be any number of reasons for this logic, whether you’re committed to paid or free tools:

• Every algorithm is different. While one tool may be capturing certain conversations quickly, another tool may be filling in the blanks in a more timely way. By cross checking different engines, you’ll be able to catch more results sooner.

• Even if you’re using a robust, feature-rich service, there are likely many different insights that the service doesn’t incorporate. Take Twitter, for example. You’re collecting tweets, but are able to drill down about the user, who the person is connected to, since when they’ve been on Twitter, frequency of Tweets, which links they’ve posted, what pictures they’ve linked to, and so on and so on and so on? The more tools you use, and some offer very specific functionalities, the greater you’ll come to understand a particular conversation.

• Backup your main monitoring service with others, just in case. In case your system is going offline for maintenance. In case results turn up missing. In case you don’t have access to a wifi network. For example, through you may be using a web based service, you may want to download mobile applications – Tweetie and Say What? come to mind – to check in while you’re away from your computer.

• Sentiment analysis. Different services go about providing this analysis in different ways. Some automate the process, relying on different “trigger” words to reach a conclusion, others assign sentiment through human analysis, while still others leave it all up to you. As a result, if you like so many of the features offered by the platform you’re committed to, but don’t “trust” how it handles sentiment, you may want to go in a different direction to gain an accurate measure.

• Unless your platform allows you to add custom RSS sources, which helps ensure that you’re not missing any results, you’ll have to find different ways to keep track of these other results.

These are just some of what could be a very long list. And in no way is this post meant to diminish the importance of finding your comfort zone with a primary platform and sticking to it. That said, a single social media monitoring platform just isn’t enough if you really want to get more out of your monitoring program.

So, I ask you, what combination of sites, tools and applications are you using? Need ideas, here’s an exhaustive directory of social media monitoring tools that will show you the potential of what’s out there.

Building on yesterday’s post about the importance of reading the links you’re collecting through social media monitoring, today we’re going to focus on tags.

What’s a tag?

Well, if you think of the web as one big filing cabinet, a tag is the label you put on a folder within the cabinet. The beauty of these files you’re using is that you can put as many labels on them as you like.

You can create these folders in one of two ways:

1. As a content producer, you’ll use the labels (re: tags) to help others who are diving into the filing cabinet find your content. Your choice of tags is important, because you have to imagine how others will use the filing cabinet and select words that are relevant to them.Content producers will tag their content when they update their blog, post videos to YouTube, add pictures to Flickr and so forth.
2. As a content consumer, you’ll use tags to organize files that you’ll want to reference again later. Social bookmarking services like Delicious provide a practical example. When you bookmark content to your Delicious account, you’re asked to provide tags for that piece of content. You can then search through your bookmarks by tag to find related information.Of course, how you tag content as a “consumer” will help others find information within the filing cabinet as well.

Why is this important for social media monitoring? Because tags are an excellent way to see how people relate the content you’re interested in to other topics. When you examine the tags attached to a particular piece of content – or several pieces of content discovered through the same keywords – you’ll gain insights that go well beyond your keywords. Ultimately, you’ll discover new information that will help you understand the topic you’re researching that much better.

How do you think of tags?

At the workshops I give at different conferences, I show those in attendance a slide with three bullet points explaining how seeds get planted:

1. You plant seeds across the web
2. You ask others to plant seeds on your behalf
3. People are planting seeds ” good and bad ones ” for you

Point is, though, if you’re not using social media monitoring tools, you’ll never really have a full handle on when and where those seeds are planted.

To monitor the social web, your options are simple enough. You can use free tools or a paid ones. Now, I don’t want this post to become about those options, as there are many resources available on the topic. The only point I want to make is this:

If you’re not clicking through and reading the links, you’re wasting your time.

It’s one thing to collect links, as I’m sure many people do. It’s easy to look at numbers and statistics. It’s fun to watch your influence and reach grow far and wide across the web.

However, and I don’t say this lightly, if you’re not bothering to click through and read, don’t bother at all.

All the real insights come from reading.

All the relationships you’ll build will come from knowing where to interact.

And none of this can really happen unless you’re reading the posts, threads, Tweets, status updates and comments you’re collecting.

If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, have someone help you gain these insights and guide your participation. But even with a little help, take a little bit of time to read what people are saying about you. At minimum, it’ll give you a feel for the social media environment you didn’t have before.

How are you gaining insights from your social media monitoring program?

Fair is fair. When you call out social media monitoring companies for not responding and question whether they’re even listening, you have to give credit to those who are paying attention.

So here’s a list of all the companies that have responded to the original challenge so far. These 140-character descriptions of social media monitoring services where either added a few weeks back, by commenting on the last post here at Planting Seeds or through Twitter this time around.

You should also note that Tuesday’s post was also syndicated over at The Customer Collective, which generated quite a bit of attention. You can see the conversation in the comments over there. And you can see just how much discussion this topic generated by checking out BackTweets (Planting Seeds post | The Customer Collective post).

Onto the list:

THE ORIGINAL SIX

• CustomScoop @All4Monitoring CustomScoop: Fast/accurate/affordable online news clips/social media monitoring. 24/7 Dashboard-Email Alerts-Custom Reports

• radian6 @All4Monitoring Real-time tracking, slice’n dice analysis, influencer scoring, workflow/team feats., platform API, Salesforce & Web trends Integ.

• Catherine_VZ @All4Monitoring Attensity: Monitor+analyze+respond 2 social med+email+surveys etc: deep sentiment+intent 2 buy+intent 2 churn+other reports.

• Blake Cahill @All4Monitoring @visible_tech here. A comprehensive social web listening, learning, engagement, & BI SaaS platform for brands & agencies

• vishals @All4Monitoring #Viralheat Real-time social media analytics #a4m

• Intelligence Pro @All4Monitoring Blog monitoring, search profiles, five presentations - graph, latest by authority, latest from prefered, frequent, search

THE COMMENTERS

• gianandrea facchini
Buzzdetector, a company monitoring and delivering strategic insights to his customers. http://www.buzzdetector.com (in Italian but with a presentation in English, too)

• Zak
Moreover’s Newsdesk tool is the one-stop shop for marketing pros delivering real-time news & social media monitoring

• Ari Newman (Filtrbox)
@all4monitoring easy 2 use, real-time, unl. keywords, drill-down, analysis, custom-branding, sentiment, team collab, API, influence, less $$

• Shanna Gordon
@bdbrandprotect - finding a needle in a haystack as opposed to a data dump, assessing sentiment and influence, providing useful analytics.

NEW TWEETS

• socialscape Listening, Strategizing, Engaging. Real-time analytics that assess influencers, trends and insights within social media

• RepuTrack™ we combine real-time retrieval of relevant online convo w/ human review. See http://www.reputationmonitoring.com for precision ORM

• filtrbox easy 2 use, real-time, unl. keywords, drill-down, analysis, custom-branding, sentiment, team collab, API, influence, less $$

• jeanju
Sid Lee provides Brand Monitoring Service based on quality analysis not only focus on tools.

UPDATES

18 September:

• ImpactWatch provides real-time monitoring of all types of media with powerful reporting tools and customizable metrics.

19 September

*

We’ll keep this challenge open ended. If you’re a social media monitoring company offering a free or paid tool, let us know in 140 characters what you’re all about. Send a tweet to @all4monitoring or #a4m or leave your comment here, after the original post or over at The Customer Collective.

We’ll use this post as the master list.

It started with a simple Tweet from @all4monitoring:

“In the social media monitoring business? If you’re a free or paid tool, describe your service in 140 characters. #a4m“

After the first three responses, I posted this a day later:

“@radian6, @CustomScoop + @Socialscape responded to this: http://bit.ly/37EZnT. Are other social media monitoring companies listening?”

In total, over a few days, six social media monitoring companies responded to these tweets. Six.

Hats off to those who did respond, including the following (in chronological order):

• CustomScoop
@All4Monitoring CustomScoop: Fast/accurate/affordable online news clips/social media monitoring. 24/7 Dashboard-Email Alerts-Custom Reports

• radian6
@All4Monitoring Real-time tracking, slice’n dice analysis, influencer scoring, workflow/team feats., platform API, Salesforce & Web trends Integ.

• Catherine_VZ
@All4Monitoring Attensity: Monitor+analyze+respond 2 social med+email+surveys etc: deep sentiment+intent 2 buy+intent 2 churn+other reports.

• Blake Cahill
@All4Monitoring @visible_tech here. A comprehensive social web listening, learning, engagement, & BI SaaS platform for brands & agencies

• vishals
@All4Monitoring #Viralheat Real-time social media analytics #a4m

• Intelligence Pro
@All4Monitoring Blog monitoring, search profiles, five presentations - graph, latest by authority, latest from prefered, frequent, search

So my question became, as noted in the title of the post, “Are social media monitoring companies even listening, let along responding?”

You would think it’s a natural.

Thanks to bit.ly, I can tell you that the link was clicked 75 times, which would indicate to me that some of these companies are at least listening. However, in a world where it’s vital to plant seeds to get yourself on the radar of potential customers, why didn’t more than six companies bother to respond? Especially to a Twitter account that identifies itself as:

“All about monitoring, including links, pointers and the odd challenge to companies to see if they’re listening. Are you all for monitoring?”

So, social media monitoring companies, are you practicing what you preach? Feel free to answer on Twitter (@all4monitoring or #a4m) or by posting a comment below.

Last week, I opened a new Twitter account, @All4Monitoring, to support the new social media monitoring service I’ve been offering clients.

Why start a new Twitter account aside from helping me plant seeds for this new offer? Actually, I have a very clear intention for it. As the profile says, it’s “All about monitoring, including links, pointers and the odd challenge to companies to see if they’re listening. Are you all for monitoring?” (Sidebar: The link from the profile is to our new site: socialmediamonitoring.ca, a URL I couldn’t believe was available given the presence of serious social media monitoring players up here in Canada.)

The idea is to become a hub for all things related to social media monitoring. So you can expect to learn about new monitoring services, talk about familiar ones, participate in the odd twtpoll here and there, and general observations about monitoring the social web for all kinds of different reasons.

Of course, you can play a role. To get the most out of this new Twitter account, it would be great if you could:

• Follow and reply to @All4Monitoring
• Tag any tweet with #a4m to point us to stuff and get our attention (as you can see, this hasn’t taken off just yet!)
• Provide feedback on the account
• And anything else you can think of within your comfort zone and the realm of Twitter

I’m viewing this effort as an ongoing experiment with a clear direction. If you have any ideas for how this account can evolve, let me know. I’m all ears!

Otherwise, I’ll see you out there on Twitter!

P.S. Feel free to connect with me on my personal account, @MarkGoren.

Gearing up for a busy fall, as I’ll be leading workshops at three different events organized by the Advanced Learning Institute, a conference organizer based in Chicago. It’s a great pleasure for me to be involved, as I’ve learned so much and made some lasting relationships at their conferences.

So here’s where you can find me this fall:

• Social Media For Government Conference, September 29 - October 2 in Ottawa
• Social Media For Healthcare, October 5 -8 in Washington
• Social Media For Crisis Communications in Government, November 2 - 5 in Washington

I’ll be running variations of the same workshop at all three events, the basic description of which is:

In today’s marketing environment, it’s vital that you respond to the right conversations in the right places. Using social media monitoring tools that are openly available, you can learn what’s being said, identify the most active and influential conversations and know where you need to be present online.

In this workshop, you will learn why it’s crucial to monitor the web to lead your marketing efforts, plus how to choose and prepare a community ambassador to voice your web presence. In addition, a hands-on approach will be taken to teach you how to monitor conversations using free tactics, tools and websites, including:

• Understanding the concept of RSS feeds and how to set up an RSS reader
• Looking at key free monitoring tools and how to subscribe to search results
• The importance of keyword selection
• Knowing where to listen to online conversations
• Preparing to respond and initiate online conversations when necessary - starting to really use social media

The early bird deadlines are still available for the October and November events - but you only have until August 12 (this Wednesday) to take advantage of a reduced rate for the Social Media for Healthcare conference. In addition, at any time during the registration process, if you mention my name, you’ll get a 50% discount off the current rate.

Also, to follow along during these events, search for #ALI on Twitter while the conference is in session. You’ll get a lot out of the sessions when you keep on eye on the back channel.

Hope to see you there!