Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

When ini­tially dis­cussing social media with clients, often the first thing brought up is using Twit­ter or Face­book as an out­go­ing tool to push their adver­tis­ing mes­sages. If you’re think­ing about social media from a tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive, there’s noth­ing wrong with this con­cept. It’s obvi­ously a cheap media buy, and we all know that it’s a big­ger and big­ger audi­ence every day. So it makes total sense to dive in, right?

In case you haven’t heard, vol­ume of social media is absolutely huge, includ­ing 133,000,000 blogs, 250,000,000 active Fac­book users and, now, over 33 mil­lion Twit­ters. This vast sea of infor­ma­tion con­tains con­nec­tions and ecosys­tems that even the most adept brand man­ager or CMO will find con­found­ing with­out the right tools and peo­ple with a ded­i­ca­tion to find­ing them.

After the indi­vid­u­als and con­nec­tions are found, mar­keters must learn what cus­tomers are say­ing and gauge their sen­ti­ment about their prod­uct, brand and com­pany. Mar­keters may dis­cover there’s a lot being said by more peo­ple than they would have thought possible.

Once all this infor­ma­tion is gath­ered, it becomes obvi­ous that sim­ply get­ting a line in the water isn’t enough. Mar­keters need to develop a unique strat­egy to engage their audi­ence that’s a lot deeper and more involved than get­ting on Twit­ter and Face­book with the same mes­sage they’ve been using in tra­di­tional marketing.

OK. You get it and you’re ready to start and want to know your options.

Hire an agency or con­sul­tant to do the lis­ten­ing and strat­egy for you.

Buy a tool like Neilson’s, Radian 6, or Social Radar and make a go of it yourself.

Don’t have the bud­get or buy in on the impor­tance of social media? Start with the free tools and and Excel spread­sheet. A cou­ple graphs and some solid num­bers may help you illus­trate the impor­tance of social media to deci­sion makers.

A cou­ple free tools are:

Google Blog Search

Twit­ter Search

Social Men­tion

Ice Rocket

One Riot

There are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of tools out there, these are just a cou­ple I’ve used. The impor­tant thing is pick a tool and stick with it if you want to do any track­ing because they will all pro­vide dif­fer­ent results. What they won’t give you is easy track­ing, graph­ing, and sentiment.