We should all realize that our digital community is a little more like the small town life filled with nosy neighbors, than an anonymous big city. Privacy is something we should all take seriously and only share what we’re entirely comfortable with everyone in Mayberry knowing — even Aunt Bea.

Here are a couple tools that can help you understand what is public about you or anyone else on the Facebook.

YourOpenBook.org

zesty.ca/facebook/

Here’s a tool that may actually help you stay a little more private.

ReclaimPrivacy.org

The truth is that Facebook is constantly changing how they address privacy. And because advertisers are Facebook’s customers and not you, Facebook is unlikely to hold your privacy more dear than ad revenue.

To paraphrase what a South Carolina State trooper once said to a smart-asssed New Yorker friend “when on Facebook, you act like you Moma is looking over your shoulder all the time.”

And one more thing; it doesn’t hurt to Google yourself every now and then too. You never know what you might find.

Over the last couple years my professional direction has changed slightly. No longer just writing copy for ads and social media, I began editing and then shooting video. Which isn’t all that crazy since during the time I was working in Los Angeles I was directing commercials as well as freelance copywriting.

It was inevitable that this transition was coming from copywriter to writer/director. And with the rapid rise of web content and shrinking advertising budgets there’s no better time to embrace the change with my full attention, passion, and on my own terms.

I’ll be blogging about what exactly this means over the next week.

This post is the over-due follow up to this one. It took awhile to write not just because I’ve been busy but because I wanted to add to the conversation when other people have already written great comparisons of the social media tools available. Plus there are some smart people writing about how you should use these tools. What I haven’t seen is what I’m going to write today — which comes directly out of a hallway conversation the other day.

“Why don’t you just look it up on Social Radar? That’s what it’s for, right?”

Well, not exactly. Which begs the question: do you need to define what you’re expecting to accomplish before you go off and buy one of these tools? Because if your goals are pretty simple, you may end up spending more than you should. Or if you’re not ready for some of the more complex monitoring tasks, maybe you could start with the easy stuff first.

Categories of tools

I think the easiest way to look at the array of tools available is to use three categories. There are several tools out there to search the Web. There are other simple tools available to monitor the Web and provide you alerts. And there are tools out there that track activity. The last category can be further broken down, which I’ll get to a little later.

Search

Google, Nielson and Technorati all provide excellent resources to search blogs in more or less providing real-time information about your brand. Bing has a social search team working on new tools and now has a Twitter search in beta. And Yahoo will even let you tailor a search engine. So there’s no need purchase an expensive tool if you’re just out to look up a little information about what’s happening on the social web. If you want to search Facbook, today you’ll have to do it on their site if you need anything more than the most basic results (Facebook is moving in a more open direction, so stay tuned). And when it comes to Twitter search, there’s a lot of options for searching Twitter since they have their API open. Some dedicated free social-search tools include:

Ice Rocket

Social Mention

OneRiot

For search, one benefit of the more expensive tools is the filtering of the results. Many providers claim to have the least noise — all appear to be better than the free ones. Another benefit is speed – it takes servers to deliver the goods fast and, well, that costs money.

Tools for alerts

For simple monitoring and alerts, Google, Yahoo, BackType all provide the ability to monitor the Web and provide almost real-time alerts when something is posted on the internet about you or your brand. If a site is popular and has good SEO, Google will give you a pretty close to real-time alert if something you need to know about is posted — for example, I get an almost instantaneous alert every time I click publish. Frankly, even if  you’re using another tool, you should be using these services. You’ll find that some search engines see somethings and others see other things. It’s just the nature of the Web and the different algorithms search engines use. Now if you want alerts that look for aberrations or spikes in volume or sentiment you’ll need to spend money.

Tracking tools

For tracking tools, I break this down into two classes: the free/freemium or inexpensive ones and then the premium tools. Obviously the premium are better for certain purposes (and do a lot more than track) but not necessary for everyone. If you need to get a general idea of the conversation about a brand and watch what’s happening over time there are some affordable, if not free options including from Trackur and Trendrr.

A step up from these tools are free and cheaper tools would be the premium version of the previously mentioned ones or Scout Labs. These tools usually provide on demand search results with sentiment, alerts and some basic charting of activity. I took advantage of the 30 day trial of Scout Labs and found it extremely useful for a pitch we were in at the time. At this price point you will find some great features available.

Premium tools

So if you can do all this stuff relatively inexpensively, or even free, why would you want one of these other expensive tools?

Because you require the ability to slice and dice a fire hose of raw data. And you want to be able to sort, dial in, tweak and drill down into the result without having to deal with noise. You want to reliably gauge sentiment and evaluate trends. And you want the easiest UI available, maybe you even need training and someone to call on the phone to ask questions. You may even want an on demand analyst to help you build reports and make judgements. Not everyone really needs this kind of capability and service or even has the time and perseverance to gain anything valuable from it.

But if you do have the time to dedicate to it, and you have the aptitude for figuring out the right questions to ask the tools, you will discover some great information that may not have been obvious using a cheaper option. And they can just make it easier to do some more complicated tasks like gauging sentiment and mentions during a campaign for a deeper analysis of how a marketing or PR campaign is functioning, comparing the sentiment of your products to your competitors over time to look for market opportunities or product problems, or using them as an on-demand customer research tool.

Radian6, Techrigy SM2, Visible, Sysomos Map and Heartbeat, Biz 360, Collective Intellect, Neilson, and Social Radar are some of the more popular tools available and well worth consideration.

One outcome of the eavaluation process for us was that we found the tools were useful in ways we hadn’t yet realized. This was especially true for our brand strategists who found ways to test hypothesis and prove and her case to team members and clients. But that’s another story.

So you have already drunk the Twitter Koolaide. You’ve been tweeting awhile and now you have a few hundred followers and are following more people than you can keep track of using Twitter.com on your browser. And you’re beginning to feel that you’re probably not getting all that you could out of your Twitter experience because of an information nozzle that is blasting so hard you’ve lost control of what you’re reading.

Now you’re wondering, “do I need to unfollow a hundred people because I’m not too interested in everything they’re tweeting?” They all seemed so interesting at first but now — not so much. Will they unfollow me if I unfollow them? Probably. And that may be OK. But if you selfishly want to hang on to them and not hurt anyone’s feelings, there’s a solution.

Thankfully, twitter now has a built in tool to help this problem: Twitter Lists. Lists allow you to group your favorite Tweeters into a single browser window. You can even create groups for specific topics. So if you’re interested in learning about a particular news story, click the “news” list you created of pundits or journalists. Or if maketing is your bag, create one of marketing professionals you respect.

You can also look at other people’s lists and get a feel if your missing something.

If you use a tool like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or Seesmic these lists can be integrated into your desktop tool or iPhone app. (CoTweet is also an excellent tool but focused on enterprise users. If that’s you, I highly recommend it.)

If you use Seesmic of Tweetdeck (Hootsuite is phasing out groups and wants you to use Twitter’s lists) you can use groups to create columns to easily scan and not have them part of your actual Twitter account. I find Tweetdecks function to be easy to use. And since I manage three accounts, ease of use is extremely important to me.

These tools should help you make more sense out of Twitter stream with a bit of time spent getting caught up sorting. I’m constantly tweaking my Tweetdeck groups to try and make sure I have the best information stream possible.

One problem lists doesn’t solve is the DM conundrum. I find that I’m consistently auto DM’d so I tend not to pay much attention to what’s in my DM inbox. I could just unfollow anyone that does that but I’m conscious that some people don’t know they’re being annoying by sending automated messages, so I’m giving everyone the benefit of doubt.

The things that will get people unfollowed by me is spamming me with porn or otherwise offensive stuff and auto blasting me with 10 tweets at a time in attempt to capitalize my stream. I’d rather tweeters be interesting than annoying.

Hope these tips help. If anyone has any to add please add to comments.

But engagement at it’s best is an emotional involvement or commitment between two parties. Unfortunately, commitment is something many marketers only expect of their customers, not themselves. They’re only committed to pushing the message out there and not listening to what the other person has to say. Fortunately for marketers customers are used to being treated this way. That’s how I feel every time I deal with the phone company or a credit card company.

So why are these companies getting into social media in the first place? Many see it as cheap media. But many are well meaning, want real interaction but simply don’t understand the time commitment associated with a true two-way conversation. And they also don’t see (or can’t advocate up the chain) the customer service, sales, or PR value yet.

So if you want real engagement, I suggest you not take “baby steps” but take measured steps into social media and not leaps. Leaps can lead to instant scalability problems and cause confusion marketers. Frankly, the people who work in marketing and PR are not used to talking to customers on a one-to-one scale. So what do you do?

Step one: Listen.

Step two: Develop a plan for engagement based on goals and what you’ve heard.

Step three: Create a presence where your largest group of customers can reach you the easily (fish where the fish are). And start a conversation.

Concentrate on this third step for a month or so before launching a Twitter presence, a Friend Feed, a Youtube Channel and so on.

We find that this is plenty for most companies at first. Even if you are just launching a Facebook fan page, you can generate significant traffic to your corporate site and learn a lot about engaging your customers quickly. This is a lot better situation than starting a social media “experiment” with an instant scalability problem. From here it will be easier to transition to real engagement with customers rather than falling back into the same old push mentality we all used to be so comfortable with.

1. Mobile Web will become even bigger.
2. The kids will continue to text at an alarming rate — it’s private you know.
3. Social media will become more important to businesses — especially B2B, entertainment, and high-involvement products and services.
4. Television will still be very important to consumer marketing.
5. SEO will still not be understood by many ad agencies, nor will they care.
6. Flash will still be over used.
7. Bad ads will be ignored even more easily.
8. Tribilization of users, listeners, and viewers will further fragment audiences and confuse marketers.
9. Boomer execs will struggle with understanding social media, much less understanding how to implement it strategically.
10. “Guru” will become a four letter word when put after “social media.”
11. Clients will still not buy your best ideas but you’ll still be pressured to present it.
12. Agencies will be slow to hire, even people they need.
13. Web video will continue to blow up and frustrate old school production companies trying to make a profit.
14. Begrudgingly marketing executives will accept that Twitter isn’t a fad but still think it’s stupid — then turn on their NASCAR.
15. “Microsite” will be removed from the urban dictionary for lack of coolness.
16. Foursquare will create real returns for smart business and some guys in New York.
17. That Apple tablet will finally appear and so will another iPhone that will make you want to throw away your lame and old 3GS.
18. Interactive agencies will leverage their bandwidth and expertise to wrench away agency of record agreements from traditional shops — especially in B2B and tech categories.
19. Very-small agencies will be at a disadvantage pitching accounts since most clients will be looking to see strong and expansive digital capabilities from their agency partners.
20. Very-large agencies will have a hard time changing course to create true digital capabilities and still meet the new, tightwad, cost expectations of clients.
21. Agency people will still be prattling about how cool their iPhones are.
22. Same agency people will still be presenting “iPhone App” ideas to clients using Blackberries, Palms, Microsoft, and Google smart phones.
23. 13% of Art directors will burn out and start presenting the same layouts in different colors for all concepts, clients, and mediums.
24. Salaries will remain flat.
25. Your boss or client will buy a Porsche but feel the need to make excuses about how it was too good a deal to pass up.

At Kilgannon, we’ve made the decision to use Social Radar as our new social media monitoring tool.

We did not take this decision lightly. We also scoured the blogs and websites. We also asked partner organizations which tools they were using and then decided on what criteria we’d use to evaluate the tools. Then spent several months looking at various tools – some we demoed and others we looked via webinar.

The tools we looked at included:

Techrigy SM2

Radian 6

Sysmos

BuzzMetrics

Visible

ScoutLabs

eCairn

Webtrends Social Measurement

Collective Intellect

Honestly, we gave all of them serious consideration. And many of them also would have been excellent selections. What it came down to was the before mentioned criteria. These are the main criteria we focused on:

Features: What the tool can do that will benefit our customers.

Training and support: Interestingly, some require more of this than others – as all tools do not allow you to create your own queries.

Cost structure: Notice I said cost structure and not cost.

Much of the discussion among bloggers has been about the wizbang features that these tools have and not the business case for choosing one over the other.

And some of these these tools make more sense for in-house marketing departments than agencies, which we are.

When talking to software providers IN GENERAL (this means not just social media monitoring folks)  I’ve found a reluctance to create a model that works for smaller companies, smaller agencies, and even mid-sized b2b companies. It seems they’re mostly interested in the big fish. That means, just like in media land, they’re catering to the non-niche, consumer audience. There is no reason that a b2b software provider should pay the same for the service as a consumer goods company – they simply do not require the same kinda of band width that Coke or Apple do.

I plan a follow up article with more detail about what I learned in the selection process that should be helpful to anyone looking for monitoring tools.

Update: Follow up here.

Andy Sernovitz had some important points on ethics and disclosure. He outlined dangers to a brand of not having clear, legal agreements with vendors acting on a brand’s behalf and opined that the new FCC guidelines a positive development for the industry. His belief is that social media will be much better served by government policing than it would by being allowed to evolve on its own the way email did.

There were some compelling BtoB stories. Orange and SunGuard had showed how social media benefited their bottom line through providing helpful information to clients and potential clients.

Also there was a terrific UPS crisis management story. And I enjoyed hearing about Coca-Cola’s Expedition 206 campaign.

But what did I really learn there? That there’s a vibrant community of professionals trying to figure this social media thing out. That it lives beyond the blogs and tweets. That people are engaged, smart, and want to do the right thing. And frankly that’s damn refreshing place to be compared to discussions about direct mail, email marketing, or print advertising. People really are seeing a brighter horizon in this space while in traditional marketing the world is shrinking.

So even if Twitter does turn out to be a stupid fad, I think social media is a pretty great space to be in.

There was a lot of learning to be had from the individual presenters which I’ll go into in a later post. But there were a few 10,000-foot view take aways too.

I was impressed with the level of dialog. No presenter thought that had to tell people why the subject was important or gave a 101. And no remedial questions were asked in the sessions I attended. This to me means that this subject that is so near and dear to us is becoming less esoteric.

None of the case studies were presented as experiments. These were all projects with senior by-in and are being taken seriously as part of a broader communications strategy.

No obsession with ROI that I’ve seen at other venues – mostly coming from agency professionals.

Obviously, this could be an anomaly, but it seems to me on a day in November, in Atlanta, GA, social media had grown up a bit.

Nevertheless, the way we’re watching TV has changed. But there are some misconceptions about the way we’re watching TV. For example, that everyone is using DVRs now and this is going to kill TV advertising. Actually, DVR use is up with older folks but the younger, more sought after audience, is watching programs on Hulu. And Hulu is capturing more money per eyeball than traditional television. Also, more people are also watching programs on mobile devices. Some programs people actually pay for on places like the iTunes Store.

So what’s the takeaway here? People are watching. But TV isn’t just on the same old box anymore. So it’s going to take different ways for advertisers to engage consumers than just running a spot on the idiot box. And it’s going to take more than just selling ad space from networks if they want to continue to generate the same revenue from their programing.

People still want to watch Lost but they’re just not so interested in appointment viewing anymore without a really good reason to tune in on time.  Fox gave it to them with “tweet peats” and Barack Obama, CNN and Facebook hit a home run with the State of the Union. This is not to imply that social media the solution to all of TV’s problems, just one of many solutions that will be required for TV to adapt to a changing world.

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