Yet another way technology has made our lives easier

As with most social media concepts, social bookmarking tools were completely foreign to me when I first began my journey through public relations. I suppose I was a subscriber to what may now be called the ‘old school’ methods of monitoring my favourite sites (admittedly mostly gossip blogs and music sites) – whenever I got a chance I would diligently go from one site to another looking for new postings and updates. What could be simpler than that? All I had to do was type the web address into my browser and hit enter. But with most things in the social media world I quickly learned that I was mistaken.

Enter Delicious. I first learned about Delicious during an Online PR class early in the semester when I registered for it as part of an assignment. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don’t use my Delicious account to its full potential, (I have only bookmarked a very limited amount of personal interest sites), but even a limited user such as myself can see the abundant number of ways social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Digg could help corporations monitor their brands.

Surprise, surprise I am not the only one who has come to this conclusion. The use of social media monitoring tools are growing by leaps and bounds every day as more and more large organizations are beginning to realize the benefits of their use.

“In addition to enormous reach (Forrester Research reports nearly half of U.S. online adults now use them), social media offer a treasure trove of information—information that can be mined using monitoring and analysis technologies to uncover insights about things like customer satisfaction with a company’s direct marketing tactics, campaign performance and the viral spread of marketing messages” writes Amy Syracuse for www.btobonline.com . All of which are very important in this competitive economy. Companies need to stay one step ahead of their competition and how better to do that then by listening to what the consumer really wants? This is what social media allows you to do, and luckily there are dozens of sites already in existence with new ones popping up every day.

Here are just a few that I found very interesting:

Facebook Lexicon – Every knows about the power of Facebook, messages are constantly being delivered here and people make decisions based on the information they gather while perusing various pages. With Facebook Lexicon you can search any keyword and instantly see how often it is discussed on Facebook user’s walls.

BoardReader – is another great site that companies should add to their list of social media monitoring tools. BoardReader allows you to monitor forum posts, topics and even forum names for when a new forum starts to specifically discuss your organization.

BackType – Ideal for reputation monitoring because it allows you to search comments that mention your brand, but if also lets you search comments left by a particular person. So BackType will alert you whenever that pesky “Laura846” who constantly bashes your organization leaves a new comment.

For a list of more great social media monitoring tools check out this article by Andy Beal on www.marketingpilgrim.com .

So although I haven’t been using my Delicious account to its full potential, I do believe that companies and organizations should be actively using social media monitoring sites. How else would they be able to collect so much valuable customer and consumer feedback without breaking a sweat? I have to agree with Amy Syracuse when she writes, “They might not be direct response vehicles, but [companies] should ignore social media and the user-generated content they contain at their own peril.”