What's your "go to" for Social Media Monitoring?

Social Media Tools Gaining Fire

The first annual Community and Social Media Study conducted by the e-Tailing group showed that brands and retailers are exploring the social space at an extremely high rate. The study shows 75% of respondents feel brands have accelerated their use of, or commitment to, community and social media in the past 6 months.

The top 3 concerns of Marketers and Retailers in Social Media:

• Brand Degradation fear - people can trash my product in front of the masses
• Competence fear - using outdated marketing techniques
• Competitive fear - believing customers are willing to leave sites to find more social friendly brand/retailer sites

WomFire, a social media marketing company, is implementing various social media strategies, based on clients' goal, in order to let brands take an open, active and effective role in conversations online.

Discipling Twitterers: Managers Seeking Control of Employees/Players

News is spreading in both the sports and business world with managers trying to keep the employees and players under control. NFL star Antonio Cromartie was just fined $2,500 for violating NFL and San Diego Chargers rules by bashing the teams training camp meals on Twitter. ESPN/NBA analyst posted a note today that ESPN sent a memo to employees that they were implementing a company Twitter policy "prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN."

The $2,500 tweet in question, according to NBC Sports, originated on July 31, and states: “Man we have 2 have the most nasty food of any team. Damn can we upgrade 4 str8 years the same ish maybe that’s y we can’t we the SB we need.”

The ESPN Tweet from Ric Bucher is Below:

These two stories topped "Tuesday Twitter Limitation" that was started with news that the United States Marines have also banner social media sites on their network.

Facebook #1 Site For Time Spent Online

Nielsen just released their June report on Internet usage, and with 87 Million visitors, spending on avearge 4 hours and 39 minutes during the month on the site, Facebook has become the #1 (out of the top ten web brands) in time spent online, and #6 when is comes to overall U.S. traffic.

Why is time spent such a huge deal? In digital marketing, we try to find user eyeballs, the "ultimate currency" stated by Stan Schroeder in his Mashable blog post. Impressions and page views are beginning to lose their cache', with marketers focusing on users' time spent on a site, or in certain content.

Facebook is not necessarily the end all place for marketers to flood with advertising, but there is a paradigm shift that needs to be investigated. People spend hours on AOL, Google, and Yahoo! as well as other portal sites, but just because time is spent there, doesn't make it the best place for advertising.

Social Media Recommendations and Opinions: Most Trusted Advertising Worldwide

Nielsen recently released a global study of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising worldwide. 90% of consumers surveyed said that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online. Social media is not just a fad, but here to stay, and more and more companies are beginning to add social media strategies to their advertising budgets.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, have increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.”

We have currently implemented social media campaigns for multiple clients of ours; engaging people talking not only about promotional campaigns, but also about the client's #1 concern, the product/service they sell. Tracking Pre and Post campaign “buzz" for our campaigns have only brought the need of social media for clients to fruition for us.