SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

I suggested in my post on Singapore Prestige Brand Award that the web, particularly social sites are the best places to monitor your brand. In the post I made mention of MyStarBucksIdea.com which fell under the radar eyes of Matthew Guiste, program manager for MyStarbucksIdea.com on the same day the post was published. That is one company actively monitoring, and it is good to know they are participating. BTW Matthew, I love the “MA&MT” comment.

The point is, conversations are being said online about products, what they like about a particular service offered by so and so and what not about the experience.? These same voices occupy screen estate on forums, one comment followed by another, flooding product review discussions, and features on social networks help to amplify digital signals carrying each of their own impressions about their lastest purchase to other netizens - literally the good bad and the ugly. In actuality you cannot escape that influence on your brand.

I recently picked up a Webinar link through a Facebook post, focusing on China internet community. Unfortunately I misplaced the link ( I’ll try to recover it and post it here) . It was a presentation on Chinese Internet population and provides an insight to their online behaviour. Amazingly Chinese internet community in 2007 exceeds 200 million users, who spent their time online in social sites like YouKu.com (ranked 8 in Alexa), Yo2.cn and BBS sites. And It is also known that chinese surfer spends time online reading peers review before running off to the stores. The Web 2.0 era is changing marketing strategies quite literally. Such work is done by Sam Flemming whose blog China IWOM I am starting to enjoy these days.

Monitoring Tools ( and free )

Thank God some for the new innovative tools are freely available to us. Below is a list of tools I use to follow some of those conversations. Here, I have loosely coined the term “Sentiment Keywords” to describe people’s feelings towards an object; be it feelings towards a brand or a product or even an experience at the store. The tools below allows you to match and search sentiment keyword phrases that appear on blogs, forums, twitter. And when constructed with a brand name, for example… “GKG sucks” or “MyStarbuckIdea cool”, the results will likely interest people in the roles as brand managers, product managers and marketers.

Technorati + Google Reader

Using the example of mystarbucksidea, I create a feed on Technorati that picks up conversations with mentions of “mystarbucksidea” http://feeds.technorati.com/search/mystarbucksidea. Combine it with sentiment keywords, we can also create a feed to find all blog mentions containing the terms “mystarbucksidea rocks”. I actually did that and I found 2 posts for the latter. You can then add these feeds to your Google Reader account (reader.google.com) and monitor future related entries.

This a free service that searches twitter conversations - real people telling everyone what they are doing, thinking, feeling which reminds me of days in IRC channels. Except in Twitter, the messages stick a very long time. I created a feed with Summize that listens for the terms “Singapore Homestay” on twitter and then add it to my feeds list on Google Reader. To make it even more interesting, you can come up with more related terms combination, phrase matching, exact terms matching. The term “MystarbucksIdeas” twits generates a long list here.

Google Alerts is a love and hate thing for me, it all depends on the frequency. It gets to me sometimes, because I cannot keep up with it always. The nice thing about Google Alerts, you can configure the system to inform you “as it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”. When a blog, regular website, contains words that match what you are searching for, Google compiles the list and emails it to you.