Most social media experts agree that organizations must participate in conversations in the social media space.  While monitoring (passive listening) has almost always been the standard practice in traditional media monitoring, it is becoming more and more accepted that when it comes to social media, companies should become active in a multi-directional dialogue, in addition to simple monitoring.

What people have to say about your company, your products, your competitors, and other issues in your industry is shaping the public’s perception and opinions.  It is crucial that correct, accurate information is available.  Social Media is where the community goes to express their opinions, recount their experiences, and seek information from others who may have grass-roots information about their subject of interest.  Your organization needs to have a voice in these conversations.

To facilitate this process, FPinfomart Heartbeat allows you to participate directly in the social conversation relevant to your organizations in two popular media – Twitter, and Facebook.

Linking your Twitter account, and Facebook fan or other public pages to Heartbeat allows you to respond and converse in these media as soon as conversations requiring participation are identified through the monitoring process.   You can identify top influences and contact them when and if this becomes necessary.  And, keeping all of this engagement in a single platform allows you to take advantage of the workflow management functionality of the product, leaving a complete and detailed engagement trail for measurement and follow-up.

Response to a Tweet, directly from within the Heartbeat product. The response will be recorded in the engagement trail for this item.

FPinfomart Heartbeat allows you to centralize and track your social media monitoring and engagement activities in a single platform.

Our customer demo of Heartbeat ends today.  Consider joining us at our final online open house session, Friday May 28th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

One of the biggest challenges when monitoring social media is dealing with the sheer volume of coverage.  It simply isn’t practical to read the hundreds, or potentially even thousands of relevant results you’ll retrieve each day.  It’s critical to have tools at your disposal to make sense of all this data.  You need to be able to “slice and dice” your results in a flexible way, to instantly apply meaning to an otherwise overwhelming amount of information.

There are a lot of powerful features in FPinfomart Heartbeat, but one of my favourites is the “Compare” tab.  This screen allows you to not only compare yourself to your competitor(s) across a set of insightful data points, but also to drill down into specific aspects of the social conversation, and relate them to your own company and your competitors.

Take, for example, our Livestock Agriculture demo.  The default Compare screen shows us how much conversation volume is happening as it pertains to each of the competitors (in this example we’ve defined the competitors as beef, pork, poultry and lamb).

The default "Compare" screen compares your volume of coverage in social media to that of your competitors.

As you scroll down from this volume comparison, you’ll also see comparison across the competitors of sentiment, as well as geo-demographic information such as gender, age, and country of residence.

However, this comparison can become even more granular, using the drop-down menus at the top of the Compare tab.  You can compare the competitors across a specific aspect of the conversation – for example, we can see the data for each these agriculture types as it pertains to the conversation about organic meats.

You can narrow your comparison to a specific "tag" or aspect of the social conversation.

Alternatively, rather than comparing volume, sentiment, and demographics for the competitors themselves, we can compare the aspects of the conversation we’re monitoring.  Use the drop-down menus at the top of the Compare tab to select each of the conversation “tags.”  You can compare these aspects across the entire results set or narrow to just a particular competitor.  For example, we might compare the discussions of organics, GMO (genetically modified organisms), local eating, and point-of-purchase when poultry is being discussed.

Comparing conversation threads, rather than just competitors, can be an insightful way to examine the data.

We invite our customers to experiment with all parts of the Heartbeat product during the free customer trial, which runs until the end of Thursday, May 27, 2010.  Diving into the Compare tab will really get you thinking about just what YOU want to monitor in the social media universe!

We hope you’ve had a chance to take advantage of the FPinfomart customer trial of the Heartbeat social media monitoring platform.  The trial has been extended to May 27th, so you’ve still got a few days left to test-drive this exciting product!

Although the launch point for Heartbeat is a graphic dashboard integrated right into your FPinfomart.ca account, it’s important to understand that there’s much more to this product than just that initial screen!  You can click anywhere within this dashboard to open the full application (it will open in a new browser window or tab).

It is interesting to note that the click you make on this dashboard is context-sensitive.  That is to say, if you click on a certain data point you’ll open Heartbeat on a screen showing results relevant to that data point.  So, for example, if I were to notice a spike in the volume of coverage line chart, I could click that data point to load the Heartbeat application to a screen showing me results for THAT day, in the medium on which I’d clicked.

The dashboard screen is clickable, and your click is context-sensitive.

In the screenshot of the dashboard, above, we see a spike in activity in News for May 20th.  I can click that data point to bring up the following screen:

Browse the results set, filtered for you based on where you'd clicked the dashboard.

I hope you’ll experiment with Heartbeat during this final week of the customer trial.  Click around, and discover the rich functionality of this exciting social media monitoring tool.  I’ll continue to post tips to the blog each day this week.

Questions about FPinfomart Heartbeat?  Contact us at 1-800-661-7678 or by e-mail at helpdesk@canwest.com.