Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

“#” VS “@” – The Gr8 Deb8

Posted by LushHouse on March 2, 2012

Thanks to contributor Maram Aoudi for this post.

Your guide to understanding Twitter and the difference between a “#” and “@”

#Tagging

When you “#tag” something you are doing it in order to join a trending topic or a conversation. It’s extremely useful to join the trending topic because it gives you exposure to people talking about the same thing you are. When you #tag (sometimes called hashtag), it becomes clickable (a hyperlink), and when clicking the #tag, it will show you everyone else engaging in the same conversation about that certain subject.

For example if you tag #coffee, then by clicking on the link, you can see what everyone around the world is saying at that moment about coffee, and join in on the conversation. This will help you increase your exposure and following because it allows your tweet to be seen by everyone who is talking about #coffee. Other people who are talking about coffee may see your tweet, enjoy it and ultimately start following you. It also allows you to join the conversation and engage with others on Twitter. If your tweet does not have a #tag in it, then it is only being seen by your followers; it does not allow you to engage the twitter realm and make new contacts.

@-ing

When you “@” someone you are tweeting to get their direct attention. You are engaging that person/company into a conversation. When you @ a person/company it drives potential traffic to that user’s account. The product or person must have an account in order for you to do this.

For example you can tweet @Starbuckscanada, and by doing so, the person controlling that account (and all your followers) will directly see that tweet. You are tweeting to get the attention of Starbucks Canada. Unless Starbucks Canada responds to your tweet or retweets you, only they (and your followers) will see it. Once they respond to you, then their followers and everyone who stumbles on their account will see your name.

# and @ – Try it out

You can include a #tag and an@ in the same tweet, for example:

I had @starbucks this morning their #pumpkinspicelatte is delicious!!!

This drives traffic to Starbucks and allows you to join the conversation about pumpkin spice lattes. It is also a benefit because for the people searching pumpkin spice latte, they might also see your account and decide to follow you.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged: social, Tips | Comments Off

Your Online Brand: Where Personal Meets Professional

Posted by LushHouse on February 27, 2012

Please welcome a new contributor to our Blog! Maram Aoudi is a member of our Social Media and Professional Services team. This is her first post on our Blog, and we look forward to sharing her insights with you.

By now, you must have heard that social media is an invaluable asset to a company. Social networking is the fastest way to connect with your clientele and find out what is being talked about in your industry. People of all demographics are online, all the time, making it the best way to find your audience and launch targeted campaigns in a time of need. The catch is that the industry is trickling down and impacting the relationships between future employees and employers. The truth is, the internet never forgets–it will always remember the mistakes and successes you create on its many faces. Because of this, employers are turning to the internet to find out more about potential future employees. Branding yourself online is necessary in order to grow and stay up to date with your industry of interest. Determining your brand can be difficult at first, but it is important to always practice safe online etiquette.

Why is online branding important to employers?

The number one thing employers do is “Google you.” This makes it easy for an employer to see what your online engagement is like. You might speak eloquently in your interview but if your online presence does not speak to the company or employer’s brand, that can be the deciding factor between you and your competition. If you are applying to work for an environmentally friendly company that is constantly advocating against animal cruelty, then you probably don’t want to blog about your new fur hat.

Manage your Facebook

The ultimate decision is yours: is your Facebook account a way for you to connect with friends or find employers? If it’s a tool you use mainly for socializing with your friends, be sure to manage your privacy settings and make sure that you are not easily searchable. At the end of the day, an employer does not want to hire a person whose Facebook account seems unprofessional.

Blog Positively

It’s always great to blog; it’s a way for you to connect with the world and share your personality online. Blogging positively is important because you get to tell people a little bit about yourself and pass your positive outlook on to others. If you are going to blog under your own name, make sure to do it in a professional way. Future employers and readers relate to positive tones and messages more than negative ones. As people look to others to engage and communicate in the social space, blogging positively makes you approachable and will help you gain followers and return readers.

Past mistakes

Maybe you made a mistake a couple of years ago. You didn’t realize that a post you had written would actually get read or perhaps your views have changed since. The best thing to do is create more content online in order to bury and outdate your mistake post. Keep writing articles, blogging and be active in the social space. The more information you get out there about yourself the more content people will able to find about you. For example, if the post you are ashamed of is on the first page of Google, just write more content so you can outdate and push the content down to page 4. An employer will look at your most recent work and/or the first 2 pages of material. If at an interview the post you are ashamed of is brought up, address it like an adult and explain how you have grown since then and now realize the importance of online branding.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged: social, Tips | Comments Off

More Americans Using Social Media and Technology in Emergencies

Posted by Jennifer Stein on February 6, 2012

I recently became aware of a 2011 American Red Cross study which examined respondents’ attitudes toward social media and emergency assistance.

The study showed that Americans are relying more and more on social media, mobile technology and online news outlets to learn about ongoing disasters, seek help and share information about their well-being after emergencies.

Some of the key findings included:

Followed by television and local radio, the internet is the third most popular way for people to gather emergency information with 18 percent of both the general and the online population specifically using Facebook for that purpose;

Nearly a fourth (24 percent) of the general population and a third (31 percent) of the online population would use social media to let loved ones know they are safe;

Four of five (80 percent) of the general and 69 percent of the online populations surveyed believe that national emergency response organizations should regularly monitor social media sites in order to respond promptly;

For those who would post a request for help through social media, 39 percent of those polled online and 35 of those polled via telephone said they would expect help to arrive in less than one hour.

While we often focus on social media as a component of customer service, competitive intelligence, and dissemination of information, it is interesting to note that it is becoming such a pervasive avenue for communication that expectations for emergency assistance have come to incorporate social media.

This survey consulted American respondents, but I would expect that the implications for Canada are quite similar.

via More Americans Using Social Media and Technology in Emergencies (or view a nice slide-show style summaryof the survey results [PDF]).

Posted in General, Social Media | Tagged: links, social | Comments Off

FPinfomart Heartbeat – Workflow Management

Posted by Jennifer Stein on May 30, 2011

FPinfomart Heartbeat contains a Workflow Management tool that provides several key tools:

Add internal comments to any item – such as notes, to-do items, suggested follow up, etc.
Assign follow-up on any item to another Heartbeat user
Get notified by e-mail if a colleague assigns an item to you
E-mail a link to any item to any e-mail address
Respond via Twitter to any Tweet, and keep a record of your response with the original item

When you hover over any hit in the Your Heartbeats tab, a “Manage Workflow” bar pops up. Click the plus sign to open the Workflow tools.

From here, you can enter any notes for yourself, or others. Any user from your organization will be able to see these notes when they view this result. Optionally, drop down the “select a user” pull-down and choose another Heartbeat user if you’d like to assign responsibility for this item. You’ll also find a link to e-mail an item to any e-mail address, from within the Manage Workflow tools.

Open the Manage Workflow tools to add any notes, and optionally assign the item to a colleague.

If you’ve added any notes to the item, they’ll appear whenever your mouse hovers over that item. These notes will also appear to all other Heartbeat users within your company, so you can use this feature as a collaboration tool.

Notes have been left on this item.

If you plan to use the assign-to-colleague functionality, you may wish to take advantage of the e-mail alert functionality. This allows you to be notified by e-mail if someone uses Workflow Management to assign an item to you.

If you encounter a Twitter result to which you’d like to @reply, click the Contents icon next to the Tweet. The first time you do this, you’ll be prompted to follow a few easy steps to connect your Twitter account to your Heartbeat account. Once you’ve linked Twitter to your Heartbeat login, clicking the Contents icon will pop up a Twitter response box, where you can post your @reply directly from within Heartbeat. This unifies your inbound and outbound Twitter activities in a single platform, with the added advantage of logging your response inline with the hit. You can then refer back to your response in future, and, your colleagues who log in to Heartbeat can see that an item has been responded to (and what that response was).

Respond on Twitter from within the Heartbeat interface, and automatically keep a record of your response.

The Workflow Management tools in FPinfomart Heartbeat offer you a collaborative workspace with which to log activities, interact with your colleagues, assign responsibility for follow-up, and Tweet, all within your results set.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged: social, Tips, trials | Comments Off

Flashback Week: Is a picture worth 1000 Tweets?

Posted by Jennifer Stein on March 16, 2011

I’m away this week, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to repost some of my favourite entries from the Archives of this blog. This post originally ran on November 25, 2010.

(or blog mentions, or forum posts, or… ?)

Reading a stream of content, however you monitor social media, can be interesting – but when crisis strikes nothing is more compelling, telling, or has more impact than a graph showing a spike in conversation surrounding an issue.

When I read about this week’s recall of Junior-strength Motrin (amongst other products), I thought immediately about our FPinfomart Heartbeat demo of the pharmaceutical industry. It monitors comparatively between the major pain-relief brands (Tylenol, Advil, and Motrin) along several issues-based criteria, including recalls. What would the social media conversation surrounding the Motrin recall look like?

The Heartbeat "Measure" screen shows a clear spike in conversations mentioning both Motrin and recall, on the day that the recall was announced. Notice also that the conversation continued in the Twitter medium into the following day, more so than in other media types.

I was also curious as to whether the other pain relievers monitored in this Heartbeat would also receive additional attention in the context of this conversation, so I used the “Compare” tab to find out.

Comparing Motrin to other pain relievers

It is interesting to note that Tylenol received a corresponding bump in mentions in conversations about recalls on the day that Motrin's recall was announced. This was mostly due to reporters and individuals reminiscing about the relatively recent recall of Tylenol products, and using the two examples as the basis for discussions about the safety of these products in general.

As evidenced by the graphs above, having the tools available to report instantly on issues provides critical insight into the impact of any crisis event. They also show the value of strategic monitoring of your products, your competitors, and the issues facing your industry.

For more information on FPinfomart Heartbeat social media monitoring, or for a free trial, please contact your FPinfomart sales representative.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged: social, web | Comments Off

Flashback Week: How FPinfomart Heartbeat is different from Google

Posted by Jennifer Stein on March 11, 2011

I’m away this week, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to repost some of my favourite entries from the Archives of this blog. This post originally ran on June 15, 2010.

When demonstrating the Heartbeat product, one of the questions we hear occasionally is, “…but can’t I monitor Social Media with Google Alerts?” While you may eventually locate much of your social content using Google, despite the depth of the Google index it’s no match for Heartbeat when it comes to Social Media monitoring, for many reasons.

Advanced Search Syntax

The ease of use of Google’s one-box search interface is great for one-off web searching, but when sifting through millions of social documents it just doesn’t allow the specificity required to weed out irrelevant content. Whether the topics you monitor generate thousands or only tens of hits each day, you want to ensure that only those conversations relevant to you are included in your results.

FPinfomart Heartbeat queries allow the use of advanced search logic to include variations on names, synonyms, exclusionary terms, multiple queries, and full Boolean logic to ensure the accuracy of your results.

A Platform for Collecting Your Results

While you may be able to locate a fair amount of relevant content using Google, you’ll be looking at each item individually. You’ll have to click each item, open it in its original context, read it, and then what? How do you keep a record of where these results were located, the date they were published, where they came from?

With FPinfomart Heartbeat your results accumulate automatically into a single platform. The list of results is always available to you. You can look at hits from your choice of date range – just today’s hits; past 7 days; 30 days; or any custom date range you wish. Once you become a Heartbeat customer, you begin to accumulate an Archive of results and can go back to them at any time.

You can also see the full text of any of your results without leaving the Heartbeat platform (including highlighted keywords, for context).

Finally, you can export a csv file (opens in Excel) of your results to create your own custom reports.

Segmenting Your Results

Even if you were to find a way to collect results you’d located using Google (after multiple keyword searches and ignoring irrelevant results), how do you analyze this information? How many of the conversations you found have to do with each of the issues you’re tracking? How do you compare things like share of voice, volume of coverage on various issues, and where in the world these conversations are happening?

The Heartbeat product is designed to tag all the content you retrieve along dimensions that YOU describe. Whether you want to compare coverage of your own company against that of your competitor; see how often one issue is discussed vs. another; or some combination of these, it is possible with FPinfomart Heartbeat. You can also search a single social media type (e.g. Twitter, or YouTube), or divide your results along geodemographic lines (gender, location, age).

Not only can you FIND relevant content, you can then “slice and dice” it quickly and easily.

Information about your Results

Beyond getting your eyeballs on the conversations that are meaningful to you, it’s critical to understand who is participating in these conversations.

As alluded to in the previous section, Heartbeat assigns geodemographic information to each result collected. We also assign an Authority score to each, allowing you to understand the impact the conversation might be having on the community.

Automatic sentiment detection allows you to see a rating for each result, as well as sentiment trends for your results sets.

And, text analytics create tag clouds and detect key conversations, helping you to quickly parse large volumes of data into critical components.

Social Engagement & Workflow Management

FPinfomart Heartbeat is not only a social media monitoring tool, but also includes tools for engaging directly with the social community, as well as managing your internal social activity workflow.

You can respond to any Twitter result (with an @reply) directly from within Heartbeat. You can also post new Tweets and view statistics about your followers. You can manage your public Facebook pages (“Fan” pages) from within Heartbeat, and view insight into who is interacting with your Facebook page.

The ability to manage an “Engagement Trail” allows you to keep track of these interactions. As well, you can assign workflow tasks to colleagues, so that follow-ups are automatically tagged to them. A record of these assignments is kept within Heartbeat.

Conclusion

Google is an outstanding search engine and certainly is hard to beat when looking for information, doing one-off research projects, or locating a website. However when it comes to targeted monitoring, measurement, and data management, a platform designed and built for these exercises is critical. FPinfomart Heartbeat offers the tools and resources required for successful Social Media Monitoring.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged: products, social | Comments Off

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