Your Brand: 10-Minute Social Media Monitoring

December 9, 2009 by

twitterGoogle is adding live results from Twitter into searches this week, forever changing the nature of brand management. Now more than ever, you need to monitor your organization’s social media presence.  You need to know right away if the live Tweet results include “worst service” or “sucks,” so you can diffuse these conversations and “push down” negative tweet search results.

A common concern, however, is that monitoring social media takes too much time, especially for small- to medium-sized organizations.  Here’s a plan for one person from a small- to medium-sized organization to monitor social media in 10 minutes a day:

  • Check Twitter for chatter about your organization (4 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck, Monitter, or Twitter’s search feature to monitor real-time conversations about your organization. To check once a day, set up an RSS feed using Google Reader.
  • Use Google Reader to check other social media sites (2 minutes): Also include in your Google Reader subscriptions searches on your organization name, services, products, executives, or brand terms in  Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and other social media sites.
  • Scan Google Alerts (2 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your organization name, services, products, executives, or brand search terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive daily updates (live is also an option). When your search terms are mentioned on the web, Google will alert you with an e-mail!
  • Scan Social Mention Alerts (2 minutes): Just like Google Alerts, Social Mention Alerts are e-mail updates (but daily only) of the latest social media results (blog, microblog, etc.) based on your search terms. Social Media Alerts and Google Alerts produce different results, so it’s worth it to sign up for both. 

Part Two of my “Your Brand” series will cover how to deal with real-time social reputation management.

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With WordPress, Your Ideas Beam into Reality

December 2, 2009 by

feedI love WordPress!

In case you missed my Oct. 15, 2009 post, WordPress is one of the leading free open source content management systems (CMS).  It’s user-friendly, interactive ( i.e., Web 2.0), and lets you create professional looking websites in no time. More importantly, you can quickly improve your site when you come up with new ideas or technology changes—without having to pay for any software or development costs.

This Sunday I came up with an idea on how to improve the web feed for eVentures in Cyberland: Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass, and What Communicators Found There. Thanks to WordPress and its large community of developers, I was able to identify the technical means to achieve what I envisioned and implement my idea in just a few hours.  

My idea was to separate the site’s web feed into three streams: one for all posts, one for cyberland posts, and one for mommyblog posts. I figured my blog’s two main categories, cyberland and mommyblog, are different enough to attract individual audiences who may be uninterested in the other category.

My solution was to install the “Category Specific RSS feed subscription” WordPress plugin along with Google Feedburner. As added pluses, Feedburner dresses up your raw XML and presents it in a neat, formatted, and readable fashion and enables you to keep count of your subscribers, change the location of your feed without losing your subscribers, and e-mail subscriptions.

Have you had any similar experiences zooming from idea to implementation with WordPress? Please share your successes in the comments section below.

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Video Clip of the Month: Muppets on Social Media

December 1, 2009 by

The Muppets Studio produced a cute clip about social media. Here’s a link to the video on YouTube:

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My Life as a Communications Consultant

November 24, 2009 by

NOTE: This post is out of date. “Alice” starts Extended Day, the Montessori equivalent of full-day Kindergarten, in September 2011, which will make me available for semi full-time work.

When I am out and about with “Alice,” my 2-year-old daughter, I am often asked what I do for a living. I usually answer “communications consultant” rather than “work at home mom” (WAHM) or “mompreneur.”  Some people seem to think WAHM and mompreneur are the new euphemisms for homemaker or that I must be selling Tupperware or something.

If the conversation continues, I explain, thanks to the Internet, I work from home when “Alice” is at Montessori school and napping or sleeping. That means I can easily work 25 to 30 hours a week or up to 40 in a pinch (with Jim’s childcare help). I try to work between 20 and 25 hours a week on average, but that can be hard because consulting is often feast or famine (you need good financial management and strategic planning skills to make it work). I don’t plan to work full-time again until “Alice” is at least 4 1/2 and in her Montessori school’s Extended Day program. I would consider a 20- to 32-hour-a-week office job before then—but only for the right opportunity and commute.

I’m lucky that most of my areas of expertise—strategic communications, web and new media, and print materials—can be done in small chunks of time remotely (alas, one of my most potentially lucrative job skills, U.S. federal government proposal writing, really can’t). I’m also lucky that my former employer has become my biggest client and that my supervisor there is a huge Montessori advocate and supports mothers spending time with their young children (from a non-sexist Montessori perspective).

I love being able to set my own hours and not have to ask for time off when I take “Alice” to the doctor, her Kindermusik class, or the library. My client sessions are primarily over the phone, so I don’t spend time commuting, freeing up upwards of 10 hours a week for work or family. Furthermore, not having to pay for gas, parking, restaurant lunches, expensive office attire, and frequent drycleaning saves me money. What do I tell people is the best part of being a communications consultant, WAHM, mompreneur, or whatever you want to call me? Being able to remain in the profession I love, get paid for it, and stay at home to watch “Alice”—and my career—grow!

What are your experiences as a WAHM or mompreneur?

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Social Media Campaign Sets Guinness Record

November 23, 2009 by

The Atlanta-based social media marketing agency Everywhere set a Guinness World Record October 16 to 17, 2009, for the most widespread social network message in a 24-hour period with 209,771 mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. In fact, the massive viral effort was so successful that #beatcancer, the campaign’s trending topic, became the top one on Twitter.

Incredibly, Everywhere conceptualized and executed the one-day pro-bono campaign in one week. It ended up raising more than $70,000 for four non-profit cancer organizations. Here’s a Blog World video about the record-setting campaign.

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