Kathryn Denton

At my Public Relations class on Monday (the one I went to before meeting my ethics friend from the last post), we had a guest lecturer on Social Media in PR. His name is Glen Raines and his business is SocialMediaMoves. If you’re struggling to find ways to get your business into the social media flow, I’d suggest checking him out and attending any presentations he does because he really has some interesting thoughts on the future of social media, and the best practices for promoting businesses with it.

While his presentation was very informative, the best part was the toys! He showed us a few listening tools that companies/organizations can use to track how they’re being talked about on the web (or if they’re even being talked about at all).

The first one I’ll show you is Monitter. Monitter is a Twitter monitoring site (as I hope you would have gotten from the name). FYI if you want to read the screenshot, just click on it.

All you have to do to get started is type in the name of the company/organization and see what’s happening. You can add a column to search for something that might fall under the umbrella of your organization (for example you might look up Kellogs in one column and ‘diet’ in another to see if anyone is tweeting about using Kellogs’ products in their diet plans.) You can let the columns scroll in real-time or pause them to give you a chance to see what people are saying. I tried searching under CSO and then individual performers, such as the Concert Master or first flautist, but came up empty-handed. So CSO if you’re listening, nobody’s talking about your players, maybe you should aim some sort of campaign at them.

Another cool tool we discussed is Social Mention. Social Mention goes more in-depth that Monitter and sort of compiles and reports on the data for you.  You type in the name of your organization and it will show you anything that’s been on the web and will need to be refreshed every so often as new stories come in.

I really think this site is awesome. You can sort the results by date or source and choose how far back you want to go. The little circles before the post will be green, gray, or red depending on if the feedback is positive, neutral, or negative. Strength is the likelihood that the brand is being mentioned in social media, Sentiment is the ratio of positive to negative mentions, Passion measures the likelihood that people talking about your brand will do so repeatedly, and Reach measures range of influence. Notice that on the left side the site also breaks down the number of each type of post and the top keywords and users. Underneath top users it also displays top #hashtags and sources along with the number of posts from each source. At the very top of the screen is the option to screen different types of social media. When I set it just to blogs the results were a little different.

FYI to any PRAD students reading my blog, I totally plan on using these sites for both my PR final campaign project and my Advertising final campaign project on CTA!