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Social Radar's graphical depiction of key influencers on the social web

Not the musical theme from the enigmatic Geico branding in this case, but highly pertinent to anyone with a brand to promote. Probably more a question of ‘who’s talking’ though.

“If you’re a brand manager, do you want to know who’s searching for your brand? Absolutely.  Do you also want to know how many people are talking about your product online? Absolutely”.

So wrote Eric in yesterdays’ post – ‘The New Rules of Branding‘ on buzzstudy.com (well worthy reading).     You can also extend that to who is talking about your competitor’s brand and why, so that you can tweak your message accordingly if necessary.  How do you find out though, especially when there are potentially thousands of sites, blogs, forums and social chatter to search through? 

You find someone with the right bit of technology, of course.  In my last post, Searching The Social Web for Your ‘Buyer Personas’, I mentioned Radian6 and today I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar with Brooks Morgan of Infegy,  looking at their social research application, Social Radar.  When you want to know your market and consumers quickly this is the sort of resource to use.  Traditionally, the only way to access this sort of information is through extensive consumer surveys and focus groups studies, all of which take a lot of time and a lot of money. What applications like Social Radar do is monitor the buzz – what people are saying about your product or company online – and they can do it in seconds rather than weeks. It is perhaps a narrower demographic than you can access using traditional methods, but we are chiefly concerned here with companies looking to market through social media.  In this respect an application like Social Radar, though not cheap, can save you a considerable amount of manual online information gathering which can end up being a laborious and expensive process in itself!

“Companies that can create real-time interaction and involvement with their customers will be best prepared to succeed in the new media world”, Eric so rightly says.  However, companies want to know two essential bits of information before they will hire you to manage their social media campaign for them:  

Where is the conversation taking place that they need to be part of and,
how can they monitor the effectiveness of their participation in that conversation – that all important ROI.  

And our answer will be – “We have an app for that”.

I am a big fan of socialmedian – I have found no end of useful stuff since I signed up to it, and this is probably one of the best articles I have come across for businesses wanting to find out where they should be participating in the myriad world of social networking - How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit, by Robin Broitman.

In order for a business to start that all-important conversation with their customers they first have to know where those customers are conversing. There is no point spending hours and hours on your Facebook account if all your ‘buyer personas‘ are conversing on MySpace.  So, how do you find out where that conversation is taking place?  Well, there are three basic ways:

1. If you want to do it yourself for free using tool like Google Alerts, following the guidelines in Robin’s article above,
    
2. If you want to do it yourself and you don’t mind spending some money, then use a tool like Radian6 - it is probably THE most comprehensive tool on the market at the moment and has a very extensive set of features that allow you to manage the data that you retrieve so you can make best use of it,
    
3. Or, if you don’t want the hassle of learning how to use and implement a strategy using something like Radian6 then we are more than happy to do it for you!

The third option may certainly be the more expensive of the options but, for those companies of a certain size, having a team with the expertise to not only extract this kind of information but to create the kind of compelling content that will attract those buyer personas to see you as a solution to their particular need – and in a measureable way – is more than worth it.

It is increasingly apparent that the two things that companies want most when considering a social media strategy is:

1. Knowing where they should be participating  
2. Being able to measure the results of that participation (ROI)

That  is why in the past few weeks we have been moving ourselves to a situation in which we can provide those solutions.  Watch this space for more news very soon.