Monitoring Your Social Media Presence

I've written before about the importance of monitoring your online reputation. In today's economy this is even more important, both for individuals and organizations. Here's a nice article on strategies for monitoring your social media presence in 10 minutes a day. (There's some argument as to whether or not 10 minutes is a realistic timeframe, but still this is a do-able daily list).

The comments offer a few additional ideas, such as setting up RSS feeds to monitor blogs in your industry or occupation where you can go to observe, interact, comment, etc. As we discussed during last year's Comment Challenge, online interactions are another important aspect of brand building.

Another comment:

I'd love to see a follow up post on the analytics and reporting on the other end. That is, once you've finished these 10-20 min of daily monitoring, what tools do you use to compile, track, analyze and share the social media results? How do you take those Google alerts from your inbox to a well-organized report? Or compile and rank tweets, LI answers, etc.? 

This is a great question--anyone have suggestions for how they do this?

Comments

[Harold Jarche]

There are now several social media monitor services that will aggregate this for you, such as: http://whostalkin.com/

[Emmadw]

Some interesting ideas ... I may start to think out a related version with an educational focus, rather than a business one, for, though we have some overlaps, there are differences;

[Adam Green]

Michelle:

I try not to leave comments that are just plugs for my product, but since you asked specifically for a way to produce analysis and reports on Google Alerts, I thought you would want to know about AlertRank.com. It is designed to solve exactly this problem. You can see a simple example of going from a list of Google Alerts to a customized PDF report in a few clicks in this blog post:

http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/04/08/identifying-the-google-alerts-pain-point-and-solving-it/

[Michele Martin]

Thanks for the links Harold and Adam. I think that for a lot of people, moving to the "analysis level" of social monitoring is the next big issue. In fact, the meta/trending stuff is probably the next level of challenge for a lot of social media tools. I know that for most people I work with, the first step has been dealing with the technology and participation in social media. I'm not sure that they've moved to the level of "what does all of this mean and how do I manage/respond to it?"

Emma--if you come up with an educationally-focused set of steps, drop me a link--would love to post!