Awareness

This is much more relevant for brands than SME’s. Awareness needs to be gauged against your competitors and it might include monitoring sentiment, share of voice or share of conversation. Ever thought a Tweet without a link is wasted? Not if your goal is awareness.

Traffic

Seeing how many people you’re directing to your website from social networks is a very sensible goal, though most businesses will be more interested in gaining traffic en route to 3 (below). One interesting question is where it’s best to channel your traffic? You might actually be better building traffic on a social network, if that site is better equipped to elicit a positive action (i.e. engagement) from your readers.

Conversion

Tracking how your interventions with potential customers via social media are leading to click thru’s and sales conversions brings social media monitoring centre stage in your web metrics set up. Adding Google Analytics to Facebook is a nice way of doing this on the cheap, and services like Hubspot offer a neat end-to-end service for tacking social media leads through to conversations.

Engagement

Gauging how active your customers are in actively responding to your social media activities can be a measure of (a) the quality of the content you’re sharing (b) how you’re presenting it and (c) how close your customers feel to you. You still need to figure out which it is, but benchmarking the number interactions you’re generating is a good start.

Research

Social media monitoring tools can be excellent for gaining real-time insight into products or services you’re offering. You can also set up alerts and searches to ensure you’re up-to-date on industry news and trends. You can get a long way with a few good Twitter searches and Google Alerts, but for comprehensive and immediate results that allow analysis and reporting, you’ll need a pay-for service.

We’ll be running a series of conferences on social media monitoring later this year. Details will be published on our Social Media Monitoring homepage in the coming weeks.

Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp offers a series of in-depth, “how to” sessions, presented by some of the worlds leading experts on social media monitoring and analytics. There will also be live demos from some of the best monitoring solutions, an Exhibition Area with other suppliers, lunch, networking and a comprehensive handout with notes, case studies and e-books. In short: it’s going to be the ultimate social media monitoring training session.

MSM Bootcamp will cover these topics:

• Getting Started with Social Media Monitoring
• How to Choose The Right Social Media Monitoring Tool
• How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service
• How to Monitor Sentiment and Benefit from The Insight this Provides
• How to Identify influencers and Build Valuable Relationships with them
• How to Monitor and Engage with Customers in Real-time
• How to Measure the Success of your Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Each session will include clear guidance on how to run your own social media monitoring campaign, using case studies, examples, demos, volunteers and interactive Q&A sessions. If you have any questions – you’ll have ample opportunity to ask them.

Our Presenters include:

• Nathan Gilliatt, the principal of Social Target and the author of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, who blogs at The Net-Savvy Executive and also runs the industry portal, Social Media Analysis.
• Marshall Sponder, the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, Emeritus Director of Social Media at the Web Analytics Association, currently working with PR firm Porter Novelli.
• Katy Howell, Managing Director of immediate future, whose clients include Sony Europe, BT, Diageo, BBC and Mirror Group and who manages the online PR diploma module for the Institute of Direct Marketing.
• Luke Brynley-Jones, social media marketing consultant and Founder of Our Social Times, which hosts Monitoring Social Media and the Monitoring Bootcamp.

Early bird tickets are on sale here now. Places are limited – so early booking is strongly advised.

The announcement then that MediMix is launching a social media monitoring tool targeted at the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries looks like proof that this logic holds.  ScanBuzz™ is already being used to monitor the top 200 products and 100 corporate brands and, in industries where consumer scare stories can be fatal, a quick, informed response could save these companies millions if not billions. Expect to see more of these niche tools launching in 2010. There it is – my first prediction for the coming year!