Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need social media monitoring tools. Before you reach for your wallet and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you will get an understanding of what is available and if you need any paid services.

I have collected 54 free social media monitoring tools.In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go...

There are companies that talk about becoming a social enterprise. Then there are those that invest in it. Dell’s investment has resulted in multiple patent applications for technologies designed to be used just internally.

The tool—Social Net Advocacy (SNA)—was on display last month at Dell World 2012 in Austin....

It’s simple to click through layers of data (topics, media providers, authors, and posts) to find out what people are saying about products, components, stages of the customer journey (for both commercial and consumer customers), and business functions. Each category and subcategory includes a breakdown of sentiment—positive, negative and neutral, along with the number of posts devoted to that topic and the change in SNA over the past week....

...According to Neilson Global trust survey back in 2009, only 14% of people trust ads while 78% of people trust consumers’ recommendations.

While the number may change today, the concept of consumers trusting their friends’ recommendations remains the same.

Recently, I wanted to watch a movie and I couldn’t decide if I should watch Wreck it Ralph or Rise of the Guardians, so I asked my editor Henry for his opinion, and he recommended me to watch Wrect it Ralph. I went with his suggestion and I didn’t regret it. But guess who just lost one customer here because somebody I trust pointed me the other way? 

The big question is how do you find these influencers or brand advocates? There are a couple of tools out there that can help you with that....