Tools to Support Social Media Transformation

As Social Media has moved into the mainstream, there has been a corresponding increase in thought leadership on the high level strategy, people, and policy changes that are required to support social media transformation.

There are many different descriptions of this transformation, from the 4 c’s, such as content, collaboration, community, collective to the 4 e’s , Kodak’s expose, engage, educate, evangelize. However you choose to describe the shift, taking the first steps includes listening to the conversation about your organization, it’s products or services and it’s image.

Evidenced by Ken Burbary’s current wiki list of 201 different options, the selection of tools is extensive. Understanding which features will deliver the most impact for your business provides you with a framework to evaluate your choices.

Platform (Account) Management

Participating in social media can mean managing multiple platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Foursquare, Google Buzz and MySpace, at the same time. If you are still unclear about which platforms are relevant for your organization, you may want to read the Top 52 Social Media Platforms post on the 60 Second Marketer blog.

Tools such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic can assist you with  cohesively updating, and to some degree monitoring, your accounts on these platforms. Though both allow you to monitor and respond to mentions of your keyword(s) within the same interface, they lack the ability for more than one person to respond to tweets at the same time. Tweetdeck also must be physically installed on a client machine which may not be appropriate for your environment. They do however, make good, free, starting points for a small to mid sized business, and take you beyond the basic Twitter Search or Google Alerts.

Monitoring

More sophisticated tools allow you to both monitor and analyze mentions of your keywords on either one or many of the platforms. Keywords can include your brand name, your product name or class, or your competitors brand, product or service. Twazzup provides details of Twitter activity and has the added feature of providing additional details about sources when you mouse over them. Information available from monitoring tools includes:

• Volume Metrics, quantify activity related to your key word(s)
• Opinion or Sentiment, attempts to qualify whether the reaction to  your brand, product or service is positive, neutral or negative
• Influence or Reach, measures the the impact those discussing your  key words have, for example, how many people follow them
• Engagement Trends, allow you to identify the content that provides you with the most impact.

Social Mention provides you with the opportunity to track key words in real time across 100+ social media platforms including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google. Their easy to read dashboard is an uncomplicated starting place for listening to the conversation about your key words. You can also choose to have an RSS feed generated, to be e-mailed on topics that are particularly important for your organization.

Mobile Apps

If monitoring and updating on the go is relevant for you, make sure that the tool(s) you choose have corresponding mobile applications. Hootsuite has applications available for both iPhone and Android, each of which has customizable interfaces, the ability to update multiple accounts at once, save searches and track statistics.

Collaboration

If more than one team member will be updating and monitoring your platforms, you can opt for a tool with integrated workflow. Hootsuite allows multiple contributors to share access, without sharing passwords, and allows you to assign tasks to different team members. CoTweet is free (Standard edition) for small teams who monitor only a few twitter accounts. Like Hootsuite, it offers multiple team members the ability to engage in conversations on the same accounts at the same time.

Cost

The price of these tools varies from free for all functionality, to free for monitoring of one key word to paid subscriptions. Generally a case of you get what you pay for, the higher monitoring functionality may be more relevant for larger organizations or when social media has become a more integrated part of your day to day operations. Examples of paid subscription tools include:

• Co Tweet Enterprise, allows for more advanced roles and workgroups, monitoring of facebook, integration with salesforce and more complete monitoring and analytics.
• Scoutlabs, from $250 per month, allows for unlimited searches, advanced analytics, the ability to export data and team collaboration features.
• Radian6, $600 per month, one of the most robust tools, their extensive list of features supports clients such as Microsoft, Adobe and Dell.
• Trackur, ranges from $18 per month for 5 saved searches to $377 per month for unlimited saved searches. They also offer Trackur free if your needs can be met with 1 saved search. The pullNotpush marketing site offers additional tips on how to use Trackur effectively.

The majority of the tools with paid subscriptions offer a free trial period, giving you a chance to test drive prior to committing to their ongoing licensing fee. Consider using other free tools first, to identify whether they will fit the bill for your stage of transformation, and to provide you with a baseline to evaluate what commitment is reasonable for the options gained by the more feature rich tools.