I do think that social media can be used by companies and organizations to help them monitor communications. I do want to make it clear that I don’t drink from the social media kool aid and think that if you’re not on social mediums that your company will fail. Some social media ‘experts’ have such strong convictions that they often tout the millions of dollars corporate America is saving or profiting from their social media initiatives. Just have an open mind and don’t be sold on it. Learn about it. See how your company can profit from social media and then use it constructively. Don’t do it because some guy shows you tons of links and forces the social media kool aid down your throat. The March 16th, 2010 Wall Street Journal article: Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media, quotes the following
“…survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.”
It’s most important to know how to use social media in order to net a profit and not a loss. One tool that can help you is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a 3rd party application that can run on your desktop pc – Windows, Mac, or Linux, iphone, and iPad. It is an awesome tool that also facilitates updating your Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace, FourSquare and Linkedin all at once, OR you can choose which account to update with a specific post. You can also set it up to monitor your channels like direct messages, mentions of your @handle, and search terms that are crucial to your organization. This last part, search terms, will allow you to do a search, enter your company’s name, and then any time that term is used, you will be alerted and the tweet will show up in that column of TweetDeck. That is key to monitoring who is talking about your industry or your organization. It allows you to thank clients that praise and do damage control for those that are disgruntled. So what does all this mean? Let’s walk through a basic setup, it’s very easy. Continue reading Howto Use Tweetdeck Effectively