Filtrbox for Monitoring Your Brand on the Web
The internet is big, right? And there are a lot of people on there, huh? So how do you know when one of them says something about you? This has been a problem for businesses for quite awhile. They want to know when somebody is complaining about them, or praising them. Or maybe they are praising their competitors. (if you want to learn more about why you should monitor your brand, read this article from The Online Marketing Blog). So services like Radian6 came along and helped enterprises begin monitoring and filtering out the “noise”. These services are hugely expensive for everyday people, so many (including me), began “rolling their own” using tools like Dappr (for creating RSS feeds), Yahoo! Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds) and NetVibes (a dashboard for displaying all your data). In fact, I had always planned to write about it here, but I have found a better tool. It’s called Filtrbox. It is a Radian6 for regular people. In fact you can create 5 filters (meaning 5 terms/brand names/etc) for free. I have been using Filtrbox for a few month now and have been really happy with it.
Here are some of the main benefits of using it.
- It monitors blogs, social networks, social news, etc for any mention of your brand.
- It tells you the sites “FiltrRank” which boils down to how influential a particular site is.
- You can set the “FiltrRank” so that you don’t have to see unimportant mentions.
- It emails you daily with a listing of your brands mentions.
Filtrbox creates an easy way to see what is being said about your brand/competitors/industry on the internet. End of story. Check it out!
**UPDATE**
Want to see proof of how these services work? Both brand monitoring companies that I mentioned (Radian6 & FiltrBox) have left comments below thanking me for write up, both are now following me on Twitter, and FiltrBox has contacted me personally and offered to send some schwag. How’s that for response? In less than 24 hours, both companies have made contact and are trying to build a brand relationship! The real test will be if any other brand monitoring service that I didn’t mention follows suit.
Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency
“Crowdsourcing” is a huge buzzword in the Web 2.0 environment. It works on the assumption that the wisdom of many is greater than the wisdom of a few. Crowdsourcing has been applied a wide variety of businesses with varying success. T-shirts (Threadless), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), biomedical research and development (InnoCentive), nominal tasks (Amazon Mechanical Turk), etc, etc, etc. There is a new player to add to the list called Name This. Name This is crowdsourcing the name of your company/project/product.
Here’s how it works. Your company pays $99 and writes a brief summary about your business and any other relevant info about the name you are after. For 48 hours the community brainstorms, posts name ideas, and votes on their favorite name. Once the time is up a super secret algorithm determines which names had the most support and chooses the winners. The top 3 namers and their supporters get a pretty sizable chunk of the money and your company gets 3 market supported names along with about 200 other ideas.
The Name This model is not novel or original, but here is why it is interesting. The majority of crowdsourced services require participants to have some sort of skill or expertise. Name This requires none of this to participate. The ability to think creatively helps, but as you’ll see if you go to the site there are a number of participants who have not yet developed that skill. The beauty of Name This is in the simplicity. Name This is the most “mom friendly” crowdsourcing site I have seen and the companies seeking names don’t suffer because of it. Naming a company/project/product can be either the easiest or hardest thing in the world. Sometimes a name just comes to you and its an obvious fit. But sometimes its an arduous struggle. This struggle is greatly eased when a community of people put their heads together to create a great name.
There are some bugs with Name This (no editing/deleting of your own names, name proposal overload, mysterious algorithm), but there is a lot that can be learned from them. Keeping it simple, easily accessible, and valuable (to both namers and companies) goes a long way when creating a crowdsourced community or service.
TwitbookFeed
Facebook has it’s new look available for preview. Just go to www.new.facebook.com to have a look. It is quite a large redesign. For example the minifeed looks similar to FriendFeed and there are different ‘tabs’ to get you to different parts of the site. A couple weeks ago, those with iPhones got a look at the Facebook app for the iPhone. Nothing too fancy, but if you see the start page for the app, you might think you are on a Twitter client, seeing a list of statuses with an update box.
Is this a turning point for Facebook? We have all been noticing for the past year or so that MySpace has been struggling to keep up with Facebook, bringing any new features that it incorporates directly from the social giant. It seems that MySpace has gone to merely keeping the audience it has. I’m curious if Facebook has reached this point also. What do you think?
L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel Recap & Notes
Last night I attended the L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel. L.i.S.A. is a 4 city panel discussing how businesses and consumers use social networks and where the opportunity lies to connect. I have been to a few of these types of event and panels and increasingly I am realizing that there is no secret to social marketing. The users need to “invite” your brand into their circle. Gaining that acceptance boils down to 3 major aspects:
- Content - provide content that your customers are interested in and is relevant to your business
- Authenticity - being transparent, trustworthy, and credible
- Help users socially connect with you and the community. Make it easy for them to use your service.
If you are not into the whole brevity thing. I have compiled my notes from the event below. I hope you can find a useful bit in there.
L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Portland, OR May 28, 2008
Moderated by: Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media
Panel:
John Furrier Furrier.org former CEO of PodTech
Michael Berkley - CEO of SplashCast
Dave Allen - Director, Insights & Digital Media of Nemo Design - formerly the bassist of Gang of Four
Hashem Bajwa - Director Digital Planning at Goodby, Silverstein & Partner
What is social advertising?
Enlists consumers to help tell your story
Building ambassadors to evangelize
Brands being invited in by consumers
Being accepted by the conversation
Web 1.0 was about website, self service, Web 2.0 is all about relationships
How do people communicate - peers, groups, context to the person
Interesting way: Using the “old media” model alongside social media - YouTube presidential debates
Wrong way: Budwieser spent millions to build Bud.tv, but the almost all of the ad views are on YouTube
Creating content for social media in your down time - HungryMan a production company has produced videos in their off time to post on YouTube that have been extremely popular
Do banner ads on Facebook constitute social advertising or is it old media model?
Clickthrough’s on MySpace and Facebook are extremely low
Would argue that this is still the “old media” view. A banner ad is a push ad. It is not social.
Just spamming your ad on a banner doesn’t work, you must be invited in. Consumer: “I want to be associated with this brand” & “I want to talk about this brand with my friends”
Companies need to understand and adjust for the “real time” environment we are in. How can you use this to add value to the user.
How is social marketing different from product placement?
Product placement is not authentic
Right way: Red Bull - gets popular athletes to organically promote & endorse
Endorsement in the community by a major player and influencer
Endorsement is one of the most cutting edge techniques right now
How does a brand get invited or be accepted?
Brands have fans that want to be associated with them
Start out with the consumer in mind
Example: people on Facebook care about recycling - HP focuses on recycling. Where is the connection
What do the customers think and care about
The metrics to measure social advertising are terrible. We can measure everything, but we don’t know WHAT to measure
Find your value and figure out how to apply it to social media. Understand your niche do something remarkable and the marketing and social media takes care of itself. You need to figure out what you want to do and accomplish.
How do you measure distributed content?
Are you gaining brand ambassadors
Track influencers (super distributors) - how many of their friends saw it and added it to their page
No one is more authentic than a friend
Build commerce into the distribution model
Brands must get invited into a social network that already exists. They can’t develop their own network, because it will automatically be viewed as an advertisement and inauthentic. The users won’t come.
Always put out content!
Content about your value proposition
People come from search - they find you on their own
Get in front of the eyes that are looking for you. Don’t try to make people look for you.
“The content is the ad”
Whoever creates the best user value win
AUTHENTICITY must be a core value
User experience is also key. What does my target audience look like? Jacob Nielsen is a usability guru.
The internet is an opt-in network. Aided (search engines) and unaided (offline marketing) awareness.
Single user on a small site can be a carrier to a bigger site and spread a message / opinion
Let the users do what they want to do. Stay out of there way. Let them talk to each other and try to measure it.
Be part of the experiments or at least talk with the people who are. Tap into the people who are doing interesting stuff.
Recommended Books
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz
Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
Do you use LinkedIn Answers?
Admittedly, I don’t use LinkedIn to its full potential. A feature was just brought to my attention by Kent Lewis of Anvil Media, LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn Answers is a feature not so prominently featured on the page (the page is busy enough as it is). It is very similar to Yahoo! Answers. You ask questions and any users can submit answers. You can then select the “Best Answer” which will display on their profile. Since LinkedIn focuses on business and professional services, questions generally revolve around business advice. Their are a lot of experts on this site, so you can get some great free and insightful advice. The benefits of answering questions are just as great. Every answer you post is a reflection on you and your brand. You are building your credibility and expert status. And each time you are tagged as the “Best Answer” your credibility sky rockets. It can also be a great way to find new leads and get new business without doing traditional sales.
Now start building your LinkedIn expertise!
Comcast and a Customer Service Revolution?
With all the controversy and suckness coming from Comcast’s general direction, who would have thought that they would be leading the way in a customer service (r)evolution. Comcast has a man on the inside. Frank Eliason a.k.a. @comcastcares is a Comcast Customer Service Rep that scouts out tweeted complaints, proactively contacts the customer, then works to resolve the issue! He helps with customers’ problems all day long including one for Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and John C. Dvorak. The idea is simple, keep an ear to the ground, and help people out. Tweet Scan makes keeping an ear out trivial. You can use it search in real time for Twitter posts containing your brand name. It also offers RSS for your search! Allowing you to be notified immediately whenever somebody comments on your company. You are literally listening to 1,032,665 (as shown on TwitDir) users simultaneously for any mention of your name. Now THAT is a killer app! So, you’ve found the people with issues, now all you have to do is have one of your trained representatives fix the problem. If it’s so easy why is Comcast the only Fortune 500 company doing this? After all, searching out people who are having problems and fixing them not only saves you money and builds strong customer relationships but is also great for press! The truth is, most Fortune 500 companies are too slow moving to jump on an opportunity like this, but that doesn’t mean that you should be. Every company (and many individuals) should at least have some sort of rudimentary system in place to keep a finger on the pulse of what is being said about them on the internet (we will be talking about this in future posts). It could be as simple as a Tweet Scan or Technorati RSS feed for brand name. You can then use this information for customer service (as in our Comcast case), monitoring general feelings about your brand, engaging customers, cultivating new ideas or strategies, maybe just for vanity, etc, etc, etc. Twitter may or may not be just another flavor of the month, but it poses some interesting opportunities. Its question “What are you doing right now”, lends itself to high volume use and open, off-the-cuff insight into users’ thoughts and feelings. I think Comcast has started the trend. It shouldn’t be long before other companies who share a demographic with Twitter are jumping on board. Think Apple and Dell. And what about unrelated brands with famously good customer service? Think Cadillac, Four Seasons Hotels, Nordstrom. It shouldn’t be long now. Every company needs to actively manage their brand online.
So here’s my question for you: How do you manage your presence online? What companies have you seen do an outstanding job? Where do you see this movement going?
