Live Podcast: Monitoring Social Media Conference Preview #MSM10

Following the success of their events In London, Influence People is hosting a one-day Social Media Monitoring Conference in San Francisco on 21st October, followed by a half-day training bootcamp on 22nd October.

Monitoring Social Media (#MSM10) will bring together leading brands, PR and marketing experts to discuss the latest ideas, trends and techniques in social media monitoring and measurement. Though a series of presentations, panels and expert-led discussions, we will explore the critical issues that marketers and PR professionals are facing in their efforts to monitor their social media interactions.

Get a free preview of what to expect at the conference as well as insights you can use now! Catch the archive here:

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Remember that this show is by you, not just for you! Your questions are an essential part of the program and included in this show! Remember you are always welcome to tweet, Facebook or email in your questions before or during my shows.

Listening Beyond Your Brand

Amber Naslund

This is a guest blog post from Amber Naslund, a social media and marketing professional, and the Director of Community for Radian6, where she’s responsible for client engagement, community building, and helping companies tap the potential of online reputation management and social media monitoring. She’s spent the last decade or so raising funds, building brands for companies of all sizes, and messing with all things online. The post was inspired, in-part, by Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun’s appearance on The A-List podcast.

When most companies hear “you have to be listening” in social media, they immediately jump to the notion that listening should be brand-focused. They’re quick to type in their company name or the names of their products to see what the web is saying.

Smart strategy, sure. But that’s not all there is to listening, and companies would do themselves well to consider listening at a different level, above and beyond their brand, to learn some important things about how their business fits into the big picture.

The Competition

The value of competitive intelligence is undeniable, and there is rich information out there on the web about what your competitors are doing.

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 4: Listening the Gateway Drug: Red Cross Case Study

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

The American Red Cross initiated its social media strategy shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2006. The organization knew there were negative blog posts about its disaster relief efforts, but had no capacity to respond, let alone track. They hired Wendy Harman, a social media integrator, to “combat” bloggers and to increase organizational transparency. “It felt like we were going to war. There were concerns about negative comments, fear even,” says Wendy whose current title is Social Media Manager.

Her first task was to identify and follow the existing conversations. “There were hundreds of mentions across social media platforms each day. I had to set up a listening post to monitor and analyze them as well as figure out how or if  to respond.”

The American Red Cross started a listening program with some key goals: correct misinformation, to be informed about public opinion, to track conversation trends, to identify influencers, and to build relationships. Wendy Harman notes, “We needed to listen and engage first before we could do anything successfully with social media.”

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 3: Listening Tools: A Starter Kit

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

There are free and paid monitoring tools available to support listening through social media channels. To make your scanning efficient, you’ll a RSS Reader, software that grabs fresh content from blog posts, web posts, Twitter, and other sources. Most RSS readers, like Google Reader, are free.

Many nonprofits like Google  Reader, especially those who are working as a team because it makes it easy to share items without cluttering up email.

For additional tutorials and tips on using RSS Readers, see the NTEN’s WeAreMedia ToolBox.

Listening tools consist of monitoring, tracking, and analytics software. Here is a good starter kit using free tools.

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 2: Listening Skills

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

Far more important than our choice of tools for the listening task, are your listening literacy skills. These include composing and refining keywords, pattern analysis, and synthesis of findings. There’s also a fourth skill:  Effectively engaging. Listening is not just quietly observing, sooner or later you need to interact with people and build relationships. Working out when and how to respond is an important technique that needs to be mastered.

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 1: Why Listening Is Valuable

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

A Simple Definition: Listening

Listening is knowing what is being said online about your nonprofit organization, field or issue area. Listening uses monitoring and tracking tools to identify conversations that are taking place on the social web.  It is a prelude to engaging with your audience. At its very basic, listening is simply naturalistic research, although more like a focus group or observation than a survey.

Listening Literacy For Nonprofits

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009.  She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

Source: timbradshaw on flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I am an early adopter of social media and set up my listening post 5 years ago to scan for people, trends, and ideas related to social media and nonprofits. Listening and engaging with people has been critical to any success I’ve achieved as a social media practitioner – whether I’m blogging or fundraising for Cambodian children. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching social media workshops for nonprofits and lately doing deeper dives on the techniques of listening both for nonprofits and in my role as Visiting Scholar at the Packard Foundation.

This is a four-part series about listening for nonprofit organizations summarizes the insights I’ve learned about listening.