News organizations continue to increase their investments in social media monitoring within their newsrooms. It has moved to becoming a staple in the production of television news events such as live debates and vote night analysis during the Republican Party primaries and caucuses.

ABC’s This Week will begin running a regular segment in which the news according to social media will be analyzed and presented to viewers.

While social media may have been an unwelcome development in the world of professional journalism, it would appear that time has brought the two together.

Having access to large volumes of data that state spositions on political candidates, their policies, or their campaigns makes it awfully tempting to extrapolate some form of polling data. Tom Webster, CEO of Edison Research, a company doing the entrance and exit polling for the election pool (NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and the Associated Press), explains the limitations of social media data being used for polling purposes and why it hasn’t been done yet. It’s an excellent piece so I happily refer you to his blog BrandSavant.com for the details.

With polling out of the question – at least for now – here are two ways news organizations can utilize social media monitoring platforms for research and why.

Find the Outlier Stories

I’ve been following the Republican primaries using our platform since early December. In the lead up to the Iowa caucus, the mainstream media had been focusing on the implosion of Herman Cain’s candidacy, Newt Gingrich’s surge and collapse, Rick Santorum’s late rise in the polls, and whether or not Mitt Romney had the capacity to hold off all these forces.

Social media followed those conversations closely however there was one outlier that the mainstream media had not turned their collective eye to: Ron Paul.  Ron Paul dominated social conversations in the lead up to the Iowa caucus. In fact, Ron Paul has continued to be a major source of social conversations in every primary to date. Depending on the week, he garnered more conversations then Gingrich or Romney and never had fewer social mentions then Rick Santorum – not in Iowa, not in New Hampshire, not in South Carolina, and not in Florida (a state Paul didn’t even campaign in).

The graph below shows the mentions generated by each candidate from January 22, 2012 to January 31, 2012 using the #flprimary hashtag.

It’s an interesting story. Ron Paul has lead social conversations against candidates that beat him at the polls. What is it about Ron Paul that has people talking about him on social?

Understand What is Driving those Conversations

Having made much of Paul’s dominance on social media, it’s possible to dig into the conversations about Ron Paul to see what is driving the bulk of those conversations.

The images below show how this can be done quite easily. By building a trend graph off of the Ron Paul section above, I drilled into the conversation spike that occurred the day after the Florida primary. Off of that spike, I produced a River of News to show me the actual posts that were generating conversations on that day around Ron Paul.

There were three conversations that trended the most. The first is a YouTube video from SuperPac soliciting donations. The second was a link to Ron Paul’s YouTube Channel with his Florida concession speech viewed nearly 95,000 times. Finally, a link to a TechCrunch.com article explores the social media buzz that is the Ron Paul campaign. So what is it about Ron Paul and his YouTube presence that drives people to share and discuss him online? More importantly why isn’t this bedrock of support translating into votes in the ballot box for Mr. Paul?

Media organizations interested in understanding the dynamics of social media and its impact on electoral politics in the Republican Party primary race can use this case study and Tom Webster’s blog as a departure point for in-depth analysis.

To paraphrase Tom (who was kind enough to chat with me via Twitter yesterday afternoon), the real nut to crack is, “The chasm between what people say in social media and what actual voters actually do.” If Ron Paul’s campaign manages to crack that nut and turn their social dominance into electoral success – and even if he doesn’t – then the historical data available on the social web could fill many blog, web, and print columns.

How are you digging deeper into your social media findings? How has social media monitoring helped you tell a story? Share your thoughts here. Check out more about analysis and insights here.

Your mother used to remind you that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Being a good social media listener will help you immensely in a crisis, allowing you to preserve — and even improve — your brand’s reputation.

Listen Before the Crisis

Emergencies are no time to develop basic listening skills. Start now. If your brand earns the reputation of being a good listener who takes care of its customers, you’ll have a backup reservoir of trust to tap into when the crisis hits.

Beforehand, look for channels to use for crisis outreach. Where does your community hang out: Twitter, Facebook, or on industry forums? Also identify and build relationships with key influencers who can amplify your response.

Social media can alert you to potential issues before they escalate. For example, community news sites around your facilities could help you prepare for the windstorm that could knock out a server farm. You’d be able to warn your customers of impending downtime.

Monitoring social media can shut down many crises before they get off the ground. You can deal promptly with an upset customer or rogue employee before the issue gets posted on The Consumerist.

Listen During the Crisis

During a crisis, monitor relevant conversations. What kind of volume and sentiment are you dealing with? Which people and which sites are critical of your brand? Knowing about the 5,000 angry posts on your Facebook wall will help you respond quickly and sensitively.

Last July 13, a massive hailstorm hit Denver, taking 22 of Frontier Airline’s planes out of commission. Our case study described how frustrated customers idled in long lines at the Frontier counters and even longer wait times on their toll-free reservation lines.

Marco Toscano, Frontier Senior Manager of Social Media, saw this as the perfect chance for his department to assist the reservations group by providing information and flight re-accommodations.

The team tracked down mentions of Frontier across the social web and reached out to re-book flights, spread updates, and let their customers know they were there to help.

One of the 4,000 thankful customers they helped tweeted, “Another reason to fly @flyfrontier their @FrontierCare booked me a new ticket in 10 min rather than the insane line at airport. Awesome!”

Monitoring social media will help you see the crisis from your customers’ perspective, shaping your language and adjusting your priorities.

Listen After the Crisis

Don’t stop listening just because the latest crisis has passed. You need to be aware of unresolved issues and lingering frustrations that need to be fixed. Don’t just passively listen: ask.

Monitor social media for sentiment around your brand, comparing levels before, during and after the crisis. Is your stock beginning to rise again? If not, why not?

You’ll find your community will be very understanding about your brand, and even make excuses for you, if you’re apologetic and transparent throughout. Tell your community what you’ve learned from the crisis and what you’re changing in response to it.

Finally, open up and ask your fans for their ideas. Listen for their insights into how your brand can make them happy again.

The Result: A Bonding Opportunity

Listening can turn a crisis into a bonding experience with your community. If you bring your community into the circle, they’ll feel like this is “our crisis” instead of just your crisis (or worse: just theirs.) After all, what better way to build lifelong trust than spending some time in the trenches together?

What crisis communications pointers would you give others? What works well for your brand? Learn more about crisis management in this month’s ebook, 30 Ideas for your 2012 Social Media Plan.

Applying social media listening and monitoring to your advertising campaigns will help you determine your campaign effectiveness. You can use it to enhance the campaign too.

Listen for social response to your campaigns. When you do, you can tweak your efforts to better align with your target audience’s needs. The result? Stronger campaign effectiveness. Here are five ways to get there.

Advertising-specific Keywords

You spend countless hours writing ads. Consider the key phrases in those ads and monitor the social web for them. What is your audience saying about your brand, your product and your campaign? Using a social media monitoring tool will make it easier to capture and track these mentions. You can then do an analysis on the data. Is the sentiment positive? What feedback are they giving you? Revisit your campaign and adjust.

Unique URLs

As shared by Econsultancy, a recent survey found that 65% of all UK print and television advertising now includes a web address. Why is it so popular? Perhaps it’s the benefits:

• Increase traffic to your website
• It’s often the easiest way for your audience to respond to ads, since they’re online anyway
• Gives more visibility to your brand URL
• Provides a mechanism to track response to ads

Use a web tracking tool to watch these URLs and see how many visitors come in, how long they stay, what they’re doing, etc. Determine campaign effectiveness based on web visitor activity.

But there’s more. You can also see if your audience is sharing your URL on the social web. Include it as one of your keywords while monitoring.

Trade Show Conversations

Many conferences have their own Twitter handles, Facebook pages, hashtags and Foursquare check ins. Whether you’re sponsoring the conference, speaking at it or manning a booth, find those social connections and monitor them. It’s a great opportunity to join the conversation and direct people to your brand. Consider creating your own Foursquare location at your booth and provide giveaways for those that check in!

#CampaignSpecificHashtags

#CreateACampaignHashtag to track conversations about your marketing effort (see Jenn’s post for successful examples). Share it on your site, via your Twitter handle and even bring the hashtag offline as a call to action. You’ll see all mentions of the hashtag in one easy list on Twitter and can gauge sentiment, interest, number of conversations and more with a monitoring tool.

User Generated Content

Asking your audience to participate in your campaign adds a layer of valuable content to your site. It’s about listening and engagement as well as getting great content from your audience. A great example of UGC is the Doritos Super Bowl ads. The Doritos brand turned over complete control of its Super Bowl air time to consumers, enabling participants to upload their homemade commercials to www.crashthesuperbowl.com (you can check out the current contenders and vote for your favorites!). The user-generated 2009 spot (made for less than $2,000) snagged the number-one spot on the USA Today Ad Meter, beating seasoned ad pros and resulting in a great story for the brand.

Use social media to promote your UGC effort. And if you don’t have the manpower or funding for a custom UGC-gathering website, social media is here to help. Use YouTube for uploading video content or Facebook and Twitter to gather comments, ideas or for contesting.

2012 is the year of awesome campaign development, I can just feel it! Use some of these tricks and ensure to take action when you gather feedback. Revise campaigns based on your audience’s needs and relaunch. When you do, your campaigns will be stronger than ever. Remember, your audience is listening to you, are you listening to them?

Learn more about social media listening in the 30 Ideas for your 2012 Social Media Plan ebook.

Are you obliged to continue full steam on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter next week, or is it safe to take a little vacation?

Take your cue from your customers. How busy are you over the break? Do your phones ring off the hook, or do they fall eerily silent?

A good rule of thumb is that B2C companies will see much more engagement than their B2B cousins. (As with all rules of thumb, use your own judgment.)

Ramp Up …
If you’re selling directly to consumers, you may need to ramp up your social media presence over the holidays — especially if your product is going under the Christmas tree.

Sellers of hot toys, take note. Lalaloopsy’s SillyHair Doll will garner thousands more fans on their Facebook page. Ripstik will get a surge of signups to their brand community, RipCity, by new owners of their Caster Board. And let’s not forget hot gadgets for adults, like the Kindle Fire.

If you’re in one of these industries, prepare for a spike in social media activity:

• Retail
• Electronics and Consumer Package Goods
• Airlines
• Hotels
• Music, TV and Entertainment

You may need to add staff to handle the increased engagement. Christmas could be the year’s biggest social media opportunity. Seize it.

… or Dial Down

B2B companies’ clients are other companies whose offices often empty over Christmas. Let’s say you sell heavy mining equipment. Don’t flatter yourself: your customers aren’t pondering your CST drive system as they help little Jack and Sophie tear presents open on Christmas morning.

If that’s you, you‘ll be safe with a minimal social media presence. Just do the following before dimming the lights:

• Update profiles across your channels with your holiday hours and an emergency contact, if you have one.
• Sign off on your last day so your followers know. (“Have a merry Christmas everyone! We’ll be back on Tuesday.”)
• Assign a team member to spend 5 minutes each day to scan through messages for anything that requires immediate action.

Disasters don’t take vacations. What if a power outage takes out your datacenter? Will you be able to respond to thousands of angry customers who are tweeting about you on Christmas Eve?

Make sure your crisis response plan still works over the holidays. Your biggest challenge will be resources. The best-laid plan will fall apart if your team is offline. Make sure that (a) you can contact your team members and (b) they’re able to engage from home or across the country.

Once you’ve guarded against the worst-case scenario, you can afford to relax. Hey — you’ve been working hard all year nurturing your social media community. Enjoy that eggnog.

Social media has been helping travelers solve customer service issues, get questions answered quickly,  and even interact with their favorite travel brands. It is no surprise that many people on the move pull out their mobile devices and seek recommendations while vacationing or traveling for business. Whether asking directly via Twitter, or searching out reviews on apps such as Yelp, today’s travel consumer is looking for that social connection that links them to the experience they are about to have.

For today’s #traveltuesday post, I thought it was fitting to reach out via Twitter and ask for recommendations of my own. As a result, I’ll share three specific thoughts with you. First, let me set it up.

The idea began a week ago as I was preparing for another trip to Las Vegas. (Thanks to Melanie for the suggestion!) I was going to tweet to my followers requesting suggestions of what to do while in Vegas. I knew that someone would be listening. Or would they?

#1: For the Traveler

I kept the tweets fairly simple:

Perhaps I should have used more or different hashtags to be more effective. Although I did get 15 unique suggestions in all, it would have been helpful to be more specific in my requests. Try specifying what you are looking for. Are you asking about the best places to shop? Maybe you are hungry for a certain dish (or beverage)? Of course, it is also possible you are simply in need of lip balm and blister bandages, so turning to social media to find a local pharmacy is also a good plan.

#2: For the Recommendation-Maker

Thankfully, my friends and followers who shared great (and goofy) ideas with me today were not simply doing a Google search on my behalf. When your friends ask for a recommendation, they aren’t asking you to answer for the sake of answering. They genuinely want to hear your experiences. Social media has allowed us to share personal stories. Let your friend run the search engines themselves, and give them your honest recommendation. I got great suggestions from people who either tried something and loved it, or heard of something fun and knew they would like it and felt I may too.

Both @kchipphoto and @j_barrak sent me wandering off to Paris. I had Crepes Suzette at La Creperie earlier in the day…

… and then back for a trip up the half-scale Eiffel Tower at night. The views of the Vegas Strip from the 541 foot tall tower were breathtaking!

Goofy colleagues got in on the action, too! Mark suggested I get married - or have my picture taken with Elvis at the very least. And Mel is big on #halfface pictures and seeing how she has always wanted to see the incredible fountain show at the Bellagio, that was her request.

(The Bellagio picture is also almost a #silhouetting shot, which is another one of our silly community team memes.)

I wish I could have made it to Fremont Street or taken a ride on the roller coaster at New York New York. I also missed out on going to The Chandelier Bar today, although I have seen it before and it IS impressive. All in all, I had great success from my Recommendation-Maker followers. Thank you!

#3: For the Travel Service Provider

Today, I was surprised at the lack of response from random local companies just actively listening for average people seeking fun things to do while in Las Vegas. Without using any direct mentions of brands via Twitter, I did not experience engagement of any kind from anyone who may hope to make a buck off me. This tells me that there are still many opportunities for social media monitoring and targeted listening on the Vegas Strip. Had a helicopter tour company suggested I check them out, or a bar tweeted me recommending their specialty up-all-night-writing-a-blog cocktail, I might have been intrigued enough to listen, share the recommendation and then write about it here. The last time I visited Vegas, I had several interesting companies pick up on my upcoming visit and pitch their product or service to me.

Because you never know who you are engaging with, it is possible that many opportunities to reach a broader audience are missed. A simple place to start would be to listen for commonly used words – such as ‘Vegas’. If you’re a travel company of any type, and are not already looking for ways that you can converse about what you offer just by monitoring keywords, drop your questions in the comment box below.

All in all

I had a great day in Vegas. I took many pictures not shared here, and even visited a few places not suggested via social media, like the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay, and Hash House a Go Go for a gigantic breakfast. I think I will watch out for the next few days to see who is asking for recommendations just like I did in the hope that I can offer my experiences to a random stranger. Social media makes travel fun!

What about you? As a traveler, have you sought recommendations via social media for travel tips and ideas? Have you dished out your own advice to friends and followers in need? Or, if you are a travel service provider, is targeted listening and engaging part of your social media strategy?

Jenn Seeley is a Community Engagement Specialist who uses social media for recommendations on sights to see while traveling with Radian6. Tell her why you love social media for travel insight by tweeting @Jenn_Seeley.

Companies that are new to social media monitoring and engagement frequently wonder where to begin. This can even be a bigger challenge if nobody is talking about your company or brand. We wanted to provide a few examples, okay, well 100 examples, of things that you can listen and monitor for across the social web.

The list is divided into 10 categories, so if you are looking for help in a particular category, see if it is listed below. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are some categories that didn’t make the cut. If there are other ideas you would like to see explored in a future list, let us know in the comments below.

Brand Monitoring
1. Listen for online mentions of your brand
2. Listen for positive mentions of your brand
3. Listen for negative mentions of your brand
4. Listen for direct and indirect questions from customers
5. Discover brand advocates
6. Discover brand detractors
7. Discover influencers for your brand
8. Learn where customers are talking about your brand
9. Listen for the most popular topics about your brand
10. Monitor public perception of your company
11. Listen for mentions of executive team
12. Listen for mentions of product misuse

Competitive Intelligence
13. Discover online mentions of your top competitors
14. Discover competitors’ latest product releases
15. Discover competitors’ recent company news
16. Listen for customer comments about competitors
17. Monitor competitors’ blogs for company insight
18. Monitor competitors’ employees social profiles
19. Monitor competitors’ content for levels of customer engagement
20. Discover negative mentions of competitors and treat as opportunities

Industry Monitoring
21. Listen to mentions of your industry
22. Listen for mentions of your brand compared to your industry
23. Listen for mentions of your competitors as part of your industry
24. Monitor share of voice in your industry
25. Monitor industry trends
26. Discover industry issues
27. Monitor industry news
28. Discover industry influencers
29. Monitor perception of industry by larger business community
30. Monitor changes in social media adoption in your industry

Thought Leadership
31. Monitor changes in conversation volume around key issues
32. Discover industry posts that require comment by your company’s subject matter experts
33. Monitor spread of company thought leadership blog posts
34. Identify online opportunities to share thought leadership
35. Identify speaking opportunities for subject matter experts
36. Determine perception of company as a thought leader
37. Determine perception of company employees as thought leaders
38. Discover other industry thought leaders
39. Monitor influence of company thought leaders
40. Monitor influence of industry thought leaders

Lead Generation and Sales
41. Monitor for buying indication terms within your product category
42. Monitor for recommendation requests within your product category
43. Monitor for discussions of your product category
44. Monitor target prospect personas to confirm accuracy
45. Monitor questions and conversations about your product category
46. Discover topics for remarkable content
47. Share relevant content with prospects
48. Answer direct questions from prospects
49. Discover competitive insights
50. Expand pool of prospects

Customer Service
51. Identify customer service issues as they emerge
52. Monitor volume of conversation around customer service issues
53. Respond to customer service issues in real-time
54. Determine if customers are willing to take issues offline
55. Gather customer feedback to share with other teams
56. Build relationships with customers
57. Answer customer questions
58. Respond to positive feedback
59. Share helpful company information
60. Monitor ongoing customers concerns

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
61. Discover relevant industry keywords
62. Monitor selected keywords for content ideas
63. Discover influencers using selected keywords
64. Determine which keywords are performing best
65. Determine which keywords are not performing
66. Monitor spread of content to determine better titles
67. Connect with people in industry to enhance social search
68. Discover relevant blogs to consider asking for backlinks
69. Monitor SEO influencers to keep up with search engine changes
70. Monitor search engine social profiles to keep up with changes

Crisis Communication
71. Monitor community news sites around facilities
72. Listen actively to conversations around the crisis
73. Establish a baseline for potential threats
74. Establish a baseline for potential failures
75. Find sites that are critical of your brand
76. Find people that are critical of your brand
77. Look for channels to use for crisis outreach
78. Determine potential issues before they escalate
79. Determine the volume of critical conversations
80. Determine sentiment level changes which could indicate a crisis

Product Development
81. Listen for comments on current products
82. Listen for comments on competitors’ products
83. Discover new uses for existing products
84. Discover opportunities for product offerings
85. Solicit product feedback and monitor comments
86. Conduct beta testing
87. Monitor new industry opportunities
88. Listen for potential new product features
89. Understand how customers are using your product
90. Identify points of difference about your product

Advertising and Marketing Effectiveness
91. Track advertising-specific keyword usage
92. Listen for social response to advertising messages
93. Gauge sentiment toward advertising campaigns
94. Monitor conversations from trade shows
95. Monitor unique URLs on your ads
96. Monitor unique phone numbers on your ads
97. Find sites relevant to your brand for online advertising
98. Learn the language of prospects
99. Monitor campaign or brand specific hashtags
100. Solicit user generated content and monitor results

What’s one more thing you’re doing with social media monitoring that you would add to this list?

Jeffrey L. Cohen likes counting to 100, but sometimes he needs help from his pal Amanda. He is a social strategist at Radian6 and the co-author of the forthcoming The B2B Social Media Book. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.

Amongst the 45,000 people, the hundreds of sessions, the awe-inspiring keynotes and Metallica’s axe, Dreamforce 2011 was a conversation hub. And within these conversations came a chat between Brian Solis and our own Marcel LeBrun about the future of social media monitoring.

The highlights:

There’s more. To see the full video and read Brain’s post, check out his blog.

Where do you see the future of social media monitoring? Share your thoughts!

Amanda Nelson is a Community Content Manager at Radian6. She is an avid writer, content curator and Prius driver. Find her on Twitter at @mileigh13.

The night is thick with darkness and the fog-coated moon is the only source of light. It reflects softly off the glistening sidewalk as your bare feet splash through murky puddles. You press on. Your destination awaits for no one and you yearn to get there. You are venturing toward the future of analytics. But as you look down at your empty satchel, you realize it needs to be filled with the supplies necessary to reach this destination. Not only that, but it must employ the utmost furnishings to accelerate you forward. You want to be the first to get there. But you are not alone in that mindset. Satchels are all around you as they swing on competitors’ shoulders.  They’re going toward the same destination too.

It’s time to break out the super powers.

As we note in this month’s eBook, the social media analytics world is changing constantly but there are pointers to craft your social media strategy into a superhuman physique. So hold onto your iPads, Batman. If you’re ready to jump into a social media program, here are some social media metrics tips that should fill your satchel to the brim.

Determine your home base. Establish what you need to measure before you give the green light on your social media program. What do you want it to do? Your metrics should align with your strategic goals so you can clearly track results. This will ground you as you venture into the social media space. As quoted by J. C. Penney in the book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment by Jim Stearn, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk.”

Cast a wide net. Go deep. For instance, if your goal is to increase awareness of your latest product, develop multiple metrics catered to each social media platform. It could be product mentions via tweets on Twitter, product link sharing on Facebook, and so on. Assess your goals to pull out the meaningful metrics. As stated in a Mequoda Group blog post by Chris Struck, “An array of metrics will help you prove the validity of your results.”

Then cast a wider net. Now that you’ve got your goals in mind and you’re looking at relevant data, open up to other forms of metrics. Look at the sentiment and behavior related to your social media program. Your community may be engaging with you about your new product via social media, but how do they feel about your product? Do they understand it? Gauge sentiment, comprehension, relevance and tone. You want the qualitative information as well as the quantitative (Avinash Kaushik does a great break down of the two on his blog).

Assess and go back out there. As results start to surface, act on them. For instance, if you tweet more, do you receive more product mentions? What makes your audience tick? Refine your efforts and jump back in! Then repeat. Here’s a great visual by NewMediaandMarketing.com that showcases this process:

Share with other Superheros. To all work toward the greater good in the world of social media analytics, we need to share. Discuss measurement methods, calculations, algorithms and approaches amongst other professionals and colleagues. Be part of the ThunderCats of social media metrics and join together in making the future of analytics an exciting one.

Do you have some social media metrics superhero tricks up your sleeve? What’s in your satchel? Feel free to share! As Spiderman once said, “With great powers comes great responsibility.”

After the product announcement from Radian6 regarding the new Insights Platform, Adam Brown, Dell’s executive director of social media, hit the stage.

He explained how marketers are wearing multiple hats now, stressing that a person cannot just be an advertiser or a PR professional anymore. I wish they stressed this idea at school – integrated marketing communications is taking over for more specific career majors like public relations. Universities should recognize this trend through their choice of degrees and classes.

Adam broke down Dell’s social media model into four equally important Rs:

• Review – see what people are saying
• Respond – engage in conversation with these people
• Record – video can be key in social media: consumer generated video is huge, but that there’s also a fine line between slick content and highly produced content. Overall though, video is about the storytelling.
• Redirect – SEO and search engine marketing are mentioned here. Adam explained the serendipity factor of finding what people are searching for online and making sure that Dell pops up first.  He made an interesting point that the company’s homepage isn’t dell.com but rather Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

I also learned that we can’t have social media turn into spam (like, in many cases, email). Adam explained that authenticity is key, being genuine is critical, and dialogue is important (this is one of the biggest issues brands have with social platforms). Social media is a two way street, but conversation and engagement should coming from the experts in your organization. For example, someone from IT should be helping people with tech problems – not the social media “guy.”

Dell decided to really invest in social media and online conversations by creating a listening command center. One of the cool features of the command center is what Adam called the “social radio,” which allows employees to listen to any “channel” of conversation through Radian6. For example, Dell has employees who can tune into customer chatter on Dell laptops, or more specifically, a certain model of a Dell laptop. This is huge for a company as they can not only key in on specific topics for a product, but can also find brand advocates as well.

Adam’s keynote concluded with an explanation that you have to be a storyteller in the social media space. He also states that we can’t think in terms of traditional campaigns because social media is constantly changing – a theme that popped up in many of the day’s keynotes.

Maurice Rahmey is a student at Boston University studying public relations and business. He’s a member of BU’s Public Relations Student Society of America, an avid blogger at mrahmey.wordpress.com and a prolific tweeter (@mrahmey).

Last week we shared our tools of the trade on sampling data for effective analysis when dealing with large data samples. Gathering the right data, and using the right tools can save you time and precious resource in the long run. To do this we’re launching a range of webinars to help you make sure that you are getting the most out of Radian6. Understand key features of the system, how to use them and in return maximize the benefits.

Whether you are undertaking social media on an ad hoc basis or monitoring and engaging daily there are several ways in which you can optimize your use of the system. Our webinars are designed to help you make the most of the investment you have made. The 30 minute sessions will assist new users, provide best practice for existing users and present the latest upgrades and development for Radian6. Our weekly webinars will cover: (more…)