The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.
Social Media Monitoring: Are You Listening To Me?
Every single day, I’m learning more and more about Social Media and realized how it affects our everyday lives even in the simplest ways. I gather information about Social Media through searching, listening and monitoring. Every day, I’m being reminded that perseverance is what will get me to where I want to be and so I really try to study and understand the field that I’m in right now. I do my work with full of eagerness because I want to learn something new.
According to Wikipedia active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding, intent to “listen for meaning”.
I suggest that active listening should “focus on who you are listening to, whether in a group or one-on-one, in order to understand what he or she is saying. For me, listening and monitoring is good; as it gives immediate insight as to the breadth of the community, how they are feeling, what they are saying, passion points, etc. But listening without acting, in my opinion, is worthless. At the most basic level listening on the web is just like listening in the real world. In our everyday life we listen for mentions of our name and topics we’re interested in. By listening with these things we give ourselves the opportunity to learn more about on the things that we’re interested for, you can be able to find online spaces where the audience is already communicating, monitoring the conversations that happen there. Because social media is open and public by nature, listening is not only welcome – it’s expected.
Today, most of the business owners doing a nice job for building their respective online communities through allowing fans to provide suggestions in a public. Once that their fans submit suggestions they allow their communities to vote or to choose on each of them. With that they take the top suggestions and implement them!
Here are the tools I use for Listening:
• Google Alerts – I used this to monitor the web at large. If it’s out there Google will probably find it.
• Google Reader – will allow you to subscribe to blogs around the web via RSS.
• SocialMention – is an all-in-one social search tool. Lots of options here.
• TweetBeep – is a good backup to capture mentions of your brand on twitter.
• Google Adwords – advertising for text, banner, and rich – media ads.
• Google – possibly still the ultimate free tool for finding influencers, especially since the launch of Google Blog Search, Google Realtime search and their “Discussion” search option.
By the way you can also buy tools that are much more refined to do this, like Radian6. In the mean time, I’m doing my own listening using the ways I mentioned above. I’m curious to know who’s doing in the world of listening. Have you tried any of these tools for this purpose?
Social Media in Business
Based on my observations of how most businesses are currently approaching the process of incorporating social media into their marketing plans, I can see that they do not truly understand all the components of social media. They get that Social means building relationships and that Media is the form of communication that they are using to build these relationships. But this is not a deep enough understanding on which to base the marketing success of any product or service. There is so much more to be considered, because social media is dynamic, nuanced, and richly layered.
Social Media is definitely a powerful force in the online world but most organization today have not yet studied the object, time and space sufficiently. Most businesses don’t succeed in social marketing now because they don’t understand all of these components; this cube model which we are developing. As Social Media continues to grow, evolve and become an ever-more important part of our daily lives, only those businesses truly understand the importance of object, timing type of message and the human culture component will be successful in their marketing efforts.
Blogging and Social Media Were Made for Each Other
Blogging has often been called the bridge between social media and search engine optimization. Once you understand it you’ll know why.
With blogging you are feeding the search engines every time you create a new blog post. If you blog once a day, that’s a new web page on your website. The blog pings a list of services that help the post get crawled and within hours your blog post is indexed and searchable in the search engines. Do that three times a day and you increase your SEO coverage.
But a blog also has other characteristics that static web pages don’t have. People can comment on your blog posts and you can comment back, making it a particularly useful platform for meaningful dialogue.
With the advent of social media, you have other ways to get traffic to your blog other than through the search engines. Since all sales and marketing is relationship-building, you can build relationships with your prospects through social media, then send your friends and fans back to your blog for a deeper conversation. It’s a multi-tiered approach to marketing that works.
At least, it’s worked for thousands of businesses for the last decade.
It seems that blogging and social media were made for each other. They go hand in hand. And if you haven’t started your blog yet, or begun your social media marketing, then I’d encourage you to jump on board.
Explore the World with Mae 