Exploring Reasons for a Social-Media Listening Hub

When you begin to engage in the world of social media, one of the most important things you can do is monitor what Internet users are saying about your company, your blog, yourself, or your products. By investigating what Internet users are saying, you can find and participate in discussions about your blog or company, and come to an understanding about the way your community views your blog (or company). With this information, you can participate by responding to comments on other blogs, Twitter, or message boards, or by creating targeted content on your own blog.

The conversations happening about your area of interest or niche amount to really great intelligence. For a business, regardless of whether you participate in social media, social-media users are talking about your company, so you need to be aware what they're saying. If you're blogging about a particular topic, you can evolve your content by tracking what members of your niche are discussing about it.

Eavesdropping on yourself

By monitoring your niche you essentially can eavesdrop on thousands of conversations daily, and then pick and choose the ones in which you want to participate. The social-media listening hub you create allows you to follow various conversations going on through microblogging services such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites, message boards, and even comments on YouTube. If someone says something negative about you, you can respond quickly to fix the situation. You could make attempts step in and correct any misinformation being said about your business, blog, or area of interest. You could make sure that people are informed about what you're doing. This is the benefit of setting up a social-media monitoring hub.

Keeping tabs on your brand

Think about what keywords or phrases you want to monitor. Of course, you want to monitor your name, your blog/company name, and other keywords that are directly associated with you. Also, consider monitoring common misspellings and permutations of the name of your brand. The MSN Keyword Mutation Tool (http://adlab.microsoft.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/) can help you determine all the common spellings and usages of the keywords you are monitoring. When you try to figure out common misspellings for your brand, examine some of the terms used to find your page by using Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) or a paid tool such as Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool (www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html).

For example, if LeBron James wanted to set up a monitoring service, he might use the following keywords: LeBron James, LuBron James, Le Bron James, Cleveland Cavaliers, and perhaps his nickname, King James. If he wanted to expand this service past direct mentions of him or his team, he could also include more general terms such as NBA Basketball or even Olympic Basketball. The general term NBA Basketball may be too general, though, producing too many results to monitor.

Additionally, you may want to view your blog or company through the lens of your customers: What terms do they associate with your company? Looking at your blog from other points of view can provide you with good ideas for keywords, but not always. Although you don't always want your company known for these terms and may not see yourself that way, getting the perspective of other people can open your eyes on how users view your blog or Web site.

Don't think of this process as just pulling in keywords, either. You can pull in multiple feeds, just like you do with an RSS reader, which allows you to monitor specific sites. So, if you concentrate on an industry, and a Web site deals specifically with your industry and has an active news flow pushed through an RSS feed, you might want to consider adding specific Web sites into the mix of feeds you run through WordPress.

The setup in WordPress that we describe in this chapter gives you the convenience of having everything in one place and can help you monitor your brand, company, or blog. The limitations of the WordPress platform mean that you can monitor only five different groupings, so you can't use this method as a replacement for an enterprise-monitoring tool for a large company. Additionally, if you own a restaurant, hotel, or bar, and want to pick up review sites such as Yelp and Trip Advisor, these tools can't do it. Most social-media monitoring tools don't count review sites as social media. Tools such as Reputation Ranger (http://reputationranger.com) can monitor ratings sites for a nominal monthly fee if you want to pay attention to those types of sites.