By Alexandra Reid
I talk a lot about social media marketing strategy here, but rarely do I mention the time-and-money-saving tools that streamline my community building activities and make our social media marketing program an effective solution for businesses.
All of the tools I use are free and available to anyone with access to a computer. They are great for small and new businesses with tight budgets and limited time for experimentation and operation. But while I highly recommend that these tools be used to support social media marketing activities, they are useless for businesses that don’t align them with a sound social media marketing strategy. Additionally, while these tools help abridge the flow of social media content so users can siphon relevant information, engage with their communities and track progress, a key challenge cited by numerous businesses is keeping on top of monitoring, measurement and engagement efforts.
We must also remember that these tools are free and far from perfect. In fact, the biggest criticisms of all social media monitoring tools (free and paid) are that they sometimes fail to provide reliable and accurate data, have lag times, bugs, and are confusing to use. That’s why we must always cross-examine data with information provided by other tools and sometimes even check information manually to ensure everything is accurate.
Today I’ll discuss the tools I use for monitoring social media. In a subsequent post, I’ll reveal my favourite management and measurement tools. You’ll notice that I don’t use many tools to do my job. This is because too many tools act as speed bumps in an otherwise efficient engagement system.
Without further ado, here are my favourite social media monitoring tools:
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, now provides a further of his commentaries on the importance to a company of protecting its Intellectual Property.
By David French
In previous posts in this series we addressed mainly issues relating to patents. In this post we take a break from patents to discuss another very important type of Intellectual Property.
Intellectual Property has acquired this name because it is a type of property that is created by government-passed laws. Without legislation, the fundamental rule of the marketplace is that everyone is entitled to copy. But when someone copies trademark, there is an almost universal recognition that this is unjust. Besides being unjust, there are powerful economic justifications for suppressing the copying of trademarks by competitors.
Everyone has an impression as to what a “trademark” is. They think of Coca-Cola, or Heinz, or Heinz 57, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. The common thread of all trademarks is that when you see a mark you have a certain expectation about what you’re going to get. Although there are no rules forcing a trademark owner to market a consistent product under a trademark, there are powerful economic incentives for doing so.
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By Alexandra Reid
For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few months, Pinterest is a new, visually stunning social bookmarking site that is breaking records for new visitors. It received nearly 11 million visits the week ending Dec. 17, 2011, outranking Google+, and experienced a fourfold increase in unique visitors from September to December. I’ve written on Pinterest here before, but I thought it might be helpful to also share with you the recording of a Focus roundtable I participated in yesterday on the rise of Pinterest in B2B.
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By Alexandra Reid
Blogs are widely known for their SEO-driving potential because they are comprised of content, which is what search engines use to locate and index results. With Google’s Panda update, content has taken centre stage and businesses that post quality material frequently have the best chances of being noticed when their audiences search for relevant terms.
In fact, as reported by Brafton via Search Engine Land, 92 percent of marketers say that content creation is either “very effective” or “somewhat effective” for SEO, and 57 percent of marketers have said that they have acquired new customers from their blogs. On the flip side, 60 percent of business decision-makers say branded content helps them make better purchasing decisions.
I’ve read a ton of information on how to optimize content for search engines, and the vast majority of it can be boiled down into one fundamental rule: write content for your readers, not search engines.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from September 2007. We welcome your feedback.
By Linda Forrest
Working in the technology realm as we do, it is inevitable that we encounter many, many acronyms in our daily work. A quick scan of the blogosphere reveals that it’s a hot topic amongst technology marketers like Chris Hoskin and analysts alike.
There are so many acronyms in play and unfortunately a lot of them overlap. When you see CMS, do you think it means content management system, or contact management system, or code management system, or client music synthesis, or…
What about BPM? Coming from a musical background, I had always associated this particular acronym with beats per minute. How wrong I was. It can also mean business performance management, business process management, or business process modeling. POS could mean point of sale, point of service, or piece of… you get the idea.
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By Alexandra Reid 
