If you’re monitoring Twitter and Google for mentions of your brand or website, you’re probably only seeing half of the conversation. What about people that shorten your URLs and share them without linking to your Twitter profile? What if someone mentions your brand name in the comments of someone else’s blog? Do you even know where to go to find this kind of information. We at Magicomm run into this problem from time to time and have adopted a small set of tools as part of our monitoring strategy to help keep us in the loop.

To solve the problem of not getting notified when people link to our blog using a shortened URL, we use a service called BackTweets. It basically shows us everyone linking to our site or specific pages on Twitter. It’s also a great way to surprise people by thanking them for the RT when they never mentioned your Twitter handle.

Now what about comments scattered across multiple forums and social media sites. SocialMention is an all powerful mention aggregator. You can search for mentions across blogs, forums, micro-blogs, Q&A sites and more. It’s one of the better free tools out there for monitoring your brand.

These two tools in conjunction with Twitter search and Google search should give you a more realistic picture of who’s talking about you and sharing your content. So don’t listen to just half of the conversation. Become the ultimate eye in the sky and really see what’s going on.

- Photo by BL1961

If you haven’t seen this yet, check in out (HP-MySpace Press Release ). This is huge for several reasons. HP is going direct to provide their services to an organization by providing them with the technology and support to produce their photos with an web-to-print application. A very strong move into facilities management by HP. Certainly will cause stress for their customers by taking the type of business away from the same printers that purchased their equipment.

Additionally, this illustrates that HP “gets it” by recognizing the power of these type of social networking sites. In the press release they indicate that “over 5 million bands on MySpace” and they are trying to tap directly into their marketing engine. Another smart move by HP and, if they manage it right, this will provide for an extremely profitable revenue stream for them for many years to come. These social media sites (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.) are increasingly being used as marketing tools by small and large companies alike. The next most natural move is to allow them to upload their brochures to these web sites and if the client wants a printed version, they get it at the press of a button. Or, they can download the PDF to their local workstation. Interesting concept linking social media with web-to-print.  Hmmmmmmmmmmm…the mind can wander all over the place with the possibilities.

How will the local printers play in this workflow evolution? Will they be able to? Only time will tell, but watch for further moves by the traditional print vendors establishing relationships with these type of web communities. Mark my words, there are more to come and it will happen faster then you think.

“See” Ya Later,

Rick Littrell

Magicomm, LLC

The New England Printer & Publisher Magazine just published an article “The new marketing and sales business model” by John R. Graham, who is president of Graham Communications. This is one of the first articles that I have seen in a Print-focused magazine that discusses “social media marketing” and how it is impacting conventional marketing wisdom. It is important that printing companies that want to become “marketing solutions providers” pay attention to this trend. I think that he is DEAD ON in his assessment!

There’s an interesting dynamic going on now in the global marketplace. The individual is taking control of their communications (now being more appropriately called “conversations”) with corporations. Now, an individual that is not satisfied with a product or service can communicate that worldwide in nanoseconds through the power of the internet. The traditional editing process that publishers provided during the dissimilation of information has been reduced, if not completely removed in most instances. With YouTube, blogs, discussion groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc….The individual (or community would be a better description) has taken control of the message from the corporations. Corporations must “interact” with their customers if they expect to thrive in the future.

The concept of “Open” bi-directional communication between an individual and a corporation should be the rule, not the exception. By using this strategy, while engaging in a conversation, you will be surprised by the results. But putting this into place requires commitment of resources and time. You have to develop a culture that wants to share and be committed to create an “individual” conversation between your customer/market/prospect. Strategies will vary, but the end result will remain the same…Have conversation with individuals, Enhance relationship with market, Expand revenue opportunities. It’s as simple as that.

“See” Ya Later,
Rick Littrell
Magicomm, LLC