Using tools to monitor social trends

Good Afternoon Bloggers,

To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns.

Today i have been playing around with some tools which monitor the social trends on specific entities. I tested several tools (Addictomatic, Socialmention, Howsocialable and Omgili) And out of all these i tried i found Addicomatic to be the most user friendly and effective. So let's get started on Addictomatic.


 Tools can provide details about your company on, but not limited to;

• User demographic information (Age, Language, Income Bracket, Time online per day, etc.)
• Information about the user for targetted advertising
• Information on what is being said in real time about your company (Example is a tool would find a comment posted on reddit which mentions your company)
• Where the "Likes" are coming from
• Can generate information to determine public opinion on your brand
• The list goes on

So without further adue, let's try out Addictomatic on our selected orgnisation, Dell Australia.

So as you can see in the image above, Addict-o-matic has pulled realtime information from various social technologies like FriendFeed, Bing News, Delicious, Twitter and Youtube, basically anything recent related to the company.

This tool to me was basically a larger search engine which queries most social services for relevant information, as for actual statistics Addict-o-matic does not actually provide you with advanced statistics, like Radian6 would.

My only complaint about this tool is it hasn't pulled any information from Dells Twitter page, even though it is existant, so it may be getting confused from the fact that there is multiple Dell twitter accounts.

So that was my experiance getting my foot in the door to Social monitoring tools, overall i think it was fairly brief, but i feel somewhat limited due to Addict-o-matic's feature set.

Thanks for reading, take care 346ers!

Dell 2.0

Good afternoon readers!

As you may remember last week we took a look at how organisations in the Social Sector could gain value by harnessing Social Technologies to help build additional value.

For this week I will be talking about how organisations in the professional service sector can build value by harnessing powerful social technologies such as Blogs, Microblogs, wiki's and internal websites (share-points)

Before we start let's take a look at what types of orgnisations are in the professional services industry, thanks to the McKinsey Global Institute, 2012, which has outlined these types of orgnisations as falling under the professional services category:

• Accounting
• Advertising & Marketing
• Architecture
• Managment Consulting
• Engineering
• IT
• Legal
• Scientific Research Services

So for my discussion today I will be analysing how Dell inc could leverage value by adopting social technologies.

Dell are in the IT organisation and specialise in commercial and home and office computing systems and services. Dell sells personal computers, servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals, HDTVs, cameras, printers, MP3 players and also electronics built by other manufacturers.

They are listed at number 51 on the Fortune 500 list and employee more than 103,000 people worldwide.

Dell currently have a well established presence in the social technology community in the form of a Facebook, Twitter and official Tumblr, with a profile on LinkedIn also.

By their current presence they could lever the following value:

• Improved Collaboration
• Market research and customer insights
• More targeted recruiting efforts leading to
• better task-employee matching

Dells main social portals are via there blog and Facebook page, using these they can potentially communicate ideas and insights through their use and through doing so they could lever value from market research and employee recruitment.

Dells Twitter and Facebook page provide a useful portal for customers to come and discuss products, relays insight and get in touch with dell – it allows a conversation to take place, providing customer insight and market research at a very low price.

Dells LinkedIn page could lever value by improving recruitment, potential employees could visit the page and could be referred by “contacts” adding value to employee recruitment.

Another cool thing dell do is "Ideastorm", this is an online community where you can submit ideas and product personal reviews to dell, which dell can then use for market and product development purposes adding huge value - Check it out some time, it is VERY neat.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Enterprise 2.0 and the RSPCA!

Hello readers!

Over the past few weeks i have been talking about my research on how organisations are going about implementing enterprise 2.0. So for this week i will be talking about some of the value levers which we can associate to an organisation.

This weeks activity is to identify and discuss any value levers which could be applied or are already in place in an organisation in the social sector, specifically a NFP (not for profit) organisation. Plenty of examples came to mind and funnily enough all of them had a presence in the standard gamut of social media (Facebook, twitter, etc.), organisations such as Red-cross, RSPCA, UNAIDS all are examples of NFP organisations working in the social sector.

I have chosen to scan the RSPCA for my task and to identify value levers from the McKinsey Global Institute Report

Some of the levers the McKinsey report identifies are;

1. Collect Information and Insights:

1. Gather Information
2. Crowd-source Resources and Solutions

2. Mobilize Resources:

1. Fund-raise
2. Create and expand volunteer network
3. retain support

3. Execute Mission:

1. Educate the Public
2. Engage supporters

4. Organisation-wide Levers

1. Improve collaboration and communication
2. Rapid organizing

The RSPCA is a animal and wildlife protection service formed in 1824. RSPCA stands for "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals"  It is the oldest and largest animal welfare organisation in the world and is one of the largest charities in the UK, with 1,453 employees.

The RSPCA has a foot in the door of social media, with a Facebook, Twitter and Blog all available to the public - So they currently do implement some social technologies to lever value.

Some of the value levers I have found during my scan of the RSPCA are

2.1 Fund-Raise

• By having a donation link in their Facebook they are able to gain increased amounts of donations, as the McKinsey report shows, on line donations are usually more frequent and greater in size than traditional "phone call solicitations"
• Could get more donations with ease

2.2 Create and expand volunteer Network

• By having an online presence they could reach more people and thus gain greater support from and gain more volunteers.

3.1 Educate the Public

• They could educate the public about the signs of animal abuse, such as seeing a neighbour abusing an animal.
• They could keep the public informed about how to get in contact with the RSPCA to report indidents

There are more that could be applied, but these are the immediate levers i have found in my search.

Thanks for reading, comment and check out my other blogs.