Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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I must admit being pleasantly surprised by this new application. SalesForce Inc. is helping corporations harness the real power of social networks — namely the Twitter community. Comcast has been a model in providing solutions to customer problems via Twitter, and is one of the first customers of SalesForce Inc’s new app.

It basically seems to be a way to easily track conversations on Twitter, and is not the only app to provide tracking, but could be the most expensive. Pricing is ”$995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the possibilities for Twitter if it were to create it’s own CRM/brand management tool on his Web Strategist blog.

Read the full BizJournals.com article about SalesForce Inc’s new Twitter CRM app here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/23/daily4.html?

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I happen to love the attention I get from personal brands. There’s nothing like feeling that you’ve been singled out to be chatted up by a Tony Hsieh — CEO of Zappos.com, or Gavy Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv, or any of the many personal brands who are active on social networks.

That’s just one upside…and for me, it’s all personal.

Well, actually, as smart companies know, it’s not all personal. Good one-on-one interaction is good business.

It makes it easy for consumers to choose that company’s products and service offerings. So much beauty in social networking — companies engage in online conversations and customer communities to boost business! Who doesn’t love to feel like they’re getting personally heard from a company representative? It’s so Mom & Pop, but with much better, faster service due to the internet.

So what’s the downside?

The sole person behind a personal brand simply cannot maintain the same level of personal interaction a team who is representing a company can. So, one day a ‘lone cowboy’ personal brand may interact heavily with customers and prospects. The next day, business obligations may prevent any interaction at all.

For some customers, this is just enough for them to loudly proclaim to their social network that Company X sucks because Personal Brand at Company X ignored their pleas for product support, or whatever. You get the idea.

From a customer standpoint, personal brands can potentially cause more brand damage than good for the company. Customers demand attention when they want it, and don’t give a flying flip about anything else that may be more pressing to personal brand respresentative. Upset customers vent all over the internet. The reputation management fallout is a lot more expensive for companies than simply hiring a team to help manage their brand online.

This is all just common sense. Companies, if one of your star employees is looking to become a star on the internet, seriously consider whether it’s in your company’s best interests to support that during work hours. If you decide that your business will thrive by having one shining star out of your employees represent it, definitely develop a contingency plan — a Social Media Brand Management Plan B, if you will, in the unfortunate event of that employee’s exit from the company.

Considering the precarious nature of managing your brand via Social Media in the first place, what should your Social Media Brand Management Plan B entail? Here’s a few, for starters:

• Immediate team brand deployment to regain control of conversations regarding your brand.
• Company branded Twitter, Facebook, etc, social network accounts.
• Full access to conversations and contacts made by your previous social media star

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Brian Solis from PR 2.0 has published a comprehensive list of Twitter tools for community managers and communications professionals. Businesses implementing a social media strategy will find a wealth of value from this list of tools, and by using them in a way that creates transparency and authenticity.

One reason I haven’t spent a lot of time on this blog writing about social media tools is because the old habits of marketing die hard with regard to using tools. SEO/SEM seems to have lulled marketers into laziness with all of the automated tools that merely require setup and monitoring. Twitter — and all social media, to be sure — requires actual engagement with the users of the media. That requires authenticty, transparency, and not hiding behind an organizational brand. In the past, I’ve found the most effective way of helping businesses understand how Social Media is different was to train them on the culture of Social Media and to incorporate that culture into their organizational communications. Now that many businesses are starting to understand this concept of transparency and open communication, more and more businesses are intelligently using the tools available for social media to improve their customer communications. So, I list these tools with the caveat that effective use of them by organizations require a real understanding of the Twitter culture of openness.

How to best use this list of Twitter tools:

• Develop a Twitter strategy with the help of a Social Media consultant
• Tie your Twitter strategy into a larger Social Media strategy
• Choose the tools which uniquely fit into your communications strategy
• Always keep a spirit of transparency and 2-way communication foremost, as some of the tools can create broadcast type messages which annoy and alienate many social media users

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Think about that for a minute. A targeted advertisement by one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world was brought down in less than 48 hours by a relatively small number of social network users. What’s more, these social network users were on Twitter — one of the social networks many companies find most challenging to use because of its format of 140 character messages, and a culture of interaction — not broadcast.

Motrin used traditional media to distribute the advertisement — they weren’t using social media specifically for distribution of this ad. It was on the Motrin.com website and YouTube, but it was also distrubuted via traditional and print media — “Safe media”. Not using social media for the main ad push likely made Motrin advertisers consider putting resources elsewhere, and not in a social media monitoring strategy. Yet, by not having a solid social monitoring strategy in place, the outrage of Twitterers to the ad swelled so quickly that Motrin didn’t notice until it was too late, and ultimately lost complete control of the entire campaign.

Some consequences of no Social Monitoring Strategy

The advertisement was a bust — it had to completely stopped. The financial implications of their misstep are likely painful. Here’s a shot of the graphic on the Motrin.com homepage.

Motrin apology

Motrin did the right thing in acknowledging it’s mistake of offending baby-carrying Moms, and then removing the ads. Their sincere tone and thanks for public feedback will likely help this debacle become a thing of the past soon.

But your company is likely not as well funded as Motrin. What lesson should you take away from Motrin’s very public social media misstep?

Don’t ignore Social Media: Even if you never promote your company via social media networks, don’t ignore it. Hire a Social Media Marketing Consultant or agency today to help you develop a relationship and monitoring strategy. Skipping this step can devalue your brand, and cost your company millions of dollars and customers.

Check out some of the brands who got punk’d by social media (via Forrester’s Jeremy Owyang).

UPDATE:
For those of you who haven’t seen the ad yet, the Motrin Moms ad is still available here.

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If the false post wasn’t enough of a pain for CNN (the owner of iReport), the SEC is now investigating the false claims about Jobs. Registration on iReport.com only requires a working email address, but CNN is handing over what information they have about the author of the Steve Jobs post.

Twitter was abuzz with news of Steve Job’s heart attack, and many considered the value of their Apple stock declining in tweets to this popular micro-blogging service. Anecdotally, I noted very few tweets relating to the story being revealed as bogus once Apple rejected the claim. Much work is going in to correct the rumor and speculation, but for Apple, the damage is ongoing. 

Who is ultimately responsible for ‘citizen journalists’? If we, as bloggers can post to mainstream media news sites, what obvious system is in place to ensure the accuracy of each post? Offline when I take my old clothes to a consignment shop for donation, each item goes through a simple inspection to make sure they’re up to the stores quality standard. Certainly online, when ‘citizen journalists’ have the ability to post news stories which can erase millions of dollars in market value, why isn’t there at least the most rudimentary quality standard in place? The short answer is speed. News networks are under increasing pressure to be the first to release an important news story, so they prefer to deal with possible consequences later rather than miss the opportunity to be the first. I submit that a simple quality check should be in place for all mainstream news sites, which requires first and last name, working email address and no submissions from a blocked IP address. Surely, there are simple workarounds to these rudimentary submission standards, but also as sure they will likely eliminate some of the market instability caused by the rumor mill.

What other submission standards should online news journals implement to help ensure the accuracy of stories submitted by ‘citizen journalists’? I’d like to hear your views.

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Here’s the Tweetup details — we’d love to have any Twitter friends, old or new:

Coffee Break
435 E 400 S
Salt Lake City, UT
7 PM -

I’ll be uploading photos of the Tweetup soon, and here’s a little advance notice — we’ve got a very special Tweetup planned for October 20. Please clear your calendar and join us.

See you at the Tweetup!

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Here’s the top 3 results I think are especially sapient (Ha!) for those of us in social media:

• More than 1/3 of marketers surveyed revealed that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising.

• When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.

• It’s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

These results are a real kick in the pants for interactive agencies. I recently met with some execs from a local interactive shop representing the 2nd largest advertising agency in the world. They were scared stiff to even consider talking about social media to their largely tech clientele. This agency excels on the creative side, and recently won awards for a great “viral video” they designed for one of their Fortune 1000 clients. But a search for this viral video doesn’t immediately connect it with the client it was representing! The only search results for the client promoted in this “viral video” are well below the fold. No viral video results at all show when I search for the company name. It takes some real searching to even figure out who the viral video was created for. There’s a HUGE disconnect there. That client paid 6 figures for this ‘viral video’ campaign, and yet finding out who the video is supposedly promoting is a real challenge. What’s the ROI in that for their client? It seems to have paid off more for the interactive agency, what with the design awards and all.

This is the kind of thing marketers can no longer tolerate. In the past, when advertising successs was measured only by reach, this may have been considered a successful campaign. Now with the specific analytics tools which make agencies much more accountable for the results of their campaigns, results like the ones above are simply unacceptable.

Smart interactive agencies will continue seeking out social media professionals and re-evaluating how to best serve their clients. Social media marketing is certainly not about creative advertising that still “pushes” a message on customers. That old standard is crumbling fast, and many agencies are hurting as they scramble to understand the new medium that is totally “pull” based and customer-centric.

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business’ and the customer’s viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions – unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out – heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don’t think this won’t happen with you or your clients – some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

A Social Media Professional’s job, especially in consulting interactive agencies and/or their clients, eliminates this kind of self-inflicted brand wound and can very often stop the hemorraging from previous decisions based on the traditional “push” mentality. In business, its the customers that matter anyway – not the creativity of an ad. The real focus should be on building relationships with the customers, not so much on the Creative Director of an agency. Social Media Marketing professionals are needed as the solid bridge from traditional marketing to greater levels of business transparency and customer interaction.

Check out the full text of the CMO answers here: Survey Reveals Brand Marketers’ Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future

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Of course, on a more practical vein, Paris may be keeping the CEO of MySpace close for some extra security to keep those private photos from always surfacing on MySpace. But then, rumor has it that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is her #1 MySpace friend…

Get the full skinny at TechCrunch: The Perks Of Being The MySpace CEO Include, Apparently, Paris Hilton

More on Paris Hilton Spotted with MySpace CEO at BloggersBlog

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Read the full article over at TechCrunch: SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs As Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill The Press Release?

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